Tales of Ruuin - Homecoming

A day of honest work

Skullgarden Graveyard

Tal, Kingdom of Morgenheim

Fall, 8th Butchermoon, Year 1876

"Are you out of your mind?! I'm not going down... down there!"

Echser's bulging eyes almost popped from their sockets as he uttered these words, his narrow face frozen somewhere between horror and disgust. By Science, how could this vagrant even ask him to descent into a freshly dug grave and crawl into a ghoul tunnel of all things, just in order to place a bomb? Didn't the lunatic realize that he was one of, maybe even the, most learned man in the whole of the Scarred Empire. He was Mortin Cornelius Echser, damn it! Master alchemist, scientist par excellence, and a genius the likes of which the world has not seen since the days of Zweistein. To call him a mental titan in a land of imbecile footstools would be the understatement of the century, that's how smart he was. How dare this... this butcher of the undead even make the suggestion.

The man must be out of his mind!

Echser paused in his mental tirade, blinking. Of course, he was out of his mind. That was akin to a professional requirement for his ilk. Only lunatics of the highest order would even consider the vocation of a lich hunter, earning their blood money by killing vampires, zombies, ghouls, ghosts, and whatnot. But that was his chosen profession, not Mortin's!

Craven...

The name said it all.

However, Echser had to admit, the lich hunter didn't look like the yellow-bellied sort. Quite the opposite... Well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and athletic, he was what you thought of when you heard: tall, dark, and handsome – if you had a thing for serial killers, that is. Even now, he seemed to emanate killing and competence. All those guns, and knives, and black leather... Definitely not the sort of man you would want to meet in a dark alley – would ever want to meet. In other words, he seemed perfectly suited to crawl through filthy, monster-infested tunnels.

Since no answer came, Echser decided on a more wheedling approach. "I thought we had agreed that my role in this... erm... partnership is that of a scholar? You take care of murder and mayhem so that I can do my job—which is to find out what secrets lurk within the flesh of these... erm... lurkers and to harvest and reprocess their internal organs in order to create those little black pills you are so fond of. I'm not a man suited to fieldwork! Only in the safety of my laboratory I can my alchemical prowess be fully unleashed." He pointed at the powerful smoke bomb that rested like a large egg at the rim of the freshly dug-out grave. "Only there can I create such marvelous devices for you."

While these words tumbled from Echser's mouth like a bunch of drunken men down a long and winding staircase, Craven just continued to stare at him from the other side of the pit. All brooding and sinister, his black cape whipping about him every time a gust of wind found its way through the rows of gravestones, one hand on that fearsome-looking saber sheathed on his hip. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Without his hat, his eyes did all the talking. Echser swallowed hard, his pronounced Addams Apple bobbing.

Those eyes...

Echser had seen the eyes of Lich Tear addicts before, though he'd never quite seen ones such as these. The eldritch narcotic caused a widening of the pupils; sometimes so much that they all but eclipsed the irises. In extreme overdose cases or in long-time addicts, this effect could spread even farther, pushing into the white. Craven's eyes, however, no longer showed any white. In fact, they showed nothing at all. Even though it was a bright day, with the sun shining directly into his face, the lich hunter's eyes didn't even shimmer. They were like holes in the world, darker by far than the ghoul tunnel down in the grave. As the silence stretched on, it became even more unnerving, devolving to downright eerie when a couple of large ravens flew from the twisted branches of a nearby tree to settle on the gravestones to the left and right of Craven. As one, they turned their beady black eyes on Echser, almost as if they knew he might be their next meal.