The Tomb of Den Divzar

Chapter Seven: The Men of Note

 Many years passed, but there in my mind still, there was a tale of three men who came from far off lands to seek the tomb of Den Divzar. Was Den Divzar a wizard, a ghost, a god, or nothing at all? Nobody is to say. Perhaps he was all of these things. It was my father who told me this story when I was very young, and it is only fitting that you hear it now that you are old enough. Learn from it and you will do good things, ignore it and you will live accursedly. That is what he said to me all those years ago. I always hoped that I learned from it, as best I could.

Kirnen stepped forward towards the heavy stone doors of the tomb, before turning with a start to a voice that rose from the woods.

"Wait! This is all our journey now. No matter the past, we must finish it together." Tol ran from the forest, with a silent Hogart in tow.

He offered a hand to Kirnen and said, "Come now. Though we are motley, it's true, we can surely do this. You are not dead, Kirnen, and you are not your ancestors. You do not have to be."

Kirnen ignored the voices of his family and took Tol's hand, pulling him into a hug.

"So be it then." He rasped, "And thank you."

Hogart nodded joylessly and the three turned to face the heavyset doors. They were engraved with the image of a mutilated corpse on the left door and a triumphant horror resembling the one they faced in the forest on the other. Kirnen and Tol stared at the image trying to remember what they had seen, with only Hogart seemingly unphased by the sight of it. They pressed on, and through the doors of the tomb they went. Inside, the rush of the wind went silent and the stone doors shut tightly behind them. A row of torches flickered to life revealing a corpse that was hung upon a wheel which was placed high upon the wall. The tomb within resembled a church of sorts, with tall stone pillars leading down a large hall to the end of the room. The vaulted ceiling and windowless walls left the only light in the place to the torches. More doors were arranged at the spaces away from the pillars and tapestries, which lay sealed and leading deeper into the tomb. Beside the torches were tapestries depicting vile deeds of violence as they were carried out by more pigmen, the images searing into the three men's brains. Before the wheel was an altar, on which lay a desecrated hog, which had been flayed and left in an unsightly way. Its guts were roped about the wheel and strung along the corpse like adornments. All three were silent, when, without a word, the corpse lifted its head and raised its dangling arm. A gnarled boney finger pointed at Hogart, his eyes went wide and for just a moment the look of sorrow on his face was replaced with one of true fear. He gasped, and then he was gone. His stave clattered to the ground and the orb on the end shattered, spilling water and fish out onto the bloody stones. His hat and cloak of clouds drifted down slowly into a neat pile beside the staff. Tol and Kirnen turned with a start towards the sound of the smashing. The pair were stunned into silence, as the space where Hogart had just stood a second earlier now had no trace of his presence. A beat passed as their minds tried to catch hold of the situation, before Tol's mouth moved without thinking.

"He is gone..."

He trailed off, not knowing exactly what to say. The corpse writhed on the wheel and Kirnen, in a desperate plea for anything to do, offered his appraisal.

"The thing must be killed."

His axes slipped off his waist and into his hands as he pointed forward at the rotting display at the end of the hall. Tol retrieved his blade of black iron and steeled his fiery nerves. The men's minds were weighed down by half remembered memories that felt too dreamlike to be real. The hogmen squealed and made half-human noises as their twisted bodies took on their full form. Before either man could take a step, however, the hog-like amalgamations began to crawl out of the tapestries in nightmarish fashion, and ran to kill the interlopers as a seething mass of bodies. Tol stood still and glanced back to the door behind him. His sword felt too heavy in his hands and his knees were weak, but then his gaze caught the cloak on the floor. Tol looked to Kirnen, who nodded with a grim determination, then surged forward to meet the oncoming horde. Their arms met flesh with incredible speed and strength, but the mass of nightmares was overwhelming them slowly with their numbers. Tol yelled above the din,

"Go forth! It must be the altar which awakens them!"

Kirnen nodded silently, his twin axes twirling to the rhythm of his deadly dance. He dodged and cut, then tried to make room to slip past the crowd. The knight by his side held back the damned things as Kirnen slipped away to break for the bloody slab at the front of the room. Tol clashed wildly with the hogs, his blade finding arm and head to feed on. His stamina faltered at every slash and his will darted in and out of his mind at the glimpse of every creature. In that moment the world was at its darkest that it had ever been to him, and yet when his swing connected to rotting flesh of his foes a voice in his mind urged him on. A light in the dark reaches of his mind that chased away the thoughts of cowardly retreat and fanned the flames of his heart that kept his arms fighting. He felt the hand of his brother on his back, and knew that he would see him soon, no longer the boy he once was.

Kirnen pulled his axes and jumped off the altar to attack the swinging corpse. Tol's arm was strong, and he had found his will, but the horrors around him were too many. He turned to cut at one, only to receive lashes along his back from another. He was dragged down and before Kirnen could act he had vanished into the swarm of hogs. Kirnen turned back to the corpse only to find it staring into his eyes. He grabbed onto the wheel and readied his ax to cleave through the head of the thing. His aim was true, but before his blade could meet his foe a boney arm grabbed his hand. The corpse held an impossible strength, though its arms looked withered and haggard. The thing held him still and spoke in a voice that split his mind.

"I am the one you call Den Divzar. You are Oliad Ermar. You have come to kill me and you have come to die."

Kirnen screamed as Den Divzar's grip tightened around his arm, the flesh seeming to boil under his touch.

"How do you know my true name! How dare you kill my friends!" Kirnen was screeching.

"Wizards do not know death as you do, so I did not give him death, but instead something else. As for the other, he was nothing, a fleeting moment not even to be remembered by the pages of history. Your name, you say? You told it to me, long ago, at the start of the world."

Kirnen howled in pain. The words made no sense, and the searing of his arm didn't help. He caught a glance and the whole of his skin was turned black as if rotting on the bone.

"You were brave to come here," Den Divzar spoke without a hint of emotion, "But your people do not know what truly lies in the outlands. They saw but a glimpse of what lies beyond here. Your people were strong, but they were nothing to me. I am the darkness in the pale, I am the death of the giants, and I am the waking nightmares of Myrian the Doomed."

With those words the hand of Den Divzar raised to grasp Kirnen's face, but with a death defying cry the northman's hand caught his twin ax on his hip and drove it into the corpse's head, its black pits rolling into its desiccated sockets. Den Divzar let loose a primal squeal, his blackened fingers releasing Kirnen to claw at the ax in his head. Kirnen dropped onto the altar, his crimson robes coating in gore from the pig. The creatures who were ripping into Tol's body stopped to look at him, but fell limp as the corpse's flailing grew slower and slower. Den Divzar went still, his unnatural eyes frozen open as his rotten body hung limply off the wheel. Kirnen's arm still burned and rotted, but with his waning strength he grabbed hold of the body of sir Tol and the clothes of the wizard Hogart. He stepped outside, the morning sunlight making him squint as he exited the wretched tomb. The trees of the woods were a beautiful green from the vantage point of the hill on which the structure rested. Their white flowers dotted the canopy and fluttered in the breeze as Kirnen slumped to knees on the ground. Tol was long dead, his body torn apart, but Kirnen lived on. He would for a very long time. A very long time. All the time in the world.