The Hunger Finds You
The door was barely ajar.
That was all it took. A hand came through the gap — grey skin, luminous at the edges, moving faster than anything dead should move — and took Dhuxtyn. Then the dark gave up two more, dragging Crowley sideways into a room you hadn't seen yet. Then two more from behind, coming down the way you'd entered.
Six of them. All at once.
You recognized the cloth. Shredded, stained, barely holding together — but it had been livery once. The tunics of the Knights of Vindictus. The Leilon chapter had come here ahead of you, and whatever they'd found had made them into this.
Ubys went after Crowley.
KeYs held the intersection, Falkor at her back, the two of them standing between the rear pair and everyone else. Moist and Lessie went for Dhuxtyn. Except Dhuxtyn couldn't see any of it — his curse saw to that — and by the time Lessie got to him he was already being dragged into a side passage that got narrower and darker with every yard.
There was no clean line. There was no plan. Three rooms, three fights, the hallway going black beyond Audrey's pixie-glow, and the whole party scattered across the width of it.
Falkor's breath lit the hallway like a lightning strike. The two vampires at the rear took the blast — one full, one half — and kept coming. Not vulnerable. You found that out the hard way.
They found KeYs first. Claws, then the bite. You heard her curse. You heard Falkor.
In the side room, they had Crowley pinned and moving. Ubys came in with blade and spectral weapon both, cutting at the grip, and one of them froze — Hold Person, paralyzed mid-step — but the other didn't. It kept walking, Crowley dragging on the floor behind it, until Ubys burned one of the Raven Queen's blessings and tore them both out of there. He landed in the hallway with Crowley's unconscious weight in his arms.
Cold light snapped around him. Anything that touched him now would regret it.
In the other room, Moist threw fire until the floor erupted into jagged stone around Lessie's captor. Lessie woke up mid-drag, stood up, hit the one holding Dhuxtyn hard enough to feel it, and then grabbed Dhuxtyn by the leg and ran.
She truck-sticked Moist through the doorway.
Slammed the door behind her.
They pounded on it from the other side. The door held.
Ubys pushed through to the front of the line — past KeYs, past Falkor, into the narrowest part of the hallway — and raised his holy symbol. The Raven Queen does not look kindly on those who hunger after souls that are not hers to take.
Turn Undead.
The corridor filled with white light. Five of the six went down — not destroyed, but broken, driven backward by something older than their hunger. They ran. You could hear them scattering into the dark ahead.
The sixth one didn't run.
It stopped. It looked at you.
"You cannot stop the hunger," it said. "It will find you."
Then it was gone. A door closed somewhere deep inside the Tomb, and the silence came back.
Audrey came through from wherever she'd been hiding when it started. Her light came first, then her face — wide-eyed and pale even for a pixie.
"Did we kill anything?"
No. Not one.
The Tomb's first level was yours for now. The hallway. The closed doors. Crowley unconscious in the corner. Dhuxtyn coming around with no idea how long he'd been out. KeYs and Falkor both marked where the necrotic had reduced what they could take.
"I think we need a strategy this time," Lessie said.
The dark had opinions about that too. You could feel them, deeper in, waiting for the minute to run out and the hunger to come back.
Next session: the vampires are regrouping too.