Nine of them at the skull door. Four who had been here before, five who hadn’t. The five were men from the Gray Company — Gallo, Larwyn, Tolm, Tarsil, and Kholix the torchbearer — and they stood at the entrance with the expression of people who had been told what was down there but hadn’t believed it yet.
Irulan braced the crowbar into the stone frame and pulled. The door gave with a grinding protest and wanted to close again, heavy and slow, like something that didn’t want to be opened and would fix the problem on its own if you let it. Inside, the mechanism had been packed with rocks. Someone had been here since last time. Rocks, and at the center of the pile, a dead rat arranged with its teeth bared at whoever reached in — taxidermied, posed, someone’s idea of a joke.
The dagger that had held the mechanism was gone. Irulan put her chisel in its place. It fit well enough.
Distant sounds while Irulan worked: the rattle of bone, a scrape of steel on stone, far off and directionless. The barrow talking.
The room inside was a meeting of dead gods. Bancroft counted six statues in the lantern-light — Orcus, Set, Archon Trill to one side, a northern Valkyrie he didn’t know the name of, a robed figure with its face chiseled off. The altar in the center had been smashed by something heavy — mace or hammer — until whatever it had been dedicated to was unreadable. Just a slab now. Bloodstained.
SeaCrock’s eyes glowed blue as his detection spell took hold. He turned slowly, scanning, and said: “Nothing. There’s nothing magical in this room.”
The pit was ten feet deep and open. Bones at the bottom — gnawed, scattered, the remains of someone who had fallen in and never gotten out. Or been pushed and never gotten out. The barrow didn’t distinguish.
Bancroft recognized the gods. The ones he knew were not comforting.
He went into the pit on a rope. The hirelings held the line above while he searched, and searching was the generous word for what he did. Forty minutes in a ten-foot hole with gnawed bones and a skull that had two protruding front teeth — half-orc, maybe, or something else that grew teeth like that. He turned over every stone and found nothing. Turned them over again. Still nothing. On the third pass, moving the skull itself, he found a dagger underneath. Someone else’s last possession.
He climbed out with it and held it up.
“A treasure,” Kholix said, hopefully.
No one felt better.
North. A taller chamber with burial alcoves — fifty or a hundred of them, square openings in the walls, all emptied. Mummified remains were scattered on the floor in the way of things that had been searched and discarded by people who didn’t care about the dead. SeaCrock’s detection spell fizzled once, then again, and the blue left his eyes for good. Twenty minutes of searching found nothing. The burial alcoves had been emptied by someone thorough.
The hirelings reported bone on stone, getting closer. Then the four guards backed up and said there was a glint in the darkness.
Two skeletons walked out of the dark with sapphires in their skulls.
Two sapphire-skulled skeletons emerging from the darkness of a burial chamber, facing a knight with a green-glowing sword
Bancroft had turned undead before. It was one of the things Sylvanus gave him that worked — the prayer, the force of it, the way the dead flinched back. He raised his hand and called the name and nothing happened. He tried again, harder, reaching deeper into whatever well the prayer drew from. Nothing. Sylvanus was somewhere else tonight.
The skeletons hit the front line. Lerwin took a sword and stayed upright, which said something about Lerwin. Tolm took one and staggered back with blood on his armor and fear in his eyes. The hirelings were looking at the sapphires — actually looking at them, calculating — and Bancroft wanted to tell them that the gems were the reason the skeletons wouldn’t stay dead, but the words came out as a shout about smashing things that no one heard over the steel.
Bancroft tried to tell the front line to swap — Tolm and Lerwin were hurt, Gallo and Tarsil were behind them, the obvious move was to rotate the wounded out. He was too slow. The idea formed, traveled from his brain to his mouth, and arrived after the hirelings had already committed. Then he fired the crossbow he had owned for months and never practiced with. The bolt sailed past the skeleton and struck Tolm in the back of the head.
Tolm turned around. “Hey!”
“Sorry,” Bancroft said. He handed the crossbow and remaining bolts to Tolm. “You’ll do better with this than I did.”
Tolm accepted this with the expression of a man who had just been shot by his employer.
Gallo died in the next exchange. The skeleton’s sword went through him and he fell without a word, his club clattering on the stone beside him. Irulan stepped into his place before the body settled.
Riyou killed the first skeleton from her perch. It discorporated — bones scattering, the sapphire dropping to the floor with a small, bright sound. Everyone knew what would happen next. They had fought these before. The gem would rebuild itself. The question was what to do about it.
Irulan tried to smash the gem with her longsword. The blade struck the sapphire and sheared off. The gem sat there, whole and bright, and Bancroft could feel it pulling itself back together.
He called on Sylvanus for a cleansing blade — something to make the sword work against the undead, something to end this. The prayer went out and came back hollow. Not tonight.
He moved to the front line instead. If nothing else, he had plate armor and the hirelings didn’t. They could stand behind him and live a little longer.
Then the torch went out.
Darkness. Complete, thick, the kind of dark that presses against your eyes.
SeaCrock fumbled for his flint and steel in the black. He couldn’t find anyone. He called out — “Marco” — and from the southwest, Kholix answered: “Polo, sir?” The absurdity of it. Two grown men playing a children’s game in a barrow full of walking dead. SeaCrock found him by sound and pressed the flint and steel into his hands.
Kholix tried to light the lantern. His hands were shaking. The flint sparked and caught nothing. The dark and the fear made his fingers useless.
Somewhere in the room, steel hit bone. Tarsil made a sound that ended, and the sound of his body hitting the floor was different from the sound of a man falling down — it was the sound of a man who wasn’t going to get up.
Tolm screamed. His nerve broke in the dark — understandable, human, the thing that happened when you couldn’t see what was killing the man next to you. He ran blind through the party, slamming into Bancroft on the way past, and kept going south into the passages.
Something hit Bancroft from behind. Wet, heavy, the wrong kind of strong — a zombie’s arm, finding the gap between his pauldron and his neck. The pain went straight down his spine.
He prayed for Light. It didn’t come. The words went out and nothing answered.
He tried again: Please. We are in extremis.
A mote of green appeared in the center of his holy symbol. Tiny. It flickered and began to fade.
Irulan was somewhere in the dark behind him. Whatever reserve she had left — luck, will, the unreasonable stubbornness of a woman who refused to die in the dark — she poured it toward him. He could feel it. Not magic. Something older than magic. The green light caught, held, and spread down the blade of his longsword like fire running along a fuse.
Light.
The room came back. A zombie stood right beside him, arm still extended from the blow. A sapphire skeleton had a bow drawn. Tolm was gone into the south. Gallo and Tarsil were dead on the ground. Kholix was clutching a cold lantern. Lerwin was asking for instructions.
From behind the zombie, a voice he knew:
“Ah. It looks like we meet again.”
Heinrich stepped into the edge of the light. Gaunt, silver goatee, the skull-and-ivy symbol at his throat. He was gesturing at the undead with both hands, directing them the way a man directs horses — small movements, precise, the kind of control that comes from years of practice.
“Do you like my little pets?” He studied Bancroft with an expression of mild curiosity. “I feel for some reason you’re hunting me. This is the second time within two days. I don’t know if this is on purpose or not.”
He pointed at Bancroft. “My pet — I need him to be alive. He knows what the girl is.”
The zombie turned toward Bancroft. It did not look reluctant.
A gaunt necromancer in dark robes commanding undead, facing an armored knight in a torchlit barrow
Heinrich cast a spell. It washed over the room — a heaviness in the air, the pull of unnatural sleep — and Lerwin dropped like he’d been struck. Just folded, mid-sentence, the way a man does when consciousness is taken rather than lost. Everyone else stayed on their feet. The spell didn’t reach them.
Heinrich looked at his hands. “What? That usually works better.”
From across the room, a crack of purple light — SeaCrock’s magic bolt finding the necromancer squarely. Heinrich stumbled half a step and turned.
“Oh. I see you back there.” A pause. “I remember you.”
“I remember you too,” SeaCrock said.
“The great Huffer Pants, wasn’t it?”
SeaCrock did not correct him.
Riyou disappeared.
Bancroft saw it happen from the corner of his eye — one moment she was there, braced in the alcove with her bow; the next, just empty stone. She climbed down silent and crossed the room like a rumor.
Her first approach, Heinrich heard her. He cocked his head to one side — the gesture of a man listening for something just below the threshold of certainty. “Oh. I remember this one.”
She pulled back. Repositioned. Tried again. This time, nothing. Heinrich didn’t turn.
The arrow came from behind him. It should have been a clean kill — the kind of shot you make when you’ve been invisible and patient and the target doesn’t know you’re there. It grazed him instead, barely, the shaft deflecting off something beneath his robes.
Riyou’s face did something complicated. She drew again.
The second arrow didn’t graze. It went deep, finding the space between his ribs where there was no deflection, no protection, nothing between the arrowhead and the man. Heinrich went to one knee. The sapphire light in the room seemed to flicker.
“What?” He turned and found her. “Oh, there you are, my dear. I’ve been looking for you.”
“You will not hurt my friends,” Riyou said, “and you need to die or leave us alone.”
Heinrich straightened. He was bleeding in a way that suggested organs. “I will kill you next,” he said. “I’ve told people about you. They are on the lookout. If I die, people will raise my corpse to find out the information.”
“Not if I burn your body first.”
A small rogue drawing a bow from the shadows behind a wounded necromancer in a dark dungeon corridor
He could see it.
Nobody else could. Just Bancroft. A green light around Heinrich — not the necromancer’s own magic, but Sylvanus’s mark, painted on the man like a sign that said here, this one, finish what I sent you to do. The same pull he’d felt for weeks, the same certainty. Heinrich was two steps away.
Bancroft had his sword in his hand. His sword was glowing. The man he had been sent to kill was wounded and within reach and marked by his god.
He was barely standing. The zombie’s blow was still ringing through his spine. One more hit — a spell, a slap, anything — and he would be face-down on the barrow floor for the last time. He was one bad moment from dying in a hole he’d been in too many times, and the god who had sent him here was barely answering prayers.
He chose to heal himself.
The prayer barely worked. The weakest healing he had ever channeled — Irulan spent her own luck to make it happen, whatever reserve she carried for the moments when stubbornness alone wasn’t enough, and even then Sylvanus gave him almost nothing. The wound closed. Barely.
The green light around Heinrich faded.
Bancroft watched it go. He knew what it meant. Sylvanus had shown him the target and he had chosen his own survival instead. There would be consequences for that. There were always consequences.
Heinrich ran.
“These are not all the playthings I have at my disposal,” the necromancer called back as he disappeared into the dark. Three versions of him split from his body as he went — mirror images, laughing, each one identical and mocking.
Bancroft cast Light again. The third time that night. It worked the way it always worked — barely. The green glow returned to his blade and he ran after the necromancer in the corridor, plate armor clanking, the sound of a man who had given up on subtlety.
He found Heinrich — or one of him — and drove the longsword through the image’s chest. It burst like a soap bubble. Two Heinrichs left, both grinning.
Heinrich tried a spell. It fizzled in his hands. “Why?” he said, genuinely aggrieved. “Why, when I’m around your heathens, do all my spells go out?”
“False god,” Bancroft said. “You called him a false god. He’s just petty.”
Irulan caught up. She swung in the dark at where Heinrich should have been — blind, accepting whatever price the barrow extracted for the attempt. Her sword found him. The blow landed solid.
Every light in the corridor went out.
Heinrich screamed. “You bitch!”
Irulan: “I told you I was going to kill you.”
Behind them, in the dark, things fell apart.
A skeleton found SeaCrock. The blow was sudden and final — he went down without a sound, the kind of quiet that meant consciousness was gone before the floor arrived. Kholix stumbled through the darkness and found the body by touch.
The zombie struck Riyou. She fell — but slowly, the way people fall in stories, holding the lantern steady as her legs gave way. She placed it on the ground. Carefully. The glass didn’t break. The flame held. Her last act before the dark took her was to leave a light for the people who would need it.
The zombie began dragging her east.
Bancroft cast Light.
The fourth time. The sword glowed green and he went after Heinrich again — through the dark, through the corridor, past the sounds of fighting behind him that he couldn’t help with yet. He found another image and destroyed it. One left.
Heinrich ran. Sixty feet of corridor, gone before Bancroft could close the distance. The necromancer tried one more spell over his shoulder. It fizzled.
“I don’t even know who you are,” Heinrich said to Irulan, who was behind him and getting closer, “but I’m annoyed.”
“You keep attacking my friends,” Irulan said, “and you piss me off.”
“Friends?” Heinrich sounded genuinely confused. “Who is friends with traitors? That woman is a traitor to the cause.”
“I don’t make deals with necromancers,” Irulan said.
A knight with a green-glowing sword and a half-orc woman warrior chasing a fleeing necromancer through dark barrow corridors
From the east, behind the fighting, behind the dead and the dying — yipping. Small, fierce, the sound of creatures who lived in the barrow’s deeper places and had their own reasons for being angry at the things that walked through their territory.
The mongrel men had come. Bancroft could hear it: bone shattering, the high yelps of attack, the sound of creatures who were not afraid of skeletons because they had lived beside them for longer than any of the party had been alive. They weren’t saving the party. They were solving their own problem. But the effect was the same.
Kholix found SeaCrock’s body. Lerwin, still alive, still standing, picked up a torch and walked into the light to relight it.
The session ended there.
The party was in three pieces. Bancroft and Irulan, chasing a necromancer into the dark with nothing but a glowing sword between them and whatever was down that corridor. SeaCrock and Riyou, unconscious in different parts of the dungeon. The mongrel men, fighting things that didn’t belong in their territory.
Two hirelings dead. One fled. Two still standing.
Both SeaCrock and Riyou survived their wounds. SeaCrock earned a new scar — a vertical line through the center of his chest where the skeleton’s blade had just missed his heart. Three scars now. Riyou lost a portion of the muscle on the left side of her neck where the zombie had bitten through. Her silhouette would be different from here on out.
Heinrich was still alive. Still running. Still one step ahead.
Bancroft walked through it in his mind on the way home — or he would, when there was a way home, when this was over, when the corridor ended somewhere. He had been shown his quarry and he had chosen himself. Sylvanus would remember that. Bancroft would remember it too. The green glow was gone and it was not coming back until he earned it.
He kept walking. Irulan beside him. The sword still lit.
That would have to be enough.
This session report was written with the help of AI. For details on the process, see Transcribing D&D Sessions with WhisperX and Speaker Diarization.