useless. He was unable to pry the door open by physical means, no matter how much strength he put behind it. He simply could not get enough leverage on the door in order to wrench it free from its holdings.
D’Arden sighed.
A few moments later, the door to the mausoleum exploded inward, followed by licks of the azure force that had driven it forward.
Nothing stood directly in the doorway. It was a pity.
He stepped over shards of shattered stone as he crossed the threshold. He could feel the corruption here, now – it washed over him as it was freed from the confines of the crypt, red and cold and dangerous and twisted, causing his spirit to recoil in horror. Something was very wrong here.
Cautiously he moved into the darkness, the soft blue light that dripped from his sword illuminating the path before him. There was no movement in the narrow stone passageway before him.
He took another step forward.
Something lurched at him out of the darkness, releasing a dried, decaying moan. A corpse stumbled towards him as he stepped backward, its arms outstretched. He could see it in the cobalt light of the manna blade, its skin parchment-dry and cracking, barely covering the bone in some places, no eyes left in the sockets, staring at him with a long-empty gaze. Red points of light glowed angrily within those deep empty holes, the life gone forever from this empty shell which was animated only by the twisted, perverted manna that dwelled within.
He swung his blade in a perfect arc at the walking corpse, severing it in two at the waist. The blue fire licked forth from the blade as it cut through dried flesh and shattered decaying bone, engulfing the rotted flesh as it consumed and purified the manna within.
The abomination collapsed into dust and bones, and then those too were quickly returned to the land as the manna consumed it all.
Corrupted manna took many forms; there were natural snarls in it that would cause beasts and men to change their form and become hideous monsters, like the fel dogs in the forest. Demons could manipulate the manna to create whatever horrific images they could imagine. D’Arden had battled against many different foes, even through one demon’s image of inferno itself, but still he could not stop himself from being unsettled by the sight of walking corpses.
It was not going to get any better in the foreseeable future.
He suppressed a shudder.
The small corridor that made up the entry gave way into a large inner chamber, with several stones reading different names upon each one. This was obviously not the mausoleum for just one family, but perhaps for all of the gentry of Calessa, marking the burial places of the rich and the decadent, who now likely once again walked the catacombs beneath him as a shadow of their lives, a mockery of life and everything precious and dear within it.
He held up his crystalline sword like a torch, using it to read the names of those etched forever in stone. Some were so faded that he could not read them at all, others seemed fairly fresh, bodies of the dead inhumed so recently as the past year or two. The names were long, flowing, and reminiscent of poetry, a reflection of the upper class that the bodies had once belonged to.
In the dim azure light, he spotted the stairwell that descended to the catacombs, where would be resting the bodies of the richest of the rich, the patrons and matrons of great familial dynasties, each likely entombed in their own gold-plated sarcophagus, with scripted lines of expensive writing etched on plaques attached to each. Rest in peace indeed… rest forever in the same decadence that they lived their entire lives.
Cautiously, he approached the staircase. If the manna could be sensed by smell, this place would be stinking of corruption. Instead, there was only the sickly sweet scent of death permeating the air.
A soft light came up the stairs from below. It was almost undetectable from the top of the steps, but he could see it if he focused his eyes clearly. There was someone – or something – down there.
Slowly, carefully, he began to descend the steps. He knew not what might await him at the bottom; he could be mobbed with the reanimated flesh of the long-dead and wasted away… or perhaps something even worse.
His foot touched down on what his mind told him was the final step. He stooped slightly and held his sword at the ground, letting the soft blue light confirm his suspicions – he had reached the bottom.
D’Arden looked around sharply. Nothing came flying at him from the darkness, nor any unexpected attacks from the rotting flesh of the undead.
This, of course, only served to make him more suspicious.
He stood in what seemed to be a great hall of some kind. The stairs had descended further than he had realized. The ceiling was high, raised up so far that the light from the manna blade could not illuminate the stone that lay above him. To the left of him and to the right there were no walls to be found within easy reach. He wondered just how large this catacomb might be, just how far in each direction that it might stretch. There was no telling from his limited sight.
It seemed to him that the dim glow he’d seen from the top of the stairs must have been an illusion of some kind, a trick to lure him down into the depths of danger. In fact, though, when he placed the sword behind his back to dim the light that shone in front of him, he could almost make it out – a soft, warm light somewhere ahead of him, in what appeared to be the distance.
He took a cautious step forward, and then another. There was no sound, no inkling that anything living had set foot down here in many years. Not even a rat scurried, so silent was the tomb that he found himself in.
At that thought, he couldn’t help but swallow hard. He’d not intended for this mausoleum to become his tomb.
The only sounds that he could hear were the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears and his shallow, rapid breathing. He took another step forward, and another, feeling as though he were following a path into oblivion with only the dim light of the manna in his blade to guide him. The light shone no truth, no revelations on this darkness that enveloped him and seemed to consume the very light from his soul.
He dared not speak aloud, lest it give those who dwelt this far beneath the soil some advantage over him. If they were not already aware of his presence from the disturbance he’d wreaked on the manna above him, then they were preoccupied at least. He’d have hoped for a more stealthy approach to entering the crypt, but he knew that anything which would purposely manipulate the manna in this way would have sensed him coming when he’d first set foot on the graveyard.
He reached a point in the darkness where he could no longer tell whether he was still standing in the same chamber. The wall behind him had vanished into the black, and on all sides of him there was nothing. He felt as though he were an island of existence, as if all of creation had simply been washed away around him, leaving him standing perfectly alone in the remaining oblivion.
Something brushed his right shoulder.
He spun around sharply, bringing the crystalline blade around in a flashing downward arc. He felt the blade meet flesh, then bone, and something moaned and stumbled away from him. In the flash of azure light as the manna fire caught the corrupted and dusty flesh aflame, he saw them.
They seemed to be almost innumerable, the number of animated dead that surrounded him. He only caught glimpses of their horrid faces in the light of the fire – they’d been quiet, oh, so quiet – the empty eyes, the desiccated faces, the yawning gulfs where once had been facial features. His breath came in a short gasp.
Then they came.
They came at him in a wave, a gasping, breathless wave of angry dead, roused from their eternal sleep in the most horrific way possible. He lay about him with his blade, hacking through the ranks of the corpses that came at him from all sides, lighting them afire as the pure manna that flowed within him and his sword sought desperately to purify the incredible corruption around them. They clawed at his eyes with shrunken fingers, pawed at his cloak and sought to drag him down beneath a sea of rotted flesh.
His breathing heightened even more as he ducked, weaved and tore himself from the grasp of the horrid things. In their grasping claws they took bits of cloth, leather and flesh as he cut them down, one by one. In some cases the manna fire leapt from one standing corpse to another, or a group of several would be devoured by the purifying cobalt flames.
Then, they were gone.
He stood alone once more, his only fleeting companions the wisps of manna fire that quickly vanished once more into the darkness as the dust and bones clattered to the ground and disappeared forever, returned to the flow
