"I don't... you know... have any particular place in mind, not yet anyway. One place is more or less as good as another, at least until I get my bearings... or where my bearings would have been a few thousand years ago anyway," Jocasta explained. Beren nodded as though that made total sense. It was incredible to meet a real life dwarf friend, most humans who had close realtionships with the ancient dwarves seemed to inherit some of their laconic nature. She wondered if there were dwarven tomes on the ancient kingdoms. The fact that this barrow was locked behind a dwarf door suggested there might be.

"Iskura is a good place to find artifacts and rumors if nothing else," she continued, "assuming of course we can get out of here without being munched on by the hungry dead."

"You certainly have a gift for looking on the bright side," Beren replied sarcastically. Jocasta hopped up onto a raised slab of stone high enough that she could kick her booted feet and plucked one of the coins she had stolen from her pouch and examined it.

"Blood King Argante," she said, turning the coin so Beren could see the slope jawed profile. 

"This coin is about six thousand years old, or course, who knows how long it was around before it ended up in this tomb?" she mused.

"Fascinating stuff, I don't suppose you have an idea about how to get out of here?" Beren asked. Jocasta looked around the chamber, her eyes following the intricate carvings on the walls. Some phrases she could half understand but it was clearly in some kind of archaic dialects.

"As a matter of fact I do, although it won't be quick."


Jocasta moved around the chamber clockwise while Beren went wittershins, each of them carried one of Jocasta's notebooks and a stick of charcoal, merticulously copying the inscriptions onto the pages of precious vellum. Jocasta muttered about the virtues of papyrii as she worked, but she hadn't exactly been given time to prepare for her expdition before fleeing Andred one step ahead of a long list of angry creditors.

"Did you hear that?" Beren asked, pausing to glance up one of the passageways from which a faint clicking sound was now audible. It was eerily reminiscent of bone rattling on bone.

"We are out of time," Jocasta declared as the sound began to grow louder. She stuffed her book into her pouch and went to the center of the room. She pulled a stick of white charcoal from her pouch and began to scratch a circle of sigils on the ancient flagstone.

"What do you want me to do with the book?" Beren asked as Jocasta sat cross legged in an expanding circle of sigils. She looked up at him in apparent confusion.

"Just put it in your pack or whatever," she instructed. It was Beren's turn to look confused.

"Don't you need it for whatever spell you are working?" he inquired, casting a wary look towards the tunnel from which the clacking of bones and the rattle of rusty weapons was growing louder. Jocasta shook her head.

"It's just for my research," she told him absently. Beren stared at her in amazement.

"YOu mean you had me spend six hours copying down inscriptions rather that trying to escape?!" he demanded.

"Well, it would be irresponsible otherwise," Jocasta replied defensively. She paused and observed her work, absently sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as as made a few last minute modifications. The marching tread of skeletal feet was joined by a foetid stench of the grave. Beren hefted his axe and stepped into position between Jocasta and the passageway. She stood up and began to chant, raising both hands above her head.

"Whatever you are doing you had better..." Beren began. As he spoke a phalanx of walking corpses errupted from the tunnel, wicked spears and rust billhooks brandished. Jocasta's voice grew panicked but her chant didn't waver even as Beren leaped forward and clove one of the archaic corpses in half, scattering bones and rotting cloth in all directions before being forced back in a series of desperate parries. 

"I think we should..." he began to shout but he was drowned out as Jocasta shrieked the last word of her spell. The sigils light with green white light and leaped up into the celiing, vanishing rather anti-climactically. Beren cast a wild eyed look over his shoulder.

"That's it?!" he shouted, batting away an axe blade and breaking the jaw of one of the creatures in a spray of teeth.

"Well..." Jocasta began and then the roof exploded. Dust and stone blocks flew in all directions, shattering statues and crushing several of the draughr in the process.  The survivors surged around their fallen foes, taking advantage of Beren's shock to exit the mouth of the tunnel and begin to encircle the warrior. Thick white roots, each the thickness of a man's trunk stabbed downwards out of the ongoing landslide like the fingers of a giant, each one driving a corpse into the ground in a spray of bone fragments. Before either Beren or Jocasta could do more than gawp the roots pulled tight around them and yanked them up into the crumbling ceiling, squishing them together as they were ripped upwards through the heart of the mountain. Rock and soil ground past outside the protective cocoon, half falling and half being pulled through the debris.

"Isthisagoodthing?!" Beren mubmled, his face squeezed tight against Jocasta's left breast in their undignified sprawl.

"Sort of!" Jocasta shouted. The spell had been cast, but it was well beyond her control at this point. Working magic within the magical echo chamber of the tomb had been a risky move, allowing her to tap into far more power than she had any hope of controling. With a shocking suddeness they burst into bright sunlight, the roots around them opening like a child tossing a ball. Jocasta tumbled end over end, clinging to Beren as they cartwheeled thought the air for long moments before she landed on top of her erstwhile partner a moment after he hit the snow cover. They slid down the snow in a heap as stones fell around them like rain, the rumble of the destruction behind them only growing. They hit a snow bank against a fallen elm tree with a crunch that shook a hundred pounds of snow from nearby trees. Jocasta pushed herself to her feet, spitting out snow. By chance she was facing towards the hill they had just tumbled down. The great tree at its crest was attempting to shove its roots back down into the hill, but the damage had been done. Snow and stone were slumping down the hill and gathering speed, developing into a full fledged avalance.

"Definitely coming down on the side of 'mixed blessing'," Jocasta said, making quotation marks with her fingers as the ruin of the hill and the barrow raced down on them like an unstopable tide.