Dead in the Water
The minute was still running.
Five of them were gone — driven back into the dark by whatever Ubys had called down from the Raven Queen. The sixth had walked away on its own terms, and you knew, standing in the hallway with the doors holding and Audrey's light behind you, that it wouldn't last. A minute. Maybe less. The hunger doesn't rest.
So you moved.
Ubys went first, through the door the speaker had vanished into. The room beyond was not empty — two of them were pressed against the far wall, unable to advance, still caught in the pull of the divine command. He hit one with a shaft of light that left it shimmering — outlined in gold like a target someone had painted in the dark. The spectral weapon was still floating. He used that too.
Moist came in behind him, throwing fire. Both shots found the same mark.
Crowley pulled himself off the floor, opened the door he'd been propped against, and stepped into the fight like he'd planned it that way.
There was a woman in one of them.
You could tell — the way she moved, even now, some echo of how she'd moved before this place got her. She came for Crowley with her claws and her teeth and he made the save that mattered. Then she ran. She had the trick of it: disengage, retreat, vanish into the water room at the back of the tomb before you could pin her.
Ubys spider-walked up the wall to get around another — the Slippers of Spider Climb, a gift he'd forgotten he had until it mattered — and threw sacred flame. Two radiant damage. The Raven Queen's light is not his element. But the cold is.
The one that tried to bite him made the last mistake it would ever make.
Armor of Agathys. Fifteen cold returned for the trouble of touching him. A frozen shape in the dark where a creature had been.
One down.
The water room was at the back — half the tomb's lower level, ankle-to-waist in black stagnant water that smelled of old stone and something older. Two of the turned spawn were cowering in the far corner, unable to advance, the divine command still holding. The woman from the hall was there too.
Crowley used his cape. Sixty feet, no warning, stepping out of the air on the other side of the room with his sword already moving. The sigil on her blazed. He hit once and she went down.
Two down.
KeYs waded in.
She'd been carrying Sir Titus's sword since the tower in Leilon — pulled it out of the wall after a devil was banished, swore to keep it safe until she could return it. She hadn't drawn it against undead before. Not in earnest.
She drew it now.
Plus two, plus radiant, plus more radiant. The blade caught the dark and held it. And when it struck one of the cowering spawn and the creature crumpled, KeYs felt the sword twist in her grip — not fighting her, not warning her. Eager. Like it knew where it was.
Three down.
The last two fought back.
The blood-drunk one went for Crowley again — hard, this time, the bite finding him where the others hadn't. He took it. Stayed standing. Six hit points and a jawline and whatever it is that keeps Crowley Bakerson standing when he probably shouldn't be.
Moist threw fire. Ubys put his blade where it needed to go. Three of you against one, in the water, in the dark.
KeYs walked over and finished it.
Six down. All six.
The water settled. Audrey's light reached the room in yellow-white spills. You stood in silence for a moment that felt earned.
Then Ubys and KeYs looked at the bodies.
There were names stitched into the tunics. Knights of Vindictus standard issue — marked for laundry, for roll call, for the chaplain who would never come looking for these six. You recognized the cut of the cloth. They'd been part of the column that rode out of Leilon ahead of you — faces you'd registered and forgotten, the way you forget faces in a crowd.
They'd been here a week.
Whatever the Tomb does to people, it does it fast.
The camp they'd made was still mostly intact — bedrolls, waxed cloaks, food that hadn't gone bad, armor they'd shed when they changed. Among the personal effects: a charcoal-gray cloak with a silver eye clasp, lightly enchanted to hold off the cold. A heavy kite shield engraved with the three pillars — light, justice, vengeance — that had been propped up as a portable shrine.
And a journal.
Ink-stained, damp at the corners. Whoever had kept it had been following orders — following names. Two names, repeated in entries that grew shorter and shorter as the camp got further from the surface:
Ser Draven Ravenspire. Ser Seraphona Shadowbane.
They'd led the chapter in. Neither name was on a tunic among the dead.
Thirteen unaccounted for. Stairs going down.
You held the first level of the Tomb of Orcus. The altar at the back of the water room sat half-submerged, waiting. The dark below the stairs waited too.
You still needed a rest.
Next session: whatever came before you is still somewhere below.