II

Akayla Sethrys’s boot hits the door just below the lock.

She’s been kicking these things in for eight or nine years now and she knows where to put her emphasis. She favors a pair of bespoke basilisk leather and steel sabatons for this purpose; today some additional luck is with her in the form of rotten wood. Jagged wet splinters fly as the broken door slams inward, peeling out of its frame. Another dungeon chamber breached.

“Onward!” cries Sethrys, crouched over her shield, blade up for quick thrusts past the rim.

Pinpoints of ominous red light flicker in the darkness. Fleshless eyes. Something stirs, rattles, rises. A dozen white frames of the dead. Human bones invested by insatiable ghosts, hungry in the dry sockets of their teeth, hungry in the hollows of their time-leathered marrows.

Sethrys doesn’t face the skeleton onslaught alone; behind her come Felix with his silver censer spilling threads of blessed smoke, Gorandal with their father’s father’s hammers, Morladi with her incantations. A wave of bone meets metal and magic. The skeletons are hungry for blood, but the adventurers are hungrier for glory. Seven major chambers into this sunken, mold-racked ruin and their enthusiasm has yet to dim. It’s not even time for lunch.

Sethrys slams, smashes, howls. Her blade flashes silver. With a triumphant cut she parts one skeleton’s head completely from its column of vertebrae. The skull whirls, the sputtering flames in its sockets painting roses of red light on the walls and ceilings as it flies spinning through the air, out the door-

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