Clearing out the street was easy, there were no more soldiers or knights, leaving the uncoordinated worker skeletons alone in their offensive. Each was swiftly put out of their misery, and their valuables looted. In economies like this, even the simplest tools were likely to go for a good rate, and each one was taken. The homes yielded a meager fare, bits of copper and the occasional tarnished silver slave. The best thing they found was what seemed to be a lightly enchanted set of knives from a butcher’s shop. They were enchanted to stay sharp and not degrade, which made them stand out with their shiny polished metal amongst rusty equipment. It was a good find, but not exceptional. Which meant they moved on quickly.

When they reached the top of the hill, they found another gatehouse with two gates. Oddly, both were closed, seeming to cut off any progress. A follower pointed out several high windows. They were little more than arrow slits, but with some maneuvering, they were able to get a look inside. The guardhouse was completely empty of people, or rather skeletons. There was a table with a number of chairs, as well as a yellowed set of cards and some dice. The gate mechanism was set to one side of the room and consisted of a large wheel and several levers. In the end, they had to hoist up Amalise. She was able to use her mana manipulation skill as a rough sort of telekinesis, which allowed her to undo the lock and turn the wheel. With a rusty groan, the portcullis raised until it was three feet above the ground before Amalise had to rest.

Of course, there were two gates which meant that they had to wait for Amalise to restore her stamina before they could switch a lever and raise the other side. By that point the group had time to analyze what they could see on the other side. Bones. Huge piles of bones. Occasionally they could see a skeleton crawling across the piles, but it was oddly dark on the other side. When Amalise had recovered for the second time, they dragged themselves under the portcullises and stood in the darkness on the other side.

Fortunately it wasn’t completely dark, more in line with what you might get on a night with a full moon. It allowed them to see massive piles of bones of all kinds.

“I suppose this is where all the other bones went.” Will said.

They were in a large courtyard with the castle looming at the far end. Bones were piled everywhere, but none rose higher than four stone obelisks with spherical gemstones at the top. A dark aura emanated from each, seeming to draw in the light, and prevent it from hitting the ground. The other thing they could see were the skeletons, and the revenants. They were crawling across the bones, tapping at them as they passed. Will could sense small sparks of mana with every tap on each bone. And finally at the base of the castle, was a large altar with what looked to be a giant horn on a stand. It seemed to be a natural horn, but Will was sure that no natural creature grew to that size. Maybe a mammoth? A Dire Mammoth? The horn had been carved to allow it to be blown, with several holes along the length so it could be played. Will would have been excited to hear what a large instrument sounded like, but black smoke was flowing out the large opening at the end.

A revenant in robes stepped up to the horn and blew.

Everything shook, and the note beyond hearing was accompanied by the grating of stone and the chatter of bone. Black smoke flowed out of the horn like a river, flowing into the piles of bone. The note stopped, but the smoke did not, flowing continuously into the bones. The bones started to move, flowing like water into the center of the courtyard. Then the pile of bones stood, unfurling into a catlike body fifteen feet tall, with a bone club tail.

The bone cat pounced.

The company scattered in all directions as Emerys took the cat head on. Emerys screamed a battle cry as he brought his mace down on the cat’s head, for smoke to form and repel his strike like he had done nothing at all. Amalise followed up with a bolt of fire that was similarly ineffective. Will looked around for ideas, and immediately grabbed an archer.

“Can you shoot the horn?” the archer shook his head.

“The smoke stops the arrows.”

“What about the crystals?” the archer looked up and loosed an arrow at the nearest crystal, and as easy as that caused it to fall over. Will ran to where it landed and snatched it up. His hands seemed to entirely disappear around the crystal, but he felt what he wanted. The enchantment. It was quite complex, and etched into the interior of the crystal itself, but not beyond tampering. Frost crawled across the surface of the crystal and the enchantment shifted.

Inside the enchantment was a store of energy, sunlight that it gathered and slowly converted into energy for use within the altar. All Will did was open the container.

A blast of sunlight cut across the battlefield and slammed into the horn. The smoke was cleared, and for a moment the sun shone all across the courtyard. But the horn was unharmed, and more smoke billowed forth a moment later as the dark aura reasserted itself over the battlefield. Emerys continued to fight the bone cat, getting its attention every time it tried to wander.

“Will! Whatever you are doing, do it fast! The cat is getting bored!”

“On it!” Will got the archers to knock down the other three crystals, and the whole battlefield got a whole lot brighter. Will rushed to the next one and aimed it at the cat. The beam of light lanced across the battlefield and seared away the cloud of smoke around the cat. The bellow was unlike anything a cat had ever uttered. Not a screech or a roar, but rather the low tone of wind moaning through a cave while centipedes skittered across the stone, magnified a hundred times over. Emerys and Amalise landed hits simultaneously, causing large chunks of bone to explode from the construct, but it wasn’t enough, and the bone cat reformed as soon as the smoke enveloped it again. Except this time, it was focused on Will.

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Will dodged the swipe of a bony paw and ducked a bite as it snapped just over his head. Emerys was bashing away at the thing just to have it ignore him.

“The Horn!” Amalise yelled. “I need to get to the horn!”

A curtain of smoke had risen around the horn. A follower who had tried to penetrate it now lay unconscious on the ground.

“The crystals!” Will yelled. “Give me the crystals!” he dodged yet another swipe, only to get pummeled by the club tail as it swung around to slam into his shield. He was thrown twenty feet before rolling to his feet. He would have been eaten had a bramble not shot out of the ground to tangle the cat for a brief moment. Will rolled to his feet in time to see Emerys glow black. Emerys shouted, and his shout held the power of a rockslide as the cat spun on him. The next moment, both crystals were placed in Will’s hands. Will dived into the enchantments, releasing the power within to bathe the entire battlefield in light. The cat’s scream came, and smoke began again to billow from the horn, but Amalise was already there, blowing a new note.

All the smoke dissipated, and the bone cat fell to pieces.

“YES! Praise all that is holy!” Emerys shouted while laughing. Everyone turned to stare at him, confused, but happy the fight was over.

“Bit of an overreaction, but I’m glad we won too.” Will said.

“Bit of an overreaction my hairy…” Emerys spluttered. “I got a mental concept in the middle of the fight!”

Shock rippled through the company and they all exploded into cheering. After everything calmed down, they all took stock of the area. They stored the giant horn. It had obvious magical properties that they would need to get appraised. Will also kept the four crystals. They were damaged, leaking out all energy they managed to accumulate, but Will was sure they would still have a use. The obelisks ended up having a not insignificant amount of precious metals embedded into the structure, but were not valuable otherwise. They all sat down to rest, and Emerys revealed his concept.

“It is The Stalwart Heart of Shrouded Night. It gives me a bit of a dark aura, which I think will be good for stealth. With training I should be able to manifest solid shadows, and I already used the compulsion effect. Apparently the Stalwart tag is similar to royal or noble tags. It can be used to compel people to fight, and to hold the line, stuff like that.” Emerys grinned in pride. “Of course the best part is that now that I have mana, I can use my Canyon Rockslide physical concept to manifest and manipulate stone.”

He demonstrated by having a handful of rocks appear out of thin air and drop to the ground. He immediately went pale, and everyone laughed at his overuse of mana. Once he had recovered, he found manipulating existing rock was far easier, though his control was sloppy and he could only affect so much at a time. Happy for his friend, Will pulled out a slab of bear meat for Koma, just to realize Koma was nowhere to be seen.

. . .

Koma was having the time of his life. He had never truly known the wonders of bones before. They were just so chewable, and the best part was that the bones got up and ran around! He didn’t realize when he got separated from the group, he was having too much fun chasing the little bone people. They were far smaller than the big bone people that his friend and the others were fighting, and so he made himself small to match.

It was a great game. He would occasionally catch one, and it would flail around a while batting against him until he let it go with a few more tooth marks. Then they would run again. They weren’t very fast, and that was Koma’s only regret in all of this, but he found ways around that. He would jump up walls and between rooftops to find good places to ambush the little bone people. That way he had to run a lot faster than them.

He currently had one of the little bone people by the leg, and was shaking it back and forth as it flailed around. It didn’t taste very good, so he didn’t hold it for long, letting the little bone person get up and run to join the others. Koma waited for a few seconds to give it a bit of a head start and then lept to the top of a nearby building. He ran across the roof and jumped to another before jumping off and hiding behind a barrel. The little bone people would come this way any second now. Any second.

Except Koma waited five seconds and then ten and then a full fifteen seconds before jumping out to find the little bone people nowhere to be seen. Koma’s tail drooped before he put his nose to the ground and started sniffing. He caught the scent of the little bone people almost immediately, and his tail started to wag. The fun wasn’t over, this was just a new game.

His nose led him to a crack in the big stone wall. It looked like the big moving things that closed the wall holes in the dens the humans liked, except this one looked like rock. He nudged it open wider with his nose, and padded inside. His eyes adapted quickly to the dim light inside, and he was pleased to find some big bone people walking around. They immediately came running to play, and Koma pretended to be chased by his new friends, just to spin around and grab and shake them. They fell apart one by one until he was left nudging a pile of bones whining for them to get up. The little bone people never fell apart like this.

But he wasn’t disappointed for long. He smelled his little friends down a hallway with a red light at the end, and he jumped to find them. Halfway down the hallway, he smelled a new scent. A mouthwatering scent. Fresh meat. He lept down the remainder of the hallway to find a paradise awaiting him. Monsters lay butchered all over the room, their meat fresh and tantalizing. His little friends were huddled in a corner, and there was a single big friend holding a small sharp thing. It used the small sharp thing to cut apart the monsters, which really was a waste of time. It should just eat the monsters directly.

It was then that Koma noticed that the red light was actually coming from the big bone person, who had stopped butchering the meat. It came around the table slowly, and started making noises.

“Good boy, stay right there.” Its voice was raspy and faint, and Koma didn’t understand a word of it, but he liked the game. Koma stalked slowly around the big friend and the two pounced at the same time. Except Koma got big while he pounced. The big friend tried to hit Koma with his sharp thing, but Koma’s fur was strong and the sharp thing deflected off of it. Koma meanwhile grabbed the big friend by the middle and shook. He was very pleased when it didn’t just fall apart. But before long he got hungry and pinned the big friend under his paw while he started to chow down on the monster meat. After eating his fill, Koma was about to take a bit of a nap when he saw something glowing underneath a pile of meat.

Koma moved the meat aside, chomping down on a few choice bits, to reveal a bone of gargantuan size, half buried in the ground. The bone was glowing a soft white and made Koma want it like he had never wanted anything in his entire life. He grabbed the bone and tried to pull it free, but nothing happened. He tried to dig it out, but the floor was stone, and not even giant ice claws could scratch it free. Koma whimpered for a moment before finally remembering Will. Will could get the bone for him! And so Koma grabbed his big friend by the leg and bounded off to find Will.