Session 3, Part 5
Suniel wandered over to the still-smoking blast area where the six constructs had exploded and gingerly picked up a long shard of metal from where it stuck in the ground. It felt and looked like iron, but as he held it it began to dissolve. Within seconds he held a handful of tiny metal flakes that lifted away in the hot wind.
The rest of the fragments that carpeted the area were dissolving as well, until there was nothing there but a fine dusting of iron slowly drifting off into the dust.
The sky monk - or at least Suniel thought of him as a monk - still sat in meditation, legs crossed, humming faintly to himself. Suniel thought for a moment of trying to ask the monk what had just transpired but, thinking of the last few attempts at communication with it, decided against it.
He turned to see Ming and Ilsa kneeling over the body of the Sergeant.
"Gone," Ming said, pausing for a moment of silence, head bowed, before shrugging and rifling through the man's uniform.
"Have you no respect for the dead?" Suniel said, walking quickly over to where the man lay.
Ming glanced up as he walked over, the man's coin-pouch in her hand. "No, not particularly. Why?"
Suniel snatched the pouch from Ming. "Bury them."
She stared back at him coolly. "If we're just going to bury them, might as well take whatever they have. If not, the hobgoblins will probably come, dig them up, and take it anyway."
Ilsa walked up, dusty, dirty, blackened, and spattered with rapidly-drying blood. She pointed at the monk and the charred, smoking area around him. "We were just attacked by... metal things that fell from the sky shooting lightning from their eyes and you're arguing over burial practices?"
Harold walked up as well, glancing at the monk. "I have the feeling there's not much more to be gleaned from talking about it. We all saw what we saw and that's all we know now, unless someone here knows something they aren't letting on?"
The four of them exchanged looks and Ming shrugged. "Whatever, let's head back to the village then."
"What about the outpost?" Harold said.
"What about it? The whole point of going there was to show him where it was," Ming said, toeing the Sergeant's corpse with her boot.
"Well, we're pretty close now, might as well check it out," Harold said, peering out into the dusty, jagged hills.
"Oh, come on, you have no idea where we are," Ming said. "You've were lost for hours only to led us straight into the middle of an ambush. I say we go back."
Suniel stepped forward with hands raised towards the two of them as Harold's face darkened. "Harold is right. I think I remember this area now. We could be to the outpost in less than an hour."
Harold nodded to Suniel. "Then we move on."
"After we bury the bodies," Suniel said.
"Of course," Harold said.
"Dig away," Ming said. "I'm going to go find some shade and pretend my water is wine."
"What about him," Ilsa said, pointing to where the monk still sat.
They all glanced at the monk and Harold shrugged. "He's no concern of ours, let him do whatever he's going to do."
As if sensing them looking at him, the monk opened his eyes, looked briefly in their direction, yawned, and lay back, stretching out in the charred dirt and iron dust and promptly dozing off.
***
They reached the outpost in the late afternoon and Harold was immediately wary; the bodies of the hobgoblins they'd killed outside were gone.
He motioned everyone to the trap door that sat open and peered in, seeing the ladder in place exactly as they'd left it.
"I'll go in first," Harold said. "If it's clear, Suniel comes down with light and the rest follow."
Without waiting for a response, he climbed down the ladder, drawing his bow from his quiver and nocking an arrow as soon as he reached the bottom. He looked down the shaft of his arrow, sweeping the narrow passageway.
The bodies were gone here as well and there was a strange smell, like rotting meat but odd and unpleasantly familiar. The small hairs on the back of his neck stirred. He motioned for the others to come down and they quickly complied, including the one they had started calling "the monk." Even the monk seemed on edge, tense and advancing in a fighting crouch.
"Undead," Suniel said, as he waved his hand and summoned light on a pebble.
Harold cast him a sharp look, but Ming and Ilsa were already heading down the tunnel. Suniel and the monk followed quickly behind.
A moment later Harold followed, staring at the wizard's back, dark suspicions and grim recollections of battles against the horrors of the Ashen Towers rising from buried memories.
***
The smell of wrongness was almost overpowering and Ming had to clench her sword grip tightly to keep from shaking. It smelled like the lake by their village when she was a child and the things had come out of the water after that unnatural storm, rotting, relentless, hungering...
Ming came around the corner to the central barracks area where the worst of the fighting had occurred last time they were here and saw a dozen hobgoblins standing clustered together in the center of the room, heads bowed as if in the midst of some dark prayer. A battle cry died in her throat as Suniel came around the corner behind her, his light fully illuminating the room.
They weren't hobgoblins, not anymore.
As one, the things turned, low sobbing moans emerging from their lips, the same moans she had heard that night when they came...
Around her her companions surged into motion, but for Ming there was nothing but blind panic.
...one grabbed mother's leg as she tried to climb onto the roof. Father slid down to grab her but lost his footing and they had him too... huddled in the thatch of the roof as they ate them alive, pulling them apart... couldn't take the awful sounds anymore and jumped as far as she could... landing running just out of the things' grasp as they came after her, close behind as she ran blindly into the dark...
***
"Ming, damnit!" Ilsa shouted as the huge woman collided with another of the walking dead and fell, sword clattering to the ground as she scrambled on all fours past them. Ilsa cut another down and slammed her shield into the press of them as Suniel blasted one next to her apart with his magic.
Ming somehow made it through them and ran down the passage towards the prison area. The last Ilsa saw of her, her eyes were blank, her expression a mask of blind terror. And then she was gone, disappearing into the dark.
The four companions remaining settled into the grim work; Ilsa hacking down anything that came around the wall of her shield as they pressed hard against her, Harold's arrows tearing into them like metal rain, Suniel ripping them apart with his magic, the monk a blur of movement, breaking the dead down one bone at a time until whatever foul sorcery that held them together dissipated.
Aside from their constant moan, the things died without cry or wail, taking wounds that would have left anything living writhing on the stone, pulling themselves up her weapon with their already-rotting hands, battering against wood and metal and flesh.
Just when they seemed to almost have the last of them put down, there was a roaring moan and, from the corner of her eye, she saw two huge shaggy forms staggering out of the darkness, skin sagging and fur coming out in clumps.
A moment later they were on her, slamming into her shield as they had when they were alive, but this time with the uncanny strength of the dead.
***
Suniel twisted his hand and uttered the last syllable of the incantation. The last of the dead exploded in a stinking blast of smoldering fur and dead flesh.
There was a moment of silence broken only by their heavy breathing and the strange spitting pleh sound the monk was making, as if he'd eaten something foul.
Harold turned to Suniel, but Suniel had already pushed past the others, desperate for air and light.
He stumbled up the ladder and sat heavily in the dust, suddenly glad for the baking, dry heat and glaring sun after the unnatural cold and dark of the outpost.
Unseeing, he stared out across the Ragged Hills.
It has come. No matter how far I travel, he thought, lost and numb. How much farther can I go to escape it?
***
"Ming? Come on out Ming," Ilsa called through the thick wooden door. The monk glanced at her quizzically, then put his ear to the door, eyes squinted in concentration.
Ilsa thought she heard sobbing on the other side but wasn't sure. "Ming, lets get out of here. It'll be better if you get outside. Ming?"
Harold came up behind her, quickly taking in the situation. He disappeared back down the passageway and came back a moment later with a crude hobgoblin axe.
"Chop it down and get her out of there," he said as he tossed it to her. "I don't think we want to linger here. I'm going to do one last sweep of the place, make sure there isn't anything we missed the first time, then let's get out."
She caught the axe and watched as Harold walked away.
"First we get ambushed, then you fall from the sky in a ball of fire," she said, turning to the monk. "Then your metal friends attack, explode, and turn to dust and an hour later we're knee-deep in the dead. I think I miss Wyrmsrule."
He stared back at her for a long moment, as if contemplating what she'd said. Finally, he raised a long, slender finger into the air, like a scholar about to pronounce something profound.
Instead, he bopped her on the nose with a single knuckle.
"Marp!"
***
Ming struggled out of her waking nightmare to the flicker of torchlight and the weight of something pressing down on her. She was pinned down and began flailing about again in panic before realizing that it was Ilsa that sat on one arm, the monk on the other.
"What happened?" she said, terror rising in her chest again as she remembered. "The dead, are they coming? Let me free!"
She strained against them, almost lifting both of them off the ground, but Ilsa slapped her, hard.
"They're dead. Well, dead again. Control yourself woman," the dwarf said, dropping her knee painfully onto Ming's upper-arm. "If you hit me again, I might have to use this axe on you."
They let her go and she stood warily, staring at the splintered door and the axe in Ilsa's hand. "What happened here?"
Ilsa grunted and tossed the blunted axe into one of the prison pits. "Your courage failed when you saw the dead and you clawed your way through them of all things. When we finally killed them - no thanks to you - I came to find you barricaded in here, sobbing incoherently. It took me chopping the door down to get you out."
Ming stared at the darkness of the doorway for a moment and grabbed up the torch that lay sputtering on the floor for reassurance. "Where's my sword?"
"It's out wherever you dropped it." Ilsa popped her jaw and rubbed it as she walked through the doorway, the monk close behind. The dwarf grabbed her shield and nodded her head towards the tunnel. "Let's get going, if we hurry and Harold doesn't get us lost, we might be able to make it back to Laketide in time to sleep in real beds. Harold's almost done with his sweep of the place so let's move."
Ming followed close behind, jumping at every shadow. When they reached the main barracks room, the dwarf and monk disappeared down the passageway to the surface as Ming searched for her sword amongst the hacked and gutted corpses. She found it amidst the corpses and hefted its weight several times for reassurance. As she started to walk out, she caught a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye.
A tingle ran up her spine and she had to bite back the bile that rose in the back of her throat. She walked towards the movement warily, approaching the small alcove at the edge of the barracks area, following a trail of half-dried blood and viscera.
The torso of one of the dead hobgoblins lay in the alcove, its arm stretched out towards the hobgoblin's execution block.
There, written in blood was a single word.
Suniel.