Summary: Arthur remembers the cave. He wants Lewis back and is desperate enough to try anything.
NOTE: Started this serval months ago and its been in ‘planning’ for a while. Probably won’t continue until after either ‘time travel idea’ or ‘winged-Arthur’ is complete. But was in an editing mode today so here it is.
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The mental case clicks open. The red light flickers to green, and Arthur carefully replaces the plastic panel he’d removed to access the lock’s inner-workings. Around him, the room remains mostly dark, dimly lit by a glowing red exit sign. Far off, if he strains and holds his breath, he can hear the sounds of people moving up and down the hospital’s hallways. This section of the hospital may be closed for the night, but the wards and emergency room operate 24/7.
Quickly, not wanting to try his luck, Arthur snatches the plastic bags of donated blood, shoving them into his backpack. The process is made hard by his single, solitary arm. In his hast, he accidentally bumps his bandaged shoulder against the cabinet. Pain shoots across his chest, forcing him to pause and wait for it to settle to a more manageable dull ache. This is the third time he’s knocked the still-healing injury and it’s been equally, if not more, painful each time. Probably shouldn’t be moving around this much after his surgery. There are a lot of things he probably shouldn't be doing. Like stealing blood, driving long distances, transversing creepy cave systems, and attempting to resurrect his dead best friend.
Backpack is appropriately stuffed with blood packets, Arthur heads out the way he came, closing doors behind him, trying to leave as little evidence as possible. No one stops him. It’s not too surprising, he can’t imagine that many people want to seal blood in a small town like this one. He makes it back to the van emptying his backpack into a cooler box which is set to the correct temperature. Next, he’s manoeuvring through empty streets, ignoring the steady throb of his shoulder, speeding towards The Cave - Location of all his recent nightmares and scene of Lewis’s death. Arthur tightens his grip on the steering wheel.
It is almost three in the morning when he pulls up to the gapping stone entrance. So far, everything is running according to his well-planned timeline. If this doesn’t work, he wants to be home before Vivi wakes up to find him missing. He hopes it doesn't come to that, but a small part of him acknowledges that this whole expedition is a long shot. In the still night air, the slamming of van doors and his occasional pained grunts echo unnaturally in the surrounding trees.
Arthur ignores the prickling unease running down his back while he struggles to carry the cooler of blood, his bag of resurrection supplies, and the hefty necromancy book down the stone tunnels. He ends up having to hold a flashlight between his teeth to properly light his way. The trip is slow and laborious, requiring several stops to catch his breath. He pushes on. Occasionally, the silence is broken by the wail of wind whistling through stone crevasses and slow dip of unseen water. By the time he makes it to the site of Lewis’s murder, he is shivering with both cold and unease. Arthur drops his load, freeing up his hand so he can use the flashlight to scan the space. Tall pointed stone barbs tower over him and throw long shadows, which crisscross the ground in uneven patterns. Nervously, he inches forward, feeling awfully exposed in the open space.
“This is such a bad idea,” He mutters, glancing up at the high stone ledge and trying to calculate Lewis’s fall trajectory. His voice bounces around. A suspicious organic lump catches his eye. Arthur takes a sharp breath, freezing, riding out the sudden wave of nausea.
Lewis…
The necromancy book states that the closer the necromancer is to the body, the higher the chance of success. Arthur swallows, pointing his flashlight away from the darkened misshapen mound at the foot of one particularly sharp spike. There is no way he can approach Lewis’s body, let alone draw the sigils needed for the ritual around it.
Arthur picks a spot on the further side of the cave. Technically, the book only specified that the ritual needed to be ‘at the location of the target's demise’. As long as it was the most recent death then everything should work out fine.
“This is fine…Everything is fine. A-okay. Nothing to worry about.” He glances into the darkness. Everything not lit up by the flashlight is completely obscured.
“Just a normal guy, doing a completely normal necromancy ritual that will totally work. This will be fine and is not in any way a bad idea.”
Wind moans somewhere overhead as if in response, and he points his torch upwards. Nothing is there but more pointed rock formations. It would suck it one fell on him…Arthur shivers. The ritual he’s planning to follow is convoluted, the instructions poorly translated by Vivi, with potential consequences ranging from deadly to horrifying. A relic from Vivi’s macabre phase, he has no idea where the necromancy manual came from originally only that it's the only option available. Of course, he has had to substitute almost all of the ‘ingredients.’ For example, there was no way he’d be doing any ‘human sacrificing.’ Hopefully, the donated blood would be an adequate replacement for the rituals ‘liquid life’ requirement.
“Okay…ah," He hesitates, "…Wards. I need to set up a protective ward.” A ward is, according to Vivi's necromancy book, needed to protect his soul from some loosely defined 'darkness. Unfortunately, the book fails to describe how to set up a protective ward. As a substitute, he’s stolen a stack of paper talismans from Vivi and the giant scroll from the shrine in Vivi’s backyard. Vivi had once said the scroll was for protection and, with his lack of options, he hopes it’ll work for him. Trying not to feel too guilty about the theft, he shuffles around slapping paper rectangles on every surface he can reach and slinging the scroll haphazardly over a nearby rock formation so it can sit unfurled. The moment the scroll roles open, its fancy Japanese characters start to glow a faint gold.
Arthur stares. Okay…He has no idea what that means. Why had he never looked into any of this supernatural stuff before now? He should have been investigating this stuff years ago! A bit late now. Hopefully, it means it is doing its ‘protective’ thing.
Arthur continues his preparations, which is made slightly easier in the light of the scroll. His hand is shaking so much that the sigils for the ritual are almost impossible to draw, never mind that the rough stone doesn’t take chalk very well. The whole process is slow and painful, but he pushes on and manages to sketch out a large circle, decorated with intricate symbology. All the practice he’d snuck in during the week seemed to be paying off.
Now for the hard part. Arthur takes the first packet of blood and ends up having to stab it open with his pocket knife. The blood spurts all over the place and his clothes and he almost throws up right then and there. He tries not to think or look as he empties out the rest of packets into the centre of the circle. When he finally finishes, his good arm is tired, his shoulder is throbbing, and he is panting with exhaustion.
Arthur pulls out a locket containing a picture of both Lewis and Vivi. He had had to steal it off Vivi’s nightstand because, despite not recognising the man in the picture, she was very attached to it. Hopefully, it would work as an ‘emotional anchor.’ He drops the locket and some of Lewis’s hair, collected from an old hairbrush, into the circle. All that is left is a long and overly complex Latin chant.
Sitting at the edge of the circle, laying the book down flat, Arthur traces the words with a finger.
This is it…If this doesn’t work…He doesn’t know what he’d do. Probably cry. He takes a deep breath and begins to read. When Arthur finishes reciting, he waits for several long, agonising seconds.
At first, nothing happens. The cave remains cold and silent. Then, a loud wind moans overhead, tearing down through the tunnels, twisting in a circle around him and pulling at his hair. The flashlight flickers off, but it doesn't matter because the stolen scroll is growing brighter and brighter. It continues to increase in brilliance, lighting the entire cave floor, reflecting off the stone spikes. Arthur’s eyes sting and he sees spots.
Then the scroll bursts into purple flame. Simultaneously, all the paper talismans explode, burning and flaking away. The area begins to grow steadily hotter until Arthur is sweating and breathless. It is so hot that the blood in the circle starts to boil also catching on fire, evaporating in long wisps of smoke which twist in the wind overhead. Arthur feels a sharp pain in his chest, tugging him forward. He grips his shirt, having trouble thinking, and edges of his vision dim.
‘Bad idea confirmed.’ Is his last coherent thought.
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Lewis breathes in like he’s returned from some deep-sea dive. His chest expands as he inhales in one desperate action. The next thing he does is groan loudly. Everything hurts. There is a constant throbbing pain in his left shoulder and his whole body aches with exhaustion. Cold air makes him shiver uncontrollably. Lewis blinks up from where he is lying on hard stone ground. He can’t see anything despite knowing his eyes are open. When he moans it is all wrong, too high pitched.
“Lewis?” Arthur’s voice, faint and whispy, drifts through the dark towards him. Lewis tries to pull himself into a seated position to get a better sense of his location. Only, he overbalances and smacks into a nearby rock, sending spikes of more intense white-hot pain through his shoulder. He grits his teeth.
“Lewis!” Arthur's voice is way too enthusiastic, piercing through the haze of pain.
Where is he? The last he remembers is walking with Arthur, navigating down a stone tunnel. They’d come to a stone platform overlooking a larger cavern, then…everything gets blurry. He’d fallen…He vaguely remembers falling.
“Arthur. Where are you?” Lewis, using his good hand, grips the rock to hold himself up in a seated position. He is not imagining it. His voice is definitely different.
“I don’t know…but I can see you,” Arthur answers and Lewis glances about, confused, peering into the dark.
“How? It’s pitch-back in here.”
Something is wrong with his left arm. It is completely unresponsive. He can’t move it at all.
“I’m not sure,” Arthur also sounds confused now. Lewis presses his back against the stone, using it for support, feeling for his shoulder, trying to find the source of the pain.
"Whoa hey. Ah...I wouldn’t....” Arthur responds to his movement, “You may notice some body parts missing, but don’t panic."
“Don't panic?! Was I injured in the fall? Oh god,” He discovers why his arm is unresponsive, “My arm’s gone!”
“I said don't panic!"
Lewis gasps, heart beating way to fast. "I'm dying."
"No. You’re fine. I swear you're fine. Just try and calm down. You need to breathe.”'
“I am breathing,” He snaps, taking several hash breaths. He’s feeling lightheaded and woozy now. It doesn’t help that he still can’t see anything. That, plus the pain, saps the rest of his strength right out of him. Lewis hears is Arthur's panicked. "Lewis!" And then hears no more.
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Of course, Lewis doesn't die. He wakes back up and is met with the same throbbing pain and cold stone. However, unlike last time, it is no longer pitch-black. A ball of floating fire, burning a mix of purple and yellow, is hovering over his chest. It lights the immediate area in a dim haze. He freezes, alarmed, staring in the soft light.
"Lewis? You're awake." Arthur's relived voice is coming from the ball of fire, which wavers and fluctuates when he speaks. What the...?
“Arthur?” He asks, hesitant, scanning the surrounding space. It is still too dark to see beyond a few meters, but he can make out taller stone structures.
“Yeah? You can see me now?”
His attention returns to the slowly bobbing fireball. Yes, Arthur’s voice is coming from the fire. Maybe he is dead after all.
"What happened?" Lewis whispers, swallowing and glancing down at where his hand should be. In the low light cast by the floating Arthur-fire, he can see there is no blood or any other sign of recent trauma. It just hurts a lot. He lifts up his remaining hand to examine that as well. It is pale. Far too pale to be his own hand. How?
So, for a bit of context, I’m running a Zombie Apocalypse campaign and my players had a run-in with a group of nercomancer ravagers trying to snatch their junk, right? And one of these guys ended up begging for his life after seeing his friends get gruesomely murdered (both his camarads got taken out with two separate crits, so lots of evisceration was involved).
One insight check and looting later, Dustin Laboy was created, a scrappy teenager who got coerced into necromancy. The stupid part of this whole thing is that it took me literal hours to catch onto the fact that my re-watching of 21-Chump Street had leaked into my DMing duties.
Here’s Dustin btw. I have to redesign him now because I decided to make him a sympathetic, reoccurring character on a whim. So, the edgy antagonist aesthetic that I slapped together in twenty minutes won’t cut it anymore. I make a bunch of these tokens for my players, so I think I might post those later 🤔
