Shale Kadran lay face up on the cold, rough granite slab of the autopsy room. It was inside Carrigan’s Blight’s only morgue, and at this time late in the evening, the undertaker was busy sleeping. He felt perfectly comfortable leaving Shale’s fairly gore-free cadaver on its own.
Abel Dren was only one man, and he’d already examined, prepared and strung up five corpses that day, far exceeding his usual limits. There had been a particularly nasty infestation of The Sunken by the Eastern Shore, and some poor fellow had struck a Sever-stone. So if some bastard wanted to die after-hours, in the midst of a peaceful dinner no less, then they could bloody well wait until tomorrow morning!
Entombed underground, the morgue sat underneath a decrepit watchtower, slumped by an ancient road to a city that no longer exists. As opposed to the heart of Illyrith's Final Bastion, thirty hundred paces north, the morgue sat far outside walled boundaries.
Lined with several magic seals and purified stone, the morgue was largely shielded from contaminants, toxic matter, cursed relics or other such dangers. Consequently there ought to have been no danger of reanimation, corruption or contagion.
Inside, a single bioluminescent lantern emitted cool purple light in one corner of the autopsy. Scarcely visible in the low light, two doors stood opposite each other. One led outside, and another led deeper inwards. Lining the walls were cluttered desks topped with dusty paperwork, corroded surgical tools and cloudy glass flasks.
Shale lay flat in the centre of the room, still draped in his sooty work uniform - a grey leather cuirass and black breeches with thick leather patches over the knees. Affixed around his waist was a thick belt. His chipped dagger still hung from it in its frayed sheath.
One dry eye stared up at the splintered dark timber ceiling of the dim, dry room. The other eye bore a deep hole. Blood pooled in the well carved into Shale’s head. It was still luke-warm and runny.
He wore a peaceful, if somewhat foolish expression. Completely unaware of his death. His mouth hung open, eternally anticipating a mouthful of peas that would never arrive.
That was, until the body that once belonged to Shale Kadran jolted.
His jaw clenched shut. Tendons flexed, his limbs shook uncontrollably. His hands balled into fists, and his eyelids clamped down tightly. With a crack, Shale’s spine arched unnaturally upwards from the table. It continued to arch up further, lifting higher and higher, until his entire body rose up off the slab.
A deep, burning, orange light exploded out from his chest, casting every bone and organ in shadow. The room glowed like the sun. Although there was no heat present in the reaction.
A thin stream of blood trickled upwards into the air from the pulpy crater that was Shale’s eye socket. Slowly, the bloody well was drawn from and the taut crimson stream remained unbroken until it collided with the ceiling and scattered apart onto the timber.
The pea that once penetrated Shale’s brain lifted up and squeezed out from between closed eyelids. No longer frozen, it was merely mushy and red. It too flew up to paint the ceiling.
The roaring embers within Shale’s not-quite-lifeless body receded and shrank down to a small rippling ball in his chest. His skin glistened with a slight translucent quality, but no longer was he quite so radiographic.
The dense sphere of light shrank smaller still. The blood ceased flowing, and Shale’s corpse hung motionless, two metres off of the slab. As the light retreated to a singular pinpoint, infinitesimally collapsing in on itself, Shale’s long, metallic fingers stretched out and his chest began to rise and fall.
The compact point of light vanished for an imperceptible instant and a wave of radiant gold erupted from Shale’s body. It shook the room with the brilliant energy of omnipresent regeneration.
The man who was once Shale Kadran bellowed out aloud, thrashing his limbs outwards in animate shock before crashing onto the slab beneath them with a crack as the granite split in two.
In total shock, and great pain, this new, reincarnated entity stared upwards with two, fully formed eyes that glowed like embers. He lay paralysed atop the slab and all he could do was disheartedly observe the large pieces of falling timber shrieking towards him as the morgue roof caved in.
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Burning pain engulfed my being as suddenly I awoke to find myself in physical form. I attempted to take in breath of air, but all I inhaled was thick dust. Coughing loud and wet, my body screamed in protest as I tried in vain, to sit up. Through bleary eyes, I saw and very much felt the collection of splintered timber and broken furniture piled atop my body pinning me down to two large cracked chunks of granite.
The dust slowly settled and my hacking coughs became a modest sputtering. As my body worked overtime on breathing, my mind was ablaze with confusion and speculation. The last thing I remembered was a total absence of life, of all sensations. I recalled an endless void, and a belligerent voice that lectured me on strange, unbelievable things.
Yet just as I had burnt up into nothingness, I found myself here, struggling to breathe in a solemn room with a great hole in the ceiling.
At this point, I feel fairly certain I’ve been shortchanged in some way, but I haven’t the awareness to fully comprehend why. For now, I have an agonising weight to get off my chest. It seemed best to start with that.
Entrapped beneath broken timber beams, a fractured lounge chair and half a bookshelf, I possessed a very limited range of movement.
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My left arm was free from the elbow down, and with it I managed to heave a beam off my chest. It smacked onto the slab beneath me with a resounding crack as the precariously balanced stack atop it dropped downwards. The pile wobbled and screeched, but nothing more than a plume of dust came raining down.
With the right half of my body now free, the weight on my left was greater. If I wasn’t wearing what appeared to be a tough leather cuirass, the splintered wood may have punched a hole or two in my side.
My arm however, was thoroughly pinched by the broken bookshelf. I felt no pain. I could flex my fingers, but they felt heavy and cold. I feared the arm was broken.
Gently, and with one little pull at a time, I began tugging away from the lumber, painstakingly pivoting onto my side. After one last and vigorous wrench, my arm broke free with a metallic shriek and a splash of sparks that bounced up towards my face.
The tower of debris shuddered above me, and the cracked bookshelf toppled over with a great crash. Luckily it fell away from my body.
Now unpinned, merely cramped, I was free to wriggle around like a worm. A worm stuck in a giant pointy cocoon.
To my relief, there was a way out directly in front of me, illuminated by a strange sticky purple substance splattered across the ground. Jelly-like in texture, the goo appeared to be composed of thousands of little purple balls, possibly eggs. They quivered as they emitted a soft, deep purple glow, and a rotten, salty stench.
Despite managing to avoid getting crushed, I was still tightly enclosed by the wreckage and my arms were pinned to my sides. Given no other option, I gradually forced myself forwards by painstakingly wiggling across the granite using the balls of my feet, my shoulders and my chin.
I approached the very edge of the slab. In its broken state, it stood a little over two feet tall. It was not a vast drop, but not one I wanted to fall down headfirst into either.
At the edge, I rocked to my side, and steadily folded my arm into my chest before easing it upwards. It brushed against a jagged piece of furniture, but the debris remained stable and I still felt no pain in my arm. Anxiety fizzed up from my stomach. I swallowed and shoved it back down.
I had successfully positioned my arm outstretched in front of me and over the edge. Now for the other. As I began to tuck my arm up against my chest, my elbow grazed a loose beam. The beam popped out of the stack like the cork from a wine bottle and a thundering cacophony of noise broke loose.
My body acted instinctively as my mind cried out curses. I grabbed at the base of the slab with my free arm and pushed it as hard as I could whilst I lifted my hips up and propelled forward with my feet.
I shot out of the shifting stack as it collapsed from the bottom up. Smacking head-first into the ground, I cracked my jaw before sliding across the floor and bumping off a cabinet on the far wall.
I had fallen right into the foetid luminescent ooze splashed across the ground. The very slick and oily ooze. It splattered across my face and down my front, greasing me up for a short slide away from the cloud of dust and splinters behind me.
Shocked and flighty, I bounced off of the floor and bolted for the first thing I spotted - a large wooden door.
I had no clue if the rest of the ceiling was in any way secure, or if the commotion had drawn out strangers, either way I wanted no part of this wreck. As if in answer, far in the distance a soft but deep rumble echoed down through the hole in the ceiling.
That settles it.
I heaved open the door, pausing briefly in relief that my arm wasn’t paralysed as I’d feared, and slammed it shut behind me.
No light except the gentle glow of the purple gunk coating my body filled this room. Before me lay a void of inky darkness. I stumbled forward, each step slapping loudly on stone blocks.
In an effort to see, I stretched my purple arm out and made use of it as a lantern. Soft light emanated scarcely a foot before me, but it felt reassuring to know I wasn’t about to smack into a wall.
Advancing one step at a time, I carefully watched my feet pass over the huge square stones on the ground. No grout cemented the stone blocks together. They were cut and laid so pricesley there was scarcely a crack or crevice at all.
It was at that moment I noticed just how high off the ground I was. I stumbled, as I reeled from the sudden disorientation.
My body was not my body. Or rather, it had not always been my body. It stood tall, lanky and ached angrily.
Whose body was this?
…Later. I would determine that later. For now, shock aside, I managed to possess some instinctive control and awareness of my body’s spatial orientation.
Onwards I went, plodding through the dark. Could there be nothing here? It seems as if the room were empty, what is- ah.
A curved stone wall appeared from the void. It was a little less than waist high. I walked alongside it, following its curve. With my gleaming hand, I traced the top of the wall with a luminescent finger, leaving behind a thin purple line that broke apart and evaporated as I continued.
I took a peek over the wall, trying to gauge what was beyond it, but the weak light I emitted revealed nothing. All I could discern was empty space. The pit was deep.
A minute passed and I had completed a lap around what was evidently a large stone circle. My heart beat loudly in my chest. The compulsion to understand this pit burned brightly in my mind. It was the first concrete, fixed thing I’d encountered. I needed to understand anything about this world, and where I was in it.
I looked closer at the low lying wall of the pit itself. The stones forming it were not nearly as large or as solid as those in the ground. These were light, misshapen chunks of volcanic rock with sharp, pointy edges facing outwards. Inside, they were aligned, smooth and coated with a fine dark residue.
Desperate to learn anything, I set to work. The rocks were loosely stacked, it seemed their own weight was all that kept them in place. I grasped a particularly wobbly rock from the top and yanked it out, coating it with my purpled prints as I did so. Smiling, I turned the rock over and rubbed it across my luminous torso, coating it with a thin layer of the bioluminescent substance stuck to me.
Now, I had a purple glowing rock. Perfect.
Despite a brief spout of reluctance, I let loose my purple rock. I cast it down into the pit, as far into the middle as I could manage.
The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the pit’s walls as it tumbled down, as satisfying as that would have been, but I saw it strike the bottom with a rather dull thud.
The blood drained from my face. My guts grew heavy and dropped down as I blindly stumbled backwards, away from the pit.
Resting at the bottom was a fractured collection of human skeletons. Broken pieces of bone rested in a sea of ash. The charred white bones rested atop sweeping waves of soot like barren, sandy islands. A segment of spinal column stood upright, mimicking a headless palm tree. And a small piece of skull drifted between two large chunks of femur like a little raft.
This was a charnel pit.