The tunnel we now walked through was barely any different from the one that we had entered. It was all blank bricks and worn stone, with nothing to really signify our progress as we walked. Unlike before, there didn’t even seem to be branching paths in this one, so it was impossible to tell how far we walked.

  We made our way through the tunnels in uneasy chatter. Jenny and Neil were complaining about a lot of things, including a number of Guild regulations and each other. I couldn’t tell how Jenny felt, but I was pretty sure that Neil wasn’t a fan of her.

  Meanwhile, Cassie and I were doing our best at absently chatting. Despite our earlier talk I still felt a little confused about where we stood, and I could tell that for all her effort to disguise it she did too.

  “So,” she started. “That was a lot.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, before falling into an uneasy hesitant silence.

  She sighed and tried again. “What, uh. What do you think he was trying to do down here?”

  I shrugged, glancing at her but not quite meeting her eyes. “Not sure. I mean, he was a necromancer, right? He must have some undead around here somewhere.”

  “Probably. I wonder where, though?”

  “Right here, probably,” Jenny interrupted. I looked up to see that our path had finally changed, opening up into a second room. This one wasn’t as big as the main room we had found Matthais in, but it was still fairly large. However, it definitely wasn’t suitable for living habitation.

  Down the centre of the room ran a path, which was completely clear of decoration save for three flickering lamps, each of which were clearly magical. They cast flickering green light across the rest of the room.

  Surrounding this central pathway were two huge enclosures, one on each side, which collectively spanned the whole room. Each of those cages was filled with what had to be hundreds of twisted corpses.

  All of them clearly used to be regular humans, but whatever the necromancer had twisted them into was definitely not. Their arms were long and wiry, tipped with small nails that nonetheless looked deadly sharp. Their legs, on the other hand, were stubby and small, their proportions almost comical on such disgusting looking monsters.

  Their heads were the worst, though. Each of the corpses had been disfigured to some extent, although the damage seemed to concentrate around the jaw. Most of them seemed to have loose lower jaws, with long, needle-like teeth sprouting in and around the mouth in a failed mockery of a predator’s jaw.

  “Ghouls,” Jenny announced cheerily. “We’re safe. This is important though, so pay attention, disciples of mine.”

  Neil turned to her with gritted teeth. “We are standing in a mass grave, necromancer. You may have no respect for the dead, but you could at least feign it.”

  Jenny smirked and raised her hands in mock submission. “Alright, alright. What are you, a priest?. I’ll explain why this is important after, shall I, Reverend?”

  Neil scoffed and stalked onward, the rest of us following in tow. It was strange to think, but I almost wished that the ghouls would come alive and swarm us, if just to clear the tense atmosphere. We said nothing as we passed through the room, and there was little here to see besides death.

  Fortunately it didn’t take long for us to clear the room and make it to the other side, where yet more blank tunnel awaited us, although this time it was at a slight incline and definitely seemed newer. Unfortunately, the atmosphere continued to haunt us even after we left.

  Jenny clapped her hands, bringing our collective attention to her as we trudged onwards. “Alright, class. We have stumbled upon what we in the business call a clue. Which of you can tell me what was important about those ghouls?”

  We remained quiet for a moment more before Cassie spoke up. “There was like two hundred of them?”

  Jenny shook her head. “Nope! Next?”

  I decided to take a stab at it. “They were dead? Like, dead again?”

  Jenny’s performative smile twisted into an equally performative frown. “Still wrong. Their necromancer was dead, of course they lost function. Do you guys know nothing? How about you, Reverend?”

  Neil said nothing, simply staring ahead and marched onwards into the gloom. Aside from Jenny all of us had been affected by the ghoul enclosure, but it was obvious that he had been hit the hardest.

  “...Alright, nothing from you either. I guess I really do have to spell out everything for you lot, huh?” Jenny stage whispered. “Remember what we found in that jar? The vampire tongue?”

  Cassie and I nodded, and I got an inkling of where this was going. I was pretty sure that ghouls tended to be linked to vampires, but I couldn’t remember the relation.

  “Well, ghouls are also related to vampires.” I mentally congratulated myself for remembering that piece of knowledge. “Specifically, ghouls are what happens when someone afflicted with vampirism dies before they can turn properly.”

  “So it’s just another link to vampires?” Cassie clarified.

  Jenny waggled a finger at her, like a school teacher disciplining a student. “Not ‘just’, dear storm mage-”

  “My name’s Cassie.”

  “-this is important for how our dead friend was going to help with whatever his boss was planning. See, ghouls don’t share the same bond with their sire that properly turned vampires do, but they also don’t share the aversion to sunlight either. Makes them great daytime forces if you can control them. Hence, necromancer.” She gestured vaguely towards the way we had come.

  “So what, you think they want to attack somewhere? Like Meria?” I asked. This was seeming pretty concerning.

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  Jenny shrugged, a broad grin on her face. “No idea! Maybe there’s some underground undead war going on and they needed footsoldiers, maybe they just really hate the living. Isn’t not knowing so much more interesting?”

  “Not if it gets everyone killed,” I said flatly.

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Ugh. For how interesting you are, you really are quite boring.”

  I didn’t have a response to that. It wasn’t often you had people arguing for murderous conspiracies, after all.

  We soon came to a stop at the end of the tunnel, which was blocked by another door not unlike the one in the ritual chamber. It was made of a thick looking steel, with a small handle with a lock in it and a single magical lantern lighting it.

  “Great. I guess we’re stuck here then,” I said. We hadn’t been able to get through the one in the main chamber, so I doubted we would make it through this one.

  “No we aren’t,” Jenny retorted, her voice full of confidence. She moved to the front of the group and examined the door closely. Then she pressed a hand to the lock, muttered a few words and pushed.

  The door swung open like it had never even been closed, and I gaped at her. “You could have done that the whole time?”

  Jenny gave me a confused look. “No? Why would I have let everyone waste time hitting the other door if I could have opened it?”

  “Because you were whining about wanting to leave, and opening that door would have had us staying longer?”

  “That seems exactly like something you would do,” Cassie chimed in.

  Jenny stared at me for a moment and snorted in amusement. “True, I would do that. No, this door wasn’t enchanted. Gods know why.”

  “We’re close to the surface,” Neil spoke for the first time in a while. “An enchantment as heavy as the one on the inner door would have been noticed.”

  Jenny shrugged. “There you go. It would have been noticed. Good?”

  “Hey, why do you know an unlocking spell anyway?”

  “I moonlight as a cat burglar," she said flatly. "Now can we actually go through the door already? If we’re close to the surface then we’re almost out of here.” I had absolutely no idea if she was being serious or not, so I decided to simply not comment.

  Without a further word she strode confidently through the doorway like she expected us all to simply follow after her without comment. She was right, but still.

  After a quick turn we found a stone staircase which spiralled up a cylindrical tunnel. Once we crested those stairs we found another door, although this one was wooden rather than metal and it wasn’t even locked, pulling open easily to reveal a remarkably regular looking basement.

  “I guess we know how he got in and out now,” Cassie remarked. “Just a regular house. Kind of disappointing, honestly.”

  “I guess he thought a huge gothic manor would have been too obvious of a place to hide the entrance to his evil lair,” Jenny remarked. “I can’t think why.”

  We quickly looked around the basement, but there wasn’t really anything laying around that looked important so we moved on. The people the Guild would send when they found out about it could look here too, it would be fine.

  Climbing the rickety wooden stairs out of the basement, we soon found ourselves in what looked to be a perfectly regular residence, with dusty bookshelves and framed paintings and unwashed dishes. The only things that seemed out of place was the corpse of the old man that was lying in a comfortable looking armchair.

  Jenny hopped over to him and looked him over. Neil grumbled when she rifled through his pockets but didn’t speak up. He almost did when she sniffed him, but he just about held his tongue.

  “Judging by the sulphur smell and lack of decomposition, that right there was a Gheist. Probably. He might have just been an old man who was invested in demon summoning, willing to work with necromancers and suffering from a weak heart with a strong sense of timing, but that seems pretty convoluted,” Jenny explained.

  “And a Gheist is…?” I asked.

  Jenny grinned. “Lesser Demon. They like to possess corpses because they don’t have physical forms of their own. Not bad as a deterrent, honestly. It was probably pretending to be this old dead guy in return for getting his body to use.”

  That explanation had Neil grimacing. “What?” I asked when I noticed his displeasure.

  “Demonic involvement is bad news. Means we probably have to get Dawn in on this.” He made a face like he’d just swallowed a lemon.

  Jenny arched an eyebrow at him. “Could you be a bit more specific than ‘Dawn’? Do you know how many groups use the rising sun as a motif?”

  Neil scowled. “The Hunters of Dawn. They get involved with everything infernal, invited or not.”

  Jenny blanched. “Sorry, why is that a bad thing? I mean, With a name like that it sounds like they’ll be useful against vampires, right?” I asked.

  Neil shook his head. “The Hunters aren’t bad. They’re not too far from adventurers, albeit less riches and fame and more solemn duty. No, it’s their allies that are bad news. No less than three different branches of Purity worshippers fund the Hunters, and as such get involved with their cases.”

  “Ah,” I answered simply. Purity worshippers were a mixed bag, to say the least. A lot of the time they were fairly inoffensive folk, albeit particularly plain ones. The largest branch of Purity worship was the Heralds of the Untarnished Coin.

  Heralds varied a lot depending on their individual zeal, but they all held the belief that your every action needed a tangible purpose. They were known to frown on everything from theatre to recreational sex to volunteer work, since it all came down to the base idea that if you did something for no tangible gain or recompense, then you were introducing ‘impurities’. It sounded like a really boring way to live life to me, but I wasn't exactly an expert.

  Cassie’s mother was actually a Herald, albeit one of the less zealous kinds. Nevertheless, she still considered any number of perfectly reasonable things to be meaningless because they lacked tangible reward. It was part of the reason I was surprised that she had come to see our performance back when we had run it.

  Of course, Purity didn’t have a reputation for being the patron deity of boredom. Many of Purity’s worshippers took a more fire and brimstone approach to 'cleansing the impure'. For example the Church of Dawn’s Light, which actually contributed to Jenny’s complaint about the overuse of dawn as a motif, found anything that didn’t have human origins to be heretical. They were an extreme example, but unfortunately not the only one.

  If multiple groups of Purity’s flock were introduced to a situation, all that happened was that situation got more complicated and typically more heated. I was starting to see why Neil was unhappy.

  “...Maybe we could just not mention the Gheist. It was summoned by the necromancer, right? So it’s unlikely that infernal beings are a great risk here,” Cassie tried. She knew better than I did how worshippers of Purity could be, after all.

  Neil shook his head. “No. We’re bound to report truthfully. We don’t know the capabilities of the others involved in this situation, so we can’t know if this Gheist was summoned by another.”

  Jenny finally recovered her wits. “Right, well we’ve all had a grand old time, but I have places to be. Have fun dealing with the Revenant, see you!”

  She suddenly broke into a sprint, dashing through the room and into the visible hallway. Moments later I heard a bang that I assumed to be her opening and swiftly slamming the door. Moving over to the window I caught her high-tailing it around a street corner like she was being chased by a Demon Lord.

  “I guess she really doesn’t like Purity,” I remarked.

  Neil smiled for the first time since the room with the ghouls, although his expression was weary and a little strained. He had been walking on a wounded leg this whole time, so I suppose that made sense. “More like they don’t like her. Necromancer, remember?”

  I smirked. “I wonder how the Revenant will react to her trying to skip out on helping them?”

  “By fetching her, probably. Or killing her. We’ll have to see. Now, come on. We should go report this so the search team can get a move on that door. The faster the better.” Neil turned and made for the hallway that lead out into the street.

  “Wait, we?” Cassie asked. “Why can’t you do that?”

  Neil gave us a look. “You two are both adventurers now, this is part of the job. Besides, two more sets of eyes doesn’t hurt.”

  Cassie and I shared a despairing look, but we both eventually shuffled after Neil.

  This is going to be incredibly boring, isn't it?

  great for everyone.

  Extract from 'Hauntings And You: A Guide To The Undead'

  "A lot of people have a misconception about the undead. Specifically, they make the understandable mistake of assuming that just because it's someone's body, that means that it's them. This isn't the case. Unless whatever raised them has been tampering with souls, of course, but in that case you have bigger problems.

  No, what you're seeing shambling towards you isn't Great Aunt Mildred coming to tea, just with a few more holes and a few less teeth. No, that is, in all likelihood, a husk. A shell of a person, raised by a necromancer or by some conflux of magical phenomena for some purpose or another. That thing isn't Mildred anymore than the butterfly you saw after the funeral is. It's driven exclusively by the same thing that keeps all undead moving.

  Purpose.

  Of course, purpose doesn't do it alone. You also need a heap of magic and just as much skill to reanimate so much as a family pet, but purpose is necessary. Now, it's also important what purpose a given undead has. A famous example is that of the Revenant. When created naturally their purpose will be a mish-mash of things related to the lives they used to lead, often torn from what fragments of memory they still have. When these tasks are completed, a wild revenant will simply dissipate, since it no longer has a purpose holding its fraying gestalt soul together.

  On the other hand, a Revenant that is raised by a necromancer will bring these dissonant fragments into harmony, giving that Revenant the same purpose as all raised undead: serve their necromancer. If done competently, this provides the necromancer with a powerful servant, one that has the knowledge of two dozen or more lives at their disposal and full loyalty to their creator. If done poorly, this provides the necromancer with a calamity waiting to happen, as parts of the Revenant's soul fail to be brought into the fold and tear at the whole, driving the entire thing utterly mad, leaving a (probably) murderous husk with massive power and no yoke.

  [Disclaimer: This volume does not condone the raising of Revenants, for both moral and legal reasons. If you are reading this volume looking for advice on raising a Revenant, please look elsewhere.]

  Most lesser undead, such as zombies and poltergeists, are only capable of maintaining their form with the help of a necromancer. While they can occur naturally, a zombie will decay to the point of immobility far faster than the average corpse, due to the wear and tear, while more spiritual undead often lack the ability to remain in one piece. Without a true soul to bind them together, most will simply fade into nothingness as they are torn apart by the passage of ambient mana, ectoplasm dissipating back into pure magic.

  Now, this is where the distinction between lesser and greater undead becomes important. To be classified as a greater undead, they must be capable of both existing without outside support and capable of assigning their own purpose, removing the possibility of true death via task completion. As the ability to assign their own purpose requires the presence of a true, functional soul, there are only three known types of greater undead.

  The first, and most romanticised, is the vampire. Often seen as somewhere between a charming villain and a lovable monster, the vampire is one of the most elusive types of undead as they are capable of imitating the living to a remarkable degree when fed. The disease of vampirism, in part, attaches itself to the soul of the host, binding it and the material form together. This results in the enhanced physical and mental abilities of the vampire when compared to the average mortal, while also being the root cause of the need for blood, since the vampire now requires consistent life essence to prevent the degradation of their soul. When going unfed or otherwise stripped of their lifeforce, the vampire will show far more typical signs of undeath than when they are fully fed, during which time they will be almost indistinguishable from the living by material sight, save for the fangs and lack of a heartbeat.

  The second type of greater undead is the Wight. A Wight is, in essence, a Revenant born of a single soul. When a soul is resilient enough to remain largely whole upon death, they will sometimes manage to repossess their own body and raise themselves as a Wight. The abilities of a Wight vary from individual to individual, but each is often very powerful, or at least incredibly fortunate. They are incredibly rare, but are known to possess many of the more beneficial abilities of corporeal lesser undead, such as the lack of a pain response and a resistance to non-specialised mind magic, alongside the ability to set their own purpose and a preternatural resistance to decay, both mundane and magical. Raised Wights are incredibly rare, but have been known to act as commanders to large forces of raised undead, as they maintain their former intelligence and personalities, like all greater undead.

  The third type of greater undead, and frequently claimed to be the most fearsome, is the lich. The lich is somewhat similar to the second entry on the list, but there are a number of key differences. Firstly, lichdom must be achieved voluntarily. It requires the removal and subsequent external storage of the soul, the various different rituals discovered capable of such a feat each have the requirement that it be performed on a subject that truly wishes for undeath. It also requires upkeep, much like vampirism, but rather than blood/lifeforce it requires a supplementing diet of either mana or souls, depending on how it was achieved. Liches are known as formidable spellcasters, as the ritual essentially turns their undead bodies into arcane batteries as a side effect of keeping them cognisant. The most well-known ability of the lich, the ability to reform at a phylactery, is also a reason for this reputation, as while it is a lesser known ability liches can channel magic through their phylactery independently from their own body. A lich cannot be raised in service to another, as their very existence requires a total dominion over the self."

  Extract End

  lot of notes about undead lore. Like, more than could be reasonably relevant in this story. I actually don't remember if I've done an ET on undead lore already, but either way I hope this was as fun to read as it was to write. ;D

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