Warhammer Fantasy: Thirteen Tolls - An Apocalypse Quest

It's never nighttime in the Pall. The underground streets are ever lit with burning sconces, and the Sons of Skavor cast long shadows as they hurry to and fro. You arrive at the grand home of the "merchant lord" Hadrin. You knock thrice on the doorknocker shaped like a warhammer on a thick oaken door, itself worth a fortune a kilometer underground. You are answered by an exhausted Dwarven lady – Hardin's wife, Gilora. Her braided hair is streaked with white, her grey eyes haunted. She has, like all her people, the strange cheek tattoos – a triangle with a long bottom below an uneven five-point star – hers done in glittering amethysts. She's a black mourning gown, half-ruined. Once it was embroidered with thousands of set jet gems, more than half are missing, their presence only attested by torn black thread. She stares at you, unseeing, a thousand miles away.

"My lady" you say, as you bow.

She says nothing, and without meeting your eyes, creaks the door the bare minimum to permit you and Pelops entry. The hall inside is a wreck. A pile of broken wutroth furniture lies in a heap in the corner. Haphazardly balanced on top is a bust of a dwarf, though of who you can't tell because someone's gouged out its eyes. The carpet that must have covered the floor is rolled up in the corner, half-burnt, leaving just the cold stone of the cavern. The painted ceiling is so stained with smoke you though it painted black. At the end stands a hearth, in which a blue fire burns. Kakram stands before it, warming his hands, his back silhouetted, his shadow huge and fierce.

He does not turn to look at you, but as you are used to know, the thought appears in your mind.

"A cursed place."

A few minutes pass in deathly quiet bar the crackling of the flames, though if you strained your ears so might say you heard – just slightly from a room off to the left – the sounds of heavy, labored wheezing. Pelops draws closer to you, unnerved. A tap-tap at the door signals the next guest for the evening. It is, of all things, a Slayer. A bright orange mohawk, a great axe twice the size of the fellow and more, spirals of blue runic tattoos – here stands a great warrior of the Dwarven race. The Sons of Skavor do not practice the tradition – in fact, they hate it, call it cowardice and stupidity – so you have never seen one in the flesh, or expected to in the Cities. You thought they fled into exile.

The slayer bows to Gilora, and to you and Kakram. Apparently his arrival was what you were waiting for – was that all who was attending – his wife, two priests, and a fellow who to Karaz Ankor, was as dead as Hadrin himself? You proceed past that left door, and into what would have been once a sitting room. The furniture here is also wrecked, smashed and splintered as if a great struggle had happened here. It's been mostly cleared, leaving the stone table at the room's centre, on which lies a shrouded body. It is silent – no breath.

You read about Dwarven funerary practice before you turned up. Apparently the tradition is for four days of mourning, with a Priest of Gazul performing rites and prayers all the while before the body is carried by the fellow's clan into their ancestral tomb. From what you've gathered from Kakram, Hadrin was clanless. So instead, they're planning on sealing up the whole house. Before that seemed a bloody waste at the time, considered you imagined a grand mansion like the funerary pyramids of Nehekara – but now it just seems blasphemous. Leaving the body in the house with all this trash? What rush were they in?

Regardless, as Kakram begins to intone words in Khazalid beyond your limited grasp of the language, you set to the task you've been preassigned. Traditionally, the grave must be sanctified, usually by another Priest of Gazul. As the Sons of Skavor do not truck with the other ancestor gods, there is no one else to do this but a foreign priest, so with much grumbling Kakram conceded to allow you to do the typical Morrite ritual in substitute, while affixing a set of carved runes in tile around the perimeter of the manor. The Gazulite seemed extraordinarily pained by all this, especially as it was half-excuse to let you snoop. He made you swear three times over you would not disturb anything – that you might look, but leave no mark, for to steal from a tomb was the worst of crimes. You make your oath, and now he was showing no signs of doubt, praying strong and clear, the Slayer and Gilora mouthing along.

You gesture to Pelops, and you both proceed into the next room to start the hallowing. It turns out to be the kitchen, and is as destroyed as all the others. This one, though, hasn't been cleaned up, so you can gather the shape of what horror happened here. Everything has been smashed against the walls, as if a tremendous force had blasted through, crushing jars of preserve and embedding knives half a foot into the ceiling. The smell of rot is omnipresent, which is curious, because you see nothing actually putrefying. It's coming from underneath a great upset cauldron, upside down, in the corner of the room. A sickly-sweet scent, from it, like old meat in the sun. You think it wise to get rid of whatever it, so, with the edge of your sword, tip the thing over. BOOM! It shatters with a crash, gone to rust and ruin on the inside, and spilling out in a pile of guts and pus and white-green mould are dead rats – a dozen or more.

You take a breath. Coincidence, to be sure. You ask Pelops to get a candle – grey wax, in honor of your Lord to burn the lot. As he hurries out of the room, you hear a cry from a little ways off. It's that horrid breathing again – ragged, dying – but this time, with a little phrase interspersed between the gaps, a word that scratches its way into your mind with the skittering of a thousand claws – "Ding-dong".

You don't wait for Pelops, but rush forward. You can't say why you did – compelled, perhaps, some ancient part of your mind screaming at you to move or die, and you choosing, in blind panic, towards the oncoming jaws. Perhaps that sort of reaction is why you're in these cities at all. But you hurry towards the noise, through a ruined dining room. You don't notice, in your hurry, the broken plates begin to ooze blood. Next is a study – you step over a shattered bookshelf. If you had waited, you might have noticed all the ink had run from the books, spelling the same word over and over – "Dum, dum, DUM!"

But you're driven by some sacral urgency, some sense that something is dearly, absolutely wrong. And so you go into what might have been a bedroom. You say might, because there is just a pit now, a hundred thousand miles down, endless and dark. You stop dead at the doorframe, and only avoid falling by grabbing a wall sconce. The moaning is coming from the pit. You Look.

Three figures – or one figure float, staring at you, joining and separating like a lamp to a drunk. They are all Dwarfs – dead dwarfs – Hadrin. His eyes have been gouged out, but tears still flow. His beard has been shaved, and you can see as he (they) sob the razor cut so deep you can see the severed spine. His fine clothes have been torn off him, all the gems embedded in his flesh torn out, leaving rotting sores. In his chest is carved the word MALOK and from every letter bleeds a transparent flame. His heart visibly beats through the wounds pumping so quickly it almost seems to be wanting to escape.

The three-that-are-one speak.

"Ding-dong" the middle says.

"Why?" says the one on the left.

"SAVE ME!" screams the right.

You gape in horror. You See, and it's an atrocity – it's a soul, flayed – the indivisible, ineffable one in three, bound together through some foul enchantment -silver-green thread. But some is missing – some part, you can tell, is torn off, and from that soul wound pours a tide of Dhar and Shyish.

"KILL ME!" cries right.

"Who broke it?" says left.

"Ding-dong" repeats middle.

You almost involuntarily begin a prayer "Holy Morr –" but you hardly get the chance to start, because as soon as you start, all three faces of the spirit contort with rage.

"FORSAKEN!" they all cry, and the walls shake, and a sob comes from the deepest, darkest part of the pit, and blood oozes from the walls, spelling MALOK MALOK MALOK, as the phantom launches forward to rip out your heart.

[RISK: Ghostbusters – Flip: Tails (Failure) [PELOPS INTERRUPT] Bonus Flip: Heads (Success)]

You stumble backwards, and trip on the bookcase. You can feel your soul flutter as the icy grasp of the dead Dwarf rips through your robe, scoring a tear along your sternum. But just as you're sure you're done, leaping with a voice-cracking war cry is Pelops – "FOR MORR!" he screams, jumping over you, and bringing Last Rest home with a great arcing overhead strike. The ghost shatters. The holy greatsword cuts smoothly through the false enchantment, and with an explosion of Shyish, there are now only two. One is the same, the dying, wounded, angry spirit – but one is what looks like Hadrin as a child, unmarred and bright-eyed, looking at you curiously. You scramble up, and draw your blade, and relax infinitesimally as the churning magic settles a hair around you.

What do you do?

[-] Run for it.
There's a slayer and a priest of Gazul three rooms down. They're better qualified for whatever the hell this is.

[-] End this.
Two on two are odds you'd bet on, ghost or no godforsaken ghost.

[-] Trap them.
You want – no, you need answers. You're a Priest of Morr with a literal bag full sacral paraphernalia – you can manage a magic circle. It's a little heretical, but for the greater good?

AN: My computer broke, so most of the preceding update was written on my phone. Sorry for any attendant roughness. Thanks as always for reading, and let me know if you have any questions.