Chapter 1: The Knaves Visit the Spudfields

Creeping down the stairs, Audree watches as the shadows shrink and evaporate in the face of her flicking torch. The stone steps only descend one flight before they land in a small stone chamber, perhaps twenty feet on a side. But it's what the chamber holds that grabs the woman's attention -- and indeed, the attention of the three men crowded behind her on the stairs.

A large stone sarcophagus lies in the center of the room, its lid shattered and lying in pieces. Towards the back of the room, another passage leads out, to the east -- and it's there, in that archway, that they all see it.

The figure stands perhaps six and a half feet tall, and is dressed in what looks like ornate ceremonial armor. He is clearly long dead, skeletal beneath the moldering leather and rusting metal, and clearly not -- for terrible green lights burn in his skull's eye sockets, and he hisses through his bare and broken teeth in a way that makes the skin crawl. The remains of his long, dark hair are lank and ropey, and it is immediately clear that he is the source of cold in the room, as well as the hideous smell.

As eye contact is made, the undead warrior takes a step, and then another, coming forward, opening his jaws to loose a low growl that seems to shake the whole chamber!

The moment that Clomm inserts the second stone, the iron staff reverberates again, thrumming with power in his hands. Both gems blaze and light up brightly, casting eerie, dancing shadows throughout the chamber in front of them... and lighting up the ancient, rotting and terrifying creature advancing towards them. There's the ring of steel as it draws its weapon, a sword that is pitted and rusting, but looks sound enough to strike with...

Initiative

"Gods, what is this abomination!?" Wax cries from the rear, where he pulls his bow off his back and nocks and arrow!

The smell of the thing as Audree gets closer, axe in one hand and torch in the other... the presence of the thing! The adventurer tries her best, but the chill and her nerves mean that the woman's axe-blow is nowhere near her fiendish target.

Endrei joins Watters in facing off against the looming horror, but where her axe blows do not connect, his swinging hammer comes down of the fiend's gleaming white skull with bone-shattering force.

Or... with what should be bone-shattering force. For when the face of the two-handed weapon -- swung with all of the tall man's considerable might -- makes contact with the crypt-dweller's head, it turns in the warrior's stinging hands and vibrates hard. It feels like striking granite, like striking something that does not and cannot break. The force of the impact does at least drive the skull towards the ground, but when it looks up again, its souless, glowing eyes burn for Endrei. It hisses in its raspy, lipless voice and comes for him, one skeletal hand extended!

Behind the pair, Elius draws an arrow while Clomm steadies the staff and the magical energies he knows course within it. It might not allow him to control the thing, he quickly realizes, but he can see the death magic animating the monster. See it, and possibly unravel it!

Endrei moves back when the thing lurches towards him, hissing cold breath, eyes blazing and long, bony fingers clicking...

As Endrei and Audree face off against the graveborn monster, Clomm unlocks the power of the staff! The eyes blaze and the head of the child wails, a keening sound that bothers the wight more than anyone. Bothers it so much, in fact, that pieces of the thing seem to come off, floating in the air like ash from a dying fire. It is disintegrating! Clomm can feel the dread magic animating the thing, and the staff's connection to it.

He can dispel it, he's sure!

And it's during this surge of confidence that Elius Wax exclaims and quails from the top of the stairs, behind the other three. A glance back reveals that a second undead warrior has risen and joined the fray... surely the brother of the first that they still face. It's two men from the horrible painting, everyone suddenly realizes, based on their armor, their rotting garb, their height and the lank, brittle hair still partly attached to their skulls. The second brother, though, is better armed, wielding a dark, wavy-bladed two-handed sword...