Disturbed Rest

[N`Ylim Fath`ir]

Darkness falls on the scorched ruin of a small home just outside Myrkentown proper, like the shroud of a mortician covering his latest tragically-acquired customer. Moonlight silvers the blackened stones that still stand despite the fire that gutted the rest of the structure, and it casts its cold light on a trio of misshapen figures emerging from the nearby treeline.

"Meat, is meat here?", came a rasping rattle from one; tall, spindly, lurching with the gait of one partially crippled, one foot turned in to face the other. "Why out here so far, plenty of meat near where warm ones live." "Better meat here.", comes the response, deeper, the words slurred as if the speaker's tongue is a bit overlarge for his mouth. This one gestures with a thick-muscled arm, ending in a gnarled, large-knuckled hand stained with grime and dirt, the fingernails ragged and filthy. "Here we eat and no one know, no one chase. Was left for us. By the Other."

The other two figures fall into an almost reverential silence, slowly swaying back and forth, trancelike. Their reverie is broken by the atonal rumbling of the largest of the three, no longer gesturing, but pointing. Pointing at the final resting places of Cass and Vin Tolmer. "There. Dig. At his words, the two slighter figures, now more visible in the direct moonlight beyond the shadows of the treeline, shuffle forwards. The tattered rags wrapped about their twisted, sickly-pale bodies flap and flutter; the eyes that seem clouded with milky cataracts set into faces fixed into permenant grimaces of rigor mortis take on an almost hungry glint. They crouch against the earth, tearing up freshly-laid sod with spadelike hands; tough, leathery fingers claw through the soft earth beneath with ease, towards their prize, their food.

The more massive of the three ghouls observes their progress with evident satisfaction and even more obvious hunger, drool trickling from the corners of a slack mouth filled with yellowed teeth. But something shakes the flesh-eater from his contemplation of the feast to come. His head tilts to the side, nostrils in his waxen-fleshed face flare wide, scenting something on the night air, something... ...unknown. He turns, slowly, searching, not sure where it is, what it is, not manflesh, but there, and close...

A blur of motion streaks from the treeline directly towards the hulking ghoul, slamming into him before he can even think to raise his treetrunk arms in either defense or attack. The impact slams the hideous caricature of life to the ground as if poleaxed. Startled, the other two ghouls cease their burrowing, leaping out of the hole they've created with a speed that belies their tortured and wasted physiques, looking about, also scenting for whatever now shared the clearing with them. A dry, harsh laughter came from behind them, as they turned towards the sound of it, a figure swirled into view, resolving itself seemingly from empty space, crouched atop Vin Tolmer's gravemarker like a hawk. N`Ylim Fath`ir, clad head to toe in leather black as night's fabric, took in the sight of these misshapen creatures, smelled the stench of the grave that clung to them like a pall, and smiled.

"The dead must have their rest. You will not disturb them, misbegotten abominations that you are. You will join them on the other side, and your wails of suffering will be sweet music to ease their need for vengeance."

[N`Ylim Fath`ir]

The massive ghoul who'd been struck down first responded with his own laughter, or what passed for it; a thick, phlegmy, rumbling sound like the coughing of a terminal bronchitis patient. "You one man. All by self, should not have come here. You meat waiting to be meat. We show you. Break your bones, bury you deep, let you die in dark, then we eat you too, like we eat these ones in ground." N`Ylim shook his head, almost sadly, as he stepped down from Vin Tolmer's marker, avoiding the excavation that was a few scant feet from being a desecration. "You've got this all wrong, gentlemen. I'm no one's meat, least of all the likes of you. Never the hunted. Always the hunter."

Enraged, the lead ghoul shambled forwards, gathering momentum like a great boulder rolling down a mountainside, ropy muscled arms spread wide to take this puny man in a bonecrushing final embrace, to hear him choke out his last breath through lungs torn by his own shattered ribs. N`Ylim stood still, almost casually, as the monstrous creature bore down on him like fate, but then he was springing upwards as the huge hands slammed together on nothing but air, his lean body curling over in a flip, then both black-booted feet hammering down as the ghoul passed beneath. A sickening crack of bone sounded as the blow connected, followed by another as the ghoul, propelled by his own forward momentum as well as the force of the kick smashed face-first into the fire-scorched stone chimney. The brutish creature slumped to the ground, leaving behind a viscous smear of black ichor like tar across the stones in a wide swath downwards. The lead ghoul now lay asprawl on the ground, head tilted at a crazy angle that could only be indicative of a smashed and shattered spine, twitching occasionally.

The other two ghouls hesitated, frozen, overwhelmed with an alien terror, like small birds fixed in the unblinking gaze of a serpent. N`Ylim Fath`ir uncoiled himself from where he crouched after landing and regarded them silently. The one with the twisted leg broke the heavy silence. "Give up. We give up. You kill Marrow-Drinker, he gone, you win. We leave, never like him anyway, always push us around. We thank." N`Ylim raised one whisper-thin eyebrow, and then replied, again sounding almost regretful. "No, I'm afraid you won't be leaving. Mister Ironhead, Mister Hammer, you may take them now."

From behind the two loathsome graverobbers came a quick rasp of steel on steel, as of blades being drawn, followed by a sound like a butcher driving a cleaver into a choice cut of beef to split the bone. The two ghouls dropped to the earth without a sound, their heads rolling a short distance away from the bodies still gouting what passed for blood from necks cut cleanly through with near-surgical precision, both at the third vertebrae down from the base of the skull. N`Ylim Fath`ir contemplated the two misshapen craniums, their eyes filming over in final, true death. He wonder what this "Other" they had spoken of could be. He'd never heard of ghouls revering anything other than a fresh meal of rotten flesh. He knelt down, placing his long-fingered hands on the heads of the ghouls, almost gently, bowed his head. "These deaths are yours, my Lord. I dedicate the ending of these miserable victimizers of the dead to You, and all the teeming unavenged dead. May my gifts which You have granted me always serve You thus." He rose to his feet, walking to the huge corpse of Marrow-Drinker, wrapped both hands around the sides of the creature's head, placed a booted foot in the middle of the broad back, and wrenched upwards. With a sound like rotten leather tearing, the head and top third of the ghoul's spinal column pulled free of the body, and N`Ylim raised the grisly trophy over his head, his own face expressionless, then placed it between the other two heads. It would serve as a warning, a message for any with the barest understanding that the night was no longer free, no longer theirs. "Take the bodies and burn them. I don't want them polluting the soil of this place, it's been defiled enough." The two massive, armored figures of Ironhead and Hammer easily shouldered the corpses of the trio of ghouls, and then faded away into the darkened wood with them. N`Ylim gave one final glance at the graves. He would have his two guards return and fill them back in once they'd completed disposing of the bodies currently in their care. "Rest well, Vin and Cass Tolmer."

And then he too, was gone, and only the dark and the dead remained.