04. Dues for the Dead

Aramil, you move further into the rooms. One room contains row upon row of pottery animals that were made from the ashes and ground bones of the deceased. Another contains thousands upon thousands of disarticulated bones hanging by thin wires from the ceiling so that no two bones touch each other. Being a high elf, you've heard more stories than most and you've heard tales of various mostly harmless funerary cults having flourished over the centuries in this area. You suspect that these rooms, including the strange bone pit, have been reserved for them.

You move to the final room and the smell of wood smoke almost overpowers you. Every surface is stained jet black with soot that must have come from the two great iron braziers on the floor. The walls are lined with almost perfectly preserved bodies—black from the same soot that stains the walls. They might almost be mistaken for mummified drow were it not for the different colors of hair. Several corpses, however, have been ravaged by something. They lay in the center of the room, torn apart, their flesh and bones gnawed by some ravenous creature. They are definitely not part of the work of any funerary cult that you've ever heard of.

Pierce, Cassyt hands you her lantern and casts a light cantrip one a ring on her hand to illuminate the room for her and Zrukz. You easily navigate around the pit and enter the room a few steps behind the rest. You turn your head and look at the bodies lining the wall. Dead, charred...well...wait...most of them are dead, but you realize that 5 among them are not. Not fully anyway. You recognise the type of undead as some you encountered underneath Sokol Keep, there are 5 ghouls hiding among the deceased.

Upon hearing Pierce's battlecry, the ghouls all start to move towards the group.

Aramil attacks the nearest Ghoul with his swords.

The ghouls swarm forward and starts to bite and claw at Vess, Aramil, Augustin & Pierce. Vess, Aramil & Augustin, you manage to fend off the ghouls targeting you. But Pierce, you feel the bites and claws pierce (no pun intended) through your metallic body.

Aramil, you go to swing with your main arm but the ghoul pushes it aside and your swing misses. The distraction however allows you to give it a cut with your off hand.

Pierce, you just barely feel the tip of a claw scrape your metal armour as the force of your shield spell repels the ghoul back.