9th of Sage’s Vigil, Year of the Horde
Despite a night of rest in Andy’s Armoury, The Abzurian was still feeling rather the worse-for-wear from our encounter with the blue acid monster in Treepo’s cellar. Noctuz and Kiira therefore took him back to the Golden Gryphon, and elected to stay on there to check on the survivors. That left Viggo, Thoradrin, Dirock and I to press on to the Abbey of Erathis.
The underground crypt was much as we had left it, as were the kruthik tunnels we had encountered. We trod warily, hoping to avoid a surprise encounter with the hive-queen, but she and her offspring were nowhere to be found. A freshly-dug tunnel leading down suggested why: the beasties appeared to have dug a new lair, deeper beneath the ground. For now we decided to leave them alone.
After a few minutes exploration, Viggo discovered one of the smaller tunnels spiralled up towards the surface. After a fifty or so paces it terminated in a dank crawl-space beneath what appeared to be a barn. A single kruthik carcass lay on the ground here. It wasn’t recent, and it seemed likely that the acolytes of Erathis had placed it here to deter other kruthik from entering the abbey grounds.
Opening the wooden trap door above us, we could survey the barn itself. Its doors were securely fastened at both ends. As further confirmation that zombies had not entered here, two emaciated and dehydrated cart horses were laying painfully on the floor, having exhausted the accessible supply of hay and water. Happy to see living creatures, we tended to them. Viggo was confident that, with appropriate care, both would soon recover.
Having at last found our way into the abbey, our next task was to secure the single gate to its stone-walled enclosure. Climbing to the hay loft, I could see it almost two hundred paces in the distance, across open ground that provided little opportunity for skulking. So much for a stealthy approach.
With few other options, Dirock, Thor and I set forth warily for the gates, while Viggo covered us with his bow drawn. Fortunately, none of the undead abominations appeared to be inside the grounds, and those outside failed to notice us until we had started to close the entrance. The gates slammed shut with a satisfying thud, and we quickly barred and padlocked them.
This task accomplished, we could now scout our surroundings. To one the left of the enclosure stood the barn we had entered through, as well as a small shed and smithy. To the right we could see an accommodation building of sorts, as well as a large goat pen containing a dozen or so healthy, bleating white goats. In the centre of it all stood a large and imposing temple to Erathis, with a single massive wooden door and stained glass windows marking its upper floors.
“Arnold, is it not strange the baa-goats are not eaten by the stinky not-dead peoples?” Viggo commented to me, pointing to the pen. I agreed, and could not help but remember our sighting some days ago of Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr trotting unmolested among the zombies. For some reason, the slavering infected spawn of hell left goats alone, yet devoured all other living things. It was a mystery that required some pondering.
First, however, we needed to see if there were any human survivors here. The residence seemed the most promising place to try first, and so we set off towards the large wooden building. It was empty, with little sign of anything unusual having ever taken place here—with one exception. A single door among the many was closed and locked. I quickly picked it, and we stepped in.
The smell and buzz of flies immediately alerted us to the corpse on the bed. A single monk, his cheeks sunken from hunger, lay dead. There was no sign of injury upon him.
As Dirock said a prayer for the dead, we searched the room. We found a journal, with a number of important clues. One entry noted that the Abbey of Erathis had been awaiting an emissary from the north, with news of the treaty talks between tamarin and the orcs of Narog-Nazu. Another entry, written in a more frantic hand, spoke of a brief blackness that had suddenly engulfed the temple, and of the sight of scores of brothers running from it moments later, attacking all in their path. Our deceased monk had locked himself in fear in his room, and then had slowly starved to death while awaiting a rescue that had never come.
Whatever had sparked the zombie apocalypse, it seems, had happened here at the abbey, in the very temple itself.
And so we set off to the temple, fearful of the danger that might await us, but certain that we must investigate nonetheless. Opening the massive wooden doors of the church, we found pews knocked over, and bodies everywhere. Some seemed to have died in place, the very life-force sucked from them by some dark necrotic powers. Others seemed to have been trampled while fleeing, or torn asunder.
Together with my companions, I stepped up to the dias, and looked around at the fearful sight. “Aye, tis a verrry bad thing that’s happened ‘ere, I’ll wager ye” muttered Thor under his breath, as he held his hammer tightly.
Spying a crack in the altar itself, I ran my finger across it. It collapsed at my touch, its very foundational essence torn asunder by some dark desecration. I barely had time to jump back in surprised, when a deep voice suddenly echoed in the large stone chamber.
“Welcome… welcome, meddlers.. to my NIGHTMARE!” A tusked figure appeared, clad in red-tinged black robes that bore the symbol of Orcus. With him three skeleton warriors arose—two above us in the gallery with bows, and a third larger one from among the pews. The latter, armed with a scimitar in one hand and a protrusions of spiky bone in the other, seemed a particularly daunting adversary.
“Where is nayt-mayr?” asked Viggo, laughing. “Is he under silly black cloak? Does he like nuts? I give him nuts!”
The robed necromancer looked puzzled, clearly unaware that his supposed fear-inspiring entrance had been badly marred by an accidental linguistic similarity to the popular Kuzian slang for an “inebriated chipmunk.” However our opponent’s deadly seriousness was soon underscored by the arrows raining upon us from above, as well as the onslaught from the boneshard skeleton before us.
As expected, it was brave Thoradrin who advanced to draw our opponent’s blows, raining well-placed hammer blows against the robed figure and the skeleton and taunting them in his thick dwarven brogue. “Ayyyee, call that a boneshard, laddy? Why me grandma’s got whiskers sharper than ‘at! Aiblins ye woods loch a wee taste ay dwarven hammer, orc? ’at will fix those gantin teeth ay yoors!”
Yet despite this, it seemed to be our cleric who attracted disproportionate attention from our evil enemies. I had been slipping in and out of the melee with dagger, sling, and spinny-blades, when I noticed Dirock slump, badly wounded, against the shattered altar. As Aunt Petunia used to say “Never eat gut-ripper beans before you’ve killed them, and never let your healer die.” In a flash I darted to his side, and quickly administered a healing potion.
Dirock stood woozily, shook his head to clear it, and leapt back into the fray. His voice boomed out, in evident anger. “How dare you, you dark abomination? How dare you despoil the radiant garb and purified body of a cleric of the truest of Gods with your most foul and cursed claws… by the mighty power of Kord, I shall return you broken to the very the hell-pits that spawned you!”
A scant few moments later he fell once more, pierced through by shards from the skeleton. I searched his pockets quickly, and found his own potion of healing, which I again administered. My aid came just in time, for Viggo and Thor—having borne the brunt of the fight thus far—were certainly in need of the cleric’s regenerative powers, if not his moralizing sermons.
The larger skeleton was finally felled by a heavy blow from Thor, although not before exploding in a final hail of sharpened bone. The orcish necromancer was a tougher adversary, although he too was finally slain by Viggo in an impressive display of twin swordsmanship. The two smaller skeletons in the gallery were destroyed quickly soon after.
A search of the rest of the temple revealed nothing more of great significance, but did tend to confirm our emerging theory. A visitor of the north had travelled here. Rather than deliver a message of peace, however, he had unleashed a dark necrotic incantation, that sucked the energy from some and infected others with the zombie plague. Even the kruthik below had been affected by this necromancy, as evidenced by the darkly corrupted eggs we had found on our first foray into their tunnels. From here the infection and the infected had then spread, plunging Phirul into darkness, death, and chaos.
Perhaps the orc we had just slain was the agent that carried or invoked this plague. He certainly wasn’t formidable enough to have hatched the plot, however. Was this a plot of the northern orcs? Or was it an independent effort by the bloody acolytes of Orcus to sow discord, undermine the treaty talks, and spark a wider war? Certainly they would delight in the slaughter that would inevitably follow.
All of this we could contemplate later. For now we had a more important task: to bring the survivors from the Golden Gryphon, as well as Samantha Heward and her son from the general store, to this our new place of refuge. In a dark irony, this place where evil had triumphed over good and set forth a plague that would kill thousands would now become a place of safety and respite for those few we had rescued from the chaos.
