As the pale-green ethereal fog began to dissapate, the sun's rays resumed their endless fount onto the vast, cerulean waters of the Great Ocean, only to be interrupted by the blood on the back of a young, corrupted wizard. The scorched and arrow chipped hull of the Requiem groaned as it weaved through the shattered remains of her most recent prey, still crackling with the lingering purple and black sparks of necromantic magic. Captain Karima Kishbar stood at the Requiem's prow with her most prestigious passenger, an old gnome wizard who had more than contributed his fair share during the fighting, as the two of them oversaw the repairs and the disposal of their most recent opponents, a small raiding band of draugr. Ordinarily, Karima would have busied herself to the task of tracking down whatever necromancer had sent a band of undead sailors to attack her ship, as she had done the past seven or eight times this has happened, as a sort of public service to the neighboring Kytaran Sea, but that was not necessary on this occassion. She watched as one of her men and one of her women as they pulled the necromancer out of the water

As the gnome wizard, his name was Ladrus, had just finished explaining to the captain, a necromancer needs to be within a certain distance of his thralls, the exact distance varying depending on the necromancer's individual command of his power. The young man that they had found in the wreckage of the draugr ship had almost certainly been the one to raise the undead who were sailing it, but he was also almost certainly not an accomplished necromancer, and needed to be very near his creations for them to stay risen. 

"There's no way to be entirely certain whether or not he was their necromancer," Ladrus was saying, "Not without knowing exactly when he died. Preferrably with far more detail than that." The gnome spoke with a voice that sounded like an old, posh eunuch, slightly higher pitched than a human, and very much at odds with Karima's husky voice, which always sounded as if she were moments away from shouting.

"Or if he even is dead," said Karima grimly. The thought had been been growing like a tumor in her mind since she noticed that his body seemed to be perfectly balanced, face down on a piece of floating detritous, with it's head above water. "This could all be a very bold ruse." She said this, though she was well aware of the gaping flaw in this theory that was being revealed, now that the necromancer was no longer partially sumberged.

"I very much doubt it," said Ladrus, staring fixedly at the empty air where most of the young man's bowels used to be. She'd suggested much earlier that the necromancer may have made the draugr play dead, while he did the same, and Ladrus had laughed louder and longer than she had heard from the old gnome in years. His mirth had not given her cause to drop the issue, however, and she had spent quite some time detailing to Ladrus how she would do it.

"The draugr fell when the cannons cracked the hull of the ship," he said, indicating the wreckage that now surrounded the Requiem. "I think we can clearly see what path the canonball took, Karima. The draugr died the same second this man died." . He pointed to the black clad corpse of the young man, which had been carelessly thrown atop a pile of dead draugr.

"That man can't be older than 32, far too young for proper necromancy. I think it's most likely that this was an acolyte to a more powerful necromancer, who'd gone out raiding without his masters knowledge."

"But why would he do that?" Karima nearly shouted in exasperation. 

It was the question of the hour; what purpose could this attack have possibly served to anyone? Was this man an escaped acolyte with a stolen ship filled with drowned men? If so, why would he have thought a fight with a visibly scarred, and therefore, experienced pirate ship could have possibly ended in his favor? Why would he have thought he would win? No, that ddidn't make any sense. Perhaps he was working at the behest of his master, some other, greater necromancer hidden on some undiscovered rock in the middle of Kytar. But if that was the case, why come out all this way? Kytar was filled with undiscovered regions, this was true, but the Requiem was not currently in Kytar. There were no islands out here in the Great Ocean, quite a dull name, in Karima's opinion, for the world spanning ocean, which she was still two days away from crossing in it's entirety. Not that she had been to every nautical mile of it, for as everyone knew, there was no point. There was no traffic, no islands, no seabirds, the entire expanse of the Great Ocean was thought not to even have any fish. Karima and the Requiem were making the Long Run, and gone were the days of Morwr Strongarm and the Dwarven Salvation, which was said to have made the journey in a fortnight. The Requiem had departed from Bone Bay roughly two and a half months ago, and this was the first ship they had encountered, right at the end of their journey. If this necromancer was working at the behest of some unseen master, that master was undoubtedly very far away.

The old gnome sighed quietly to himself, as he leaned his elbows on the thigh-high railing overlooking the work. He reached up to pull at the shorter portions of his oddly shaped beard. "I don't know," he said after some time. "There isn't enough information, this doesn't make sense. Necromancy or no, wizards aren't stupid. You have to be intelligent to be a wizard. Unintelligent people who study magic from a book always die from the experience as a built in failsafe against bullshit like this. Not even an acolyte would have picked such an obviously uneven fight."

"So this wasn't a winning fight, then," Karima said, immediately knowing what Ladrus' response would be. 

"We can't rule that out either," the gnome said tiredly. "You should have someone sift through the ashes after you burn the draugr. I wouldn't recommend searching them beforehand, just in case, but there could be something that survives the fire that provides more answers." By this point in their entirely cyclical conversation, both parties were leaning against the railing, though Karima only by her knees, and watching the work of the Requiem's crew. 

Draugr are a very specific type of undead sailor, and as such, required a specific method of destruction in order to stay destroyed. This in itself is not uncommon, being that necromancy was revilled by nearly all known civilizations, it's practitioners typically have to figure out things out for themselves. This makes most brands of raised thralls unique to their necromancers, with their own weaknesses and immunities, like a sort of signature, or fingerprint for the necromancer in question. The observant magical forensic investigator could tell who raised which corpses, simply by the efforts needed to be taken to destroy it. Draugr, on the other hand, are a separate class of undead thrall, as the ritual used to raise them were first created during a time that necromancy was far more commonplace on Gadria, long, long ago. During such times, when some multiple seaside wizards are under the constant threat of whichever army happened to be threatening their keep at the time, they tend to grow a sense of comraderie with one other, inevitably leading to the sharing of grotesque discoveries and experiments in dark magics, many of which spread, and can still be found today. Draugr were one such experiment, being created when a necromancer destroys a ship at sea, then collects and dries each corpse. Ladrus had been unable to tell Karima what happens next, as modern respectable wizards make a point to avoid as much knowledge of necromancy as possible, but one only needs to lay eyes upon a desicated corpse, that somehow remains waterlogged, once before being able to hazard a guess as to what process raised this creature. 

It is also understood by all that the streams of water that pour endlessly from beneath the helmets of the draugr were added to make destroying the creature that much more difficult, as the only known way to permanently destroy a draugr  was to burn it. After the fight, Karima's crew had not needed to be told to begin gathering all 249 draugr corpses, and preparing the deck of the Requiem  to serve as a pyre; they had begun the work as soon as the fighting had ceased. Noteably, Ladrus' travelling companion had also not needed to be told what to do after the short battle.

"Look who still doesn't want to take the helmet off." Karima said, bringing the gnome's attention to his student, who's face was still hidden behind a vicious looking helmet of clouded steel. The fully armored figure was busy helping with the cleanup, longer arms bundling more severed limbs than most of the largely dwarven crew. Ladrus sighed again. 

"I don't know the first thing about teaching," he said, seeming to simultaneously welcome and loathe the change of subject by the strained sound of his voice, and the way that he began to vigorously rub his temples. "Hells, I don't know the first thing about modern humans. I wouldn't know how to speak to be sure my lessons were heard."

"Oh, come off it," scoffed Karima, "I am a modern human, so are quite a few members of my crew, and so are many of the people I've seen you interact with. You don't know how to talk to young people. Because you never have. Because you're a reclusive old gnome, and you've apparently always been a reclusive old gnome. That's why you keep having interactions with them that go the way of the incident last night." Ladrus' face collapsed into shock at her directness. They had known each other for years, but Ladrus was still constantly being surprised with the speed of Karima's wit. He assumed she'd considered where their conversations would go beforehand, and had prepared responses to be at the ready. This was because, to Ladrus, to whom the fabrics of time, space, the mundane and the arcane are but mere playthings, the idea that someone could be so socially competent was pure fantasy. Karima laughed at his expression and softened her tone.

"But as a scholar, you know that that will come with time." Ladrus opened his mouth to object but Karima was prepared for this, and kept speaking over him. 

"AND as a scholar, you can't help but impart your knowledge to everyone you speak to. Trust me, everybody who knows you says so." At this, Ladrus dropped his jaw slightly further in offense, and Karima quickly backtracked. "It's not a bad thing. People ask questions and you always have an answer. Your work and your personality are keyed to spread knowledge and erradicate stupidity, and nobody would find fault with that. You're in denial because you don't know how to speak to the young person who grew up on this side of the Baggodh Tree."

Ladrus looked down in thought for a several moments. "That," he said when he finally looked up, "is probably true, if I'm honest with myself. Even so, am I not justified?" Karima smiled. She didn't understand how anyone could dislike a man who could freely admit when he was wrong if you pointed it out. The gods knew that kind of man was rare.

"You're apprehension is understandable," she said to her old friend, "but scholarship should lead to more interactions with strangers, not less. If you just stop hiding and start answering questions, I'm sure you'll figure out how to be a teacher eventually." As far as she knew, being seen answering questions was essentially all being a teacher was, and Ladrus was not exactly guarded when somebody had a question he knew the answer to.

"Besides," Karima said, "I've never known you to try something new without having every second thoroughly planned out. She almost missed the look on Ladrus' face, the same expression she would often see on the faces of her sailors when she asked after a task she had previously given, just before they would assure her that they were "just about to get right on that". Tellingly, she nearly missed the expression because Ladrus, much like the workshy members of the Requiem's crew, cleared it from his face as quickly as it had appeared.

"Oh, Shargan's Hooks*," Karima sighed in exasperation. "You don't even have a plan, do you?" Ladrus splayed his hands sheepishly. "Who plan's for this sort of thing?" Karima conceded that point, at least, and invited the wizard back to her cabin so they could refer to her vast collection star charts, and utilize some rudimentary divination to make a rough estimation of the time this detour will cause them to lose, as the crew of the Requiem and Ladrus' apprentice continued pile corpses for the pyre.

Dornr Strongarm was beginning to have some serious doubts about his chosen profession. He had grown up as a dwarf in the Kytaran Sea, born to an influential family on the island of Tarlock, and had always been expected to carry on the family tradition of seamanship. These days, the sea called to all dwarves as the mountains of old had, and so Dornr had no problem with the prospect of the life on a ship. But his teachers had spotted his keen inteligence early, and over the course of his education, he was steered towards the field of medicine, much to the delight of his family. 

"You'll spend a few years as a ship's surgeon," his father had told him. "After that, we'll see what other uses for you we can find." Dornr had heard that tone from his father before, so calculating, like there were elements of Dornr's future that he was not privy to know*. His father had always sounded like that when he was brokering some deal that would inevitably end in more people being sent to the poorhouse. 

Dornr had gone along with the plans to make him a ship's surgeon, mainly as an excuse to avoid following his father into banking, but the apprenticeship system to gain the coveted Certificate of Seaworthiness that would allow him to travel the Kytaran Seas unsupervised under the Guild of Surgeons, involved serving on several long voyages with "minimal risk and maximum supervision by experienced sailors." Dornr's keen intelligence had not availed their services to him in considering this phrase, and he failed to consider what it might mean in this context. Specifically, he had not considered that he would be serving on a pirate ship, contracted by the government to ferry refugees from the mainland to the free Port of Tarlock, his home for most of his rather long childhood. 

He had also not considered that, while this assignment was not turning out as dull as he had initially believed it would be, it was not necissarily exciting for him. When the draugr had appeared on deck, Dornr had proven his suspicions that he would be about as adept with a sword as he was with a scalpel, that is to say, unfortunatly lacking in practice. He had only survived because the wizards apprendice had pushed him out of the way and taken on half of the horde on their own. That was the kind of person you wanted on a pirate ship, Dornr had decided. The wizards apprentice seemed more like a warrior than an acolyte of the arcane, and had proven to be a most fearsome one at that. Barreling into a rank of undead raiders, lashing out first with a hard round shield, making up for it's small size with manuverability and power. Following the sheild was a blur of spear thrusts, and skull crushing blows with it's hard, oaken shaft. Occasionally, the wizards apprentice would drop to the deck to pull a knife from a boot, and in a flash, the knife would be imbedded in a far away draugr, and the warrior would already be engaging another in laughably one sided hand to hand combat. 

That was the kind of man you want aboard your ship in the Kytaran Sea, where draugr raids were so commonplace as to make this incident entirely fogotten by most of the crew in a few weeks time. Dornr paused in his work to watch the tall muscular man throw an armload of draugr pieces onto the growing pile. He'd spent most of the journey in his quarters, and now kept his face hidden behind a visored helmet. Dornr hadn't seen his face. Dornr paused to watch the apprentice drop another armload of legs onto the pile, before taking his spear and moving towards his quarters below decks. Some men earned their rest more quickly than others.

What you didn't want was a young, inexperienced dwarf surgeon, who could not hold any kind of blade with any kind of confidence. Nor could he stand the sight of blood, a rather glaring flaw for any prospective pirate, sailor or sugeon, and thankfully, Dornr's keen intellect had brought this problem to his attention some time ago. Currently, as he engaged in the maritime adventurours lesser known past time of loading the corpses of fallen enemies onto a pyre, he pondered the possible directions his future could take, the glaring problem being that there was one rather obvious direction, that of following his father into banking. His thought exercise of the day, which he was using to distract him from the fact that he was handling once living flesh, that was now drained of blood, were the possible other directions his career could take if he could not find a way to make this one work. Dornr had attempted to enlist one of the younger cooks assistants to bounce ideas off of, but the young man in question, a former street urchin named Oliar, was only nine years old, and spoke with a kind of accent that Dornr found he needed to decipher before he could get any information out of the boy.

"It're like 'is," the self assured child was saying. " 'E sail's 'rouna worl' lookin'r stuffa take. Some's do fightin', some's do shoutin', some's do'a foods, but it'sa lookin'r stuff et matters, at'na sailin'. You sail, you look f'r stuff, you take's et. Rest of it ain't but free water." He punctuated his garbled sentence by throwing the draugr torso he'd been carrying onto the growing pile. After the wizards apprentice had killed the necromancer, they had all fallen to pieces. Dornr could figure out Oliars strange metaphors without much issue, for example, it is illegal to charge for fresh drinking water throughout the Kytaran Sea, and so "everything else is free water" meant that everything else is assured, so there isn't any reason to worry about it. The problem was that Oliar spoke as if he was raised by someone who spoke without using their lips. He scrunched his mouth shut with every word he spoke, and it fell to Dornr to untwist those words into something resembling Common.

"So," Dornr said slowly, waiting for a the last few tumblers in his mind to fall into place, as he bent to fill his arms with severed, bony arms, "you're saying it doesn't matter what kind of sailor I become, as long as I figure out how to be a sailor?" Oliar beamed with the pride of one who has led the simple minded to some simple conclusion. "Aye, an sailorin's the rack**. Yer git's te sailorin', git's te rest later." Dornr considered this as a possibility. His mind showed him visions of the range of expressions his fathers face would make, were Dornr to suggest that it may be  beneficial to spend some time as an unspecialized sailor. He could see the old dwarf's eyebrows creasing with the speed and force of techtonic plates colliding, when he heard the phrase "deck seaman". Dornr could hear his fathers first question at the suggestion: "A pirate? A common, thieving pirate?" Sure, Oliar and Captain Karima and all the others were "respectable pirates" when Dornr is kept far away from them, but they'd be "common pirates" if he tried to come any closer. 

"I don't think my father would take to the idea," Dornr eventually said to Oliar, who's face fell at the comment. 

"Wouldn' know nudden 'bout dat. Didn' know me real ma n da. They's et did brought me up didn' c're mutch f'r stature." Dornr looked quizzically at the bronzed, barefoot youth. Oliar had a habit of knowing far more about what you were thinking than his backwood accent would suggest. 

"Who did bring you up, Oliar?" Dornr asked, before hurridly amending "if you don't mind my asking?" Some people on the Kytaran Sea could be quite touchy on the subject of their past. Dornr only knew that Oliar was an orphaned former street urchin, but that was enough to warrant caution. 

"I's raised by da Shell Men," Oliar said definitively, in a voice that suggested more information would not be forthcoming. Oh, Dornr thought, so he's messing with me. I wonder how much of what he's said has been bullshit. Upon reflection, Oliar had only given Dornr friendly advice when he wasn't simply listening to Dornr complain. That comment was probably just to ward off further questions. Probably.

"Stature is his thing," Dornr said. "I don't care, he does. He would never allow me to just," Dornr paused, looking for a polite phrase, "be a sailor while I figure out what else I could do. Then he wouldn't be able to," he paused again to translate the banker term his father would use*** to one that an ordinary father would use in this instance, "....make sure I'm learning as much as I can." 

"Dun't feel like his worry," Oliar said lowly, "Ain't him learnin' sailorin'." 

"No," Dornr sighed, deciding against explaining familial obligation to a street urchin. "Is suppose it wouldn't to you." He dropped an armload of bones onto the pile.

Oliar was not to be dissuaded. "Yer want's ta please yer da?" he said, making a champion's effort to understand the subtleties of a strained father/son relationship.     " 'E's gotta be pleased wif whatcher doin', does 'e? Odderwise yer can't do it?"

"Well-" said Dornr, but Oliar was not finished.

"Why's yer da get to stick 'is fingers in yer soup?" he asked using more beggar slang to sound genuinely concerned. " 'E ain't yer cap'n, 'e ain't pay yer wage, 'e ain't here pickin' up soggy corpses. Why should 'e tink 'e can order yer about? An' dun't gimme no 'Aye, Oliar, it's posh fam'ly stuff you wouldn' git 'er'. Why carn't yer jus' go an' do what you wanna? Maybe just not come back ter Tarlock til ol' dwarf kicks it?" He quickly remembered his manners and added, "No disrespect meaning." 

Dornr had to pull hard on the reins of his facial expression, becuase he nearly gave Oliar a condescending look, though not for the reason Oliar would have thought. The truth of the matter, which Dornr also judged Oliar would be unable to understand, was that dwarfs didn't run away, not as a matter of principle, but because they didn't have anything to run away from. In times long past, the dwarves ruled the mountains, delved deep beneath Gadria's earthen skin to plunder the riches of her flesh. In those days, the dwarves viewed everything beneath ground to be their propertiy. After they were torn from their homes, were shackled with the chains of slavery and eventually escaped to the Kytaran Sea, they took that idea with them. Nowadays dwarves feel the same kinship with the sea, that is, the entire sea. Dornr could not have left his father's scope of influence by anything short of going back to Mainland Ikar, suicide for any living dwarf. That was if he wanted to leave his family and his life on Tarlock behind, and he didn't. Dwarves thought of the world as being much smaller than humans, or any of the taller races did, ironically.

"I suppose I probably could," Dornr lied to satiate the boy. "I don't really want to, though. I don't hate my father, it's just that he can be a bit...", he scoured his mind for a word that would be polite, honest and would likely exist in Oliar's vocabulary. " A bit... pontifical... imperious." Oliar nodded approvingly. The beggars of Kytar, while not the most verbose vagrant population in the world, have been known to employ hundreds of words with definitions similar to "one who abuses power", "evil ruler" or "one who must be killed for the good of all". Dornr continued. "My father isn't a bad dwarf, he's just successful. That does strange things to a dwarf's mind, you think you know the best ways to do everything. I don't want to run away or anything, I just want him to understand my point of view." Oliar considered this with the air of an anthropologist learning of an uncontacted tribes customs, wondering if there was any way to integrate them into modern life.

"Awright," he said at last. " 'E's yer da, I get's it. I still talks ter Skreek when I'm 'round Drumlin', e's nice enuff. I wou'dn' want 'im angry wif me neiver."

"Skreek," Dornr said impassively, "That would be the Shell Man that raised you?" Oliar had been lifting the headless trunk of a draugr with some difficulty, and looked at Dornr with bemusement, then meaningfully at the corpse. Dornr and Oliar were similar heights, which was why they had paired up for this task. Dornr took the hint, and lifted the other end of the corpse, and thanked his long education for telling him that the process of creating draugr involves the removal of every bodypart deemed unnecessary to being a draugr, and that included reproduction.

"Dun't fink a crab can raise a human?" Oliar asked conversationally.

"I didn't say that," said Dornr, not wanting to challenge Oliar's story. Though he did say, "I just know that humans cannot survive on Drumlind," as innocently as he could manage. Oliar considered this. 

"Not topside, no," he conceded, "but ther's oth'r ways fer-" 

The pile of draugr remains suddenly errupted, pushing Dornr, Oliar and most of the other pirates away from the pyre. Bones and scraps of dessicated flesh exploded from the mound as if propelled by some unseen explosion from within the mound, before the crackle of black, necromantic magic that had only so recently departed the ship, returned, reached out from it's apparent source, and stopped the individual scraps of carrion mid-flight. The black beams of energy pulled back in on themselves and brought the draugr pieces with them, forming into a mass. Dornr had slid several yards away in the concusion the explosion had created. He staggared to his feet. A skull had collided with his right knee, and he held it while he madly scrambled towards where Oliar lay prone. The boy had been pushed further towards the toprail, and knocked out cold, and while Dornr pointedly and unashamedly ignored whatever was happening with the bodies, he was sure he should be able to reach Oliar before... Just move! he thought to himself to chase away the images forming in his head. 

An otherworldly shriek ripped across the sky, drowning the shouts and screams of the sailors. Dornr dared not look behind him. He focused on Oliar. His leg gave out beneath him and he cursed loudly. He looked down and saw that crimson blood had begun to soak through the cloth of his trousers. Something other than the skull had hit him then. He hadn't seen anything else. He tried not to think about what the nearest sharp object had been when the draugr erupted. He had to get to Oliar. He had to get back up!

On the other side of the deck from Dornr's struggle to rescue his friend, the rest of the working party of pirates watched in horror as the amalgamation before them grew larger and larger. Torn shreds of draugr flesh slid, crawled and was dragged towards a central, writhing mass, consciousness having spontaneously erupted from the pile of carrion the sailors were preparing for the torch. Shards of bone embedded themselves in mounds of drowned flesh, flaps of ripped skin magically adhered themselves together and towards the trunk of the forming creature. Bit by bit, pieces of rotten meat from accross the deck were telepathically pulled towards the center, forming the ends of crooked arms. As the various body parts joined with the whole, they broke apart and seemed to travel up and down the carcass to the places they were needed most; long bones reinforcing the new arms, sinew detatching from meat to form joints where needed. The monster immediately put these arms to use, swinging blindly at the crowd of pirates, who each deftly backstepped the blow in turn An army of eyeballs of various states of decomposure rolled, slithered and oozed their way towards two cannonball sized cavities in the space that would be this creatures face. Millions of sharp, chipped draugr teeth marched with considerable speed towards the widening maw, which already spanned most of the creatures middle, and threatened to spread further. The monster used the gift of sight to more accuratly make swipes towards the pirates. The pirates, having seen the formation of the jaws, all ran a wide distance from the beast, so the first few swipes of the mosters yielded only more scraps of draugr. These scraps were quickly gathered in the monster's arms and added to it's bulk. 

The awestruck sailors realised, nearly too late, that the accumulation of mass would likely mean an increase in power for this mysterious creature. One sailor, a young woman with every inch of her body wrapped in colorful scarves with ordinary clothing outsite of them, took charge of the gaping crowd and began to shout people into motion. Ropes and chains were thrown over the growing creature as they could be found, but more slain draugr flesh quickly flowed overtop them, embedding the restraints within what was quickly becoming a singular body.

The large ballistas at either side of the forecastle on the aft end of the ship could be disengaged from their outward ranges, in order to set their sights towards the middle of the deck in cases such as these. Two middle aged dwarves, a husband and wife named Geron and Glythe, who had grown indistinguishable from one another in both appearance and thought after many years of marriage, darted from where they had been firing their own crossbows at the creature, and ran towords the ballistas on each side of the ship. With arms like tree trunks, the dwarves did not waste time with the mechanism, and simply pulled at the weapons until they ripped free from their mounting. Geron and Glythe fired wrist thick bolts of heavy iron, to little more effect than their smaller crossbows had been. The gaps between bodies forming the larger creature allowed it to absorb the projectiles with little notice of their impact. Still, the creature grow, occasionally shrieking with the ever shifting wail of a thousand dead men. Or more accurately, 249 dead men. 

"You!" Thrane, the tiefling First Mate shouted pointing at Dornr, who had managed to drag himself and Oliar towards the gathering pirates. "Get the mages!" he ordered, moments later adding "Leave the boy here, we'll watch him! Just go! I SAID GO!" 

Dornr shook himself from the trance he had entered, then finally realized that he had entered a trance. He dropped Oliar at his feet and took off for the Ship Sorceror's quarters. He found the mage, a pure-blood elf with needlessly ornate scarlet and gold robes, already running towards the commotion. The two momentarily exchanged a glance, before the sound of another bar of iron making a dense thunk in the carrion was followed by another roar from the beast. 

"Master Ladrus is in the Captain's quarters!" the sorceror shouted at Dornr, already running towards the monster. Dornr needed no further encouragement. He turned and bolted up the steps of the forecastle. The Requiem was a large ship, and it was a good few moments before Dornr's short legs covered the distance between the top of the steps and the door to the quarter deck. Dornr burst through the first set of door, and only thought that it might be prudent not to burst through the second set a moment after he had begun to do so. The thick oak and teak of the Requiem insulated the inner chambers well, and Dornr couldn't hear the commotion from inside the Captains quarters. This thought forced itself to the forefront of his mind, as he looked alternately in the eyes of Captain Karima and Master Ladrus, who were engaged in the examination a large map on that had been unrolled on the floor. Both were looking at Dornr with the kind of expectant glare that threatened to transform into rage and shouting if not presented with an explanation.

"There is a monster!" Dornr gasped. "Draugr! Their... bits! Their parts are all coming together!" Both faces contorted in confusion for a moment before Dornr gave up. "Come quick!" he shouted as he ran back out towards the deck. The Captain and the wizard were not stupid people, he thought. They'll be right behind me. Sure enough, the Captain soon overtook him with her longer human legs, and she, followed by Dornr, followed by the shorter Master Ladrus, reached the toprail of the forecastle. 

They had arrived just in time to see Merillion the Sorceror be consumed by the creature.

Merillion had not wasted any time with engaging with the crew. The lithe elf lept the quarterdeck toprail and fell the 20 feet to the top deck, not bothering with the stairs. As he fell, Merillian bunched his hands to his chest and began to quickly hiss an encantation.

"Igne argn chyl congra..."  he began, making quick, complex signs with his hands. He ran a few steps towards the creature, but stopped before he'd gotten too close. He did not announce his arrival, choosing instead to concentrate on the spell he was preparing. His scarlet and gold silk robes, however, paid their way in purpose once more, as the nearest sailors to him noticed the audacious colors and announced the incoming magics to their peers, who promptly took several precautionary steps away from Merillion. The elf subconsciously congratulated himself again for the purchase of the fine robes. Regardless of what the Captain thought, he firmly believed that mages should be immediately noticable, and the bright robes could always be relied upon to draw the attention of any crowd. They also happened to be magically reinforced, and highly fashionable.

None of the sailors had been stupid enough to engage the creature in hand to hand combat yet, and had been giving it a wide berth as it crawled and made struggling grasps towards them. At this point, the amalgam of draugr corpses had taken the form of the upper half of a human torso, with bodies in varying states of decay and completeness forming a chest with two long arms. Large portions of the creature's outer layer were gaps of bone, from which the violet haze of necromancy could be seen from within. Occasionally, the whole of the mass would pulsate, and a wave of force would push the draugr away from it's center and back again, beginning with the bottom layer and moving up. Arms, hands, lengths of sinew and even legs would extend from the mass and recoil back into the safty of the body, giving the impression that the creature was still trying to grow. So, naturally, nobody had any intentions of getting near it. 

"... ch'tair akavr nockta!" the sorceror finished. Sparks danced accross Merillion's knuckles as he pushed his hands away from his body and released the ki he had been building up through his fingertips. The ki released in the form of a fount of fire that passed through the gap between the crowd of sailors, close enough to cause them to erupt with sweat and to singe eyebrows and mustaches. Unimpeded, the flames sprayed accross the draugr corpses, and the creature screamed from some unseen mouth. Fire was the only definite way to kill a horde of draugr, so it stood to reason that this would hold true whether they were together or separate. Other members of the crew took to the sorceror's example, and began throwing flasks of lamp oil and throwing open pouches of gunpowder towards the creature.

The draugr flesh caught fire and the monster began to burn alive. Merillion began to relax. Most of a shipboard sorceror's job, he'd found, turned out to be solving the kind of cognitive problems that were beyond the average pirate. Likely, had the captain beaten him to this scene, she would've ordered the rank and file to burn the creature as well.

Merillion felt at his belt for his flask, sensing that he'd just saved the day. He took a long pull of the fine gnomeish brandy, replaced the stopper, and looked up from his position to see the captain, the dwarf and Master Ladrus appearing on the toprail of the quarterdeck. He returned his flask to his belt and raised his hands to his mouth to shout a greeting at them, possibly an assurance that he had everything under control, when everything went black..

Karima, Ladrus and Dornr watched as the pirates and the sorceror began to throw flammable material and burning torches at the monster. They watched helplessly from a distance as the monster seemed to suck it's own mass in on itself, further than it had for any of it's previous convulsions, and Dornr had the sinking feeling that the monster was building up to something. Immediately after he thought this, the monster stopped pulling in on itself and exploded in several lines of grasping draugr arms and tendrils of necromantic magic, both wrapping around the limbs and torsos of those unfortunate enough to be to close. This included Merillion, who had turned from the fight to find the captain. He seemed to be preparing to shout something at them when a net made of interlinked draugr limbs flew over his head and dragged him off his feet, toward the central mass. 

"Oh gods above," whispered Karima, an unusual curse for a sailor. The various tentdrils and chains of flesh each pulled their prizes back towards the central mass, just as it had with Merillion, and the monster continued to grow. Dornr felt as if his heart was going to burst through his throat with it's frenzied beating. The remaining pirates backed further from the creature, mostly giving up the effort of burning it. 

"If that didn't work," Ladrus said, speaking up for the first time, "then we can assume that this new... thing is no longer a draugr. Or many draugr for that matter." Captain Karima looked from the gnome to Dornr in annoyed confusion.

"Does that matter right now?" she asked.

"It means it changes how we kill it," Ladrus answered calmly. "Magic changes things on a fundamental level and everything has rules. We need to figure out what it is , then we can kill it." Karima considered this for a moment before accepting it as an answer to her unspoken question, that being "What the hell do we do now?"

"Ok," she said, trying to maintain a level tone, "So how do we do that?" Ladrus had begun to consider this as soon as he had stopped speaking, and continued to do so, unheeding Karima's question. Karima was used to this type of behavior from the socially inept old gnome, but after a while Dornr's growing terror of either being eaten by this creature or drowning at sea overcame his fear of appearing disrespectful of a superior.

"Master Ladrus?" he urged, a hint of mania in his voice, "What should we do?" The wizard looked up from his contemplation, but still did not answer the question. 

"Where did Yana get off to?" he asked instead.

"She was helping with this detail," the captain answered evenly. She seemed to be calming down, completely contrary to the fact that she had just seen a sizable portion of her crew be devoured by some carrion monster. Who the hell is Yana? Dornr thought, though he had the presence of mind to hold his tongue.

"She should still have the Twin Shilling you gave her. Call her up to where we are. I'll restrain it and see if I can open some of those gaps. If we can see inside it we can probably figure out what it is."

"And the people it just killed?" Dornr was shocked to hear his voice explode from his lips, but the fact that this hadn't been addressed yet was absurd. The wizard and the captain turned to him.

"It didn't kill anyone, lad," the captain said placatingly, reaching out and placing a hand on Dornr's shoulder. "We've got a Cairn Ward on the ship, so Master Ladrus and I are both notified whenever someone dies on board." Dornr deflated like a burst wineskin. Cairn Wards were, in his opinion, needlessly detailed death monitoring spells, used by less reputable people of every type to do things like find corpses, solve recent murders and get away with what could be considered minor acts of necromancy. They gave their users closer attunements with death around them, and they can sense the end of life better than any vampire could, as long as the charms remained intact. Dornr looked back towards the monster, as the party started down the stairs to enact Ladrus's plan. All of the people it had just absorbed were still alive within. That was... good, he thought, better for them not to die such horrible deaths. But what exactly was happening to them now, he couldn't stop thinking to himself. Were they actually melding with the rotten flesh of the draugr? Or were they just bonding magically, without any actual joining of flesh? 

Dornr forced himself to focus on the task at hand as he took up position behind Ladrus and Karima, before he realized that he hadn't any roles to play until someone gave him his next order. Instead he watched the wizard, and consciously took several steps away from the gnome when he realized that he was chanting to himself. 

As the nature of the spell Ladrus was preparing began to reveal itself, two shining circles of blue conjuration magic appeared from thin air, spinning on either side of the monster. They turned out to be portals, as two astral tethers sprouted from within them, and wrapped themselves around each of the monsters two limbs. The tethers pulled taught, and the monster was effectivly immobilized. It began to struggle against it's bonds, letting out an otherworldly roar. The small wizard was jerked  several feet into the air by the thrashing of the monster. Captain Karima reacted quickly, and leapt out to catch Ladrus before he could be thrown to the deck. Ladrus himself had hardly reacted to being thrown into the air, such was the nature of manipulating the flows of magic, one had to stay inhumanly focused. The captain sat down on the deck with her arms wrapped around the gnomes torso. She braced herself against the toprail at the starboard edge of the topdeck, and was nearly lifted herself when the monster made another mighty pull at it's etherial bonds. Karima wrapped her legs around the vertical braces of the toprail for added stability, and looked wildly around for support. Her gaze met with Dornr's.

"Does it look any different?" she yelled maniaclly at him. Dornr looked closely at the monster for some sign of what he should be looking for. The gaps between individual draugr had grown wider with the wizards spell, and Dornr could see-

"Out loud, you idiot!" Karima shouted at him after he'd been looking for a moment. "I can't bloody well see the fucking thing, can I?" Dornr looked back at the captain and noticed that she had secured herself to the toprail with her back to the monster, so she could keep hold of Ladrus without either of them going overboard. She couldn't turn her head all the way too look at the creature without relinquishing some control over Ladrus. Dornr then noticed the murderous expression his captain was facing him with, and quickly turned back towards the monster.

"The gaps are bigger," he dutifully reported. " I can see the guys inside, they're trying to push out." The pirates had clearly not taken being consumed lying down, and most had been holding weapons at the time. Swords and scimitars seemed to have a difficult time piercing the joined draugr flesh, but they and the arms that held them were pushed as far out between the gaps created by Ladrus's spell as they could. Dornr could hear the shouts of the men and women, and notably, they did not sound like screams of agony, rather, they sounded like roars of rage at the indignity of having been effectively eaten.

"Do you see anything that looks magic?" Karima asked, settling back down after Ladrus made another spirited leap. 

"It's all purple inside," Dornr said lamely, "There's nothing that looks all that magic. There's a few swords, there's the  men,there's a box in the top, there's a-"

"It has a chem!?" the captain suddenly shouted. She turned to look further behind Dornr. "It has a chem!" he nearly screamed. Dornr realized he could hear fast approaching footsteps, and turned just as two large hobnail boots leapt over his head. He turned back around and saw the sprinting figure of the wizards apprentice, running towards the monster with only a javelin in hand. When he'd gotten within thirty feet of the monster, it made a powerful jerk at the appendage closest to the warrior, but when it didn't come, the monster sprouted a third arm to lash out at him. The wizards apprentice lept over the extension of draugr flesh as if he'd been planning to make a great leap at that point anyway, twisted himself back towards the creature, and let loose with his only javelin while sailing through the air. 

Dornr watched as the javelin connected with the black square near the top of the creature, shattering it to nothing. Less than a second after contact, all life had left the creature. Draugr corpses fell away to the deck, all vitality gone. The sailors who had been taken into the mass, including the ships sorceror, began to push their way through the pile of corpses. After a few cursory checks for injuries on the formerly consumed sailors, it was concluded that the only person who would need to spend any time recovering from this episode was Merillion, who had used vast amounts of magic keeping himself and the other sailors inside the monster from being crushed or punctured by the shifting draugr corpses. Soon after the elf was led back to sickbay, the rest of the crew returned to their duty of gathering the draugr for the pyre. 

Dornr had remained near the captain in the aftermath, hoping for some more information on what exactly he had just witnessed. Ladrus, Thrane, Gershin the cook and Lud the boatswain were all waiting with the captain for the wizards apprentice to return from some task among the corpses. Nobody had been seriously hurt, but Lud had been among those consumed by the monster, and as of yet, none of those who had showed any desire to speak to anyone for the time being. Dornr was just beginning to wonder if the First Mate was going to tell him to get back to work when the wizard's apprentice jogged up to the group.

"Did you find anything?" Ladrus asked, and the warrior removed his helmet to answer. Dornr had to keep himself from making any shocked noises. He knew there would be no salvaging his face. He would just have to hope noboby noticed that.

The warrior removed her helmet.

"Right where I left it," she said to the wizard, and passed a scrap of parchment to him. "So it was a Carrion Golem?" she asked. "I thought you couldn't make those without a ritual." The wizard shook his head.

"That makes about as much sense as our first mystery." he said sighing. "Thankfully, we at least have the certainty in what it was. The chem proves that." He held up the paper his apprentice had brought over. "It's written in infernal," he said after some examination. "I should be able to translate it in the governor's library. In the meantime, the draugr are back to being draugr, so we'll keep on with the pyre. But really, this just throws more confusion into the batch. Now there's a  necromancer with apprentices willing to die for a pointless cause, who can also create Carrion Golems out of piles of flesh from miles away." The wizard shook his head. "Thank you, Yana," he said to the warrior, "You can go and get some rest now, we'll take it from here." The young woman looked uncomfortable for a moment before replying, "I can help with the clean up."

She had straight blond hair, and if Dornr hadn't seen her basically save his ship twice in one day, he might've described her as frail. Her face was thin, and she seemed to have a hard time meeting the eyes of strangers, as she was currently staring intently at Ladrus, looking like she would sooner let her neck snap than look anyone else in the face. Dornr might've thought of it as arrogance if she had not dropped her gaze to the deck when she'd met his. Nobody who dropped their gaze lower than a dwarf's could possibly be arrogant, he thought, particularly a human.

"Don't worry about it, love," said Gershin. The dwarf woman was not any less matronly for the fact that you could lose a small dog in her beard. "You've certainly done more than your fair share with this lot, an' there's not a person aboard this shit that would say you 'aven't earned an early night." Yana conceded the point. Clearly she was too exhausted to argue. 

"Alright then, I'll go and have a lie down for a while," she said. "Call me if this thing comes back." She turned and walked back down towards her quarters. 

"So, what then?" asked Thrane. The devilman was clearly antsy from not having had anything to do during that fight. "Just burn the bodies like they were regular draugr?"

"They are regular draugr," said Ladrus matter of factly. "Carrion Golems are amalgamations of souls as well as physical bodies. The chem-" he held up the scrap of paper once again."-is what holds everything together to make a crowd into a golem. Once you destroy the chem-" the gnome dramatically tore the paper to shreds, "-then it is no longer a golem, it has gone back to being a crowd of draugr. Therefore, they now need to be burned again to prevent them from rising. Just like ordinary draugr, because they are ordinary draugr." Thrane was not a man to be subdued by single strands of logic, but luckily he had a strand of his own. 

"Piling the bodies is what made 'em all stand up together in the first place," he said. "What's to say it wont happen again?" Ladrus visibly relaxed, a scholar presented with an opportunity to impart knowledge. 

"If you were to destory the chem of an ordinary golem," he began, "as in, one made from clay, you could never again use that golem's clay to make a new golem. It's one of the failsafes built inherently in what a golem is."

"Right," Thrane said dryly, "These failsafes, do they include golems rising without someone to perform the rituals?" This caused Ladrus to deflate slightly.

"Yes, alright," he admitted. "So this golem seems to work differently that the other golems we know about, I'll grant you that. So the safest thing to do now would be to burn it, then sweep the ashes off the deck so it can't cause us any further harm. And either way, we know it was a golem, so if it happens again, we'll know how to kill it." The First Mate thought this over. Part of Captain Karima's selection process for her senior staff included the ability to have one's mind changed when presented with sufficient facts. 

"Fair enough," he finally said. "So we should be reaching Tarlock tomorrow then"