James Lowder - Knight of the Black Rose

Magda moved in front of Soth and locked gazes with him. “My lord, you cannot trust Strahd. For all you know, this could be an elaborate plot to get revenge upon you for what you did at Castle Ravenloft.”

“Perhaps that it so,” the death knight allowed.

With a grunt, the dwarf sat up. “Then it’s into the woods, is it?”

“No,” Soth said. “We follow the count’s directions.”

Both Magda and Azrael gaped in disbelief. “Why?” the Vistani managed to ask.

“There is only one fact with which you need concern yourselves,” the death knight rumbled. “I have chosen to follow Strahd’s suggestions. There is no opening for debate.”

Having finished with the latest corpse, the skeletons stood in the road, awaiting Soth’s instructions. The death knight strode past the mindless undead, and they fell in after him. Side by side, Magda and Azrael watched Soth as he marched ahead.

“He’s probably right,” the dwarf noted. He slung his pack over a shoulder and shrugged his mail shirt into a more comfortable position. “I mean, we’ve encountered no foes on this road-none alive, anyway-and we are heading in the right direction.”

That last comment fanned Magda’s nagging suspicions. Her thoughts showed clearly in her dark expression. Azrael could not help but notice.

“Yes, I saw the castle once,” he admitted, “but I was never inside. And, yes, I plan to tell Soth about it by sundown. I’m just waiting for a good time to tell him everything he might find the least bit interesting.” He smirked. “My life has been more colorful than those Kulchek tales. No offense, but fairy-tale heroics always bore me to tears.”

Without a word, Magda fell in behind the last of Soth’s mindless soldiers. The undead knight shuffled along at a slow, steady pace, his armor clanking against bones, shoulders stooped and arms limp at his sides. Every step seemed a monumental task.

That must be what it’s like to be undead, Magda realized suddenly. You want to rest, but you can’t. You have to press on, toiling endlessly, just as you did when you were alive.

She edged closer to a skeleton and gazed at its strange visage. Although a battered bronze helmet covered much of its head, the dark sockets of its eyes were visible. They were empty, just as the knight’s features lacked personality.

The undead warrior stepped sideways to avoid a large stone in the road, and ran straight into Magda. The Vistani knew that, though the skeleton had no eyes, it should be able to see as well as most living men. Her puzzlement deepened when it paused and scanned the road for whatever had caused its stumble; its eyes passed over the Vistani as if she weren’t there.

“The medallion,” came a voice from behind her.

Magda spun around at the sudden sound, her cudgel raised to strike. Azrael laughed. “They can’t see you because of the medallion,” he said. “You said so yourself.” The dwarf shrugged. “I mean, that’s what you told me, anyway. You could have been lying, I suppose, but we spies can usually tell when someone is bending the truth.”

The Vistani smiled despite herself, though more from the absurdity of her situation than any genuine humor in it. In less than a half-cycle of the moon, she’d gone from a quiet, uneventful life among the Vistani to struggling to survive from day to day. Undead warriors and a werebadger were her traveling companions, creatures she’d heard about only in legends until Soth had appeared in camp. She even carried a weapon out of the tales she loved the most-for she truly believed the cudgel was none other than Kulchek’s own Gard.

“Don’t make light of my suspicions, Azrael,” she said at last, though her voice held little anger. “You had questions about me when we first met, just because I am Vistani. I have proven myself, but you have not.”

“You haven’t proven yourself to me,” Azrael replied bluntly. “Besides, I’ve never said I trusted you. I just have the good manners-even if I must point it out myself-not to bring it up every few hours.”

They traveled for the rest of the afternoon in silence, stopping every now and then for the skeletons to deal with yet another body found along the road. Soth grew more distant from Magda and Azrael. He spent almost all of his time with the undead warriors. Once Magda even heard Soth talking to one of them, as if it might fully understand his words. The sight chilled her to the core.

By the time the sun touched the horizon to the west, the road had begun to crawl up the slope of a small mountain. Trees grew more sparse, then were replaced by huge boulders as the predominant feature of the terrain. Fewer and fewer bodies dotted the landscape as well. The relief anyone felt at that fact was soon overcome by concern, for the going quickly became treacherous. Even the mindless skeletons, whose careful progress rarely faltered, slipped on the loose gravel that covered the mountain road.

Only Soth and Azrael moved with ease. The rocky landscape was not the dwarf's favorite, though, and he trudged along with a sorrowful look on his face. Magda wondered if the place made the dwarf homesick-Soth had said that, back on his world, dwarves lived deep underground in vast cities of stone. She could not know that the place depressed Azrael for the exact opposite reason.

“Can we stop for the night, mighty lord?” Azrael asked, pausing to shake a stone from inside his boot.

Soth scanned the horizon. Massive chunks of granite stood all around them, separated by only winding, shadowy paths filled with gravel and pale weeds. A pillar of white stone, flushed rosy red by the setting sun, pushed above the jumble of granite ahead. “We will stop at the base of that column,” the death knight replied. “It is a landmark Strahd mentioned in his directions.”

Magda and Azrael hurried through the maze of boulders, toward the white stone pillar, but it was farther away than it had first appeared to be. By the time they reached the obelisk, the sun had disappeared, leaving Gundarak in the clutches of twilight.

The pillar was huge, as tall as any tree Magda had ever come across in her travels with the Vistani. Perfectly smooth, its sides were covered with tiny runes. As far as Magda could see in the gloaming, they ran all the way up the column, but she could not understand any of the symbols. Around the column’s base lay a wide clearing, the ground hard but free of small stones.

“Marble of some sort,” Azrael noted. He tossed his pack onto the ground and slumped against the pillar. His mail shirt insulated him from the faint shudder that slid up the marble, and the long day’s march had dulled his senses enough to make him deaf to the faint magical hum, a signal that vibrated for miles in all directions.

Lord Soth and the twelve remaining skeletons entered the clearing. “At sunrise, we will head north from here, staying in the foothills of this mountain and the one to the west of it,” he said coldly. “The way straight through the mountains is too difficult for us.”

Magda set her pack aside and began to scour the area for firewood. “Not much to start a fire with.” She sighed, scanning the area through the growing darkness.

“No fire,” the death knight said. “It would alert everything within a day’s march.”

“That spoils the atmosphere for my life story a bit,” the dwarf noted sarcastically, “but we wouldn’t want Gundar himself charging up here to interrupt me.”

The others said nothing as the dwarf rubbed his hands together, then cracked his knuckles. It was as if he were about to arm wrestle someone in a tavern.

“The place where I come from looks a lot like the land you see around you-boulders and rocks and not much else,” he began. “It’s that way over much of the surface, anyway. I’d only seen the surface a few times, but that’s more than most of my kind. No, the others spent all their time in the cities, hammering out weapons no one used and jewelry no one ever wore. Peace and humility were the rule in the city of Brigalaure, but they crafted the damned swords and rings anyway, just because it was important to make something…”