After yet another exciting night of careful exploration, we were heading back to our tower. It was quite fascinating just how diverse the conglomerate city was and how many different parts there were to discover. By now, I had noticed that it wasn’t just the cities of Denver and Colorado Springs which had been combined, there were other, much smaller, places in the mix, too. Sadly, my geographical awareness was lacking and I wasn’t able to place the few names we had come across, so I had no real idea where Simla or Wigwam were located and the only places named Windsor and Strasburg I knew about had been in Europe, placing them a little too far afield. Right?

Sure, the signage I came across might have come from there but I was quite doubtful about that, it fit too well with the rest of the signs we had seen. While a place in France might have English signs, and one in England most definitely would have them, I doubted they would look like the ones we had seen here, nor did I think the buildings would be in the same style. But then, the only images I could picture relating to Windsor were of the Castle carrying the same name and in regards to Strasburg, I knew even less. I just had that vague image of a large Cathedral with a high tower but even there, I might be mistaken. It wasn’t as if there was only one large Cathedral in the world and a lot of them had some fairly similar silhouettes. So, without those landmarks, I had little idea if Windsor and Strasburg had been transplanted halfway around the world or if these were other places with the same name, it wasn’t as if we humans were terribly creative when naming things. One just had to ask the Koreans and all the people named Kim. Sure, there was some cultural significance to the name that I didn’t remember but it was an excellent example, as were the many towns named Springfield. So far, I hadn’t come across one of those but I wasn’t about to rule it out.

Maybe once we came across a few of the locals, they could shed some light on the insanity that had resulted in a ruined city some hundred or so square kilometres in size. Whatever the case, the large area was teeming with interesting creatures, both of the bestial and of the humanoid variant, with a good number of Undead thrown in for good measure.

An excellent example of that variety was the area we had come across tonight. A graveyard, just as outsized as the city itself, with signs indicating that it was combined from multiple sources, including at least one animal graveyard. As with so many things, the Change hadn’t been kind to the resting dead, mostly because it hadn’t allowed them to keep resting peacefully. The graveyard was filled with walking skeletons, both humanoid and otherwise.

There were the usual, simple skeletons, humanoid remains, reanimated in some way, likely by some side-effect of the Change, alongside their bestial counterparts. Curiously, they even combined in some cases, like the skeletal horse and its bony rider, or worked together in a complex fashion, like the avian skeleton guiding and directing a pack of skeletal dogs. It was a fascinating process and if not for the sheer number of skeletons, the complexity of their behaviour and the lack of time since the Change, I might have speculated whether an actual person had animated all of them, but with conditions as they were, I was almost certain it wasn’t the case. Especially as the skeletons lacked a crucial thing I would always want to include if I were to create an rmy like this, a link to make sure nobody could pick up my valuable creations one by one.

Which is exactly what we had been doing in our probing exploration, strike down a few of the skeletons, either by using magic from afar or by sneaking up on them and crushing them with brutal attacks, and move back into the shadows. It was fairly easy, the skeletons were only in the upper fifties, but there might be more interesting targets further in, the graveyard was massive after all. Despite prior observation with the Oculus I couldn’t put numbers on its size, just a guess that it was about eight square skilometres, but even that was vague. Luckily, I had been able to scry the area with my constructs, looking for anything interesting, and noticed a few open crips, with Skeletons moving in and out of them. That these open crypts were also blocked from the scrying construct made them even more interesting, though we would have to be careful during our assault.

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But for now, we were moving back to our tower, Luna and I quietly contemplating the presented intelligence of the skeletons, while Alex and Lia were chattering about some strange application of Bone Dust, of which they had gathered a sizable amount. It was a good thing that my study of the Space Rune had allowed me to partially morph my shadow bags into actual, magical bags with an expanded size. The curious downside of them was that the weight stored in the expanded bags didn’t change, giving the Shadow Bags that stored items outside reality, and htus negated their weight, a major advantage to go with their downsides. Luckily, bones and Bone Dust weren’t all that heavy, at least for physically powerful beings like Lia or Silva.

The discussion about skeletal intelligence was fascinating. We both agreed that the skeletons couldn’t be naturally intelligent, they simply lacked the hard-, or rather the wet-, ware to think. No brains, no nervous system, nothing guiding them but the energy, the magic, that held them together. Even more interesting was that the skeletons had some faint traces of Astral Power, not enough to explain their animation or intelligence but enough to give some hints, indicating that the Astral Power was only part of the puzzle. The problem came with the question of origin.

Luna and I were uncertain whehter the Skeletons had simply been animated like the various Undead we had come across before, as these Skeletons didn’t share some of their mental and magical traits, or if the Graveyard was some sort of special zone, like the Charland was. If so, I was fairly confident that I should have felt the Death Magic in the air but I hadn’t been able to sense anything. And if there was enough Death Magic in the area to animate hundreds, if not thousands, of skeletons, I should have felt the it.

Luna, on the other hand, was more interested in the question of what made these Skeletons special and what made the Graveyard so special. There might be a reason why it had been brought together in the first place, though I argued it was simply part of the effect on the greater area.

Neither of us had an idea what truly made the Skeletons tick, we only knew it had to do with the magic holding htem together. To figure out the details, we would have to perform some tests and experiments. Maybe, if we came across a suitably small one, we could pack it up and take it with us, so we could work undisturbed. Sadly, the magic animating them faded the moment one took the head off one of them, otherwise it would make transport and containment a lot easier. And it might make for an awesome prop, especially if I could manage to give one the ability to speak and find a method to inscribe information into the magic animating a skull. It would make for a fairly interesting recording device. Why drink from the skull of your enemies if you could turn them into part of your library?

When a strange scent tickled my nose for just a moment, I froze, noticing that Silva was frozen in a similar way, her fur standing up and a soft, warning growl admonishing us all to be cautious. Once the scent I had noticed trickled through my nose and was identified as wood smoke from a fire by my mind, I had to agree with her assessment, we should be cautious. Fire should always be handled with caution, it always indicated potential danger. Either from the fire itself, if it was running wild, or from the people who made and contained the fire. Both could be dangerous in their own right.

When we continued to move, we acted as if we were back in hostile territory, with enemies waiting around every corner. No sound escaped, even the wind wasn’t disturbed by our passage, we were nothing but shadows in the darkness of night.

Finding the fire was trivial, even if we hadn’t noticed it by the scent it gave off, we would have seen the light long before we reached it. What we found when we did was quite curious, there was one guy, roughly my age and blonde, on watch while four other forms were on the ground, huddled in sleeping bags.

But, the truly interesting part was that their camp was almost perfectly on the path between our tower and the town. Either that was a pure coincidence or somebody had noticed the giant, glowing orb sitting above our tower. Both possible and ether would be highly amusing.