The next room, whence the ghost must have come from, was much tidier than the others we have seen so far. There was even furniture. A few empty, orderly shelves, a table in the middle of the room, and a desk at the wall. There was even an ornate carpet in there.

Jim entered first and walked towards the desk to search it. As soon as he stepped onto the carpet, it moved with sudden alacrity. The monster-turned decoration had an army of small, serrated teeth that were hidden between the tufts that were now chewing through the tiefling’s shin-guards with alarming speed.

Our comrade screamed and unsheathed his rapier, but the carpet-monster did not seem to mind the small, fast stabs it was receiving. I ran in to tore through a wide patch of the freakish creature. This time the attack elicited a cry of pain, but the beast still did not let go of Jim’s leg.

But the tiefling found his own solution. His eyes turned into deep crimson, he pointed towards his assailant and shouted a deep word. Black flames erupted and ran hungrily along the surface of the carpet. They consumed the shrieking monster in an instant but left Jim untouched. The tiefling let out a deep sigh, then slumped against the wall. His right leg was in shambles.

“We should beat the way before us with a pole next time,” I said, fighting the urge to vomit. “I don’t want to see anything the like ever again.”

“This day really did a number on us,” concurred Trueanvil. “I thought it would be a leisurely stroll with burning some helpless skeletons to crisp intermittently. We have become a little too cocky.”

“I just hope there will be something really interesting in that desk,” Jim sighed, as he closed his wounds. “The bite of this bastard hurts like hell. Might have even some poison in its fangs.”

“Here, take an antidote,” Beldrak handed him a vial. “It won’t do any harm. Now let’s see, what have we got here?”

With his usual caution, the dwarf opened all the drawers and lockers he could find, using that invisible hand of his. To our collective relief it triggered no trap, neither did the desk turn into a toothy monster.

“A heap of gold, that’s always nice, some silver we can use as change, and what do we have here? A diary! Written by none other than Arundil himself!”

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“Is he famous? Who is that?,” asked Jim eagerly.

“Never heard of the fellow,” grinned Trueanvil. “And if even I don’t know he was, he can hardly be famous, right? But otherwise, I suspect we might have found our necromancer, responsible for the mess outside. Let’s see. Hm.”

“It says ‘This is the true testimony of the sins and atonement of Arundil, the mage’. It seems the fellow was Durgeddin’s friend and lieutenant.” Beldrak’s eyes were jumping from line to line, as he skimmed through the pages. “We almost got the story right, but not totally. Poor devil got spooked when the greenskins broke through the gate and started streaming in. He teleported away. When shame got the better of him, he came back only to see everyone massacred. The orks were not really interested in these parts though, they were occupied by looting the smithy and getting comfortable on the upper levels. Our boy, Arundil set some traps up, lured the orks in, beat them badly. Then… Yepp, then he went insane. He is rambling about how he should dismantle some ineffective wards, to replace them with better ones. He made a bloody death-trap from the corridor by the looks of it, then started to knock holes into his own defences. Then he died and turned into a ghost.” Trueanvil closed the diary with a loud thump.

“Not a happy story, if you ask me, but it has the upside that it sees a lot of greenskins killed. Those stories are always in high demand.”

“Anyways, it is good that we could give him final peace,” said Jim.

“How does one turn into a ghost?” I asked, involuntarily thinking of Lucius. Brother, I really hope nothing like this happened to you, and you lie in your grave peacefully.

“You need powerful regret, a wish for revenge, or something along those lines,” answered Trueanvil. “And a load of magic, of course. It is seldom that someone who wasn’t a powerful magic user in life turns into a ghost in death.”

“That… is good to hear.”

“Now the question is whether we had enough for today, or should we do some more exploring?”

“Let’s finish it today. I don’t want to come back here ever again,” grumbled Jim. “We are done with half of the rooms, the other half cannot be this bad, can it?”

Thus, we pushed forward, searching room after room. We did not encounter any more undead, it seems Arundil himself was the last one. There were still some traps he left behind, one chamber exploded into a fiery inferno when we threw in a stone, another held half-rusted armours that tried to move and attack us. We smashed these into bits, but not easily, and their iron fists left both Jim and me covered with bruises.

Then we arrived at the last room. We readied javelins and motes of fire respectively, Jim tore open the door with his spell, and I glimpsed the most beautiful woman, I have ever seen in my life.

“Hello,” she said, looking up from the book she was reading. Then she raised her eyebrows. “Are those weapons necessary? I promise I won’t bite.”