Darkess and fear

A soldier guides you to the nearby graveyard and towards a crypt that looks eroded by time and neglect. The names on the marble gravestones washed away by the elements, making it impossible to know whose grave it is. He tells you that he is the youngest son of the local undertaker and this is how he knows about the secret passage that leads to the dungeon of the castle.

He pushes his fingers inside the orbits of a skull sculpted on a wall and one of the tombs slides to the side with a rumbling noise to reveal a hidden staircase leading underground. You look to the shadows, then to him.

“Will you come with me?”

“No, Ma'am. I may be foolish enough to challenge Solvene, but not so much that I am willing to disturb the sleep of the dead.”

“Yeah. It seems that I am the only one who is that brave… or stupid.”

The stairs leads you to a corridor that must be four or five meters underground. The ceiling is low, so you are **** with your head down, but at least the structure looks stable, sturdy stones wall surrounding you, so you don’t have to fear that you could be buried by a sudden collapse.

As you progress, a cold breeze brings the stink of stale air, humidity and… things long dead. You don’t need to look for the source of this smell for long: any now and then in the walls are small niches where skeletons or mummified bodies are laying for their eternal sleep.

You have no idea why those people were buried in this strange way and not in tombs like the ones in the crypt. Maybe they were not family members, but servants, maybe…

One of the niches is empty.

You stop and check a second time: the niche that it is at your right now is empty, while all the others that you have seen before contained a skeleton., as the ones after that your torchlight shows you.

Your heartbeat goes out of control as you look into the darkness that lays just out the range of your light.

You try to calm down. I mean there may be millions of reasons for that niche to be empty, without having to be something supernatural. I mean, even in a place like Erofights City ghost stories are just that, stories, and you have never heard of…

A crack in the darkness.

A skull flies towards your, it’s orbits glowing of a red light.

In the air, a spectral voice yells.

“YOUR SOUL IS MINE!”