Reluctant Necromancer

My trolls were a little worse for wear after the orc fiasco. But they were still mobile, so we took them along with us. They’d also proven themselves to be pretty good scouts. The orcs were a complete write off unfortunately. I wondered if their healing abilities would have translated to their undeath. Though I wasn’t sure there was a way to kill them that didn’t leave them virtually useless to me.

There was no useful curtain of light leading us away from the confrontation we’d just completed. I still wasn’t sure if we were even within the dungeon within a dungeon that temple seemed to be or if we were back in the original dungeon. If I thought about it too much I felt like I was being inceptioned and got a headache.

So after getting cleaned up we all shuffled together and set off through the trees again. By the time we set off the sounds of the jungle had returned. We marched for over half an hour without anything to break up the monotony.

Mara called a halt and had everyone sit down and relax for a few minutes. Something about vigilance fatigue or something I don’t know. I did know that I was glad I wasn’t in Ashley’s shoes. Literally. She was still breaking in the boots and I think she’d developed a few blisters. She’d started limping after the orcs.

I waved to get Oliver’s attention and nodded in her direction. He tilted his head in question and I pointed down to my own feet. Oliver smiled and stood up to check on Ashley. I nodded my head in thanks and looked away. I wasn’t sure how she’d take to someone looking out for her like that. I knew I could be grumpy about stuff like that. It would only be after the fact that I’d appreciate the thoughtfulness of the gesture.

A few minutes later Ashley nudged me with her foot as she settled down close to me. “Thanks,” she murmured in my ear. “I keep forgetting he can take care of stuff like that for us. You know?”

“So, you’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

“I’d be mad if you sent him to me without me asking,” I muttered embarrassedly.

She rocked into my shoulder. “I know. But I like that you were looking out for me.” She leaned over and pressed a kiss to my cheek. I felt warmth from her lips spread across my face and knew I was blushing. She giggled lightly before returning her attention out into the jungle around us.

Ugh. She was going to either soften me up or kill me before everything was said and done. I could already feel the urge to be a grumpy bitch being shackled in favor of being understanding and shit. At least when it came to her. It sucked! I could still be a grumpy bitch to the others though. So there was something.

Honestly this was a first for me. I’d dated before, I wasn’t some nun or anything. But I usually went for fellow grumps. Someone to complain about things with, not someone to make me see the other side of things. Ashley though made me want to try and be better. To be nicer.

Not all the time. She wasn’t trying to change me. That I would have fought against tooth and nail and felt justified in hating her for. No, Ashley just patiently pointed out the good in situations and other people until I started seeing the same thing without her explicit input. It was super annoying and I wanted to hate her for it, but I think it was having the opposite effect on me. If anything I was beginning to fall for her. I felt like a sapphic stereotype. Falling for the girl and moving in with her within days of a first date. Ugh. I hated girls like that. I never got it before now.

“Alright, time to keep going,” Mara called out quietly. With a grumble we all stood up and crawled back into our little formation and set off once more.

As we continued through the jungle it began to change around us. At first it was a scent. There was the smell of smoke and wood fire in the air. Then other changes began to become apparent. Some of the sounds we’d been hearing died out. There were fewer animal noises in general. Then we began to come across evidence of a great big fire. There were trees with leaves burnt around the edges, then bushes with entire burned chunks missing, the trees with one or more sides burnt and charred. Then we started running into the actually burned down forest.

Suddenly we were in a grove of blackened matchstick trees. Scorched, blackened earth. No underbrush to be seen. Just rows upon rows of charred, broken trees rising from the earth like jagged knives pointed angrily at the sky. Ash puffed up with each step.

I looked around in confusion. Was this intrinsic to this dungeon? Everything was stone cold. There was no residual heat from a fire or even embers left to bank. We couldn’t have been the cause of this. We hadn’t been here long enough for a fire to burn out and cool down completely. Not something of this scale.

“Wow. What do you think happened?” John asked from the front.

“I don’t know. It’s weird though, right?” I asked in return.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, why would a dungeon burn down its own jungle?”

“Why does a dungeon need a jungle at all,” Mara inserted. “If we head down this rabbit hole we’ll all end up crazier on the other side.”

“Just…” I waved my arm to encompass everything around us.

Ashley shrugged, “Aesthetics?”

“Exactly,” Mara’s voice rose. “It’s just flavoring. Let’s keep going.”

So we kept marching through the burned out landscape. Burnt and broken trees poked out of the ground all around us as we continued onward. The ground crunched under our feet. The smell of smoke hung heavy in the air.

After a while the husks of trees no longer stood up. They were broken into large pieces and chunks littering the ground all around us. Going forward became more involved as we had to weave around or climb over fallen, burnt out tree trunk pieces.

The ground no longer crunched under foot. It was like walking on solid glass. I would not want to trip and fall here. The ground wouldn’t just not cradle you in your fall, it would cut you to ribbons on its uneven, pockmarked surface.

Then we began to stumble upon the first bodies. Little, twisted goblin skeletons burned to the bone. In some instances bones had warped or shattered in the heat of the fire. Then there were larger bones. A few hundred feet away we came across the first troll bones.

A few hundred feet past that we came across what remained of a little tribal village. There were little mud huts turned to crumbling ceramic or whatever mud and clay turned into when you baked it. A few larger huts were scattered around the clearing as well. It looked like the trolls and goblins had lived together here. I wondered idly how that worked out.

We moved through the world in silence. The further we’d walked, the harder it had been to break. And now, walking through the lands of our would be enemies, I almost felt bad for whatever had happened. Not that us killing them would have been any more or less painful or permanent. I don’t know why the little piles of bones got to me the way they did. I turned my eyes sightlessly ahead of me and walked on.

Past the little village we came across the first orcs. Turns out burning them would kill them as well as decapitation and essence removal. None of us stopped to check any of the bodies for essences or cores. It just didn’t feel right. And we all subconsciously agreed.

We kept walking, and the world continued in its burnt out hellhole landscape to the horizon. Maybe twenty minutes after we passed the village the first signs of something being alive out there showed themselves. In the distance there was an angry roar that rang out. As we crept closer it looked like there was a copy of the temple we’d originally entered, except now they were crumbling ruins. The stone burned and cracked. And atop it stood a figure draped in shadow. With four arms spread wide.