IABD 62: The Ancient Chapel

“We should enter through the chapel,” Matthias suggested, pointing to the long structure. “It’s the biggest space in the abbey, and probably where the ghouls are most likely to gather. I say we clear them out.”

Bregindoure and Dagma grinned.

“If there are a lot of them, we can have a contest: who can slay the biggest number, the quickest?” Bregindoure raised an eyebrow. “I would wager something, but the only thing around here are ghoul corpses and rocks.”

“I think I have enough rocks,” Dagma made a face. “And I don’t want ghoul bodies.”

“Well, we don’t have to wager, we could just keep score. Come on, then, let’s clear those foul creatures out.” Matthias trudged through the deep snow, heading toward the chapel.

The building loomed before them, large enough for most of Barrowgate’s town square to fit inside. Up close, the decline of the ancient abbey’s facade was plain to see: shattered stained-glass windows seemed to look down like squinting eyes, gargoyles long weathered from the punishing elements, and stone walls whose carved panels depicting Jorgmund’s chosen champions throughout history, were now blackened and broken.

Though Matthias had learned the names of many of the Ascended Deities’ most notable high priests and champions in his lessons, he did not recognise most of the figures here, even those few still mostly intact.

The chapel’s steeples rose in the sky like knives; many stones had crumbled. A crow’s cry carried by the wind echoed through the trees, a stench drifted from inside the chapel.

The air had stunk for the entire time they’d lived in Windstone, but the odour somehow seemed worse today.

Matthias listened for any sound of movement coming from inside, but there was only silence.

Of course, what that meant he couldn’t say; there could have been a hundred ghouls lying in wait, still and breathless, claws poised to shred their prey, or none at all.

He pushed the image of waiting ghouls from his mind as he and his siblings approached the chapel doors. Months before, they had piled large rocks against these very doors and others leading to the abbey in an attempt to keep the ghouls from having access points to come and go through freely, while remaining undetected.

However, some of the smaller rocks had been moved aside and a path was carved through the snow drifts leading to larger stones still at the chapel doors. They were piled against immense double doors, tall enough for a war mammoth to walk through with ease, and wide enough for several wagons to roll through side by side.

“Looks like they were coming through here,” Dagma noted. “But I don’t see any tracks in the snow; it seems they haven’t been this way since the storm.”

“I think you’re right.” Matthias examined the doors. 

He glanced back: in the distance, Polla, Ellian and Beggahasta followed, keeping track of the Stonebreaker siblings.

“I could move the rocks from the door.” Bregindoure suggested. 

“There might be ice keeping them in place,” Matthias warned.

Bregindoure flexed his massive arms, grinning beneath his moustache. “I think I will be more than fine. Just watch my back and make sure nothing comes to attack us while I’m focused on these rocks.” With that, the towering giant slung his shield across his back, placed his mace on his belt and began digging through the snow. “We should have brought a shovel.”

“Wait, let me.” Dagma focused her gaze on the snow pile. “Move.”

The snow shuddered, sliding off the stones piled against the door, leaving only bare rock behind.

“Thanks, Dagma! You’re better than any shovel I could ever want!” Bregindoure laughed, breath misting on the wind as he reached ahead and pulled one of the boulders from the pile. Without a single grunt, he laid it in the snow; working quickly, removing the other stones.

As he worked, Matthias pressed his ear to the icy doors, listening.

On the other side, something softly shuffled toward the door.

“There’s something moving around in there.” Matthias’s tendril slid from his shadow. “No prizes for guessing what it could be.”

“Well, it’ll soon be dead. And I mean literally dead.” Bregindoure finished moving the last stone.

With the doors cleared of snow and boulders, they found a hole smashed through the bottom of the door on the right, wide enough for a child—or an emaciated ghoul—to slip through.

Dagma crouched low, peering through the hole from a safe distance.

Matthias crouched beside her.

Through the hole, he could make out broken pews, garbage, bones, and mounds of decay piled against the doors. The mountain of trash was so high and wide, he couldn’t see the rest of the chapel beyond it.

He glanced back at the broken statue of Jormgund peering through the snow behind them, doubting the god of suffering would be pleased with the condition of the abbey.

“It stinks in there.” Dagma wrinkled her nose. “I don’t see any ghouls though.”

“Through that pile of garbage, there could be hundreds of them waiting for us.” Matthias pointed out, standing and examining the doors, noting the ice caking them. “I bet those doors are frozen shut and those ghouls also have a hoard of trash piled up against them. I doubt we’ll get them open easily.”

“I believe I have a solution for that.” Bregindoure cracked his neck, rolling his head from side to side. He drew his weapon and shield, squaring up in front of the doors. “I’ll charge them. Just make sure if there’s any ghouls waiting on the other side, they don’t kill and eat me before I get a chance to acquaint them with my mace.”

“We’ll watch your back,” Dagma promised.

“Watch it as it gets eaten.” Matthias added under his breath.

“I heard that.” Bregindoure glowered at him, before turning to the door. The giant took a deep breath. His Rune of Sprinting flared on his back, and he shot forward in the blink of an eye. 

His immense body hit the doors shoulder first, the sound that followed was like a crack of thunder. Ice shattered, wood splintered; the impact forcing the doors free.

Trash, remains and shattered pews piled against the door were thrown through the air, sailing throughout the chapel.

Ghouls lying in wait were shaken, struck by flying debris or sent flailing through the air as the doors blew inward.

Matthias wasted not an instant.

In a heartbeat, he was through the doorway and into the building, Dagma was close behind. The Stonebreaker siblings immediately set upon the fallen ghouls near the door; Dagma’s sword slashed undead heads away from their necks, while Matthias’ hammer crushed undead skulls.

In breaths, those ghouls were dead for good, while the rest were scrambling to their feet deeper inside the chapel. The pack of ravenous undead were at least twenty-five strong—or had been before the elimination of their four kindred—the rest stood snarling at the intruders.

Matthias struck before they could take a step toward him and his siblings.

His hammer and sword crushed and split, his tendril wrapped around undead monsters then smashed them headfirst against floor tiles.

Dagma followed right after, far quicker now than she had been when she’d first come to Windstone, she was no longer limited to just finishing ghouls her brothers had brought down.

She darted at the undead monsters with the ferocity of a wolverine, slashing their legs while their focus was on Matthias. When they fell screaming, she took their heads.

They had turned away from the whirlwind of death that was Matthias, looking for easier prey in his younger sister. They licked their lips in hunger, pausing as a looming shadow fell over them.

With grunts of surprise, they looked up in time to see Bregindoure’s mace coming down in a wide, sweeping arc.

There was a tremendous crash, ghouls went flying, bodies forever broken, splattering on the ground or against the walls like insects mashed underfoot.

Bregindoure shouted, “That’s three with one swing! Not bad, eh?”

Ghouls moved toward Dagma, he crushed them with the head of his mace.

Matthias carved a path of ruin through the undead in a blur of movement. Some of the creatures recoiled, seeming to recognize him from his assault on them at the hermit house.

They pulled back, but he cut them down, not letting a single one escape.

In heartbeats, the siblings stood above the ruins of their enemies, breathing deeply.

“I thought there would have been more,” Bregindoure said, smashing the head of a twitching undead.

“I’m not surprised,” Matthias looked around. “We’ve been living here for months but never came inside the abbey; they probably never expected us to. I think they were caught off guard.” 

“Good,” Bregindoure said. “But what we just did made a lot of noise. We should keep moving.” He looked around. “What a terrible place.”

Words could not describe the level of violation that had been committed against Jormgund’s temple; in some ways, it was fitting: many depictions of the God of Martyrs showed his body covered in scars, half-healed wounds and other marks of suffering.

Now, this chapel was the perfect reflection of the wounds carved into his divine form.

Filth coated nearly every inch of the temple; it was caked to the walls, pressed into the floor and even hung from the candelabras on the walls and ceiling. Bones—some looking like they might have been there for a hundred years—were piled in the corners of the room, some appearing bestial, others appeared humanoid.

Holy symbols and statues had been shattered on the floor, and the lectern where the abbot would have given his sermons from was now a burnt husk, lying in the back of the chapel.

The stench defied all logic: Matthias had never smelled anything so foul in his life. Not only did it reach his nostrils, but that miasma of death and wrongness seemed to reach even deeper than it had in other parts of this place.

He thought he’d grown used to the stench by this point, but this place made his skin want to slough off his body. He gripped his weapons tightly; he would grow used to this place in time too, he knew it.

“Where should we go from here?” Dagma asked.

“We need to find where the ghouls are entering the abbey from, when they come from their dens below: an entrance from the catacombs, a cellar…or whatever else it might be.” He looked around. Somewhere in here, there should be an entrance to the Old Abbey Roads, we should find that too.”

“Oh, oh! We should make our way to the abbot’s quarters,” Bregindoure suggested. “And the library. Who knows what knowledge we might find there!” 

“You are and your books,” Matthias laughed. “If only they made me so excited.”

They crept through the chapel, listening and watching their surroundings.

Matthias could hear the sound of feet rushing over stones somewhere near.

“It sounds like they’re close,” he warned his siblings. “Prepare for an ambush.”

It did not take them long to find that ambush.

As they passed near the stairs to the belfry, four ghouls sprang from the shadows, straight for the intruders.

Matthias was a blur: his sword split one in half mid-leap, while his hammer smashed another to the ground. His shadow-tendril wrapped around a third, slamming it to the floor, splitting its head apart.

Dagma and Bregindoure got the fourth: the giant slammed the monster against the wall, crushing it between stone and shield. When he let the ruins of its body slide down the wall, Dagma cleaved its head from its shoulders with ease.

There came more sounds of ghouls moving through the abbey.

“Interesting. They’re not calling for the rest yet,” Bregindoure muttered. “Are they afraid of us?”

“That or they’re luring us deeper into the abbey so we’re easier prey,” Matthias said.

“Cheery thought,” was Bregindoure’s dry reply.

The Stonebreaker siblings slipped deeper into the abbey, picking their way through centuries of accumulated filth and debris. In some places the ceiling had been damaged, broken open by catapult stones, exposing the blue skies above; in those areas snow covered the floor, trampled and crisscrossed by more ghoul tracks than they could make out.

They picked their way cautiously through snow and debris, heading to where Ellian had said the library was, months ago.

On the way, they passed the Chamber of Suffering, where another pack of ghouls were waiting in ambush; they might have succeeded too, had Matthias’ sharp nostrils not noticed the increased foulness coming from that hallway.

That fight was quick and ugly: after months of training, the Stonebreaker siblings proved more than a match for packs of average size ghouls, especially in the tight corridors of the abbey where the undead could not surround them.

Bregindoure stood as strong as a rampart, he could hit with the force of a trebuchet stone: the uncertain and nervous warrior who’d first arrived in Windstone was long left behind, in his place, a young giant of growing strength, prowess and cheer, stood.

Dagma was beside her brothers, picking her battles, cleaving down undead with her sword held in a two-handed grip. She reserved the Gift for more dire situations, preserving her stamina.

Matthias was the reaper, turning everything that stepped within reach of his arms or tendril to pulp on the floor.

His confidence grew as he left more and more enemies in his wake…yet so did a feeling of unease. As they headed deeper into the abbey, the air grew charged with something he could not name.

Something that seemed to reach up from deep in the earth, calling to him.

He kept that thought from his mind for the moment: for now, he needed to focus on threats nearby, not the mysterious down below.

Soon, the ghouls had been cleared from the Chamber of Suffering, leaving Jormgund’s space no longer occupied. The Stonebreaker siblings did not stay there long: the conqueror’s horde that had invaded this place had obviously wished to make the Chamber of Suffering an accurately fitting name.

The remains of atrocities that had taken place there were better passed over, quickly.

Together, the Stonebreaker siblings kept going, moving deeper into the abbey, facing stiffer resistance; every few rooms or so, they would encounter packs of ghouls trying to bring them down, but the undead did not come in enough numbers to challenge them, yet.

Instead, they were able to go deeper and deeper into the ruin, as if they were moving down the gullet of some immense beast. Piles of filth lay everywhere, and that unease within Matthias continued to grow.

The miasma also thickened, and he set his jaw, determined to put it from his mind.

At last, they reached the library, to find—

“This place has been gutted!” Bregindoure sounded mortified.

Books were missing, burned or otherwise destroyed. Everything of value had either been ruined or taken. Only the remains of the ghouls’ grisly meals were left behind.

“I don’t know if we’ll find anything of use in here,” Bregindoure said. “I mean, I—Wait, Matthie, are you alright?”

Matthias had stepped into the library and stopped dead in his tracks.

A sound in the distance had reached his ears, something that caught him by surprise.

He turned as though in a trance; eyes fixed on the library’s far wall. “The monks’ quarters are that way, aren’t they?”

“Yes, why?” Dagma asked.

The young greatfolk’s eyes narrowed. “I swear to you, I think I hear someone weeping, coming from that direction.”

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Author's Note

Hello everybody, short note today cause I have an errand to run that's just come up. Cya Wednesday!