Bancroft
Bancroft #
The news had reached Helix three days prior: Wyz the goblin wizard, along with Alandor and Perch, had vanished into that accursed book in the barrows. Touched it together, holding hands like children afraid of the dark, and one by one they had been swallowed by shadows. Morrigan and Aura had watched it happen, helpless.
Bancroft tried not to think about it as he drove his shovel into the ancient earth. Wyz had been insufferable, yes—calling everyone “minions” and treating the world as his personal experiment—but the little goblin had saved their hides more than once with his arcane darts. Now he was gone, consumed by magic too old and hungry to understand.
“Focus on the task at hand,” Bancroft muttered to himself. The untouched barrow mound rose before them, its grass-covered dome hiding secrets that might make them rich or dead. Probably both.
Bancroft standing guard while laborers dig
The croaking started distant—a rhythmic, throaty chorus somewhere out in the marsh. Seacrock’s dog lifted its head, ears pricked forward.
“You hear that?” Irulan asked, pausing mid-dig.
“Frogs,” Seacrock said dismissively. “Just frogs.”
But the croaking grew louder. Closer. And when the reeds parted to reveal two massive shapes—each the size of a hunting hound, their warty hides glistening with marsh slime—Bancroft understood that “just frogs” meant something very different in the barrowlands.
Bancroft fighting giant frogs
“Sylvanus, grant me—” Bancroft’s prayer died on his lips, the divine words scattering like startled birds. Beside him, Seacrock’s attempted cantrip fizzled into nothing. The frogs’ bulging eyes fixed on the dog with primal hunger.
Two tongues shot forward—pink, muscular, horrifyingly fast—but Seacrock’s hound was faster. It dodged beneath the first strike, twisted away from the second, and came up snarling.
Irulan didn’t hesitate. Her blade sang through the humid air, catching the nearest frog mid-croak. The creature’s head separated from its body with a wet, meaty sound, and the massive corpse slumped into the mud. The second frog took one look at its fallen companion and fled, crashing back into the reeds with panicked leaps.
“Well,” Bancroft said, wiping swamp water from his face. “Back to digging, then.”
The sun hung low and blood-red on the horizon when Irulan spotted them first.
“Company,” she said quietly, her hand moving to her sword.
Six figures shambled across the barrowlands, their movements jerky and wrong. Even at a distance, Bancroft could see the grey-green pallor of their skin, the vacant stares, the way their arms hung at unnatural angles. Zombies. Six of them, and the light was failing fast.
“We should go,” Seacrock said, already backing toward the road to Helix.
Bancroft wanted to argue. Every instinct told him to stand and fight, to call upon Sylvanus’s cleansing fire and turn these abominations to ash. But six against three, with night falling and no defensive position? Even righteous fury had its limits.
“We’ll return tomorrow,” he agreed, hating the taste of retreat on his tongue. “The barrow isn’t going anywhere.”
Dawn found them back at the dig site, shovels in hand and prayers on their lips. The dead frog still lay where it had fallen, bloated now in the morning heat, its belly distended and crawling with flies.
Bancroft was watching Irulan work when the corpse moved.
Not the settling of dead flesh—this was deliberate, purposeful. The frog’s belly split open like an overripe fruit, and from within its rotting guts, grey hands emerged. Zombies—four of them—dragged themselves from the carrion womb, their bodies slick with decay, their empty eyes fixed on the living.
“Sylvanus preserve us!” Bancroft raised his holy symbol, but one of the creatures was already on him. Dead fingers raked across his armor, finding the gap at his elbow, tearing flesh. Pain lanced up his arm.
Behind him, Seacrock screamed and ran.
Bancroft turning zombies with holy light
“SYLVANUS!” This time the prayer came fierce and true. Green light blazed from Bancroft’s holy symbol, and the two zombies before him simply came apart—their rotting flesh disintegrating, their bones crumbling to dust, scattered by a wind that existed only in the space between the mortal world and the divine.
But Irulan still faced two of the creatures, and Seacrock’s dog had thrown itself into the fray beside her. The brave hound’s teeth found undead flesh, tearing and rending—but then a zombie’s jaws closed on the dog’s throat, and the animal’s defiant snarl became a wet, gurgling whimper.
“Hold on!” Bancroft charged toward them, his symbol still blazing. Another prayer, another burst of emerald fire. Two more zombies crumbled. The last one turned its dead eyes toward Bancroft, and what passed for intelligence flickered there—enough to recognize death when it came for the already-dead. It fled, lurching away across the marshland.
The dog lay still in Irulan’s arms, its eyes glassy, its brave heart finally silent.
“He was a good boy,” Irulan said softly, stroking the blood-matted fur. “The best boy.”
Bancroft knelt beside her, his hand on her shoulder. “We’ll bury him properly. Say the words. He deserves—”
The ground trembled.
Two giant scorpions burst from the earth not thirty feet away, their pincers clacking, their segmented tails raised and dripping venom. They were each the size of a pony, their chitinous armor gleaming like polished obsidian.
“Run,” Bancroft said.
This time, no one argued.
Helix offered cold comfort that night. Seacrock searched every kennel and farm in town, desperate to replace his fallen companion, but no suitable dogs were to be found. What they did find were three laborers willing to dig for coin—desperate men who didn’t ask too many questions about why the party needed help excavating an ancient burial mound.
“We go back tomorrow,” Bancroft announced over watered ale. “With more hands, we’ll break through before nightfall.”
Irulan nodded, her expression hard. “For the dog.”
“For the dog,” Bancroft agreed. “And for Wyz, and Alandor, and Perch, and everyone else this cursed place has taken from us.”
The laborers earned their pay. By late afternoon of the following day, their shovels had broken through into darkness—a rectangular opening that exhaled cold, stale air like the breath of a sleeping giant.
Bancroft descended first, holy light radiating from his shield.
The chamber that opened before him stole his breath away. Four massive statues dominated the room, their stone forms stretching from floor to ceiling, their features worn smooth by ages beyond counting. At the center stood an altar of black marble, and upon it…
“Gods above,” Seacrock whispered from behind him.
Two shallow bowls flanked a wooden vase, and in each bowl, gems sparkled in the torchlight—rubies and sapphires and emeralds, a king’s ransom glittering in the darkness. The treasure of ages, waiting to be claimed.
They searched the room methodically, checking for traps, for hidden mechanisms, for any sign that this bounty came with a price. Two of the statues glowed faintly when Seacrock cast his detection spell—magical guardians, no doubt, waiting to be awakened.
“Don’t touch anything yet,” Bancroft warned. “We need to—”
“Well, well. What have we here?”
Three figures stood at the barrow entrance: a wizard in travel-stained robes, a warrior in battered mail, and an elf with calculating eyes. The wizard stepped forward, his smile not reaching his gaze.
“Fine work, finding this place,” he said smoothly. “We’ve been searching these barrows for weeks. Tell you what—we’ll give you forty-five gold to walk away. Fair compensation for your labor.”
Seacrock laughed—a sharp, incredulous bark. “Forty-five gold? For all of this?”
“The barrowlands are dangerous,” the wizard continued, his tone hardening. “People disappear all the time. Accidents happen. Forty-five gold and your lives seems like a generous offer.”
“Generous indeed,” Seacrock replied, keeping his body between the newcomers and the altar. “But we’ve already claimed this site by right of discovery. Perhaps you’d like to try one of the other mounds? I hear there are several still untouched.”
The wizard’s eyes narrowed, but after a long moment, he turned to his companions. “Come. There will be other opportunities.”
They left, but Bancroft noticed the warrior glancing back, memorizing their faces.
“We need to move fast,” Bancroft said. “They’ll be back with reinforcements.”
They resumed their search, working quickly now, checking every corner for traps or hidden passages. They had nearly finished when Seacrock’s dog—no, Seacrock had no dog anymore. The sound came from outside. Clacking. Chittering. The scrape of chitin on stone.
Three giant scorpions poured through the entrance, their stingers raised, their compound eyes reflecting torchlight like a thousand tiny flames.
Seacrock was closest to the door. He raised his hands to cast, but the nearest scorpion was faster. Its stinger punched through his robes like a needle through silk, and the wizard crumpled without a sound, his face already going grey from the venom.
“Seacrock!” Irulan moved toward him, but two more scorpions blocked her path, their pincers snapping.
Bancroft’s mind raced. The statues—the magical statues. If they animated when the treasure was disturbed…
“Waylon!” He grabbed the torchbearer by the shoulders. “The gems in that bowl—dump them in a sack and run for the exit. Now!”
The young man’s eyes went wide. “But the scorpions—”
“Trust me. The statues will animate. They’ll fight the scorpions, or at least distract them long enough for us to escape. I’ll protect you.” Bancroft raised his holy symbol. “Shield of Faith!”
Divine light wrapped around Waylon like golden armor. The torchbearer swallowed hard, nodded once, and sprinted for the altar.
Janus, the other torchbearer, watched this exchange with mounting horror. “No,” he said, backing toward the entrance. “No, I didn’t sign up for this. I’m getting out of here!”
“Janus, wait—!”
But the young man was already running, his torch clattering to the floor as he fled toward daylight. He made it perhaps three steps before the scorpion at the entrance caught him. The stinger rose and fell, rose and fell, and Janus’s screams echoed through the chamber before falling silent.
At the altar, Waylon’s trembling hands swept gems into his sack. The moment the first ruby left the bowl, the two glowing statues moved—stone grinding against stone, ancient joints cracking to life, massive heads turning toward the disturbance.
“Run!” Bancroft shouted.
He and Irulan sprinted for the exit, but the animated statues were faster than anything made of stone had a right to be. One massive arm swept down, blocking their path. Behind them, the scorpions advanced, cutting off any retreat.
Bancroft raised his holy symbol, the prayer to Sylvanus forming on his lips—but the words died unspoken. The cleansing fire was meant for the unnatural, the undead, the corrupted. These scorpions were creatures of nature, monstrous though they were. Sylvanus would not strike them down.
Irulan’s blade rasped free of its scabbard. Bancroft drew his own weapon, his shield coming up to guard.
“Back to back,” he said quietly.
She nodded, her shoulder pressing against his.
Two statues. Three scorpions. No retreat. No divine fire to save them.
Bancroft smiled grimly. If this was where Sylvanus meant for him to fall, then he would fall fighting.
“For Wyz,” he said.
“For the dog,” Irulan replied.
And then there was no more time for words.
Map of the barrow chamber