Journeys beyond the walls of Blestrysnia were never easy, or safe, nor in any way pleasant. And they became only harsher as one trekked closer to the Barrow Mountain. Blestrysnia itself lay some five miles east from the mountain base, close enough to be eternally beneath its terrible influence and beneath its shadow if ever the sun shone upon these lands. There was something inherently haunting about the mountain. Like a cursed being, a knowing entity in its own right, the Barrow Mount seemed malicious in its intentions. Never did monsters fail to arrive from its slopes, nor had anything good ever come from it.

  Dragomir struggled to imagine a world without its evil, for everything he’d ever known had been under its influence. Not once, in all Dragomir’s life, had he seen the sun. He knew what a sunrise was supposed to look like, the descriptive properties of the sky during a sunset, but nothing beyond those superficial bits of knowledge. To know about something and truly understand it were wholly different things. And unfortunately, all the simplest joys and beauties of the world were as strange to him as the living dead were to the people of different lands and Exile Princedoms.

  Perhaps, Dragomir wondered as he walked alongside Runt through the cursed wilderness surrounding the Barrow Mountain, that was his reason for following Runt on this journey. Dragomir wanted to fight and die for a worthy cause, yes; but a foolish death for a pointless search was bereft of both honor and purpose. He needed a proper reason to accept this task. But beyond his taking of Runt at his word, there was no logic in doing this.

  Such was also the reason why he and Runt walked alone. The other Corpsehunters Dragomir had asked for support, including Florin, had refused to accompany them for this quest. And while nobody attempted to stop them, as all Corpsehunters had the choice in when and for what cause they died, nobody seemed to think that either of them would return. Florin seemed to already be considering who his next apprentice would be immediately after Dragomir explained his and Runt’s plan.

  But Dragomir, for some reason still unknown to even himself, had decided to join Runt. And thus they walked, somewhat listlessly, towards the Barrow Mountain’s south-eastern slopes.

  Rising above the swamps below, the ground became gradually more dry as they ascended in elevation. Soon enough, Dragomir could look out across the forests below, towards the furthest edges of these lands where the grey pale almost seemed thin enough for sunlight to break through, though none actually did.

  From there, Runt and Dragomir could do nothing but simply wander. They spent the remainder of the first day walking throughout the mountain side, discovering streams and cave burrows while hiding from the occasional gheist or corpsewight that came near to their path. On any other occasion Dragomir would prefer to rid the world of these unliving beasts, but staid his hand if only to preserve their lives for the time being. Fighting a gheist would inevitably attract more, and corpsewrights had a terrible habit of never being truly alone.

  Many Corpsehunters had been killed upon the mountain. More than once they crossed paths with an old headless body, often little more than bones in scraps of clothing, often with a weapon still in their grip. Twice they nearly stumbled upon Corpsehunter bodies that had been raised into unlife. And unlike with other corpses, Dragomir insisted upon killing these two wights.

  Again Runt proved himself a capable enough fighter, though only after drinking one of his potions. But beyond those moments or strength, Runt was often left near the point of exhaustion. The mountain slopes took much out of him, and often Dragomir was forced to wait while Runt rested and recuperated his strength.

  The frail man practically passed out from exhaustion after they made camp. Within a deep but well-hidden hollow, Dragomir took first watch while Runt slept soundly. They made no fire, spoke only in hushed whispers and only when necessary at that. They spared no chances while taking what rest they required before setting off again to resume their search once they’d both slept.

  And it was only after that rest, two or three mealtimes later, that they stumbled upon something peculiar.

  Upon the higher slopes of the mountain, near the edge of the treeline, was a building the likes of which Dragomir had never seen before. It was an old chapel. Of that, Dragomir was certain. Though what gods it was built in worship of he hadn’t an inkling. Covered in so much moss and vines that its white stones blended near fully into the forest surrounding it, Dragomir could make out a humble belltower at its forefront. Further back, hidden amidst the vines were what appeared to be stained glass windows, though what they depicted couldn’t be made out through the overgrowth. The bell within its tower, so rusted and worn that Dragomir thought it would have fallen long ago if not for the vines that had intertwined with its cords, was humble in its own way; only ever capable of echoing a short distance, perhaps to a community that once surrounded the chapel in some now forgotten time.

  The chapel might have been a peaceful sight, a place deserving reverence even after so many long centuries. But there was an aura, a deep and terrible power from it. Just looking upon the chapel sent a shiver of doubt through Dragomir’s body; and he knew immediately that something truly beyond this world lay ahead.

  The interior space of the chapel was dark, impenetrable through the gloom. Dragomir caught no sight of anything that lay within, but some instinctual part of himself understood that it was not abandoned. Something lurked inside the building. Something as old if not older than the chapel itself.

  Dragomir and Runt looked at each other, and without further delay they approached the old chapel.

  “Do you think this is it?” Dragomir asked Runt as they came to the Chapel’s open doorway. Even this close he still failed to perceive what lay beyond the threshold.

  “All I know is that this is a place of power… This might not be the origin of the Grey Woe… but deep evil permeates it regardless.” Runt glanced back towards Dragomir. “Be ready.”

  With those words Runt stepped into the dark, and with a breath Dragomir followed after.

  Immediately Dragomir recognized the unearthly nature of this place. Through the threshold he felt a strange pulse of energy, a deep reverberation that made his body vibrate and his sight blur. Then, with a jolt of surprise Dragomir felt his foot touch the cold stones below. Looking back he saw the outside world, a mere pace away, though for some unknown reason he felt as if it were a world of distance, as if the place he stepped into wasn’t connected with where he’d arrived from.

  The air also felt different. Far colder, it was a ghostchill, the freezing shiver that marked haunted places. Turning back ahead, in the direction of Runt and the rest of the chapel, Dragomir realized for the first time the sheer impossibility of the space they occupied.

  The chapel’s exterior was humble, twenty paces long and at most half that wide. What he’d stepped into was more akin to a cathedral of legend. So long that Dragomir couldn’t properly perceive its end with width to match, and so tall that what looked like clouds or thick fog had formed to hide the true ceiling from view. Not a single surface was without a masterwork of art. Each stone was carved with such intricacy as to make even the smallest of rocks a worthy magnum opus. Each candelabra, of which there were perhaps thousands strewn throughout the space, were without exception perfect in their shape. This cathedral was a testament to everything that had been lost in the Deep Woe, the craftwork of old empires.

  Dragomir felt dwarfed in all aspects. Like a maggot before a palace. This place of worship seemed more fitting for gods than men. Yet the aura around them, and those things within the endless rows of pews, made it clear that this was a place fit only for devils.

  Throughout the benches were bodies, old skeletons which had long been desiccated into husks. Many still posed as they’d been at the moment of their deaths. Bowed in prayer or looking up towards the cathedral clouds above. Dragomir’s grip upon his cleaver tightened, yet none of the bodies moved to attack. All remained silent, save for a single strange sound in the air that was so quiet that he almost didn’t perceive it over the softness of his own breathing and heartbeat.

  Straining himself to hear, Dragomir thought that it must have been a voice, a song, music that reverberated like an eternal echo from ages long past.

  Dragomir had to refocus himself. He pushed aside his fear, knowing that there was no reason to fear death when it was his ultimate purpose in life. He didn’t allow himself to become overwhelmed by the sights before him, though the sheer scale of everything threatened to trip Dragomir off balance. He breathed, calmed, nodded to Runt who’d likewise gazed across the cathedral with wide eyes, then they moved forward.

  Cleavers at the ready, they braved past the first pews, their steps echoing far into the distance though never loud enough to fully dull the ethereal chanting all around them. Dragomir kept a closer watch on the husk corpses than Runt, whose attention remained solely on what lay ahead; and Dragomir understood why. Something unseen, known, but not unfelt lay before them, further into the cathedral.

  They were not assaulted, neither attacked by the still corpses nor by the unseen being which doubtlessly knew of their arrival. Yet Dragomir still had to suppress a quivering in his hands by gripping his cleaver tighter, his off-hand fist clenching into itself until his fingernails drew blood from his palm. He’d never been so shaken by the dead. He lived to fight and eventually join them. But now, a deeper dread wormed its way through his gut as if fear alone was beginning to rot him out from the inside.

  Runt seemed to understand the danger they were in and prepared for combat accordingly. Pulling another vial from his belt, he quickly downed it from beneath his mask before stifling a cough. But Dragomir saw how his eyes focused, his pupils first expanding then contracting into narrow pinpoints befitting a stray and feral cat.

  They walked what felt like leagues to Dragomir. Pews after pews, rows and columns never-ending. The sheer scale of this otherworldly palace of forgotten faith was nearly beyond comprehension. Yet it seemed that even this place was not without limits.

  Though at first it seemed they would walk forever like revenants through fields of their kin, Dragomir eventually caught sight of an altar.

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  The altar was humble in form. Modest, built from simple wood with only a single silver candlestick at its center, the thing seemed entirely out of place in a cathedral of such monumentality. Dragomir at first thought that there must have been hidden detail to it, perhaps reliefs or a masterpiece of woodworking within the altar that he couldn’t make out from the far distance. But after moments more of walking, Dragomir failed to notice any sign of such details. This simple and plain altar, less adorned than those of Blestrysnia, was entirely mundane. Yet he could feel only a heightened awareness in its presence; especially as he and Runt came to stand before it in silent observation.

  Dragomir felt watched as he stood there. A dark power lay trapped within. On some fundamental level, deep in his soul, he knew that this altar was responsible for countless terrible acts.

  Many thoughts came to Dragomir, slow and ponderously as perhaps minutes passed while they both stood silent and unmoving. He considered destroying the altar, perhaps through burning or by hacking it to pieces. But he feared that its destruction would only unleash a worse evil from within. He then considered somehow sealing it away. But if this strange place beyond normal time and reason could not contain its evil, then nothing within his comprehension could either. Turning to Runt, Dragomir saw the way his ally watched the altar, wary, aware.

  Dragomir was just about to speak when Runt uttered a single phrase sharp and low in tone, a warning.

  “It’s coming.”

  Very suddenly the grey pale light around them, tinged by only the faintest of gold, was snuffed out. Dragomir turned around just in time to watch as row after row of candles in their candelabras went dark, making it seem as if the light itself was fleeing.

  Dragomir then noticed the silence. The echoing song had completely vanished; and in its place came a laugh, one without mirth, a child’s giggle made haunting by forces beyond the corporeal.

  Gripping his cleaver in both hands, Dragomir turned to watch as Runt drank down another vial which forced several stifled but nonetheless bloody coughs from the man before he likewise shifted into a battle stance.

  Their eyes moved about the darkened cathedral, glancing from one shadow to the next. Nothing came for them, not at first. The corpses in the pews remained still. The child’s laughter faded, only to be replaced by an even more quiet but constant crying that made Dragomir feel sick from its palpable sorrow.

  Perhaps minutes or only seconds elapsed while Dragomir and Runt waited for change. Their wait ended when Runt was suddenly thrown back, away from the altar and Dragomir.

  He could see the surprise in Runt’s eyes as the man was cast through the air as a blur by unseen forces, his body limp as his cleaver slipped from his grip. Over dozens of rows of pews Runt sailed through the air, into the dark, only to land with a shattering of rotted wood and rusted iron, leaving Dragomir immediately and wholly alone before the altar and the force within.

  Dragomir braced himself for a similar assault, to be thrown into the distance, while hoping that he couldn’t be impaled upon a candelabra or left broken upon the pews and hard stones below as Runt might very well have been. But Dragomir wasn’t cast aside. Instead he felt a sudden onrushing of cold air, a force coalescing before him upon the altar, and the child’s weeping grew louder in his ears until it nearly became deafening.

  Dragomir could only look at the altar, that damned and haunted thing, and watch as the visage of something almost human took form around it.

  Like faint mists this being took form. From the faint outlines in the dark, Dragomir perceived it to be human in shape, small, childlike. And as the body coalesced so too did its voice gather into that same place upon the altar. Then all at once the ghost was before him, whole, almost alive in its detail, and crying.

  The child was crying. A small boy, barely ten years old if that, sat upon the altar as a blue-white phantom from times long past. With its hands over its face the ghost wept against itself, scared and alone.

  This was no It but a He, Dragomir thought. The boy was unlike any living dead he’d ever known. The boy breathed deeply between sobs; he coughed and sputtered between gasps for breath; his limbs shook as he seemed to rock back and forth in a vain search for comfort. Nothing Dragomir had ever known had prepared him for this moment. And despite a lifetime of fighting against the curse of the dead, Dragomir couldn’t help but treat this ghost differently.

  His grip upon his cleaver relaxed. The weapon was likely useless against this ghost anyway, given its lack of true corporeal form. Instead of fighting, he merely observed; then with a breath he stepped forward, his hand reaching towards the boy in the hopes of offering whatever comfort he could.

  It was as his hand touched the boy’s shoulder that Dragomir was overwhelmed by a vision, his entire existence falling away as he perceived only that which the ghost showed him.

  Dragomir witnessed many truths about the land he called home. He saw vision of the Barrow Mountain, long before the time of its curse, when sunlight was still known to its slopes though even in the vision no such light could be seen. He witnessed a city far beyond anything this world was capable of building, familiar in many ways though unfathomably more grand than the Blestrysnia he knew. He watched as terrors, those first monsters of the Deep Woe, arrived as veiled shadows. He then beheld the aftermath, the ruins of that old Blestrysnia, battered and broken though not without hope.

  And then, he saw the child. A young boy who was born barely before the beginning of the Deep Woe, his life nothing but a trial of hardship. The child knelt before an altar within a humble, ruined chapel. The echo of its ringing bell could still be heard alongside the screams of those who’d been massacred within as they’d sought refuge many years previous. The boy knew this place could offer no protection, no clear guidance to overcome the horrors of this new age. But he still hoped it could offer a miracle.

  He begged, pleaded, for his dead parents to be returned to him. He was still so young, weak, hungry, tired. He wished only to know the comfort of his parents’ soft words and protection again. For no child deserved to be left alone on the Deep Woe, though many certainly were. The boy chose, rather than to accept the loss, to instead defy reason and continue begging, for hours and then days even as the bodies of his parents rotted beside him and he began to starve. His throat failed him long before his desire to stop pleading towards the heavens. And even as his body began to fail him, he continued to ask for salvation.

  Eventually the boy had gone mad, like so many others. The true purpose of his desire was lost. He stopped thinking about why he needed his parents returned and thought only towards seeing it done. His mind blocked out everything that wasn’t his endless chant, saving himself from the suffering of his body as it wasted away and the hopelessness that grew without end.

  And only then, after so long, when his throat was so broken by speech that each syllable was nearly impossible to utter and so hungry that the two bodies at his side started to seem appetizing, did something finally respond.

  From the dark a voice spoke out, offering not a miracle but a bargain. It told the boy, desperate as he was, that it would exchange life for another. Through sacrifice his parents would walk again, if only through the death of another.

  In his madness, which had been carefully cultivated by the being now before him, the boy agreed. He accepted the deal and vowed to see that one life would be exchanged for the others, that someone would die so his parents could walk this world again. Yet, as would be remembered only through stories and legends in the age to come, the being, the Grey Woe, had played a trick upon the child.

  Corpses would be raised from the dead as husks, the Barrow Mountain would be cursed, the land itself would fall to the endless grey pale the Grey Woe cast, until the day came when the boy offered up a sacrifice.

  His parents, as truly the first among corpses to befall the great curse of Blestrysnia, rose from the dead and killed their own child. Yet in the Grey Woe’s trickery, it refused to consider the boy’s death as payment for his end of the bargain, and the Grey Woe cast the child’s spirit into the endless void between worlds to know only the sorrow of his final moments.

  Dragomir only became aware of himself again as he stumbled back away from the altar and fell backwards onto the ground. With a shuddering gasp his body shivered as cold ice slowly melted from his skin. The deep cold around him, the continued cries of the child, it all came into focus as he fully realized the meaning of the child’s offered vision.

  Dragomir might have thought over the vision endlessly if he’d been given the time. But already, he knew enough to understand why the boy had shown it to him, and what he needed to do.

  The curse of the Barrow Mountain, all the suffering Dragomir had dedicated his entire life towards, had culminated in this moment. The child needed someone to sacrifice themselves to have the curse lifted, as only through the loss of one life could others be truly restored. The sunless sky above, the poisoned ground below, the shambling corpses in every wood and swamp; it could all be undone if only Dragomir offered himself as this sacrifice.

  Dragomir didn’t feel apprehension in that moment as he approached the altar again to stand before the still sobbing child. Not even as he knelt before the altar, unsheathed his sharpened dagger, and looked down towards its tip. He’d fought for years in the hope that his death would mean something. He always slept with a vague expectation that it could be his last rest. He awoke and ate thinking that every bite could be a part of his last meal. Never should a Corpsehunter fear death, for it is the fate of all regardless. Such were the teachings of his mentor that he not only heard but felt in the celebrations of the Honored Dead.

  With absolute clarity Dragomir looked up towards the ghost as he gripped his dagger in both hands, its tip aimed towards his own neck.

  But then he heard a shout from behind him, Runt, who was too distant to properly make out the words. Dragomir almost smiled, knowing that Runt would tell the tale of his death and ensure this sacrifice was not forgotten. If he’d not already settled upon this course of action then Dragomir might have hesitated long enough to heed Runt’s words, to understand them for the warning they were. But when given a chance to embrace his good and meaningful death, Dragomir proved overly eager. He simply stared up towards the crying child before him, and in the hopes of offering him and everyone else below the Barrow Mountain salvation, Dragomir thrust the dagger into his own flesh.

  Dragomir felt calm, almost relaxed as the blood poured from his neck. He felt at peace as his limbs went cold and life drained from his body. He even watched, more fascinated than anything, as his blood pooled upon the cold stones below in the shape of strange runes.

  It was only as his blood began to rise into the air towards the crying child that Dragomir felt any amount of confusion. And he didn’t feel dread until that lifeforce reached the boy, whereupon his sobs morphed into something far more chilling; a laugh.

  With glee, his face still obscured by his own hands, the boy’s body began to shake with mirth. His voice grew in strength, power, and wickedness. And only then did the ghost show its face by removing its hands, to reveal not the visage of a young boy but instead something unhuman. With red eyes, a smile so twisted as to be sickening, and a look of utter triumph, Dragomir knew this thing to be a monster.

  Only then did his strength fail him. Dragomir finally fell to the ground, neck still bleeding as the last vestiges of his life fell from his body. He could do nothing now. He’d been tricked. Like the boy so long ago, if such a child ever existed, Dragomir had been offered a bargain and been foolish enough to accept. Terribly, it was then that Dragomir realized what Runt had been shouting, what the frail man had been attempting to tell him, for Runt had already realized the truth of this monster.

  It was the Grey Woe. And Dragomir would only be yet another of its victims.