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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spyscribe" data-source="post: 2187291" data-attributes="member: 5808">(Hey all, this is likely the last update until next week, so another long one.  Hope no one minds too much. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )Part the One Hundred FourteenthIn which: a little night music goes a long way.“Do you hear that?” Eva whispers.In the darkness, she can just make out Anvil’s nod.  “Riders approaching?”“No,” Eva’s voice barely carries over the rhythmic throb floating through the darkness, “it’s…” and then, Eva realizes what the sound is.  “Holy crap, they’re drumming.”Anvil’s voice rumbles in the dark.  “Where is it coming from?”###Kiara jerks awake with a start.  Someone has a hand across her mouth.  Someone is whispering for her to be quiet.  She is about to call out to Annika over their empathic link when she realizes that “someone” is Eva.“What is it?” she whispers.“Shh… I’ll tell you outside.”Outside the tent Kiara’s keen ears easily pick up the faint sound of drumming in the otherwise silent valley.  “How long has it been going on?” she asks.“About twenty minutes,” Anvil replies.“Is it getting closer?”Eva shakes her head.  “It doesn’t seem to be.  We think it’s coming from the town.  Can you fly over and check it out?”Kiara’s eyes light up almost visibly in the darkness.  “Sure!”“Whatever’s going on, keep your distance,” Eva cautions her.  “And don’t let anyone see you.”Kiara nods.  “Don’t worry.  I’m really good at not letting anyone see me.  This one time, I was in Noran and—”“Perhaps,” Anvil breaks in, “this story would be better left for another time.”Kiara ducks her head guiltily.  “Right.  I better go before Annika wakes up.”  She flashes a quick grin and then leaps into the air, shifting into swallow form on the way up and then flying off into the darkness.Eva and Anvil sit, watching for Kiara’s return and listening to the drums in the distance.###Kiara swoops in towards the town, the sound of the drumming growing louder in her ears, filling the air around her until it seems as thought she is flying through the sound itself.  It is a strange and powerful rhythm, ulike any other she has heard before.  Boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba…As Kiara gets closer, she spots movement below: groups of people bearing torches, moving through the streets of Bountiful.  There are four or five bands of thirty or forty people each, and they wander, seemingly at random, about the town.  Two groups make their way through the fields outside the walls.  Fortunately, neither moves in the direction of the party.  Kiara observes them for a moment.  She knows she should probably turn back.  But darn it, she hasn’t really learned anything new yet.  Are these drummers really people, or are they skeletons?  Or are they the people that made the skeletons.  And why are they drumming?So many unanswered questions…Kiara swoops in closer.Boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba…She flies low, over the wall and into the town.  Careful to flit from shadow to shadow, she follows the sound of the drumming, boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba. As the sound gets louder, she finds a secluded windowsill to perch on ahead of one of the groups and waits, watching.The group turns the corner.They are skeletons, one and all.  Some carry torches.  Others carry drums and pound out the driving beat, as they and their fellows… dance.  It is a capering dance, jumping, stomping, and waving hands, and it is made all the more eerie by the utter silence with which the dancers perform it.  The only sound is the stomp of feet, the clack of bones, and the pulse of the beat.  Boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba…The beat pounds in Kiara’s head.  Despite herself, she finds one of her feet tapping the rhythm.  So powerful.  So beautiful.  She begins hopping back and forth, from one leg to the next, her best imitation of the skeletal dance she suddenly wishes she could join.Boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba…Without even thinking, Kiara flits off the windowsill and down towards the dancing skeletons.  She bobs and wheels and dives with abandon, performing in the air what these skeletons can only do on the ground. The skeletons continue their dance.  And Kiara dances with them.Boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba…They make their way through the streets, through the town, dancing, stomping, waving.  Soon, they are crossing the bridge over the river.  Other groups of skeletons join with theirs, all the dancers converging on the Keep as the drumming pounds harder and harder.  The gates of the Keep are wide open, and the skeletons dance their way into the darkness beyond.Oh, goody! Kiara thinks.  Now I’ll get to see what’s in the Keep.  Won’t Annika be proud!And the tiny swallow flies forward, flitting to the beat of the drums.Boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba…###Annika sleeps fitfully.  She is not sure how long her dreams have been filled with dancing and drumming and a strange urge to give into the pulsing boom-ba-boom-boom-ba-boom-ba of the beat.  She wants to resist, and she wants to dance, and she is resisting, but she is dancing, and she’s worried, but she’s serene…And then she wakes up, a horrible feeling in her head.  And she screams.###Anvil and Eva had just begun to wonder if Kiara was all right when a shout from Annika’s tent abruptly answers their questions. “NOOOOOOO!”Quickly followed by a slightly disoriented remainder of the party, they burst into Annika’s tent to find the wizard sitting up in her bed-roll, clutching her own arms in a white-knuckle grip.  Her terrified eyes look past the party, focused on something far away.“Kiara, no!… don’t listen to it… please don’t listen!  Focus on my voice.  Focus on my voice!  Come back, sweetie!  Come back!”###Kiara dances and whirls, caught up in beat, no other thoughts in her mind as she nears the gates of the Keep.And then, ever so faintly, there is a tugging on her mind.  She tries to shrug it off, but it is persistent.  Insistent.  A small voice, whispering quietly against the lure of the drums.  There is something familiar about it.  Something she should know.  Something she should recognize.She stops flitting about and listens.  She focuses, trying to figure out why that voice is so familiar…And all of a sudden the whispers become screams.With a jolt, Kiara blinks and looks around.  She’s scant feet away from the entrance to the Keep.  Dozens of hideous skeletons caper to their insidious beat around her, passing through the dark gates that she herself had nearly entered.Kiara looks down.  The skeleton beneath her rattles and clacks his way into the keep.  As he disappears into the shadows, she notes that she appears to have pooped on his head.Holy crap.###  Annika releases her death grip on her own arms.  Her frantic cries turn gentle.  “Okay.  It’s okay sweetie… you did well.  Come on back.  Come on, it’s okay… It’s okay…”Annika’s breathing slowly returns to normal.  She blinks several times and eventually seems to register that the rest of the party has crowded into the tent.Lira slips an arm around her shoulders.  Although Annika is outwardly much calmer, Lira can feel her trembling.  “What happened?” she asks gently.“I’m not sure…  I just know that she wasn’t… I almost lost her.”  She takes another deep breath.  “It’s okay now.  She’s on her way back.”A few minutes later, Kiara arrives.  She flies straight into Annika’s arms and snuggles there for a good twenty minutes, refusing even to change out of swallow form.  Finally, she calms down enough to shift and to tell the others what happened.###“They didn’t seem to mind that I was there, they didn’t even seem to notice.  And so I went with them, going from house to house, all through the town until finally we started going over one of the bridges to the other side of the city, where the keep is.”Kiara bites her lip, wraps her arms more tightly around Annika’s waist.  Annika smoothes her hair reassuringly.“I was able to jolt her out of whatever it was, and then she came back,” the wizard finishes.Lira has used a prestidigitation to heat water for tea, and the adventurers sit quietly, sipping from their tin mugs.  Eva avoids looking over at Annika, sure that the other woman is not pleased with her.  Fortunately, Annika is more relieved that Kiara is safe than upset that she was in danger in the first place. Benedic and Reyu come back from their scouting mission about then and relate what they have found.  “There’s no sign of actual living humans or livestock anywhere in the valley,” Reyu reports.  Benedic adds, “It’s eerie.  They’re all going out their daily lives, right?  Just as though they were still living.  Skeletal milkmaids milk skeletal cows, then bring empty pails to their skeletal mothers who pour nothing into their churns and proceeded to not churn it into butter.”“I think it would have been eerier if they had made it into butter,” Eva puts in.Reyu is also clearly quite troubled.  “As it started getting dark, all the skeleton people got into their beds, pulled up the covers, and just… lay there.”“Did they sleep?”  Thatch asks.“I… do not know.  There was no way to tell.”Kiara shudders.  “At least they weren’t dancing.”“It’s okay,” Annika reassures her.  “We don’t have to go back to the town.  We’ll just go directly to the tower.”Unfortunately, the next morning the party is forced to reassess their options.</blockquote>

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