“Hold on, I’ve got some bread around here somewhere,” the shopkeeper mentions off-handedly. Going about the kitchen she opens various containers, assembling a spread of food ingredients, all of which were theoretically edible. “Give me the pan when you’re done with it.”

“Ok, fine, you can have one of the eggs,” allows the necromancer, sliding the fried protein balls onto a plate.

“Thanks for the eggeracity,” rejoins her mother, tossing several buttered slices of bread onto the burner, burnished with a bit of a block of cheese upon each body.

“That was almost a word,” snarks Avery, pulling the plate off the counter. “Why are there only three.”

Immediately from the shop comes a reply.

“No idea,” states the invader.

“That’s very guilty,” Avery mentions. “I was already going to share. How dare you eat what I was going to trade for a sammich.”

“Khajiit is innocent of this crime!”

“Well you aren’t!”

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Heading back the other way, Ham finds, to his complete lack of surprise, another dead end with a coffin in it. This one is vertical, though, which is somewhat odd. A large block of stone, with a carved door to swing outward. There was nothing behind it, other than the rest of the empty square room though, so it probably wasn’t a secret passage.

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Not unless it went straight down.

Deciding not to dwell on that idea, Ham returns to the antechamber with the fountain, and takes a right to get back to the podium room. The place up with the pulpit kind of looks like a location where a speech would be made, which would make sense if the family that owned this mausoleum did a ceremony every time they interred a new body into the place. Most of the time, the graveyards would get a bit out of hand if every person was buried in one of these ornate tombs, but nobles could usually afford to have dead relatives brought back to life by one of the churches. If the church couldn’t manage to bring that person back to life, that usually meant that there wasn’t enough of a body for a burial in the first place. Only nobles who literally just died of old age would need a space in a mausoleum, which kept requirements for digging out more eternal resting places down.

Peasants didn’t usually get mausoleums at all, of course.

Remembering that the last door he tried was a pull door, Ham goes straight for the handle of the blockage toward the last path he hadn’t taken yet. It swings open easily, revealing one single room, far larger than any of the previous chambers. While the dead end rooms were maybe six meters across apiece, this corpse haven was more like ten by sixteen. It was using a good bit of that space on having four coffins in it, rather than the one apiece of the other rooms, but that was still quite a departure from the norm. All the coffins were evenly spaced from each other and the wall, other than one in the back right corner which was offset toward the center by a meter. That was extremely irritating to Ham’s design sensibilities. Why would anyone do such a heinous thing?

Granted, he was planning on pillaging all of these coffins for whatever jewelry or other valuables they had been buried with, but still. There were some things that just weren’t done.

Deciding to take it upon himself to correct this grievous misallocation of corpses, Ham summons one of the skeletons he had imbued earlier to do the physical labor for him, ordering it to push the coffin in line with the other coffin nearer to him. The bones strain for a few seconds, but the stone block moves, surprisingly easily. As the coffin reaches the exact line, it stops moving, despite the skeleton continuing to push, and the entire object sinks into the ground slightly, locking in place.

To Ham’s left, the patch of wall between two of the coffins slides apart, revealing another, secret, room.