The three of us rode on for the rest of the day and got to Braytown by late afternoon. We took Wraith to the same armory we went to before. Arduwan gave him some gold coins and the two of us waited for what seemed like forever for him to pick some gear out.

“Here! What do you guys think?” he asked as he showed off his new outfit.

“What are you, Lawrence of Arabia?” I mocked, observing his Arabian Fantasy attire. He had a white Arabian style Hamtar Turban with matching robes. Underneath, he wore basic leather armor for stealth. For a weapon, he chose a curved Scimitar sword. He also purchased some small throwing daggers and a rope and grappling hook.

“Well, I like it. It allows me to be smooth, agile, and mysterious,” he defended.

“Okay, just try not to mysteriously get killed by your own ego,” I said, before suggesting, “alright Arduwan, think you call another horse? We can teach him how to ride on the way out to Davol’s hideout.”

“Actually,” Wraith interrupted, “I was thinking maybe I could try something different. Could I have another gold coin, Arduwan?”

She reached into her drawstring bag and gave him one. It was like giving out a piece of candy to her. Wraith started walking over towards the marketplace and I saw exactly what he was going for. He bought a freakin camel.

* * *

The three of us journeyed out towards the desert again. Arduwan and I on our wild horses and Wraith aboard his came. I was incredibly surprised to see how well he handled it. There was some wobbling and inconsistency at first, but after a while he rode like a natural!

“So what’s the plan anyway?” he asked.

“We hadn’t really thought that far ahead, but Arduwan knows where Davol’s fortress is. I figured we’d go check it out firsthand and see what we’re dealing with.”

A few hours later, we arrived at Davol’s fortress just before the sun was about to set. It stood out plainly amongst the flat, rock laden desert. It was a multilevel stone structure with an iron door in the front. No one could be found, and it was quiet except the crowing of a vulture picking at the bones of what I assume was the last adventurer to try and breach the fortress.

“What do we do now?” Arduwan asked as we dismounted our rides and leashed them to a nearby boulder.

“I’m…really not sure,” I noted, realizing I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“I have an idea,” Wraith suggested.

The three of us walked up to about a hundred feet away from the big iron door. Nothing moved, not a sound. It was just us and the large imposing structure before us.

“Hey, Davol!” Wraith shouted out, “There’s a really sexy, voluptuous, scantily clad woman out here to see you! I know you’re all alone cooped up in there! Probably just with some zombies and some other weird stuff!”

“Are you crazy!” I scolded him.

After a moment, the iron door slowly started lifting up.

“See, it worked,” he said.

The three of us started to walk towards the entrance but Wraith began moving away from us to the right.

“What? You’re not going now, after you did all that?” I asked.

“You guys go in that way. I’ll scale this wall and try to find a way in on the second floor. We’ll cover more ground that way,” he announced as he took out his grappling hook, tossed it up and pulled the rope tight. Without much effort at all, he scaled the outer part of the fortress.

“How the hell is he so good at this?” I asked under my breath before being interrupted by two beings lumbering out of the darkness of the fortress's front door.

“What are those things?!” I yelled while drawing my sword.

Arduwan did the same and replied, “Crypt Dwellers. They’re henchmen of Davol’s.”

The two hunchbacked and facially deformed creeps waddled towards us with their arms stretched out. Arduwan and I easily dispatched one each before running onward into the entrance.

Inside, it was dark. Arduwan lit a torch and said, “here, you carry this so we can see. I’ll walk in front to protect you.”

I took the torch and decided to go ahead and open up my submachine gun case. I wasn’t planning on resorting to this so quickly, but it was the only weapon I had that I could handle one handed while carrying the torch. I’d much rather have Arduwan holding her greatsword with both hands while walking in front of me to reduce any chance of repeating the last mishap.

No one else had tried to stop us yet. The entryway split off into two different halls. We decided to take the left side first and see where it led to. Down the hall, we reached a descending staircase.

“What do you think, Arduwan? Should we go down and see if it leads to a treasure room that might have the Great Horn?”

She simply nodded and we began our descent. At the bottom, Arduwan took out another one of those freaks like the ones we saw earlier. I clutched the torch and my MP5 tightly as I stepped off the stairs. It was really scary down here. Worse than anything I had seen during my time in Murk. The dark recesses of the room were difficult to see, so I inched towards them with my torch. That’s when my heart sank. There were bodies in white sheets lining the walls of the room.

“Must be victims of the villages that Davol terrorizes,” Arduwan noted.

“Well, no Great Horn down here. Perhaps we should go back and check out hallway number two,” I nervously suggested.

She agreed and we went back up the staircase. When we got back to the second hallway, we found three more of those Crypt Dwellers. They were on their way to investigate where we had gone. The hallway was narrow and Arduwan stood in a thrusting stance since swinging her sword would've been difficult here.

“I’ll take care of this,” I said as I unleashed firepower on all three. I emptied the magazine and left none of them standing.

“Incredible magic!” Arduwan praised, as I loaded another magazine in. Eleven more to go.

At the end of the hall was a door. We moved quickly, not worrying at all about stealth at this point. With Wraith’s yelling and my shooting, it was obvious we were here. Inside the door we found an eating area that was lit by candles. Clearly, we had interrupted dinner time as the sun had been setting when we came in.

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Back at the entryway, we chose to take the third hall. It had a spiral staircase that led upstairs. It was the only way we had left to go, so we started to take it. But not before we heard something coming down the hall behind us.

“Who could that be? We checked everywhere back that way?” I noted.

“Perhaps Wraith?” Arduwan suggested.

“But he went up to the second floor.”

Suddenly, we saw shadows in the flicker of my torch. There were a number of people slowly coming around the corner into the hall we were in. We just stood there frozen, waiting to see what was going on. Then there they were. Zombies! It was the bodies we saw in the dungeon below that had reanimated. I started unloading on them. Out of ammo again. I replaced the magazine and unloaded it again. More of them collapsed as I replaced my ammo once more.

“Come on, Arduwan, let’s go upstairs,” I said as I fired a few shots off and tossed my torch down the hall to put a barrier between the dead and us.

We rushed upstairs where there were at least sconces on the wall with torches for us to see. Arduwan closed the door at the top of the stairs and started piling up some nearby furniture in front of it. I looked around. No sign of Wraith. He probably took off when he realized things were getting real. Two more Crypt dwellers came out from another room, at us. I shot down both of them with the remaining ammunition in the clip. Reloading once more, I realized I had burned through about half of what I brought with me.

“What now?!” Arduwan asked.

“That way!” I pointed, “there must be a staircase to the top floor. If Davol’s in there, we can take him out and maybe the zombies will stop.”

We rushed through to the next room. Sure enough, another staircase going up. We could hear the zombies start to tear through the door we had left barricaded as we hit the first steps. Once we got to the third floor, we stopped immediately. We were in an open room directly across from a cloaked figure with a disfigured face. Not as bad as the Crypt Dwellers but ugly enough. It must be Davol.

“Why have you entered my domain,” he questioned furiously.

Arduwan pointed her sword at him and said, “I have come to retrieve the symbol of my people's power and slay you in revenge for the villages you’ve terrorized!”

She wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed but damn if she couldn’t deliver a line.

“You shall deliver on no such declarations. I will watch as my minions feast upon your flesh,” he replied.

“Oh, you will, huh?” I smirked as I lifted my submachine gun up and opened fire at the ghoulish man.

The bullets appeared to stop in midair and fell on the ground as a thin green barrier could be seen separating our half of the room from Davol’s. Arduwan walked up to it and tapped it with her sword. Davol began laughing maniacally. This was really bad; we could hear the zombies downstairs approaching the steps. Just when things looked the bleakest, out from the rafters behind Davol, Wraith leapt down and drove a dagger in the spot where his shoulder met his neck.

“Ahhh!” Davol yelled out as the concentration of his barrier dropped and he staggered over to the balcony that overlooked the rear of his fortress.

“Yatta!” Wraith shouted, in a victorious pose.

“Incredible timing, Wraith!” I praised.

“You fools! You’ll pay for this!” he shrieked as he raised his hand in the air and an orb of green light flew up into the sky.

“I’ll finish this,” I said, aiming the gun directly at him. I pulled the trigger and didn’t let go until the chamber was empty. Bullets rattled Davol’s body, and he fell over dead where he stood.

“How did you get in here, Wraith?” Arduwan asked.

“I snuck in through a second-floor window when we first arrived here. When I saw Davol ordering around those underlings to go stop you guys, I snuck up here to the third floor. I figured a treasure room would be behind the boss’s chambers, and I was right,” he thumbed towards another room, behind the rafters he was perched on. He continued, “when I heard you fire off those rounds downstairs, I figured Davol would come back up here. So, I hid up in the rafters until the time was right.”

“Color me surprised,” I said, “you’re actually really useful!”

Arduwan interrupted, “Eric, I don’t think killing Davol stopped those zombies!”

She was right, they were starting to come up the stairs. She began hitting them with her sword as Wraith drew his. I reloaded. Didn’t have much ammo left. Luckily, there weren’t that many and the three of us finished them off as they came in single file.

“Whew!” had me worried there for a second, Wraith said, “come on, let’s go check out the treasure room.”

We went into the room next door and there was a pile of treasure. Gold coins, silver coins, gemstones, jewels, gold plated trinkets, etc… Wraith started loading up the deep pockets of his robes while Arduwan and I stood there looking over the collection for the Great Horn. There it was! Arduwan walked over to retrieve it. She held it out in front of her and gazed upon it in victory.

But then we heard a strange sound. We decided to go investigate. Wraith halted filling his pockets and Arduwan draped the Great Horn around her neck by its strap. The three of us went back out to the balcony, where the noise was coming from. Davol’s body was still lying there, so it wasn’t him. Then I remembered something. Before I shot him, he fired some weird orb up into the sky. I never saw it come back down. So, I went over to the edge and looked out over the landscape behind the fortress.

“Uhh, guys, you might want to come check this out,” I said to the others as I quaked in my boots.

“What is it?” Wraith asked.

The three of us looked down to see a green light sweeping over the ground. It looked as though a mass grave was being unearthed from within and zombies were climbing out of it. They must have been more victims of Davol. Then I remembered something else. The front gate was wide open and there had to be over a hundred of those things coming directly for us!

“What do we do?!” Wraith asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve only got a couple magazines left! We can’t get downstairs fast enough to escape and I’m not sure if we can fight them all off ourselves!”

Without saying a word, Arduwan stopped further out on the balcony. She raised the Great Horn up to her lips and sounded it off several times. The blare of the horn could be heard echoing off the rocky hills that were nearby the fortress.

“That’s right!” I exclaimed, “this fortress is on the border of the Barbarian Lands!”

Arduwan stopped sounding the horn and told us, “there. My brethren will surely come to help. I don’t know how many were close enough to hear my call. But I’m sure that some did. We’ll just have to hold them off till they get here.”

“Right,” I agreed as, I reloaded my gun.

Wraith ran downstairs to see if he could do anything to stall them while Arduwan and I grabbed whatever we could to try and barricade the stairs when he got back. After a couple minutes he came back up and signaled us to start blocking it up.

He said, “there wasn’t much I could do to stop them. I killed a couple in the front of the line, but they started pouring in fast.”

We stacked chairs, tables, lanterns, rugs, whatever we could find. It nearly wore us out but the zombies would just be able to walk right in on us and chow down. I stood with my gun ready and aimed at the door. My comrades were beside me with sword in hand. Just as we heard the first group begin tugging at our makeshift barricade, we heard something from outside. When we looked out, we saw barbarians on horseback rushing towards the fortress from the northeast. There were about thirty of them. Plenty for us to clean this mess up together with.

“Alright, Arduwan! Good thinking!” for a change.

The barricade was coming down and I opened fire. The front row fell, and I quickly reloaded. More zombies came into the room, and I fired again. More fell. My comrades held fast to not get in the way of my line of fire. We could hear the barbarians downstairs clash with the rear of the zombie horde. I unloaded one more time, finishing off all the ammo I had brought to this world. I dropped the gun and drew my sword back out.

“Let’s end this!” I shouted as the three of us braced for assault from the legion of corpses.

The rotting mob, now free of my suppressive fire, poured into the room and we clashed hard with them. Arduwan swung her greatsword mightily. I fought as valiantly as I had ever. Even Wraith held his own with his scimitar and daggers. That guy was seriously impressing me today. It wasn’t long before the barbarians downstairs fought their way to the front while the others finished off the zombies outside.

Three of the buffest looking guys I had ever seen in my life knelt down in front of Arduwan. One of them, with long brown hair and little in the way of clothing covering his body said, “we are at your command, my queen.”

We spent the evening celebrating with the barbarians and waited to leave at sunrise. After ordering her subjects to spread the word through the barbarian lands that her tribe was now back at the seat of power, Arduwan asked what we planned to do next.

Wraith was loading loot onto his camel's saddlebags when I told her, “Well, I had an idea that might work. Could you take me to your village? I want to try and help you turn your people back from stone.”

Arduwan smiled and said, “of course. I would appreciate your help and welcome any suggestions. But what makes you think you can do anything?”

“I just have a hunch. Really just an idea worth trying.”