Dawn broke over the eastern coast of Leria, gilding her gloomy shores with rare sunlight if only for but a few scant minutes. The perpetual gloom that hung over Leria broke up into a constellation of tempestuous gray clouds over the sea far to the east - dispersed enough that they permitted the morning sun to poke through in orange sunbeams here and there on the coast of the land once known as Rhanea. Once the sun rose higher into the sky, into the cover of the perpetual Lerian gloom, this stretch of coast would darken once again. But this respite of sunshine, however brief, proved frequent enough at least in this locale as to sustain a coastal woodland comprised of gnarled, stunted hawthorns and anemic pines, clinging to life on only a handful of green needles amongst so many sickly yellow and dying.

The woods gave way to the coastline abruptly, terminating at a short bluff that demarcated the forest and the beach. Salty wind blew off the sea into the woods, carrying with it the roar of foamy surf crashing upon gray sand and pebbles. Mats of stinking sargassum deposited halfway up the beach delineated the furthest extent of the waves. Around these deposits of rotting seaweed and odd bits of driftwood wound a trail of some dozen pairs of footprints in the sand a mile long. The tracks emerged from a trail in the woods and ran along the beach - were erased by the surf in some spots - and terminated at the heels of a procession of ghouls led by a mounted revenant - one of whom was the freshly-risen ghoul known as Abbot.

For perhaps the first time in a hundred years, Abbot felt the warmth of the morning sun upon his desiccated and mummified skin. He squinted from the intense brightness on his dry, milky eyes; but did not look away. This sunrise was perhaps the first thing of beauty that Abbot had witnessed in his undeath. 

"Not often that the sun shines here anymore," noted the one-eyed ghoul that had helped unearth him several days earlier, noticing Abbot's reaction to the sunlight. "The Great Necromancer's magic holds the clouds over the lands. Been that way for years and years. Ever since they built the Spire."

The one-eyed ghoul - Lops, he called himself - was the unofficial and unsolicited historian of the party. He was one of the only mindful ghouls in this procession, save for Abbot and [i]possibly[/i] the jawless ghoul known as Grumble. Lops had clearly relished having someone else to talk to - or rather, be heard by - because ever since exhuming Abbot, Lops engaged in interminable monologues about everything and anything at all. Over the first few days of searching for old graves and new ghouls, Lops had covered the past two centuries or so of Lerian history, focusing of course on Eagoth and his conquest of Leria. Even when his knowledge of the Conquest had been exhausted, Lops would continue talking about something else until their revenant eventually tired of listening to him and shut him up.

"Not sure what it is exactly 'bout the Spire that keeps the clouds up," Lops droned on. "Complicated magic stuff that I don't understand. But the farther you go from the Spire, from Necron, the less cloudy it gets. I heard that it's almost clear skies once south of the Neck, and I guess far north past the Bridge too, but I reckon it's still gloomy up there too from all the snow. And of course, out there, far out to sea, it's clear skies. Way out there, hundreds of leagues away in the lands where men are still alive, they say that the sky is pure blue."

Normally, Abbot said nothing in response to Lops' ramblings, but something about sunshine and blue skies, living, breathing people, and a part of the world where things were still [i]normal[/i], piqued Abbot's curiosity.

"How does anyone know what it is like in the lands of the living? I thought you said that the Phasto Fleets keep the Necromancer's ships from crossing the White Straits?"

"The warships of Phasto are able to sink big, slow moving boats chock-full of ghouls, that's true. But small boats in the dead of night can make the journey across the sea into the lands of the living. Dangerous work that is, but there are some revenants in the Necromancer's employ that serve as spies. Very few - it's hard to get there and easy to get caught when they arrive. I heard that the living train dogs to smell the undeath, just like our master has those hounds to smell the dead underground."

"And what do those spies say about the lands of the living?" Asked Abbot.

"Those types don't associate with humble grave-diggers like us. They go directly to the most powerful revenants - Theleden and the like. But rumors get out to folk like us anyways. And they say that the living are not working together like they used to to keep the Necromancer from crossing the Straits. All those warships, all those soldiers, all the food and treasure needed to keep living armies working. And for so long - almost fifty years now. Word is that some of those living kings, princes, dukes, so on and so forth... they're tiring of paying their fair share."

"Less talking, more walking!" The revenant barked from the front of the procession back to Lops and Abbot. "If it doesn't involve how to find fresh new corpses for the Great Necromancer, then I don't want to hear it!"

"Yes master," Lops affirmed with a measure of disappointment.

Their taskmaster turned back and fell back into a bored slump in the saddle as he surveyed the coastline spread out before them. Abbot found this revenant master particularly unlikable. In the several days since Abbot had been raised, their master had never once offered any of the ghouls so much as a moment's rest. If they were not digging graves, then they were marching to look for another forgotten cemetery or unmarked grave that might contain a useful ghoul. He suspected that their revenant resented this lowly charge - scouring the countryside for ghouls like some undead gleaner - and hoped that he might be given a more prestigious duty if he demonstrated promise and usefulness to whatever undead lord he served. It seemed to Abbot that he fancied himself a knight - riding around needlessly on an undead horse in chainmail so rusty that it offered little protection and needlessly encumbered him. Obnoxious as his master was, Abbot knew antagonizing him was a profoundly bad idea and resigned himself to silence as well.

The cawing of gulls over the roar of the waves crashing at his feet drew Abbot's gaze up into the sky. A pair of cackling seabirds soared overhead on the winds blowing off of the sea. They followed the coastline for a way, flapped their way across an inlet and continued into the distance on a headland a league or two down the coast. A flock of fluttering white specks congregated at the tip of that distant headland.

The coastline veered inland in a small bay, at the end of which was a coastal meadow overgrown with willow shrubs and wild privet. Crumbling walls of wattle and daub just poking out of the sickly brush and barnacle-encrusted remnants of jetty piers half-buried in the sand of the beach suggested that this had once been a remote fishing hamlet - depopulated bloodily by Eagoth's undead minions during the conquest, or perhaps abandoned for more plentiful fishing waters some time before. Either way, where there were villages, there were cemeteries.

"Go find the cemetery," the revenant ordered, leading his ghouls down the beach to the forgotten settlement. "Any headstones are going to hidden under years of weeds, so make sure to cut down all the brush and ensure nothing gets missed."

Wordlessly, the ghouls in the party shambled over to the crumbling facades without so much as a word. Abbot, however, was transfixed by the flock of seagulls congregating at the tip of the headland on the other side of the bay.

"Did you not hear me, maggot?" The revenant snarled upon seeing Abbot staring off into the sea. "Get to work."

"I apologize, master, but do you not see those birds on the far side of this bay? Look at them," Abbot pointed across the water to a fluttering mass of gulls half a league down the coast.

"We are looking corpses, not seabirds."

"Right, but do you not wonder would could have attracted such a flock of them? Hungry gulls eat anything, carrion included. And to have attracted such a number of gulls? I think there may be a wrecked ship out there, possibly full of dead sailormen. Let me look and see, master, if only to satisfy my own curiosity."

"Go then, but be fast," the revenant agreed, clearly moved by the possibility of finding corpses. "You two," he snapped, beckoning Lops and Grumble over, "go with him and make sure that he comes back by noontime, lest I let the gulls feast on your carrion instead." With that, the three ghouls continued down the beach at a hobbling jog so as to reach the other side of the bay in a reasonable amount of time.

"You don't intend to try to escape from our revenant, do you?"Asked Lops, once out of earshot of their master. "Because if you do, that is a very bad idea. If we were to try to escape they would eventually find us, if not our revenant, then someone else, and we could expect no better fate than being tossed into the Dead Seas of the Locus."

"It is tempting, but I have no intention of fleeing from our obnoxious master today," said Abbot. "I simply want to see what it is that has attracted such a number of seagulls to that spot up there."

The sun by now had risen well above the cover of the clouds, plunging the Lerian coast into the typical overcast gloom. The winds off of the sea had picked up, bringing larger and more numerous waves crashing against the shore. But even over the roar of the waves, the cacaphonous cawing of a hundred seagulls could be heard as they approached the sand dunes of the headland. Tremendous splashes of seafoam against the windward side of the dunes sent dozens of gulls flapping up into the air with each crash of the waves, only to glide back down to whatever it was on the other side of the dunes that had attracted them. It was clear that something substantial had attracted such a preponderance of gulls.

At last, Abbot, Lops, and Grumble had reached the far end of the bay and crested the sand dune deposited at the tip of the peninsula. But there was no wrecked ship full of gull-pecked sailors on the beach below them. Instead, they witnessed a mammoth blob of orange flesh jiggling against the waves that had deposited it upon the beach. Gulls gathered around to peck at a conical bulb of meat that was three or four wagon-lengths long. The mass of flesh terminated at a preponderance of slimy tentacles as thick as a man's torso, each lined with a thousand suckers with sharp serrations on the cup of each. A gargantuan eye - easily dwarfing a man's head - stared up into the gloomy sky above.

"Whuuuh?" Grumble moaned inquisitively.

"That, Grumble, is a kraken," Lops declared, slowly ambling down the sand dune toward the beached monster. Gulls scattered into the wind, giving annoyed caws as Lops, Grumble, and Abbot descended toward it. Lops took one of the tentacles in his hands, marveling at the serrated suckers on the inside of the slimy appendage.

"A big one, too. When they get this big, they grab ahold of small boats with all these arms, reach up over the hull and pull on the masts to tip a boat over to swamp it. Once the crew is in the drink, it grabs em with these sucker cups, and pulls em down to their haunts at the bottom of the sea."

"Where did you hear that?" Asked Abbot, staring into the giant, lifeless eye of the kraken.

"Porter ghouls from the Meridions. Thought all that talk of krakens was just seamans' tales they recalled from life. Guess there was something to it after all. We'll want to tell our master about this. His lord, and probably his lord's lord, are going to be very interested in this."

"Stay here and keep the gulls away from it, Grumble," said Lops as he went back up the dune to head back to the rest of the party. "No doubt our master is going to drop everything and put us to moving this thing, and he'll be furious if it's not in perfect condition."

"Moving it? Where to?" Asked Abbot.

"Necron, without a doubt."