After an arduous journey through the woods, along the small river and through the mountain pass, the outlander warband finally reached the entrance of Thorn Vale. As they looked at the large valley that spread out in front of them, a singular exclamation resounded from the group.

“Well, shit.”

Instead of finding an abandoned yet lush forest valley, the outlanders were greeted by the sight of a desolate and lifeless landscape split in two by the river that ran through it. There were no signs of life anywhere. They couldn’t hear a single bird chirping or the noise of crickets. Besides the sound of the flowing river, the valley was dead silent.

“I don’t understand this,” Letty said as she looked at the crooked and darkened trees on both sides of the river, the sight of something similar to buildings showing in the distance. “It shouldn’t be like this. The whole valley feels...”

“Dead.” Valerie finished her thoughts.

“What the hell happened here?” Osmond asked as he tried to touch one of the trees along the way, the bark cracking and splitting apart beneath his touch.

“Didn’t the old man say something about a poison or sickness in the valley?” Cruz mused as they walked along the still visible path towards the distant ruins.

“He said that the royals secretly ordered the local lord’s Landwaker tree to be poisoned according to the hearsay.” Fabien corrected her.

“The death of a Landwaker should at the most cause magic to thin out once again,” Regis noted. “It wouldn’t cause something like... this.”

“There’s no point in guessing,” Quentin stated, marching forward with firm steps. “Maybe we can find some answers in those ruins.”

“And shelter,” Amanda added. “The sun is going down fast. We only have about an hour before it vanishes behind the mountains.”

“We better hurry up then.” Sophie hummed as the group hastened their steps.

Despite the valley’s natural shape allowing them to see far enough to notice the ruins, it still took them about half an hour to reach the place. As they neared their goal, the oppressive atmosphere surrounding them grew stronger. The already dark and dry grass slowly began to show whitish-grey patches where some sort of dust covered it.

“This is quite different from what I expected.” Fabien admitted as they stood before a gate with solid stone walls on both sides.

The walls were in a good condition, hardly the two centuries old ruins everyone expected them to be. They walked up to the slightly opened gates, seeing an empty village on the other side of it. None of the buildings seemed to be excessively damaged or ruined. At most, they would call them abandoned. Larger patches of the same whitish-grey dust covered most of the area, sprinkled on the buildings and the cobblestone streets like early snow. It almost made sense with the nearby mountain range being as white as it was.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Amanda grumbled. “This place is supposed to have been abandoned in the past two centuries but these buildings look far too new and well-maintained.”

“It looks like someone took up residence here,” Regis noted. “They most likely rebuilt whatever they found and created a settlement.”

“But why?” Mary looked around perplexed. “Why would anyone want to live in a village like this? This place gives me the creeps.”

“There could be many reasons,” Valerie sighed. “Perhaps they were outlaws, or maybe they were just simple peasants that got fed up with the rule of their lord.”

“This was a pretty well-developed little village.”

“But where are the people?” Letty questioned as they walked through the empty street. “It seems like it’s been abandoned for a while, but not that long ago.”

“I think that might have something to do with it.” The dark elf pointed forward as they entered what seemed to be the market square of the settlement.

A dried-out and gloomy-looking dead tree stood in the middle area of the small square, drawing their attention while sending chills down their spines in the steadily waning sunlight.

“That’s a Landwaker tree.” The wood elf girl stuttered as they walked slightly closer.

“And a very dead one at that.” Her sister remarked.

“Do you think this is the tree elder Derris told us about?” Valerie asked as she stopped a few metres away while the wannabe druid reached out to touch the tree, only to yank back her hand with a hiss.

Black smoke floated off the finger that seemed to have been burnt by some kind of strong acid that slowly began to make its way up towards the first finger joint.

“This...” Letty winced in a mixture of pain and terror as she watched her fingertip turn black with rot.

“I’m sorry!” Regis said as he hastily drew his dagger while grabbing the young woman’s hand, pushing it to the nearby stone wall, cutting off the fast rotting finger at the joint before the rot could spread further.

Letty screamed in pain beneath the hand her sister put on her mouth while holding her down. Most of the outlanders stood there in shock for a moment before rushing forward to cast minor healing on the wound to stop the bleeding and help hasten the regrowth process.

“What the hell just happened?” Amanda asked, completely freaked out by the sudden turn of events.

“That tree isn’t just dead,” Letty spoke up between tears as Cruz hugged her tightly. “It’s as if it was forced to become the vessel of something dark, malicious and rotten. It’s...”

“Death,” Osmond stated as he scooped up some of the snow-like dust from the ground, smearing it between his fingers. “I can recognise this thing anywhere.”

“What is it?” Fabien asked, already fearing the answer.

“It’s ash,” the pale youth answered grimly. “The kind of ash you’d only find in a place where a powerful necrotic curse killed off anything that had even a spark of life in it.”

“But...” Mary stuttered. “It was supposed to be some stupid poison. Not...”

“This could have been the source,” Quentin muttered as he stared at the dead Landwaker tree. “Right up there.”

“What are you talking about?” Valerie stepped beside the distracted paladin. “The source of what? Quentin?”

As she touched the man, she could feel him shiver, passing it on to her as the group felt the previously ominous atmosphere become baleful and overwhelming as the sun began to fully disappear in the distance. The air became chilly with the sensation of something coming closer to them at a rapid pace.

“We should find shelter for the night.” Mary stated the obvious, earning a firm nod from everyone.

“There’s a smithy over here, Amanda pointed at a nearby abandoned workshop. “And that seems to have been a tailor's shop.”

“That building has the sign of a tavern,” Mary pointed out a two-story building. “And that one must have been a small general store or something. All of these places are covered with the stuff.”

“Are you trying to tell me that all this ash…”

“It’s people,” Osmond nodded. “Along with the local animals.”

“But…”

“Quentin, your domain!” Regis said with an almost commanding tone as he forced the crystal of his staff to glow when an unnatural shiver rushed along his spine, following the disappearance of the sun behind the mountains.

“What’s going on?” The rest of the group turned towards him puzzled by his strange behaviour before the paladin slammed his fist into his shield, releasing the warm light filled domain to surround the group.

“We’re not alone.” Osmond said as he looked at the heavy shadows that began to move and grow as the last rays of the sun died out. “It seems that whatever happened here left some nasty shadow remnants behind.”

The group watched in horror as the shadows came to life all around them, turning into humanoid-shaped figures. The creatures almost looked identical to the shades they had to defeat back on Earth to gain their gateway coins, but these were far from being the same. As the beings rose from the ground, they disturbed the ash, mixing with it until their originally pristine black form became a baleful ashy grey. A heavy miasma wafted out of them while they began to march towards the outlanders, only to recoil when they reached the edge of the paladin’s light domain.

“What now?” Fabien asked before the dark elf blasted a part of the baleful shades apart with his ‘runic ray of light’ spell.

The shadow creatures fell and crumbled, but others took their places.

“We have to get out of here.” Regis said as he rushed forward with his staff lighting the way.

The others followed him through the newly opened passage between the shades as they ran toward the nearby smithy. He opened the door and then closed it as soon as they were all in.

“A simple door won’t stop a bunch of shades.” Osmond noted as he watched the spell weaver place his hand on the door.

Glowing blue lines snaked out from beneath his palm, forming runic symbols on the door that turned into a bright golden membrane.

“Keep up your domain until I seal everything!” Regis said to the paladin while walking over to the windows to repeat the warding procedure before sealing the fireplace and then the wall itself an arcana regenerating potion later.

The sound of banging could be heard from outside, followed by painful hisses as the barriers rippled.

“I’m not sure your barriers are going to hold.” Valerie noted as she watched the steady ripples on the light membrane that covered the door and the walls.

“It’s a modified barrier that has been linked with the element of light,” Regis stated as he sat down to catch his breath. “The moment they attack it, they will suffer a backlash of light elemental damage.”

“In other words,” Cruz sighed somewhat relieved. “The idiots are killing themselves.”

“I will have to recharge the barrier from time to time, but it should keep them out until sunrise.”

“And then what?” Amanda growled with frustration. “We came all the way here, only to find a friggin haunted village full of vengeful ghosts. There’s no way we can live in a place like this.”

“We have to cleanse the village,” Osmond expressed his opinion. “That’s the only way to get rid of them. Otherwise, they will likely come back every night.”

“How do we do that?” Mary looked at the pale youth panicked. “I don’t know anything about ghosts.”

“Os,” Cruz turned towards her companion. “Necromancy is kind of your forte.”

“This wasn’t necromancy, or at least not in the way you think. If I’d have to guess, those vengeful shades are likely the trapped souls of the locals. You can’t kill them, only temporarily destroy their form. They will reappear as soon as they’ve regained enough strength.”

“That is,” Valerie cleared her throat. “Unless we can find the thing that anchors them here and destroy it.”

“It’s the tree,” Quentin mumbled as he listened to the angry growl of the shades. “It has to be.”

“What is it with you and that fucking tree?” Cruz burst out with an annoyed tone. “You’ve been fixated on that thing since the moment you saw it.”

“When I was helping Edmund check if any of his men were demonic collaborators,” the paladin sat down while talking. “I had plenty of time to ask him about the origins of the undead menace and the reason for the war. He told me that the reason was quite complicated.”

“It usually is.” Fabien rolled his eyes.

“One of the reasons was that the current king is quite old, so the court is quite strained due to the succession question. The second reason is that since the court is busy with the first reason, some of the nobles thought that they could get away with grabbing more territory than they were given. This led them to fight over villages and unclaimed settlements that had a good enough Landwaker to worth the trouble.”

“But what does it have to do with this particular tree?” Sophie sat down beside the paladin.

“Edmund told me that the reason this whole fallen tide occurred was that during the largest battle between the local lords, some dark spell caster showed up. He didn’t know the exact details since he wasn’t there, but some other survivor told him that this dark mage fellow used a black staff to blast off some incredibly strong necrotic ritual. His personal magic advisor then noted that the staff had to be some kind of high-ranked focus that was crafted for this exact purpose.”

“And you believe that this is where it was made?” Amanda asked as she watched the dark elf place his hand on the slowly fading ward of the door to renew it.

“They said that only a Landwaker’s branch could handle something like that.”

“It does make sense,” Osmond sighed. “If this tree is the one that was poisoned two hundred years ago, then even if it did manage to survive, it would be filled with poison. Someone with the right skill and enough power could channel all that miasma into a single point of the tree.”

“And create the black staff using that tainted branch.” Valerie finished his thought.

“I noticed a part on the tree where a branch had been sawed off.” Quentin nodded.

“So you’re trying to tell me that we walked into the middle of a suicidal cultist village?”

“No,” the pale youth shook his head. “No one is stupid enough to rebuild a ruined village, only to kill themselves.”

“Then what happened to the locals?” Letty asked, only to regret her question a moment later.

“They were most likely sacrificed by someone else to fuel whatever ritual was used.” Regis guessed, earning a slight nod from Osmond.

“That is the most likely scenario.”

“I hate it how the two of you talk like a pair of academics when it comes to the subject of mass murder.”

“We can’t change what happened,” Regis noted. “And getting over emotional will only cloud your judgement. Staying detached and ‘academic’ as you put it, is the best way to figure out the connection between things and to find a solution.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not mad about the things that likely happened here, but we have to think about the here and now. We have to think about finding a way for us to get out of this mess.” The pale youth added.

“I guess you are right,” the tall woman let out a defeated sigh as she sat beside Sophie. “Creep.”

“So how are we going to destroy the Landwaker tree?” Sophie asked the important question, diverting everyone’s attention towards the important matter.

As the topic turned darker, silence fell on the group with only the sound of the angry shades hissing loudly outside.