It was a new day for the Defender’s Guild members. The sun was hidden behind the clouds just slightly, with peaks of light that beamed down like heavenly columns in the grasslands that surrounded the heinous Blackwoods. Even the woods themselves seemed just a bit more interesting than usual. The change was no doubt brought on by the egregiously long march some many miles and hours long to get around to the far side where the Zandanian encampment was set up. They came from the east, from their homeland, to meet the blighted territory.

The hike was easy for Ozzy, but he kept pace with all the hopefuls that went out for a new leg up on a long-term job to stay in good company. The only thing that waited far ahead of him was the steely glares of orderly folks who could pick his story apart in fewer questions than it would take to cut open his disguise. He’d made the hefty claims of being from their homeland for the longest time and it was his first time actually seeing any one of them.

He found the Zandan people, on the outset, to be very strict and militant. Yet they spoke exclusively of divine powers, of holy orders, and of miraculous feats. So they were a cult the size of a nation with their own standing, highly mobile armor. An organized religious body of zealous warriors in sterling armor. All dead-set on eradicating the skeletons at their source.

Everyone else found them to be a chore.

“Ozzy,” Yort asked. They were in the middle of the group, surrounded by grunts of effort and exhaustion as men walked with heavy backpacks or hauled carts on tired horses full of overnight supplies and camping equipment. People had conversations all around, mostly of what they were expecting to get done under the new supervision. “Was it always like this?”

Ozzy pursed his lips - mentally. He had to lie more and more to people’s faces without them ever seeing his own. It felt unfair, but it was the only way he could meet them as an equal. Even just the impression of equality felt important to uphold.

“In the city, yeah,” Ozzy guessed. “My folks were…fringe. Heretics, so called. They had their own ways. Peaceful enough but still kind of risky. Anyone who goes against the Holy Estate had to be punished. I got used to hiding my face all the way until I escaped. My folks…ingrained it into me that showing it to the light would make it so they could find me. They - them, the actual guys who do the killing of people like me.”

“Is that real?” Yort asked with a chuckle. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“I mean,” Ozzy prattled on, “I’ve been wearing veils or blindfolds so long that…yeah, the light kind of hurts my face. It’s just…I guess maybe it’s what my folks would have wanted. For me to kind of, sort of, resist in a safer way than what they did.”

“But it got too much for you and you left,” Yort said. “Had to buy off some Tarts just to get covered up again.”

“Yep,” Ozzy nodded. “Not my proudest moment, running out of the woods naked but for a golden armlet.”

The two of them chuckled over the completely false memory. Stenny caught up to them, as did Freid, from the rear of the group.

“This is boring!” Stenny exclaimed. “How much longer?”

“Crossing the border like this,” Yort said, “is a half day trip. It was morning when we left. It’ll be evening once we settle.”

“And the sky,” Ozzy added, “will stay that bright the whole time.” He pointed to the gray veil above the lichyard, and the divot in the clouds that sank lower than the rest of the sky directly over where Gozzpek’s realm resided. The fantastical nature of it was commonplace to the Defender’s. They saw it as nothing more than their work site.

“It’s gonna drive the Zannies mad,” Yort said. “Living next to that for so long. What pay they’re giving us is probably a pinch to the full scoop they’re saving.”

“Might be,” Ozzy said. “But we shouldn’t complain. They probably have enough forces to do this themselves.”

“Yes,” Freid said, stepping forward to join the conversation. “But that would only complicate the matters. Another faction in the Blackwoods hunting the undead would provide us with competition, as well as the mercenaries who are there to plunder from fallen corpses who will be hopeful of the amateur mistakes this new faction will make. They are preemptively banding together with the more experienced professionals - us - to fight for a common cause.”

“But how common is it?” Yort asked. “We want to kill skeletons for their body parts. They want all of them dead and gone forever. Farheim will go bust if they get their way.”

“Even if they had the ability to do so,” Freid said, “such an effort may take months at full preparation. Perhaps years, considering what lands still border this place to the north.”

Also, defeating Marrowbane is just the introduction. All the rank and file open-field tactics won’t matter at all underground!

Ozzy’s thoughts were not celebratory, though to any other skeleton it would be that way. He was surrounded on all sides by those who would strip him, cage him and sell him for great profit as they faced the diminishing retreat of their former consistent tradable resources. Yet he was calm and well adjusted. He felt surrounded by friends. Or friendly co-workers. Banded together in good humor in the face of their truly terrible job.

The walking continued. Ozzy’s lost sense of time and inexhaustible legs made it difficult for him to realize just how long the journey was. Yort got fed up and went to one of the carts to rest his feet. Stenny went with him, though she was on and off the cart more than anyone else that day. That left Ozzy to walk with Freid, who commonly took position as a strong, silent type. This led to a noticeably awkward atmosphere.

“One of us,” Freid said, “should ask the caravan master up front how far we are from his station.”

“I’m sure he’ll have a sanctimonious answer,” Ozzy said. “Like patience is a virtue, or you’re not being paid to complain.”

“You are of his people,” Freid said. “Can you not ask him?”

“N, no,” Ozzy said. “If he sees my face he might -.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“What about your voice?” Freid asked. “Would he recognize you by that alone? Would anyone?”

“N…Well…” Ozzy stammered to avoid the responsibility. He didn’t want to be the one who got the group held up over a mid-march lecture. Even worse, the Zandanian may request him to uncover himself on some religious grounds, and refusal would incur not mere suspicion and rumors but direct arresting action to pry his mask off by force. And then everything would go wrong.

“Ozzy,” Freid said. Ozzy turned and looked. Freid tugged on his own mask that was tight against his lower face and showed what was beneath. The parts of his jaw to the sides of his lips were torn away. His teeth and the flesh and gums beneath were exposed. As he talked his lower lip moved as normal, but the motions of his jaw were plainly visible with a lack of lower cheek meat to cover them. “I do not wear this to escape persecution, but to shield others for I know what difficulty there is in beholding the consequences of my own former failures.”

“Y-you’re not difficult,” Ozzy said. “Just…unfortunate.”

“Indeed,” Freid said. “I have endured pity as well as scorn for my looks and have taken all such blows in stride. It has not deterred me. And I have not strengthened from it.” He tugged his mask back into place. “But it is part of me. Something which I cannot be without. I hope, in some passage of time, you may lose your own shame of your scars and let them see the light.”

Ozzy took a deep look into Freid’s eyes. He was a man who’d seen a lot of action, and not just in the Blackwoods. He was a returner from the north - from a warfront against a foreign nation, defending the Tahlman lands of Renelac from the horrific invasions of the Pollermen. Ozzy knew what he should do. It was a great time to reveal himself, bones and all, to lift up the veil like he was wiping away the fog that covered his vision to see better - to see the world unfettered and unhidden.

Ozzy picked up his pace, held his head down, and marched to the front of the group. He didn’t dare look back. He ran from Freid’s invitation to bare all and approached the horseback Zandanian instead.

“Excuse me,” Ozzy said. The man on the trotting horse ignored him. “There’s some talk going around that we might have gone the wrong way. And I know we haven’t. I mean, you came from the right place, so you’d know if it was the fastest route - well, the safest fastest route. The Blackwoods doesn’t have roads, really. None for horses. Probably. Uh, but this walk has been going on really long. The cart horses are getting exhausted and the people too - will there be supplies at this camp for all of us, if you can say? Or something nearby we can harvest from like a stream or -.”

“We arrive soon,” the man said. “Look ayon.” Ozzy tried to figure out where a yon was - it was up ahead. He could just barely see it, but the fold of the rolling plains around the Blackwoods was in the way. There was indeed a camp in sight. Another half hour of walking, if that, hidden just behind a copse of woods that stretched up like a tendril from the dark mass in the valley pit below. They were right on the edge of the edge of the Blackwoods, mere steps away from the first and newest looking trees.

The Defenders’ arrival was met with little internal fanfare but much personal celebration. Everyone was eager to hop out and take a load off from all the walking. There was a long tent erected into a makeshift meeting hall with two long tables for shared dining and meetings with pew-like benches to sit in. One of the tents was fashioned into a church. The holy icon of the Zandan people was a Z-shaped bolt, one which in their legends was used to slay the last of the dragons, adapted from some far more ancient myth that Gunn might know about.

Ozzy took it all in as he wandered from place to place. Those two tents were mostly it. The rest of the fixtures looked more permanent, tents with wood-slat roofs and doors. Portable hovels meant for the knights and regal types who would supervise the willing labor force from the Defender’s Guild. The area was already cordoned off where the walls would someday be erected and the ground work would be dug in to make the fortress complete. It was a proper construction site, albeit funded through medieval malice for unknown lifeforms living in the woods.

What was missing were proper lodging and accommodations for the number of people who arrived. The Zandanians must have expected a smaller or slower turnout as the number of free standing hostel style “sleep anywhere and good luck to you” tents were only two, totalling about 16 beds. Nice, solid cots that would do good as bludgeons against invading skeletons if the need arose. It hardly established the strong image the Zandanians wanted to communicate for the future. And the caravan arrived with at least 30 willing adventurers. Some brought tents, most didn’t. Their only option was resting for the day and walking back to Farheim.

The meeting tents saw immediate use as the groups gathered up and took their favorite looking seats. Yort and Stenny sat next to one another, and Ozzy took a seat between Yort and Freid. In due time, someone spoke up to bring order to the chaos. It was not Yort, but someone older who Ozzy never met before, a well dressed man in round spectacles who looked more tired than most.

“All right, all,” he began, “we’re here. I don’t want anyone to say they regret it. We all have our reasons for coming here. It’s mostly related to the money. A day of work even without producing results just for surviving a walk through the Blackwoods is a high temptation that none were keen to ignore. Can’t blame you for that. But we can barely say were in Renelac lands any longer.”

“Fine by me,” someone said at the other end of the table. The rest of their delivery was unintelligible but it still led to a brief rise of laughter from their friends.

The bespectacled man nodded sarcastically. “Yes, yes. We should divide ourselves accordingly to our purpose. Some came for labor, others for hunting. And if we have too many of one camp or another I’m certain the Zandanians will make us readjust according to their most tolerable scheduling. Let’s see hands for those who came to work construction.” A surprising number of hands went up. Ozzy counted them quickly and got 13. “That’s nearly half. That’s good. Now, how many are set to leave as soon as you’ve eaten some slop and rested your eyes?” A much smaller count. Only four, one of whom could hardly keep his hand up. “That’s 12 of us then on expedition duties. An easy divide - none of us are going out there alone. Agreed?”

“Aye,” Yort said. The general consensus was agreement or silence. No one went alone into the Blackwoods. None but the dumbest, or perhaps bravest. The attendees at the camp were all seasoned enough to understand the basics of skeleton hunting which did not warrant response to the most simple questions. Those who didn’t speak had the confidence not to.

“What’ll it be, then?” the orator asked. “We have 12. That’s three teams of four - four teams of three - six teams of two - two teams of six. Now six in one party is right out. You’ll be likely to hit each other swinging your weapons around in the dark. Four seems just right, but three parties won’t get enough ground covered in the day to make a difference. If we want a wide sweep to pick off every single skeleton we see, we should go with more teams, small numbers.”

“Is that what we want to do?” Ozzy asked. “Go in with less people?”

The man adjusted his glasses. “That concern is valid. Even if it is coming from the town errand boy.” Ozzy nodded along to the sarcastic boos and claps he got. He didn’t even know the guy and was being smack-talked by him. “Four of three then? This would make the divide of wealth easier as well. 15 to 5 apiece of coin for each skeleton slain and hauled in.”

“I think,” a man said, who stood up to an impressive height and balanced a sledgehammer at his side like a cane, “we can afford a trial run, from least team size to most, to see how well each method works.”

“That sounds fair,” the lead orator said. “We can take low-risk routes today and increase the risk with more people. Stick to slaying roadside wanderers and tree-sleeping ambushers and the like where the trees are short. Agreed?”

“Aye,” everyone said. Ozzy chimed in a moment late. He wanted to think about it longer, make sure it was the right call.

Really, he regretted not raising his hand when he was asked who was going back to Farheim. Now his only option was to go back into the Blackwoods. The one place he’d avoided as a professional for the majority of his young career.