TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 32 (RAW)

Chapter 32 - The Palipula Barrows.

Be careful of the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

- W. Clement Stone.

Seraphina raised the visor of her helm and let the cold bite her cheeks. Sir Filippe grumbled to himself before he dutifully handed her a small metal lantern that she hooked onto her belt. The others waited in the hush beneath the standing stones; she did not look back as she ventured forth. 

Only one of them defied her order and caught up to her.

“I am coming with you,” Sir Frest said. “On this I must insist, Lady Seraphina.”

The last thing she needed was someone leeching precious experience. She halted, drew a steady breath. “You most certainly are not.”

“It is my duty, Lady Seraphina. I would not forgive myself if anything untoward happened to you,” the former bandit said.

She was almost amused by the sudden chivalry. She might have allowed it—until she recalled him strolling the gardens with Miss Templeton, her homeroom tutor.

“If I have to repeat myself, I’ll have your hide flayed. You’ll only be in my way,” she replied, voice acid.

She turned, leaving his answer to die on his lips, and with a sure step crossed the threshold of the Barrows—into the unwelcome dark.

The shard of Zajasite trapped inside the lantern glowed like a lazy star. Cold, steady radiance breathed out—no flicker, no smoke—washing the tunnel mouth in pale blue that pushed the dark back. Mana was thick here. She touched the lamp once more to check that it was securely fastened to at her waist.

Her weapons gave her comfort. The zweihander rode her back, a long cross of metal taller than she was; the estoc lay slim and spiteful at her left hip, a square-sectioned thorn built to pry into the places armor pretends are safe. The unnatural things here had resistance to the main damage types she could inflict with them. And here, even more so, for necrotic flesh and bone infused with the dark energies would reject the bite of her weapons. They would try to, at least.

Just the way she wanted it.

The first passage sloped down, then down again, a throat of darkness. The Zajasite light showed a world that had long died, ancient and intimate. The walls were of tamped earth and mortared stone, hair-fine roots like black veins threading through the surfaces. At the edge of the light was the scurry of blind white beetles vanishing into cracks. Continuing down, a part of the ceiling was coated by a fungus crust that caught the light and glittered like hoarfrost. She breathed through her mouth. The air tasted of iron filings and, strangely, the faintest scent of lilies, long wilted.

Funerary things marked her way. Niches cut into the stone at shoulder height held lidded urns painted in spirals and sun wheels—the old Palipula script winding like vines. Thick dust filmed everything and dulled the once-bright colors to bruise and tea. Tall amphorae with narrow necks lay half-buried where a part of the ceiling had collapsed, their slender handles looped like women’s arms. A bowl of gold, beaten thin and set with three chips of lapis, sat beside a clay lamp whose wick had gone to powder. She passed a bronze mirror black as a moonless pool, a comb cut from bone, a child’s toy chariot with two stone geese for horses. Coins glittered here and there, thin discs stamped with the mark of the Shallow River, left to pay the Boatman, some priest swore would come. A funerary mask leaned against a niche, its hammered bronze face greened by centuries.

Antiques that collectors would pay a fortune for.

At each turning, the tunnel seemed to offer her choices, but there was only one correct path; she followed the relief carvings of spiral suns, trusting her memories to shepherd her dead toward the deeper chambers. Once she touched a lintel and her fingers came away chalked with ash and something else—ward dust that had burned out a lifetime ago.

The groans began as a rumor in the stone. A sound, a pressure in the ear that made the hairs along her scalp prickle beneath the padding. She stilled, and the groan returned and then uncoiled into smell: the sweet-sour of old meat in a damp pantry, the wool-grease staleness of burial shrouds, the wet leather reek that of graves pried open after rain.

They came out of a side chamber whose walls bore a mural of a spiraled sun. Six of them, then eight; a crowd. The first shuffled into the light with its hands raised as if in dumb petition. The skin along its cheeks had sloughed and then dried, leaving strings; its jaw worked, bereft of purpose; its eyes were coins of curdled milk. Others pressed behind, a clot of ruin and cursed flesh.

Seraphina slid the estoc from its sheath and brought the zweihander off her shoulder in the same breath. The girl let the big blade fall into her right hand while her held her slender weapon. The corridor did her a kindness; there was no room for them to flank.

“Good,” she said softly, and then she moved.

Even one-handed, the zweihander darted like a fast dart. She stepped into the first corpse, the force of the blow great enough to impale its cohort behind. With her great Strength, she swept them to the left, smacking the undead things into the walls. 

You have slain a Zombie. 13 experience gained.

You have slain a Zombie. 15 experience gained.

As the Necromantic energies that filled the walking corpses fled them, time rushed back and claimed them, leaving them as nothing but dust. and shoved at its collarbone with the blade’s cross, driving it backwards into the press. An eager zombie lurched toward her. A quick high snap kick answered its enthusiasm, the Runes on her armor flaring as they started to disrupt the corpse's binding magic. It was the raw physicality of the blow that ended near instantly, folding its skull inwards, and its body went loose.

The estoc struck like a heron’s beak. She thrust with her gauntleted left hand, guiding the long spike as she found what was left of their brains. In and out. In and twist and out. She hooked an ankle with her greave and sent a corpse floundering before stomping on its head; she pinned another to the wall through the arch of its palate and tore free her weapon before it remembered to fall.

More token points of experience.

They were slow, and she was not. Theirs was a single-minded stupidity; hers was intention. She used the big blade to push and break despite the limited space, and the shorter one to deal with those that came close and fast. After the sixth fell, something like laughter rose in her chest, and she started to hum. Her breath fogged; she bared her teeth in a smile behind her helm and lost herself for a moment.

The only source of annoyance that consistently flared now and again was the fact that her teacher had been right in her teachings. Seraphina had relied too much on her superior physical abilities. Now the girl was learning something of great utility, economy of motion.

And with two weapons working in tandem, one a shield, the other a spear, the roles switching sometimes, she had landed on a style that was uniquely hers. That could only be hers, for she doubted anyone else could wield a massive sword as one did a dagger.

When the last of the first lot hung like a discarded robe from her estoc’s point, she heard the deeper sound—the change in the bones of this dark place. Stone grumbled, and something shifted. A dozen small clicks rippled outward as if the barrows were drawing breath. The sleeping power within had finally started to awaken and take notice.

“All right,” Seraphina said, voice low. “Come on, then.”

They obliged. From honeycombed niches, bones rattled themselves into choices: skeletons shouldering on the memory of what they once more, skulls cocked and rattling. They bore broken weapons of bronze and scavenged ancient steel.

From a cracked stair, three ghouls loped in low on knuckles and the balls of their feet, mouths packed with too many teeth, eyes the color of a blood moon. A thing in a priest’s beads dragged itself by the elbows, spine making a whispering sound along the stone. A barrow-wight stooped, its hair like drowned moss, its fingers ringed with old significance; the golden rings ticked together as it flexed.

Cold gathered, the kind that comes from the Shallow River. Her Zajasite lamp dimmed slightly as if something drank its courage. The runes along her vambraces warmed in answer, the bronze lines brightening to a heart’s faint pulse.

Seraphina planted her feet, in the light of the lamp the green of her eyes matched the undead’s baleful stares with their own maliciousness. She would giving nothing up to the dark but the shadow of her blades. The skeletons came first, their movements so slow they felt almost polite to her. She met them with the estoc, each thrust a note on a clean page: eye, ear, joint where the jaw hinges; through the open triangle beneath the sternum to snap spine; a short, mean jab at the atlas bone where head meets neck with all the force of a war mace. Their teeth clicked in disappointment as they folded.

A ghoul vaulted a fallen urn and came for her face with both feet. She took a step shorter than sense said and let it sail, then turned on the ball of her foot and cut—a flat, mean swing—and its calf parted like rotten fruit. It rolled, snapping; she pinned its wrist under her sabaton and put the estoc through the soft dark at the inner corner of its eye. The second took a thrust in the mouth and kept coming until the guard caught its teeth before she tore the weapon away. The third, she fed to the zweihander point-first and pushed until the point of the blade clanged against the ceiling.

More experience, but still it was not enough.

Something hissed. The priest-thing raised a hand in a benediction gone wrong. The air drew tight as if trying to remember a prayer. Her runed bronze sang; the Hydra-scale drank. The evil curse broke like a wave on rock and left only the smell of old incense. Seraphina laughed again, short, bright, delighted. She launched herself forward with Dash and her long blade fell like a hammer and the priest’s skull came apart like baked clay.

The wight watched, patient as the Death that was its aspect. It stepped forward once, twice, twirling its twin axes with old skill. The temperature of the room found new depths. Frost filmed the bronze mirror on the wall; her breath hung.

Behind the wight, more shapes shouldered out of the dark—long-limbed carrion things with eyes like dull coins, a rattling chain of vertebrae that moved like a serpent, a woman-shaped silhouette with a veil of cobweb and a dark smile she could feel but could not see.

Behind her, the skeletons had started to reform and she heard the pitter patter of things that hungered for her life.

The thing that controlled this place had drawn her deep, thinking to trap her. She almost laughed at its temerity. 

Seraphina’s pulse settled into that low, useful place it went in times of challenge. The girl centered the universe around herself. She shifted her stance, left foot slightly forward, right heel anchored, the lamp at her hip throwing her shadow long and tall before them like a second champion.

“Good,” she said again, and showed behind her white-scale helm. “Let’s make this quick. I’ve a date with your master.”

The undead obliged the living. And the Barrows, awake at last, began to empty themselves into her light.

And then she used one of her most powerful weapons. A thing that was beyond the simple play of steel. She wished to cleanse this place, and the Covenant answered.

Her wail tore threw them, the resonance of it like a tidal wave birthed by the greatest of storms. 

The tunnel took her voice and made it larger. The undead met the sound and came apart.

The skeletons were first. The bonds that held them together simply unfastened, turning to dust. The tone found each bone and asked it a question in a language that it could not understand. The old bronze weapons and scavenged iron they carried dropped in a dull patter and lay as if ashamed to have been used so long against their will.

The zombies buckled as if their strings had been cut—and in a sense, they had. Then note plucked, and the knots forgot how to be knots. Skin that had dried to parchment let go on their claim to this world in great sighing sheets. The sweet rot smell grew thick, then thin, before time rushed in and had its way. One reached for her even as its hands sifted into the pile of dust its forearms had become.

You have slain a Zombie. 15 experience gained.

You have slain a Zombie. 12 experience gained.

You have slain a Zombie. 11 experience gained.

…

The ghouls tried to outrun the sound, and for half a second, they succeeded, but the note was faster than even their unnatural speed. It reached through ears and into the hungry, mean intellect that animated them. Their eyes bled the color of old wine. One hiccuped a laugh that wasn’t a laugh and folded around its own ribs; another spasmed then snapped suddenly still.

You have slain a Barrow Ghoul. 23 experience gained.

You have slain a Barrow Ghoul. 27 experience gained.

…

The serpent made of bones was caught mid-strike as it sprang forth towards her. It writhed once as her voice found its weakness. The wail found each rough little bone a different pitch. It tuned them, then de-tuned them, then told them the truth: you are an error. Links between the vertebrae popped, and the unnatural construct slumped into a poor heap.

You have slain a Barrow Serpent. 47 experience gained.

The veiled woman lifted her head, her features almost invisible in the poor light. Her own mouth opened, her own voice—a thin, razor-edged keen—came on to meet Seraphina’s. The two sounds braided and fought. The undead’s veil fluttered as if in the wind. Seraphina did not change her note. She let the Covenant hold it steady, brightening the high harmonics until they were almost pure gold with power. But against one who could defeat an ancient Banshee with her voice, the contest was already lost. The curse, the ancient enmity that bound the powerful undead to this place, went out like a candle in rain. The woman drifted backward into nothing, leaving only ancient silks that soon also crumbled into dust.

You have slain a Barrow Deathsinger. 124 experience gained.

The ancient wight stood longest. In desperation, it set both of its axes toward her, the twin blades humming as they cut through the air. Concentrating only on her note, she did not bother to dodge. The Death-cursed blades smashed into her armor, but it did as much damage as falling rain on slate tiles. The golden rings on its fingers chimed in a wicked little chord, trying to foul the purity of her voice. Frost surged across the stone of the floor toward her boots, and her lamp dimmed to a wounded glow. The Runed bronze along the lines of her armor flared, bright as veins of dawn as the frost flowed over her. Hydra-scale plates drank it all in, taking the unnatural cold and turning it to harmless icy crystals on her boots.

Seraphina gave more of herself to Judgment, her voice rising in a crescendo as her lungs almost emptied. The wight’s rings cracked one by one with tiny bright pings. The frost crawled back from her sabatons as if embarrassed to be seen. The wight took a step, then a half step, and then its knees remembered it was in the presence of a great one, and they learned reverence. It sank, not like a fighter bested but like a man kneeling to pray, and the blue smoke rising from where its eyes once were, its existence unraveling under the holy assault.

You have slain a Barrow Wight. 94 experience gained.

You have learned Wail of Judgment (lvl.4)

Not bad, but I need more. Shame I couldn’t keep the rings.

Behind her, the skitter and scrape of the things that had been gathering drew nearer—the trap’s teeth ratcheting shut. She turned and saw them: a heaving press of undead. From deeper in the throat of the Barrows, something unholy stirred, a pressure that made her teeth ache.

She drew breath and unleashed her Wail of Judgment. The note blazed bright and pure. The first ranks folded spine by spine; corpses toppled like wheat before a scythe, opening a line for retreat.

Her Mana guttered low. It would refill in time, and a pull of Mana potion—liquid cancer in a bottle—would hasten it. She could feel her helm also aiding in the regeneration of her Mana. Seraphina closed her eyes and weighed her options.

Press on now, or turn back now and return when her reserves were full?