Deluge of the Dead

[Letho]

((Closed to Relt Peltfelter and whichever character Duffy picks))

“Well, I guess it could be worse.”

This thought was Letho's solitary companion as he walked into town of Bonnam. The sun was sinking, huge and red on the horizon as he walked through the dusty streets, the rattling sound of his spurs only contested by the light breeze that picked up an occasional curtain of dirt, sweeping it past the lifeless houses. It was a queer kind of silence, though, not at all like the natural type that you would expect to experience while walking through the streets at dusk. There was no shuffling behind the curtained windows, no muffled sounds beyond the walls, no dogs barking, no cats knocking over crates, no crickets strumming their incessant monotone note, none of the little signs that would signify that the town was in fact turning in for the day. Instead, the quiet was complete, eerie, like someone locked you in a coffin and dropped it into the ocean.

Letho certainly didn't expect that. Last reports told of an uprising in Bonnam, a pocket-sized revolution led by a man whose name the Marshal forgot (he was never good with names) who had a thing or three against those in charge of governing the city. Some people had apparently felt the same – or thought they did; these revolts tended to be downright contagious – and they convinced some more people and soon enough there had been riots and destruction of property and eventually death. Because these things had a bad habit of escalating. Always. And Letho Ravenheart was here to clean up the mess.

“Some mess,” he thought as he walked into the main square. Unlike the roads leading to it, most of the town center was paved with stones, the empty space probably doubling as a market during the day given the number of stands scattered over its entire breadth. Abandoned stands by the look of it. Most still had goods on them, rotting away under the summer sun and spreading the acidic stench across the square. Letho was spared from the full force of the rancid stench by a fortunate fact that he came from the south and the wind was blowing westward, but it was still far from a place where he wanted to stand around. He repositioned the Lawmaker so it rested more comfortably on his shoulder and moved on, skirting the square's south-east edge, heading towards the tavern.

The Nag's Rump wasn't a terribly famous inn, with no stories about it reaching past the outskirts of the town, but it was fairly large and well maintained, nearly rivaling the Town Hall in sheer girth if not the splendor. But that wasn't a surprise to the Marshal; with the population of some three thousand souls Bonnam wasn't a particularly large town, but its location was quite auspicious. It was nestled between Gisela and Ferrytown, meaning all merchants heading out to sea or returning from it had to pass through it. And with the distance between the two being just under two days of riding and Bonnam somewhere at midpoint, travelers didn't have that much choice but to stay at the Rump, or other smaller taverns. So it should've been bustling with activity. Only, it wasn't. Like the rest of the town, the house stared back at Letho with black windows, its main entrance about as inviting as a gaping maw of a dead man.

The Marshal braved the three steps up to the porch all the same, shouldering past the batwing doors and into the gloom of the main room. Empty chairs and half-finished pints invited him to the silent party, the still frame broken only by the dust motes floating lazily through the shafts of the dying light.

“Where the hell is everybody?” At this point, he would’ve welcomed a pitchfork or two aimed at his face and a blazing pyre, the protesters’ old time favorite. That at least he would know what to do with. But the utter lifelessness of this town was a mystery that so far offered no clues as to what had happened here. Letho could speculate, of course; his money was that the rioters gathered everybody up in some place or other (probably the cathedral just outside the town), aiming to use the hostages as negotiation tokens. Or maybe a conflict broke out at a location he had not discovered yet, and most citizens fled from the violence and death. Both scenarios had enough holes to make a half-decent sieve, but it was the best Letho could do for now.

Stepping back outside, the Marshal was attacked again by the stench of the market, but he stood firm against it, passing through the stands with a determined gait. When he reached the fountain in the center – not surprised in the very least by the fact that it was bone dry – his mighty hand lifted the Lawmaker above his head, releasing a single thunderous blast.

“CITIZENTS OF BONNAM!!!” his voice followed, not as piercing as the lead and gunpowder, but booming enough to carry the message through the streets. “I AM MARSHAL RAVENHEART, HERE TO RESTORE ORDER!!!”

His words seemed to fall flat, barely producing an echo, as if it too was undesirable because it broke the stillness. He brought the gunblade back down, the reloading mechanism making a metallic click as he ejected the spent shell, then reloaded a fresh one. And still, beside it and the sweeping wind whistling gently past his ears, there was no sound in the air.

“A lot of good that did.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

As russet and black fought over the evening sky, a gentle wind shook the sparse vegetation at the edge of town. The creaking of the wagon wheels as they rattled over the parched soil of the rough-hewn roads was the only note which broke the quiet beauty of nature at her stillest. The gentle splendor of it all was something which Relt Peltfelter might have quite appreciated, were she not otherwise engaged in playing Super Mario on her cell phone.

She was currently lying in the back of a pig cart, currently devoid of pigs but loaded with feed, which happened to be heading her way to pick up a shipment of prime hogs, also known as ‘oinking gold’. This was the latest in a long line of rides bummed and favors asked with no intention of repayment, all in the interest of reaching a city which may house an individual who knows how to repair a car.

It had only been a few days since Relt had realized that, through some horrific contrivance of coincidence, she had been transported from her native home of San Francisco, California in the year 2025 to the middle of bumfuck nowhere on some dungeon-bearing and dragon-having planet known, evidently, as Althanas. Naturally, there was a period of some adjustment to this fact, which involved much screaming, three to four gallons of cheap alcohol, a few bowls of weed, and a cute puppy to hug until things seemed okay.

By now, however, she was doing alright. She had a goal. She needed her wheels fixed, and if her inquiries were correct, then her best bet was either in Radasanth, which was close by, or Alerar, which was less so. Being of a practical mind, Relt chose to start with the former, and it was in the furtherance of this goal that she had pestered the pigsman to let her hitch a ride.

She felt the wagon grind to a halt just in time for a goomba to make her lose her fire flower, and the owner of the cart tapped her on the shoulder. “We’m stopping here tonight, miss,” he said quietly.

“Where the fudge even is this place?” Relt asked, “Seems kinda quiet,”

“Town of Bonnam, miss,” the pig-carter said, “Been a bit of trouble here of late, as I understand, but shouldn’t be any real trouble. As far as accommodations go, I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I have an arrangement with the owner of The Forelorn’st Goose, but they’ll be full up. I suggest you try The Nag’s Rump, if you want a bed fer th’ night,”

“Yeah yeah,” Relt mumbled, stretching as she hopped off the pig cart, “What time should I meet you out, uh…ugh…” she trailed off as the aroma of putrefying vegetables reached her nostrils. They wrinkled accordingly. “What kind of trouble did you say they had here?” she asked, but the driver had already wandered off into the darkening streets. “Oh, real fucking nice,” she muttered, walking away with a hand over her nose.

The girl hoisted her bag and stowed her cell phone; she only had one life left as it was, and there wasn’t another mushroom in world 3-2, so she might as well return her attention from that world to this one. It really was deathly quiet, with only the flapping of her flip-flops on the cobbles to accompany her. No torches or lanterns were lit against the waning daylight. Relt was beginning to become acutely uncomfortable. It was as if everyone in town had pulled a Mary Celeste and just wandered away, leaving everything as it was. She passed a market stall, evidently vending a large amount of now-wilting celery. A few of the weird gold coins they used as money here were shining invitingly.

Now, it must be acknowledged that Relt is not as amoral as some; she would not kill a man just to watch him die, nor steal the bread from a needy mouth. But if a shopkeeper just happens to look the wrong way at the wrong time, well, she is not exactly averse to slipping a hypothetical candy bar down her hypothetical pants. It is this casual disregard for unconsidered trifles that led Relt to, with the subtlety of a neon elephant, slink over to the ragged oak counter and carefully pick up the handful of coins.

It is very regrettable, then, that at the exact moment her fingers touched the metal, a gun went off behind her. She dove behind the stand, nearly toppling a display of rancid turnips as the tumbling vortex of big city instincts took over. A man, facing away from her shouted something about restoring order, then seemed vaguely disappointed not to get a response. It became obvious to Relt that this man was not signaling a one-man massacre, so she left her ill-considered and stanky hiding place.

“Well duh!” she yelled across the flat, still epanse of the market square, “I mean titty-balls fuck-rake, since when does order involve random fucking gunshots into the air? No wonder it’s so quiet, everybody’s scared some asshole is gonna pull a drive-by on ‘em. Gotta think this shit out, bro,”

[Cydnar]

Cydnar had not taken to the life of a politician too kindly. He was, deep down in his heart, very much a man of war. Though the title of Salthias offered the occasional foray into the crystal geodes of the Under-dark, or to the snow cursed wastes of Salvar, rarely was he given the opportunity to venture openly amongst the human settlements. When the council approached him with their concern about a small town in Corone, he had, quite naturally, accepted the appointment with the uttermost host and pleasure.

Until he arrived, that was.

Magical corruption and it's misuse were the primary concern of the Hummel, it was their ancient ward to contest such foul play and eradicate the errors of man's ways from the surface of Althanas, lest it destroy their own civilisation in the process. It was often an obvious enemy, roaring in the face of conformity with powerful pangs of blatant, outright devastation. In the war against Xem'Zund, it had scarred the surface of the earth, and when the Beast of Many Bloods had wrought havoc on the streets of Radasanth, the screams had been an audible melody to the bounty hunter's elongated ears.

But Bonnam? No such blatancy existed.

Only silence.

Only death.

He moved along the side streets with a crouch in his step and delicate palms measured firmly against the crystalline hilts of his sword canes. It had been two hours since he had emerged into the settlement, and two hours since he had seen a living soul. There was nobody, at all, anywhere. Whilst he could taste the faint pang of magic in the iron, like blood on his fangs, there was no obvious source and no sign of struggle.

Cydnar was at a loss. Even with the obsidian tones of his long robes masquerading his movements through the broken barrel underclass world of Bonnam, and careful, delicate steps carrying him silently through the melange of nothing, he stood out clear as day.

Bang!

The thunderous noise came unmistakably from a gun of some description. With a whip crack, Cydnar dropped spider like to the floor and levelled his ear to the ground. The human voice that followed it was welcoming, and he stood upright with a sudden rush of possibility, excitement, progress.

He skipped along an alleyway between a tall, rickety building made of pine wood slats and an old, run down bakers, whose windows were still dusty with the flour of yesterday's batch. At the end of the alley, he drew on the crates for cover and leant out to peer into Bonnam's main market street. There, clear as day stood a man.

Cydnar smiled, and slowly stepped out into the purview of Letho, hands out where they could be seen and stance neutral and non-threatening. With lithe, subtle movements he walked out into the centre of the market, leather boots crushing the wagon trails underfoot. "It would appear," he began in perfect common, "that the people of this town are not here to be ordered; nor indeed, to be restored at all. Pray tell me, good Marshal, what brings you to these parts?"

[Letho]

The exclamation that came from somewhere amidst the vacant stands and rotting vegetables was somewhat of a surprise to the Marshal, his eyes snapping towards the source, but it wasn’t nearly as surprising as the foul language that followed it. He had heard worse, sure; Radasanth Docks had an unfortunate abundance of seasoned sailors and worn-out hookers that could fill your ear with enough profanities to last you a lifetime. But hearing the harsh words carelessly spewed out the mouth of this five-foot-nothing tyke was... unexpected to say the least.

“That is quite a mouth you got there, kid.”

The reason Letho used such an ambiguous title wasn’t necessarily condescension, but more of a necessity for he wasn’t quite certain what exactly he was dealing with. The youngster before him sounded rather girly, but her appearance – if indeed it was a “she” – did little to support that claim. Her hair was ridiculously short for a lass, her eyes hidden by some sort of shaded spectacles (which Letho found utterly impractical and downright idiotic given the time of day), her attire preposterous and unladylike, revealing too much in too uncouth of a manner. But as he closed the distance between them one rattling step at a time, his scrutinizing picked up the distinct (if relatively modest) curvature of her body and faint traces of femininity in her posture.

The Marshal stopped his approach some good five paces from the girl and let the gunblade swing down from his shoulder, hoping to convey a less threatening image, but he was pretty sure he was failing miserably. His brown leather duster was so worn and dusty that only patches of the original colors remained, like traces of rust on a grimy iron plate, and it did a poor job at concealing the rest of his armaments. The hilt of his bastard sword peered over his shoulder like an old mentor, the dagger and the revolver at his hips playing hide and seek behind the brims of his coat, restless in the breeze. All of that hanging from his hulking figure couldn’t look anything but threatening.

Before he managed to do any introductions and possibly alleviate some of the tension, another person made its presence known, his approach smooth as silk and almost soundless. “Where the hell did he come from?” The answer was soon quite evident as the elf strode forward, cool and calm like a poker player with a nut straight. Letho had no particular love for the elves, nor did he garner any animosity. At best their tree-hugging kind was useful, and at worst downright annoying. He hoped this fellow would be the former.

“I am Letho Ravenheart, of the Corone Rangers” he finally introduced himself, tipping the invisible hat to the barely visible lady in the foul-mouthed girl. “I was supposed to investigate the rioting in this place, but it would seem that I am a bit late to the dance. Either of you local? I am yet to find someone who can explain what exactly happened here.”

He sincerely doubted it. The elf looked like he just came fresh off the ship from Raiaera and the lass looked like she just came fresh off the ship from... Hell if he could tell. One of the Moons more than likely. Nothing about her seemed to fit this deplorable picture, and that certainly made a statement. When you stuck out as a sore thumb and not an elf wearing a dress, maybe it was time to ask yourself some questions.

The sun was continuing its daily routine as they spoke, losing portions of its blazing diameter to the horizon one iota at a time. More than half of it was gone already, the other half painting the west with deep reds while the east sunk into the purples and blues. The night was coming fast, Letho knew, and regardless of how harmless Bonnam proved to be so far, he didn’t want to be out in its streets after nightfall. There was something... queer in the air, an indescribable sense of wrongness just beyond the edge of his senses, and Letho reckoned the night would only amplify it. He felt it in his guts, and the gut seldom lied.

[Relt PeltFelter]

To say that being labeled “kid” irritated Relt a bit would be an overstatement; while such a pejorative would normally provide her no end of annoyance, it was far overshadowed by a more important bit of information; a different and far more significant element to which Relt’s mind immediately cleaved.

“Snrk,” Relt stifled a chuckle, “Did you say your name was ‘Ravenheart’? You sure you don’t mean ‘Blackdark Ladycrying’, late to the dance at the Pennyfarthing Crybaby Floorgaze Box Social?” The girl laughed nastily. “Oh, shit. Man. Nah, dawg, just messing with you,” she added, slapping the grizzled older man on the shoulder. “I’m pretty fugging obviously not from around here, but maybe ask Doctor Twinklepixie over there,” Despite herself, Relt was beginning to relax. It’s difficult to be on edge when in the company of a man with a goofy name, no matter how obviously he overcompensates for it with weaponry.

It is, however, still quite easy to be cold, which Relt was beginning to realize. Still clad in the street clothes of a young, confident San Franciscan, the relatively crisp air of this spooky little town was bringing goosebumps to her coffee-hued skin. Her lip-ring was like a delicate and fashionable ice cube punched through her skin, and it was all she could do to avoid shivering. Relt hugged her oversized button-up tighter around her, looking around the silent streets.

It has already been established that Relt was born and raised in San Francisco, California, a city that hasn’t been silent since the first colonizing Spaniard dropped a brick on his foot. Even the areas of Althanas Relt had visited up to this point were alive with the buzz and hum of insects, the murmuring of people, the gentle sound of a man pouring a bucket of water on two amorous dogs. To be in a heretofore populated area that was now emptier than a banker’s heart, well, it was unsettling. The place didn’t feel right, something about it made her skin crawl more than the low temperature. This place was…

“Dead,” Relt said aloud, not really sure why. She turned back towards Ravenheart and the elf who had, before this, totally dropped off of her radar. She ran a hand nervously through her spiked hair, sniffing peremptorily. She immediately regretted this sniff, in light of the decaying vegetables surrounding her, and the girl utterly failed at stifling a gag. If she had intended to follow her sniff with a comment, it was now lost in a hoarse dry-heave.

“Okay,” she managed, “We should…go somewhere that it doesn’t smell bad. ‘Cause I’m sticking with you two dudes until either you both are stabbed by a dude in a Shatner mask or I get broken in half by a robotic man-beast,”

(if anything here isn't working, IM or PM me and we'll talk about it)

[Letho]

“Oh joy.”

Try as he may, Letho managed to understand about every other word the chatty romp of a girl uttered. He was relatively certain that there was an insult of some sort cocooned in them, or at least a snarky remark directed at his surname, but given her introductory words, the Marshal figured he got off pretty lightly. Still, even with the all the senselessness in her jabber, Letho came to a conclusion that this girl wasn’t terribly likeable. Maybe it was merely a case of age difference; he was old and she was young, and she was vibrant and frisky and he felt as if he carried a mountain on his shoulders. And maybe these days he jumped to conclusions all too readily, eager to dismiss anything that doesn’t fit in the monotonous routine of life. Or maybe she was simply that annoying. To the grizzled war dog such as Letho, she seemed the kind of a girl which, if you were a benevolent kind of a person and she was in trouble, you would go out of your way to aid, but not too far out of the way, the type that had a witticism for every situation and found herself extremely humorous.

At least they seemed to be on the same page when it came to vacating the square. Though it seemed that the girl wanted to leave out of fear for her nostrils and not necessarily her general wellbeing, Letho had to agree with her proposition for it was his intention as well. There was little that could be discovered while stumbling through benighted streets even if his gut was wrong and there was nothing stalking in the darkness, and trying to leave Bonnam and ride for the next town over was likely to result with either a broken horse leg if you were lucky, or some nocturnal creature chasing you down into the ditch if you werent. No, they were rather stuck in Bonnam for the time being, and finding shelter was next on the agenda.

“The tavern is quite empty, unsurprisingly, so we can turn in for the night there,” Letho finally said, relocating the Lawmaker back to his shoulder, his hand hanging on its butt, keeping the heavy weapon balanced. His eyes, locked in a frown as usual, drifted towards the other large edifice in the square. “I want to check out the Town Hall while there is still light, though. There might be some clues as to whatever befell this town.”

In truth, he hoped to find a living clue before the day’s end, maybe someone scared out of their wits stowed away in the broom closet or some such place. Because regardless of how meticulous you tried to be when gathering people, you could seldom get every single one of them. And even though that realization should’ve offered him some comfort, Letho found himself walking towards the three-story building on the other side of the square with little hope. That eerie sensation seemed to be wrapped around all three of them, about as pleasant as a piece of meat jerky stuck between your teeth, constantly reminding you that something wasn’t as it should be.

The Bonnam Town Hall was a remarkably gaudy construction given the locale, most likely the pride and joy of the townsfolk – at least those currently in its offices – with its high-arched windows set in thick walls of smooth, light gray stone which the dying sun now colored dark red. The pointed arches themselves were finely carved, each one specked with miniscule details, with those on the ground level protected with sets of vertical iron bars. The roof, made of red terracotta tiles, looked almost blood-colored as the last sunrays struck it. But beyond the glass windows, the place looked as dead as the rest of the town.

The double doors that led into the spacious antechamber were ajar and gave way readily as Letho pushed them inwards, revealing a sight not overly different from the one in the Nag’s Rump. The reception desks were messy, but not trashed, the way they would look if someone walked out of their post in the middle of the workday. The many doors leading towards the offices were haphazardly open, most looking as if somebody just walked through them and forgot to close them. And hovering over it all, like cigar smoke in a barroom, was a very faint scent of staleness, bordering with decay, a smell of a pantry left unattended for far too long.

“Let us look around. But do not stray too far,” the Marshal said, his voice hushed even though he had no intention to make it so.

[Cydnar]

Cydnar remained relatively quiet as the Ranger and the plucky girl made their way into the tavern. He followed with an elegant sway of the hips, and as he pushed aside the wavering door, he tucked his long grey hair behind his ears and tied it into a loose pony tail. He felt no immediate danger from either of them, though Letho's title spoke many more words of promise than the grizzled veteran realised.

His deeds, and those of the Rangers in the civil war had permeated down through the soil and the granite and quartz geodes decades ago. The Salthias watched Radasanth and the surrounding countryside only casually, for they had come to realise magical maladies and evil could not rear it's head for long as long as the Rangers drew a breath between them. It had been so long since he had travelled to the surface that his head started to spin trying to remember the grammatical formulations of the common tongue.

The idyllic surrounding rested at odds with the taste in his mouth. Whilst the terracotta rooftops and the delicate architecture, no doubt the product of lazy, over free minds of country folk belittled the danger they might well be in, Cydnar took time to appreciate it as his new found men-and-woman at arms went about their search.

"My name", he began, speaking loud enough to be heard even as he walked to the opposite end of the hall to Letho, "though of little consequence beyond civility, is Cydnar Yrene. I am here of an accord much like yours I expect - a need to investigate..." He peered behind a large dressing screen, set with intricate bird patterns, black spirals of artwork on a deep vermilion silk.

He considered the many ways he could go about telling his tale, but settled on the simplest. "I am an agent of a mutually interested party, a hunter, of sorts. There is a strong magic at work here, of an odious and malefic nature that means no good for any of us." He settled a casual glance on the girl, and paused for thought.

He drew a breath, "I sense no stronger auras inside than out, so I imagine we will be safe...for a time. If there is evil afoot, as one might say," he turned to double check behind the screen before walking back towards the others, "it is not letting us know it is here". He rested his hands casually on his hips, half expecting questions to be levelled and accusations to start flying.

He withdrew his fangs, just to make sure. "It is a pleasure and a calming thought to see you both here, we will work quicker and safer together".

[Relt PeltFelter]

“Oh my god,” Relt rolled her eyes, “Tone it down there, Robert Frost, this ain’t a poetry jam,” The girl had made her way behind one of the abandoned desks, and was in the process of turning a slight mess into a large one, in the interest of looking for clues. “Oh shit,” she said, looking up, “I just realized I never introduced myself, since I was too busy making fun of you guys’s names. Wow, rude of me. Name’s Relt Peltfelter, and holy shit this guy kept booze in his desk,” Relt’s distraction was obvious, as her destructive search had yielded a mostly-full bottle of some kind of greenish liquor. “Damn,” she said, “I think I would have liked him. Y’know, when he was alive,”

Relt paused. Now why did she say that? There were about a hundred other possibilities for the disappearance of the townspeople, among those at least three plausible ones. What made her so certain that they had died? It was a thought gnawing like a rat at the back of her brain. She pushed it away, focusing instead on the alcohol at hand. “I don’t, um…” she said awkwardly, “I don’t know anything about booze on this planet. Is green the right color? Whatevs, not the time or place right now anyway,”

A faint but insistent sound was heard from somewhere above them; it was a delicate scratching sort of sound, like a fingernail dragging across a block of ice, but in the silence of this dead town it echoed as an avalanche. The air stilled briefly as the sound faded, but for once Relt felt disinclined to fill the silence with her voice. She stepped cautiously away from the pillaged desk, remaining as silent as a person wearing flip-flops is able.

At the back of the main room was a heavy wooden door, possibly made of teak or some similarly expensive material. It clearly lead to the upper story, as indicated by a cheerful little wooden sign. There was a sharp bang from the upper story, this time much closer to the presumed entrance to the staircase, as though someone had knocked over a chair. Relt held up her cheerily logo-emblazoned truncheon, still slightly stained blue from a prior monstrous engagement. Its weight was like a grandmother’s smile in a dark room: reassuring and disquieting.

The mysterious stirring above had apparently subsided. Relt looked from Ravenheart to the elf-guy whose name, she thought he had said, was Irene. Maybe he was actually an uncommonly unattractive elf-lady? Relt couldn’t be sure, and was pretty sure that no elf lady worth her ivy-draped buttocks would allow herself to be called Irene. These things were, of course, immaterial to the fact that for the first time since their arrival, something in this town other than themselves was moving.

"Hey, Raven dude," Relt whispered, "Just out of curiosity, this town wasn't built on, like, an ancient Ind-oh. Uh...an ancient, I dunno, goblin burial ground or something, was it?"

[Letho]

Letho was behind the large receptionist’s desk, right gauntlet under his armpit as his bare hand flipped the pages of a leather-bound logbook, when he heard the shuffling from upstairs. The log itself offered sparse information, mostly dates and names that meant nothing to the Marshal and short descriptions next to them that he hadn’t the time to read. The book did offer one piece of information, though; the date of the last entry seemed to be made over a week ago. Which made little sense to Letho, but before he had a chance to mull over it properly, the shuffling from above first cracked the silence, then shattered it completely with a thud, leaving the trio momentarily frozen in their boots.

“There had not been goblins in these parts for centuries as far as I know,” Letho said absently after he was certain the sound subsided. His eyes were locked on the heavyset door in the back of the room, and it seemed he wasn’t the only one inspecting it as all three of them tracked the sound to it. He shoved his hand back into the gauntlet and returned the Lawmaker to the sheath on his back, drawing his sword instead. “And even if there had, goblins do not make graveyards. They rob their dead and leave their bodies to rot.”

The Marshal made his way to the door with determined strides, despite the silence that almost implored him to proceed cautiously. When his hand tested the knob, the shiny brass turned and the door creaked open to reveal a carpeted set of stairs that led to the second and third floor.

“Let us check upstairs. The sound seemed to be coming from there.” Though the rich, burgundy threads of the padding muffled his steps as he started up the stairway, his spurs still gave off quite a racket, making a stealthy approach impossible. Halfway up the stairs, the muffled noise began anew, and Letho could almost hear something resembling a groan before another loud thud echoed through the hallway, reestablishing the uncomfortable silence.

“This mutually interested party you mentioned,” the Marshal said without turning towards the white-haired elf. “I do not suppose they offered any further information about what had happened here? You seem certain there is magick at work here.” Letho doubted that Cydnar would reveal any more even if he actually knew. Elves were cryptic folk by nature, and if they deemed you didn’t need to know something, you had little chance of getting it out of them. Not that it mattered, as there was no time for a response. By the time they reached the door, another sharp thud resounded through the building, this time more distinct, like two pieces of wood hammered against each other. And then all was silent again. Letho paused, then tried the door once the silence was absolute.

The sight beyond them was common; a short hallway opening up into a large chamber. The smell was not. The bludgeoning stench struck them head-on, filling their nostrils with a thick, almost moist reek of decay, making even Letho’s eyes watery. He brought the elbow to his face, but the sleeve of his duster did little to stop the smell from assaulting his olfactory sense. Something had died here, there was no doubt about it. This was no sack of potatoes or a roast someone forgot in a closet. Death was in the air and it wasn’t shy about making its presence known.

“You might want to stay here,” he said to his companions. “I have to check it out.”

There was nothing remarkable about the hallway beyond the stairs, but it led Letho into a circular auditorium where the government officials from Bonnam and surrounding areas probably held assemblies. It was quite a spacious room, with cushioned red seats spread around the central dais in a half-circle, and with tall marble columns at each side that supported a pair of balconies where dignitaries probably parked their pampered behinds. The power of the revolting stench was at its peak here, and the reason was quite evident. The elected politicians were still hard at work at their seats, staring at some undetermined spots with glassy, unfocused eyes even if their lives abandoned them some time ago. Their skin was sickeningly dark, like a gangrenous wound that spread over their entire deformed bodies. Some were bloated grotesques, leaning backwards in their seats with clothes breaking at the seams, while others had huge gashes in their abdomens, spilling their innards like dark purple snakes. A woman that must’ve been sitting next to the aisle was now sprawled on the floor, her skirt shamelessly pulled up to reveal her guts coiling from her posterior, and the man next to her, bent forward over the desk with hand hanging over the other side as if he was trying to reach a pen he just dropped, had an unnatural bulge in his pantaloons.

It was only natural, Letho knew, the gasses pushing against the entrails and searching for the way out. He had seen death before and knew all its merciless stages. But even a grizzled vet such as himself never saw a sight such as this one. Battles were gruesome, sure, but the bodies were usually dealt with in the aftermath either by pyre or mass graves. Never has he seen so many left unattended for so long.

The man sitting behind the desk on the dais was staring at him with blank eyes, his tongue hanging out of a mouth surrounded with black liquid. His hand still clutched to the small hammer that was probably used for bringing order to the quorum. But as Letho proceeded deeper into the room and approached the front, the body of the man holding the hammer seemed to spasm, his head jerking to an upright position. And before the Marshal’s eyes, this rotten shell of a man stretched its cracked lips into a horrible grin, pulled the hammer back and struck it against the desk.

And unlike in life, when they had been subjected to the strike of that hammer and the order it demanded, now those gathered began to rise with only mayhem in mind.

((And let the games begin. I was thinking that it would be more fun if they didn’t act like regular dumb zombies, but actually moved with a purpose, like trying to block all the exits and picking on the weakest (Relt) first. They’re still slow and squishy, though. It wouldn’t be fun if they weren’t. :D))

[Cydnar]

No... Cydnar mused, the Council had not informed him of the cause or anything beyond the mere statement of presence. Something was here, and something was very, very wrong.

"The Hummel, my people, have but one purpose in life. We are avatars and priests of the Thayne Yrene, who you might know as the World Snake. His providence is to cleanse all the unwanted, corrupted and misused magic on Althanas to ensure the world and the greedy tongues of man do not tear everything so formed in the Thayne's image apart. Rest assured," Cydnar crouched to run a single, delicate finger along the dusty pattern of the tiles, "if I am here...then something evil, someone evil is to blame."

He took a deep breath, but with his senses and not his lungs, and reeled slightly beneath the menagerie of nauseas that assailed his head. With no choice, he pushed down with his jaw and let his fangs curved out and protrude over his bottom lip slightly. The magical bite instantly tingled, and the magical aura in the air became even more apparent. "I detect...a rising", it was the only word he could think of in common to describe a swell, or a Narden in his native language.

He stood swiftly, but saw that Letho had already discovered the first point of contact. No sooner than the hammer had risen, it fell, and the thud of the gavel pulsated through the air like a conjuring trick. Cydnar's sword cane sheaths were pulled from his sash so quickly he nearly dropped them. "Look out!" He waved at the girl.

He dropped both canes and with twin shings of polished, sharp metal rising, the arcane hematite blades Altheas and Freya shot upwards. He caught them, tips centimetres from the tiles and let the rattle of his sheaths on the cold embrace of this small town's decadence die down. Moans, groans and shuffling could already be heard from the doorways and the overhead balcony.

Taking no time to ask questions, Cydnar conjured a radix of magic of his own into being and smiled at the appearance of a chunk of spherical quartz between his forefinger and thumb. It shone a bright azure for a moment, before falling into an obsidian and violet swirl, then dropped into his palm. "I do not think we shall get any better answers from them, good Ranger, let us do away" he snapped his hand over his shoulder and sent the sphere into the skull of a creature that once appeared to be a clerk.

The snap of bone and rotting flesh washed over the Hummel, who did not turn to see if the creature was defeated. It's head had snapped back from the impact, and though it's neck was shattered and it's eye sockets now stared upwards at the decaying but still regal domes of the town hall...it still shuffled towards it's prey.

These are not zombies... he shuddered. "If they still move so after that, then they are possessed by a higher providence and power than mere necromancy!" He span to face the injured creature and crossed his blades together with a ching. "Let us cleanse this place, let us scour these lands of this abomination!"

He reverted to his natural tongue to recite the ancient condemnation of the Salthias, the summary judgement delivered to anything found in violation of the Ancient Lore.

"<You have been found wanting of responsibility, and I condemn thee in the name of Yrene to death!>" He skipped forwards, a dervish of blades, and life and death collided.

[Relt PeltFelter]

With nothing better to do (except drink a bottle of potentially expired alcohol), Relt had followed her coincidental compatriots up the stairs. Alarms, honed by a lifetime of horror movies and violent video games, were clanging in the back of her head. The whole thing was beginning to remind her of the last thing she had wound up doing. As if any minute, she was going to run into an entirely different set of reanimated corpses set to walking by an entirely different sort of means-

“Holy shitfuck tittyballs!” Relt shouted as the verminous horde of decaying cadavers loosed themselves from their dormancy and began crawling loathsomely toward the trio. The elf dude (who had referred to himself as a ‘Hummel’, though the guy looked nothing like a creepy collectible figurine found on a grandmother’s shelf) had tried to wave her away, but Relt was too fixated on the hateful grins of the approaching monsters to pay his warning any mind.

A thing which once was a woman lunged at Relt, snatching with gangrenous claws at her skin. The girl, defying the knot of terror tightening her gut, smashed down on the creature with her truncheon. The female revenant’s head cracked, blackened fluid leaking from purulent gashes forming in the tanned leather skin, yet still the woman grasped at Relt’s shoulders. Relt backed away, slamming the wretch in its burst abdomen over and over. She wasn’t thinking, now, just trying in vain to stop this mockery from moving.

Relt pressed her nightstick against the abomination’s forehead to keep the grinning creature at arm’s length. With the sound of frozen silk hitting concrete, she smashed the bottle of liquor against the wall and dragged the ragged, booze-dripping edge forcefully across the zombie’s thigh. A tendon snapped like a bowstring and the carcass dropped, still trying in vain to reach the panting Peltfelter.

Just as that one went down, heavy hob-nailed boots smashed its head into pulp as another pair of dribbling undead cretins lurched forward, their sightless eyes fixed madly on Relt. The two things were probably laborers, in life, judging from their rude garb and developed musculature; they appeared to have been in the room to repaint the walls, according to the drop-cloth and paint pots now scattered haphazardly across the floor. The larger of the two zombies had evidently chewed away his own lips in hunger, and his smaller cohort had inadvertently loosed an eyeball from his head, leaving it dangling alongside his scraggly beard.

As the rage of her combat faded, Relt felt only bone-freezing fear. Suddenly, the two zombies stopped. The ragged muscles of their bloated faces twitched in an unfamiliar configuration, and a bile-shredded vocal apparatus produced something akin to a whimper. The smaller of the two former-men actually cowered behind its arms like a child.

Relt stopped. This was incredibly aberrant behavior for the ravening masses of unlife, at least according to the library of Bruce Campbell films she had absorbed as a wide-eyed preteen. Her fear faded, replaced by cautious curiosity.

Just as her mood shifted, so too did that of her attackers. They peered at her like an animal in a zoo. One reached towards her clumsily with bloodstained hands, and Relt leaned back, the icy spike of terror shooting up her spine. The undead recoiled as well. Relt stared at them again for a while, aware of their empty sight focused similarly on her. It was like looking in the world’s grossest mirror. Finally Relt laughed like a hyena would laugh if their cry was actual laughter, and not just unusually laugh-like. The rotting men’s morbid rictus twitched awkwardly into something approaching a smile.

“Holy shit you guys,” Relt managed between laughs, “It’s like a fucking cartoon, what the hell,”

The larger of the two zombies opened its mouth and emitted a laugh like someone playing a guitar made of mud. Relt prodded it in the stomach with her truncheon, her disdain for its forced chuckle rather obvious. It swung its arms at Relt in a bear hug and tried to bite her.

“Oh fuck!” Relt cried, gouging the creature’s face with the broken bottle and driving it off, “Still kinda dangerous though, watch out!”

Relt had failed to notice that her audience of unearthly mimics had grown by about five more walking bodies, all 'retired' politicians. They stood in a rough circle around her, looking as frightened and uneasy as she did, though still eying her as buzzards watched the last sickly buffalo to shuffle up to the watering hole. “Li’l help would be nice, probly,” Relt said over the sound of groaning and mumbling.

[Letho]

The first reanimated corpse that lurched towards Letho got its head sliced clean off; a sideways swipe of his adamantine blade detaching it and both outstretched forearms as if the bones weren’t even there. It really was that easy with these abominations. They were as lethargic as a fat merchant and as soft as rotten wood, and the Marshal had sent his share back to their rightful graves over the years. Because there was always someone dabbling with forbidden arts that had to be dealt with, some upstart mage who had a graveyard close at hand and wanted to raze a little hell of his own. Letho reckoned this situation in Bonnam was just one of those cases... for about a second. And then the corpse made another lunge towards him.

Even though it was one head and about one arm short, the sack of rotting meat and bones was still coming at him, waving its shortened appendages like the Althanas’s worst mime. There was no blood pouring out of the gaping wounds; it had changed into a black coagulated form that dribbled from the veins like oil. The strength of the rotten stench soared, almost making Letho gag. It, combined with the Marshal’s surprise, was almost enough for the undead creature to get a shot at clobbering him over the face. But then Letho launched his shoulder at the bloated torso, sending it sprawling backwards and over the first row of mahogany desks.

Farther up the aisle, the elf – or Hummel as he called himself – shouted something about cleansing and the girl seemed to be having one of her episodes of irrationality, laughing even as a pair of slouching figures closed in on her. Letho wasn’t sure what a cartoon was, but its humor didn’t seem to last very long as more of walking corpses surrounded her. The Marshal made a move to help... and was pulled back by a hand on his shoulder. It was clammy and dark grey with thin skin broken on many places, but its grip was surprisingly strong, nearly yanking back Letho’s considerable bulk. At the far end of it, hanging over the huge desk in the middle of the room, the remnants of the mayor grinned that hideous grin at him. It brought the gavel at the side of Letho’s face with as much speed as it could muster, but to the seasoned eyes of a war veteran it almost seemed to be moving through water. Letho’s free hand grabbed at the wrist, twisted it until it made a dry snap while his sword went through the mayor’s chest and out his back. The mayor wasn’t impressed, still grinning as if he didn’t have a piece of metal stuck in his flesh, but the Marshal didn’t give him another chance to strike. With his blade still hilt-deep in the ex-politician’s chest, he lifted the very lively dead man and then sent him flying up the aisle. The rotten flesh-and-bone missile struck the figures standing around the girls, toppling three of them like bowling pins.

“There is naught but death here!” Letho said, motioning towards the two to join him on the dais, the raise in his tone unnecessary as their foes shuffled towards them with barely a sound. Another undead, this one with a trail of guts behind him, made a motion towards him and got a heavy boot in its chest, the strike caving in its chest and sending it to the floor. “We should leave this place.”

It was a simple plan, but its execution was everything but. Though their motion seemed chaotic, the walking dead did a very good job at blocking all the exits. The double doors through which they entered moments ago and the hallway behind it was getting pretty crowded, with decaying bodies standing almost shoulder to shoulder like soldiers in formation. A cluster of them was grouped around the exit on the left and another in front of the door behind the dais which probably lead to the mayor’s chambers. The only way out was...

“Up,” Letho finally said, his head snapping towards one of the balconies. There were no slouching corpses up there and the windows didn’t have bars on them. There was a door on each side, but each one lead back down to the auditorium. “We must go up!”

Wooden ladders were inconspicuously set beneath one of the balconies, probably left behind by the workers that did a bit of redecorating before this chaos. But as soon as Letho made a move towards it, three of the creatures seemed to home in on his motion, dragging their feet and stretching their gangrenous limbs in his direction. The Marshal managed to outrun them to the ladders, but by the time he sheathed his sword and bowed to pick it up, they were on him. One of them stepped onto the far end of the ladder while the other two continued their slow motion towards Letho. Grabbing the ladder with both his hands, the bulky swordsman put his mighty muscles to work, jerking them up and slamming the zombie’s head into the ceiling, the dropped it down on the other two, almost leveling their squishy bodies with the ground.

“Come, up you go,” he said as he came out from beneath balcony with another pair hot on his tail, setting the ladder against it, then yanking his sword back out. “I shall hold them back.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

There are few things more innately unsettling than being stared at. Whether it be the tingling on the back of the neck one gets when under unseen observation, or the sweating and fidgeting of being on stage in front of a crowd, the sensation of being watched is uncomfortable in the extreme.

When the eyes watching you are scabbed and glassy with death, and the faces they are set in distort in crude mockery of your own emotions, this effect is, understandably, amplified. Relt was getting a case of, to put it scientifically, the willies. The zombies, or whatever they were, closest to her formed a dense ring of slack-jawed mimics which kept those still ravening with uncontained aggression from approaching, but also prevented the girl from escaping.

She steeled herself. Fear and curiosity had been supplanted by annoyance, and as she watched the grey-green expressions around her shift in kind, she struck out with her nightstick. A shrimpy undead collapsed with a broken neck, flopping around like a marlin on the deck of a boat. She dashed over him before the circle could close again, and headed towards Ravenheart. He had finished some kind of macabre Three Stooges segment with a ladder, and as she approached the older man urged her upwards.

“Don’t have to tell me twice, Edgar Allen,” Relt muttered as she climbed like a gecko up a pane of glass. She watched nervously over the balcony's edge, as if this was all a really poorly executed piece of interactive theatre.

Back in the pit of murderous ex-politicians, those which had been enthralled by Relt seemed to emerge from their torpor and reintegrate with the surrounding horde. A particularly large group seemed to surround the self-declared Hummel as he fought towards the ladder. His sword-canes swung against the unresisting flesh which assailed him, severing limbs and heads alike, but the crawling carcasses nevertheless continued their assault.

Suddenly the Hummel dropped; a zombie, both legs broken, had crawled too close unseen, and with noxious yellow teeth severed the fighter’s left Achilles tendon. Blood pooled under him, but to his credit the mysterious individual kept fighting. He sliced the sneaky attacker into mincemeat, but the groping, raw hands of the decaying army were implacable.

There was an unpleasant meaty sound as a quintet of ruined fingers, propelled by unearthly energies, pierced the fallen elf-man’s chest. He screamed as the hand closed around one of his ribs, pulling it outward and releasing an inordinate amount of blood as the frenzied corpses fought to force their arms into the wound as well, pulling his ribcage open like a blooming onion at a Halloween-themed steakhouse.

Relt, well-schooled though she was in (at least virtual) carnage, had to sit with her back to the balcony wall and her hands over her ears. She choked back a sniffle when Cydnar’s screaming stopped, a tattered mouth biting through his exposed trachea.

“Raven-dude!” she cried after a moment, “Come on, man, I don’t want to be up here by myself!” Relt peered over the edge in time to see her ladder-based savior swarmed by revenants as he began climbing the ladder.

"Run!" he managed before they pulled him back into the churning morass of murderous abominations.

“Shit,” Relt whispered.

[Letho]

The forecast was dreary with a chance of zombie in the Bonnam Town Hall, and it was raining heavily on Letho right now. Faces dripping with black ooze and sickening yellow puss, hands with gnarled fingers and arms with torn muscles, kicking legs and bloated torsos, blood and guts and shit and bile, they dominated the Marshal’s world as the undead piled onto him like logs on a pyre. All he could see was decaying horror, and all he could smell was decaying horror as hits kept coming from all directions. He lashed away at them once he recovered from the hard landing from the ladders, breaking a few knee caps and tearing off a couple of arms at the shoulder, but it seemed that for every one he eliminated, three more came down in retribution. A kick in the ribs. A punch in the neck. A set of teeth digging into his calf, another in his left shoulder. A set of what felt like a million hands pinning him to the soft carpet of the gaudy auditorium. And finally darkness.

When Cydnar had gone down, Letho wondered briefly how the Hummel got overpowered so easily, but now he was finding out first hand. There was an unearthly might in these things, a slow but irrefutable power like that of a river stream that kept coming at you regardless of how much you fought it. It chipped away at you little by little until you finally broke and made a misstep that led you to a gory death. That seemed to be in store for the Marshal now, as every rotten body in the room wanted to participate in this mindless stacking game. But Letho Ravenheart was made of sterner stuff, and his fate was not to perish at the hand of some meat puppets. For the briefest moment the room fell silent as the pile reached its maximum size.

And then it exploded.

The fact was that Letho could’ve gotten out of the mountain of bodies whenever he wanted, but as someone once cleverly said, sometimes you need to pause for effect. He wasn’t particularly worried about the bites: as the late Cyndar already concluded, these weren’t actual zombies, so there was no real threat from their bites (other than the odd infection, of course). And the blows... Well, in forty years of adventuring and belligerent living, his hide grew thick enough to take them with an odd grunt or two. So he waited at the bottom, doing his best to cover his face and groin while most of the undead made their way to the pile, and then made his move.

A sonic boom resounded through the halls as white flames lashed out between the piled bodies like magma through cracked earth, followed by a gunshot which blew out a hole in the bodies. Through it came the tawny blade of the gigantic Lawmaker gunblade whose flat side Letho spun in a full circle, sending bodies flying to all four corners of the room. Some splattered against the walls, leaving black smudges as they peeled down to the ground; some crashed through the glass panes of the windows only to get stuck between the iron bars, their bodies even more deformed than before; some went tumbling over the rows of seats, losing limbs and body fragments in the process like badly sewn rag dolls. In the middle of this carnage, Letho was a changed man, bathed in white flames that seemed to pour in and out of his eyes, blotting out his irises, his muscles further expanded until they threatened to tear his clothes.

There were two more bodies hanging onto the Marshal like leeches, banging at the metamorphosed man with their fists, but Letho walked underneath the balcony as if they weren’t even there, as if they weren’t trying to pry the flesh off his bones with their bare hands. Once he was beneath, he crouched low and then launched himself upwards, breaking through the ceiling and landing near Relt, sans the zombies. The only trace of them ever clinging onto him was a detached hand still clinging to his shoulder, nails still digging through his duster even though it should’ve been physically impossible for them to do so.

Letho sheathed the Lawmaker, then closed his pearly white eyes and took a deep breath, let it out with a long sigh. The flames disappeared as if the Marshal was splashed with water and his bulk returned to its usual size. He plucked the persistent hand off his shoulder with a calmness of a man eating a ham sandwich.

“That is going to ache on the morrow,” he said, then turned towards the odd black-haired girl. Letho found it odd that she managed to make it out of that hellhole and not the elf, but that was life. Sometimes you just rolled a hard seven. Approaching the ledge, he looked down towards the mess they were leaving and the mangled body of Cydnar. “It was unfortunate that we lost him. I feel we are going to need his help before the night is done.”

Beneath, the remainder of the walking dead seemed to be regrouping, but it was a slow enough of a process to give the two some breathing space. “We shall have to make do,” he finally added, pushing back the brims of his duster. With one hand Letho pulled out his titanium dagger, the other producing the iron revolver he never quite got used too. He handed them over to the girl. “Here, these will do a better job than that tiny club. I reckon you know how to use them.”

The girl was weird, true, but also capable. Most teenagers her age would’ve put their heads between their knees and cry for a savior. She bashed skulls. And cursed like a hooker on a hot day, but that was beside the point right now. He had no doubt she’d figure out which end of the weapon went where.

“Now, let us be away.”

A quick glance through the window wasn’t terribly promising. There were no awnings on the way down, no auspiciously positioned bales of hay or parked wagons, no trees leaning oddly close to the walls. Just mowed grass and scattered rose bushes with neat rows of poplar trees some way off. It would have to do; by the sound of it, their smelly friends from downstairs were already shuffling their way up the stairs. Throwing himself through the window without a word of warning, Letho went plummeting two stories down, landing as softly on his feet as someone his size could... Or at least that was the plan. As it turned out, the bite in his calf was deeper than he realized during his adrenaline rush and his leg gave way under him as he touched the ground, sending him in an awkward tumble forward that ended with his face in the grass.

“Bloody hell,” the Marshal grumbled under his breath, pushing himself back upright after a moment worth of pause and spitting some of the green back to where it belongs. He tested his leg once, found the support it offered passable for the time being, then looked up towards Relt. “Come on, I will catch you.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

There was little to no chance that Relt was just going to let this guy catch her. Not only had he just gotten swole and gone totally sick-house on some deadites before jumping through the ceiling, but letting a big strong man catch her was just entirely not her style. Way too damsel. Relt opted instead to haul the ladder up over the edge of the balcony, and swing it out the window. It didn’t reach quite to the ground, but the topmost rung caught nicely on the damaged frame of the window. Shoving the knife and revolver into her bag, Relt descended the ladder carefully and hopped down to the ground like a particularly smug cricket.

“Yeah,” she said, “Next time maybe you should think for a second instead of just hulk-smashing out a window, big mance. How ‘bout we get the fuck out of this town before the goobers back there pull a Romero on our asses?” The big Marshal didn’t seem to fully grasp all of Relt’s jargon, but to his credit he refrained from remarking on it.

The streets were deserted as the two unlikely compatriots strolled down them, but the buildings alongside were alive with crashing and groaning. Occasionally a dead face would leer at them impotently through a window.

“Shame about that other dude, I guess,” she said conversationally as she watched a meat-man fumbling uselessly with a door latch, “I mean they kinda popped him open like a crab pot full of strawberry jam, which can’t be a good way to go out,”

“I suspect that this is not a good way to go out, either,” Letho responded. Relt looked ahead, and wrote a new entry in her big book of discouraging sights.

The street ahead of them was clogged. Someone had pushed a couple of carts over onto their sides and jammed them together, blocking the way. On top of this was piled any old junk one could get their hands on: furniture, barrels, an occasional unlucky zombie which must have been caught unawares during construction. Bits of the barricade were on fire, though whether this was intentional or not was up for debate. Several yammering ghouls stood watch in front of it in a sick parody of life; an undead mother, stomach burst and viscera swinging free, clutched her squirming child, which had gnawed the flesh of its lips to tatters. What may once have been a guardsman stood pressed flat against the exterior wall of a pub, stroking the brick with its skeleton hands. As yet, the revenants did not seem to have noticed Relt and Ravenheart.

“Okay, so let’s try a different road, I guess,” Relt said after a moment, the gift of the gun clutched in her hands.

“By what miracle do you suspect they will not be similarly blockaded?” the Marshal replied.

“Fu-uuck. Since when do, like, zombie things have the wherewithal to fucking block the exit on purpose?”

“These cretins are not true zombies. Something unusual animates them,”

“So what, they’re magic? Fuck, I hate magic,” Relt squinted and aimed the borrowed firearm at a grey, moaning head.

She had used a gun exactly three times before this point. The first time had been a pellet gun at the county fair, in a misguided attempt to win an enormous plush octopus. Eight of her ten shots had hit the unfortunate carny running the game.

The second was a paintball match a friend had dragged her to, from which Relt had eventually been ejected because the rules didn’t recognize her stealth kill technique of trying to slit someone’s throat with a paintbrush.

The third, and hitherto, final time Relt had used a firearm was three months ago, when a trio of hoodlums had tried to rob her place of employment. Being the only non-octogenarian staff member in the restaurant at the time, Relt had grabbed the ancient 9mm which sat under the register at all times and fired blindly at the three men. While DNA from the blood spatter due to a grazed earlobe had eventually led to a conviction, Relt had been docked a week’s pay for putting six bullets through the restaurant’s fiberglass mascot, Panda Paul.

It therefore should not come as a surprise that, when Relt fired this iron handcannon, not only did she miss her intended target by a wide margin, and not only did the kickback of the improperly aimed weapon smack her in the eye and send her sprawling to the ground, but that the bullet she fired ricocheted off of the barricade in front of them and entered the bell tower of a nearby religious center.

The rhythmic clonging of the bell seemed to get the undead’s attention. They looked up from the pointless tasks which had occupied them and their glassy eyes fired with renewed purpose as they drank in the sight of living flesh.

Relt managed to stumble to her feet, one hand clutching the rapidly bruising flesh around her right eye. “Y’should t’ke th' g'n b’ck,” she muttered, handing it to Ravenheart.

I took some liberties with dialogue here, obviously. If anything feels crazy out of character just let me know and we can workshop it. Other than that, feel free to get us to the Marshal's Office.

[Letho]

“Capable, but hasty,” Letho thought as he reclaimed his revolver, doing his best to suppress a smirk. But then again, weren’t all kids her age a bit quick on the trigger, both figurative and literal? Was he any different all those years ago? Of course not. If anything, there were trainers back in Savion who would claim him being even worse back in the day. You are a bludgeoner, Lothirgan had told him more than once, and though the old mentor had said it with neither affection nor approval, Letho never really thought it to be a bad thing. Bottom line was, bludgeoners got things done. They got from point A to point B via the shortest way possible and never mind the mess in between. The girl didn’t necessarily fit the bill, but there was a certain bluntness to her, a certain lack of finesse that the Marshal could relate to.

That’s probably one of the reasons why he hasn’t chastised her for painting a giant bull’s eye on their backs (though he had every right to). Another was that there was no time for dawdling. Getting swamped by the two dozen zombies in the Town Hall was bad enough; getting caught by two hundred or more out in the night was a recipe for a bloody disaster. The Marshal’s mind went into overdrive the way it always did in critical situations, assessing and calculating and doing it all over again in a matter of moments. Breaking out of the town was an option... or it would’ve been if he had been alone. While Letho was rather confident he would be able to break through one of the barricades, he wasn’t certain Relt would’ve survived mad rushing one. On top of that, nothing would be solved that way. Bonnam would still remain an undead hellhole, waiting for a new set of unfortunate wanderers to munch on. So he ticked leaving off the list.

“We need something defensible, something sturdy...” he muttered to himself, keeping an alert eye on the shadowy figures that slowly started to move with a purpose, homing in on the pair. There weren’t that many usable structures in Bonnam: taverns had too many entrances, the shops usually had large display windows, the houses were too shabby to last a night worth of banging and scratching and prying. The cathedral was a decent tactical post, but it was in the outskirts and past the barricades. The solution dawned at him when his mind unintentionally fled to what brought him to this dingy town in the first place.

“The Marshal’s Office,” Letho finally said, turning to Relt. “We can hole up there at least for a while. I passed it on my way to the square. The walls are thick and there are bound to be armaments there.” One of the dead things, its head bent to one side like that of a confused puppy, came dangerously close to the two, extending its hands towards the girl even though it was still some good twenty paces away. The Marshal put a bullet into one of its kneecaps, then two in the chest, the sheer caliber of the weapon propelling the corpse back the way it came.

“Jeez, alright, just go easy with the cannon there, Tex,” the lass said, again calling Letho something other than his name. He was still getting used to it, but it was a process, and it was bound to be arduous just like dealing with this girl always seemed to be. “I’d still like to have my hearing after this shitstorm is over.”

“We should make haste,” Letho said, ignoring the complaint and shoving the revolver back to the holster underneath his duster before leading the way back to the square. Navigating through the streets of Bonnam proved to be easier than the Marshal initially anticipated it would be. Though the street lamps were unlit, the bright sunny day left behind a clear night, with a silver sickle of a moon just peeking above the horizon. It bestowed light aplenty for the duo once their eyes were adjusted to the dimness, enabling them to slip past the packs of moaning and groaning zombies with little opposition. But even if their pace left the undead in the dust, they still persisted in their pursuit, like a tortoise in a silly story that Letho once heard. Only there were hundreds of turtles in Bonnam, but on the flip side the hare from that story didn’t have a gun and was a bloody idiot, so the Marshal figured it evened out pretty well.

They reached the Ranger’s post without another word spoken, even Relt opting to keep her mouth shut save an occasional grumbled curse here and there. Such was the atmosphere in Bonnam, pressing down onto them like an overcast sky, and every sound they made seemed like a threat to this invisible veil that, once torn, would bring down an unholy torrent upon them. They walked this edge of the knife all the way up to the main entrance to the Marshal’s Office, relieved they haven’t fallen off. They were welcomed by a man-made thunder that shattered their precariousness like a porcelain figurine smashed against the wall.

They stood before the oak doors when Letho heard a faint, metallic click from the other side of the door. He pushed Relt out of the way and dove to the other side just in time to get the tail end of his duster turned into a sieve by a buckshot. There was some muffled muttering from the other side, followed by a second shot which sent a spray of wooden splinters out into the street. By then the Marshal had recovered, his back against the wall, motioning to the girl to stay down and away from the door.

“Hold your fire!” he ordered the shooter, doing his best to get his voice through the door without alerting half the town. His eyes snapped from the shot door to the street down which they just came, looking for signs of their dedicated followers. There were none yet, but the reach of his eyesight was limited in this light and everything past a hundred paces was just a big mush of shadows and blackness. “I am Let...”

Another shot blew a fist-sized chunk of the door away, and another followed shortly afterwards. Once the echoes of the twin shots died down, Letho heard another click from the inside, recognized it as the sound of a shotgun reloading, and made his move immediately. Despite the missing pieces, the door looked sturdy enough for a battering ram, its frame fortified with iron, but a kick from the Marshal’s foot broke it open with ease, caving it inwards. The cabinet that had been pushed against it was sent sliding backwards, and the armed figure barely managed to evade getting crushed by throwing themselves to the ground. The man fumbled the rifle, then squirmed on the floor to reach it, then reached it and cursed as he realized he dropped all the shells as well. By then Letho was on top of him. Grabbing him by the cuff of his shirt and lifting him up like a misbehaving kitten, the grizzled Marshal pinned the trigger-happy man to the wall.

“I said: Hold your goddamn fire!”

[Relt PeltFelter]

Relt was in absolutely no mood for this horseshit.

The pain in her eye still playing kettle drums in her brain, Relt closed the damaged door in the way only an unhappy teenager can. It clanged shut, bar sliding into place. The girl shoved the cabinet back in front of it, and began rummaging through the various fixtures of the room. She was vaguely aware that Letho had a man by the neck for shooting at them, but right now she was just looking for something to try and bring the swelling down on her rapidly blackening eye.

“Who are you?” Ravenheart insisted, pressing the man against the wall hard enough that the offender may have become a permanent fixture there of.

“And also do you have any ice?” Relt added, digging through a likely looking, but ultimately useless, cabinet.

“I…ice?” the imprisoned gunman asked, “Why would I have any ice? Does it look like winter outside?”

“Oh my god whatever with this selectively medieval shit. You have guns and you don’t have fridges?”

“Ignore her, for the moment,” Letho growled, “Because my questions are of more immediate concern. Who are you?”

“I, uh…I’m the marshal’s deputy,” The smaller man managed, “I holed up in here when things started getting bad,”

“You mean when you hit puberty, you little fuck?” Relt responded. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to transfer her annoyance onto this anonymous man, and in truth he probably had a good six inches on Relt’s own diminutive height so the ‘little’ descriptor was inaccurate, but no-one has ever accused an irate Relt Peltfelter of being fair.

Or, as the previous firearm situation so deftly illustrated, of being accurate.

“Wh...what?” the supposed deputy said.

“Again, ignore her,” Letho set the man down, taking a step back. Despite the cessation of physical hostilities, the aura of danger about the Marshal at this stage actually seemed to grow. “Now, define ‘getting bad’,”

“Well what do you expect me to say, ‘a bunch of dead things walkin’ about’? You’d think I’m some kind of nut,”

“I assure you, one among our number has already been torn asunder by these abominations, so your sanity is not in question. Regarding that, at least. But what happened prior to that? What caused this?”

“I was, uh…asleep. In the…in one of the cots upstairs. First I heard of this was when the bastards started clawing at the door, trying to get me. They were tearing people apart in the streets, smashing their heads in with anything they could find; fry pans, hammers, all that. I’m lucky to be alive, me,”

“Yeah yeah shut up,” Relt rolled her eyes, “Doesn’t matter, don’t care. What I want to know is how the fuck did you sleep through the end times shit happening out there? You are a terrible fucking cop,”

Ravenheart simply grimaced.

“Hey, I bet he knows something he isn’t saying,” Relt said, nudging Letho with her elbow, “Let’s do good cop, bad cop. You be good cop, ‘cause I’ve always wanted to do this shit,” Relt rubbed the bridge of her nose, and leaned her head side to side until her neck popped. In one step she was in front of the deputy, hand pointed accusingly up his left nostril. Letho was frozen, bewildered by the speed with which this girl reached utterly inconceivable conclusions.

“Alright you fucking piece of shit,” Relt spat, “Why don’t you spill the beans before I shove a TV so far up your ass you’ll have to bend over so your boyfriend can watch the football game. Do you hear me, you dirty bitch? I will jam you up and send you home to momma, comprendes?”

“What, I-”

“Don’t ‘what’ me, I’ll bury you where they can’t bring bloodhounds, do you hear me?”

“Hey, I don’t-”

“I said do you hear me, motherfucker?”

“Okay! Okay, yes, there was something else!”

“Ha, fuck yes, I knew that would work,”

Letho shoved Relt gently out of the way. The kid was wearing on his nerves, and he wasn’t even sure what that display was intended to accomplish. “What else is there, deputy…?”

“Fingers. Er, Deputy Fingers. Yeah. Okay, so I’m not entirely sure it’s related, but before this…this thing with the dead people, I heard a lot of yelling outside. Some upstart and his bunch of hoodlums not happy with the way things have been running. Rioting and so on,”

“And why,” Letho asked, “Did you not go and investigate this, Deputy Fingers?”

“Erm, well like I said, I was asleep most of the day,”

“Is that so? That’s a terribly long time to be asleep for anyone who isn’t an infant,”

“It, eh, it runs in my family. I have these spells, you see, where I just go to sleep for long stretches, and-”

“You’re boring and a liar,” Relt complained, sitting backwards on a chair which had seen better days, “So shut up and let’s fucking get out of this zombie town so I can go get my own shit done instead of wallowing in someone else’s,”

“Marshal,” the deputy remarked, “Your daughter over there sorely needs a lesson in manners,”

Shit, this thing has a lot of bunnying and whatever. Just shoot me a line critiquing anything you want changed. Not sure I have the best handle on these two guys' characterization and what have you.

[Letho]

Letho Ravenheart spent enough time in the Corone Rangers to know that they were a strange menagerie, their ranks filled with folk as diverse as Corone itself. From deluded wannabe heroes chasing the childish stories of knights and maidens to reformed criminals who chose to pay off their debt by serving the realm, the Rangers accepted all dedicated to the cause. And despite that, this Deputy Fingers didn’t sit right with the Marshal. He didn’t get that queasy feeling of something awry in his gut (his never-failing gut), but there was still something that didn’t make this man quite fit the picture, sort of like those puzzles where you needed to notice the difference between two drawings that looked alike. You knew there was something wrong, but you couldn’t quite put your finger to it. It bothered Letho enough to change the game.

“I’m not his fucking daughter, numbnuts!” Relt lashed out, but before she could fire another salvo of her crazy talk, Letho hushed her.

“But you could use a lesson, in patience if manners would not stick.” The girl made a gesture with her hand, extending her middle finger and offering a false smile, but the Marshal’s crazy bullshit filter made him ignore it.

“Now, the local Marshal... ah, what was his name?” Letho muttered the last almost to himself, making a motion to his pocket to fish out the note he had received little over a day ago, the name currently lost in the cobwebs of his mind.

“Billow,” the Deputy offered. The name, same as the one on the bottom of his note, rang true to Letho’s mind the way things always do when someone else reminds you of them.

“Yes, Marshal Billow. What happened to him? Amongst the dead...” He paused, then corrected himself. “Well, the undead at least?”

“Oh, no. The Marshal died in the riots. Or so the Deputy told me... The other Deputy, that is... Edders I think was his name.”

“The other Deputy?”

“Yeah, it was like a stray rock or a lucky shot or something coming from the rioters. Hit his temple and dropped him dead.” Deputy Fingers mimicked the motion of an object hitting his temple. “Edders, he... Well, we rallied the rest of the townsfolk after that. Billow was well respected in Bonnam and I figure his death turned the town against the rioters.”

“This was a couple of days ago, I reckon?” Letho asked.

“More like over a week ago.”

“Interesting. Because I have a letter here from Marshal Billow,” the Marshal said, providing the folded parchment from his pocket. “dated three days ago.”

“Yeah, motherfucker, you’re caught with the hand in the cookie jar now,” Relt found it appropriate to comment. “I say you go Hadoken on his ass and we get the hell out of here.”

“That’s impossible!” Fingers insisted.

“Well, someone is lying here, and from my experience a piece of paper is less likely to do so than a person.” Letho’s hand slipped to the butt of his revolver, the index finger tapping it calmly.

“Look, I’m not lying, I swear!” The Marshal made a step forward, and the man recoiled, his back bumping against the wall. “Check... check the book.”

“The book?”

“The report log. There, on the Marshal’s desk. Check the entries.” He pointed to a messy collection of parchments barely held together by the leather thong wrapped around it. Letho nodded to Relt to inspect it, opting to keep a close eye on Fingers.

“What is this shit?! Man, this Billow was as neat as my eight grade chemistry teacher...” Her mouth went on, but luckily her hand worked the pages, shuffling through the mess. “Here, it says the Marshal died on July, fifteenth... What’s today?”

“Twenty-fifth,” Letho said.

“See? Told you. Eddars kept the log since then, but soon after all this shit happened...” Fingers trailed off. Letho nodded still unconvinced, but a little less suspicious. He figured he’d try one last test.

“Very well. Perhaps we misjudged you... Deputy,” he said, taking a step back and moving his hand away from the gun, his posture immediately less threatening. “How long have you been in the service?”

“Almost a month now. The Marshal... He, uhm, hired me when Garret first started his protests.” Letho looked towards Relt, who was already shuffling back through the pages with an annoyed sigh.

“He’s a fucking liar, shoot him in the... No, wait, just kidding, he checks out.” The Marshal shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“So you would know the Oath?”

“The Oath?”

“The Ranger’s Oath?”

“Oh, that. Guess so. Rangers must uphold the law, protect the weak, subject themselves to the needs of the realm... or something. Look, I just repeated the words after Billow.”

“And the handshake?” Letho said, offering one huge gauntleted hand.

“What handshake?”

“The secret Rangers handshake. You must know it.”

Deputy Fingers paused for a moment, swallowed once and stepped forward, his hand gripping the scales of Letho’s gauntlet and giving it a simple shake. Then he smiled. “There is no secret handshake.”

“True enough, Deputy. True enough.”

It was enough to quench the Marshal’s suspicion for the time being, though Fingers was still a far cry from earning his trust. But that was unsurprising; Letho Ravenheart had never been a man who bestowed trust easily. “Now, tell me about this Garret. Is he the reason for this madness?” he asked, stepping away from the Deputy. He discarded the Lawmaker and the bastard sword from the scabbards on his back in favor of the ability to sit down on one of the benches. He rolled up the leg of his denim pants, inspecting the bite mark while the man spoke.

“I don’t know. Don’t think so,” Fingers said, now relaxed enough to lean against the weapons locker. “Garret, he was just protesting against the bloody Merchants Guild taking over his shop. Something about some owed money, I don’t know. When they killed the Marshal and the townsfolk turned, he tucked tail and run.”

“Ran where?” Letho asked, reaching into the breast pocket of his duster and providing a small leather pouch. He untied the top and a herbal fragrance spread across the room, finally quelling the smell of gunpowder. The Marshal applied a couple of pinches of dewy green stuff on the wound.

“Dunno. Does it matter? The next day the town went crazy anyways.”

“And you didn’t think that’s related? Smooth work, Sherlock,” Relt interjected after an odd period of silence.

“He’s just a guy. How could he cause all this?!” the Deputy shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, he is the best clue he got, so if you could...”

He couldn’t because there was no time. Their conversation was cut short by a hand banging against the door, followed by the sound of nails scratching against the wood.

[Relt PeltFelter]

There was a grinding, creaking sound as Relt slid another piece of heavy, but mangled, furniture in front of the door. “I doubt that’ll make much of a difference, but it’s worth a shot,” she muttered, “So what’s the plan?”

“We keep it simple,” Letho said, “We go over one of those barricades, the deputy and I find this Garret, and we get answers. It’s beyond us to cleanse this town; two men and a slip of a girl can’t do the work of an army,”

Relt’s lower left eyelid twitched. Slip of a girl, her ass. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“My horse is just outside town. You are to take it and ride to safety,”

“Bullshit! Look, I definitely want to leave this shitty zombie town, but if I do then I’m doing it on my terms. You can’t just shoo me away like a-”

“This is no place for a girl of your age. You’d be a hindrance to us and a danger to yourself,”

“I’m not a fucking child!” Relt shouted, switchblade suddenly open and in hand, “And if you insist on treating me like one then we are going to have a problem, so get this real straight: I don’t care if you’re the unholy goddamn offspring of the Incredible Hulk and Robocop, you do not tell me what to do,”

Their eyes locked, Relt’s hazel orbs burning with indignation. Letho seemed unmoved. “One way or another,” he stated, voice as cold as wet concrete, “You are going to be on that horse, riding out of town,”

“Oh really? Then fucking do it. Hit me, knock me out, whatever the fuck, but I swear it’s not going to do you a damn bit of good. Remember how those things just kind of froze around me? You're gonna wish it was that easy for you,”

“Are you threatening a Corone Ranger, young lady?”

“Wait wait,” Fingers interjected, “You mean the villagers…they don’t attack you? Why?”

Relt was still irritated, and everything about this deputy put her teeth on edge. “Dunno,” she managed, “Just kind of started, uh…you ever see like an old black and white movie, where the dude in the gorilla costume and the actual gorilla are standing on either side of a gap in the wall, and the dude thinks it’s a mirror, and whatever he does the gorilla does at the same time? Well, I guess you wouldn’t have. But whatever, they just kept doing whatever I was doing. Kind of,”

“And as I recall,” Letho added, “The moment you seemed excited about that, one of them tried to bite you,”

“So it’s not foolproof. But it’ll slow them down long enough for your burly ass to smash the blockade,”

Letho was quiet. Damn, if the little mongrel didn’t make a bit of sense. “Fine,” he said at last, “If you want to risk your fool life, go ahead. Just don’t come begging me to save you when you wind up like the elf,”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now let’s go kill some fucking zombies,”

“They aren’t zombies. Not technically, at least,”

“Well obviously they aren’t Romero zombies, but those are kind of cliché anyways. These are more, like, Evil Dead zombies,”

“There are zombies which aren’t evil and dead?” Fingers asked, confused.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what she says half the time,” Letho cautioned, “And I doubt that will change any time soon. Does this building have roof access?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. There’s a ladder on the second floor which leads to a guard’s walk at the top,”

“Right then,” Letho said, “Follow me,”

[Letho]

They hurried up the stairs, the Marshal leading the way with a lit torch in front of him, none of them too eager to stick around to face another wave of the rotten corpses. Letho paid little attention to the rooms they passed by on the second floor, acknowledging them as offices and storages in the offhanded way his mind usually did when it was focused on something else. Relt was on his mind, and her stubborn insistence, and how natural his rejection came. It reminded him he had gotten old. Sometimes it seemed that it wasn’t so long ago that he was on the receiving end of such conversations, chastised for being too rash, too bullheaded. And though he had probably said to himself back then that he would never act like that when age comes catching up, here he was doing exactly the same. He reckoned it was the natural order of things. It was for the old to lecture and for the young to ignore and learn from their own mistakes. He just hoped Relt would live to learn from hers.

They were near the ladder when the girl stopped their progress. “Hold on, let me check something out,” she said before slipping into one of the rooms. Letho, already more than mildly annoyed with her, took a deep breath and let it out of his nostrils, the followed her in. The first thing that struck him was the smell, the sulfury scent of gunpowder heavy in the air, and once he was deep enough in the windowless room, he realized why.

“I wouldn’t wave that thing around here if I were you,” Relt said, pointing to the small barrels with Alerar markings on them. One of them was open and half full of the black grainy stuff.

“Marshal Billow was well equipped, it would seem,” Letho said, switching the torch to his other hand farther away from the barrels. While it wasn’t uncommon for the Rangers to use firearms these days, pistols and rifles were still few and far between what with Alerar withholding most from the open market. Same went for gunpowder; it was difficult to get a hold of and you usually had to pull some strings to gather a cache such as this one.

“We can use this shit,” the girl said, shuffling through the bright red sticks of what Letho assumed was explosives, neatly arranged on one of the shelves. “I saw this in a cowboy movie once. They make a trail of gunpowder, light it up, get the fuck out of there and blow everything up.” She turned and looked towards the Marshal. “It would get that lot downstairs off our asses at least for a while.”

Letho’s first reaction was, as before, rejection. Fiddling around with this stuff was dangerous and the gain was debatable. The zombies were slow and currently busy banging at the door downstairs. By the time they got through, the trio was bound to be too far away for them to pose a threat. But for all his bluntness, there were occasional traces of tact in the big man, and despite his better judgment he didn’t dismiss the idea. He did make a revision, though.

“This is Alerar black gunpowder. It burns fast. If you light a trail, it would get to here before you got up the ladder.” The Marshal didn’t stop there, though, and offered an alternative. He picked up several of the sticks and shoved them in one of the many inside pockets he had on his duster, then threw one to the girl. “Use that. And a long fuse.”

“How long?”

Letho shrugged; he didn’t know that much about explosives. “Long enough to blow them up and not us.”

“You know, if you don’t mind me saying, for a Marshal, you don’t seem all that concerned about destroying public property,” Deputy Fingers said with a trace of a smug smirk on his beardless face as Letho exited the room, leaving Relt to make the arrangements for the blast off. The Marshal didn’t return the smirk.

“I am rather certain none of the locals will tell on us.”

******

Five minutes later, the trio was on the timbered roof of Bonnam Foodstuffs and Tools, three figures barely distinguishable from the darkness that surrounded them, their silhouettes little more than vague outlines against the black sky. The town was still silent around them, though not quite as dead as it had been when Letho first strolled into it hours ago. There were fires burning at every major exit, big blazing things lashing their orange tongues at the sky and scorching away the surrounding blackness. They made the shadows of the lethargic dead dance a jittery dance on the bleak streets of Bonnam. The Marshal and his companions didn’t watch this odd show, though; their eyes were set on the Marshal’s Post four houses away, and the darkened windows that seemed to offer no activity whatsoever. About a minute ago they had heard a muffled crash, possibly signifying that the walking dead made their way through the barricade at the front entrance, but that was it.

“Are you sure you set it right?” Letho asked, and immediately received a look that meant to split his head like a melon.

“Yeah, I set it right. It’s not fucking rocket science. The wire thing goes into the stick thing and it makes a...”

KA-BOOOOM!

They were all prepared for some major fireworks, but none were prepared for the might of the shockwave. The last thing they saw was the building disappear in an expanding ball of smoke and flame before they were knocked down by what felt like a fist as large as a frigate. Letho grabbed for some leverage as he slid down the slanted roof, but the covering was new and he was heavy. He slipped over the edge, caught one of the gutters in one last desperate attempt of safety, but as soon as his entire weight bore on it, it tore off sending him falling two stories for the second time in as many hours. The dirt and his ribs broke the fall. Deputy Fingers was slightly luckier, landing on his feet and smacking his chin against his knee, chipping a tooth in the process. Relt had the best fortune of the three, touching down amidst wooden crates and burlap sacks of what Letho assumed was litter.

“I reckon...” the Marshal started after some of the aftershock daze passed, his face still in the dirt as he slowly pushed himself up to one knee. It was even more difficult than the first time, the ache at his side a possible proof of at least a couple of cracked ribs. He got up and leant heavily on the nearby wall. “I reckon we ought to have put more distance between ourselves and the blast.”

It was a ridiculously obvious thing to say, but he said it anyways, and said it with a grin. Bad jokes couldn’t hold a candle to a good pain remedy, but they helped. A bit.

“We should get moving.”

[Relt PeltFelter]

“Thanks, Officer Chucklefuck,” Relt growled. The sacks in which she had landed had been, of course, garbage bags. Garbage bags which had been neglected for some time, due to the plague of undeath. Possibly the only things (besides the three humans) with a pulse in the town at the time were the tenacious cockroaches and flies which swarmed away as Relt stood up and peeled, in accordance with some narrative law, a banana skin off of her head. “What the f-…do they even have bananas here?” she grumbled as they hurried along, “I mean it’s a tropical fruit, and this place is really…I guess British-feeling? Don’t tell me that a planet which hasn’t discovered the fucking fridge has a perishable imports market, because that is frankly bullshit. I will not buy that,”

Her compatriots ignored her.

It was not long before the trio was huddled in an alley in the lee of one of the barricades; not the one which Relt and Letho had seen before, of course, but a burning pile of wood nonetheless. This one was wider, to fit the street it blocked, and therefore somewhat lower, which was a stroke of luck. “Alright, so what’s the plan, exactly?” Relt whispered; her eyes were fixed on the approximately three dozen shamblers which stared dully into nowhere, as if guarding the exit.

“The plan? Simple,” Letho said. He shoved Relt into the street.

The girl stumbled awkwardly, her flip-flops making a sound like a duck gargling charcoal. This alone was enough to draw the attention of the ambulatory deceased. Relt strutted forward, heart pounding like typewriter keys being mashed by a toddler’s chubby fist. As she approached, the undead rushed in their broken way to meet her, shattered feet dragging from wrenched legs, eyes dislodged from sockets, teeth hanging from cracked jaws.

Relt clenched and unclenched her fists as the monsters approached. They groped at her with shaking fingers, though slowly her trepidation seemed to be reflected in their dusty countenances. They paused, atrophied facial muscles twitching into a semblance of caution. “Oh my god why does this work…” Relt whispered.

“Fine, okay, whatever,” she said after a while, “Hey Clint and Barney back there, gimme about…two minutes, then start smashing this wall down or something. Actually make it one, ‘cause I haven’t eaten anything,” Moving cautiously, so as not to distress the staring revenants around her, Relt unslung her backpack. She reached inside, hand closing around a glass tube and a plastic bag.

“Listen up, dead fucks,” Relt said, looking into a growing array of pustulent, leaky faces with empty, soulless eyes, “If this shit can calm me down enough to stay hidden from a fucking barnacle-dragon, it’s gonna hit you like a ton of fucking bricks,”

Relt clicked her lighter, and her bong began to gurgle happily. She took a couple of big hits, blinking hugely and suppressing a cough. “Ooohhhh yes, there we go,” she said, “That’s the fucking shit. How are you bitches taking it?” The girl blew a thin stream of smoke into the face of the rotting baker that stood in front of her. The cautious fear which the zombies had been mimicking in her was fading, and those walkers which still had eyelids were shutting them and swaying back and forth. Relt felt her world swimming and took another long bong hit.

“A’ight bro-dawgs, go ahead and smash that…do that thing you’re s’posed to do. I’m just…I’m cool here. These zombies are cool, they’re just getting their mellow on,”

Letho hustled over to the barricade, followed closely by Fingers. “I’m not sure what that is you’re smoking,” he mentioned in passing, “But I’m sure it’s illegal,”

“Whoa, don’t be a buzz-kill, Raven…Ravenfart. Heheh. Yeah,”

Letho tossed one of the sticks of dynamite he had liberated from the now-smoldering Marshal’s Office into the least on-fire portion of the barricade, and dashed back towards their hiding place. The Deputy seemed confused; he looked back and forth from the pile, to the retreating Marshal, to Relt trying half-heartedly to extricate herself from the ring of undead admirers. “This is your plan?” he asked, “Just blow it up?”

“Why alter a classic?” Letho called behind him, ducking into the alley. Fingers eyes bulged like grapes and he hurried too, beating Relt there by moments. The girl turned the corner into the alley just as the flames reached the dynamite, and a blazing wagon-wheel blasted down the street behind her. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck singe slightly, but through her marijuana-induced haze it was as if a koala had caressed her neck.

“Well, did it work?” Fingers asked after a moment. Relt peered out into the street; the barricade was gone. As was most of the street below it, and the buildings at either side. Of her coterie of hot-boxed zombies, only a few blistered limbs were left. One appeared to have been eradicated completely save for a pair of smoking shoes.

“Yeah. Yeah, it totally worked. Fuck yeah,”

“So what now?” the Deputy asked.

“We head to the cathedral,” Letho answered, “If this Garret is still alive, odds are he’d have gone there to avoid all of, well, this. And if not, then we’ll at least have a big stone building to hide in until more favorable circumstances present themselves. A holy building, at that,”

[Letho]

The cathedral stood atop of a hillock just outside Bonnam, the cap and the surrounding slopes around it specked by what Letho remembered to be gravestones from his skimming glance several hours ago. The church had been creepy even in daylight in that calm, hallow way these things always were, your subconsciousness making you walk and talk just a bit softer when near it in honor of the dead. But now, as the trio made their way up the slope, it looked downright ominous, as if the dreadful night sapped every bit of holiness out of it, leaving a shadowy husk that gazed back at them with dark windows. Even the moon seemed to shy away from it, announcing it had other plans as it ducked behind a convenient cluster of clouds. There were no sounds in the night – no wolves howling in the distance, no nightingales with their irritating calls, not even a breeze sweeping through the knee-high grass – other than their feet crunching the gravel as they took them up the hill.

Though Letho didn’t like the look of the place, he seemed to be the only one with foreboding thoughts on his mind. After her little experience with the undead, Relt had first seemed overjoyed with her success, a grin on her face so wide you thought he knew the greatest joke on Althanas and wasn’t eager to share. Then she just seemed... loopy, like a drunk in that perfect zone between well inebriated and one too many. But as they drew closer, her smile diminished and her eyes snapped this way and that more and more, as if she was hearing something the others didn’t, the joke in her head gone horribly bad. The Marshal was rather certain her state had something to do with the funny-smelling smoke she inhaled from the weird apparatus she had in her bag, but there was no time to inspect it further.

Compared to the girl, Deputy Fingers was a slab of stone with a human face chiseled into it. When they first left the barricades and headed towards the cathedral, he had been just as disquieted and antsy as before, but it seemed that the closer they got to their destination, the less emotion his visage allowed. His posture straitened and his strides became more determined, making him look like a man with a purpose. Letho didn’t find this particularly odd. It usually took something drastic to snap a man from feeling sorry for himself and taking a more active role, and he reckoned turning a whole lot of zombies into rotten meat pulp qualified as such. At any rate, it was a welcome change. It would make the man more useful should things turn sour for them when dealing with this Garret fellow. If he was even there and not halfway up to Berevar.

Names with no meanings and an occasional face chiseled into dark gray granite or white marble stared back at them from the tombstones as they passed, but the presence of the numerous burial sites worried Letho not at all. It was a common misconception that the necromancers raised zombies from the graves. There were seldom more than a handful of fresh candidates at any time in graveyards this size and that made for a pisspoor army. No, the masters of the dark arts usually opted to stalk battlefields and plague-stricken sites, where bodies were aplenty and nobody cared if a dozen of two went missing. Not that he believed the mischief of Bonnam was done by a necromancer, not after he saw and heard. There wasn’t a dark mage in entire Corone who had the power to kill and raise an entire town. Or at least Letho hoped there wasn’t one. Because if there was, the trio was going up dung creek without a paddle.

They were closing in to the grand entrance to the cathedral, the massive double doors waiting for them just a dozen marble steps arranged in a half circle, when the Marshal halted their advance and motioned towards a small mausoleum amidst the standing stones. The doors of the church were ajar, and that didn’t sit well on his gut. Open would’ve been good; it would be a possible indication of something waiting for them. Closed would’ve been better; it would give him some hope that someone was still alive and holed up in there. The Marshal’s Office was closed after all and they found Fingers there. Town Hall was open ajar and they lost Cydnar there.

“Alright, listen up. I do not want to charge in there without checking out the place first. We should go around...” His voice, little more than a whisper (and even it felt utterly out of place amidst the silent markings of souls long passed), was interrupted by Relt. The girl grabbed the Marshal by the forearm, leant just a little too close into his personal space, her face suddenly completely serious.

“Ravenhead, hey, I... I totally need to tell you something.” She paused, looking him in the eyes with all the seriousness of a terminal illness, and whispered: “I...I don’t like him. This Deputy. He gives me the heebie-jeebies, like a creepy distant cousin I had that kept staring at my knockers. We should shoot him in the face and bury him. Plenty of room here.” She snickered, but it seemed like a courtesy laugh to her own joke.

“Sure, whatever. You just sit here while I check it out. The Deputy here...” Fingers didn’t seem to be paying too much attention, his eyes locked on the church tower. Letho snapped his fingers at the man. “Wake up. You stay here with her while I go scout the cathedral.”

Relt would have none of it, taking a step back, her hands on her unimpressive hips, the usual tantrum pose for the young. “Hey, hey, no way I’m staying here with Deputy Doofus. I tole you, I don’t fucking trust him!” If Fingers was insulted by her words, there was no trace of it on his face.

“Well, I do not trust either of you. Not that it matters. I cannot scout the place out with you acting like a damned village idiot. So here,” He slapped his revolver back into her hands. “Try not to hurt yourself this time.”

And with that, Letho went out into the night.

[Relt PeltFelter]

“Let’s get one thing straight, Don Knotts,” Relt growled, “I definitely don’t trust you. There weren’t any frigging cots on the second floor of that Marshal’s office place. So who are you, really?”

The deputy was silent. He stood facing away from Relt, stiff as a board.

“What, a crook? Some jagoff who was in a cell or some shit? Hey, why the fuck don’t you answer-oh shit.”

The deputy had turned around. His eyes were gone. Well, not really gone, as he was holding them in his hands, but definitely not where they belonged. Where they belonged was in the now bloody and torn sockets which the deputy had turned on Relt. He croaked hatefully, crouching as if to leap like a huge bullfrog. Relt darted away from his clumsy leap, and heard a loud crack as the deputy’s badly-aimed tackle sent him colliding with a tombstone. The deputy’s body lay still.

“F…fuck. Fuck,” Relt panted, holding the revolver in one hand and the iron dagger in the other. “Are you…what the fuck, are you dead?”

The deputy’s body twitched. A hand scrabbled blindly at the soil and found purchase, and Fingers pulled himself awkwardly to a stand. His sightless head turned jerkily to look at Relt, blood pouring from the crushing wound on his skull. His jaw fell open, hanging slack, and a guttural moan issued forth through the fountain of blood. Even as it flowed, the blood began to turn black, and the undead Fingers crept closer towards Relt.

“Fuck this!” Relt fired the pistol three times, each bullet actually hitting its target. The force of the shots knocked the still-moving body to the ground again, and the girl took this opportunity to bolt into the cathedral. She slammed the doors behind her, bolting them shut. She panted heavily, leaning against the solid stone walls and trying desperately to collect both her breath and her wits. Why had she thought getting high was a good idea?

The room she found herself in appeared to be some kind of antechamber. There was a small podium to one side, and the walls had been painted a kind of rich burgundy. There were alcoves where candles should have been burning, but the waxy cylinders sat cold and unlit. Relt straightened up, stretching her limbs. She still had the gun she had been given, as well as her own switchblade. The girl looked around, hoping for some sign that the big Marshal had preceded her through one of the several doors this room possessed.

A flicker of candlelight slipped under the crack of the big main door. Relt figured it must have led into the main…church…part. What was it called, where everybody sat and listened to an old dude talk about being sad? Whatever, Relt never went to any church or anything. There was a flicker of candlelight coming from the other side of the door to the Old-Dude-Sad-Talk-Room.

“Hey, Ravenheart,” she called out as she pushed the doors open, “Bad news, dawg, I-”

Relt froze. Four hundred pairs of soulless, glassy eyes stared at her from the pews.

The cathedral was occupied by an attentive flock of zombies. Her entrance had startled them, but slowly they turned away, ignoring her as though she was unimportant. The undead abominations bent their heads in a solemn posture of prayer.

Relt backed slowly in the direction she had come from, but the door slammed shut behind her. She turned and scrabbled at the latch, but it wouldn’t move. The metal was ice cold, cold enough to sting her hand. She turned back to face the unholy congregation.

One of the shapes near the front of the pews was unusual; it slumped oddly instead of bowing forward. It was a familiar shape. Relt crept towards it, trying to make as little noise as possible.

Letho was sprawled in a heap on the third row of pews, next to a zombie woman who appeared to have chewed her own arms off. Black blood glistened on her Sunday best. Letho had much healthier-looking red blood glistening around a fresh wound on his forehead; somebody must have gotten the drop on him. Or a couple hundred somebodies.

“Letho!” Relt hissed. Every undead head turned to face her again, the creak of rotting neck tendons becoming briefly deafening. But the faces simply turned away again, returning to their prayers.

Relt tried to help the unconscious Marshal to his feet, but he outweighed her by a factor expressible only through scientific notation. Finally she gave up with a huff. She’d just have to wait until he came ‘round. Relt looked around, drinking in the macabre sight of a bunch of penitent monsters. For the first time she noticed that there was a body at the pulpit as well, gripping the edges so tightly she was surprised it wasn’t leaving marks. The man at the pulpit did not resemble any kind of priest she had ever seen; he was dressed like a merchant. He didn’t seem nearly as decayed as the other zombies, or at least, not the same kind of decayed…

There was a groan from behind Relt, and she turned to see the Marshal rubbing his head in pain. “Whoa, Ravendude, you’re not a freaky monster too, are you?”

“What? Oh, it’s you. Great. What are you talking about, where is the deputy, and what are you doing in here?”

“Dude, I shot the deputy. But I did not shoot the…sheriff. Hm. Also he turned into a zombie, that’s why I shot him. Then I ran in here, which turned out to be Bad Idea,”

“I came in here,” Letho said, as if not really hearing her, “Something…hit me in the head. I don’t…” he blinked, then seemed to notice the others who he was sharing his space with. “Oh, no. This is a problem,”

“Yeah, no shit,” Relt hissed, “So let’s just leave and then-”

There was a sound behind Relt, from the pulpit. She turned to see that the man at the pulpit had looked up. He turned his head from side to side, the motion of his muscles sounding like the tearing of sails in a storm. His eyes…were empty. Not the empty of the mutilated deputy outside, but pure emptiness. These eyes were emptier than anything has ever been, a void in which matter did not belong and indeed could not survive.

“this vessel is weak” the empty man said.

There are many clichés used to describe the voice of a possessed individual. They sound as if many voices are speaking at once, or their voice is deep and raspy, or the sound as if the voice is a tape being played backwards.

If syllables were pipes, then the words this voice made sounded like plumbing installed by a very inadequate plumber. They were bolted together, the words were comprehensible, but they felt wrong, like the thing producing them had never heard words before, had never spoken before. Of course, the voice was also deep, raspy, and sounded as though many taped voices were being played backwards at once. Clichés become clichés for a reason.

“I assume this is Garret,” Letho managed, standing. He drew his great sword-gun, and Relt tried not to feel that her own armament was not inadequate.

“this vessel is weak” it said again, “so very weak and small so very inadequate”

“By the authority of the Corone Rangers,” Letho stated boldly and clearly, “I demand that whatever you are, you release your hold on the citizens of Bonnam and cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin,”

“That oughtta do it. Thanks very much,” Relt rolled her eyes.

“we have existed since before everything the void and the dark for eternity spinning and pulsing alone this world was flame shapeless and burning and we took it as ours” The body of Garret walked forward, stuttering and shaking, like an animatronic dummy reactivated after too many years. Clearly, the body hadn’t moved much in the last week; big pieces of frozen flesh sloughed off like chunks of broken glass, crashing to the floor. Where the bone should have been exposed, there was only more of the terrifying void that filled the thing that had been Garret’s eyes.

“we moved the pieces the things the pieces made then came the Flesh, and we took it as ours and made it dance for us then came the Flesh that Sings it blinded us, sealed us away beneath stone and earth alone so far from the Flesh so alone” The monster was getting closer, standing only a few feet away from the two surviving humans. Letho moved to swing his gunblade, but the weapon stopped well before it hit Garret; held in place by dozens of corpses, eyes glinting strangely. Another swarm of undead grasped the Marshal’s arms and legs, pinning him tightly, and yet another surged out of their pews to hold Relt. She kicked at them to no avail as they held her in place, immobile and upright.

“we own this Flesh” the thing continued, more chunks falling away. It held the ruined remnants of Garret’s hands up in front of it, scraps of skin and nail cascading to the floor, “this Flesh woke us freed us for lust of power and now this Flesh is ours our presence burns it away with cold destroys the Flesh that Thinks the Flesh that Walks we need a stronger vessel”

“Whoa, okay, now hold on, before you take the big guy here as a vessel,” Relt said, waving her hands cautioningly.

“Excuse me?” Letho asked, trying to wrench free of his necrotic bondage

“Oh come on, obviously they want you,” Relt said, “You’re some huge dude who can hulk out and shizz, and I mean it did send the message-”

“we sent a message a cry for help to attract strong Flesh smart Flesh needy Flesh Flesh Flesh”

“See?” Relt gloated, “I just said that,”

“we need new Flesh” the creature said, now nothing more than a skeleton-shaped hole in space, drifting slowly closer to the duo, “we will take this Flesh” it said, one hand-shaped void pointing at Relt.

“Whoa, what? No no no, why me?”

“this Flesh is new this Flesh is from outside this Flesh is strong inside the Flesh that Thinks the Flesh that Walks the Flesh that is ours” The entity pressed a hand against Relt’s face, the bone shaped of darkness pressing through her skin. Relt’s eyes went blank as the skeleton forced more of itself into her face.

“She’s a child!” Letho roared, “You’ll not take a child!” the Marshal wrenched mightily, shaking his arms from the grip of the undead. He swung his weapon towards the black skeleton, blade flying straight and true.

- - -

Relt drifted at a crawl through space. The stars blinked as she moved slowly past, drifting into an iridescent nebula. Relt guessed that this probably represented the inside of her head in some way, but she didn’t cling to this hypothesis too tightly. After all, the last time she had assumed something was a psychological metaphor, she had almost been eaten by barnacles.

At the core of the nebula was a mote of blackness, somehow more black than the rest of space. It churned and squirmed, seemingly just as confused to be wherever this place was as Relt herself.

Relt recognized it. It was the thing that made all of the zombies, the thing that pushed itself into her head. It wanted to take her over. “Get the fuck out!” she shouted.

“Get out!” someone else shouted.

“Get out!” came another voice, and soon a hundred, and a thousand, and a billion more. The whole of the universe was made up of voices shouting the same thing, “Get out!” over and over, as the roiling black mass seemed to shrink in on itself, writhing and changing shape in panic. Relt tried to shout, and every voice spoke her words. The universe sprouted hands and each one reached inwards, into the nebula, grasping the black mass and tearing it apart, leaving no trace, forcing it out and away.

Relt thought this was all very cool.

- - -

The marshal’s sword passed through the entity as though it were nothing, and the black skeleton disappeared entirely into Relt’s body. The undead holding them dropped away, paralyzed, and Letho stepped back from Relt, holding his weapon at the ready.

“Damnation, do not make me have to dispatch a child this night,” he muttered.

Relt’s body twitched. Her hands flailed wildly a moment before grasping her mouth and forcing it open, unleashing a torrent of black smoke which coalesced into a cloud that filled the ceiling of the cathedral. The last scrap of smoke fled from Relt’s body, and the girl swayed once before here eyes snapped open, looking around.

“Whuzzuh? What happened?”

“THIS FLESH IS WRONG” the cloud screamed, small portions of it seeming to catch fire “I CANNOT THIS FLESH THERE IS NO TIME NO FLESH THERE IS NO FLESH NO FLESH NO FLESH NO FLESH”

The undead which had filled the church were looking very unhealthy. They looked stretched and wrong, and flailed in a manner unnatural even for the reanimated. A thing that had been a banker stretched a hand towards the wall; literally stretched, as the fingers expanded far behind their normal span and dragged down the wall hard enough to leave grooves in the stone. The zombie opened its mouth to scream, and the mouth kept opening, stretching up until the skin could no longer support it and it snapped. Other undead began distorting in similar ways, and where their skin touched that of another zombie, sickly purple fire began to spread.

The black cloud overhead was shrinking, burning up and screaming like a pig being roasted alive. The deep, raspy, backwards, multi-tonal voice shrieked and moaned and, finally, vanished with the cloud itself.

“What the fuck?” Relt shouted.

“No time, so for once, shut up!” Letho grabbed Relt over his shoulder like the worlds most argumentative sack of potatoes and sprinted for a window. An enormous work of stained glass stood at the rear of the church, depicting a scene which would surely have been remembered as being of great reverence and religious meaning were it not for the fact that Letho jumped through it like a bowling ball through a glassblower’s convention, sending shards flying everywhere.

The Marshal dropped his load unceremoniously, and Relt stood up and dusted herself off. The town of Bonnam burned in the distance; Letho assumed that whatever had happened to the reanimated carcasses in the church had also occurred in the town. That or the fires of the barricades had spread, but either one should have been sufficient to wipe out the evidence of this blight.

“I think it didn’t like the way you tasted,” Letho said, “What happened?”

“Oh, nothing I guess,” Relt said, waving a hand dismissively, “You know that feeling where you’re an infinite amount of people all shouting at the same time and then you feel a little light-headed?”

“To be honest…no,”

“What, really? I thought everybody got that,”

“No, it doesn’t sound familiar,”

“Weird,” Relt said, “Well it was inside my brain, then that happened, and now I guess I’m okay?”

“I see. We should go,”

[Letho]

Letho Ravenheart didn’t like unsolved mysteries, ambiguous story endings and word puzzles one letter away from completion. These things gnawed on him (and he gnawed at them) like a dog on an old bone, chewing away even if there was no marrow to be had. Sometimes he could will such thoughts away and sometimes he couldn’t, but eventually they all came back to bother him, more often than not triggered by something unrelated. He would sit by the fire and the shape of the shadow would remind him of a story his mother told him once, or he’d be going down some road in the middle of nowhere and the trees ahead would remind him of another grove where someone or something disappeared without a trace. And then his mind would be back at it, walking down the same roads, following the same thought patterns to the same conclusions. Maybe it was just human nature, to hang onto the unanswered question marks. Maybe it was just his nature.

Either way, Letho Ravenheart was pretty certain that the night he spent in Bonnam would take its rightful place on the list of “Things To Dwell On”.

In all truth, the Marshal had no idea what had transpired in the cathedral. He had been there; the events played out in front of his eyes like a stage play with really bad actors that had a tough time getting the point across to the audience. And despite his front row seat, he still couldn’t quite figure it all out.

Strangely enough, Relt had been at the forefront of it. And even now, as the two of them footslogged back down the hill with the church collapsing in purplish flames, he couldn’t quite figure out why. The thing that orchestrated this entire uprising, it was rather clear that it initially intended for Letho to be the new vessel, summoning him with a faux message and leaving enough traces behind for him to follow back to the cathedral. So why opt for the girl with no particular skill other than a sharp tongue? The only answer that the Marshal could scrounge up was the girl’s strange ability to affect those around her with emotions she was experiencing. Perhaps it would’ve been easier for it (whatever it was, which was another bone left for him to pick at a later date) to channel its power through her, but that explanation was a stretch either way you spun the tale.

Not that it really mattered to anyone save Letho’s inquisitive mind now that the vile thing was dead. The manner of its passing, however, was an even greater puzzle to solve. An ancient spirit with the ability to possess over a thousand people to a degree that they cease all activity and leave their own bodies to die, a primordial creature old as the land itself, rejected and smitten in a matter of moments? Letho was no wizard, but he knew his monsters and he knew that it took something of gigantic magnitude to bring this thing down. So what was it in this tomboy that could chew up and spit out something so powerful? She wasn’t telling and after receiving the same answer three times on their trek down the hillside, the Marshal got tired of asking. All Relt had to offer was nonsensical hogwash and a shrug of her shoulders.

“So, where are you off to next?” Letho finally broke the silence. The heaviness of it didn’t bear down on them as heavily as before, as if the destruction of this evil presence somehow lifted some weight from the air around them, but his voice was still unnaturally loud with nothing but the steady crackle of the fire that was slowly claiming most of Bonnam.

“Shit, man, I don’t know. I was trying to get to someplace with folks who would know how to fix my car, but this town turned out to be a real stinker,” Relt replied, her tone and her posture seemingly unaffected by the ordeal up on the hill. He kept looking for some subtle traces of possession, a part of him still suspecting that the spirit was trying to pull a fast one and sneak out in Relt’s meat suit, but there were none.

“Well, Gisela is the next big town if you follow this road East. There is plenty of folk there that can repair a cart,” the Marshal said as the ground flattened and the gravel path that led up the hillock joined the packed dirt road that ran through the Bonnam outskirts. The dawn wasn’t yet upon them, but it was creeping closer, waking up the east out of the blackness of its slumber by the darkest shades of blue as the stars slowly began to fade. The moon was long gone by now, but there was no need for its light anymore as the new day announced its arrival. Letho led the way through the remnants of a dead town and towards the stables where he hoped to find his steed.

“A car, man. I said... Ah, never mind.”

“Well, whatever it is, if they cannot repair it in Gisela, there is bound to be someone who can repair it up in Radasanth. It is quite a voyage to get there, though. A week and a half on a good horse I would say,” Letho said, turning away from the road as they struck a sign with a badly drawn brown horse and some letter’s that might’ve said “Three-legged Mare” once. He heard the muffled neighing and the restless stomp of hoofs even before he opened the barn door, and then brought a smile to his face, a first in almost a week. The Marshal liked this horse and he would’ve hated to lose it to some brainless zombies. He patted it on the neck and the beast stomped in approval.

“Or you can double back West to Ferrytown and catch a boat up to Radasanth. It is a perhaps a faster route, but the sea can be fickle this time of year,” Letho talked as he went about saddling his horse. Once he was done, he saddled another that stood in the adjacent box. “Either way you are going to need a horse. This one is a bit on a raggedy side...”

“I don’t know how to ride a fucking horse, man,” Relt dismissed the notion.

“Learn it. The Rangers patrol these lands, but they are few and the bandits are many. But they are easier to outrun on a horse.”

“My, my, if I didn’t know you, Marshal, I’d say you worry about me,” the girl said, that smug smirk back on her face. Letho blew air out of his nostrils and shook his head, but a grin crept to the corner of his mouth.

“Well, it would be a shame to survive this night only to be clobbered over the head by some mugger and left to the vultures.” It was a bad joke and neither of them laughed.

“At any rate, you might also be needing this,” he said, reaching into one of the saddle bags, shuffling through it a bit, and providing a rather heavy leather pouch. He tossed it in her direction and it landed in her hand with a metallic jangle.

“What’s this? Come on, I don’t want your charity. I can take care...”

He cut her off before she could start making a bad case. “It is not charity. It is a standard fee for hired swords that work for the Rangers.” It really wasn’t, but Letho kept a stone cold face when he said it and he reckoned Relt had little chance of seeing through his lie. “Though you are not very good with a sword... or a gun for that matter, you have earned your keep tonight. Keep it. Or toss it into the ditch. I care not.” He adjusted the straps on the horse’s girdle and swung into the saddle.

“So what about you, Sherriff? Where are you heading?”

“I have to report back to headquarters, tell them what happened here, then gather some people to clean this mess up. Though it might just be best leaving this town to burn to the ground. Not like there is anyone left to miss it.”

“Shame. Such a nice town,” Relt said.

“It was. And then we strolled in.”

((Spoils: Letho gets three sticks of Alerar-made dynamite he took from Marshal Billow’s cache.

As per rules of the Blitz, 2026 of Letho's GP gets transfered to Relt
As per rules of the Blitz 723 of Cydnar's GP gets transfered to Letho and Relt, 361 for Letho and 362 for Relt
Please contact the participants of this quest if there is an issue with this.))

[The International]

Let me just start by saying that it is my honor to review Harold and Kumar Go to Bonnam. I thoroughly enjoyed this thread. It wasn’t super serious, it wasn’t epic, it wasn’t a tear jerker, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s refreshing to see a thread like this – that has quality writing but doesn’t take itself too seriously. On with the notes. I won’t be commenting on Cyndar seeing as he left the thread early.

Plot Construction 22 /30

Story 7/10 – Fun stuff. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The climax, when compared to the explosion earlier, might have suffered if it weren’t for the twists the two of you provided. That was well done, and I hope other writers look to this as an example of not needing a super epic battle to depend on heightening the energy. The conclusion felt a little hasty though.
Strategy 7 /10 – I’m glad the both of you played smart with your characters instead of strong, which you could have easily done, Letho. Instead of making it an all out zombie slaughter and easily cutting your way out of there, you put something in your characters’ way and kept them in the conflict and allowed it to go its proper length. One thing I had a hard time with though is how Letho got knocked out near the end so easily.
Setting 8 /10 – Everyone did a superb job describing Bonnam at the beginning and appealing to more than one sense. You also did a superb job mixing it in with the action. In other words it didn’t slow your pace down. With that being said I think you may have had a tiny bit more room to give us the setting before it slowed you down.

Characterisation 24 /30

Continuity 7 /10 – Everyone had a reason to be here. That’s good. The question I repeatedly asked myself was where in the Corone timeline is this taking place? I kind of assumed that since the Civil War wasn’t mentioned, that it took place before that. Certain issues that I had with the continuity, like all that firearm equipment in one place in Corone of all places, were lightheartedly saved by Relt daring to make a jab at them.
Interaction 8 /10 – Smooth would be the best word to describe this category. Your characters reacted to the world and each other in a logical and fitting manor. You were also very creative in the variety of ways that you dealt with the zombies. Letho you didn’t just lay the smack down, and Relt you didn’t just cower in fear.
Character 9 /10 – Highest score here! Why? Because, Relt, you just made a believer out of me! Someone can make a character from Earth and not screw everything up. Not only were Relt’s words and actions true to form, your narration seemed to be a part of her. You made me laugh a lot, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Herculean straight man, Letho Ravenheart, who was also spot-on with his character. He reacted exactly how I thought he would to everything going on, and the reminiscence of being Relt’s age gave your odd couple dynamic substance. This wasn’t a ten because Relt, you were a tiny bit heavy on the Earth references. It’s a good thing they made me laugh.

Writing Style 22 /30

Creativity 8 /10 – This is very much connected to setting in terms of literary/rhetorical devices, but it was also used well to keep the action fresh. Although I’m thanking God that I didn’t have to read a written version of a zombie video game, the two of you would have been able to do that and keep it entertaining with your colorful prose.
Mechanics 7 /10 – A few easy to miss spelling errors. There might have been a spot here or there where the syntax threw me off a tiny bit.
Clarity 7 /10 – I had to re-read a sentence or two. Once in the beginning, and once in the middle mostly due to syntax but it was all very straight forward.

Wildcard:8 /10
Like I said it was a lot of fun. I can see another good quest from this odd duo in the future.

Total: 76

Letho gets the three dynamite sticks, but two out of three of them are duds. If the story took place in Alerar, it would be a different story.

Letho gets 1915 exp and loses 1665gp
Relt PeltFelter gets 836 exp and gains 2388gp
Cyndar Yrene gets 290 exp and loses 723gp

[Silence Sei]

GP-Exp added.

Relt leveled.