We finally came across the catacombs I was told about, and I asked Fernau the obvious. He told me, in the past, it was used as a grave for people from Dustdown and other villages around. Those other villages no longer exist, and as punishment for failing some previous 'test of loyalty', the tomb was cursed.

The corpses inside rose as undead and began roaming around at night. It wasn't threatening, but it did lead to some loss of life over the years. More than a pressing threat, it represented a show of force and of constant stress.

Dustdown had petitioned their rulers for the catacombs to be cleared or disenchanted for years. Nothing. The farmboy's words though, led me to the secondary realization that the villagers thought I was another test of loyalty. Would they support, harbor, or help the Sleeping Hero if he were to appear?

Explains the hostility. They were browbeaten. Hopeless. Except for maybe that woman.

The catacombs themselves were built into the earth. It was hard to tell what part of the hill that the entryway sat in was natural. Or if any of the formation was natural at all. Something like clay or other soft stone formed an arch. The wooden remains of a door were smashed into the dirt before the dark mouth it once protected.

"Here it is."

The farmboy trembled with fear. And, his fear was making me afraid. Magic, undeath. I didn't know how to assess that threat. Could it be taken in hand with armor and weapons? Was it frightening because he was entirely unarmed?

Or was the gruesome reality of life being extinguished waiting in the darkness to claim us both?

"Alright," I said aloud, for no real purpose other than to make a sound.

The wheels were turning, and day light was burning. It was well past afternoon now, and the balmy weather had taken a sharp and surprising turn to chilly. Out in the expanse to my right, past the ledge the catacomb resided near, I got an eyeful of the landscape north of Duskdown and likely what formed the edges of Fernau's knowledge.

Dozens of meters below us, in a lowland that stretched to a lip of water, was a barren hellscape.

"What is all that?" I said with an aghast expression. It was not a pretty sight. The valley, and the village, and the forestry I had explored so far were relatively healthy and ‘normal’, such as this place could manage.

The expanse I faced wasn't healthy, or natural. The ground was blackened and ashy. Shrubbery and trees existed only as stumps or remains, gnarled and grey. Odd, wispy black tendrils of smoke curled up from the ground and wafted away into the grim orange of sunset. These smokey trails hinted at a blaze that had occured recently, but everything else about the environment told me it had been still and undisturbed for a long, long while. A natural instinct that this was not a recent development.

The words earlier, of spoiled land, return to me. And I realized that the magic mouth never did follow up when I reached the village.

Fernau made a sheepish noise. "It's just a bit of badlands. Stuff like that is all over. Don't go near them."

"Don't have to tell me twice."

I leaned on my spear and shook off the thoughts of those badlands, turning my attention back to the door which lead to this problem. I could just go in and fight them.

"Do you know what's in there?" My question, really, was just to delay further. Though, I would learn the value of gathering as much information as possible before a conflict.

"No."

Hope dashed.

"Any stories?"

"Ya, don't let your children out too late or they'll be snatched away by your own dead ancestors."

"Are you going back to Dallow?"

"Do you know how to get back?"

"No."

He swallows and looks at the grass before us. It's long, relatively, some of the stalks reaching passed my shin guards. Springy, lively, swaying in the breeze. I can't read his expression but it's probably as unsure as ever.

"I can wait until you're done, to lead you back."

I nod and, go forward. Forward. The ground below me wasn't good footing, but the boots helped. Damn good boots. I could feel myself dragging as I approached. I didn't want to proceed.

I keep the spear up and ready, and look down into the catacomb. The darkened entryway spilled immediately to a stairway down. The stairs were shifty and steep, between the poor construction and darkness, walking down them looked to me like asking to fall down on my face.

I noticed on the wall, sticking in a sconce, a burnt-down torch. I wiggled it free of its rusted iron holdings and examined it. Blackened with use, but the tip still had some ragged scraps. If I could douse the tip in the small bit of kerosene I could light my way.

Idiotically, I called back at Fernau, who was watching from several meters away. "It's dark!"

"Yeah?" He replied, and no more.

Something about it made me laugh, which, after a few notes, got him laughing too. It made me pull away from the archway and set my bag down. I set the spear down and thought a moment, my hand on the hilt of the sword at my hip.

"Okay. Can you help me get a fire going?"

"How come?"

"A torch, of course."

He nods. "We shouldn't have left so late in the day. If you're not quick it'll be dark, it'll be hard walking back."

"Can you get us back in the dark?"

"Maybe?" He shrugged and set to work making a ring of rocks.

I knew a little bit about making a firepit. I hadn’t camped, but I had firemaking explained to me before and I retained a small bit of it. I let him take the lead and tried to get him the stones and sticks he needed.

With a bit of his own flint - sparing the need for me to open my pack - he gets a sputtering fire going.

With a dip into my pot of oil, the rag easily and greedily soaks up the flame. I hold it high and aloft, away from me and my eyes.

From the gloom, a pair of skeletons emerged. Consumption of media, Halloween decorations, and my own mind couldn't prepare me for seeing them. The visages of death, ambulated and clawing at me to rip my life from me. It was the perfect, most horrifying thing possible. Death seeking to claim me.

Uncanny, it was, seeing dusty and dirty rag-covered bones lurching from the tight hallway down at me. One of the two was shorter, I assumed maybe a woman or someone who died young. The other was taller, hanging over me with an arched spine.

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I had my sword drawn already for what good it did me. With a clumsy, foolish swing I scraped the sword's tip against the wall, and slam the edge of the blade against the tall skeleton's ribcage.

A sinister gleam of purple rolls out from the bones I strike across the animated undead's form. The evidence of the magical 'tissue' keeping all these bones together and reinforcing them.

There is a low rattle, a hollow sound, and my over-extended arm is grabbed and tugged at by the shorter corpse. It's claw-like finger tips seep into the cloth and gambeson padding, poking into my skin painfully and piercing it. I felt the blood and warm, vile pain begin to grow and I tugged myself and my weapon back.

A swinging, jutting strike from the tall one smacks the torch from my hand, and I backpedal until my heel hits the stairs.

The sputtering torch illuminates their lower halves, wreathing them in an oval of dying light as they stalk forward, shoulder to shoulder. Their hollow eyes flickered with an evil light of their own. The stark, empty, awful death-grins they sported gave me the shakes.

I thrust, my sword tip poking against the sternum of the shorter one. I felt the reflection of force ride up my forearm to the elbow and it made my teeth chatter. Just as much effect as the slash. Like a raindrop on a lake's surface, a crackling purple ripple echoed out across the ribs to the shoulders and hips.

I scramble up the stairs, just as the larger one grabs my shoulder. I shake him off, the skin on my neck getting slashed. I croak a sound of pain and fear both, surprising myself with the utterance.

"Fernau!" I call at the entrance, staggering up the stairs, hand and foot. The steep staircase never made for speed of movement, nearly caused my end. With great effort, I make it back outside.

My panicked calling roused the farmboy from whatever he was doing by the fire. And, I was never more thankful to see a man with a weapon pointed at me. I could see the fear in his eyes, and I am certain he could see the panic in mine.

I found my footing by the time I dove to stand alongside him. It was two on two now, I liked those odds better. Fernau thrusted forward at the short one. Asking no questions and hesitating not a second. A fighter's instinct, perhaps. And the spear is a weapon often handed to those with little experience in weaponry.

However much or little time he'd had with a pitchfork, low-skill floor or not, Fernau's strike got rebuffed by the skeleton. The pointed tip cracks against some of the lower ribs and gets stuck, pinning the skeleton but also his weapon.

I catch only the briefest of his struggling. My own unskilled thrashing at the larger skeleton was marred by a rising uncertainty and the blur of adrenaline and panic. Neither I nor Fernau made any headway, barely keeping the skeletons off us.

I was being pushed back toward the fire until I manage to knock the larger skeleton off balance. Simultaneously, it struck at my sword arm with such force that it casts off my blade from my grasp. My back to the firepit, I think of nothing better than grabbing a blazing hot stone - screaming as I do - and bashing.

Thokk, thokk, crack, thokk. I slammed, bashed, and struck. Barbarian, unskilled, furious, and rampant. But, each blow with the rock made cracks in the larger undead. A singular strike to its head rocked its jaw off it, sending it flying to the grass.

It staggered back, and almost comically, collapsed into its constituent parts.

Fernau looks to me with a 'Nrrrhnnn!' of a sound, wiggling the skeleton still stuck on his spear.

My burnt hand throbs with pain, but the stone had cooled. I can only take a half second to breathe before I crush the skull of the smaller one too.

I dropped the rock just as the second skeleton fell and growled in pain, grunting and grasping my forearm, squeezing to subdue some pain. "I want a fucking mace."

"Huh?" Fernau dips the spear tip, and then begins laughing nervously. I can't help but join.

"We got 'em."

"We did. We did it. Well, you did it. You killed them."

"No, fuck that. We did it. You held that one down. That spear didn't work at all, huh?"

"No! It got stuck, it got stuck on the point when I shoved forward, right in its... these." He pokes the rib cage.

"Ribs."

"Gah, right, ribs. The word fled my tongue."

I wasn't pleased with what I saw when I looked at my hand. Red, raw, and blisters already forming. It felt stiff and staring at the wound made a cold chill of pain roll down my spine.

Fernau hustled over with a huff, first grabbing my bag and then returning to me. He held my forearm while looking at my hand. "Why'd you go and do that for?" He snickers, setting the spear against a shoulder and shaking open my knapsack.

"You had bandaging in here right?"

I nod, smiling but watching the catacomb's mouth. No chance there were just two.

"My sword didn't do shit."

"Did-- what?"

"It didn't even scratch them."

He wrapped up my palm and tied it off, tight but the pressure felt a little relieving - even with the pain. I flexed my hand and curl it up, felt a blister pop, oozing into the bandage. Not the best.

"Rock did 'em in right and good. If I knew it'd be so useful I'd have picked up one instead."

I shake my head, walking over to reclaim my sword. I put it back in my sheathe. It wasn't the tool for this job at all. I think briefly back to the chamber of tools. A cooking pot would have been more worthy a weapon. I'd passed over the maces and axes there in favor of the short blade for reasons unknown and idiotic.

I snagged my rock again. "The spear was good, it kept the thing away from you so I could smash it."

He lit up and nodded. His blonde bangs got over into his eyes, which he brushed aside. A few drips of sweat dotted his forehead. "Good swings."

"Was nothing, really. I was fucking panicking."

"You were fucking swinging." He repeated my foul language with a strange lilt to it, like he wasn’t fully sure what it means.

We catch our breath, and I drop the bomb that I lost the torch. He is unbothered. In fact, gone seems his fretfulness at all. I found, oddly, so was mine. With my adrenaline drained and my hand aching, I felt tired. But I didn’t feel afraid. Not at this moment at least.

"There are more down in there."

"Ya," he shifted the spear from one shoulder to another.

"If you hold them or trip them up with the spear, and keep them pinned, I can crack their heads. Sound good?" A sly grin came across my features, and I white-knuckled the hefty stone in my left hand.

He nodded emphatically. "But a torch? Who will carry a light? I need two hands for this pole."

We resolve to fetch the torch. Nothing occurred. But by god did we take that move slow and steady. He went forward and first, spear leveled at his hip. But, I had my bad hand by his shoulder and rock ready for any undead miscreant.

With a new blazing star to light our way, we delved again. The aura was entirely different with a companion. Nerves, and paranoia. It began to creep in around every dark cut shadow and corner. But we persisted. Something about it felt right, like we could do it if we just kept together.

Trouble came when we reached a cross-section. A forward, left, and right path.

Shamelessly I admit I shrieked when a skeleton lunged for me from the side. It tangled up my left arm and grappled at me. When Fernau turned to help me, he was struck by another lunging from the forward hall.

I could hear and feel my partner thrash on my shoulder and try to swing. We were too cramped, these halls offered no wiggle room for our weapons. Fernau swung, I think, and I heard a low and loud crack.

I felt a swipe of pain at my eyebrow, and right after a blow to my gut softened by armor. Even still it knocked the air from me. My strikes were weak and unfocused but with my wanton battering. I shattered my foe's collarbone. Which unsettled its head from its accursed body and it collapsed into a rattling pile.

Fernau had managed to pin his enemy against the wall, it looked dazed, slowed. With a single and fell strike I opened up the skeleton's head like a coconut. It dismantled itself until just its ribs held limply on Fernau's spear point.

The torch had fallen, and in the complex of shadows and the drumming of my heart, I'd not even noticed. I quickly scooped it up before it doused itself, and gave Fernau a look. From the corner of his left lip up to the ear a thin red strike oozed. It didn't look too bad or deep, but it was long.

"Nice scar," I choked out, chest aching from my blow there.

"Huh? What? What happened?"

He touches his face with his offhand, patting the blood. "Is it bad?"

"No, you're good. Keep the eyes up."

I felt a warm wetness on my eyebrow, a cut like his I was sure. I was afraid to touch it for fear of getting blood in my eye.

As we continued, I noticed, bizarrely, that the darkness was less oppressive. I and the farmboy did a route around the catacombs twice and found no other sources of evil to put down. Figuring that was all, we exited again.

When I sat down, I nearly collapsed, exhausted.

Food and water were taken, and Fernau helped me set up my bedroll so I could rest.