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When he'd fought the rot ogre, Tomasj's sword fighting had been powerful, fast, graceful in a brutal and terrible fashion, a symphony of murderous motion.

Once they'd entered the undercroft tunnels and encountered the tightly-packed rotting dead, his style was more like a lumber-fur felling punky trees, each stroke heavy-pawed, sweeping, taking advantage of the tunnel being just broad enough for a good swing and offering no chance of being outflanked.

The wolf had relegated to Father Timid the duty of keeping the shambling horde back during his backswing, and the priest used the iron-headed staff he'd reclaimed to do so, meanwhile forcing himself not to think about the poor folk they had left behind in their flight.

His guilt was scrabbling at his gut, and he knew that even with the Finder's blessing and command to leave them, that it would haunt him. Their screams had taken on a pitch he'd never known before, horror beyond fear, pain beyond suffering, chilling shrieks that made his blood feel like curdled milk.

He also smelled piss and shit, and realized that both stenches were his own. He would have been humiliated had there been time to consider the dampness and weight in the pants his clergy wore beneath their ceremonial robes.

They had taken short breaks every few minutes of their slog through the undercroft, often shin-deep in fetid old rain-water, surrounded by the ossuaries of those too long-dead for whatever foul magic this plague carried to re-animate.

During a break he judged to be near the mid-point between the door they'd hastily barricaded and the door that would lead to their only opportunity for escape, Timid brushed sweat-soggy fur back out of his face and finally found his voice, though it was surprisingly hoarse given he couldn't remember having done much talking.

"Tomasj, how did you learn to fight like this? These dead are so...So recent."

The wolf had seemed to deflate between fights, the spirit of his battle rage having inflated and strengthened him. Here, in the dim light of the two candles Tomasj had fixed to the top of his high hat, the wolf seemed nearly skeletal with fatigue. Timid thought the wolf might be suffering some wasting sickness or another, by the way the creature's breath rattled when at rest.

Tomasj's smirk was mocking, lips curled back, as he leaned heavily against the muddy wall. His response sounded wet, raspy, as if something were jangling about in his lungs.

"The undead have always been a problem in Svalich. You lowlanders are like children, sheltered from all danger. That they grow so quickly here is a sign of your pathetic weakness."

Timid frowned at the wolf, and struggled to find words with which to defend his people from this arrogant foreigner, only to find his mind black of an example or argument. The dead had come, and when they had come, the city had collapsed like a pile of plaster with too much water in it.

"Then why are you helping me? Why are you even here?!" Timid was waving his arms, feeling a pressure in his chest and head he recognized as anger and terror intermingling, one feeding the other like pitch to flame.

The priest squawked in surprise as Tomasj lunged, leather-gloved paws creaking as they dug into his habit and shoved him off his feet. His back was against the muddy wall, the iron-capped staff flopping into the water from nerveless fingers as he felt the wolf's fetid breath across his face again.

"Because you have the Star, you fool!"

"Wh...What? The Star? What does that have to do with anything?"

He stared into those reddened eyes, and saw them glaring back filled with so much rage and chaos that he found himself looking away as if he'd been slapped, flinching and hunching back against the rotting muck.

Tomasj abruptly released the cat, letting him slide to a miserable sit in the muddy water as he strode past, pushing the wet around him with sloshing noises.

"You do not yet deserve to have answers, little boy. When you stop acting like a spoiled child, maybe I will answer your questions. For now, we move, before you start to cry and give up like the weakling you are."

"Spoiled child? Everyone I know just died, you monster!" The cat felt a surge of anger again, hot and scarlet, as he pushed himself up out of the mud, fists balled and shaking. That the wolf could treat him like a child, after all he had been through, combined with the anger he felt for the deaths of his followers, caused fury to light his eyes with a heat that made the wolf tilt his head, and then chortle out a raspy laugh as he turned away and continued walking down the muddy tunnel.

"It hardly matters anyway. Our world is dying, priest, and your faith can't save it. Keep hold of that anger, though. It might just keep you alive, you know."

Despite himself, Timid glared at Tomasj's back, as he futilely swatted at the mud caking into his rough-spun robes before following in a cloud of sullen anger.

The worst part of their torment, she had realized, was the polished silver mirror they left hanging over her in the times when the shifts of torturers left her with a moment to do more than lapse from tormented consciousness into exhausted slumber.

With her one working eye, she gazed up, and what reflected on that fine silver surface was a thing out of horror and fevered nightmare so juxtaposed with the engraved silver that it seemed unreal.

One bright blue slitted eye looked back at her from an eyeball otherwise filled with browning blood, which was seated in a sunken, bruised, swollen socket so spongy she was surprised at being able to open it. The other eye was less lucky, covered over with weeping flesh so ruined she couldn't recognize herself.

Her headfur was gone, torn away in patches of bloody scalp that hung away from her skull, and her nerves cried out in agony as her mind acknowledged the newest thing they had taken from her these last months.

Arching in her bindings sent whirls of scarlet agony bursting through her vision, and for a time she was lost in them, felt as if she were falling forever in darkness deeper than the sea. Her wrists burned, from being bound so long. Her breasts, lacerated with hundreds of tiny cuts and a few larger slices, scraped against the rough and filthy woolen blanket they'd laid over her, and burned when the hard-spun cloth left bits of sweat-soaked wool behind in the puckering wounds.

She realized it wouldn't be long now. She was no longer attractive enough for the Duke's sick pleasures, no longer able to fight after all the damage he'd done to her body, and long past the point of being capable of escape, her muscles wrenched and depleted from repeated straining and slow starvation.

Soon his revenge could only be through killing her, and she found herself hoping for it, waiting for it, just short of praying for it, as fever wracked her and her salty sweat burned horribly in festering wounds.

When next her eyes looked into the silver mirror, she knew time had passed, for the wounds on her scalp had been sewn shut in a foul mockery of medical practice. The mutilated creature refused to contemplate tears, and instead her heart burned with the familiar anger she'd long used as a weapon, honed like a razor edge, cooled and banked behind iron-clad discipline.

I will survive this. His king could not survive me, his vengeance will not either.

She curled her fingers and, satisfied she could move most of them, worked on curling the toes of her right footpaw, feeling them slowly burn to life, the sensation of needles rippling through torn calf muscles bringing a gasp of pain from her bruised throat.

From her left footpaw she felt nothing but a sense of weight and pressure, and the damnable silver mirror, beautiful despite its awful reflections, showed her nothing of what was wrong with it.

When she tried to bend that leg, the pain blew through her body like a catapult stone crashing through glass, blasting everything from pattern to blur to nothingness.

Later, she awoke again, to gaze up at the accursed silver mockery. Her right eye was healing, the swelling declining, and she felt no new bruises or cuts. A growl resounded through the chill, damp stone chamber, and she realized it was her own stomach calling out for sustenance, as the growl was accompanied by a sickly pain she'd not felt since before she'd left the village of her birth.

They must have decided to just let me starve...Cowards cannot even finish me!

The thought should, she realized, have left her shrieking in dread. Instead, a sense of solidity flowed around her, the knowledge that her torment may be over giving her comfort, a comfort she rapidly realized was a false one. That way lay surrender, and death.

Marshalling her strength, she flexed both arms, one at a time, feeling for any give in the manacles. Instead, she discovered a terrible burning in her muscles, and a sickly feebleness that got her growling in aggravation as she yanked futilely against the hard, rough iron cuffs.

Time passed, as she rhythmically jolted against her bonds, until she could no longer move against the wrenching pain in her shoulders and elbows, or the torn sensation of her muscles.

After more time, she found the pain passing enough to move again, and jerked against the bonds once more. Warm stickiness had flowed and hardened in the fur on her wrists, and on the one ankle she could move, and it surprised her no guards had come to see what commotion she was making, even if it was just to poke fun at her futile efforts.

As the exhaustion came quicker between exertions, she slowly became cognizant of other sounds from beyond the door to her chill stone cell. Groans, perhaps of other prisoners, she thought. They echoed oddly, and carried too long, more like terrible atonal singing than the cries of weak, starved furs.

She jerked again, and again, rested, and pulled more when she could. The groans seemed to be louder now, closer, and she flinched when something struck the door to her cell hard enough to shake splinters off the rotting old wood.

Her heart leapt into her throat, as she felt something give. The right manacle shifted, ever so slightly, turning as the screw holding it in started to pull.

A little longer...Best rest while the guard comes in...

She laid still, closing her eyes yet again, despite the terror of it. Not being able to see, even by her own will, left her battered, torn skin crawling as if it were covered in ants.

A thud sounded against the door again, shaking more splinters loose, though it was weaker this time, and the sound made her brow beetle, which sent lances of hot ache through her whole skull, causing her to grunt animalistcally, the skinned flesh there tingling and biting, feeling simultaneously scorched and frozen.

Something's not right. That's no guard...He would have just opened the door by now...

She began working the screw again, and found the screw lodged again. Gritting her sliced jaw, a low growl began to rumble in her, an amalgam of her anger at being tormented and tortured and her frustration with the damnable bonds. She braced a footpaw against the table she was manacled to, and with all her remaining might heaved.

A crackling noise echoed about the chamber, and she recognized the sound of her shoulder leaving the socket...And then, through the shriek-inducing agony, the sound of the screw rending wood and bursting free. As she flopped flat again, the bone popped back into place with another crunch that left her thrashing.

Gasping, salt sweat burning her wounds, she instinctively tried to curl onto her side, but was still too restrained. After a time, the pain began to fade, and she found herself staring up, listlessly, at the mirror yet again.

Her movements had, she noticed, shifted the table on which she rested. She could no longer see her ruined face. Instead, she could see her blood-caked breasts, small and made smaller by the effect of laying flat on her back. Her upper stomach was a mess of scarlet lines, the long thin cuts made by the Duke's younger son at his older brother's urging.

The woolen blanket had shifted downward during her exertions, far enough that it was slowly slipping off the torture rack. She averted her eyes before any sight of her crotch could come.

Another crash drew her back to reality as the door shuddered again, and developed a long crack running up its blackened front. She shuddered and rolled, grabbing the edge of the table with her free paw, and letting out an un-muffled roar as she throw her whole weight against the other bolt.

It gave just as the door did. With a cacophony of groaning, shattering wood not unlike a ship running aground, a hulking horror walked right through the collapsing thing.

As she slid off the table to her right, the ankle pins yanked free of the weakened wood, and she flopped to the floor, yelping aloud in pain.

The thing leered at her, and as her vision cleared of the red-streaked pain that clouded her, she saw, to her horror, that this was no guard.

It stood just under seven feet high, with a jaw that seemed to hang by only a scrap of flesh, its pallid skin bearing the awful peacock and green hue of rotting meat. Its left arm was just...Gone...Scraps of meat hanging in its place, over exposed bone. Its right arm clutched a familiar shape, still tied into its sheathe.

As she struggle, grabbing at the crumbling wood of her torture table when her left leg refused to hold her weight, horror gave way to a hoarse laugh she couldn't even recognize as her own.

Thank you, monster. You brought me my sword.

Father Timid felt as if icy fingers had clamped around his chest and squeezed, and he'd felt that way for half an hour now, as he slogged through the chilly tunnel's clammy water. They had stopped taking breaks what felt an eternity ago to his burning, struggling lungs and legs, and he couldn't help but wonder how the obviously ill wolf slogging through the water ahead of him managed, especially given he was chopping up the foul dead they encountered every twenty steps or so.

The darkness felt cloying, as the wolf's candles burned ever lower, and Timid felt a twinge of fear roiling in his gut. Fear of the dark, which he chided himself for as a silly and childish thing, and yet could not for the life of him shake.

"H-how...Huff...How much longer?"

The wolf was wheezing as he asked the question, and his voice seemed vague, strange, as if he were asking someone else. Timid grimaced, hoping it wasn't whoever he'd been talking to before. Some ghost of his past, perhaps.

"N...Not far. Another...Five minutes. We should stop..."

Tomasj grunted, and turned his blackened blade point down, leaning on it as it sank slightly into the mud under the brackish filthy water, nodding his tall-hatted head.

"When...Mmf...When we arrive at the door, we will have to fight. Dead will be thick in the graveyard. If you fall behind, I will take the Star and leave you to die, understand?"

Annoyance more than fear burned in the priest, and it both surprised and bothered him; the clergy taught patience as a cardinal virtue. Their deity, the divine Finder of the Lost, had endured far worse in his duties than a mad wolf threatening him, and Timid resolved that he could do the same.

Then again, at his core, he felt doubt. If the Finder would not come to help them in this, were the old stories even true? Or just, as one cynical old priest had whispered to him on his death bed, a story meant to give people hope?

"Why the Star? It's just a piece of old jewelry to a non-believer like you!"

The wolf hunched his shoulders forward, and then turned, a dark and toothy shape in the dimming light of the candles burning on his strange tall hat. When he smiled, the glow of candles off his fangs gave him the appearance of a shadow demon, a haunt of dreams, a formless billowing toothy shade.

"Who ever said I am a non-believer? It leads the way. Nastasia tells me so."

The witch hunter drew his pistol and in a flash had its sticky, bloody barrel pushed against Timid's snout. The brother surprised himself, by grabbing the barrel and shoving it aside, wiping at the sticky gore with the back of his filthy sleeve while giving the wolf his best admonishing glare..

Tomasj laughed, and re-holstered the thing, before turning and continuing his raspy-lunged trek towards the door, just barely visible now in the gloom as a moss-covered, arched portal.

"Good! You are learning!"

Finally, tired legs carried Timid to the doorway, though he stopped a few paces back as the wolf leaned against it, pressing his pointed ear to the crumbly, rotting surface.

His voice was a harsh rasp of a whisper, and Timid winced in sympathy despite himself as he listened.

"The dead track by sound. You always know when they are coming in a horde, because they will groan to signal each other. If they are all groaning, they are chasing something."

Tomasj looked back at him, and Timid nodded, swallowing a sour lump of trepidation at facing the damned things again. He clutched the iron-capped crosier to his chest with paws suddenly dampening with sweat.

"When we leave the crypt this door must open into, we must be quiet. The dead do not get tired. If they spot us, we must kill them before they call others. If we cannot, we run and hope they lose our trail. Or find some other thing to eat."

The priest grimaced, and shook his head once, firmly.

"No. I won't be party to letting others die for us."

Tomasj snorted and lowered his arm, resting his shoulder against the door and giving a push that seemed only to smear the moss around and add a touch of rotting green to his black leathers.

"You won't have to. I'll do it for you, little boy."

As the wolf gathered himself, hunkering down and shifting his posture, Timid put a paw to the mad creature's shoulder, albeit hesitantly, and pulling it back almost immediately.

Tomasj turned his head just enough to look at him out of the corner of one reddened eye.

"If we...W-when we...Escape. Where do we...I mean what do we do?"

Timid swallowed his fear, though he felt it thundering in his chest and warbling in his voice. The wolf's face canted in an odd look, the one eye he could see lidding shut as if the wolf were suddenly half-asleep, then opening again more intensely, wider, showing the scarlet-lined whites there.

"The disaster will spread quickly once a major city is overtaken. Refugees will carry the curse with them, among those who were bitten but have not yet died. We warn the largest local army still standing. Where would that be?"

Timid's face stiffened into a grimace of distaste, which he masked by putting his shoulder against the door next to the wolf, preparing to help heave it open.

"Duke Rigar Casso. His castle and lands are about three days from here, eastward. He's...He's a vicious man, an enemy of my city...He murdered his own k-"

The wolf interrupted with a snort and spoke in his gravelly foreign voice.

"Does not matter. That is where we will go. Politics are meaningless when the dead walk. You lowlanders will have to learn that quickly, or all die."

With that ringing endorsement of lowland sense meeting with Timid's dread that politics would, in fact, be the end of them both, Tomasj shoved his shoulder against the door, earning a crumbling sound and a series of creaks as the old stones pushed against the wooden framing and began to surrender to age and force.

"When I tell you to run, you do it. If you do not, I will come back for the star once you are dead. Understand?"

Timid growled low under his breath, lashing his striped tail behind him as he gave another shove and then lost his balance, stomach lurching as he flopped through into the pitch dark of the crypt and face-first into fetid water fairly floating with bits of old corpses.

Spluttering, he felt his gorge rise, acid eating at him as he vomited up the chunks of old flesh along with his dinner. All the events of the day rushed over him for a moment, a cacophony of horrors, and he narrowly avoided squealing out and curling into a ball as the witch hunter darted over him and sliced into the yawning, scraggle-toothed face of a monk he recognized, in a moment of jilted lucidity, as the old brother that kept the gardens.

Instead he simply froze, one paw clasped onto the Finder's Star so hard its metal points dug into his palm, and watched as the wolf who had been near collapse from exhaustion seemed to inflate with a maddened, rolling laughter that echoed off the walls in a dissonant music. Tomasj hurtled into the creature, bashing it back with broad strokes of his sword that left its guts hanging in dripping rivulets.

It swiped back at him, the inexorable inexhaustible strength of the dead clashing against the steel and fury of the stranger in buckled leather.

For his part, Timid huddled in the cold water, clutching his crook and looking frantically for other foes. He found himself wanting to intercede, to help the laughing, sickly wolf, but knew enough of swordsmanship to know getting in the way would harm them both more than help him.

Shambling shapes shifted in the candle-lit gloom beyond, and Timid rolled forward, cold water pushing his robe up around his hips before he straightened his knees and shifted back and forth trying to find a way around Tomasj and the undead brother.

A roar from Tomasj warned Timid that the fight had changed. The brother's footpaw slid on something in the muck, and Tomasj's blade found its eye, squelching through the gooey eye and into its skull. The thing fell, and Tomasj lost his balance, flailing one arm as the thing's skull clung to his sword and pulled him, cursing, towards the water.

"Get up you fool! Fight or die!"

Divine Finder, please...

With tears of stress and exhaustion running down his cheeks, little Timid lurched into a run and dexterously slipped around the kneeling wolf as the witch hunter grunted and yanked, trying to free his blade from the sucking flesh and muck.

An overhead swipe of his crosier clipped the ceiling, blunting the force of his blow and raining mud and dead roots. As he struggled to recover, swinging weakly to keep the creatures at bay, a corpse so chewed as to be nearly a skeleton stumbled and plowed into the young priest, bowling him backwards as its clawed bone fingers reached for his throat.

Unable to contain a shriek, Timid lashed out with a boot, hitting something that crunched just as his head went under the opaque water, the filthy stuff flowing into his mouth as he tried to scream, to thrash, to fight.

As claws closed around his throat and dug in, cutting off his air, Timid flailed, but the water clung to him, hugging him as if it wanted his blows to fail, stealing their force as his crosier merely bounced off the grasping foes swarming over him.

A body fell across him, its slimy weight squirming and reaching, invisible in the opaque opal world drowning the cat. His claws, unused since he was a child for anything but occasional grooming, swiped out on instinct, but had no effect on the nerveless dead thing other than to leave strips of flesh clinging to him under the water.

Tomasj! Help me!

Thrashing, battering at the tireless dead, Timid's blinded eyes began to swim with blackness, as the crushing pressure on his throat increased, as more bodies bore him down into the muck. A sharp pain lanced up his arm, making him suck in water as he tried to shriek, feeling flesh ripping away from the back of his wrist as something nuzzled at his flesh like some sort of defiled baby.

Timid's thrashing began to weaken, to lessen, and he released the crosier, a strange blissful calm coming over him as he dimly registered the water behind his head being agitated and something stepping on his bitten wrist.

His other paw came to his chest, grasping at the Star, as his bloating lips shivered and shifted, airlessly whispering a prayer.

Please, Tauriel, Finder of the Lost...Please, if you will not save me, save others...

Even though you know them not?

That doesn't matter now...

You must save yourself. I have given you the tools. It is for you to wield them.

The priest's paw lashed out then, though he couldn't feel the effort he made to move it. Everything seemed warm suddenly, the cold of the crypt's drowning waters seeping away from him as if suddenly afraid. He could see, then, that the thing on his wrist had torn his paw open with its tigers' claws, but there was no pain.

Then he noticed a light, burning in the water just above his chest. The Finder's Star had lifted up, though he knew the metal should have sunk from the weight of its precious metals, and it was glimmering like some sort of lantern, pushing back the translucency of the water, purifying it in a growing bubble, and where it touched the dead, their flesh sloughed away, dissolving like so much beer poured in a river.

He tilted his head, the hands that had been crushing him now gone, and saw that Tomasj had freed his sword, but was locked in deadly combat with a dozen of the things that had swarmed him as Timid had ineffectively guarded.

He felt ashamed, saw the faces of those who had died in the church, and knew in his heart that had he been stronger, he might have saved them. He also knew that there was no time for guilt. That right now, he had to help those who still lived.

The bubble breached the water's surface, and for a moment he thought the unbelievable magic had vanished, until it struck from behind the creature's swarming his mad, vicious guardian. He saw it crawl over them, a wave of destruction that simply reduced them to piles of charcoal and ash, without so much as a hint of fire.

A moment later, the witch hunter, with a lunatic grin, grabbed him out of the water by the scruff of his neck, crowing madness as he went.

"Nastasia, do you see it! Hahaha! I TOLD you he was strong enough!"

The wolf was laughing, capering, jostling the bleeding, gagging, choking cat as he vomited water and stared at his wrist. A few seconds ago, it had been rags of flesh dripping off bone...Now it was merely bloody, gashed, painful in the sudden rush of air from being swung about. As water flowed from his lungs, and Timid hovered on the verge of unconsciousness, Tomasj dropped him on a rock ledge and drove his fist into the cat's gut so hard that the priest's forehead hit the wolf's armored chest, bruising it on the studs of metal there.

Simultaneously, his lungs jolted, and pinkish water flew into the wolf's face, down his front, though the thing seemed not to care, dancing madly and laughing.

"Do you believe in fairy tales now, priest? Do you see why we need the Star? Hahaha! Learn how to do that again, and we may have a chance!"

Timid clasped his paw over the Star, feeling its warm weight in its palm. He reached for it, or tried, with his mind, whispering a traditional prayer in his head as his lungs were still too clenched for it.

Nothing. His heart sank a moment, though only a moment. The Finder had done something. It was, for the first time in his life, actual proof he could see that magic was real. Perhaps if magic were real, his hallucinated voice was real as well.

"We must...Must find the Slaughtered Knight...M-must...Must seek the...The rotting heart...Unghk..."

The wolf caught him as he slumped forward, and as Timid's eyesight faded to blackness, he heard the wolf's hoarse whisper.

"Visions, then...Fine. If we find this Slaughtered Knight and he's of some use to us...We will use him."

Cel lay face-down in the mud, as rain poured down around her, soaking the sloppily applied bandages she'd found on her way here.

With the soggy chill of the rain, she felt also the dry heat of fire, as it climbed the tower from where she'd knocked a hooded lantern into the dry shaving pile the garrison once used for horses.

Not a single guard had been alive, and it had taken all her remaining stubbornness and stamina to fight past the half-dozen shambling, nameless horrors she'd encountered on the way.

Somehow, she knew, something had happened to the prison. Those beasts were all guards, all furs she recognized, some she had even been...No, she cut the thought away, as a surgeon cuts a tumor.

She had lived for vengeance, and gotten it once. Now, she knew, she must have it a second time. To survive that long would mean ignoring the pain and indignity of what had been done to her. Her ruined face, pressed into the mud, had burned so badly with pain that it was now numb, and it reminded her of what she must do to survive. To find Duke Casso and gut him like a fish.

With the flagging ends of her iron will, she dug her paws into the loamy, wet soil, and slowly crawled forward for inches that felt like leagues, until her left paw found a fallen bit of stone. Grasping it, she slowly climbed upright, until she could lay against the wall with her ruined knee out front and her wounded, sliced, but functional leg limp beneath her.

Spotting the silver of her sword, she reached and dragged it over, despite the locking cramps in her muscles.

When it reached her knees, she turned it, laying it flat before her with the blade pointed east.

Chapped, cut lips shivered as she spoke, hoarsely whispering the only prayer that came to mind.

"Mighty Ataras...Father of my father's father...Mother of my mother's mother...I will kill Casso and his sons for slighting our line...Let me live long enough. Then I will be with you again."

She settled back against the stone then, and let the memories come, barreling through her like a storm through a village, and wept silent tears as she quenched herself in that suffering, tempering her spirit for what was to come.