The Blackwood stretched out over dozens of miles of uncharted, unexplored, unreachable terrain. The blackbark trees covered the land as a shadow, and the skies overhead were unrelentingly grey. A perpetual gloom held overhead. From a far distance, one could see the central point of the endless clouds, a deep depression which hung over the one place where no trees ever grew. A bulge hung down over the lichyard, like a marker in the sky denoting where the heaviest degree of evil rested in the gruesome lands.
It was neither day nor night in the Blackwoods. Hours passed but the light never changed. It darkened, but never turned fully black with the fall of night. It was like the very light of the sun had been trapped in the clouds and leaked down through it. The light was ever faded and sickly grey, and even the air felt dead where it drifted.
There were some places within the Blackwood which weren’t in such lifeless states. It was once a place where homes were built and where people lived without fear of skeletal assault. None of those places stood, but for the ruins they left, foundations and fallen walls scattered into stoney mounds as proof that life once existed in some form.
Even further out on the fringes of the hill-scattered forest were signs of more recent habitation. Full walls were overgrown with the white crust of dead mold and petrified vines which crawled up from the dirt. One such wall belonged to a long fallen chapel. The north-facing wall still had the rounded opening where a splendid window was situated in the past. Even the glass that fell into the ground from disrepair found time to rot away under the gloom.
The ceiling was gone. Most of the walls were gone. It was merely a standing ruin, taller than most but just a husk of what once was. It provided precious little reprieve from the dread of the Blackwoods as the skeletons had no reason to patrol so far away from the lichyard. What few did wander that far away were nearly inanimate, lifeless, but quick to spring to life at any disturbance.
One disturbance entered. A man walked through the woods along a path with a cane at his side. He was an old man with sunken features covered up by a tassled veil over his face. He was clothed in a long shirt which stretched to his knees and covered his saggy pants around his sandaled feet. On his head was a floppy turban of cloth. He wore a long scarf around his neck that merged with the slope of his back and chest as he hunched forward.
The man peered at the fallen chapel ruins and wandered inside. His feet shuffled quietly across the forest, and then the third step of his cane clacked against the softened stones. The sound aroused two skeletons to rise up. They skid their backs up along the surface of the wall to stand. The rest of their bodies were eaten away by age, consumed by the corrosive grass of the Blackwood perimeter.
The two ruin guardians still clutched at rusty handles. A blade was reduced to a dagger, and another implement was worn down into a sharp hook. The skeletons attacked together. The old man spun around with his cane up and burst the swinging arm of a skeleton apart.
“Hmm?” he grunted. His closed, blind eyes were stuck staring at nothing. The other skeleton rattled before it attacked. He stepped to the side and avoided it, then swung his cane in a tapping motion. One tap shattered the clavicle, another the shoulder blade. The arm fell off and crumbled. The old man swung his cane around and stuck the crook into the open mouth of the standing skeleton. He yanked down and its jaw popped off.
“Am I breaking something?” he muttered. He stiffly jerked his hand up and forward. The cane crook pierced through the back of the skull and burst the top of the spine. The skeleton collapsed just as the other retrieved its fallen weapon to try and attack again. The old man stuck the shaft of his cane out as he turned around. The tip caught in the eye-hole of the skeleton and smashed its skull against the wall, destroying it.
He shrugged. “Old place must be falling apart,” he said to himself. He spun his cane around and handled it from the crook to tap at the ground as he walked inside. The floor was mostly overtaken by grass. Patches stuck out in the space where the mortar was long since worn away. The fallen ceiling and crumbled walls formed impassible peaks of stone, more foreboding than flat walls were, all the way up to the former altar.
The old man tapped his cane as he proceeded into the ruin. His head held position as he moved and his unseeing eyes wandered along toward a decrepit altar. Slouched up against the wall behind the altar, between a fallen pile of rubble and huddled around a patch of dusty cloth, was another skeleton. It was totally immobile, and was turned away from the entrance entirely.
The old man found his way to the altar, what was left of it, and palmed his hand around the surface of the stone lid. He found something underneath where the top met the sides and stuck his cane in to pry it open. The stone lid ground against the coarse rock cover as he inched it forward until it finally tipped over and fell down with a deep thud.
It just barely missed the skeleton’s legs, which were curled up in a fetal position around the bundle of cloth in its arms. The skeleton, formerly immobile, turned its head down just a bit so its blue eyes could peer out over its rubble covering.
KKKKKHHHHH!!!!! That was close!
I didn’t even know that thing opened up. Has this guy been here before? Who is he? Did he follow me in and I just didn’t know?
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Ozzy found himself trapped with a skeleton-killing, ruin-raiding warrior with no way out. He saw what happened at the entrance. He barely managed to enter through the other side when he heard the commotion. He’d come so far away from the lichyard and avoided all signs of life after his run-in with the questing parties. He didn’t want to lose everything without a chance to see outside the blasted forest.
The old man stuck his cane into the opened altar and stirred it around gently, searching for something by touch. His eyes squinted with disappointment. “Hmph. Nothing. Too late.” He sat on the edge of the opened altar and rubbed his forehead. Right below him was the lone skeleton, which started to silently shiver under his unwatching glare.
He must not see me? Or, he thinks I’m an actual dead-guy skeleton and not a walking, fighting, crazy skeleton? If I move he’ll probably smash me apart. I have to wait it out and -.
“So quiet out here,” the old man spoke. Ozzy stopped himself from shivering, even from thinking, with the fear that his intentions might send him into involuntary movement again. “It’s a shame that it’s considered cursed land. A man looking for peace could come out here, and with time, he’d find it. Some men did, and courted followers. They brought their lives with them, their wealth and goods, but they were betrayed. Generations of betrayal have stained these lands and turned them to ruin, and one ultimate betrayal has kept them that way.”
The old man rested his hands on his cane and leaned forward. He turned down to Ozzy on the floor. His eyes opened. They were grey and clouded over, but he turned them down as if he could see.
“At least one of us finds it peaceful enough to sleep through the malaise, eh?” He spoke knowingly, as if nudging Ozzy to stand up and drop the act. Ozzy refused and held himself to the ground. “No goods here for me,” the old man continued, “but maybe they aren’t far gone.”
The old man hopped down and clacked his cane toward Ozzy’s huddled up body. Each tap of the cane against the stone sent a spark of fear through Ozzy’s unmoving body. His eyes started to quiver in place. The old man landed his cane solidly between Ozzy’s legs and twisted the blunted tip against the ground.
“Hmm?” he grunted. He looked down and stabbed again, just beside Ozzy’s femur. Then again right next to his spine. He reeled the cane up and lowered it, gently, to prod at Ozzy’s head. “You must be thinner than you look,” he said. “But your Way is plenty solid.” He tapped on Ozzy’s skull. It returned a hollow thunk with each hit. “A bit drafty between the eyes, you are. And a strong sleeper at that.”
This guy is either screwing with me or he actually can’t see me, Ozzy realized. He slowly turned his head. The old man stepped back and leaned down on his cane again.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve not met someone like you in a long while. With lines like that….Have you seen what happened to the treasure in this case?”
Ozzy realized he’d been had - sort of. He wasn’t seen, just discovered, which sent him into a bit of a quick think as to how he could get around it. He didn’t want to fight a man so obviously comfortable with a thick cudgel, so he decided to rise up and cooperate.
“Uh, no,” he began. “I didn’t even know that was sealed. I just - I just got here a few minutes ago to get away - to escape the skeletons in the woods. And I -.” He gulped, audibly. “I’m really just trying to find my way out of these woods.”
The old man nodded politely. “I’d heard someone left some treasure in a ruin like this nearby,” he explained. “Though, blind as I am, I must have taken a wrong turn and found my way to some different patch of nothing.” He chuckled, self-amused. Ozzy awkwardly chuckled back and stopped immediately when the old man drew in a sighing breath. “There’s none to do now but return empty-handed. I’ve lost nothing but time wandering here.” He stood up and moved as if to leave, completely ignoring Ozzy where he laid.
Ozzy was left with a split decision. First, he stood up and inspected the altar to see if it was actually empty. It was, aside from a lining of thick black mold that started to waver and dry up once exposed to the stagnant air of the forest. Then, he had to think. What would he do next? He finally met a human that wasn’t drastically opposed to his very existence by virtue of having flesh and he having none. But that was because he was blind. Ozzy wondered if it was at all good, forgetting about any notion of heroism, to take advantage of his blindness for his own benefit. Probably not, no. Someone with eyes had to exist where the man was going. And Ozzy wanted to go there with him.
“Um,” Ozzy spoke up. The man continued on his way, unbroken by Ozzy’s interjection. Ozzy ran light-footed to catch up. “Sir, I - do you know the way out of the woods?”
“You’re concerned for me?” the old man said, with a scoff. “I’ll be fine. I’m used to seeing through the world rather than at it.”
Ozzy tilted his head in confusion. “Could I, maybe, follow you? I - I don’t want to seem like a beggar but, well - the truth is I kind of have to. I don’t even have any clothes. I’m just a - and I’m not - I’m not good to look at. For reasons. But I’d rather not be in these woods at all, if I can help it. So would you mind if I -?”
The old man raised a hand to slow Ozzy’s rambling down. “The one I met before you was the same way,” he said. “But he was a good soul. And I can tell, so are you. You wouldn’t be stuck here if you were a savage, a brute, or a cunning cut-throat. Follow as closely behind me as you wish. I’ll see you get clothed and fed and have a roof in my caravan for the night.”
“Thank you,” Ozzy said. He paused as the old man continued. He still had to reveal the most inconvenient truth of them all. “Uh - if people see me -.”
The old man tilted his cane back and pointed to the floor. Ozzy looked back and saw the dust-covered cloth he’d bundled up to hold onto splayed out wide.
“You’ll be clothed as well,” he declared. “And worked. A fair living until you can find a life of your own.”
“Got it,” Ozzy replied. He stepped out past the two broken apart skeletons at the chapel entrance. His hand instinctively reached up and wrung around the space under his jaw, but he missed and grabbed his own spine with a timid rattle. He threw the church cloth around his shoulders and huddled it up as much as he could to cover his bones from sight.
The old man led him out of the Blackwood and into the world still unknown to him.