Where the Road Joined

Rennin had been staring at the dead farmer for some time when Norrim handed him an ale. They were several days north of Berdusk in a roadside inn where fear had settled heavily over the common room. Beneath a wool blanket lay a man who had been dead for three days and who, according to his family, had spent part of the previous night trying to get back into his own house.

He wasn't the first. Graves had opened in three nearby villages. A shepherd had seen his grandfather wandering through a field nine years after burying him, and a widow had awakened to the sound of her dead husband scratching at her door. Norrim had spent the evening listening to frightened locals while Rennin quietly considered what they had learned. The two had traveled together for decades, and Norrim knew better than to hurry his old friend toward a decision.

Eventually Rennin decided they needed a cleric. Norrim smiled and informed him that he had reached the same conclusion twenty minutes earlier. It was an old rhythm between them. Rennin considered things until he was certain; Norrim waited, usually with a drink in his hand, until Rennin arrived where he already suspected they were going.

Brynhild Starkhelm was tending a boy with a broken wrist when Rennin found her at a small temple serving the farmers and travelers of the region. She knelt beside the frightened child and explained that setting the bone would hurt, but only briefly.

     “Can you be brave for exactly three breaths?” Bryn asked gently.

The boy nodded. On the first breath she set the bone. On the second, warm healing magic passed beneath her fingers. By the third, he was staring in astonishment at a wrist that no longer hurt.
Rennin explained the walking dead. Bryn listened without interruption and then began packing bandages and supplies. When he pointed out that she had never actually agreed to accompany him, she seemed puzzled by the need for an answer.

     “Dead people are walking,” Bryn said. “Why would I say no?”

The journey back taught Rennin something about her. Bryn wanted to know everything about the afflicted villages—the missing, the sick, the children, the animals and the families of the dead—but revealed almost nothing about herself. Whenever Rennin ventured too close to her past, the conversation somehow returned to him. It happened so smoothly that several minutes passed before he noticed.

Norrim liked her immediately. By their first evening together he had her laughing over old stories of his travels with Rennin, including one involving Rennin attempting to negotiate with an ogre while unknowingly standing on the creature's dinner. Rennin insisted it had been dark. Norrim pointed out that darkness did not make the sheep any less a sheep.

Bryn also noticed something about Norrim: he was never the hero of his own stories. No matter what had happened, he found a way to make someone else the interesting part. Norrim, in turn, recognized how carefully Bryn listened to everyone while revealing almost nothing about herself. He recognized a closed door and, unlike most people, felt no need to knock.

Three days later they met Klifton when his unseen warning stopped Norrim an instant before the dwarf stepped into a concealed snare. The ranger emerged from the trees carrying a longbow and wearing the wary expression of a man accustomed to anticipating trouble. He had been following the same trail of strange deaths for nearly a week and had traced it to Dunbarrow, an abandoned mining settlement in the foothills.

Klifton was uneasy around strangers, but his uncertainty diminished when he began discussing the terrain. He drew the mine, roads and surrounding ravines in the dirt and argued against approaching immediately. They knew too little about what waited inside. Rennin listened and accepted the ranger's recommendation without challenging his expertise, which seemed to surprise Klifton.

For two days they watched Dunbarrow. They saw the dead emerge after sunset and return before dawn. More importantly, they saw living prisoners being taken into the mine.
That ended the watching.

Klifton planned an approach through an old eastern ventilation passage shortly before dawn. Dunbarrow ruined that plan almost immediately. The passage had collapsed, leaving them in unfamiliar tunnels with the returning dead closing behind them. Rennin studied the rubble for only a moment before reorganizing them. Norrim took the front, Bryn remained close behind him, and Klifton searched for another route.

The first undead struck Norrim's shield hard enough to ring through the tunnel. The dwarf scarcely moved. He drove the corpse backward and began methodically breaking the advance while Rennin fought beside him. The two required little communication. Decades of fighting together had reduced much of it to instinct—a shift of Rennin's shoulder, the angle of Norrim's shield, a space opened and filled before either needed to ask. Klifton's arrows slipped between them from farther back, finding openings that scarcely seemed large enough to exist.

Then Bryn entered the fight.

Rennin had gone looking for a cleric and had imagined healing, prayer and perhaps someone sensibly positioned behind the warriors. Bryn corrected that assumption with her mace. The first blow crushed the side of a dead miner's skull. The second finished it. She broke another corpse at the knee and smashed it down before it could rise, fighting without elegance but with frightening efficiency.

Norrim glanced toward her after she crushed another skull. Bryn caught the look and demanded to know what he was staring at. Norrim merely grinned and returned to fighting.

Then the mine filled with more dead than steel could stop.

Bryn stepped ahead of the others.

     “Behind me, Ren.”

Something in her voice convinced Rennin not to argue.  Bryn lowered her bloody mace, raised the holy symbol at her chest and whispered a prayer. Divine light erupted through the tunnel, hard and brilliant enough to drive the darkness back. The advancing dead recoiled. Those nearest her stumbled into the creatures behind them, and then the entire mass began fleeing deeper into the mine.
Rennin watched Bryn rather than the dead. There was no triumph on her face. Only sadness. These things had once been people, and she seemed incapable of forgetting that even while destroying what they had become.

Then they attacked.

Norrim drove into the retreating dead while Rennin fought beside him. Klifton's arrows struck anything attempting to circle behind them, and Bryn followed with her mace. For several furious minutes the tunnels filled with steel, arrows and breaking bone. They had never fought together before, yet by the time the last corpse fell they had begun moving with the strange instinct of people who somehow knew where the others would be.

Bryn wiped her mace against an old mining sack. Norrim surveyed the bodies around her and quietly informed Rennin that he liked the cleric.

From somewhere behind them, Klifton reminded him that there were four people in the group.

Norrim decided he liked the ranger too.

They found twenty-one prisoners alive beneath Dunbarrow.

Getting them out proved harder than getting in. Klifton found a route through the old workings while Bryn tended those too weak to walk unaided. Norrim kept frightened survivors moving, and Rennin shepherded the group through unstable passages.

Eventually one collapsed.

Klifton had been scouting ahead when the ceiling came down between him and everyone else. When the dust cleared there was only rubble. Rennin's first instinct was to dig, but Norrim stopped him with a hand on his arm and a glance toward the twenty-one frightened people waiting behind them.
Rennin understood.

Whatever had happened to Klifton, remaining in the unstable mine could kill everyone else. Rennin stared at the rubble for a long moment before ordering the survivors onward.

The dead caught them again near the surface. Norrim held the rear passage while the prisoners escaped toward daylight, refusing to give ground until a blow split his shield and another shattered it completely. He went down hard.

Rennin turned back immediately.

So did Bryn.

Norrim tried to send them away, insisting the prisoners mattered more, but Bryn slipped beneath his arm and hauled him upright. She understood what he was doing. He was trying to make abandoning him sound sensible.

     “You don't know me well enough yet, Norrim,” Bryn told him.

Despite the pain, the dwarf smiled. Apparently, he told her, he would have to work on that.

Then an arrow struck the corpse nearest Rennin.

Klifton stood farther down the passage, bloodied, torn and very much alive. He had found another way through the mine. His next arrow killed the creature approaching behind Rennin before the paladin even knew it was there.

Together they reached daylight.

Hours later, the four sat beneath a tree overlooking the road. Norrim had a bandage around his head, Klifton had another around his hand, Rennin's armor was battered, and Bryn's robes were stained with the blood of the living and the dead alike.

Klifton eventually admitted that after the collapse he had found a passage leading outside. He had followed it halfway to freedom before stopping.

Bryn asked what had made him turn around.

Klifton stared toward the distant road for a long time.

     “I kept thinking about what would happen if I didn't.”

Bryn reached over and squeezed his hand. She asked nothing more.

They should have separated after Dunbarrow. Bryn had a temple to return to. Klifton had spent years traveling alone. Rennin and Norrim already had another destination.
Instead, three nights later, all four were sitting in another roadside inn.  Norrim had already made several new friends. Bryn was listening to an elderly woman speak about her grandchildren. Klifton had chosen a seat where he could see both doors. Rennin sat quietly and watched them.  Only then did he understand what had happened beneath Dunbarrow.
Klifton had anticipated dangers the others had not seen. Rennin had made the decisions when plans failed. Norrim had stood where someone needed to stand and refused to move. Bryn had carried healing in one hand and a mace in the other, knowing instinctively when each was required. None of them had tried to become a company, nor had any of them set out to prove what they could contribute. Yet whenever one reached the limits of what he could do, another seemed naturally to take over.

Rennin eventually asked Klifton where he intended to go next.

     “North.”

Rennin considered that for a moment. “So are we.”

Norrim looked at his old friend with considerable amusement. They had not, in fact, been going north.

Klifton understood the invitation anyway.

When Bryn returned and learned that they were apparently traveling north, she asked whether that had been their original destination. Norrim told her it most certainly had not.
Bryn considered the matter.

     “All right.”

That was it.

There was no oath, no grand declaration and no promise that they would remain together. The following morning there were simply four people on the road instead of two.
At the first fork, Klifton chose the left-hand path. Rennin asked why, and the ranger explained that the right road was shorter.  Once, Rennin would have asked another question.
This time he simply followed.  Norrim fell into step beside Bryn and began telling her a story that grew less accurate with every mile. Bryn laughed and corrected him despite having no idea what had actually happened. Klifton walked ahead, watching the road, while Rennin followed behind and quietly watched the three people who had somehow become his companions.

Years later, a grievous wound would bring them to a distant valley hidden beneath mountains and fog. Embermist Hollow was still far ahead, as were battles, losses, friendships and years none of them could yet imagine.

For now, four roads had simply joined.  And together, they went north.