#irrlicht

The chapel was hauntingly beautiful. A skeleton of its former self, the beauty and the glory it once held was still evident. The stone walls towered and arched over them. The stained glass windows were broken in many places, but when the sun shone through they would still produce a dazzling kaleidoscope of lights.

As they traversed lower, however, things began to look more sinister. The stones grew darker, the torches grew sparse and the air grew stale. Small skeletons of rodents and the shells of dead bugs littered the corners of the stairs. Once they reached the bottom, Marianne felt her body freeze.

Rows and rows of crude burial mounds lined the walls in disordered lines. The mounds of dirt made it very clear where the bodies were. These were shallow graves, hastily dug. Some had a few stones to act as a headstone, others had seashells. The ones farthest from the entrance seemed to have bigger stones, and looked as if they had been buried deeper.

“Perhaps,” Blank notes, “your knights are simply resting and need to be awakened?” Marianne’s jaw dropped in horror at that statement. Awaken the dead?

A dancing fire caught Marianne’s eye. Over one of the most recently dug graves, so shallow the dirt scarcely covered the body, was an odd colored flame floating gently back and forth over the length of the grave. More of these flames seemed to slowly appear over some of the graves.

It’s september, which basically means it’s Halloween. So buckle up while I fill this month with ghosts and ghouls!