Vorn
Vorn #
Look, I’m not an adventurer. I want to be clear about that up front. I dig holes, I carry things, and I try very hard not to die. The pay is decent when you factor in the hazard, which is the only reason I keep signing up for these jobs.
The first thing I saw when I showed up for work was two women shooting arrows at a book. Not a person holding a book. Just… a book, sitting open on a stone pedestal. Aura and Morrigan, their names were. They were putting real effort into it, too—good groupings, solid draw—but the arrows just bounced off the pages like they were hitting plate armor.
“It ate our friends,” Morrigan said, by way of explanation.
I nodded like that made sense, because when you work the barrowlands, you learn not to ask follow-up questions.
They couldn’t destroy it, so they came up with the next best plan: drag it back to Helix and let somebody smarter deal with it. Nobody wanted to touch the thing—fair enough, given what it apparently did to the last people who laid hands on it—so they levered it onto an old traveling cloak using sticks and the flat of a sword. Morrigan tied the corners into a makeshift sled, and we set off dragging it behind us like the world’s most cursed piece of luggage.
We didn’t move fast enough.
Darkness caught us still on the road, the marshlands stretching out black and formless on either side. I’ve walked this road at night before. You keep your torch high, your eyes forward, and your mouth shut. That’s the protocol.
The murmuring started first. Broken words, half-formed, drifting out of the dark like someone talking in their sleep. Then three shapes emerged from the marsh mist—humanoid, but wrong. Each one had a single oversized claw where its hands should have been, curved and gleaming like a sickle blade. Their mouths moved constantly, whispering fragments that almost sounded like words.
“…souls… the binding… return what was…”
“What are they saying?” I whispered.
“Nothing good,” Aura said, nocking an arrow.
The two carrying the book-sled panicked. Can’t blame them, honestly—I was about two heartbeats from running myself. They bolted, tripped over each other in the dark, and the whole bundle went tumbling off the road. The book hit the swamp water with a heavy splash and sank into the muck.
We froze. The creatures didn’t even look at us. They waded into the swamp, those terrible claws dipping below the black water, and fished the book out with an almost gentle care. Then they turned and walked back into the darkness, still murmuring, cradling the book between them like something precious.
Nobody moved for a long time after that.
“Should we… go after them?” someone asked.
Morrigan stared into the dark where they’d vanished. “No,” she said. “Let them have it.”
Dejected doesn’t begin to cover the mood on the road back. We’d lost the book—the whole reason for the trip—to things we didn’t understand and couldn’t fight. And then, because the barrowlands never let you have just one bad night, four skeletons came rattling out of the darkness.
They hit us fast. The adventurers fought back, blades flashing in torchlight, but skeletons don’t care about pain and they don’t hesitate. Torvin went down first—a bony hand punched through his guard and caught him in the throat. Dask tried to run and took a rusty sword between the shoulder blades. Two good men. Two guys I’d shared bread with that morning.
The rest of us made it back to Helix, bloodied and quiet. I helped carry Dask’s pack. It still had his lunch in it. Half a meat pie, wrapped in cloth. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I left it on his bed at the inn.
While the rest of us were trying to forget the night, Roderick went poking around the inn and found the room that old Alandor had been renting before he got swallowed by the book. Everything was still there—his gear, his clothes, his personal effects, all waiting for a man who wasn’t coming back.
And tucked under the bed, wrapped in a scrap of wool, a goblin egg.
“What do we do with it?” Roderick asked, holding it up to the lamplight. The shell was leathery and warm to the touch, with a faint greenish tinge.
Nobody had a good answer for that.
The next morning, they hired us again. Same crew, minus two, plus whatever fresh bodies they could scrape together. I should have said no. Torvin and Dask were still cold, and here we were heading back out like nothing happened.
But the pay is the pay.
The book was gone, of course. Whatever those clawed things were, they’d taken it somewhere we couldn’t follow. So instead, the leaders—and I use that word loosely—took us to some kind of crypt they’d found before. Underground, stone walls, the smell of dust and old death. There was a staircase hidden behind a mechanism in the wall, one of those clever ancient contraptions that the barrow builders loved.
“Someone’s tampered with this,” Morrigan said, examining the mechanism. She and Roderick hunched over it, muttering about counterweights and trigger plates, their torches throwing long shadows down the passage.
I was watching the corridor behind us. That’s my job when the smart people are busy—watch the dark and hope nothing watches back.
Something watched back.
The zombies came shuffling out of a side passage, three of them, their dead feet scraping on stone. Grey skin, black eyes, the stink of rot rolling ahead of them like a wave.
I looked at my friend Cade. He looked up at me—and I do mean up, because Cade’s a halfling, barely reaches my belt buckle. Don’t let the size fool you, though. He’s stronger than me, smarter than me, and he knows it. Normally he runs caravans between Helix and the Motte, but the barrow jobs pay better when the merchants aren’t moving. We get along because we think the same way about most things, which is to say: practically.
“Run?” he said.
“Run,” I agreed.
We don’t get paid enough for this shit.
We came back after the groaning stopped. The adventurers were fine, of course—they’re always fine, the mad bastards. They’d dealt with the zombies and moved on to their next bit of insanity: they’d found an axe somewhere, and now they were using it to hack a hole in the wall.
“There’s something behind here,” Roderick said, covered in stone dust, swinging away like a man possessed.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The wall sounds hollow.”
I stood well back and watched. In my experience, when you find hidden things in the barrowlands, the hidden things don’t want to be found, and they express their displeasure in creative and violent ways.
Sure enough, whatever was behind that wall had been sealed for a reason. The explosion wasn’t huge—more of a sharp crack and a blast of hot air that knocked everyone back a step—but it sent chunks of stone whistling past our heads and filled the corridor with choking dust.
When the air cleared, everyone was still standing. Singed, dusty, ears ringing, but alive.
“Well,” Morrigan said, brushing debris from her hair. “That could have been worse.”
They paid us on time, at least. Full day’s wages, plus the hazard bonus, counted out in copper and silver on the tavern table. I pocketed my share and ordered an ale.
Cade hopped up onto the bench across from me, his feet dangling a good six inches off the floor. He had dust in his hair and a fresh burn mark on one sleeve from the explosion, but he was already grinning.
“Same time tomorrow?” he said, raising his mug.
I looked at my coins. I thought about Torvin and Dask. I thought about clawed things whispering in the dark, and books that eat people, and walls that explode when you look at them funny.
Cade was already thinking the same thing. I could tell by the way he shrugged—a small, resigned gesture that said yeah, I know, but what else are we going to do?
“Same time tomorrow,” I said.