Fears and Terrors Laid to Rest
Twelfth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
The wights did not come in waves like the raging sea to be dashed against the shore, they came in ranks, each
fallen warrior guarding the flanks of those besides them with the skill born of a thousand battles and the courage of ones who no longer feared death, their lines anchored in the narrow passageways. Ancient bronze rose and fell again and again upon armor and flesh as polished shields and ancient grave wards tied around the joints in strips of dried leather were bluntly thrown into the fray. Rina was fighting in the fore besides Ser Lonmouth and Sal'Nis while Mercy kept back and healed.
Had it been a minutes or hours? Rina wondered through a haze of exhaustion and sweat, her muscles burning with exhaustion as no mere sparing could cause. Finally, the last of the foes fell to a sweep of the knight's sword and the naga's crushing coils.
Again they stood in silence and darkness, again there was no sight of their foe, but now they knew that he could pass at will through any vein of ice to strike at them.
Was he watching even now, or marshaling yet more of the dead to send against them?
"We need to map out the barrow," Rina said once she had caught her breath, the last of her aches and pain soothed away by their healer's touch.
"If wishes were boats then all men could sail," Mercy noted with a tired smile of her own. "This place is a maze. Unless... I'm going to try something."
Ser Lonmouth reacted to the proclamation as he would have to being told enemies were on the other side of an unlocked door and about to charge them again, but he did not object.
Curious, Rina watched as the incarnate faded into fog as she had done countless items before, but this time instead of forward or passing between cracks in the walls she sent a thread of her substance no thicker than a man's finger down the long corridor. After a few more attempts to see how thin she could make the thread of mist Mercy began slowly advancing across the floor, like morning mist finding shelter among the shadows.
Or like a vampire in search of prey, Rina thought amused in spite of herself.
Either the master of the barrow wasn't prepared for creeping mists or he was less canny than she thought he was for it was not long before Mercy found him trying to weaken a fused stone arch on the very highest level of the barrow, likely trying to add 'collapsing roofs' to its perils.
Rina clicked her boots of far travel, one hand on Ser Lonmouth's arm and the other on the golden scales of the child of Yss.
Once more Oathkeeeper flashed in a blood red arc, meeting the frost encrusted axe and batting it aside to carve through stolen armor and into the bone beneath, but this time Ser Alren thought to use magic to tip the scales in his favor. His gaze was ice, fit to freeze the blood in a warrior's veins and from his hand
sprang frost to shroud them all in icy tombs before they had even died. But Rina
was ready, she knew the words, none better, and with a twist of her own magic she felt Their power break.
Ser Alren, or the thing that had been him, tried to draw back towards the nearest wights, but a wall of golden scales bared his way, he turned to the nearest ice wall, this one bare and glistening, but as he turned his back upon the Stormlander knight his fury only seemed to grow. New forged steel cut ancient bone and shattered his spine. He gave one final wild swing with all his might, but none of the skill he had shown before.
"Remember me!" he called, voice fading as though into some great distance.
"Father remembers your life, uncle, I wish I could have done so too," Rina said softly more to herself than the others. Then more loudly, "We don't tell anyone in Saltpans what happened here or who we found." The words were not a question. She would not burden her father with knowledge of what his elder bother had become.
"Agreed," Mercy said at once, followed by a mental nod from Sel'Nis and a moment later by a faintly smiling Ser Lonmouth.
OOC: And finally done, the loot will be up tomorrow.
