Date of Expedition: September 14
Party Members: Valdenheim Wolfhart (Priest of Ulric), Agnes (Knight), Wolfgang "Fiddler" (Engineer), Negin Rustig (Thief), Tally (High Elf Arcane Wizard)
Major Discoveries: An ancient mausoleum beneath Garffan's Rest, built in no fashion known to the Empire — three levels deep, trapped, and carved throughout with hieroglyphs, vultures and jackals. A lord of undeath lay in a black sarcophagus at its bottom, attended by two silver-halberded guardians. Both destroyed. The thing spoke of a master. We did not learn who.
Casualties: None among the party. Two villagers of Garffan's Rest found dead. Two others never found.
The leaves were turning when we came to Garffan's Rest, by separate roads and separate reasons, and found the village with a hole in it. Two villagers had gone into the old mausoleum on the hill. Two of their kin had gone in after them. None had come out. Father Albrecht Fen, a priest of Taal, and Reeve Ilse Rann told us the tales. Daemons. Deaths going back generations. One found bled white. Another hanged with no rope. They offered twenty gold crowns for the truth of it, and for the living, if there were any. Gold is nothing to a priest of Ulric. But a door that eats people and is left standing is an insult, and Ulric's will was that I should walk through it.
We went.
The first level was the entrance and nothing more — a stair going down with statues on either side.
The second level was trapped and made no sense to me. Hieroglyphs cut into the walls. Sealed urns. Beetles worked in stone. Vultures, over and over, and other ornament of a kind I have never seen in the Empire nor heard described. The arrows came first, down the length of the passage, and took Fiddler. I went to him to see to the wound, and in doing so I put my weight where I should not have. The stair beneath us gave way and became a steep ramp. We went down it together. There were spikes at the bottom. That is where Fiddler lost his teeth. Tally mended him with sorcery — a miraculous thing, and one I have no liking for, though I will not pretend it did not save him. The teeth are still gone.
The third level was the same work grown thicker, the carvings crowding every surface. Statues lined the walls the whole length of it — men's bodies with the heads of vultures and jackals, standing in rows, watching nothing. There we found two of the missing, hacked to pieces. The other two we never found. I do not know what became of them, and I will not pretend otherwise to their kin. One hall ended in nothing but a jackal-headed statue. Another ended in a door. Behind the door was a chamber of sarcophagi, and at its head a great black one, ornamented beyond the rest. What was in it was already getting out.
Withered skeletons stirred to meet us. Behind them stood two guardians in better preservation than any of it, bearing silver halberds twice the height of a man, and they did not move at all. Agnes went in first and Fiddler behind him. I took the nearest skeleton and cleaved it through. Agnes broke the second with a downward swing, and it came apart like dry sticks. The guardians watched. Their master was still working to free itself from the black casket.
Fiddler took his moment and put a handgun ball directly into the thing. It struck — and the creature's body shimmered with some working of magic, and it was merely angered. It came across the chamber for him. Tally stood beside him and called out its weaknesses. Fiddler drew his blade, his shot spent, and vaulted from a sarcophagus to take a skeleton through the ribs.
Then blades passed my shoulder out of the dark and went into the eye sockets of two more skeletons, and they fell to dust. I saw the outline of Negen Rustig for half a heartbeat before the shadows had him again. Agnes and I finished the rest. The dead thing reached Fiddler.
What Fiddler did next I cannot account for — whether it was wit, or fortune, or a god's hand on his shoulder. He set off black powder in the creature's face. The blast lit it, deafened it, and tore apart whatever protection it had wrapped around itself. Agnes charged while it reeled and took its leg off with his sword. As it went down burning, I took its head with an upward swing. The head flew the length of the chamber and landed in the black sarcophagus, and the lid closed over it by itself.
The two guardians crumbled where they stood.
It spoke while it came at us. It spoke of a master. That is all I have, and I would rather say so than guess. We took what treasure was there. I do not know what any of it is for. We carried what was left of the two back up into the light and told Fen and the Reeve plainly what had happened below — including that two are still unaccounted for. They were less pleased by the truth than men usually are. They paid the sum agreed.
We left Garffan's Rest as we came to it.
The thing in the black casket is dead. Whatever built that place is not, and no hand of the Old World I know built it.
— Valdenheim Wolfhart, Priest of Ulric
