The ride to the graveyard would have been unremarkable had Darion seen any of this before. Familiar roads dulled the eyes y'know.
But this was his first time moving through Percvale, and so despite everything: like the gauntness of it and the quiet desperation hanging over the place, he looked.
The streets were not empty, but they felt like they were in a way.
People moved slowly, heads down, conserving themselves. Children sat in doorways rather than running through them. Men leaned against walls and watched the two riders pass with flat, tired eyes, the stares were not exactly hostile, just watchful. As when Darion first arrived at Percvale about an hour ago, they had this watchfulness of people who had long since stopped expecting good news.
The buildings looked exhausted. Walls that had probably once been whitewashed were now the color of old ash, plaster cracked and peeling in long strips. Shutters hung at odd angles. A cart sat abandoned at the roadside, one wheel missing.
Then they passed through what Darion assumed was the market.
He had expected little. He got less.
The square was almost entirely bare: a wide open space clearly built to hold dozens of stalls, now down to a handful, most of the ground just dirt and… nothing.
But near the center, one stall stood out. Not because it was impressive, but because it was the only one with anything on it.
It had bread, rows of it that were stacked.
Dark, dense loaves with crusts so hard they looked closer to stone than food. The kind of bread that, in any proper city, would have been considered expired and tossed out and fed to birds.
"That bread," Darion said, keeping his voice low. "It looks like it's been sitting since last winter."
"It may well have," Garren replied. "But in Percvale right now, that stall is worth more than most men's houses. Food is scarce enough that even bread like that commands a fortune. People don't buy it straight away, instead they save for it, that's how expensive it is."
'This seemingly not pleasant sight expensive?'
Crazy stuff!
Darion looked at the loaves again and then a thought arrived. Hungry people weren't patient. They weren't rational either. One desperate man with nothing to lose and fast legs might steal them.
But then, behind the bread stood the seller. A broad man. Across his back hung a large axe. Beside him, leaning against the stall post, stood a slender young man with a bow and arrows.
'Oh'
Nobody was going near that bread certainly.
Trying that would be risking your life.
As Darion's horse drew level with the stall, the large man's gaze settled on him and stayed. Not a glare. More of a slow, careful appraisal.
Darion held it for a moment, then looked forward again.
They rode on.
Citizens murmured as they passed: low, sideways talk that died just before it became words. He caught fragments though.
They were surprised about who he was and some were even wondering if he was the new baron, a question that came with skepticism.
"A new Baron?"
"Uh…?"
Eventually the streets gave way to open ground, and the open ground gave way to the gates.
Two of them, set apart by a considerable distance, both standing open. The one before them was larger, stone posts smooth and the iron gate rusted but still standing. Beyond it, rows of graves stretched back into the grey distance, seemingly perfectly arranged and creepy looking. Far off, the second gate opened onto a wider, more crowded expanse of earth. That one was for the common folk of Percvale.
Both full and both quiet.
Darion pulled his horse to a stop and turned to Garren.
"Thank you for bringing me. You can go."
Garren's expression didn't change, not exactly. But something shifted behind his eyes. A question he was too disciplined to ask aloud.
He simply bowed his head, turned his horse, and rode back without a word.
Darion dismounted, looped the reins around the gate post, and stepped through into the knights' graveyard.
The wind moved through in long, low passes, bending the dead grass and letting it rise again. The graves spread further than he had expected: more of them, packed closer together toward the back where the older sections began. Some had proper headstones, names carved into them, though the letters had softened over the years until they were barely readable.
Others were flat stones pressed into the earth, nameless. A few were just mounds that had settled nearly level with the ground around them over the decades.
Rusted helmets lay half-buried in the soil here and there. Whether they had been placed deliberately or simply forgotten, Darion couldn't tell. Either way, the earth had been slowly swallowing them for years, rust bleeding dark stains into the dirt.
He walked slowly through the older sections, reading what names he could still make out, until he spotted rusted shovels scattered near the grass, left behind at some point and never retrieved.
He almost smiled. He had forgotten to bring one.
He picked up the least rusted of the lot, tested the weight (not heavy actually) and got to work.
It was harder than expected.
The ground was dry and packed solid, completely indifferent to his efforts. Every push of the shovel sent a jarring shock up through his arms. His shoulders ached after the first few minutes. He was not, apparently, a man whose body had been recently asked to do anything like this.
He kept going.
Sometime later, a smell hit him.
He stopped, pressed his wrist against his nose, and reminded himself this had been his idea entirely. The graves here were old, a good amount of them decades old even, so the smell wasn't a surprise.
He breathed through his mouth and kept digging.
When the shovel finally struck something solid, the sound told him immediately.
He cleared the remaining dirt carefully and looked down.
He saw Bone. They were smooth, pale, stripped and entirely clean. No flesh, nothing soft, only a skeleton still arranged in the rough shape of burial.
"That's surprisingly too clean," he muttered.
Although it was seemingly smooth, it was still rusty: in a clean way that is. He had half expected to see a coffin of some sorts but then, that wouldn't be possible for common knights in a dying and starving kingdom.
Whatever the years had done, they had been thorough. The bones had a strange sleekness to them, as though the earth had polished them slowly from all sides.
Darion reached down and lifted it free. Far lighter than he had imagined. He carried it up and set it on the grass beside the grave, then straightened and looked around.
The graveyard was empty. His horse stood at the gate with its head slightly lowered, wholly uninterested in what he was doing.
He lowered himself to one knee, the other leg bent with his foot planted firm. He looked at the skeleton laid out before him, going over the hollow sockets and the crossed arms still loosely holding their burial position.
He exhaled.
"Hope you were a good one."
He reached out and placed his hand flat against the chest of the skeleton, over where the sternum lay.
"REVIVE!"