PreCursive

  The light from Sylvia’s Skill was dim, but it still allowed me to see the hallway around us as we desded. Thankfully, Hook and Dusk hadn’t gone very far. I would have beey pissed off if they had gone on ahead ahe two of us behind. As we linked back up with them, none of us spoke a word.

  Even though we hadn’t gooo deep just yet, something about the atmosphere in here pressive enough that words escaped me. Empty sces were illuminated on the walls, while cobwebs and dust caked every surface they could find purchase on.

  The silence was all-enpassing.

  Exging gnces between the four of us, we tinued doweps. As the group walked ever downwards, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the st time I had ventured into a tomb apanied by a dwarf. Ba Hollow Hill, Azarus and I hadn’t known what we were getting into with the bunker. But we had beehusiastic about it, even with as somber as the environs had turned out to be.

  I didn’t feel any of that enthusiasm right now.

  We had been desding for so long now that I was shocked wheoairs abruptly ended. We looked to have been deposited onto a nding of some kind, as not far from our position was peared to be a cracked and crumbling stone mo, shaped as a simple standing sb. Carved onto its surface were geometric patterns that bined in an…almost runic pattern, to my eyes. Ahese were not the linguisties that I was so used to by this point. It was a little disorienting, to see something in which I detected a hint of familiarity, but yet was so alien.

  Beyond the mo stretched a long, dark hallway in which the light of our skills couldn’t pierce the gloom.

  Still.

  We couldn’t stop now.

  Without a word from Hook, his floating light skill wobbled down the hallast the mo.

  We followed.

  As we walked, I kept a paranoid eye on my surroundings. This left me with plenty of time to examihe mausoleum proper. To me, it didn’t look like the Orcs who had built this pce used coffins in the same way that humans did. Instead, it almost looked like they…mummified their dead. Almost immediately after passing the mo, withered, cloth-ed corpses became visible set into alcoves in the walls became visible. These alcoves were at least fh on each side of the hallway, with carvings in that same geometriic script set into pques o eae.

  What the hell was that nguage? It wasn’t being transted by Language Adaptation, so it must be runes of some sort. That was the only written nguage that wasn’t covered by the universal Skill. But long ago Grey had told me that the runic script that the people of Vereden had been handed down by the gods millennia ago, long before the War in Heaven. The Orcs were ruled by one of those remnant gods. How and why were they using a different script than one gifted by their very own goddess?

  I…couldn’t help but notice a few other things, as well. The mummified corpses of the interred were visibly rger than any human I’d ever seen. The smallest one I saw, even as withered as it was, had to be over seveall. Living Orcs must be massive. These corpses alone were bigger than even Venix was.

  The sed thing I noticed was that some of the alcoves were absent of their octs. Even if the sb had the runiame of an oct carved into the stone pque o it.

  I took a deep breath, and tried to put it out of my mind.

  It only took a few feet for the hallway to begin to branch off, even as the main trunk began to wind in front of us. It felt like we began to enter a new splinter off of the main hall every mi this point. Some of them were blocked off, however. The ceiling had caved in on a few of these brang paths, leaving the opening obstructed with dusty red-brown stone and the dislodged corpses of the interred.

  Hook, though, wasn’t deterred by any of this. He didn’t seem surprised by any of the signs of deterioration. He just kept walking on a beeline, leading us down the main hallway.

  At least, initially.

  Abruptly, the hall we were walking down ended in a colpse. It almost seemed t from nowhere. One moment, the hall was free and clear before our cautiously creeping forms. The , blocked off by a wall of debris. It looked like the right wall had pletely caved it, the victim of aremely deeply reag tree branch. It snaked in through the wall, strangely withered for how deeply it had grown.

  Hook cursed at the sight of it. “Damnit,” He whispered into the gloom. Even with as quiet as he was keeping his voice, it still echoed up and down the dead halls. The noise of his profanity returo us, bounced off of distaone walls almost mogly.

  Damnit damnit damnit, the mausoleum itself seemed to call back.

  “This was our path forward,” Hook tinued, ign the echoes.

  I took a deep breath. “Whely, was the st time you were down here?” I muttered in a tone filled with strained patience.

  “Ah…,” A note of almost-sheepishness filled Hooks's voice then. “About seventy years ago.”

  “Seventy fug years?!” I whispered furiously. “Of course it’s in worse shape now!”

  “In fairness,” Dusk said, in a voily slightly quieter than her already muted tohis tomb is over a millennium old. It is reasoo assume drastic ges such as this would not occur in a fra of that time.”

  “Quiet,” Sylvia said sharply, holding her light higher. She peered into the darkness of a hallway that veered off to my left. “Listen.”

  The three of us who were bickering fell silent. For a moment, the only thing that I could hear was my owhing, as Syliva didn’t o and Hook and Dusk had stopped. I joihem.

  Absolute silence filled the halls of the mausoleum. My ears rang with the pumping of my own blood.

  In the distance, far beyond the darkness of the path Sylvia was staring down, I heard it.

  A stotled, as if kicked by a foot.

  Hook took a deep, slow breath. He stared dowh with narrowed eyes. “We ’t stop,” He said in a low tone.

  “And we must keep moving forward,” Dusk picked up in a whisper.

  I slowed my pulse using my c, in a rare moment of trol over my own physiological responses. “How familiar are you with these tunnels, Hook?”

  Hook shook his head in response. “Not very. I only really know the straightforath, and that’s bad enough. I deemed it too dangerous to explore this grave more than I did, all those years ago. But unfortunately, now we’re going to have to find another way forward.”

  A humorless smile touched my lips, hidden from the others in the darkness. “Well. No time like the present, I suppose. Might as well start with this one.”

  I saw the shadowed form of Hook’s head nod slightly in aowledgment before he slowly stalked forward. Sylvia and I followed him, with Dusk deg t up the rear.

  We marched in formation silently, following the broad, squat back of the Noe Division lead. Gradually, our surroundings began to ge. In the dim light provided by Hook and Sylvia’s Skills, I wasn’t able to realize what it was initially.

  But my middle ring provided the answers.

  The alcoves were starting to look more and more bare of octs.

  Judging by the tense posture of Hook before and Sylvia to my left, I wasn’t the only oo notice.

  A st filled the air abruptly, something I had never smelled before. I…didn’t know what to make of it.

  It was dry, so impossibly dry. The slightest hint of rot and decay underli, just barely more than an impression of almost seemed like boiled bo was the st of long-gone bad marrow that clued me on in it, you see.

  I’d boiled more than a few bones for Fade, in the past.

  Suddenly, ahead of us, Hook sent suddenly still. I couldn’t evehe rise and fall of his chest anymore. “Stop,” He said, in the barest suggestion of a whisper.

  I froze, as did Sylvia to my side and Dusk behind me.

  Over the top of Hooks head, his free-floating light Skill had ventured far enough ahead that its illumination seemed to be brushing just slightly against something. For a moment, I couldn’t uand what it was. To my eyes, it almost looked like a rge crowd of grey pilrs, standing tall and proud impossibly in the middle of our path.

  Until one of those pilrs shifted slightly.

  Skitter skitter, went the rock that the withered foot of one of those ‘pilrs’ had nudged.

  Hook strengthened his light, without moving, breathing, or making any indication that he’d done so at all.

  Suddenly, I could see what was before us much more clearly.

  It was a crowd of what I could only describe as withered corpses, impossibly standing uheir own power. But they were so, so, horrifically inhuman. The smallest of them was seveall, with the rgest bei feet, their desiccated heads nearly brushing the ceiling. They were ed from head to toe in dusty linen bahat hung loose on their paper-thin grey skin. It was stretched so tightly over their bohat all muscuture looked to have been shriveled aossibly turies ago. ures were visible over those bones. No nose, no eyes, nothing to mark them as having been male or female when st they drew breath.

  All that remained were monstrous undead, standing impossibly still and silent but for the occasional, slight shuffle.

  My breath caught in my throat in horror. I lost my grip on my pulse as dread thundered across all levels of my ringed sciousness.

  Unfortunately, I lost my grip on something else as well.

  For the first time in my tenure as a warrior, from before I had been recruited as a. From before Caer Drarrow, and all the battles I had been in. The lessons that Azarus had drilled into me time and time again in our training failed me.

  The Oninite dagger in my right hand slipped from my hand, to ctter onto the stone of the floor below me.

  The sound of the metal echoed up and down the halls, loud and cmorous. Sylvia and Hooks's heads snapped around to face me in startled panid dismay, as I did the same at my hand that had betrayed me.

  Rattle rattle rattle, the halls of the tomb seemed to mogly echo back at me.

  I scrambled to pick my bde back up, g a mortified hand tightly around the hilt.

  When I straightened, I found that the skulls of the undead before us had turo face our dire. In the depths of their empty eye-sockets, an eerie blue spark of fire began to burn. The front of the pack shuffled one foot forward, and its arm lifted in our dire. Its fingers curled into cws, as if to grasp at us.

  Hook was the first to break out of our impromptu spell. “Back,” He said quietly. He began to shuffle backward without turning to face us. Sylvia and I were forced to move with him, or be forced to. “They’re not agitated yet, we still disehey won’t pursue us if we don’t get any closer.”

  Over top of his head, I could see more and more of the crowd of undead started to shuffle towards us slowly.

  “Exactly how sure are you of that?” I asked him in a straione.

  Hook didn’t answer me.

  Dusk did.

  “It doesn’t matter,” She said suddenly, in a tense voice. “We ’t retreat.”

  I turo ask what she was talking about, but as soon as I did, my question was answered without a word from her.

  There was a seass of undead slowly shuffling their way down the hallway behind us. At first, I was fused and terrified as to where they had e from. But then I watched as a corpse on the walls we had only just passed by suddenly animated and stood from its resting pce.

  It joihe group that was closing in on us, never making a sound.

  My lips parted in shock at the sight.

  “This,” Hook said in a heavy voice behind me. “Is a trap. These aren’t naturally undead.”

  “There’s a Neancer down here.”