God of Trash

Rhys held his breath and pulled his aura in. Stepping quietly over the floor, with the help of some decrepit floorboards he’d insisted Orlen not fix and Trash Step, he approached the other room. The shriek was quiet, only loud enough that his enhanced ears heard it, and muffled, as though it came from beneath the building… though, to his knowledge, the building had no basement. His heart beat faster in excitement. Was it a ghost? Ghosts were pests, weren’t they? And besides, they came out when a human died. They could be considered a human byproduct, and therefore, trash. And curses he’d already established as trash, so if the ghost happened to be paired with a curse, even better. He crept closer, peeking out into the next room. He didn’t want to scare his precious guest away.

There was a creak, then a long, slow groan. The room laid in shadows, and it was darker with its windows drawn than it would be usually. He had to utilize his enhanced mage vision to see at all. The room looked the same as it ever did, for all that, nothing more than an empty tavern with rotting tables and chairs sitting out around the space. They hadn’t opened the inside of the store to customers, and Orlen had been pushed to his limit fixing the building, so he’d left the furniture as it was for now. His eyes flashed from table to table. Were the tables haunted? Or maybe it was the very ground the store stood on that was cursed? Whatever it was, Rhys was ready.

Another creak. At last, there was motion in the room, as a panel in the center of the room swung upward of its own accord. Rhys held his breath. A hidden trapdoor, opening on its own? No, could it be? Were the previous owners of the tavern killers, or maybe cannibals? Did they throw the unquiet dead into the basement, then disguise it so no one would ever discover their crimes? He licked his lips in anticipation. A mob of cannibal corpses would make a nice addition to his rat and bug swarms, though… the corpses would be the eaten people, not the cannibals. Still, even so, the corpses would surely be rife with vengeance, and therefore curse energy. In the worst case, he got curse energy, and that was still valuable.

Footsteps, clanging on an unseen ladder. That wasn’t very ghostly, but maybe they were corporeal ghosts, or, as others knew them, zombies. He’d met several skeletons, too—in fact, curses seemed to favor skeletal forms. It wouldn’t be surprising if he was dealing with a skeleton, here.

A head poked up through the floor. Rhys crouched behind the wall, watching from the darkness. It swiveled, left and right. It looked very human, and his mana senses told him it felt very alive, as well, but… but maybe that was just part of the curse! Yeah. It was an illusion, for sure!

He turned back. “The coast is clear. Move, move!”

“The hell’s the rush for?” a second very human voice complained.

The first voice scoffed. “Some idiot rented this place, so until they move out, we gotta keep it quiet! I’ve already called Jona, and she’ll do the usual cursed routine, but until then…”

“Why don’t we just kill ‘em all in their sleep?”

“Edgar says they’re mages, and one of ‘em’s scary strong. He might just be a mortal old man, but he’s never been wrong before.”