by Eric Vall
“It smells like something died,” Rana said as she raised her arm to cover her nose.
“That is exactly what you smell,” Morrigan said flatly. “What you smell is the scent of rotting flesh.”
“You know what, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear just about now,” Rana said with a snort. “Not only did we just waltz into the dungeon of doom complete with ghost torches, now there’s a pile of rotting corpses around here somewhere.”
“It is not necessarily a pile of corpses,” Morrigan corrected. “There is, however, a large amount of them given the intensity of the smell, but they may be scattered across the dungeon.”
“Thanks, Morrigan, that makes me feel so much better,” Rana groaned.
“I am glad to have eased your mind,” Morrigan said blankly.
Suddenly Carmedy let out a screech.
“What’s the matter?” I turned to her with concern, and the others crowded around her.
“I-I felt something brush against my foot,” Carmedy shivered as she looked around nervously.
“Are you sure? I don’t see anything,” Annalíse said as she glanced around.
“I know I did.” Carmedy nodded her head quickly. “It felt cold and… ugh what is that thing?” the feline squealed with fright as she pointed a shaky finger at the wall near Morrigan’s head. The rest of us quickly turned to look in the direction that Carmedy pointed.
On the rocky wall was a black scorpion. It fiercely opened and shut its pincers with a loud clack that made Carmedy jump.
“It’s only a scorpion, Carmedy.” Rana waved her paw as the cat backed away from the creature. “Just stay out of its way and it won’t bother you.”
“I wasn’t trying to get in its way, I didn’t even know it was there.” Carmedy cringed as the scorpion skittered along the wall and moved ahead of us. As the creature scurried past us, Carmedy gasped.
“It has a snake’s tail!” The cat’s mouth gaped open. Sure enough, the scorpion did have a snake’s tail, and it slinked and wriggled along the surface of the wall.
“By the gods,” Annalíse breathed. “What sort of creature is this?”
“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “I’ve never seen such an animal, but I am interested to know if it evolved naturally or was created by magical power.”
“Ok, I’ve already been freaked out three times, and we haven’t even gotten out of the entrance tunnel yet, not a good sign.” Rana shook her head. “This place is all kinds of creepy.”
“While I do sense something sinister, we have to move forward.” I gestured ahead of us. “We must conquer this dungeon, and there is nothing that is going to stop us from doing so. These are mere parlor tricks designed to frighten children. If the deity here was so mighty he would not need to resort to cheap scare tactics. Do not forget that you are my minions, and we have conquered many perils. This will be no different.”
“He’s right,” Annalíse said determinedly. “We’ve come this far on our journey. We’re not going to let anything keep us from conquering this dungeon.”
Carmedy hesitated for a moment and then nodded her head in agreement though fear was still in her eyes. Rana and Morrigan also shook their heads, but they too had concern on their faces. I turned around and once more we began to make our way through the tunnel. The stench of decaying bodies intensified and now and then we’d see another scorpion-snake creature scuttling along the floor or the wall. We continued to forge ahead until I saw that the tunnel branched off into three passageways ahead of us. We stopped for a moment as I studied each of the tunnels, and then I turned to the fox.
“Rana, do you hear anything coming from any of these tunnels?” I asked as I gestured to the three passageways. Rana’s instincts had never failed us before and there were few things that could escape her superior hearing. If there was anything waiting to attack us in any of the tunnels, Rana would undoubtedly be able to detect it.
Rana moved to stand beside me and her ears immediately began to twitch rapidly. Her eyes darted from tunnel to tunnel, each of which was lit with torches just like the one we were currently in. The fox opened her mouth to speak when suddenly a voice suddenly called out.
“Help me, please,” a faint voice whispered.
“Uh, did anyone else hear that?” Rana turned slowly to look at the rest of us. Before anyone could respond, the voice spoke again.
“Please, help me.” The voice was female, and it sounded weak as though the person were unwell. The sound seemed to be coming from the center tunnel. To my surprise, Carmedy moved past me and made her way to the middle tunnel.
“Carmedy, what are you doing?” Rana hissed. “We want to move away from the spooky voice not toward it.”
“But there’s someone in there that needs help,” the cat said as she turned to look back at us. The petite alchemist’s green eyes were no longer filled with fear, but with determination and purpose. “She sounds as though she’s sick or injured, and if that’s the case it’s my responsibility to help. I won’t abandon someone in need.” Without another word, Carmedy hurried into the tunnel. The cat didn’t bother to look back to see if any of us were coming, and she walked quickly with her small fists clenched. She had a mission, and she was going to see it through.
The rest of us exchanged looks of surprise and followed after her. I had never seen the small feline speak in such a manner. She walked forward without hesitation and didn’t seem to notice when a few scorpion-snakes crawled past her.
“I’m all for helping people in need, but can’t we talk about this?” Rana whispered as we followed Carmedy through the glowing tunnel. “This could be a trap or something.”
“Maybe,” Carmedy replied without looking back, “but there’s also a chance that there really is someone in there who needs medical attention. I’m not going to ignore them.”
“But--” Rana started to retort but Carmedy interrupted her.
“You have a code as a thief, right? As someone who practices medicine, I also have a code. I can’t just stand by,” Carmedy said evenly. Her words seemed to get through to Rana and the fox quieted down.
“If there is someone in need, go ahead and do what you can to help,” I said. Though I had no real care to help myself, the cat-girl’s conviction reminded me so much of my Isolda. “But, everyone, be on your guard. We don’t want to be caught unawares.”
“Understood,” Morrigan and Annalíse said in unison and Rana nodded in agreement.
“Look!” Carmedy suddenly exclaimed. Up ahead, a shadowy figure lurched by and out of sight.
“Help me,” the pained female voice whispered.
“Don’t worry, we’re coming,” Carmedy said as she quickened her pace into a jog, and the rest of us hastened to keep up with her. “Just hang on!”
As we continued forward, I couldn’t help but notice that the foul smell of rotting flesh grew stronger still. Within minutes, we were finally out of the tunnel. Before us lay a vast circular cavern and torches were fixed the walls and lined its perimeter. Our group moved ahead with caution and our eyes roamed around the large cave in search of the distressed woman.
“Hello?” Carmedy called out as she gazed around the room. “There she is.” The feline pointed to a small cloaked figure slumped on the ground to the far left wall of the cavern, and she immediately rushed ahead.
“Carmedy, hold on,” I said, but the cat didn’t listen. As she neared the figure on the ground, she paused for a moment and looked around as though something had caught her eye. She suddenly gasped and raised a hand to her mouth.
“There’s more of them,” she yelled to us over her shoulder.
“What do you mean there’s more of them?” Annalíse frowned as the rest of hurried to join Carmedy. “More of what?”
Once we reached the cat’s side, we understood her meaning. Several yards ahead of us were countless figures leaned against the walls and lying on the ground. Each of them was shrouded in a black cloak and didn’t make the slightest movement,
a hood draped over their features to hide their faces. “There’s so many of them,” Rana whispered as she cautiously stepped forward. “What are these people doing here?”
“Perhaps they are prisoners of this dungeon’s master,” Morrigan said as she glanced around at some of the figures propped against the walls.
“There’s no time to waste,” Carmedy said as she continued toward the small figure that lay ahead of her on the ground. “Everyone, spread out and check for pulses.”
“You think they’re all dead?” Annalíse’s eyes widened.
“It would explain the smell,” I said as I approached one of the shrouded persons leaned against a wall.
“Exactly,” Carmedy said as she knelt down before the person crumpled on the floor. “I suspect most of them are dead, but there may be some amongst them that are still breathing. If that’s the case, we have to do what we can.” The cat proceeded to speak to the person in hushed tones, and she picked up their arm to feel for signs of life.
I leaned over one of the huddled figures and pulled back the sleeve of their cloak. The person’s arm was a ghostly white, and their fingernails were discolored and had grown so long, they had begun to curl. I pressed my fingers to the underside of the pale wrist to feel for a pulse. I felt no heartbeat, and yet I felt something as soon as I touched the limb. Something stirred within this person.
“No live ones over here,” Rana called out from across the cavern.
“None here either,” Annalíse shouted from where she stood at the back wall.
“I do not sense life in any of the people whom I have examined,” Morrigan said, and she crouched down to inspect one of the bodies. “And Fea and Macha do not seem to detect any soul energy. I believe all of these people have perished. Judging from the deterioration that I have observed their deaths weren’t recent.”
“I don’t understand it,” Carmedy said as she studied the body before her. “I heard a woman call out, we all did. Not only that, we saw someone moving around in here.”
“Maybe whoever it was is hiding,” Rana shrugged. “With this many bodies stacked up, something tragic obviously took place here. Maybe there was some sort of massacre, and this person was the sole survivor. If that’s the case, I don’t blame them for hiding from us. They have no reason to think they can trust us, they’re probably just trying to survive.”
“That still doesn’t make sense though,” Annalíse said with a frown. “If they wanted to hide from us, why did they call out? And also, Morrigan said that the level of decay of the bodies indicates that these people have been dead for quite some time. How could someone have survived in here for so long? And why wouldn’t they have left?”
“Perhaps there’s some sort of magic that has bound them here,” I mused as my eyes roamed around the shrouded figure before me. None of this added up. Something was wrong here, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I had felt something stir within the corpse I had touched, something dark and ominous. It was almost as though… the corpse was both dead and alive. The sensation had been sinister and a little familiar. There was no doubt in my mind that there was dark magic at work in this place.
“Hey, guys, um... you might want to take a look at this,” Carmedy called out to the rest of us with fear in her voice. We made our way over to the cat who still knelt on the ground, and the shrouded body was in front of her. As I approached, I noticed that Carmedy had removed the hood that had obscured the person’s face. Morrigan was the first to reach Carmedy, and as she looked down at the lifeless frame, her eyes widened, and she murmured something in her elvish language.
“What is it?” I asked, but no sooner had I spoken the words did I see what had struck fear in Carmedy.
“Holy mother of...” Rana reeled back in disgust, and she covered her mouth as though she felt sick.
Now that the hood had been pulled back, I could see that the person who lay before us was, in fact, a woman, and her face was truly a gruesome sight to behold. The female’s facial features were mismatched and stitched together as though they were patches of a quilt. The two halves of her face were of different skin tones, one olive toned and one fair. Two rows of stitches ran down the center of her forehead down either side of her nose and stopped at her chin. Her nose was burnt from the sun and seemed far too large for her face, I suspected that it had once belonged to a man. The wretched creature had only one ear behind her matted black hair, and it was shriveled and decayed.
“By the gods,” Annalíse breathed. “What manner of evil is this?”
“I’ve never seen anything so despicable,” Carmedy shook her head.
I silently knelt down beside Carmedy and rolled the dead woman’s cloak up to her knees. The corpse’s feet and legs bore countless stitches and were just as mismatched as the woman’s face. One foot was several sizes larger than the other and was missing two toes. The left leg was almost a foot longer than the right one and both limbs looked to be bruised and diseased. Carmedy was right, this ghastly patch job was truly despicable. I felt an unexpected pang of pity for the stitched together female. Any beauty that this woman might have once had was long gone, whomever had done this to her had turned her into a monster. I only hoped that she hadn’t been alive when she had been sewn together.
“Who would do such a thing?” Carmedy said with a horrified expression as she looked down at the patched together woman.
“Some psychotic freak,” Rana said with a look of disgust. “Someone turned her into some sort of creepy rag doll. It’s sick. It’s absolutely--” Rana’s words seemed to catch in her throat when all of a sudden, the dead woman’s eyes flew open.
“She’s alive!” Carmedy screamed and crawled away out of the corpse’s reach.
“That’s impossible,” Annalíse said in almost a whisper and narrowed her eyes at the patched up female. “You checked her yourself, she wasn’t breathing.”
“I know, but look!” Carmedy cried out as she frantically gestured to the body. “How do you explain that?”
“This is undoubtedly the work of a master of necromancy,” Morrigan said darkly.
“What in the…?” Rana’s voice trailed off as her eyes widened with fear. The female corpse’s arms began to flail, and her legs thrashed against the ground as though she were having a fit. Carmedy and I stood to our feet, and we all took a few steps back from the animated body. Without warning, the dead woman abruptly sat upright. She slowly turned her head to look at us and tilted it to one side.
“Please, help me,” she whispered.
Chapter 8
It was the same female voice that we had heard call out to us before, but when she spoke, her lips moved in a stiff, unnatural manner.
“What on earth is going on here?” Rana gaped.
“Look!” Carmedy shouted as she pointed ahead of us, and the rest of us turned to look in the direction of the feline’s trembling finger.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Rana said in disbelief.
The several dozen other bodies that had been propped up against the rocky sides of the cavern and slumped on the floor were now coming to life. Their limbs jerked and writhed as they sat upright, and one by one, their hoods fell away to reveal faces that were just as hideous as the female corpse’s whom Carmedy had inspected. Each of them bore terrible stitches across their faces and had mismatched features. They slowly turned to look at us, and their soulless eyes rested upon us. Then suddenly the bodies leapt into the air all at once as though they had been yanked upward by some unseen force. With their jaws slack, they hung in the air over our heads with their arms outstretched. The way in which they hovered in the atmosphere reminded me of victims of soul exorcism, but this was an entirely different form of magic.
Carmedy stared up at the floating bodies and wrung her tail nervously while Rana quickly fished her daggers from her pocket. Morrigan glowered at the wretched creatures, and her eyes went wholly black in preparation to summon her dark magic, and Annalíse scowled and drew
the sword from her hip as well as Bloodscale from her back. I too prepared myself and withdrew the God Slayer from my void pocket.
Looks like it was time to destroy some undead.
“You think me to be a freak, young fox?” a sinister raspy voice suddenly called out, and it echoed throughout the cavern, and the five of us whirled around in search of the speaker. The voice wasn’t coming from any of the bodies, and by the building power I felt in my gut, I knew it had to belong to the dungeon’s deity.
“Ooh, I don’t like this.” Carmedy shivered, and her ears lay flat against her head as she glanced around fearfully.
“You call my work sick,” the disembodied god wheezed. “You do not understand, no one ever does. Your minds are too simple to comprehend my genius. You should be honored to have the privilege of gazing upon such magnificent creations.”
The bodies began to lower back to the ground, and once their feet touched the cavern floor, they stopped and raised their heads and hands to the air as though they were giving praise. I looked up to see that what the corpses gestured to was a figure shrouded in a similar black cloak that descended from the shadows above us.
The god descended until he was a few feet above the heads of the corpses and floated there. The hood that he wore obscured his face, but from beneath the darkness of his hood, I could see two piercing yellow eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth that held a sinister glow. In each of his hands were several wooden implements that resembled small crosses. As he quickly moved his hands, the army of bodies lowered their hands and stood to attention.
“They’re- they’re human puppets,” Annalíse said with terror in her voice.
“Indeed, they are,” the god rasped. “These are my prized possessions. No other such collection exists in this world. What you see before you is my life’s work, centuries of craftsmanship before your very eyes.”
“Uh, no what I see before me are some stitched rotting corpses attached to some floating maniac,” Rana said with a look of disgust.