Demilich and animated undead horde attacking ouest Lutet.
*Copied excerpt from my setting document*
In late 54FK, three Lutite Custodians were assigned to an Outer Ring Patrol- a common procedure, but seen as a privilege for those with career interests. This patrol consisted of panin brothers, Ponce and Jehan , and saulorous elfe, Aia Bittern. The three were a tight-knit group, growing up alongside each other, and training together as Custodes. After months of attempts, request after request, they were finally assigned together for an ORP. They would be mapping and marking the path from est to ouest, finding any dangerous undead or criminal activity and extinguishing the threat.
The three were given the essentials: a bedroll each, six weeks rations each, cooking pots, and medicine; As well they had their standard kits, each with a lantern, shortsword, and round shield. The Custodes are trained how to survive in the Catacombs for an extended time prior to their ORP, and new practices are always being added to the guide. They would sleep in empty tombs, delve into forgotten paths, and hunt rats once they ran out of rations, but the accolades acquired once they return make this struggle worth it for them. Their instructor notes the three as driven, each more than capable of working alone- but together were an efficient machine. The ORP could have been as long as an eight-week operation for the team, and they were assigned to take a route that dodged any other major systems as a part of a new initiative to map-out every hall and passage under the city.
Jehanโs journal details the first two weeks as plain and uneventful, but at the beginning of their third week they found a covered entrance into seemingly undiscovered tunnels.
โ...After Aia sensed an aura from some rubble and we breached through the debris, we uncovered these [chambers]. They were different from any others we have seen and we had to walk in a caravan-line formation to get through them. We walked like this for what seemed to be hours, turning and descending down staircases, the same walls, the same stairs, and the same floors. I am writing this as we encamp in one of these hallways, and it seems that ahead is much of the same shit.โ
Excerpt of Jehanโs Journal, Entry 16
A couple of days after the above entry they entered a large chamber that was largely as featureless as the previous halls, with nothing but an opposing hallway entrance and a long-cold firepit and cauldron in the center of the room. The bowel of the cauldron had rusted out, and the firepit had a short puddle of water collected in its basin. Noticing this- the Custodians quickly found a leak in the ceiling, so they would secure both pathways and camp within the chamber for a few nights to collect and boil water before continuing on. The halls forward were noticeably more worn, Jehan speculated on the possible enchantments that could have been protecting the previous halls from both age and discovery.
Through their fourth week, the patrol would delve deep into these tunnels where they would encounter a slurry of crumbling infrastructure, and old traps. The first days were fine for them, but during their sleep on the fourth night, Ponce contracted an infection on his arm while they were trudging through a flooded tunnel. This would not slow them, but they were running low on their rations in these unmapped tunnels, though their determination drove them deeper. A large cave-in would scramble their path, and would cause them to finally attempt to turn around- during this maneuver however Aia would fall into a pit while escorting Ponce across a gorge, presumably to her death.
The brothers would continue for another two weeks, astonished at the depths of the tunnels they had found themselves in. Ponceโs condition continued to worsen, and as Jehanโs stated, his behavior began to worry him greatly as he became more erratic and driven to find the deepest pit of the Catacomb. They found a small pool that had fish in it and cooked them all, adding to their rations, though they were small and not very sustaining- other common catacombs pests such as rats were completely absent, and undernutrition began to strike the brothers worse and worse as they continued.
At some point in the next week, the two Custodes reached a platform above a deep and large chamber that had a circle with, as Jehan described as โ...ritual glyphs unlike any Goetic symbols Iโve seen beforeโฆโ. They decided to sleep and then descend to the bottom as they woke up, but that is where the journal ends and any events between the disappearance of the brothers and the attack of the Demilich are unknown.
In early 55F.K, rumblings beneath the street level of the Central Plaza were reported in the early morning. After a couple minutes they would cease, but then one half-hour later a sinkhole would open underneath three homes and swallow them whole. From the massive cloud of dust and debris, a horde of Confederate-era undead began to pursue and slaughter anything in sight. This attack took the city by complete surprise, and countless civilians would perish only within the first hour- and even then, the undead forces took several dozen city-blocks before there was a defense from Lutet. Every living Custodian upped their weapons and mounted a blockade of the Plaza, encircling the district to the best of their ability, though they were losing numbers fast.
Custodian scouts were told to collect any able-bodied fighters willing to follow them back to the front lines; The Slumbermille Lutites tended to the wounded that they could, while their combat-trained clerics then stormed the bottlenecks of the city, exhaling a flurry of their magics onto the awoken platoon. Other cults would quickly join in the fight, covering the streets in a smattering of fire and light as spells tore across the sky- but suddenly they spun-out and fizzled away as this aura of dread washed over the Lutites.
A tall and skeletal figure walked over its undead forces with ease- it would raise a hand and wither the charging Custodians with a gesture. Under a dark veil over its face, two gleaming crystals in place of its eyes scanned over the awe-struck city folk, and it let out a harrowing cackle. The bodies of the dead rose to its call, causing Custodians to have to cut down their own fellow guard. A third wave of defending Lutites hit the front lines as the House Cheval cavalry trampled over the weaker undead forces along the ouest-front, and Chevronguard units in the area organized an assault over the est bridge that pierced through a flank of the undead.
The fighting raged on for hours, the massive being seemingly helming this fight scorned the city, razing the Lutite civilians without mercy. Between House Cheval, the Custodians, the Clerics, and the Chevronguard, a plan was quickly devised to destroy this monstrosity; Some Custodians would seize a whaling vessel from the nord docks, and other ally forces would retreat into the farmlands of the Bagoud gardens, and in a bloodlust- it would follow them. Thin wrappings covered in lich-magic draped around its dessicated body, glowing as they flare around its slashing attacks towards the baiting defenders. But as it reveled in the destruction it was incurring, it met the broadside of the whaling ship; Two massive harpoons would race from the boat and implant themselves deep through the chest of this thing, the weight of them alone dragged it to the ground as the chains would reel it towards the river. Before it could even think to conjure another spell, the three cannons aboard the ship unloaded onto the monster. What would leave pits in the hulls of rival ships created craters and voids in the beings body, and as the unlife faded from the terror the surrounding defenders could let out a sigh of relief. Many would lose their life in this gambit, and their sacrifices would be commemorated with a memorial site in the same spot that they felled the creature.
Within the rest of the city, as soon as the thing was destroyed by cannonfire, the undead fell again and the fighting stopped. Once everything settled, the mourning period began- many still believing that Lutet is still in this age of mourning. More than seven thousand would lose their lives in the couple of hours that the undead were rampant, and this scar on the city would show itself for generations to come afterward.
The rebuilding came immediately as folk wanted to move past this devastating situation, which for the next decade would bring Lutet closer together than any disaster previously. A large swath of unclaimed halls within the Catacomb became devoted to those who died in the attack, while the undead army was burned in a series of massive piles along the Bagoud, the ash of their bodies were then shoveled into the river and left to flow sud and become forgotten. Chevronguard registrars on site would denote the massive skeletal figure as a Demilich, a result in a failed attempt of a Lich Ritual. Its unknown what this was doing beneath the city for so long, whether if it was a contingency of the Confederacy, aspiring wizards, or some sort of other freak incident, it didn't matter to the citizenry so long as the Custodians and Council could confirm that a similar event would not occur within their home.
A dozen ORPs were sent to delve in the same halls that the three previously went, though the only evidence of the last team sent left was their camping supplies and Jehanโs journal. The large chamber that Jehan wrote about was filled in by the fallen debris, keeping the details of it a mystery to Custodians and historians alike since. Copies of Jehanโs journal were replicated countless times and can be found in classrooms, libraries, and bookshops alike, even becoming a standard item in the training of Outer Ring Patrols.
Thank you for reading if you got this far :D
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