Chapter 8: Rest In Pieces
After taking a few steps down, Simon couldn’t help but notice how much colder it was in here than it was in the cave he’d just left. The stairs descended at least three floors before ending in a door with ornate carvings around it. The goblin cave had that moist dampness you expected in a cave, but this was different. It was almost like walking into one of those large refrigerators they had in restaurants. He could see his breath by the time he got to the bottom, but fortunately the stairs were ice free so he wasn’t going to slip and break his neck again.
The door at the bottom opened to reveal a crypt, with stone sarcophagi dominating the floor and niches on the walls where skeletons lay in perpetual rest. So the next level was a crypt, huh? That figured he supposed. Skeletons were even easier than zombies, so at least this wouldn’t be too hard. The skeletons mostly lay in moth eaten robes or other ceremonial garments, but the armor that some still wore had rusted completely through in places. Last time he’d tried to sneak by the monsters, but that didn’t work. They were probably programmed so that it would never work, he realized, wondering how far out he would pull aggro from creatures like this. Not that it mattered - this time he decided that he was just going to go for it as he walked to the first skeleton and swung down hard on the spine, between the skull and the clavicle. The skull fell away almost immediately and he moved to the next one, hoping to kill as many of these things as he could before they started to rise. There had to be almost thirty though, and by the time Simon had beheaded the third, the first few closest to him were starting to rise to their feet.
Once these things were awake and holding their ancient weapons he had to turn his attention from the easiest to kill, to the one that was the closest to killing him. This worked for the next few without any issue, but crucially he noticed that simply stabbing the head or severing an arm did very little. It looked like these things were operating on zombie rules: the only way to make them crumble into dust was to strike their head from their shoulders or to smash the skull to pieces with a savage overhead chop. It turned out that that was easier said than done. Any unexpected move, or half-hearted parry on their part and suddenly the blow he’d lined up to perfectly separate their head from their shoulders became a glancing blow at best. By the time he’d killed the twelfth skeleton he was practically surrounded and utterly exhausted. Now that they were fully awake they were swinging at him as well. Their weapons were slow and easily parried, but with so many attacking him at once the only viable defense quickly became to give ground.
Simon was slowly fighting his way back to the doorway when he saw it. Rising from the tomb farthest from him was a skeletal knight unlike the rest of the moldering skeleton’s he’d slain so far. They were little more than bones and rusted weapons, but it was actually a knight that had been buried in a suit of full plate armor. Even after decades or centuries of being interred it looked almost new, along with the great bastard sword that it unsheathed as soon as it was standing. That wasn’t what attracted Simon’s attention though. It was the glare. The rest of these skeletons only had empty sockets, which was unnerving enough, but the knight had a blue glow where its eyes should be. Simon found himself paralyzed by it, and was unable to look away. As the knight strode toward him in slow motion, he could see clouds of frost radiating from the joints in the armor and finally understood what the word terror really meant.
When Simon was younger he’d spent hours arguing with friends about the difference between fear and terror in different games. He thought that it was a dumb mechanic, and that it was impossible for there to be some sort of fear that was worse than fear itself. He was wrong. He’d obviously failed a saving throw or something, because he was utterly petrified by the personification of death that was walking towards him with unhurried steps. It was a nightmare - a waking dream, and even though he knew that the other skeletons were still a risk he couldn’t do much but hold his sword up numbly as they pressed their attack. Seconds later the first blade pierced his armor, slicing cleanly through his flesh. Others followed, and by the time he dropped his weapon from numb fingers he’d been impaled through the liver, the stomach, and the lungs by no less than six swords and daggers.
Unlike the other deaths he’d suffered so far at the hands of his enemies this one at least wasn’t too painful. It was cold more than anything. Each of the blades that skewered him was bone chillingly cold, but in his dying moments he considered that a small price to pay to escape the horrible gaze of that terrible knight. He lost consciousness before that awful opponent was able to reach him, and died grateful.
When Simon woke up the terror still hadn’t left him completely, and he laid practically paralyzed in his bed for ten minutes before he sat up. “What in the hell was that?” he asked himself. “It had to be some kind of spell - right?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Either that or I’m a coward, he thought to himself as looked up and noticed the mirror was writing to him. ‘I’m not sure what you’re asking about, can you be more specific?’