A thin, dry voice echoed down the musty corridors. A strange constant chattering that pervaded the very air of crypts. At the entrance it was barely a whisper, hardly audible over the sounds of ones own breath. But as you penetrated deeper in to complex of broken, dusty tombs the words slowly began to take on strange, alien shapes. Few could comprehend the mysterious chanting, but most who heard it inevitably succumbed to a rising paranoia. A deep seated dread of whatever unnatural invocation was being performed. Some fled from from the crypts entirely lest the babbling drove them mad. Others rushed ahead into the darkness, desperate to put a stop to the foul sibilant chanting once and for all.
Either way they tended to end up running into one of the many, many traps and ambushes that littered the necropolitan network of tunnels. Maris found the whole thing hilarious. Doubly so since, unlike most who walked these grim pathways, he actually knew what the voice was.
He'd left Brodnak behind to take care of his unclean duties, and gone down into the crypts to find somewhere painful to leave the Elvish bow. It was, after all, shiny. And there was one thing he'd learnt down the dark years of working in dungeons it was that people would ignore the most obvious of traps as long as there was an appropriately shiny object to bait it with.
You couldn't go TOO shiny of course. If the bait was too valuable looking it tended to put people on their guard. You could work this to your advantage as well. He'd once taken a giant ruby, placed it on an altar in a large room and then watched a group of adventurers spend six whole hours looking for traps that weren't there. The groups confusion and paranoia mounting with every trap they didn't find.
Of course, eventually one of them did take the gem, but by that point it was almost midnight, when the gem became a portal to the Screaming Netherplains Of Arkg-Jinlor and the whole group was consumed by a flock of Maggotbats drawn through the gate by their own fears. Oh how he'd laughed.
But this bow was of much lesser, and thus much more suitable order of magnitude. Just good enough to be be better than whatever whoever found it was likely to be carrying, but not so great as to look suspicious. Stick it by a pit trap and watch the great and the good do their best lemming impressions.
He continued into the heart of the labyrinth, the constant chanting increasing in volume as he approached the source.
"Gryarg flus grapknag omrood phlut" it went. Funny, he didn't recognize the language, though there was something familiar about it. Still, he shouldn't be surprised. He really didn't have as much time for learning new languages as the voices owner, what with all the stupid errands he seemed to find himself being sent on.
Time was always an issue for the undead. Compared to most people they simply had far to much of it. Any undead being is, at the end of the day, powered by will. For the simpler types such as zombies this was usually the will of their creator. For the more complicated and intelligent types, such as Maris himself, it was their own. They were given a will of their own when they were created, and it was this that gave them their power and versatility. You'd never get a mindless zombie to learn anything at all, let alone complicated death magic. At the top of the necromantic food chain you had the Liches, whos terrible burning willpower allowed them to continue on past their own deaths. However the slow march of time erodes all things, and any individuals will to go on is no different. You may have a will to live that's as strong as mountain, but even the mountains pass if you wait long enough.
This was the danger of undeath. If you "lived" long enough eventually you ran the risk of not really being all that interested anymore. And since it was only your will that was sustaining you in the first place eventually you'd just go to pieces. Quite literally if you were a skeletal type. Even the most powerful were prey to this problem. The ancient and mighty Liches and Vampire Lords spent centuries in a kind of hibernation, sustained only by the last fragments of their once implacable willpower, until they were finally able to muster up the drive to get up and actually do something.
It was therefore important, if you hoped to sustain your undead existence down the centuries, to ensure you had some goals to pursue. Some sought power, or knowledge. Some pursued black pacts with the denizens of the crawling hells or researched ways to pervert nature itself to their twisted whims. Which was all very well for the high ranked types, but not everybody had the clout to build multi level dungeon fortresses and stock them with the howling armies of the damned.
Maris emerged into the desecrated chapel at the centre of the crypts. Piled up around the altar were a bewildering array of heavy looking tomes. Atop the altar, propped on the smashed remains of what had at some point in the distant past been a graven image of some forgotten saint sat a single skull, which chattered away to itself in that peculiar fashion that skulls are not commonly wont to do.
"Egeeth purdabr, knuk mung beezjil agraaaaaaaallllll"
Like most undead, K'vin Eldskull had been created for a specific purpose. In K'vins case that purpose was to wait in cupboard, and jump out at anyone who came by. Unfortunately whoever it was had raised him up had granted him a bit more autonomy than was really required for the job given to him, and quickly began to succumb to that fatal apathy. That was, until the day he accosted a rather confused looking bard who had only ventured into the dungeon on a dare whilst trying to impress some girl in a tavern. K'vin was idly rooting through the possessions the bard had left behind on the off chance there might be something interesting, but really he didn't see much point in kidneys. Then he opened the bards pack and his unlife changed forever.
"Evening K'vin" Maris said. He didn't know if it really was evening or not, but when you spent all your time in the lightness depths of the earth the distinction seemed fairly pointless. "How's it going?"
"Omrong lardle krup munk jurym meegle targlos paaa" said the skull, nodding slightly. To be fair, when you're a skull there's not many options available to you for expressive behaviour."
In the pack K'vin had discovered a single dense and weight tome. A rare and valuable volume of epic poetry that had been banned in most civilised areas, and several of the uncivilised areas that at least had standards. It was a complete edition of the legendary poem "The Ballad Of The Conquests Of The Mighty And Unconquerable Oglaf Olglafsun". Part of the reason this particular work had been banned was that few of these conquests happened on the battlefield. It was a ribald piece written in extremely bad taste and with few concessions to the laws of biology. The other reason was it's length. Evidently the original author had taken the concept of the epic poem as something of a challenge. Some said there were 3975 stanzas, some that the strophes and verses ran into the hundreds of thousands. Most scholars however agreed that they gave up trying to count after a while and just guessed. There is only so much graphic detail a man can stand, and it's rumored that the first hundred lines or so are dedicated just to describing Oglaf Oglafsuns foreskin.
In Iambic Pentameter.
The one redeeming feature of the work, it was said, was that if anyone actually tried to recite the whole thing they would probably starve to death before they finished. Assuming that no offended parties took it upon themselves to end the performance early. And that bit with the sheep and the giant mantis offended EVERYONE.
Of course, none of that was a problem for a lonely skeleton with time on his hands and few visitors. And so, finding himself in possession of the worlds worst and longest poem, K'vin had resolved learn it. All of it. And when he'd finally learnt each and every foetid line of tortured prose, when he could recall at will and recite every ghastly detail of Oglaf Oglafsuns dallience with the Squidqueen of Y'prool, when he had at last mastered the whole text in the original form he started translating it into orcish and started again.
Then impspeak. Then into the tongue of the Slavering Pygmy Smiths. He constructed a translation for the Skittering Rat-Things. He did a version in the ancient dead language of Azeeth. In the high and low speech of the Clasterganderous islands. He even translated it into elvish, which wasn't easy as they don't even have words for half the stuff that goes on, particularly in 13th verse of the 92nd stanza. The bit with the cooked ham. At some point in all this he got ambushed by some cleric or other, wielding a very large hammer and an even larger attitude problem. He barely even noticed. He'd lost interest in that whole jumping out of cupboards thing.
Sure, his body was destroyed, but what did he really need it for anyway? Admittedly not having arms made turning the pages a bit more difficult, but he had plenty of time. Eventually they'd locked him up in the crypts just to get rid of him. The only company down there was the Zombies, and they cared about poetry about as much as they cared about anything that wasn't eating someones brains, which was not at all. It wasn't until someone had given him a set of forbidden dictionaries of the forgotten languages that anyone had noticed how disconcerting the constant chattering could be. As long nobody knew what he was actually saying.
"So, what version is this then? I don't recognize it" Maris asked.
"Glomrang pardunyer verglob overbarklarmanglerotund" chattered the skull, vaguely nodding to an open book.
"Draconic? Doesn't SOUND much like Draconic." said Maris, slightly confused.
"gifnifvarblod grubblestanky gyongurg nabwoth creemy yaprobs" said the skull, rocking in the opposite direction.
"BACKWARDS Draconic? I'm impressed. That can't have been easy. I hope you didn't accidentally summon anything up this time"
"Vroondradleg korbukle noom noom ftang greeble parkded vlarp yoongjy avdad" the skull continued, giving a brief nod towards a trail of fluorescent pink slime that stretched from a charred patch of floor to one of the many archways.
"Oh. Well, I won't tell if you don't."
"GGGGGGGGGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP" the skull shrieked, seemingly in agreement. This was obviously a good bit.
"Anyway, I'm just looking for somewhere to chuck this" he said, holding up the bow. "I was thinking maybe by the spiked pit trap down by the desecrated statue of Saint Johann The Cruelly Beheaded. It could do with a bit of a pepping up don't you think?"
"GONGWONGFLARBLEGRANGWANGVEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOW. AKRUMBLUNG VOSHNID BES!"
"Okay. Well, I'll be off then. Don't want to distract you." Said Maris, heading for the archway furthest away from the suspicious slime trail.
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