by J. Stone
When they entered the city, Ruby stopped in front of one of these horrible spikes and stared at the body it was pierced through. “You still think my sister can be saved?” she asked her demon.
Scarlett looked to her princess, putting her hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure you can save her if that’s what you want.”
“If that’s what I want…” she repeated with little inflection. Ruby continued to stare at the awful sight before finally deciding to move on. “Let’s go. We need to find a way into the castle.”
The pair of women continued forward into the city, avoiding the guard’s eyes under their hoods and staying off the main roads. They eventually came to a little hill that she used as a vantage point to inspect the castle. From there, Ruby looked down and surveyed what the castle had become. There was no moat as some castles in the region had been built to include. Instead, the castle was simply well constructed. Each corner had a tall tower, where men were stationed to look down at the city below. The main entryway into the castle was guarded extensively. The heavy portcullis was down, with four men stationed on either side of the metal grates. Behind them was a second drawn gate with even more men guarding it. Overhead, two to three men with bows patrolled back and forth, looking down below and suspiciously eyeing anyone who got too close.
Ruby acknowledged that there was no way they could get through all of that without a costly fight. Instead, the princess began to consider alternative ways into the castle grounds. Only one possibility seemed to stand up to her internal scrutiny. There was a crypt that had at one time been where the royal family and important members of the kingdom were buried upon death. There were two entrances - one inside the castle, where the clergy and family would enter, and another on the outside, where the tenders to the graves could enter and maintain them.
Both entrances had been sealed off for many years, however. After the establishment of Lavidia, there were those who threatened its existence. In the early days of the kingdom, the elves still lived in the region, but there was much conflict between them. The elves were much more adept in certain branches of sorcery than humanity. One key difference was their predilection for necromancy. The elves were very concerned with both death and rebirth. Some chose to live on past their natural expiration, returning as anything from shambling corpses to terrifyingly intelligent liches, while others sought to pass on their own knowledge and wisdom in a cannibalistic practice upon their deaths. It was largely because of these major cultural differences that humans and elves fought.
The two groups clashed a number of times before the elves were finally driven from the region, settling permanently south of Elythine and the Sornik Sea. The humans then began calling that area of the world the Land of the Dead. Before their departure, however, the elves attacked Lavidia and the castle at its heart. One of the necromancers cast a spell that brought life to the dead stored in the crypts beneath the castle. Though Lavidia’s soldiers eventually drove back the elves, the corpses they revived refused to return to the earth no matter what was done to them. Having no way to deal with the threat, the chamber was simply sealed off. No one knew whether the corpses still maintained their magic after the hundreds of years since their revival, but no one was curious enough to have gone in search.
Ruby was not as hesitant. She needed a way to get behind the castle walls, and there was no other way from what she had seen. “Come on,” she told Scarlett. “We’ll go another way.”
“Oh?” the demon asked.
“Yeah, there’s an undercroft that runs under the castle. We’ll go through there.”
“Won’t it be guarded as well?”
“I wouldn’t expect so. No one has been down there in a long time.”
Scarlett raised an eyebrow at that. “And why would that be?”
“Undead.”
The horned demon leaned forward, waiting for further explanation to come. There was none. “What do you mean undead?”
“An elf necromancer cast a spell on the graves long ago. No one knew enough about the sorcery that the caster used, so they just sealed it off.”
“What kind of undead though?”
“I don’t really know. It all happened long before my time. I’m sure the two of us can manage though.”
Scarlett was less optimistic. “I don’t know anything about necromancy either. I’m not sure what good I’m going to be.”
Ruby shrugged and kept moving. “They can’t be anything but bones at this point. We’ll be fine.”
The horned demon bit her lip, worrying about their chances to actually deal with something created by necromancy, but she followed her human master toward the crypt. Eventually, they arrived at an old mausoleum building in an empty area. It was a simple grey structure with a set of pillars on either side of the bronze door and a mounded ceiling over its top. The vacant area had long been abandoned and unattended. Brown roots grew up the very bottom of the sides of the mausoleum, while moss and green vines stretched up, covering the rest of the structure, weaving inside cracks in the masonry. Looking around, Scarlett could find no one within her line of sight. Even the sounds of the city had died out upon nearing the place. There were no windows along the walls of the small structure, and the only entrance was the heavy-looking bronze door that was locked by a large padlock but was also covered with nailed boards stretching over its surface. Scarlett could clearly tell that no one was meant to open that door, and she was concerned that Ruby wanted to be that person.
“Are you sure about this?” the horned demon asked, wincing at the sight of the crypt’s entrance.
“Nothing can stop the two of us, Scarlett,” the princess replied. “Come on. Let’s get it open.”
Ruby walked up to the bronze door, placing her hand on one of the wood planks. Before the poisoning, there was no way the weak princess would have been able to yank the piece of makeshift barricade out of the secured place over the entrance, but with its power running through her darkened system, she had no such weakness left. She snatched the wood off the frame and tossed it to the side. Repeating the act several more times, while Scarlett stood at her back, the princess soon cleared the planks from the entrance. All that remained was the lock. She had dealt with such things before. Hardly giving the padlock more than a thought, Ruby spit her acidic flavor of venom onto the metal, melting it away and causing it to congeal in a liquid mess on the ground.
Pressing down on the latch of the door’s handle, Ruby swung the heavy bronze slab backward, releasing an awful stench into the air. A musty, stagnant breeze billowed forth, managing to even catch the princess off guard. All her own noxious poisons seemed like child’s play to the smell of death from inside that mausoleum. After coughing the nasty air out of her lungs, Ruby looked into the small chamber. All that was inside was another heavy cover over the stairs leading down, but in the years of its disuse, it had become decrepit. Layers of cobwebs covered the corners of the room, strange black liquid leaked from the ceiling, and some of the vines from outside had found a way to creep through the thick walls.
The princess waved her hand in front of her face, brushing the stagnant air from her nose, as she stepped into the small chamber and looked at the sealed stairs. A thick stone slab lay over the path into the crypt to prevent anything from getting up or down. Even with her strength, she suspected she couldn’t move it.
Ruby turned back to Scarlett and asked, “Can you grab my hammer?”
The horned demon nodded. “Of course, my princess.” Scarlett reached into the void and retrieved the war hammer Ruby had become so accustomed to as of late and handed it to her master.
The princess took the weapon, spitting some version of her poison onto the mallet at the end and turned back into the mausoleum. The height of the ceiling gave her just enough distance to raise up the hammer and bring it back down. The sound released was a deafening crack, as her metal hammer met the hard stone slab. The poison that she had laced the weapon with sunk into the splintering crack and into the f
issures she’d created. The toxin began to eat away at the stone, but she raised her heavy war hammer toward the ceiling and swung back down again. The poison inside the stone sizzled like it was meat over a fire. A third strike followed, but then the princess paused. She had felt the stone slab nearly give way after the last blow, so she waited for the acid to finish tearing its way through. Ruby felt connected to it, just like she could reach out and control the people she had killed with her poisonous gift. Guiding the venom through the porous holes of the stone, she caused it to seek out every weak point in the slab, until she could finally break through. When she thought she had accomplished this, the princess held the hammer vertically over the stone. Ruby let it slip through her fingers, until the head collided with the slab and broke through, causing chunks to tumble down the steps and away from the hole. She grabbed the shaft of the hammer just before it slipped completely through her fingers and raised it, resting the weapon on her shoulder.
Ruby turned back to Scarlett with an eager grin on her face. “Ready?”
Chapter 37. The Undercroft
Scarlett had used her magic to generate a pair of torches that each woman held out in front of them to guide their way through the dark crypt. In their other hands, they had their weapons - Ruby with her war hammer and Scarlett, her scythe. Though they hadn’t yet seen these undead that supposedly roamed the undercroft, the path to the castle was long, and they wanted to be prepared. The crypt was more than a simple sepulcher with a few caskets or tombs; this was a sprawling labyrinthine series of chambers built to contain generations upon generations of Ruby’s family line. Though much of it remained empty and yet unused due to the necromantic spell, there were plenty of bodies that had been stored within before it was sealed.
The pair of women had passed by a number of caskets and, disturbingly, found them to be empty. The lids lay to the side with claw marks and scratches on their inside covers. The proof, however, of the undead had yet to be seen. Centuries had passed since the spell was cast on the bodies of the undercroft, and not even Scarlett knew if the magic could sustain itself for that length of time. She was pessimistic that there was any chance of making it through the crypt without finding out though.
The underground tunnels were quiet. The only sounds the women heard were from themselves - the clacking of their shoes on the stone below, the crackling of their torches, and their own breathing. The princess listened intently for any sign that there was some undead creature stirring beneath Lavidia, but still, she heard nothing to denote a presence beyond their own.
The caskets they had passed thus far had belonged to friends, staff, and important members of the kingdom, but none were the final resting places of anyone from Ruby’s family line. Turning a corner, the princess found the chamber offshoot where such people had been interred. She found herself unable to resist the urge to see what remained of them. Holding the torch out in front of her, Ruby examined the more expensive caskets that lined the wall. The first she found had words engraved just above the tomb, but they were covered in layers of dust and old cobwebs. She leaned her hammer against the wall and raised her empty hand to the writing, brushing the years of neglect away.
“King Cyrus Willow,” she said aloud, reading the words she found underneath.
“This is your ancestor?” Scarlett asked.
“The first king of Lavidia, yes.”
Looking down, below the words to the casket itself, the princess saw that her ancestor was not still within his coffin. Just as the others had been, the lid had been shifted to the side, and nothing remained where the body should have been.
“But he appears not to be here…” Scarlett said.
That was when they heard a sound begin to echo throughout the chamber. Ruby raised a finger to silence her servant. Scarlett’s eyes widened as she listened as well, attempting to breathe as quietly as possible, and they both stood quite still, waiting to hear the sound repeat. It echoed down the hall again. Still, neither woman could place the sound to an action, but they knew it was something else causing it. They weren’t alone down in that undercroft. The sound grew closer. Ruby picked her hammer up from the ground, the metal softly scraping against the stone floor, and she turned to face the direction she believed the noise to be coming from. They now identified the sound as a combination of a soft and hard scraping. Something that shouldn’t have been dragged along on the ground of the floor was limply pulled, as this thing stumbled closer to the women’s location.
Around a corner came the barely held together decaying body of a man’s corpse. Its head should have been nothing but bone after all the time in the ground, but the skin remained, stretched terribly over its skull. A red glow from deep inside empty eye sockets glared at them, and its intermittently toothed jaw hung down from its skull, held there on only one side under the ripped and stretched skin. Somehow, single, long grey hairs hung off its scalp. Held clumsily in one hand was a relic of a sword, being dragged along the floor with it, and the thin fingers of its other hand were looped through the handhold of its shield that fell down to its side, grating against its leg. Ancient battle armor adorned its desiccated corpse, marking what was once a man as an important warrior. The sigil on its chest was Lavidia’s brown willow tree on a green fabric, as would be expected, but it was an archaic variation that had not been used in many years.
The wight struggled to raise its sword up toward the women, but Ruby stepped forward to deal with this threat. She was quicker than the slow undead creature, animated only through a spell of old. The princess dropped her torch to the ground and gripped the shaft of her weapon, swinging her heavy war hammer before the skeleton could bring the sword along any path that might harm her. She knocked the wight’s head clear off its body, ricocheting and echoing noisily down the hall. Its body slumped over, dropping its ancient blade to the ground and leaning its shoulder against the wall.
Ruby looked back to her horned demon with a cocky smile. “See? They’re not so tough.”
Scarlett shrugged. “I guess not. Maybe I was worrying for--”
The demon stopped and stared intently at something behind Ruby, causing the princess to turn and see the wight’s skull sliding through some unseen force back to its decapitated body. The red glow of its eyes did not wane at all, as it was pulled back to its neck. The undead thing stared with the same intensity, as ever, as the wight stood, picking its sword back up from the ground and beginning to readjust itself. Rather than be afraid or worried as Scarlett seemed to be, Ruby found herself annoyed at its persistence.
“Can’t!” She raised her hammer. “Anything!” She swung it into the wight’s skull. “Ever!” The head crashed down the hallway once again. “Be!” She brought the hammer back into the skeletal creature’s chest. “Simple?!”
Ruby continued to pummel the wight’s undead body with her war hammer, its various bits and limbs flying off, as she vented her frustration. Behind her, Scarlett winced at the carnage and violence she brought down on the wight, fearing it wouldn’t be enough. The horned demon thought she could hear something over the sound of the princess’ frenzied cries, and she turned around to see more of the shambling corpses - brought to them by the noise of Ruby’s hammer clashing against the ancient bones and armor of the wight.
Despite their long captivity in the undercroft, some of these corpses still had most of their flesh intact. The magic that held them together also seemed to prevent them from further decomposing. None of these new wights had been warriors in life. The women were dressed in expensive but deteriorated gowns, while the men wore hole-filled tunics with Ruby’s family crest stitched into the fabric. Elaborate rings were on some of their fingers. One woman had a sapphire gem necklace, and one of the men’s brow was holding up a golden crown embedded with jewels. Clearly, these were some of the members of the royal line. What all these wights had in common with the warrior that the princess continued to smash was the red glow in their empty eye sockets.
“Ruby!” Scarlett shout
ed, not turning her head away from the new undead. “Bit of a problem!”
The princess’ violent rage was stopped, as she heard the panic in her demon’s voice. Ruby looked toward her to see more of the wights shambling toward them. The skull and various other body parts that she had knocked off began to come back together behind her.
“Alright,” Ruby said through heavy breaths. “Time to go.”
Picking up her torch from the ground, the princess turned back toward the reassembling wight and kicked its head down the hall, preventing it from piecing itself back together too quickly. Scarlett followed behind her, looking back to the slowly moving corpses. As she passed the soldier wight, its hand reached out and grabbed her bare leg. At the simple touch of its fingers, the horned demon could feel her life force being drained out of her. Through their connection, Ruby could feel even her own energy slipping away but not as strongly as her demon. The wight’s skull that Ruby had kicked down the hall came barreling back toward her, hitting her hard in the knee, bouncing off behind her and nearly knocking her over. She looked back to see a spectral blue energy being sucked from her servant and flowing into the wight.
“Scarlett!” she shouted back.
No response from her horned demon. Her eyes were transfixed on empty space in front of her, glazed over by the wight’s draining touch.
Ruby tossed aside the torch once again and gripped the hammer with both hands. She brought the heavy weapon down on the skeleton’s elbow, cracking it in half and releasing its grip on Scarlett’s leg. The horned demon stumbled forward and collapsed a few feet away from the wight, her body under her own control again.
“Are you alright?” the princess asked, turning and leaning down to her servant.