Bones cracked under Kegan’s feet as he stared upwards at the tower looming over him. As he’d gotten closer to the tower the land of the river delta had gotten sparser. He’d clashed with small groups of roving orcs and goblins over the last two days. None of these groups had stood a chance against him. They were all bad swimmers, and staying on the raft gave Kegan an absolute advantage in combat against them.

The tower was on an entire island made of bones. Parts of the shore of the island had looked like sand at first, but it was just ground up bones that had broken down by erosion from the river’s current.

The bones seemed to have come from all kinds of creatures. Kegan saw squirrel bones, deer bones, bird bones … and lots of humanoid bones.

Kegan walked a few more steps before he realized it was too quiet behind him. Kegan turned around, Jot was shivering on the back side of the raft, as far away from the tower as possible. Kegan walked back to the raft to try and drag Jot with him. Jot was making a pitiful whining sound, so Kegan gave up and let him sulk on the raft.

The island was circular, and about two hundred feet wide. Kegan walked slowly and carefully around the tower, but he didn’t see any kind of entrance. The tower was about forty feet wide and over a hundred feet tall. Kegan had see some kind of room at the top.

The bones that made up the tower seemed to be fused and melted together. Kegan tested his weight on some of the bones closer to the ground, the small ones would snap, but larger bones seemed to support him. He decided it was climbable.

A few hours later, a hundred feet in the air, he was regretting his decision to climb the tower. The bones became increasingly brittle the higher he climbed, there were multiple times he’d almost fallen, and his clothes were being torn up by bone shards.

There was a platform within reach finally, and a door leading to the room he’d seen. As he pulled himself up onto the platform the wind suddenly stopped. There was an eerie quiet. He approached the door slowly, on full alert. He heard noises as he got closer, at first he thought it was the wind again. But as he got closer to the door it sounded like voices at the edge of his hearing. Some voices were whispering, some were shouting, but they were all the same volume and he couldn’t quite hear what any one of the voices was saying.

He reached out tentatively to push the door open, and as his hand got closer to the bone door the voices he was hearing became louder and louder. Kegan was sweating, his other hand was turning white gripping a copper dagger.

His hand shot out the last inch and pushed the door open. As soon as he made contact with the door all the voices went silent. The door creaked open, revealing a well lit interior. There was a small room with nothing in it except a doorway leading into a hall. The walls and floor were all made of a smooth bone like material. Kegan knew from experience that bones did not melt like copper. But if he had not known that, he would have thought that this whole place was made from melted bone.

He walked cautiously into the room, his leather boots not making a sound on the cream colored bone floor.

A crisp clear female voice called out:

“Hello dearie! Don’t be shy, I’ve been waiting days to see you, come on in and have some tea.”

Kegan jumped at the sound of the voice, but felt like a fool after hearing what sounded like a sweet lady. He was still cautious, but he followed the sounds of the voice into the hall, and around the corner.

A spacious room opened up in front of him. Lining the walls were tall bookshelves crammed with tomes. In the center of the room was a bed, work desk, and dining table. At the work desk carving something into a round bone circle was an orc woman. She had long jet black hair, a matching dark robe, pointed ears filled with bone earrings, olive skin, and the jutting lower teeth that all orcs shared.

She smiled and looked up as Kegan entered

“Please, help yourself to some tea, and take a seat. I’m sure your journey must have been very long.”

She gestured to the dining table where there was a steaming pot and two fancy looking cups.

“I am not thirsty.”

Kegan saw a momentary frown cross the orc’s face before her smile came back.

“Oh well, I thought serving tea was a common human custom. You must forgive me if this is an outdated practice, it's been so long since I last spoke with a human.”

“How long?”

Kegan saw a look of triumph replaced quickly with mock surprise.

“Oh dear, you must not have heard, humans have been extinct for seven hundred years, and it’s been over a thousand years since I last spoke with one.”

Kegan didn’t know what extinct meant, however it didn’t sound good, and he wasn’t going to reveal his ignorance in order to find out.

“That is too old, no one lives that long.”

“No normal beings live that long, but I am far from normal. I am a sorceress.”

She stood up from her desk. She was very short, only five feet tall, but as she walked around the desk towards Kegan he felt her presence was intimidating. She spoke as she walked,

“Even a mediocre sorcerer can extend their life for a dozen centuries, but I am not mediocre. I am the greatest sorceress to ever roam this continent. All of my enemies are dead, and you are standing on their bones.”

She was within striking distance of Kegan, and he was getting a very bad feeling about the change in her tone.

Just as he was tensing to spring forth the floor changed beneath him, the bone floor bubbled up and wrapped around his feet. Solid arms gripped him from behind and he looked back to see that orc skeletons had appeared behind him and restrained his arms. He struggled against all of the restraints. He had some wiggle room, but not enough to stop the orc woman from thrusting out the bone object in her hand against Kegan’s chest.

Spikes shot out of the bone charm into his chest until they touched his rib cage. As soon as it did Kegan felt all of his movements immediately halt. All of his muscles could still move, but his skeleton was locked in place.

“All of my enemies except you. I thought you must be a sorcerer to have escaped, but you just stupidly walked in here with no idea of who I am. There is no way a normal human like you could have escaped the purges, and lived for so long. This means I must have missed a pocket of humans. Thanks to you now I know I need to look for them.”

With a sneer on her face her she twisted something on the bone charm. Kegan felt an excruciating pain in every bone of his body. As if every single one was being crushed. He was dimly aware of the bone strengthening perk activating again and again.

The sneer turned to a face of confusion, and then shock as the bone charm on Kegan’s chest suddenly exploded. Splinters of bone from the explosion flew into the orc woman’s face. She screamed in pain and clutched at her face.

The pain in Kegan’s bones instantly disappeared. He threw his weight forward. The orc skeletons holding onto him weren’t prepared, and they couldn’t stop his movement.

Kegan slammed his head into the sorcerers forehead, knocking her out. The two orc skeletons fell apart as the magic holding them together dissipated. The bone holding his feet in place was still present. He took out his copper sword and began hacking away at the bone to free his feet.

He pried his foot free and was going to go make sure the woman was dead. When he looked up he was surprised to see her standing. Her face looked perfectly fine, there wasn’t even a hint of blood from the bone splinters or his headbutt. The bone from the floor was flowing up her legs in tiny rivulets forming a bone armor around her chest and head, then flowing down to her arms to form a jagged bone sword in each hand.

Kegan whipped out a javelin and threw it at her chest. She couldn’t even react before the copper javelin had buried itself right into her heart. She staggered and the rivulets of liquid bone fell away from her turning solid as soon as they hit the ground. Kegan charged and swung his sword at her neck hoping to make sure she was fully dead.

One of her bone swords snapped up to block the attack, and the other stabbed at Kegan’s stomach. His copper sword had nearly cut the bone sword in half, but it felt stuck. Her sword had managed to barely penetrate the copper armor he was wearing.

He tried to yank his sword free, but it wouldn’t budge. She was smiling. He was wondering why she hadn’t tried to stab him again, but then rivulets of bone started flowing down the sword. They flowed into his wound and he could feel the bone sword growing spikes inside him.

Looking down at her smiling face he noticed the javelin slowly being pushed out of her chest, and was a large rivulet of liquid bone flowing into her wound.

He let go of the sword, grabbed the javelin, and yanked it out. She gasped and the rivulets faltered for a second. He began repeatedly stabbing her with the javelin. The liquid bone would flow into each new wound. Her face looked vacant, and there was no longer a liquid bone streams flowing into Kegan’s stomach. He wrenched both of the bone swords out of her hands. Then broke them apart with his copper sword.

She looked like she was slowly regaining consciousness. Kegan didn’t want that. He began stabbing and hacking at her with his sword and javelin. Her body fell to the tower floor. Kegan caught his breath, and observed her again.

The floor was melting around her and flowing into all of the wounds. Every wound he had given her seemed to be filling in and healing all at once. There was a growing dent in the floor around her. The bone was being used up to heal her. But he couldn’t exhaust all the bone here. He was standing on a tower of bone.

He picked up her body to block the contact with the bone floors. It seemed to have worked. The liquid bone tried to rise up off the floor to reach her corpse, but it could only get a few inches off the ground before falling back down.

After a minute it seemed to have given up on reaching her corpse, but instead of stopping it moved towards a puddle of her blood on the ground. The puddle of liquid bone and blood began growing and bubbling up from the ground.

He put her corpse on the ground, but the liquid bone seemed to be ignoring it and was forming a completely new body for her. He cursed the blue spirit in frustration, and glanced around desperately for something he could use. ‘Books, bookshelves, table, bones, more bones, paper, bone charms, tea, tea cups, candle … candle.’

Flame sprouted from Kegan’s pointer finger as his fire starter perk activated. He ran to the bookshelves and started setting a book on fire. As the flames caught he carried the burning book over and threw it into the pile of liquid bone and blood. The pile was gaining a vaguely human shape, but the burning book disrupted all of that. The fire wasn’t quenched like Kegan had feared. But nor did the liquid bone catch fire like he had hoped. Instead the two elements avoided each other.

‘I’m gonna need a bigger fire’ he thought to himself. Kegan turned around to look at the bookshelves and smiled.

Three hours later Kegan pulled the raft onto a little island. He wiped the sweat from his brow, and caught his breath. He had been using a long pole to push the raft back upstream as fast as he could. He looked back at the tower of bone. The entire top of the tower had been engulfed in flames initially, but now, it was only smouldering.

Kegan was sure that she would come back alive after the fire finished, but he didn’t plan on sticking around to find out. ‘This whole trip was a bad idea’ he thought to himself. Once he got back to solid land he was gonna ditch the raft, and run all the way back to the mountains.