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It's the smell – stagnant water and mossy stone – that really gets under your skin. The same smell from the spirit Ravensheugh's vision, but much stronger now, much more real. Master Brehm doesn't seem to notice, or doesn't seem to care, about the smell or anything else about the burial mound. His gaze is set straight ahead, his jaw tense with a quiet fury. This has turned into more than just a little bit of field work for him – this is personal.
It strikes you, then, that you don't really know much about Master Brehm. Not really, not as a person. Not even much about his career, save for the occasional anecdote – often vague and deliberately ambiguous – that he used as part of his lessons. Seeing these marks here, the signs of necromancy and the forbidden arts, did it stir up some long-buried trauma?
“Mind yourself now,” Master Brehm snarls, gesturing for you to half as the crumbling stone steps come to their end, “This place has been despoiled. Touch nothing until I tell you it's safe. Don't even LOOK at anything until I say so. These men, these... degenerates have been known to leave vicious traps and snares around their lairs. The culprits themselves may be long gone, but the danger remains.”
He's treating you like a novice, like it was your first day at the academy, but maybe that's not too far from the truth. This is the real thing after all, not some dusty book or tedious lecture. Nodding silent agreement, you follow as Master Brehm leads you into the burial chamber itself. Despite his warnings you find yourself glancing back and forth at the stained stone walls. The diminutive figures are there, just as you saw in your vision, black smears of blood clinging to...
Dolls. Straw dolls, twisted into vaguely human shapes and pinned to the stone walls with brutal iron nails. The sense of relief is so great that you almost laugh aloud, the weight on your shoulders seeming to lift somewhat. Master Brehm nods the all clear, and you start examining the chamber in more detail. Aside from the grisly idols nailed all around you, the walls have been stained with all manner of occult symbols – the mark of the centipede is everywhere, a nightmarish tangle of legs and jaws entwining the other glyphs.
Taking centre stage is the mummified body itself, the ancient corpse laid out upon a stone slab and adorned with tarnished jewellery. No signs of looting, you note, so it wasn't the urge for plunder that brought the culprits here. No indication that the mummified body itself had been desecrated either, which gives you some faint sense of relief. As if that really made things any better.
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