As they made their way through the mounds, Hunter had the chance to examine some of those barrow entrances up close. Most were made out of stone and their heavy iron doors were rusted shut. The entrances of others had been bricked up with plaster, mud, and rows upon rows of handmade clay bricks, though why, when, or by whom, Hunter couldn’t guess. And others were simply left uncovered, their doors blown off their hinges or missing altogether. Those were the most chilling ones, like the gaping mouths of dead giants buried under the packed earth.
Fawkes was leading the way, Hunter followed her, and the newly-named Fyodor followed Hunter. The ravens were flying above them, scouting the area, looking for threats or anything else that might stand out. They kept their squawking and cawing to a minimum. Even they felt something was wrong in the air.
Hunter couldn’t shake the feeling they were being watched. He told Fawkes, and she nodded in agreement. Somewhere out there, there were pairs of eyes stuck on their backs, watching, waiting. Maybe it had to do something with his prior negative experiences involving mist and unseen presences, but he found the whole thing unnerving.
“Do you think we could get out of the open for a while, catch our breath?” Hunter asked her at some point.
“And do what?” Fawkes frowned. “Duck in the entrance of the next doorless barrow we see?”
As it turned out, this was exactly what they’d end up having to do. They were about halfway to the great mounds at the center of the valley when a storm broke out. Dark clouds covered the sky as if out of nowhere, and harsh winds blew from the mountains in the north. Then came the rain, a true deluge of freezing cold water that threatened to soak them to their souls.
“Still think we shouldn’t find cover?” Hunter shouted at Fawkes, barely audible over the roar of the wind and rain. Instead of answering, she simply pointed at the nearest tomb entrance in sight. Judging from its rusty hinges, it once had a door–emphasis on ‘once’ and ‘had’. As they ducked into the dark entryway, a notification informed Hunter they’d just entered a new area.
They entered a small antechamber, barely large enough to fit the two of them, the ravens, and the direwolf. ‘Antechamber’ was a euphemism; after decades of exposure to the elements, the stone floors and walls were covered in dirt and roots, making the tomb look more like a natural cave rather than a man-made barrow. Barely any light made its way inside. Hunter’s Low-Light Vision ability kicked in, painting faint outlines around everything. There were carvings on the walls and fragments of weathered, broken pottery on the floor. Offerings to the dead, he realized.
“What’s with this place?” asked Hunter, shivering. “Even the weather’s kind of cuckoo around here.”
“Quiet” Fawkes shushed him, throwing a worried look towards the dark corridor that led lower and deeper into the tomb. “Make no sound. There’s something down there.”
“Like wh-”
“Hush!”
“Like what?” Hunter whispered.
“A recluse. Pray to your gods I’m wrong.”
“A recluse? You mean, like, a hermit?”
“Hush!”
So hush he did. Whatever worried Fawkes, it worried Fyodor, too. The direwolf shook the water off his fur, launching droplets all around and drawing angry caws from Biggs and Wedge, then stared at the darkness deeper in the tomb. Hunter gave him a few hesitant pats on the head to calm him. They weren’t still on petting and cuddling terms, the two of them, but they were making progress. The direwolf paid zero attention to him. Still staring at the pitch-black nothingness that was the lower end of the corridor, he flattened his ears and let out a low growl.
“Quiet, boy.”
Direwolves, as it turned out, even friendly and semi-domesticated ones, weren’t big on either following directions or staying quiet. In the face of a fear and a possible threat, Fyodor did what he knew how to do best: he let out a feral, thunderous bark that resounded in the underground halls, challenging whatever made its lair down in the tomb and warning it to stay the hell away.
“Shit,” Fawkes swore under her breath and tried to muzzle the direwolf with her gloved hand, paying no heed to its huge fangs.
It was too late.
Something stirred in the darkness below–something big. Hunter felt it rather than heard it, the clicks and clacks of many clawed feet dragging a humongous body through tunnels too tight for comfort.
Fawkes felt it, too, and wasted no time. She jumped to her feet, drew her pistol, and aimed it at whatever it was that was coming.
Hunter’s Low-Light Vision ability allowed him to see what he otherwise wouldn’t: a massive, fast-moving jumble of shapes and outlines rushing straight at them. His mind couldn’t quite piece together what the creature was. Then Fawkes fired her pistol, and in that brief flash of light, Hunter saw enough.
Hell, he saw much more than enough.
It was a huge spider. It had a body bigger than his own and hairy, spindly legs several times the length of that. Its wicked-looking mandibles were big enough to tear a man apart, and two of its eight eyes–the front-facing ones–were oversized beady orbs of pitch black. If Fawkes’s shot had hit the thing, it hadn’t slowed it down one bit.
“Get out!” she screamed at him. “Run!”
Hunter didn’t need to be told a second time. He got up and rushed out of the antechamber as fast as he could. Biggs and Wedge flew out, too, flooding his mind with a cacophony of worried chittering. Fyodor followed, his eyes wide with primal fear. Last out of the entrance was Fawkes; she barely made it in time to dodge to the side and avoid the huge arachnid legs that burst out of the opening behind her.
“Spiders!” Hunter groaned, though the roar of the downpour around him was too strong for him to even hear himself. “Why does it always have to be spiders?”
Not wasting any time, the spider barreled after the biggest moving shape it could see–Hunter. With no time to do anything else, he just dodged to the side.
Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t do much. The entrance to the tomb, however, was on the side of a mound. Hunter’s dodge took him downhill, and his tumbling down the slope was the only thing that saved him from being speared by the sharp claws at the end of the spider’s front legs.
A few feet away, Fyodor growled and barked and showed its teeth, but he didn’t seem all too eager to get any closer. Hunter didn’t blame him. All he wanted was to get away from the thing, too. Out in broad daylight, the arachnid looked even more alien and horrifying. It was almost as big as a horse and looked hungry enough to eat one, too. The pouring rain bounced off the chitin plates that covered its back, not slowing it down in the slightest.
No, Hunter thought, looking at its hair-covered, alien-looking spindly silhouette with abject horror. Such a thing shouldn’t have the right to be this big. Hell, it shouldn’t have the right to even exist.
Unimpressed by Hunter’s disapproval, the spider reared for another attack. Hunter took another step back–which, this time, cost him his balance. He slipped, lost his footing, stumbled backwards, and almost lost his grip on his glaive. The spider, perfect predator that it was, launched another leg at him, piercing his shoulder with a burst of blinding pain and pinning him down on the ground.
Hunter screamed in pain and horror, trying in vain to free himself. Even the tiniest motion sent wave upon wave of pain through his shoulder. To make things worse, the spider raised a second leg, ready to harpoon him again.
Somehow managing to fly despite the strong wind and rain, two dark shapes dove straight at the spider’s eyes.
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The ravens’ attacks didn’t do much damage to the monstrous arachnid, but they did surprise it enough to slow it down for just a moment.
Just a moment was exactly how long Fawkes needed. Leaping out of nowhere with her silver-gleaming blade in hand, she slashed straight through the spider leg that was keeping Hunter down, cutting it off at one of its joints and spraying Hunter with what must have been almost half a gallon of foul-smelling spider goop.
Maimed and positively furious about it, the giant spider turned its attention to this new threat. It rubbed its mandibles together, producing an angry rattling sound, and attacked Fawkes with a lightning-fast lunge. She somehow still managed to dodge, dancing out of harm’s way with the grace of the world’s deadliest ballerina.
Hunter pulled the severed spider leg out of his wound, gritted his teeth through the pain, and tried to use his glaive as a crutch to find his footing. With his shoulder ruined and bleeding as it was, he could barely move his left arm without screaming, let alone fight. It was getting tiring, getting his ass kicked. He didn’t feel afraid anymore.
More than anything, he felt jaded.
“Biggs, Wedge,” he signaled to his familiars through their mental link, “let’s see what that Ill Omen Ability can do.”
The ravens, still trying to stay aloft despite the pouring rain and strong wind, gave him their version of a determined ‘aye aye, sir!’ and made another pass at the spider, their eyes suddenly shining an eerie lime-colored light.
Whatever Ill Omen actually did, it hurt the spider plenty–enough to stop it in its tracks and make it writhe. Hunter felt a grim satisfaction rise in him.
How did you like them apples?
With the monster on the back foot–or rather, on the back four legs–Fyodor finally found the guts to join the fray. And join the fray he did; he jumped right on its hairy, carapace-covered back and did his damnedest to stay there, growling and scratching and biting at everything that looked like a half-decent target.
As the spider thrashed around to throw the direwolf off it, Fawkes found the chance to slash through another one of the thing’s legs, severing it and drawing another burst of furious, pained rattling.
“Biggs, Wedge,” Hunter signaled again, “use Ill Omen again!”
Stirred by their previous success and eager to deliver more of the same, the ravens swooped in and unleashed more of that lime-hued energy.
Whether it was due to its injuries, or to the stacks of Curse of Ill Omen–which, as it turned out, could afflict the same target multiple times–the spider’s movement was now considerably more sluggish. With Fyodor tearing at its back and Fawkes steadily reducing its number of usable legs, the fight seemed all but over.
Or so Hunter thought.
The monster, however, had a last trump card to play. Faced with the very real possibility of death, it flew off in a blind, erratic fury, thrashing around, throwing Fyodor off its back, and knocking Fawkes over with a wide sweep that caught her by surprise. Having gotten rid of those two threats, it turned its attention to the remaining one–or rather, to its prey.
Hunter.
There was no method to its moves now, no harpooning legs, no predatory games, no carefully timed lunges. The spider simply flexed its legs and jumped through the air with its mandibles clicking like crazy, eager to snap around Hunter’s neck and put an end to his squirming once and for all.
With one arm almost useless and neither the time nor the strength to dodge or evade, Hunter did the only thing he could do: he planted the butt of his glaive in the wet earth, raised its blade to the sky, and braced himself for the attack.
If it had been a lesser weapon, or if he had held it at a different angle, the shaft of the glaive would probably have snapped like a twig under the weight of the monstrous spider.
In fact, it almost did.
Almost.
Hunter felt it warp and bend in his hands, so much so he’d swear he heard it crack. Then the blade pierced through the softer carapace of the spider’s underside, impaling it and drowning Hunter in a stream of bluish ichor.
The spider thrashed around for a few seconds, drenching Hunter in spider goop and almost crushing him under its weight, then it curled up and stopped moving at all.
“Is it dead?” groaned Hunter, desperately trying to keep the ichor away from his face and mouth. “Get it off me, dammit!”
***
As Fawkes dragged him back to the entrance of the tomb, Hunter tried to look on the bright side of things. He was drenched to the bone, but at least the rain had washed off the spider goop off him.
His shoulder hurt like hell, but at least the tomb was now a safe place for them to get some rest and wait out the storm. Plus, the spider had dropped some loot: a few Giant Spider Glands, a few Giant Spider Webs, some Spider Chitin Plates, and a semi-transparent, wispy Essence of a Barrow Recluse. Hunter was too exhausted to stand, but not too exhausted to greedily shove it all in his backpack.
“I swear, I’ll never understand you” grumbled Fawkes as she was cleaning his wounds. “Your transient habits and your transient magics and your transient way of thought.”
“What did I do this time?” he groaned. “Ouch, ouch, can’t you be a bit gentler?”
“Still, I have to hand it to you," she continued, ignoring him. “You held yourself up quite admirably out there. Unlike this mutt here.”
Fyodor, who was resting his huge furry head on Hunter’s lap, turned his snout to the other side, embarrassed.
“Come on, he did jump on the back of the spider.”
“If he wasn’t such a little crybaby,” Fawkes said, and wiped the blood off Hunter’s wound a bit more vigorously than she strictly had to, “the spider wouldn’t have gotten a whiff of us in the first place. Hold this gauze in place and put some pressure on it. Let me get a healing salve.”
She reached into one of her countless pouches, rummaged a bit, pulled a vial of rusty red liquid that looked suspiciously like coagulated blood, uncorked it, and handed it to Hunter.
“Down the hatch it goes, then,” he said and raised the vial in a mock toast. “Cheers.”
“No, no–you don’t drink that, you buffoon!” hissed Fawkes, grabbing the vial from his hands just as he was about to gulp the red liquid inside. “Don’t you have salves where you come from?”
“Uh… I thought you said healing potion.”
“Healing potion?” Fawkes shook her head in disbelief. “Do you think I’m made of money, lad? Those cost a king’s bounty.”
She poured the red liquid on Hunter’s wound and wrapped it with a clean bandage. It took effect almost immediately, relieving some of the pain and making the injured area feel hot and cold at the same time.
“Uh, Fawkes? What’s this thing made of?”
“Strawberry jam and pixie dust,” she brushed him off. “Give it a day or three, and you’ll be good as new.”
***
The wind and downpour outside still went strong throughout most of the day, so there was nothing for Hunter and Fawkes to do but sit around in the tomb’s antechamber, wrap themselves with their blankets for warmth, and exchange stories.
Hunter tried to explain how movies and games and dungeon raids had given him insights about fighting monsters and using his transient ‘magics’. Fawkes kept marveling at how silly all these gimmicky make-believe transient pastimes sounded.
“Okay then,” Hunter said. “Tell me about you. Tell me about your friend. Tell me about that Lodge you keep mentioning.”
That caught Fawkes off guard, and the tiny wrinkles around her mouth quickly turned into deep worry lines. Hunter almost regretted bringing the subject up, but said nothing. They were pretty much joined at the hip for now, he and she. It was only fair he at least knew the real reasons why she’d dragged him to the valley of tombs, ghosts, and monstrous spiders, right?
“The Lodge… We of the Lodge were once an order of sorts, though we’re too few now to call us that, I guess. In short, our mission is to track down dangerous artifacts and relics of the old world and make sure they stay buried and forgotten.”
“Is your friend of the Lodge too, then?”
“He is,” Fawkes nodded. “He’s a Seeker, which means he roams the world investigating rumors of dangerous artifacts and potential threats to our cause. He sent word to me, saying he unearthed something of immense interest in the lands of the Brennai. The kind of thing you can’t just ignore. We were to meet and investigate together, but Reiner, ever the fool, isn’t one to sit around and wait.”
“So he came to the Ghostbarrows alone,” Hunter guessed.
“It’s been a fortnight since the folken last saw him,” Fawkes nodded. “I tried to contact him, but my sendings go unanswered.”
“Do you think something happened to him? I mean… something bad?”
Fawkes stared at the raging storm outside, her mouth suddenly a thin, pale straight line of worry. In that moment, she looked old; worn and weathered by decades and decades of hard life, Hunter realized. To him, she’d always seemed kind of untouchable. She had been his one constant in Elderpyre, Fawkes, so cavalier about everything, always quick with both wit and blade.
Seeing her so worried felt… wrong.
“Reiner’s the kind of fool who’ll add a little flourish to every cut and stab, just for the fun of it,” she finally said with a sigh. “but he’s a grown man. A Seeker of the Lodge, and as deadly a warrior as I’ve ever met. Worrying about him now won’t do anybody any favors.”
“For what it’s worth,” Hunter said, “I hope he’s alright.”
That brought a slight smile to Fawkes’s face–a smile that did little for her worried eyes and her furrowed brow.
“So do I, lad," she said, turning her gaze away. “So do I.”