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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Universe" data-source="post: 1755834" data-attributes="member: 8944">Part 2 - When the Unbreathing WalkKaereth of One Oak The woman was light. Kaereth was sure he could have thrown her across the river, if he had wanted to. She smelled bad, and she was still bleeding, so part of him did want to. But, he had told the tall pretty woman that he would help carry her, and so carry her he would. He just wished he had a free hand so he could plug his nose.  The pretty woman was talking again. He turned to her, listening closely.  “Does anyone know where the closest Apectan temple is?” she asked. “I’ve only been in Thanesport a few days…” Kaereth thought hard, his brow furrowing as he pushed his thoughts through a hazy mind. He hadn’t been in the big city for very many days, either. He couldn’t help her.  The dark man with the fake smiles spoke up. Kaereth didn’t like him. He was mean to the dwarf, and he never smiled for real. He was a liar, and Kaereth did not like liars. This time, however, it seemed to Kaereth that the man was telling the truth.  “There’s an Amastacian temple a few thousand yards north of here, just off of the harbor road. Someone’s got to service the sailors in port,” he said, a mocking grin splitting his sallow features.  The pretty woman’s face fell. “Will they help this woman?” The singer spoke, her voice musical, even against the thunder of the rainless storm, “We have little choice but to try. If there’s anything to do for her, it needs to be done now.” The rest of the group nodded their ascent. Nodding as much to herself as any of them, the pretty woman spun on her heels, and then started jogging up the dirt road toward where the smiling man had said the temple was. Kaereth followed, his strong legs easily keeping pace with the rest of the group, despite his added burden. His eyes locked on the road ahead, he almost didn’t notice it, at first. His burden had moved of its own power. He was sure of it. Kaereth stopped dead in his tracks.  The pretty woman took a few more steps forward, and then faltered, realizing that she alone continued toward the Amastacian temple. Kaereth didn’t wait for her to voice his concern. “Something…wrong” he said, to no one and everyone at the same time. He looked down at the obsidian skinned alder woman, hoping (and fearing) to see what he had seen before.  She lay still in his arms, unbreathing. Unmoving. Could it have been his imagination? “She move!” he declared, looking up a the group that now surrounded him. The dwarf approached, reaching up to pat the worried half-orc on the mucular forearm. “It’s a’right, lad. It couldn’a been other than yer mind playing tricks.”  Kaereth looked down to his auburn-bearded companion. Nodding, he smiled, as two small, boar-like tusks poked out of his thin lips. It must have been a trick of the light. The flashing lightning had confused him, he assured himself. “Y-y-yes,” he assured them. “A trick. We go?” The pretty woman smiled at him, which made him feel good. Then she spoke, which made him feel even better, “It’s alright. We cannot be too careful.  “The Blue Star is an ill omen, tonight, and the storm does not mitigate my fear that something is happening out there,” she continued, motioning toward the crashing sea beyond the harbor with her left hand, “that we have absolutely no control over.”  Her reassuring smile was replaced with grim determination. “We go.” As she turned to restart their trek, Kaereth felt his burden jerk in his grasp once more. “She move!” he bellowed.  As the eyes of his new friends turned back toward him, the body shuddered again, this time so violently that it nearly twisted out of his vice-like grasp. Just as suddenly as it began, it stopped, and the corpse fell limp in his arms once more.  Before he could summon the words to describe what had just happened, the woman’s body jolted once more. Her eyes shot open. The left eye was dry, and bloodshot. But, in the flash of lightning that accompanied the change in the corpse’s demeanor, he could see that the right had collapsed in on itself, an empty hole in a face that Kaereth would have called pretty, had she been alive. He didn’t see her eyes before; they had not been open in the tavern.  The others started to move toward him, keenly aware that the young half-orc’s burden had begun moving of its own accord. Before they could move even a half-step toward him, the single remaining eye seemed to glow with some inner light, as if a blue flame had been lit in her skull. Kaereth watched as the woman’s face began to peel before his eyes, the skin around her left eye flaying itself, pulling back to reveal blue, bruised muscle.  Even Kaereth could not mistake the shape. The Eye of the Bluestar!  He tried to drop her, doing his best to suppress a scream. Somehow, in her struggles, she had managed to grab hold of him. Ruined arms wrapped around his enormously thick torso, she heaved herself up and bit him.  Blood spurted from the wound, bathing Kaereth’s shoulder in sudden crimson heat. He jerked back out of her grasp, and he heard her teeth snap as she left them in the wound she had made in his shoulder. When the unbreathing walk...fear, Master Ryoko had said. Kaereth was more than afraid. He was terrified.  She heaved herself up from the ground, her blood and his mixing in her ruined, feral mouth. Her still-bleeding hands grasped for him, but she made no sound as she lurched toward her attempted rescuer. Kaereth pushed back his terror. Clenching his hands into fists, he breathed deep, and smashed. He felt her cheekbone give way, and felt her skeleton shudder as bones snapped throughout her body from the force of his blow. Kaereth smash. Kaereth did not smile.  Before he could strike the creature again, he heard a twang from behind him, and the air above his left ear whistled as something raced through it. A wet crunch signaled that the missile had reached his target, and the next flash of lightning revealed a quivering crossbow blot transfixing the center of the flayed-skin sigil of the Death Lord. The creature fell, this time truly dead.  He looked over his bleeding shoulder. The smiling man. He had not expected that. Apparently, neither had the smiling man. A scowl was painted across his face. Seeing that Kaereth was looking at him, his lying smile returned. “Sorry about that, my friend. I wanted to make sure I hit her – you nearly put yourself into the path of my crossbow.” Of course, it sounded like a lie.  Kaereth wanted to scream. Kaereth wanted to cry. Kaereth wanted to run away. But Kaereth would do none of those things. Before he could share his terror with someone he trusted, the shorter woman, the one who had come to the body with him in the inn, spoke.  Quietly, but assuredly, she informed the others of what she saw, “You’ll want to reload that crossbow.” Pointing a notched arrow at the now twice-dead Talon, she continued, “She might have been the first, but she’s hardly the last. There’s more out there, in the water.” She also told them that they were coming this way. No one could hear her over the moans of the dead.</blockquote>

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