The Nest of the Necromancer

A Puffer and Lace Adventure

Chapter One: The Cemetery Stakeout

The night air in the Rolling Hills cemetery didn't just feel cold, it felt heavy, like the fog was a blanket draped over hundreds of leaning headstones, each dating back centuries. Puffer and Lace each crouched in the shadow of a particularly moss-covered tomb, their eyes fixed on the fresh mound of earth marking the peasant girl, Amelia's, final resting place.

"Listen," Lace whispered, her voice low and gravely. "There're no ghosts. Not everything is magic, trust me on this one. Most things are mundane, yeah?"

Puffer's big green eyes, gleaming in the moonlight, looked skeptical. "But if it is ghosts, is your axe gonna do us any good?"

Lace, annoyed, said, "My axe'll kill anything that'll bleed, Puff! And whoever's been tormenting these poor bastards can bleed, mark me on this. It's the work of some kind of sick, demented pervert with a poison kit and a shovel."

"Maybe," Puffer said, sounding almost disappointed. "But silver will work on ghosts, everybody knows that."

The much larger woman narrowed her eyes in annoyance. She said, "Mayhaps they do, mayhaps they don't. In any case you're gonna have spent a fortune just to shoot pretty missiles when good hard steel woulda done just fine, and at a tenth the price."

"I've got regular boring ol' steel, too," Puffer pouted, a silver tipped bolt twirling in her left hand. At her partner's grimace she tucked it away and hefted her crossbow, her eyes scanning the dark tree line. "'asides, silver will do for a mundane pervert as much as a ghost or vampire."

"Ain't no ghosts or vampires involved in this, Puff," Lace said in frustration.

"Lace, the villagers saw them walking! Saw the dead walking! Three witnesses from three villages all seeing the same thing? That's no coincidence."

Lace let out a huff, her hardened heart having only cracked just enough to bring her here because of the sheer terror she'd seen on the villager's faces. "Commonfolk see what they'll see," Lace said. "Don't mean what they say they saw's what they really seen. Get it?"

Puffer let that percolate for a few silent minutes. She tried to keep her eyes focused on the burial mound but, as usual, they constantly drifted upwards to the stars. It was a beautiful night, despite the fog and the surroundings. There was something peaceful about a cemetery, she thought. Pretty, too, but then again Puffer tended to see beauty in nearly everything.

It was Lace who broke the silence. "Bodies don't just 'disappear', though, I'll grant you that. But it ain't ghosts possessing them or vampires raising them up as living corpses. Nope. More I think about it, more certain I am it's someone is digging them up to have their... fun. And when I find him, I'm going to..."

She stopped. The dirt on Amelia's grave shifted. "Did you see that?" she said, voice dropping to a whisper.

"Huh?" Puffer said. She quickly scanned the surroundings with her keen half-elf eyes, spotting no skulking men in dark robes with shovels, nor ghosts or vampires, neither. "I don't..." she started.

"Shh!" Lace said. "The grave!"

Puffer looked. For a moment she didn't understand, but then she saw: the earth was bulging upward, spilling down the sides of the freshly dug mound in rhythmic, sickly thumps.

"Yeah, I see--" breathed Puffer, her green eyes as wide and round as platinum coins.

"Shh!" hushed Lace.

A pale, slender hand-- Amelia's hand, had to be-- pierced the surface, its fingers clawing at the night air with a strength no corpse should possess.

"Oh, gods," Puffer breathed. A thrill of excitement rushed through her, and not only because she suspected she was about to be proved right. It was also the excitement of the new, the extraordinary, the supernatural! It's why she travelled with Lace, to see things like this.

To experience real adventure!

Suddenly Amelia's head broke the surface, her eyes snapping open. They weren't brown anymore, and she wasn't pretty the way she'd looked in her coffin at the funeral. Now her eyes were twin orbs of a pulsing, sickly green necrotic light, and her face was gaunt and stretched, her mouth open impossibly wide. Her once dainty fingers were claw-like, digging into the earth, dragging her body out another foot, and then another arm came free and, in a jerky motion that made Lace's stomach roll, pulled the rest of its body out from the grave.

The girl scrambled to its feet in upsetting, efficient movements like those of a puppet on strings. It began to stumble, unseeing, toward the north gate.

"What-do-we-do-what-do-we-do!" Puffer said, near hyperventilating.

"We follow her," Lace hissed, her skepticism replaced by a cold, sharp determination. "The villagers didn't know where they went. We gotta find out."

"Oh gods," said Puffer again, her skin as pale as milk. For the dozenth time this year she ignored her instincts for self preservation and allowed her excitement for adventure carry her forth. She followed Lace toward certain danger, giddy and terrified at the same time.

My debt is paid, part of her thought selfishly, I don't need to do this! But then Puffer rebuffed herself when she thought of the terrorized villagers, the sickened loved ones who'd seen their recently departed's empty graves. Of course I need to do this, she thought. Heroes don't run away!

They moved like shadows, tailing the animated girl through the labyrinth of graves. Puffer took point, darting ahead of her larger and louder friend with the silence of a whisper. The half-elf all but disappeared into the darkness, hugging large tombstones and the walls of the mausoleums. If the thing that had been Amelia had any capacity to discern followers it wouldn't be able to see her, but it showed no sign that it could do anything but stumble forward, one jerky foot before the other.

As they crossed the threshold of a weathered stone archway, something happened. The ground beneath them seemed to chill, and hum, and... move? Puffer wasn't sure but she thought there was a rumbling beneath her feet.

And then she saw it: a hidden runic-ward, etched into a nearby headstone, flared with the same nauseating green light as Amelia's dead eyes. Puffer only spotted it for an instant before everything went to shit.

The silence of the cemetery was shattered. All around them, the earth began to roil as rotting hands and bleached white ribs burst through the sod.

"Eeep!" Puffer shrieked, her lightening fast brain knowing instantly that this was, well, not good.

"Stay close!" Lace roared, drawing her large, ebony battle axe. A tide of skeletal remains and decaying flesh from decades past were breaking through the earth all throughout the cemetery now, far more than Puffer would have thought possible, and they were all moving in one direction: toward the warrior woman and her roguish half-elf companion.

"Never mind, run!" Lace growled as she swung her axe in a wide, unforgiving arc that tore through rotting clothes and ancient bones.

Puffer didn't argue. She slipped between two of the oncoming skeletons and tumbled between the bony legs of a third, then scrambled forward, not sure where she was going. Looking back over her shoulder she saw Lace cutting through four more skeletons, but it didn't seem to matter: eight replaced them, moving faster than they had any right to, and soon Puffer couldn't see her friend for all the bones.

"Lace!" she screamed, scrambling up the side of a nearby mausoleum as the skeletons closed in. From her vantage she spotted rotted and rotting corpses, too, but for every one of the ghouls there were a dozen more where the flesh had long ago rotted away leaving only bones.

It was like the whole cemetery had awoken. This was, Puffer knew with a sinking and fearful heart, about as far away from good as a situation could could get. She readied her crossbow with a crank of the gnome-engineered pulley and not knowing what else to do, began to loose her silver bolts.

***

Lace was buried under a dozen of the ancient dead, their bones and rags blocking out the moonlight, blocking out everything. The sounds they made were like the cracking of eggs writ large, drowning out Puffer's cries. Lace felt their razor-sharp teeth and filth-encrusted claws snagging on her mail armor, on the padding beneath. She struggled to shake them away as the links of her armor snapped.

"NO!" Lace cried, a mouth full of earth and bone dust her only reward. With a sound of tearing metal and hide, her armor was shredded off her body like husked corn.

The violation of the bony hands and the cold rot of decaying flesh against her skin was enough to make her want to panic. Her, Lace, warrior of the realm, daughter of a king, panic! She who had slain orcs by the dozens and survived the wrath of giants, suddenly scared by a few clammy, rotting hands and brittle, bony arms?

But never had she been overwhelmed so quickly and by so many. And being stripped naked against her will, hands groping her, touching her, scratching her... cutting her! It was all too much.

No, she thought.

She rolled and kicked and bony hands gripped her ankles and pulled her legs wide apart. Another slashed its claws across her amble chest, drawing blood and exposing her breasts.

NO!

The sheer audacity of the ambush and this sudden contortion of her nude body snapped something inside her. Lace didn't just yell this time; she detonated.

"NOOOO!" she roared.

With a primal, guttural scream, a naked, mud-streaked Lace exploded outward from the pile of corpses. She didn't have her axe anymore, it had been knocked away, so she reached for the nearest solid object: a heavy, fallen tombstone.

What would take two normal men working together to lift off the ground Lace easily hoisted in her rage. She was not a "normal man" under any circumstances, but while enraged she was a superhuman woman. She swung the large slab of stone like a two-handed club, shattering ribcages and sending skull fragments flying in a spray of bone dust.

All she could think and see was red. In her blind rage she growled like an animal and simply swung, and spun, and crushed everything before her. What little remained of her shredded armor fell off her body but she didn't care, didn't realize, didn't stop.

And deep in her heart she felt a feral, primal sort of contentment: this was what living was! This was the antithesis to what surrounded her right now, real life, real passion, real joy! Her screams and growls began to mix with laughter as she waded into the oncoming wave of bones.

***

High above, Puffer found her footing on the mausoleum roof. She didn't waste time being shocked at her partner's sudden lack of wardrobe, or to admire her athletic, curvy body. Her eyes lingered only just long enough to gawk at the woman's huge breasts as her mud-coated blonde hair swung wildly with every swing of the tombstone she wielded.

Was she... laughing? Puffer couldn't believe it, but it was true.

She began to move, leaping with impossible grace from one stone roof to the next, her crossbow twanging as she put a bolt through every green-eyed skull that tried to climb toward her. When she ran out of bolts she switched to her shortbow and the silver tipped arrows she'd been mocked for having worked wonderfully to put these horrid dead back into the earth.

"Swing! Where's Swing?!" Lace roared, smashing a ghoul's head into its own chest cavity with the tombstone.

"Ten o'clock! Under the rib-heap!" Puffer yelled, pinning a skeleton to a tree with a well-placed shot.

She watched Lace dive into the fray, her bare skin a pale blur amidst the gray rot. Thankfully when she reemerged she had reclaimed her doublesided axe, Swing, and the tide officially turned. She became a whirlwind of steel, carving through the skeletons and ghouls, severing heads from bodies, sundering legs and arms, all while the barbaric woman laughed and howled with carnal joy.

But more were rising. Puffer could see them, moving like an avalanche toward them. How many more could rise from a centuries old cemetery serving half a dozen villages? Puffer was overwhelmed by the possibility of an endless tide of undead all determined to recruit them into their ranks.

Then she remembered that glowing runic ward from earlier. Glancing back over her shoulder Puffer's eyes locked onto a pulsing, glowing tombstone near the center of the archway. "Lace, I think I know what to do!" she cried out.

"You 'think'?!" Lace growled. Her energy was beginning to wane, Puffer saw, and desperation was in her cry as she said, "Then hurry and do it, gods damn it!"

Puffer didn't answer. She leaped from the roof, tumbling through the air and landing in a roll. She sprinted for the ward, dodging the grasping hands and snapping teeth. She stomped on a hand bursting through the earth then sidestepped an armless skeleton with a graceful spin. Reaching the tombstone she put her back to it, dug in her heels, and pushed. Her diminutive size notwithstanding, the century old, moss coated tombstone gave way.

It toppled. The green light flickered once, twice, and then vanished into the dark.

Instantly, the tension in the air snapped. The skeletons and corpses fell into heaps of inanimate bone and rotting flesh; the corpses all slumped down into the mud, their green eyes extinguished.

Silence returned to the cemetery, broken only by Lace's heavy, ragged breathing. She stood in the center of the carnage, naked covered in graveyard filth, and gripping Swing so hard her knuckles were white.

"Amelia," Lace cried, pointing toward the north gate.

It was swinging empty in the wind.

Puffer scrambled up the side of a nearby mausoleum, perched on its roof, and with her keen half-elf eyes searched the forest north of the gate. She saw nothing.

"She's gone," Puffer said softly, leaping off the roof and jogging over to her partner. She was too stunned to bother hiding her admiring gaze as her eyes worked up and down her partner's gorgeous body. Even mud-streaked and bloody it was like something from the arena statues, only not so hard, and not so motionless.

Lace was tall, taller than most men, with broad feminine shoulders that managed to exude a man's strength. Her large breasts rode high and proud on her chest and there was a patch of golden curls between her legs, its color matching her long and wild hair. She had a narrow waist and wide hips, long legs and well toned body. Puffer had to force herself to look away or risk looking too much.

Simply put? She was gorgeous. It wasn't just her body, either, as remarkable as that was. She also had a noble face, high cheekbones and dark lashes, blue eyes and full, pouty lips. Though she rarely smiled Puffer had caught her friend doing so once or twice and that alone was enough to fill her day with such joy that the poor half-elf could nearly burst.

Right now she was nearly bursting in another way.

"Now we know the truth," Lace said, voice dripping with venom.

Their eyes met, and Puffer quickly glanced away. She unclasped her cloak from around her neck and tossed it to her partner. It was just enough to cover her suddenly embarrassed partner's breasts and groin.

"What truth?" Puffer asked.

"That there is a person responsible for this," Lace said as she adjusted the small cloak better to hide her nakedness. "This isn't random magic. Whoever is summoning these dead girls set a trap for us. When we tried to follow her the whole cemetery woke up. That glowing rune tells us a lot about the person who designed it: they're smart, they're capable, they're paranoid--"

"...and they're perverted?" Puffer grinned. "I mean... I don't think it was an accident the first thing they did was strip you naked, right?"

Lace scowled. "Right. Now, go find me some clothes. We must have passed a dozen farms on our way here. Make it quick."

"You don't usually like me stealing," Puffer said.

"I'm not usually naked in the middle of a cemetery!" Lace snapped. "Now go!"

Puffer went.

END OF CHAPTER 1