Coney looked around. “Shit shit shit.” He said, walking away from the half broken door. He couldn’t stop looking back at it, but when he saw an eye looking back at him he booked it. He ran as swiftly as his bunny legs could take him, and that wasn’t slow. He was able to easily run twenty, thirty, forty feet in a matter of less than a minute.
Looking back the creature had stuck limbs in, long spindly limbs that had too many joints. They looked like human arms, but had multiple elbows, it was too much for him to take. Without a second thought to anything else Coney ran to another corner and didn’t look back. There he found where he was, the path was sandy, and the walls were lined with alcoves. Within the alcoves were sarcophaguses, each one carved intricate in odd ways. There seemed to be scenes of the underworld on them, but they weren't the pleasant ideas he remembered from Egyptian exhibits.
No, these were terrifying, looking like demonic forms dragging souls off to hell. Even the images of paradise were set among images of suffering, and the suffering was far more popular on the whole. “This place is kind of fucked up, you know that?” He asked no one in particular. Sure, his viewers might be seeing this, but really the voice was more for his own peace of mind.
Coney explored around a corner, and nodded. “Okay, so this place… it’s rough. The walls are hard stone, rather than the brick we saw in the rest of the undercroft. That means this is where some of the stone is quarried, and it also explains why it’s a darker shade.” His paw rested on the wall. “I just need to find the right part down here, somewhere below the church, and grab the book.”
It wasn’t long before he was faced with his first enemy. Unlike the zombie he fought, which had been fresh and dealing with acute putrefaction, what he ran into this time was the wrinkle face of something far darker. Remembering he’d done at least a little study, he tried to analyze the creature.
Ghoul, Undead , Threat Level Red
Well, from memory ghouls were either usually supercharged zombies or sometimes magical junkies out for a fix of flesh and blood. This seemed a lot closer to the former, a creature that was so skin and bones it might as well be a skeleton. With an ineffective battlecry, more of a squeak, Coney slammed his scythe down to start the battle.
Coney’s blade entered the flesh of the ghoul, but it didn’t look very phased. Instead it leaned forward on its oddly shaped legs and jumped at the attack. Running for coney was a lot easier than fighting. Maybe it was the instinct of a prey animal, but Coney would make it work for him. All he had to do was find some way to protect himself.
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Down a hallway, through a bend, through a bathhouse. It was all the same, the ghoul was behind him and no amount of blade action could cut it down. It was too resilient, and too wily for anything else. Instead, all it could do was keep fighting, and the same for Coney. He kept going until he got to the other side of the bathhouse. There, looking into an empty pool with a mosaic on the floor, was a statue.
The statue was beautiful, it was crafted from some black stone, and it had an almost wistful look as it presumably looked at the reflections that wouldn’t be there any more. Before he could admire it any further Corny ran on. The next room was connected and had its own statue. Instead of a perfect man staring into the water, this was a similarly perfect man being chiseled from the rock.
“What’s this, some kind of modern piece? I mean come on, it feels like they want me to tell them it’s okay, to praise the artistic nature, despite looking like it’s completely unfinished.” Ignoring everything else he continued on.
After the bathhouse he supposed there really were many things down here he hadn’t expected. Come to think of it, he was lost. He wasn’t even in the catacombs anymore. But, it wasn’t like he could easily reorient. He had no compass, and the tunnels themselves were impossible to map for him. They were simploy that complicated, at least to him.
The ghoul wasn’t too quick, but it was no slow shambler. No, it could move pretty dang quickly when it was ready for lunch. However, the fight was still in Coney, and he’d occasionally slice the ghoul’s shoulder. They slowly healed, but there was still a lasting effect. He continued the assault.
Finally, the ghoul lay in pieces. “Hermes, god of travel, helps guide my feet to what I seek.” Coney walking again was easy, and without being ghoul chow, but the structure of reality was an odd one. “The god of muses, people like you, they came and began to disaster”
Coney could almost hear laughter in the distance, but it had to be a figment of his imagination. There was no laughter, there was barely here. Being this lost was ridiculous, he could hardly imagine doing anything else.
Luck Increased by 2!
Well that was good, but with the words Franca had about luck he wasn’t sure what luck did to him. As he walked, he found that the walls went from slightly more smoothed out walls to rough cut walls, as if they had been taken to with a pickaxe.
Walking through them he once more saw the sarcophagi, though they were far less ornate. Many were just a coffin, cut from wood and hewn smooth by time and the efforts of man. “Good, this has to be the way.” Coney said for the viewers at home. Slowly he creeped down the hall, and climbed up towards the most desiccated sections of wall. From what he could tell the rougher it was down here, the older it was, and generally that was a problem.
Standing in the middle of the new room was a skeleton. Behind it was a surprisingly ornate box. One that had a symbol on it. Opening the book up, he turned back to the first page, and just after it he found what he was looking for. That symbol had been marked on the page, right next to the entry about the author’s master. This was far more dangerous, far more important, than he believed.
“I’ll be damned, that’s not good.” He said, a bit of an understatement.