✦ Narrator ✦ — "The careful eye sees what the reckless never live long enough to notice."
Location: North Ryke - Dungeon, Floor 1
Time: Early Morning
The party’s attention turns toward the right-hand corridor.
Before anyone commits fully, several members take a moment to study the passage more closely.
Percival kneels briefly, his gloved fingers brushing lightly across the disturbed stone. The dust tells a quiet story. Something large passes through this corridor regularly, but the drag marks are inconsistent. Not a single creature, but several. Clawed feet, scraping bone, and something heavy that occasionally drags behind them.
Xian-Fu steps forward next, her nose lifting slightly as she draws in the scent of the air. Beneath the stale odor of ancient stone and dungeon dust, something else lingers.
Rot.
Not fresh, but unmistakable.
Talos crouches near the entrance of the passage as well, running his large fingers across the floor. The grooves in the stone are shallow but repeated, worn slowly over time. Whatever travels through this corridor does so often enough to carve its presence into the rock itself. Like an ogre dragging an axe across the floor.
Silence follows.
The corridor ahead stretches roughly eighty feet before widening into a modest stone chamber.
At the far end of that chamber stands a heavy stone door.
Unlike the rest of the dungeon’s construction, this one appears intentionally sealed. Thick slabs of fitted stone form the frame, while the door itself is carved with faded geometric patterns. The runes lining the nearby walls glow faintly brighter here, their pale light casting long shadows across the chamber floor.
And something else waits there.
Four figures stand between the party and the door.
At first glance they resemble the remains of long-dead warriors and mages. Rusted armor clings loosely to massive skeletons, each one about half the size of Talos. The party sees empty sockets staring forward from beneath broken helmets. Fragments of old weapons remain clutched in bony fingers: a chipped axe, a notched spear, a worn staff, and a bent sword.
They do not move. They do not breathe. Still, they are there.
The moment the party’s footsteps echo a little too loudly down the corridor, one of the skeletons tilts its skull slightly.
Bone scrapes against bone.
A hollow rattle echoes through the chamber.
Slowly… deliberately… the four undead sentinels begin to move, lifting their weapons with jerking, unnatural motions.
As the four sentinels roar, piles of bone in the far corners seem to come to life. About 20 human sized skeletons.
Slowly… deliberately… the four sentinels raise their weapons, ancient joints creaking as they step forward to block the approach to the door.
A deep, rasping roar escapes their hollow frames.
And the sound awakens something else.
In the far corners of the chamber, what first appeared to be scattered debris begins to shift.
Piles of bones tremble. Skulls roll across the floor.
Then they rise.
One after another, skeletons bring themselves upright from the heaps, assembling into humanoid forms. Rusted scraps of armor hang loosely from some of them, while others carry little more than cracked femurs and corroded blades.
Thirty-two of the human-sized skeletons stagger to their feet, their empty sockets turning toward the intruders.
✦ @Proto ✦
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