The door felt like there was a troll on the other end of it. Not that I’d ever actually felt a troll’s strength, mind, my only experience of the fuckers was on the occasional hunt. Nice and safe from the back of a horse and the other end of a foot-long spear head and a cubit-wide crossguard. If I’d ever pitted my own muscles against theirs, though, I’d have been better prepared for the feeling of holding that door.

  We stayed there grunting and struggling for long seconds, each moment certain the door would be forced in and our deaths brought upon us. Had I thought about it, I’d have known better. The struggle was maintained when Vara and Laryck fought it without me, and my own efforts had likely brought half again the strength to our side of the contest. There was no risk of us losing this contest, not quickly. Not until our human bodies had tired and their undead flesh had not.

  I didn’t think about it then, but Vara did. And she was nice and clever about what she did knowing that.

  “Hold them for me!” She barked, then plucked herself away from the door before I could so much as call her a mad bitch. My instinct was to flee of course, but I could feel the press of undead strength grow in her absence and knew I’d be letting them pass if I extricated my own limbs from the effort of pinning them.

  “Fucking bitch!” I snapped, even as I felt my arms weaken and my enemy’s not. The door was starting to inch open now, one deathly finger-span after another. How many seconds did I have before rotting death barged its way in and started hacking me apart? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

  “Out of the way!” I risked a glance back to see that Vara hadn’t just left, she was dragging Will. Not well, mind, because though the boy was barely five feet tall he was also fat as a pig and probably weighed fifteen stone or more. Vara surprised me just by managing to move him the five or so feet she did. I jumped aside, shoving against the door with boots rather than arms to make the most of the awkward position, and watched the wounded boy left slumped against it.

  It wasn’t perfect, his deadweight alone, though well propped for leverage against the door, was a poor substitute for all our strength combined. The undead managed to widen the door enough for limbs to pry their way through, hands twisting and grasping or thrusting with knives to aimlessly stab at any living flesh they thought might be on our side of the wood.

  They didn’t find any, not even Will’s given how carefully Vara had placed him. But they did give us a nice chance to turn the tables a bit.

  My sword came down hard on one of the undead’s wrists, a heavy chopping motion that carried every bit of my strength and rage behind it. In my head, it was quite a manly exertion. Probably, I looked ridiculous. Crying, sweating, wide-eyed and hacking away at an enemy who couldn’t even see me. Still felt good watching steel bite down to the bone though, especially when a second hit took the hand off entirely.

  “Ha! Yes! Fuck you! Little bastard shit fuck!” I kicked a protruding foot poking out the bottom corner of the door, grinning as I felt the bones shiver under my heel. Now this was the sort of fight I was made for—nice and fair. Fairer for me than for the enemy, of course. “Come and get me if you can!” I jumped back for a second as it looked like the door was opening wider, then got stuck in again when it didn’t.

  Eventually the undead retreated. I didn’t understand it then, but have since learned that all but the most primitive of reanimates are able to do that sort of thing—figure out basic facts about how they can best leverage their actions to kill the most humans. Just as they will use a hammer instead of their fists, they will avoid destruction if it doesn’t bring the chance for more killing.

  “I can’t believe we survived that.” It was Laryck gasping, and panting to boot. Big as he was, the dullard had nothing near my stamina. His muscles were broad and dense, made for hauling sacks of grain more than darting around on light feet. Even if I never trained more than an hour a week with my sword, that measly duelist’s dedication still prepared me more for fights like this.

  “I can.” I grinned wider, mainly out of my frayed nerves. I would learn after this that I had a habit of grinning when scared, or nervous. It would haunt me till the end of my days, because people would never quite stop taking those grins as a sign that I somehow relished the danger constantly thrown at me by bad luck and, I could only assume, several of God’s most vindictive angels.

  The looks I got from it then were actually disconcerting enough to intensify the grin, even as I wiped and sheathed my weapon. Fortunately, all eyes soon turned back to the still-wimpering Will.

  “Is…He going to be okay?” I heard my own voice croaking as I asked it.

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  “Clear me some space!” Vara’s voice suddenly sounded a great deal heavier than it usually did, practically barging Laryck and I aside as she knelt down beside the lad. We were silent as the grave watching her work, scraping on her knees and carefully rolling up his shirt. None of us spoke—we barely even breathed.

  “He’ll live.” Vara said at last, after tearing off a strip from her own shirt—exposing rather more of her belly than polite society would have approved of—and using it to deftly bind the boy. She’d had to fashion it into two separate lengths of fabric to loop them around his fat waist, but managed in the end. I found myself surprised and impressed in equal measure by her dexterity.

  “That was amazing.” Laryck gasped.

  “It was alright.” I shrugged. He frowned at me.

  “I meant you, Kyvaine, what you did—it was blood amazing!”

  I hesitated at that, and decided that hiding my surprise was probably the best move for now.

  “As I said, it was alright. I did what was necessary.”

  This would haunt me in later years, too. Anyway we continued down the dungeon because we did not, franky, have much choice in the matter. At our backs were a half-dozen undead with an ambiguous number of limbs and a great many spears. At our front was either a way out or, at worst, more undead. Or so we thought.

  Our torches had withstood the fight, fortunately, though Will was unable to carry one as he had before. Actually, he was unable to carry himself even. Laryck was forced to hold the boy with a long arm under both of his, half-dragging the boy around behind us as we ventured deeper.

  It slowed us, as did the fatigue. We hadn’t felt it in the moment, hadn’t felt much of anything, but that brief explosion of maddened violence had exhausted us more than might a five mile walk. I would learn later in my years to expect this effect, and to ignore it. I’d have more energy again, if I needed it.

  As we deepened our descent, the warmth of our torches started to become more and more of a treasure. It’s cold underground, oftentimes. Depending on where you are, of course, and how deep you go. Minus the great magma pools that kept certain depths toasty, that dungeon got chillier as we went down.

  “What is that damned cold?” Laryck growled, seeming to do as many men did and turn his fear into anger. Will trembled against him, though I suspect the spasms came more from his wound than our surrounding temperature.

  “I don’t know.” I replied, figuring his question needed some sort of response. “But I doubt it’s anything good.”

  I didn’t actually doubt that, or believe it. I just thought pessimism would sound more heroic than optimism. Fool that I was, it pretty much ate away at Laryck’s remaining nerves until we came down to the latest chamber. This one we entered through a staircase cut halfway into its bowels, and the scale of it was such that our puny torchlight didn’t reach any of its far walls.

  “Look at the floors!” Vara whispered, as we headed farther down. The tiles were different, cleaner here. And patterned. I’d never seen stonework quite like it, so unlike the grungy brickwork from farther above. What struck me next was the air—it smelled clean. Unnaturally so, devoid of any scent at all.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Laryck was asking me of course, it was my family who did most of Sheppleberry’s interaction with the outside world. I could only shake my head.

  “Never even heard of it.” I murmured, leaning down to examine the patterns more closely. These tiles were clean too, as if the dirt and dust were somehow scared to get on them.

  “I thought your family dealt with all sorts.” Vara noted, wryly. “Weren’t you talking about rooting an elf woman, the other month?”

  I had, as a fact, but it had all been bullshit. Of course I couldn’t just admit to that—not even if it meant heightening my odds of living through this dungeon. I was male you see.

  “That’s different from this and you know it.” I grumbled, hesitating, then heading farther down. It wasn’t like we had much choice, the undead at our backs meant there was no turning around and this was the only way forwards. Our only other option was to wait, and hope we didn’t have anything nasty stumbling onto us anyway. So we descended.

  The tiles remained unchanged, and the darkness seemed to thicken around us. I felt it squeezing me, whispering silent promises of death and pain right into my mind. This was what a more seasoned adventurer would describe as “ridiculous paranoia”, a common occurrence when one is surrounded by pitch black on all sides with only a flickering torch for light. I didn’t know that at the time though.

  “We should leave.” Laryck whispered, and I glared at him.

  “We are leaving, this is our only way out.” I said it confidently enough to persuade him, but not myself. It was all I could do not to audible tremble. Was I going to die here? I thought so, at the time. But then I spent so much of my life thinking so back then.

  My musings on mortality were, fortunately, interrupted as we finally came to something breaking up the darkness ahead. It was a wall. No surprise there, however big the chamber was there had to have been walls somewhere. This one was ridiculously tall, too tall for us to see the top, and carved into its surface was a curious set of symbols quite unlike anything I’d seen before.

  It hurt just to look at it, made my head throb as if from a hangover. Looking around I saw Vara and Laryck wincing away from the markings, too, blinking and gasping under just the same mental anguish as me.

  “What…What is that?” Vara growled, trembling suddenly. It felt strangely unnerving to see her so unnerved.

  But I barely heard her, because pounding in my head now was a new thought. An irresistible one. Quite without meaning to, without even really knowing I was doing it, I reached out for the surface of the stone carving. I heard Vara call out a warning as my fingertips brushed the smooth rock, then a sudden connection struck my mind.

  Everything went dark for a moment. Then I saw more than I ever had with bare eyes.