Darkness and Hellfire

"Son of a bitch." Isaac swore and stopped with his boot a few inches off the ground, about to finish his next step. He slowly brought his foot back and placed it on the ground next to his other one. He squinted down at where he was about to step and bent over at the waist to take a look at what his mana senses were telling him.

"What is it?" Edward questioned and peered down at where Isaac was looking. It took the Guild Master a moment to see what Isaac had noticed. They were almost back into the cavern where their battle took place so the positioning was perfect for the ambush. If the plan was to use the entrance of the tunnel as a kill box, then the entire raiding group would have had a clear line of sight onto the first wagon or two.

"How did we not trigger this?" Isaac wondered and knelt down next to a small sigil carved into the ground, filled in with gold, and then loosely covered in dirt.

"Can you tell what kind of spell it is?" Edward asked.

"Not through the dirt, and I don't want to touch it and set it off." Isaac replied. "I'll let Shamesh know it is here and hopefully Alexander will be able to figure out what it is." He pulled a silver coin out of his Inventory and placed it at his feet while he did just as he had told Edward he would.

"Good idea." Edward said and straightened. "So, are we getting around it like how we did before the chimera?"

Isaac nodded and put a hand on the Guild Master's bicep. "Just in case." He agreed and cloaked them both in shadows. Both men just walked right past the magical trap in the floor and continued on. The trap had been placed almost right in the middle of the path and it stood to reason that a horse or wagon wheel would end up rolling right over it, especially if there were multiple of them. When they ran past it before, they were probably just lucky and didn't end up stepping on it, or it had some other condition like direction of travel built into it. Once they were past the magical trap by a few strides, Isaac let go of his control over the shadow-cloak and the shadows dissipated back into the rest of the local darkness.

"That has to be the singularly most effective stealth skill, spell, or ability I have seen to date." Edward commented.

"It is only ninety nine percent effective." Isaac explained. "People extremely sensitive to bloodlust will still feel the attack coming. I still displace air so some hyper specialized traps are designed to look for just that displacement. The right high end items or spells can create the same effect, I just do it faster, easier, and it can't be dispelled. Well, I didn't think it could be dispelled until that assassin blasted an antimagic pulse in our faces. That probably would have done it."

"I'll keep the limitations in mind for the future. One of the reasons I am always trying to find out adventurers' limits is because I never want to send you into a situation where I have to recover your corpse, like Azazel." Edward added the final part with a bit more somberness than the rest of his words. It seemed like the death of the young warlock still weighed on him to some extent.

"Don't beat yourself up over that one." Isaac told him. "No one could have known that it was Jala who set up those wards. The dispel Protection From Divination based on the movement of the dirt on the ground in order to open up the target for other magics was just mean, and very much her style."

Edward nodded. He understood exactly what Isaac had said, and he didn't hold it against Jala, she was just doing what she was being paid to do and had done nothing out of malice, but that just left the blame aimless, and aimless blame often found its way back to the one pondering it. "I know." Was all he told Isaac as they continued on.

The inside of the cavern was devoid of life, save for the two humans, and so the duo immediately went to search and loot the corpses. They also needed to bring all of the bodies into the middle of the cavern so they could be cremated to prevent an easy resurrection. In the case of Farlen V'Nova, they would be bringing his body the entire way back to Safeharbor first. Certain resurrection rituals could be done if they knew the exact place where he died OR if they had his body, but nothing could be done about the first. The thing with those rituals was that they would need things like personal effects, family members, and at the very least, the blood of a direct descendant. It also needed to be done within a week of the death, otherwise the soul would be too far removed from the mortal plain. Gathering all of those things would require a lot of teleportation in a very short amount of time. So much of it in fact that Alexander's detection array was likely to pick up what they were doing long before their ritual would be complete.

Isaac eyed the chain that had linked the two sickles the lead assassin had used together. "Where did his weapons go?" He wondered and approached where one of them had been laying. He bent down and rubbed his fingers through a small sickle shaped pile of ash.

"I figured it would be something like that." Edward commented. "That enchantment was far too powerful for a weapon to be able to sustain. Eventually the disintegration just turned the weapon to dust."

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"How much do you think that kind of thing costs?" Isaac asked and looked up at Edward as he rose back to his full height.

"If it only ran for a minute and then destroyed itself, three hundred thousand gold, give or take the skill of the craftsman who made it and how many times it had been done before." Edward said with a thoughtful nod. "The arrows that they were shooting at Shamesh and Alexander probably cost ten thousand gold each and they only lasted for around two seconds according to our wizards."

"Yikes." Isaac said and shook his head. "He cannot be happy about failing to kill any of us." They continued talking while they moved on to looting the half of a wizard and crispy assassin who were still in the middle of the cavern.

"I would be livid." Edward agreed. "They burned through at least half of a million gold worth of consumable gear if you count the smoke bombs, whatever the golden circles he kept activating were, and the poison arrows. Add on the loss of trained assassins and their non-consumable gear like their enchanted weapons and armor, it wouldn't surprise me if he lost more than a million gold from this encounter, on top of failing the job. They really had it out for you two. Otherwise no one in their right minds would put a million gold bounty on two people and then still send an elite squad of knights led by a council member."

"Who were all being guided by a maximum level ranger and his merry band of rangers and scouts." Isaac added.

"Well, you are the Legend Slayer." Edward said with a chuckle.

"Patriarch Killer." Isaac corrected him. "That's what one of the soldiers called me when we got ambushed on our way out. I wonder where Contantis got all of the money for this. Lenna said that they didn't even have that much in the vaults."

"Maybe some of the other branches contributed." Edward postulated.

A chill ran up Isaac's spine. "Something is here." He said with absolute seriousness. His tone and sudden change in posture immediately put Edward on high alert, even if he hadn't said a thing.

Edward drew his sword and stood side by side with Isaac. "Where is it?" He quietly questioned the dark mage.

Isaac slowly shook his head. "Everywhere, and nowhere, but mostly over there?" He sounded about as sure of himself as he felt. The feeling was disembodied but seemed more concentrated in the direction that he had pointed in, the direction where he and Lenna had killed Farlen V'Nova. "Let's go check it out."

"Agreed." Edward stated and they slowly and carefully approached where Farlen's corpse lay.

It only took them a dozen seconds or so to reach the body, even moving at a walk, and what they saw was novel, terrifying, and unnerving. Farlen's headless corpse was twitching on the ground as his burnt to a crisp head lay half a dozen feet from it. A soft indigo light was starting to shine in the head's empty eye sockets, where his eyes had been before they popped from their insides boiling, as well as from the chest of the dead paladin's body. A profound sense of wrongness seemed to radiate from where the pieces of Farlen lay.

"Uh, is there something that we should be doing about this?" Isaac wondered and looked to Edward for answers.

Edward shook his head tentatively. "I have no idea. I've never seen a natural undead form before. I'm not sure if we even can interrupt the process." Right as Edward finished speaking, the head of Farlen began to roll all on its own towards the neck that Lenna had separated it from once Isaac had left to help Shamesh, Alexander, and Edward.

Isaac shadow-stepped into its path and impaled it with Truth. No sooner had the head stopped rolling did the body quickly slide across the ground and lock into place. It had happened almost too quickly for Isaac to react and his instant reaction was just to jump out of the way of the object moving along the ground. Isaac's sword had impaled the head through the missing faceplate, back of the helmet, and then into the ground beneath, but he suddenly felt like standing over the reforming paladin was a bad idea. No sooner had the thought finished forming, dark purple chains began pouring out of Farlen's core area.

Isaac vanished and appeared next to Edward with confusion and worry on his face. Edward didn't look any more confident. "Alright, I tried to stop it, now what?" Isaac wondered.

"Now we just have to fight it once it's finished doing whatever that is." The 'that' in question was the flailing of the chains in all directions around the body like they were looking for something to devour. Edward frowned and put his lightning sword back into his scabbard. "If we are watching a Death Knight being made," He pulled the sword an inch out of the locked position and slammed it back in place. When he did so, the handle wrappings changed color from golden to light blue. He did it again and the wrappings turned silver. "then be ready to hit it with everything you have until my blessed sword can finish it off." He pulled his sword out and this time it was faintly glowing with holy soft white light and it was clear at a glance that the sword was plated in platinum. Isaac could feel a hint of the same power that existed in Lua and Halya's presences, faith based divinity. "I'll need the armor out of the way or an absolutely perfect path to its heart."

The chains coming out of Farlen's corpse found the bottom half of his sword and the top half of Lenna's. "If he is as strong as he was in life, then we are in for one hell of a fight." Isaac commented right as the halves of the sword were welded together by lines of indigo and dark purple thread that passed through the metals in order to catch stitch them together. The same thread and pattern connected Farlen's head to his neck and the hilt of his sword to his hand. Isaac threw a silver coin at it before he remembered that it was platinum and threw one of those as well. Both coins were slapped out of the air by one of the chains.

Edward slowly turned and looked at Isaac as the dozens of chains still coming out of Farlen's chest began wrapping around his body and growing thorns. "Really? Throwing coins at it is the best you have? Aren't you supposed to be the 'Lord of all that is Dark'?"

Isaac shrugged. "Yeah, but we both know that the title is more of a challenge than a truth at this point." Isaac replied and got ready to fight as soon as their opponent was finished forming. Neither of them wanted to be caught in the forming process. Based on what happened to the sword, there was a chance that their bodies would get stitched to the rest of it, and absolutely nobody wanted that, well, no one who wasn't a part of the drow empire anyway.

Edward shook his head and also got ready to launch an attack. "If this thing starts kicking our asses, I'm blaming you and then running back to the others so we can fight it together." Edward grumbled.

Isaac thought about arguing but really couldn't. He was the one claiming to be the 'Lord of all that is Dark' so he kind of had it coming every time an undead or something showed up trying to eat or kick his teeth in. "Fair enough." Isaac said under his breath just as the body of Farlen V'Nova levitated up to stand on its feet. Indigo glowing orbs met Isaac's silver eyes. Apparently, Farlen's corpse knew exactly which one of the two was responsible for its death.