Past of Many

[relentless]

The soul paid no attention to anyone else, for its attention was fixed on the one who communicated with him. He watched her quietly, before being taken aback by her reaction to his cries.

But he could tell that Talea understood, unlike the others. And with a wisp and gasping wind, the soul vacated into the depths of the graveyard, the coldness around the area had left them. Talea would be the only one to see where it went, a glowing cosmic blue amongst the trees growing dimmer and dimmer, before it passed through several obstacles. Perhaps it returned to his slumber? Who truly knew at this point.

==
As the soul moved, so did the mist, carrying on visibly and becoming more watered down. Through the veil of the wall of mist, a rusted iron gate lay half open. From the silhouette itself, the bars were crooked and thin, and the gate seemed ever so slightly open. Other than that it was hard to make out details from this distance.

[EloHim]

"- Your ability to care is admirable, Doctor. But I'm afraid you're out of your depth here, so to speak."- Elorit remarked to the Plague Doctor. Alchemist knew better than to interrupt whatever communion there was between the spirit and the girl. He put the wooden figure away in his pocket in case it will be useful later... and as a memento.

Talea strongly reminded him of... no, it would hardly make sense now, would it? And yet...the similarity was uncanny... The Bird probably was laughing his ass off about Elorit's confusion, wherever he was. Probably will bring it up when they meet again. One fact remained - the girl knew more about the true nature of their task than any other member of the group present.
And as far as Elorit was concerned, that was all that mattered.

[The Carrying Blade]

For Mithra, she saw this as the ghost listening to her. As although a spirit of a dead one being able to be talked to was almost completely new to the warrior, at death it was believed in her tribe that the spirit and soul would forever stay there until one performed the proper rituals or moved the body, both of which was done to be sure nothing would keep them on this earth. She couldn’t be more wrong at the moment but that was something she might learn later, now they could move forward.

Though then there was Talea, the odd one had such an affinity for this talk of spirits, it didn’t take a genius to know without her this mission might as well be doomed.
“Death Talker, lead us would you? You are our only eyes and ears that can see what is spirit.” Mithra called to her, beckoning her forward, looking over to Elorit and motioning him up too knowing he might have the only charisma to make her listen and stay as well.

[EtherealNoire]

Pulled from her invocations by encroaching hands rested over the incorpreal of Night's, Talea rose to the female light-dweller's summons. Though the woman spoke, the sound carried with it an authority that dimmed beneath the commandments upon the air. The voice of Night. 
Possessive in his hold, he raked his fingers through her locks, which appeared in mortal eyes to swim within the air as if animated by the souls who had so assuredly beseeched them, before swaying towards the gate's foreboding maw.
Talea too cast her gaze to the waiting darkness, where she found her spirit called, drifting pass the others in a silence as revered as the graves.
Voices, hushed and fearful, hissed from betwixt the shadows, questioning the passage of the phantom broken from its fetters.  Who were these mortals that tred between the hallowed and the forsaken? How did they hold such power?
At the border of the mist she lingered, a spectral waiting to ferry the vagrants on into the realm of Death.

[black379]

"Pardon?" The beak of Adeney's mask protruded without regard to Elorit's personal space as the doctor looked to him sternly.

"Out of my depth?" He huffed indignantly, hands settling on the strap of his satchel as if he needed something to grip besides the strange man's neck. Surely it was these people who didn't have a grasp on reality. They were the ones out of touch. Adeney would have to admit that he was naive about souls and spirits, it was only a few days earlier that he was convinced such a thing existed. But even if there was a spirit beckoning them onward, he was sure that defiling corpses and groveling in the mud was unnecessary.

"You'll feel like a fool when I'm stitching you up." The doctor swiveled sharply and followed behind Talea. This is why he would rather work alone.

[relentless]

Beyond the veil of murky white, and through the hallowed bars of forgotten iron, a graveyard that seemed incredibly broad, with an abandoned church in the bottom right corner. The width of the area was similar to that of two football pitches, and about half of the size of one.

The bars of the gate were bent and weathered from the elements of the world, and what seemed like a lock n' chain seemed to have been corroded. The faintest shimmer of blue, similar to that of the ghost Talea had just encountered shined from beneath the iron chain.

From what could be seen from the entrance of the Graveyard, shallow graves had been upturned and dirt seemingly wrenched out of the ground, claw marks had been laid bare with strange, human footsteps pressed about into the dirt. The mist was still heavy, moisture was thick in the air, and with the sun going down, darkness would envelop the mist. Though there were some... strange light sources to be seen from beyond, blurred and moving, all of them shared a murky crimson red, flickering into a cosmic blue before returning once more.

===
Upon entering the graveyard, the heroes would be constricted to a somewhat wide path of iron fencing that acted as an external hallway. Open archways led into small catacombs and areas of occupied land riddled with graves. The mud was thick, and sloppy, though a reasonable amount of footing was managable.

A majority of graves were still sealed for the most part, however there were those that had been unearthed. Coffins half open, fully or graves 'empty' could be seen from the most narrow glance. The first unearthed grave would be to their left, a stone casing held up to the sky, partially ajar. A drip and drop from the interior of this stone coffin could be heard, but anything after that seemed void.

[EloHim]

"- Same will go for you, il dottore."- Elorit said, chuckling. How many times he put up that wall of confidence during the times most desperate? He did not remember. It was a good front, that served him well… but that wall was made of glass. Impressive, but easily shattered.

As the group walked into the graveyard and observed the state of the burial grounds, Elorit was appalled by what he saw.
"- Someone done a great deal of defilement and unearthing…”- alchemist was stating the obvious, but when he saw something so wrong done on such a scale, any other words were confined within his mind.
Savages… Barbarians… No respect for the dead…
Spirits came from somewhere, alright. Elorit put his bets on graverobbers. Of course there will be no rest for those buried if any idiot with the shovel could walk in and dig them out in hopes of taking something valuable from the coffin. They started the whole thing... but what came after the graverobbers...? That he was not so willing to find out. But he knew that if the group sticks around for longer than necessary - they will.

[The Carrying Blade]

Mithra looked inward to the graves unearthed and the steps taken by dead men who sought to defile those sanctified. She merely sneered at this display, looking ahead as the drip drop of some liquid perforated her ears. She wondered what lurked here still, though she had one thought in mind as she continued behind Elorit and Talea.

“Undead. Walking bones. They may have plagued this graveyard, keep a look out for anything moving even if it’s a simple corpse.” She warned, knowing full well what a walking corpse could do to someone given her expedition into the cove and it’s horrible ending with a life wrenching wound. She did ignore the drip drop, not trusting what kind of vile liquid could be leaking inside a coffin.

[EtherealNoire]

Polar the liquid's eerie platter rose a gentle melody, with notes so faint that it seemed the ambiance of twilight itself rather than Talea's psalms. Those gifted in sight, however, or attune with the dead could glimpse the wavering light that bathed her, both gentle and mystic as it flickered forth sparks to caress each hollow grave.
She cradled it deep within her soul, searching wretched imprints stained amidst the grounds. Of despair, anguish, spite and ire she held their broken quintessence against her heart, beseeching Night to hallow her spirit with His might. That she may mend the souls wrenched from their sacred rests and driven to tumult.

Still as her footsteps revered the darkness, whispers, tenor, graced her pray. They resounded through her veins, pulsed within her blood. "Forbearance, consort. All shall come to pass." And she too fell to silence as the edict evanesced, turning once more to the mortals that followed her as a will-o-wisp to their demise.

"Caution keep our way. The lamented tread these grounds with souls of cholar nonpareil."

[relentless]

Nothing would come of the drip and dropping, a simple cause of rain it seemed, though it was hard to tell what it had mixed with at the bottom. Nothing stirred nearby as of yet, the general vicinity was rather dull yet reaking of an ominous touch. The creak of metal from fenced gates across the yard seemed to echo, a harsh tug on the violins string is what it could be described as. A grating, yet quiet sound that lingered through the confines of the mist.

Two paths were greeted in opposition to the party, a T junction more or less that could go either way. To the left, an open plain of land occupied by a sheet of gravestones, with the blue lights appearing and disappearing at random intervals. Though what was it? The creak of the undead? A gravedigger? Or perhaps something more sinister. However the left path wouldn't be a straight line to the open plain, in fact it could just go straight on... though what lay at the end was but a mystery. Facing the right path, it seemed more gilded yet reeked less of opportunity due to its confinement, the great silhouette of what once was a noble church for those of the faith, now shattered and broken within the unnatural mist that plagued this place.

Neither the less, the crack of stone and creaking of gates never stopped, and the mist was certainly playing tricks on them from either side, other shadows beginning to emerge as the sun dimmed... or were they truly that of illusion?

[black379]

The others had their theories, grave robbers or undead stirring in the cemetery. Dealing with looters was hardly worth Adeney's time, but if there were undead, something must have caused them to rise from their graves. He had seen lurching skeletons and shambling corpses before. Finding the source, whether an entity or spirit, of the undead might prove useful in the doctor's efforts with Florence.

As they came to the intersection, Adeney preferred the rightmost path. He wasn't keen on tripping through gravestones, and the decrepit church held a better chance to find occult scrawls. But the party didn't share his agenda of note-finding.

"Perhaps we split up." He proposed, his pointed beak turning to the group.

[Shinzon]

Aaliyah had kept quiet through it all, eyeing each member of the party like a hawk; but it was when Adeney made that foolish proposition that she spoke up, abruptly so. "This is the worst idea I have heard since we left the Hamlet", she spoke harshly. "While you lot are too loud for my liking, splitting up to get picked off is hardly an alternative." With her opinion voiced, she took the lead, remaining as careful as ever for any traps, although she kept a strict trigger discipline: she had seen people firing a crossbow out of fright and severely wounding an ally before.

"I know enough about walking corpses and reanimated bones to know that it'd be better if we get this all resolved before they all fall in on us." That sentence was directed at the rest of the group: not simply to Adeney. If she was honest with herself, the place was giving her the creeps: graveyards were alien to her, considering how her culture worked with disposing bodies, and she doubted that a zombie could get back to the surface from the depths of the sea.

[EloHim]

"- Agreed. We separate - we get caught and killed. If we stay together we might have big enough chance to survive against whatever it is out there."

The common sense wins again, right?
Elorit was not acting surprised at hearing about living dead...mostly because he already had witnessed a creature that was a little bit scarier than a couple of walking dead bodies… at least he hoped so? He never had any offencive communions with the dead and wasn't sure he would welcome the experience. But he signed up for this, knowing well that almost every expedition would lead to combat.

Very well. Sell your potions. But I envision many better places to sell them.

A voice of a certain frenchman in his head. Those words...like an insult to him, and yet Elorit found in them a very good incentive to stay in the Hamlet. He will make sure to shove those words right down that bastard’s throat next time he meets him.

[EtherealNoire]

Quibbles of mortals and creaks of iron grated through the barren air, contending still the cries of souls that anathematized their flesh. The spirits sought succor in one who knew their ways, not the broken voices of the depraved, and their desires charged each breath drawn in the darkness.

It assailed Talea's mind, ravishing her senses until her eyes grew blind to corporeal realm and sought their dolor gaze. Alienated, they welcomed her affection with possession, envious of those who cherished her not, where fervid fingers raked her skin and hands ensnared her own.
Desperation painted their compulsion, eager to consume her, yet none could see the figures as she could, burdened with malice and anguish nonpareil.

The light-dwellers sought naught but their paltry understandings, noting not her drifting form. As if entranced she let the spirits guide her, bathed in mystic aura like a star amidst the night. In the corner of mortal eyes the light would glimmer, reflecting in the hollows of her mask and her ivory skin, but it too would fade should they pursue it, and all that lingered amidst the mist was her peregrination to the graves.

[relentless]

Finally, a direction had been taken to further the party's conquest deeper into the plains of the churches grounds itself. The fog mixed with a brush of shadow as the descent of the sun had finally made its due, only a slither of its limelight remained, where the want of torchlight would only increase. A path that had a much rougher feel to it upon the soles of their feet, a dry mud and even drier grass from where the rainwater had not pooled. A ghost-like aroma hung to the blades of dry grass, a tinge of grey similar to that of the fog seemed to discolor the grass, an oddity in its own right.

Though as the heroes made their way back, where the sounds only seemed to grow less and less, a sudden scratch and skitter erupted from the open grave where the dripping had occurred. Rats? A fox? Or something more sinister? It was hard to tell what had caused the sound from the lack of a torch, though a scuff along the dirt, just outside the open graves surroundings had been made.

Along the perimeter where the auras of cosmic blue had once wandered, the absence of normality seemed to lessen, an aroma of paranoia and deceit grew upon the cold gravestones that hung in the very pits of the heroes eyes. Something was off, the very scent of the word 'off' was indeed prominent, but there was another scent that would be more apparent, more distinguishable and less reputable. The smell of dead things, somewhere in the distance, but the smell of it was all too common. Like a potent vinegar, it stung at nosehairs, but not enough to cause that of vomit. Its potency would not change, and it was hard to tell where it was coming from exactly. The occult being, the wanderer of the crow and bearer of the doll, Elohit, had the attention of something in the shadow. Whatever it was, whether it was of reality or of the mind, the location of interest had not made its self known nor did it seem to make any reproach toward the man himself.

There were silhouettes, vague in description and even vaguer in its very shape, but it was close. Yet it did not move. Thankfully, with the heroes having brought a supply pack with them on their ventures to the graveyard itself, they would find themselves at ease knowing that they had reasonable supplies to get them through.

---

Supply Bag

A fickle thing, a container fashioned from tanned goat hide, composed of a variety of buckles and leather strings. It was about half full with supplies, which included:

6 torches

8 rations

2 holy water

3 urns [reasonably heavy, would require two hands to lift for the average individual. Though a physically strong creature could easily lift it with one hand.]

2 tinder boxes [contains 5 matches in each box]

2 shovels [clipped onto the side of the bag, not actually inside it.]

---

Perhaps with these supplies, the heroes would find a solution to whatever issue may come to pass.