The remaining days before Anastacia had to leave for Mournvalley, she spent mostly by loafing around in the tavern with her friends. Sleeping became harder as she started seeing more nightmares about her past, and as the departure grew nearer and the nightmares from her past grew more vivid and daunting. Gilbert even suggested that Anastacia could seek help from a few adventurers that were experienced in the art of dream weaving through magic and could make one’s worst nightmares into pleasant dreams – or even worse, but it was decided that given her adverse reaction to mind altering magical effects that it was a path better left unexplored.
On the last night before leaving, she tossed and turned on King’s lap for hours until finally falling asleep.
The Anchor pointed her dull rusty dagger at the giant mountain of a man who had appeared in the doorway to her dark room.
After a few seconds of the awkward standoff, the man kneeled to seem less intimidating, but was still easily as tall as the terrified girl in front of him. “This is no place to keep a child in!” He scoffed and scanned the room with his eyes. “My name is Gilbert, we ‘met’ briefly in the throne room. You might not recognize me without the chains and so on though. Anyway, we’re in a bit of a hurry here so pack what you need in this and we’ll scram.” He explained quickly and tossed a worn-out sack he had found to The Anchor.
The girl dropped her knife to catch the bag and looked at the man in disbelief. Did he really think that they could just escape like that? If it was that easy, she would have vanished ages ago. But this was probably the best chance she would ever get, so The Anchor started to hastily gather everything she had in the room while the man kept watch on the door. Before leaving, she gave one last look to her cell and closed the door, hopefully for the last time.
“Okay, are you ready? Stay close and let me handle any problems that we might run into.” Gilbert whispered and gave The Anchor a pat on the back, almost knocking her over. “For fuck’s sake, do they not feed you? You look like you’ve been living on moisture and the occasional speck of dust alone.”
As they headed upstairs, The Anchor avoided looking at the mangled remains of what used to be the guard outside her room. She was still trying to figure out why another necromancer would free her and go as far as killing for it. Something bigger had to be going on, but she probably wasn’t going to be a part of it since she was just allowed to leave with some random adventurer they had caught.
“Do you know where they’d keep my gear? I’m sure they took them along when I was captured. Maybe there’s like a storage room nearby?” Gilbert asked and quickly peeked around a corner to make sure the next corridor was also empty.
The Anchor shrugged, since she never had a need for storing things, no one had told her where anything was kept. Usually the servants just brought stuff to her.
“Well, keep an eye out for them then. I’d rather have a weapon on hand if possible, just in case we run into someone.” The adventurer whispered, moved into the corridor and started opening doors in the hopes of finding his stuff.
Despite living in the castle for fifteen years, The Anchor had never seen what was behind any of the doors and got perhaps too engrossed by what they discovered behind some of them, since she didn’t notice the presence of a weak necromancer approaching them.
Luckily Gilbert heard them and managed to shove The Anchor into one of the rooms before they were discovered, shutting the door behind her. When getting pushed, she yelped loudly and alerted the other necromancer of their presence.
“Halt! Who are you? You’re not from here.” The other necromancer yelled and hurried over to Gilbert.
The Anchor tried to peek through a gap between the door and its frame but couldn’t see much, she could however tell that the necromancer was beyond useless. He couldn’t probably even tell The Anchor was only a few meters away and much less do anything about it. In all likelihood, he was a son of a distant relative of one of the royals and now worked as an errand boy for the family, or something.
Gilbert laughed. “Son, I might not be able to raise corpses like you people, but that doesn’t stop me from making them.” His response was followed by a sound of glass shattering, a muffled scream and something crashing through a wooden door on the other side of the corridor.
Even though she had a vague idea of what happened, The Anchor was still relieved when Gilbert opened the door and greeted her with a smile.
“Oh! You found my stuff, well done!” He said and pointed at a backpack on the floor next to the girl. Scattered around it was a massive pile of mail and leather armor, a mace and some other odds and ends. “Just let me slip those on and we’ll head out. Is there an exit we can use besides the main gate? – or the sewer, never try to escape through the sewer. Everyone considers it at some point, most people try it once but it’s never worth it.”
While the adventurer geared up and made sure they found everything, The Anchor ran through the places in the castle she had been to and the ones that had a way out. Most of them were windows in the higher floors and not really useable, but there was one place that would work perfectly: the collection hall.
The floor of the corridor was covered in wine and broken glass. Wine was scarce in Mournvalley, even among the royals, so whoever the unfortunate necromancer was carrying the wine to before getting smashed through a door must have been a special guest or something. The inquisitors definitely would have been allowed to have some.
“So, where are we heading? Is there a secret entrance or something we could use?” The adventurer asked and moved about to make sure everything was strapped on right and didn’t chafe.
The Anchor pointed down the hallway, towards a large door at the other end.
“You’re not much of a talker, are you?” Gilbert asked while dipping his finger into the wine on the floor and tasting it. He didn’t seem terribly impressed by it.
After hesitating for a bit, The Anchor opened her mouth. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” She said and shrugged.
Gilbert tried his best to not laugh but failed miserably, he kept going for a while before suddenly stopping. “Wait, you’re serious? You live in a cell in some castle’s cellar and think that talking to strangers might be dangerous? The others are going to love you.”
“The others?” The Anchor asked, looking slightly worried.
“In Valor. You know there’s a whole city full of adventurers, right? It’s where I was supposed to take you.” Gilbert explained started walking in the direction The Anchor had pointed in. They didn’t exactly have the time to sit down and have a chat.
The young necromancer hopped over the wine and followed him. “No, I wasn’t told… I kind of assumed you’d just get me out of the country and leave.”
“Nay, I don’t leave young girls alone in the woods. Don’t know who you are, but I’m sure Valor has a place for you.” The adventurer whispered, carefully opened the large door and peeked in. “It’s empty.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The room behind it appeared to be a classroom of some kind, the walls were filled with shelves full of tomes and multiple graphs depicting different parts of the human body. In the middle of the room was a large stone table with a polished metal plate on top, on the edges of the plate were grooves that all led to a small basin by the end of the table.
To someone from outside, like Gilbert, the entire castle reeked of rotting flesh, but the room was in a league of its own. Despite all his experience in a job that had much higher than average risk of running into corpses, he gagged and had to cover his face when he entered the room. “What the fuck is this place?” He asked and looked at one of the graphs.
“It’s a classroom… for me… for things. We were supposed to meet here in the morning.” The Anchor said and tapped the table in the middle of the room. “Anyway, let’s not stay here, it’s gross. There’s a staircase over there, it’ll take us to the collection hall, which usually has people in it to look after the collection but maybe it’s empty now too. That place has a door to the garden, which is outside and all we need to figure out after that is how to get over the wall.”
“This place has a garden? Didn’t think necromancers were into growing flo… It’s not going to be flowers, is it?” Gilbert sighed and headed to the staircase.
At the bottom of the barely lit staircase was another door, but before Gilbert had the chance to open it and peek in, The Anchor stopped him.
“There’s someone there, let me handle it.” She suggested. The necromancer in the collection hall was formidable to say the least, and a regular human like Gilbert wouldn’t stand a chance against her, not in the collection hall of all places.
The collection hall was the place where Mournvalley kept its armada of skeletons when they weren’t in use. It had been decades since the necromancers had waged an actual war, so most of the collection had been in there longer than almost anyone in the castle had been alive, only to be taken for a brief spin outside by one of the custodians. The fact that the undead didn’t require any kind of upkeep on the field, meant that the army of skeletons could dwarf any living army, or all of them at once if there just were enough able-bodied necromancers operating it.
The bulk of the army were the countless human, orc, dwarf, beastfolk and other roughly humanoid skeletons that had been claimed after wars or just flat-out stolen from their graves over the centuries. Some of them still donned the rusted weapons or armor they had been wearing during their last moments alive or had been laid to rest in, but since Mournvalley had no reason to arm their skeletons, many were unarmed and bare. Besides these, the hall stored the skeletons of great beasts such as giants, dragons, massive snakes, griffins, ogres, werewolves – basically, if it had a skeleton, at some point some deranged necromancer had added it to the collection.
Despite its massive size, the collection was only a portion of what the necromancers had in their disposal; there were at least three other collections that The Anchor knew of, and for as long as things kept dying, the collection would be a work in progress.
She stepped in the room and was immediately noticed by the custodian that was working on something by her table.
The woman was somewhere in her twenties and had a pretty unique black mohawk hairstyle. Despite obviously having spotted The Anchor, probably before she even entered the room, the custodian looked away. “I wonder if I left that thing in the other room over there, I better go look for it for the next few minutes.” She spoke abnormally loudly and clearly, grabbed a blue bundle of cloth from the table and disappeared into a room The Anchor knew to be just a small closet.
“What the…” The Anchor mumbled and knocked on the door behind her to signal Gilbert that it was safe to come out.
“That was fast. Holy shit that’s a lot of skeletons. I take it that you guys don’t keep them in your closets, you just pile them all here?” Gilbert joked.
“No, we keep them here because the closets are full.” The Anchor said and walked over to a massive gate in one end of the hall. The gate itself would be impossible to open without alerting everyone in the castle, but luckily it had a small door on it for the custodians to use on their daily activities. “We can get out from here, just cover your nose before you come out.” She said and stepped out.
Gilbert followed her, only to realize that despite being outside in what was supposed to be fresh air, the smell of decay only got worse. “What the fuck is wrong with the people here?” He muttered and looked at a bloated corpse on the ground. It was partially covered with gravel, but its upper body was still out in the open, and what looked like the evilest leafless, spikey bush bursting through its chest. The adventurer then looked around and saw that the entire courtyard was filled with such bushes. He prided himself in knowing a lot about plants and creatures of the world, but this particular one he was unfamiliar with – probably for a good reason.
“It’s called lung rose. It’s a lot like a normal rose but doesn’t flower and only grows if planted into something’s lungs. Really good for poisons and medicines apparently. If you mix some into the wax of a candle and light it, everyone in the room dies. So definitely not good for scented candles.” The Anchor explained and wobbled forwards with her eyes firmly shut. “There should be a wall somewhere here, if you can think of a way to get over it and back down, we’re free.”
“I’ve got enough rope and the surface of the wall is suitable for climbing, but nothing that can be used as a grappling hook. Do you think there’s anything like that inside?” Gilbert asked and took out a bundle of rope from his backpack.
“Oh! If you can get any kind of bone and tie it on the rope, I can hold it still up there, so you can climb.” The necromancer said and walked straight into the wall.
Gilbert fetched a femur from one of the skeletons in the hall, tied the rope to it and flung it over the ten-meter wall. After the necromancer gave him the all clear, he pulled on the rope as hard as he could to make sure it could support his weight and when it didn’t budge he started climbing a lot faster than one would think someone that massive could.
“Okay, now you.” He coaxed the necromancer from the top of the wall.
The Anchor looked at the rope and seemed distressed. “I forgot that I can’t climb ropes.” She admitted.
“Can’t or won’t?” Gilbert asked.
“Can’t, my grip strength is trash.” The necromancer shrugged.
Gilbert sighed. “Okay… Tie it around yourself and I’ll pull you up.” He suggested and grabbed the rope.
Finally, with a few pulls, they were both on top of the wall and for the first time, The Anchor actually felt confident about the plan.
The patch of wall they had climbed on was between two seemingly unmanned watchtowers and was only accessible through them. The simplest way out would be to use the rope to drop down to the moat outside the wall and swim to freedom.
Gilbert wasn’t too excited about having to swim but would be willing to do it if needed, as long as the girl would be able to make it to the shore on her own. “You can swim, rig-“
He was interrupted by a loud explosion high above them. Unsure about what it was, Gilbert pushed The Anchor down and took cover. When nothing happened for a few seconds, they looked up and saw a bright blue cloud of dust around where the explosion happened.
“What is that? Have we been spotted?” Gilbert asked and looked around.
Suddenly a second explosion was set off a bit further away, then a third one and a fourth. After six more, the adventurer made the call to not waste time investigating it and risk being cut off on the other side of the moat, grabbed the necromancer and jumped down into the murky waters.
Anastacia flinched awake in King’s lap and made the usual checks. “I’m Anastacia, I’m at the inn, in my own room and there are no other necromancers nearby…” She listed and took a deep breath.
A part of the evening of their escape she didn’t know about involved a couple if red robed inquisitors having a lovely evening on a balcony only a few stories up from the courtyard they had escaped from.
A woman with six arms was leaning on the ramparts of the balcony and watched the escapees go about their business. “Look at them go, you weren’t kidding about these adventurers, they do get things done – with a bit of help, of course.” She smiled, sat back down on the bench next to the other inquisitor and leaned against him.
“He alone made it through the little ‘quest’ I set up for them, so he has to be a cut above the rest.” The other inquisitor said and took one of the woman’s skeletal hands. “Such a shame we have to ruin the evening, my dear Coquelicot. But those two need more time to get far enough away before anyone notices.”
“Oh Alizarin, you know I don’t mind a bit of noise. In fact, I think the evening is only getting better.” Coquelicot laughed and kissed her husband on the cheek, leaving behind a smear of dark red lipstick. “There are five guards nearby who will likely hurry over. Do you want to take cover to avoid the splatter?”
“Not on your life! You know I like watching you work.” Alizarin said and handed his wife a tightly packed pouch of signal powder.
Coquelicot tossed it over the balcony’s edge, where it went off, spread the blue powder for everyone to see and signaled the beginning of the rebellion. When the people they had recruited for their plan responded with their own signals, there was no going back anymore.
Two necromancer guards rushed to the balcony from inside the castle. “Madame Inquisitor! We heard an explosion. Are you two okay?” One of them asked and looked around for the cause of the loud noise.
Coquelicot responded by using two of her hands to rip off the guard’s head and a third one to punch clean through the second guard’s chest, heart and spine. “Better than ever.” She laughed and got ready to receive the rest of the guards.