It’s not like I hadn’t tried other ways. Traditional ways. For years I’d toiled, fourth son of a minor noble family, scrabbling against my parents’ oppressive disappointment since the very hour of my birth, when I was narrowly spared the traditional ritual sacrifice of every fourth child. The knife had been about to drop when a messenger had delivered news of the timely (or untimely, depending on whom you asked) death of my eldest brother in the Blood Wars.
Despite that impromptu and life-saving promotion to the position of third child, the younger me had proved disappointingly inept beneath my family’s grudging tutelage. As I grew older, and increasingly unlikely to excel at the traditional night elf ways of gaining influence—political intrigue, verbal sparring, backstabbing of both the metaphorical and literal kind—my parents had done the only reasonable thing they could think of: given me to the Temple of Arachnia, Spider Goddess of the Nightfolk.
There, I labored for almost a decade as a lowly acolyte, fuming at the injustice—silently, of course. The high priest’s gilded scepter came down hard on those who complained aloud about their lot in life, especially when he judged serving the goddess to be the highest of callings despite our positions as glorified caretakers of her temple.
Khazla and Draykon had already found themselves in the same position just a few weeks prior to my own induction into the temple, though they’d come from slightly humbler beginnings—the son of a commoner mage and the daughter of a dust-rat—and therefore (one might argue) deserved their ignoble fate much more than I.
But we were each outcasts in our own way—had literally been cast out by those who were meant to protect if not cherish us—and the three of us soon discovered that when we stuck together, survival was less a possibility than it was a guarantee. Better yet, we didn’t just have to survive; we could also live, despite the best efforts of the other acolytes to grind us down.
Still, it was a hard, miserable existence. Until now.
A few months ago, myself and some of the other acolytes were entrusted with restoring and categorizing the contents of the ancient crypts that spread across multiple floors beneath the temple. Some of the deeper tombs had lain untouched for centuries, and simply unearthing their contents had been no small task in itself. Traps, pitfalls, vermin, and other hidden dangers had made the work as treacherous as it was difficult, though it’d at least kept things interesting.
We found the vault sometime during the third week. By that time we’d all seen (and swept, polished or repaired) enough mummified corpses, shrunken heads, organ jars, cursed weapons, and articulated skeletons of long-extinct beasts, that I no longer batted an eyelid at the idea of opening ominous-looking sarcophagi, yet something about this vault was different.
It was guarded by three consecutive doors, each forged from a different metal, none of which I recognized. Only the inner door was closed, so we could see that each door was as thick as the length of my forearm, and each was carved with runes and rough images that warned of something dreadful inside.
Even more disturbing was the fact that the final door swung open slowly at my approach, seemingly of its own accord, while we were all arguing in hushed whispers about how in the hells we were meant to use the custodian’s keys to open a vault door with no keyhole.
Perhaps most disturbing of all were the marks on the inside of that innermost door. Deep gouges, growing fainter towards the bottom, as though whatever had made them had begun to lose strength the longer it struggled to get out.
From where I stood in the doorway—the others had dared me to investigate and then hung back themselves, the cowards—I thought I could see the pale gleam of bones further in, though the shadows were too deep even for a night elf’s eyes to fully penetrate.
As though sleepwalking, I took several steps across the threshold of the vault without even realizing I’d moved. My oddly dreamlike state meant I only noticed too late as my fellow acolytes—somewhat predictably, I realized in hindsight—hefted the heavy outer door closed behind me, plunging me into utter, complete darkness.
No; not complete darkness. As I stared around, wild-eyed, I saw several humped shapes, and realized with growing horror that they were in fact enormous desiccated bodies, faintly illuminated by a strange purplish light coming from the depths of the vault. Their strange, twisted, alien hybrid forms put me in the mind of the creatures said to roam the Netherdark beyond the city limits.
Those monsters generally avoided the main city of Uldrazir, strung as it was with blue-green roachlights: alchemical globes crafted to mimic the phosphorescent glow of the rock-roaches that, for reasons scholars could only guess at, acted as a natural deterrent against some of the Netherdark’s nastiest predators. But there were no roachlights here; only that strange purple radiance. If any of these monsters remained alive, I could measure the remainder of my life in minutes.
I stood frozen there for some time. The heavy silence of the vault was oppressive, broken only by the thudding of my heartbeat in my ears and the scuffling sounds from outside as Khazla and Draykon fought against our brothers and sisters to let me out; yet every muffled shout, every scratch and scrape, seemed to echo and create the illusion that the sleeping corpses were waking up.
However, once my initial terror subsided and I’d convinced myself that the dead creatures really were just that—dead—I slowly ventured deeper into the vault.
That faint purple light was mesmerizing. I felt myself drawn to it like a grotto-moth to a roachlight, stepping unconcernedly over the outstretched limbs of the sprawled monsters as though their mere presence hadn’t made me almost soil my breeches just a few moments before. The finger bones of an ancient hand crunched beneath my heel and crumbled into dust.
