The collection was marvelous.
Even in the darkness of the catacombs, the ‘elf ‘ could appreciate the way the torchlight glinted off her collection of jars. Everyday birthed a new contributer to her supply since the sailor ship had come to rest at the port near the orcish city, and with every kill her skill with the scalpel had increased tenfold. Indeed, by now she could cut into a chest cavity and relieve it of a heart in all of ten minutes, regardless of the creature. Far from the catacombs of the Lamb, she’d found a new place to stash her little treasures until the ship would be homeward bound.
The fact that dead bodies were delivered to the little crypt almost every hour kept her scalpel very happy.
The Undead One had called it the “dumping” site, as far as Anisse had learned. This Undercity had become far more interesting than the elven captial of fornication she’d been wandering before. But ah, Eversong. It seemed to also breed plenty of victims for her to practice upon, and most civilians were too concerned with their mating rituals to care for what had happened to nameless bodies left to the Scourge outside of their shining city. Still, the crypt offered less of a need to be so mobile, and it gave her a chance to witness the use of the Undead’s dark magic: necromancy. The winged spirits exacted the use of it in mesmorizing form, resurrecting lines and lines of the fallen just outside of the graveyard gates…
Free to take what she needed from the “failures”, extra earnings were spent in procuring more glass jars. They tinked against the crypt’s stoney ground as she lined them before the row of filled vessels. Casting a final, small smile to her collection in the corner, she rose, seeming to separate from the shadows, so long had she been sitting there in the dark. The newest bodies were heaped over in the torchlit crawspace, tossed on the stone floor like rag dolls. She drew the hood away from her face as she knelt down, and the make-shift ears that were sewn into the insides were pulled away as well, weighing down the hood as it hung.
The details of the corpses became apparent to her--one a male corpse, the other female. Though the female was in better condition, for some reason she could not explain, Anisse chose to open up the male first. She gazed for a time at the corpse’s face, the jaw ripped away to leave nothing but a lolling tongue.
“This will not hurt at all…” Anisse whispered in the dark to the corpse, parting the rags around the sunken chest. “But I’m sure you knew that, didn’t you?” The delicate blade slid against the weak, fragile skin, and barely had it cut through that the skin sunk into the chest, as if sucked into a sinkhole. A sigh left her as she parted dried viscera, seeming to fall apart like grains of sand. Was there even something worth salvaging inside? The chest rustled like a bag full of dried leaves as she searched, until she felt something hard brush against her fingers. The heart was black as she fished it from between the brittle ribcage, and hardened over, veiny muscle shriveled to nearly half the size it ought to be.
Raising the hardened heart to the torchlight to better see it, Anisse hardly realized that the female corpse was awakening, that her bony hand was skittering across the floor. Only when she felt the bony fingers wrap around her ankle, did she realize something was very wrong…
“Hhhhhhh…his….wkkt….” the awakened corpse rasped between full, cold lips. Alive. No, dead. Undead. How could she have not known?! Anisse thumped back onto her bottom, trying to kick her ankle out of the undead woman’s bony hands. The hand disconnected at the wrist in her struggle with the re-enlivened corpse. The shriveled, hard heart was dropped between the corpses in her surprise. Anisse sought to reach forward and claim it… until she began to notice the male shudder as well.
It seemed the corpses were not ‘duds’ after all.
“…..hh….how dare you….” The female shuddered up to a seated position, the sound of her rasping words and scraping fingers leaving a sharp echo throughout the crypt. She was now crawling over to the body of her dead, jawless husband, helping him to sit up off the stone floor. Both stared upon their violator with gleaming, angry eyes, the light of undeath filling them completely.
Shocked into silence, Anna sat completely still in the darkness, watching as the female’s fingers poised over the gaping hole in her mate’s chest. She was trying to shove the hardened heart back into place! Whatever apprehension she may have felt seemed to drip away as she watched the female try to thunk the heart back into it’s hole. Back into that rotting bag of dried flesh. She wouldn’t have it!
There were better places for such hearts. And this one was hers!
Narrowing her amber eyes, Anna shot forward, propping herself on her knees to better propel herself. She snatched the shriveled heart from the hole it’d been shoved into, breaking a few of the brittle rib bones of the corpse in the same motion. It was hers!
“Mine! ITS MINE YOU LITTLE INGRATE! AUUGH!!!” The female’s raging screams followed Anisse out of the crypt as the deader tried to drag herself after, legs still not fully working. Darting away from the path, she spat out a quiet obscenity as she realized she’d left most of her collection with the undead couple, and probably could not re-collect it.
“Get her! GET HER! You wont get away with this!”
The small grin slipped up against the little grave robber’s face, adrenaline pumping. She stopped to wrap the shriveled heart into a piece of cloth before ripping back into her run through the dark wood.
The Deathguard would have quite the story to tell.
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