Any Old Tuesday

There is a sort of restlessness to a place once ravaged by war. The battlefields are full of the stillness of corpses long after the bodies have been cleared away. Even the air feels warped, a gaping hole torn into the natural distribution of life. You can tell immediately when you’ve stepped onto land that was once drenched in blood, no matter that the overturned earth has since blossomed into a field of flowers and wild grasses. Amongst such lovely scenery, the chill of death persists and trails its fingers along your spine. Listening close, the wind carries forward the echoes of countless final breaths with every brush.

In such a place, is it really a surprise the dead would rise again?

Although it has been several centuries since the various wars that once raged like an unforgiving storm across the now Empire of Fraxinus, wandering spirits remain anchored. Whether they chose to remain or have been trapped somehow, only the heavens could tell you. Whichever it is, it isn’t particularly important. The true crux of the issue is that such places have a nasty habit of reanimating corpses.

They also tend to be near the best preserved of the ancient ruins, which is what draws one wayward young researcher into their presence.

Covered in a simple wool cloak, the frayed edges might cause her to be mistaken for one of the undead herself. Beneath the hood her hair is twirled into a rams-horn bun on each side of her head, the occasional stray strands falling free beside her face. More notably, each step is accompanied by the soft jingle of bells that hide somewhere under her cloak; they mark her path more than her feet do, calling out her coming and going. To those awaiting rescue in the ruins, they are the sound of hope. In one hand she carries a thin shepherd’s hook made of rowan wood, towering two feet over her head, and in the other a carved stone suspended from from a fine chain. The pendant swings in slow circles where it dangles, guiding her to her quarry.

That would be, of course, the ruins. She isn’t psychic, after all, how could she know anyone was there in need of her help? She has no way of knowing that a trio of adventuring youths are huddled together around their fallen friend. And if it were only that, they might have managed to move his unconscious body from the oddly intact maze recessed into the ground; unfortunately, shambling cadavers are most talented at falling into giant pits and getting stuck. The natural turn of events when one is incautious and bites off more than they can chew is being cornered and vastly outnumbered.

The healer of their group is desperately casting every counter-curse he can on their knocked-out shield-bearer. Sweat drips from his face as mumbled half-forgotten prayers tumble out between his lips, the stress of the situation and the heat of unskillfully cast light magic pushing him ever closer to the edge of delirium. He doesn’t know enough to fix this. It is a common truth. Even so, he is the only one that can do anything for the other man at all.

The others, a mage and a swordsman, stand guard. They try to pick off the skeletons and zombies that stumble towards them. There are too many. The only reason they haven’t all died already is because the corridors of the maze have prevented more than two or three undead from approaching at once. But this is a war of attrition, and the dead have no need of rest or care for their fallen. The stream of them feels endless, dozens in view and countless dragging themselves out of distant corners at the sound of a mob forming. In truth these sorts of low level undead are easy to deal with, when there are only a few. They are not particularly strong or smart, their attacks amount mostly to flailing and biting, they act without intentional stealth and with no strategy to speak of.

They may not be the most well-seasoned adventurers around, but with some planing they too could have wiped out this gathering legion. They could have won. They did not have to die here, and they all knew it, but they would die. For their recklessness, as so many do, they would die. Would have, if not for the arrival of a young woman in a ratty beige cloak and worn leather boots. And what an arrival it was!

Vaulting overhead by way of her shepherd’s hook, she overshot the group slightly and landed among the undead. For a moment, even their hearts ceased to move as the impact of her landing seemed to occur in slow motion and drive a ring of dust outwards. If the hood had not fallen back to reveal a human face, they may have feared that she was a wraith of some sort for the way that her cloak fluttered against gravity. She held her crouched position, the unnerving tensing of a predator about to strike. It didn’t take her keen pale yellow eyes long to assess the state of things, the skeletons were much slower.

Between one breath and the next she shot forward, hook swinging out to catch the nearest of the monsters and launch it in an arc towards its cohorts. Its bones split apart on contact, held together by only the weakest of ambient magics, in the absence of flesh or half decayed ligaments like some of the less desiccated corpses. The dull clattering of several other lost bones echoed off the stone walls, but this alone would only delay them until they reassembled themselves. Regardless, she continued knocking them together into a growing pile of bones and tangling mangled zombies. Soon the pile was taller than the walls of the maze, which were already nearly fifteen feet.

The trio watched on in disbelief as the cloaked woman took on the seemly endless swarm of undead like it was simply a casual afternoon activity to her. Perhaps it was, with the almost careless way she drew magic runes into the air and summoned rain of all things. It soaked the bodies she had gathered, absorbing into dry exposed bones and flakey tissues. To what ends? They couldn’t say, none of them had ever heard of water being effective against the undead. However, they didn’t have to wait long for the answer as she proceeded to pull a book out and chant a blessing; the visible water glowed, infusing with a purification spell. She had transformed the rain into holy water.

As the last word trailed from her mouth the gathered corpses began to disappear as if they were dissolving, or perhaps sublimating, into the air.

In mere minutes she had cleared away more than three dozen undead, and still moved to clear out the remainder in the immediate area without pause. There was something cat-like in the nonchalance with which she sprang from the ground up to the top of the walls and down again, each time relying on her hook to push herself up or soften her landing. The steady rhythm of her bells continued long after she was out of sight, bouncing around the bowl the maze was built into. Groans of the dead joined the gentle percussion to form a rhapsody mid-battle, the last song they would feel vibrating through their bones before being exorcised.

Her movements acted as a parody of dance, wide sweeps and fast turns flaring the edges of her cloak, but only the undead were within sight to witness it. They could not appreciate the beauty of her leg striking out to kick a rare armored skeleton in the chest plate and send it skidding backwards through the crowd. She winced briefly at the horrible sound metal scraping against stone produced.

The heart of the maze welcomed her by offering up even more monsters for her to take out. Now with the ability to surround her, they could almost be considered a threat. If she were less experienced, and maybe a little inebriated, poisoned, perhaps. Anything can happen when at the mercy of the ruins and their morally ambiguous experimental enchantments. However, the center of this maze didn’t appear to have any special effects or treasures; they either never existed or had already been triggered by the wandering skeletons. Not that it would have changed what must be done.

Dodging between the nearest bodies into the very center, she planted the tip of her staff in the ground and used it to support herself as she jumped and kicked off from one undead to the next. Bouncing between them as she swung from the curve of her hook, she quickly bashed the remaining monsters apart and neutralized them. Each bound crushed brittle sternums and snapped skulls from spines; these older ones had gone much longer without feeding than the ones closer to the edges of maze. None of them had so much as a scrap of papery tissue left to flake off and were wearing the pure white hue of sun-bleached bone. They were practically dust already, exorcising them wouldn’t require purification. She could simply break them and be done with it.

Except, they wouldn’t find any peace like that.

And really, it was the least she could spare them.

For all the unknowns about why so many dead seem to rise again on the continent Fraxinus calls home, there is one truth everyone knows: the dead don’t come back entirely of their own volition. They are dragged to it; summoned from the veil by powers unseen. Called forth into a purgatorial existence as a mockery of life and then abandoned. A desecration of the spirit as well as the body.

With only the rain as a witness, she whispers a breathless blessing and saves more than just the living.