Tales of a Great Dale Native Son

[UilliamNebel]

Below the Graven Earth:

Dethos sat looking at the woman’s remains from the shadows of the crypt. It was the smouldering that had gotten him, the powerful tie between memory and smell was highly underappreciated most of the time. But that sickly sweet smell of burnt ‘long pig’ fat, there was never any forgetting it once you’d had the displeasure of it and knew what it was.

She’d been a cultist, Dethos didn’t even know she was a woman, until he had heard her brief screams when the fire trap splash of oil, turned flame, bursted about her to completely engulf. She wasn’t even able to cry out long, as flame feed by her clothes, and body, quickly lead to her breathing in flame and smoke, then just gasping, gagging, and asphyxiating when her throat closed from the horrific burns as Dethos finished her with a flurry of darts and then danger falls.

A numbness set in over the ranger, as he slid back into the shadows from the grisly task. Knowing she was the last in the group about the immediate area, and he had time to pull himself together before more grave robbers and their cultist allies came to patrol. At the surface of Cordor’s graveyard, the undead wandered with the night. Skeleton, mummy, all sorts might be come across there. But they were more or less manageable for the ranger under the night sky. Down here, below the surface, in the narrow tunnels, away from the crypt entrance, things were far more cat and mouse between the living in opposition. A necromancy cult of some sort seemed to have taken root here, and Dethos, following the Oak Father’s expectations would put them to the blade and pyre, as he would any undead, for the living who dabbled in such were as tainted as the results of their craft.

And that was the irony of it. This woman cultist, a no doubt wicked being, was the conduit for Dethos’ sudden surge of memory for his beloved. As tears only partly from the smoke, welled up in his eyes, he even now recalled the morning in the distant Forest of Lethyr when he’d come back to the smolder remains of his beloved Druidic handfasted mate, killed by ‘Blighter’ agent’s in service to the ‘Rotting Man’ of Rawlinswood, from the north, across the dale that divided the region and where the blighters were forming to lay waste to all of nature which they could. Even now as he looked over the smouldering mound, of a crumpled body on the cobble stone floor of the crypt, he could not keep his mind from the pain of that day as it went to seize his heart and breathing to feel again. Burned out from their cave sanctuary, his beloved had died trying to defend several children of her circle’s membership, from the Blighters murderous raid. It was utterly hopeless, and horrid, with the beast even having partially devoured the woman, even as she was most likely still alive, and living through the agony of partial immolation.

There was no time though to stay in that place of blackest memory. Natural instinct, self preservation, and feeling the will of Silvanus within himself, Dethos Black’Oak would have to shake it off, as he so often did, push down all that emotion and memory of what he had lost and the horror of her passing. Only now, here, in the midst of great peril could be allowed to occupy his every thought, for dawn was still hours away, and many a cultist was ripe for ambush and culling still. Perhaps later, at the altar of the Silvanus Temple, perhaps then in his deity’s presence full, among his clergy, Dethos could finally put down the burden of the wild’s warrior, to allow himself grieving, perhaps some grief. Till then, he’d carry his sorrow and pain, as a knot in his stomach, as he set to the task of killing by the means he had, those who defiled nature’s order so obscenely.