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“Help me!” A weak, frightened voice from deep in the catacombs. “Help. Someone, please!”
A group of three travelers had ventured too close to my lair. Just within earshot. A damsel was there, in need of saving!
“Help,” the voice said, weaker this time.
Two members of the group ventured into the barrow. They inched forward, swords drawn. The entrance tunnel had been remodeled to be a straight shaft with numerous side detours and false paths. The cry for help always seemed just around the next corner, until…
Living shadows reached out and grabbed the pair of would/be heroes like so many squirming fingers. Struggle though they might, the fell magic soon wrapped them in bulbous cocoons of shadow pulsating in the walls. Only a quick, alarmed, already-distant shout came from the pair before they were consumed.
“Bohrs? Reiner?” Their third member approached even more cautiously, torch and sword drawn in accord.
He passed right by the shadows on the walls that were actively corrupting his comrades. Still, he followed as that cry for help wafted down the tunnel again.
Closer, it grew, until, around the first major bend, this interloper discovered the source.
It was not a damsel held in shackles by some undead lich, but a warrioress, axe In hand. Glowing red eyes evidenced her allegiance to the barrow’s master. Not a damsel, but a willing and purposeful trap designed to lure the gullible.
At the sight of my darling lieutenant, this intruder turned to flee. The shadows enveloped him before he could even turn around. Kicks and pushes did nothing, for physical instruments were futile against the encroaching darkness. Soon three pulsating cocoons hung in the halls, bulbous around the midsection. The third shuddered once, then twice… then came to a gradual stop as the contents settled, ripe for corruption.
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Not more than an hour later, I paid a rare visit to the dungeon’s first floor. The new lantern features were ripe and ready to burst. Three fully-formed, fully-living humans emerged from their stasis, eyes now glowing red. They all saw my skeletal visage and bowed immediately.
“These three belong to you now, my lord,” said Helgetha, presenting them.
I touched her shoulder Paulson affectionately. “You were excellent bait, my lovely assistant.”
The once-proud warrior bowed, glad to be of service.
I turned to the new recruits.
“Are there others?”
The lead one – Bohrs, I think – bowed his head. “An entire trade convoy, heading towards Starfall. They’ll be stopping not far from here.”
“And can you lead them to this burrow?”
“Without hesitation, my lord.”
Excellent.
Sure enough, a waiting game resulted in my legions of technically alive, inaugurably indoctrinated thralls. Quite unlike their reanimated brethren, these thralls could think. They could talk – gladly providing me oral testimony of their lives before walking into my lair. They could plan, and most importantly, venture outside the barrow and operate independently.
Travelers were claimed, subverted, and sent back out to lure in the rest of their convoys. Treasure from these convoys placed strategically around the surrounding valley lured in the odd tomb raider still. But with convoys came pack animals and even horses. A bit of experimentation revealed that the shadow-thralling magic could ‘convert’ base animals almost instantaneously. Only humans, with their wills, required a bit of time in the oven to refine into a loyal thrall.
Sending red-eyed thralls out into the countryside to drag back prisoners from farmsteads and into the barrow for conversion. Mere farmers were not experience fighters. But they had good muscle mass to build upon, and the valley was now full of them. In the time since my clan had moved in, and in turn been squashed by outsiders, some new fad called ‘subsistence farming’ had taken on. This isolated many of the new settlers in sparse plots of land. I had my disciples help themselves to anything they could finding in the surrounding valley.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The feast lasted until the first of these thralls fell far from my lair. I could sense the casualty from my throne and swiftly recalled everyone else out in the field.
Organized resistance once more marched upon my barrow.
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Another group from the realm beyond Starfall awaited. Many centuries had passed at this point. It was doubtful there was even oral history of the doomed attempt to seal my barrow last time.
“This is the combined might of Starfall, Fireforge, and some number of other towns past the mountains. New advancements in horse-drawn travel had allowed communities to be connected over far greater distances than they had in my day.
Helgetha confirmed that this was the combined might of their fledgling, above-ground steppe empire that hailed from outside the valley. Unlike that attempt to seal me up in the ancient days, this group was mostly soldiers with a handful of porters and supply wagons to keep everyone fed.
Perhaps I’d pissed someone off?
No matter. This army needed food, and its soldiers would grow bored and fatigued besieging a (as far as they knew) empty barrow. My minions had no such weaknesses. If the surface dwellers attempted to funnel through my lair's narrow tunnels, they’d be picked off by traps and consumed by living shadows. Either way would rapidly turn a terrified army of the living into an implacably disciplined army of the dead.
But no army or even scouts ever entered the tunnels. Just what were they doing out there? I almost wanted to send some red-eyed thrall to go parley. Decided against it; that would kill off a great deal of my mystique.
After some weeks of this, I felt a strange rumbling throughout the barrow. Someone was attempting to burrow in from the opposite side of the burial mound.
Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. All defenses were oriented toward the front entrance There was little time to rearrange the layout with more traps. But this risked letting surface dwellers infiltrate the second or third level. Why, they could dig right into my throne room!
That wouldn’t do.
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Luckily, I’d corrupted many a thrall who could describe the order of battle of these Fireforger types. I slowed the attempted tunnel crew with new poison traps I’d been concocting in my boredom over the years.
I waited, listened, and plotted. The camp outside inched closer by the day. It appeared that coordination was occurring between the tunnel crew and camp crew. They were going to time an incursion for when the tunnel was breached.
Rather than fight on two fronts, I carefully timed things until just before it sounded like the tunnel was ready to breach. Then, one early evening, I set the thrall loose on the camp. Sun was still too high to utilize my undead, but the thralls were far stronger than any skeletons. They set fire to the camp in an organized fashion, striking when least expected and targeting the largest tents with flame. We’d timed the attack between shifts.
Thralls were capable of independent thought. That left the full army of reanimated undead to wait with me down in the throne room. I also kept Helgatha around, by far my best warrior and bodyguard.
When the tunnel breached it collapsed an entire wall of my inner sanctum. Maybe a dozen warriors wielding heavy armor and steel weaponry streamed out; the poison traps had racked up a few casualties.
The undead crowded the chamber, and they wasted no time in surging forth into the new foes. Many were rotten to the bone – it had been some time since anyone had last made it down here.
Though the enemies possessed greater armor than most of these lesser undead, sheer numbers whittled away at the party. Only four made it close to my throne. One bearded warrior wearing a Starfall insignia on his breastplate performed a great flying leap at me with his battle axe – only to be blocked by a parry from Helgetha’s own.
There were shouts from the still-living members of the party. They seemed to know her. No matter. I summoned forth my dark magic and consumed this particularly brave warrior in a shadow chrysalis. His axe clattered to the floor.
By that point, with no help from the topside camp arriving, the warriors turned to flee down the tunnel they created. Only two were able to make it out into the sun, and safety.
The shadow cocoon shuddered once… then twice… then three times. Then a fourth time. They usually didn’t last so long.
“My lord,” Helgetha said. “This specimen. Why, it’s none other than my former husband.
“Is that so?”
Again, the cocoon shuddered. It ruptured all at once. That bearded warrior broke free from my magic. I made some equivalent to a frown. That hadn’t happened before…
“I’ll fight to break you free!” the war chief, Novak, said in a variant of my mother tongue – it had changed over the years, but was still mostly legible. He pointed wildly, still batting aside a web of shadows. “No matter what, Helgetha. I’ll…”
I took his battle axe off the floor and buried it in his temple. The shadows dissipated, for there was no longer any life to corrupt.
“Your husband, eh?” I asked, motioning to the now-corpse.
Helgatha nodded. “Yes, my lord. Pity. He would have made an excellent thrall.
I raised him with my necromancy. Even then, Helgatha barely reacted, so total was the corruption of the shadow cocoons.
I sat upon my throne. The other thralls would be dragging in dead from the camp for later resurrection. Losses were more than offset. The barrow was secure for another century more.
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