Leonidas looked into the fire and realized he was more relaxed than he probably should be considering their plan for the morning.

Marryck has finally, after a few days of trying, finally gotten someone to actually sell them a small bag of pipe tobacco and now they are in the chair near Leonidas, feet up on the arm of his chair, puffing away contendly.

Jortimer is nursing a mug of ale. Leonidas knows that Jortimer, having spent his latter formative years being raised around dwarven youth, has a tolerance for ales and meads far beyond normal human levels but Jortimer has mostly taken small sips.

Tabintha? She's up at the bar talking to...

...Jogi, Tholan, and Sige. A plan has been forming, helped by 5 gold pieces to buy everyone drinks for the next couple of hours. The coins had been Leonidas's idea. Getting them drunk had been hers.

"Not too drunk," Jortimer had cautioned, in a rather motherly tone.

Tabintha had punched the stout priest playfully and then gone off to strategize.

In his mind, Leonidas imaged he was using chalk to write on a blank wall.

Problems:

1. What is the Heart?
2. How can the Heart be destroyed?
3. Just how mad was Otto Axebreaker going to be?
4. What else might be in that room?

Then, under that, he wrote another line of mental notes:

PLANS:

1. Summon three gobbies.
2. Marryck opens the door, not touching the lock, and they see if the first gobby can enter.
3. Assuming:
   • The gobby does not explode in such a horrible way as to be demoralizing to everyone, and
   • Something else does not go terrible wrong in the process...
4. Send in another, even if the first gobby does just slightly catch on fire, get cut on half, et cetera.
5. Repeat into out of gobbies or until they are pretty sure the door isn't trapped trapped.
6. Tab and Jort will then enter and proceed to tank whatever bad stuff can swing a sword or dagger at them.
7. Mar and himself would enter and try to find something that might be called a "heart".
8. Once got, they would leave, shutting the door, and then use a dagger to try and seal it as best they could.
9. Get everyone out where Sige and Jogi are waiting, forge stoked to as hot as it can get so hopefully they can smash said "heart" to bits.

This is all a fancy way of saying most of them problems would be the unknowns. The door clearly had stopped the King or Warlord (it was not lost on Leonidas that both terms had been used) for some time, but maybe the Heart was the thing being stopped. Taking it from that room might unleash all hell on them.

And would the forge trick work?

Tholan was going to wait at the top of the stairs. If he heard pained screams and thought he could help, he would do so. If the screams were obviously fatal or he could not help, his job was to do a terrible thing: slam the trap door shut and then help Sige seal it so complete than Jogi's great-grandchildren would have no idea the tomb existed.

"Sorry, Stonehaven," Leonidas mentally impended to this thought.

Speaking of appending thoughts to thoughts, he went back and wrote in huge letters across his previous mental list:

DO NOT FUCK WITH ANCIENT UNDEAD THING THAT CAN SUMMON OTHER UNDEAD THINGS.

This War/King/Lord could be any number of things, but if this curse could bring about stuff like that zombie mound and keep those torches lit, it was well above their current skill level.

"We good?," Tabintha asks, rosy cheeked and on the verge of a giggle. She has shown back up while the other three are deep in their various nervous ticks.

"Yeah, sure," Jortimer replies, gloomily.

Marryck, in response, tries and fails to blow a smoke ring.

"Alright, bed, and then tomorrow we become legends."

Entering the Tomb...well, you know, the Tomb Tomb

The chink-chunk-cunk sound of Jortimer using a hammer and a log splitter to crack the edges of the door were joined by his occasional cursing.

"If this door is keeping the ghost in, then just shutting it should work," Leonidas points out to his sister, who apparently added this addition after they started.

"Maybe, but we know there are things in here brought forth by either Axebreaker or the Heart. We can't assume that they won't be able to just...break down the door. We don't know what they will do."

"That will have to do. Everyone ready?," Jortimer says after making some definite cracks in the door frame, though none are particularly precise and at least one looks like it will just crack all the way through if any pressure is put on the door.

Leonidas nods and soon three gobbies poof into existence near him.

Marryck nods, turns the key in the lock, and pulls the door trying to not touch the lock itself...

...and then the door swings open. The room inside is darker than the rooms outside, but in the light of the hallway they can make out some shapes on the floor and some sort of structure dead ahead.

Leonidas whispers a command and the first gobby gets into the very edge of the room and then jumps and down, swinging its sword to see if there are pressure, string, or such traps.

Suddenly the room is a flare of blue light as the ghostly energy inside burns brighter than anything else in the dungeon. Leonidas catches some words that sound like a drowning man, ironically with the world's driest throat, shout in a deep baritone: "...inions of the Hooded Man, rise and protect your King!" and then a clacking sound. Pretty soon, the first gobby is pushed out as four skeleton figures - half the size but thicker boned - are fighting it.

Tabintha shouts, "GO!," as her and Jortimer try to push up.

Leonidas realizes it's a repeat of the ghoul fight and tells Tabintha to fall back to the door to their right, where the skeleton spearmen had been. They need room to move, but it will take her a second to strategically retreat.

The leading gobby jumps and smashes his short sword down into the skull of the dwarf skeleton right as the dwarf skeleton swings. The result is the skeletal form of the dwarf collapsing in a heap while its pickaxes flies out of its hands and skids across the floor.

Tabintha jabs at the one she is fighting and chips a huge chunk off of its shoulder.

Still, another of the four skeletons fills the gap.

More worryingly, the brighter blue light in the room is now spreading out. The torches nearest the door are flaring up to double brightness. Excellent if you wanted to do some light reading. However, this is ominous.

Doubly so when Tabintha realizes the light reaching the shattered dwarf is doing something. The bones start regathering and knitting together.

"Leo!," she shouts, "The light, it's putting them back together."

Leonidas glances down at the skeletal spearman remains near his feet. Thinks of the room full of corpses behind him.

"I said fall back, dammit!" Then, to the other two gobbies, he points out the bones and tells them to run and throw them in the hall behind him. Which they start doing.

"Shield up, move back steadily. Give Leo some room to get past!"

As Tabintha shouts this to Jort, she starts stepping back, deftly avoiding shovel strikes by the skeletal dwarf in front of her. She hears the gobby grunt as a shove strikes it against the head.

Behind her, Leonidas and Marryck have dived into the room where the skeletal spearmen came out of it, and the door is partially closed.

Tabintha has a goal to clear the way, hopefully before the still reknitting fourth skeletal dwarf wakes back up.

Tabintha sees one of the skeletons go into the room with her brother and shouts a likely needless warning. Her, Jort, and the gobby (where are the others? she wonders) continue to back up.

They are now far enough past the doors that she can switch back into attack mode.

Leonidas grunts as the bony fist hits him in the ribs. Tabintha slashes down and takes off its other arm, but it keeps fighting without pain. Behind them, Jortimer also cries out as he is hit by the shovel in the last skeleton's hands.

Leonidas knows he is getting trapped. They will spend their whole time fighting these things as the blue light seemingly spreads to fill the whole tomb and then possibly beyond. He has no idea how far the light will spread.

"WE HAVE TO PUSH THROUGH!"

As the skeleton blocking their path falls, all three are pushing forth into the room above. Behind them, the light continues to spread and the skeletons continue to reform.

---

Jortimer takes the old book and tosses it at one of the dwarven skeletons.

"COME ON, YOU!," he shouts, trying to get their attention.

Jortimer knows even if he keeps knocking these things down, the bright blue light will just get them back up. Sure, there is likely some sort of catch. Holy water from a church. A line of salt. Tossing silver on them...wait. No. His satchel has a few gold coins, but Tabintha has the lion's share of the coins.

"Damn!," he thinks.

Still, if he can lure them all together against a corner of this room, he has a trick up his sleeve. As the skeleton warriors approach, he leans against one of the heavy, rotting shelves and starts shoving.

Right as the shelf rocks forward, Jortimer calls upon the earth itself to start shaking. As his connection to Throff flares up, a small earthquake not much larger than a few meters around him to violently shudder.

The dwarf skeletons start to tumble and collapse back into bones and then WHAM! the shelves, already weakened by age and now now titled right as the floor heaves, drop on top of them.

Just to be sure, Jortimer picks up a few of the random bones and tosses them as far as he can, as well as the weapons. He knows they will try to reform but hopefully this buys the others some time.

As Tabintha looks up at the creature above her, she feels a chill. It floats there, clearly once a warrior, and it mostly just watches and mumbles to itself. As it does, its face flickers like a lantern show. One image is that of a not-terrible but perhaps bloodied king, someone who has fought long and hard for his people. The other is something twisted. What scares her the most is how frightened this second face is.

With each switch, the creature, the wraith of Otto Axebreaker, switches his words like reading from two different scripts.

"The hooded man...you need to run...are you with him, the...I am lost...HOW DARE YOU?...be strong for...GUARDS!...those poor..."

It's, frankly, unnerving.

While not taking her eyes off of it, the three of them shove against the stone lid of the tomb, shaped to look much like the wraith in front him, hands clasped over his heart.

They each feel a chill in their bones as they do this. Like the chill of their own grave is reaching out from a future hopefully more than a few hours down the road. Leonidas and Marryck stumble the hardest, but even Tabintha can feel her life force lesson.

The torches on the wall flare up even more and start burning wildly.

Inside the tomb is...

...the corpse of Otto Axebreaker, wrapped in old ropes that could likely be snapped by any sort of force. In the decayed ribs of the creature, the Heart - a black and purple amulet - pulses as dark threads flash out towards the torches on the wall.

Then there are the bugs. Hundreds of them start pouring out. The same color as the amulet. Eating on the decay which makes no sense. They start to swarm out...

...and most attach to Tabintha who flails back and swats them aside. Luckily, she gets most off before they can start biting or tearing into her flesh.

Marryck grabs the heart and starts running, asking the others to follow.

As they get outside the door, and as Tabintha goes to slam it shut, she looks back...

...and sees the noble face of the wraith has won out over the strange, twisted one. It nods at her and right as she is closing it, she sees the wraith down and tangle its ghostly hands into the rope.

Marryck is pulling out daggers and shoving them into the cracks they made, forcing the door shut. Tabintha worries that if the other Otto Axebreaker comes out, it might give pursuit, and hopes this door will hold...

...but does not stay to check. They are running into the large room and see Jortimer standing by collapses bookshelves and scattered bones that he keeps kicking away as they try to get something under the shelves. Shelves that occasionally rise up as whatever is under them keeps getting crushed on loop.

"Jort, what in all hells?," Leonidas asks.

"You got it?!"

"Yes!," Tabintha says.

Jortimer's response is to turn and run back towards the stairs out of here.

The others follow...

...into the room filled with dried out corpses right as the torches flare up in that room.

The three zombies they bested earlier are starting to stir but none of the quartet stop. They dash on down the hall, pulling the door shut behind them, and know it is only a matter of moments before all the creatures they have fought in the dungeon will be reawakened.

Scattering up the stairs, they come out the trapdoor to see a surprised Tholan. He starts to talk about a pair of weird goblins running up with arms full of bones but Tabintha cuts him off and pulls her her sword.

"They might be up any moment. Mar. Jort. Get that to Sige and help him destroy it."

Leonidas feels a burst of pride that his sister has not dismissed him, but also knows that the ancient evil artifact might be the more dangerous option.

Still, Jortimer goes to run off, panting heavily, when Marryck calls him back. They push the amulet into Jortimer's hands.

"I know you hate your family's obsession with jewelry, but you are the best to help."

Then they turn around, bow out and arrows notched, and wait for doom to fall. Down below, a loud crash as something large collapses can be heard.

"Oh, wait," Leonidas says. He runs over and looks at Jogi's crates and liquor stash...

...and starts rolling a cask of dwarven brandy back to the top of the stairwell.

"Help me get this over...like, pour it over."

Without needing too much explanation, Tabintha and Tholan help lift the barrel and together bring it down hard into the top of the stairs. Brandy starts pouring down as Leonias grabs a lantern from the wall and tosses it into the pouring liquid. Blue flame erupts, but no the blue flame of alcohol burning. It won't last long but it might give them some time...

At the forge, Jortimer is shouting instructions to Sige, Jogi, and Hamund. Sige is manning the hammer while the massive frames of Jogi and Hamund are furiously keeping the fire going as hot as possible.

A crack forms on the Heart...

...as down below, the loud sound of moans and that mystic blue light hits the bottom of the stairs...

...and the mass of the zombie abomination pours up, ignoring the burning fire as is its flesh reknits from the damage. Right as Tabintha swings her sword down...

...the second hit is even better. The Heart shatters and the molten silver is poured over it...

...the blue light blinks out all at once and the mass of dead flesh crumples and starts dripping back down the stairs. Within seconds, the centuries of decay catch up and it turns to dust. Then ash as the brandy fire consumes it.

The smell is unpleasant.

"Well, fuck," Tabintha says.

Down below, Otto Axebreaker smiles as his wraith fades. The blue light is gone and the protection on the door into the underground tunnels is finally free.

---