"We're at a crossroads."

Those words were deep in the rotten woods over the hill. The lumps and humps of the lurid landscape concealed the faceless ghosts within their arboreal fortress. Light as a leaf, the lost wander from their urban nightmares and into the deceitful forest. Well, they feel as though they wander, but the truth is troubling: the malevolent spirits inhabiting the thick oaks and warped junipers lure melancholic dreamers with wind whispering in the willows. "If you can just get out of the city," he whispered while his feet mumbled the cobbles. That wasn't all! "People? They're posion!"—vile thoughts! These toxic notions oozed from the tainted trees and corrupted fungus; along invisible vibrational conduits, the thoughts would waft into Radasanth.

"Break it up."

Sweat drops spoke from the brow to the quivering heart. "In our immediate future, I only see darkness—the worst war humans will ever know." It was a bleak assessment, but sweaty brow and quivering heart were in concord: it was blood chilling, it was dreadful.

The army of raging skeletons were riding the forgotten woods, atop the living's most vital stallions. The sound of hooves on the solid earth—mud compressed along the deer trails—echoed the rumble of fast-flowing thunderheads above. Then, the rain fell like a lake inverted. Heartbeat and beaten brow ran. Down which of the four corners, they didn't know. The bone hunters were coming, the bone hunters were riding, the bone hunters were beating down a horrible pulse—faster. And faster. AND FASTER.

The duo came upon a rain-drenched mansion in a lost corner of the forgotten woods. Rags, once curtains, swished in the broken windows. There was a bell dinging in the thunderstorm's squalls. As the slave bell rang, they considered troubling the banshees and spectres inhabiting the old home. "Are they getting closer?" sweaty forehead asked. Of course the bone riders were getting closer, but that's not what he meant. The grove itself was tightening around them. Quaker, the one with the troubled heartbeat, replied. "We don't have any other choice—we have to hide inside," as the words trembled from his lips and into the murk, he knew that the forest and its demons wanted them inside that house of horrors.

Regardless, they went in.

And so did the swords!

Just steps into the mansion the serrated steel of an unremembered generation pierced their flanks, their legs, their arms, and their feet.

The two fools bled all the way to the basement. In the damp, they were jailed! And it was there that they waited for judgment—bleeding, forever—while the flaky-skinned master guarded their cells.

That bastard cackled with the best of them.