The markings on the walls started glowing. Starting from the outer edges of the room and working inward toward the center. Like sothing was being drawn in from a great distance and arriving slowly. The color was close to red but underneath that sothing was different.
The Shaman stood at the stone table and spoke continuously. It spoke like it was reading from sothing written a very long ti ago and knew every word by mory.
Hiroshi watched the walls.
The lines connecting the circles were glowing fully now. And where they connected at their intersection points small nodes of light had appeared. Brighter than the lines. Concentrated. Like the geotry of the room was a machine and those points were where the pressure was building up.
Then the first one appeared.
In the corner of the room near the low door the Shaman had entered through. A shape. Vaguely upright. Translucent in a way that wasn’t quite transparency. More like sothing trying to be solid and not fully managing it. It had the rough shape of a goblin. Small and hunched. But the proportions were wrong in ways that suggested whatever process had produced this thing had not been kind.
Then another appeared beside it.
Then three more along the far wall.
They didn’t move. They just stood. Flickering slightly. Their outlines uncertain. The expressions on their faces, if they could be called expressions, were not sothing Hiroshi wanted to look at directly so he stopped looking at them directly.
More ca.
They filled the edges of the room steadily. Goblin shapes mostly. Dozens of them appearing in sequence along the walls and in the corners and between the hanging bodies above. They overlapped where there wasn’t space and the overlapping made them harder to look at. Like two images pressed together that the eye couldn’t reconcile into one thing.
The Shaman’s voice got louder.
Then the human ones started appearing.
These were different. Taller shapes. So in clothing that suggested different places and different tis. A rchant’s coat. A soldier’s uniform from a style Hiroshi didn’t recognize. Plain working clothes. Noble dress. All of them translucent the sa way the goblin shapes were but sohow more present. More weight to them even though they had no physical weight at all.
They ca in larger numbers than the goblins had. Filling the space above the goblin shapes. Layering into the room from floor to ceiling until the air itself seed thick with them. Hiroshi counted without aning to and stopped counting when he passed a hundred because the number was still climbing.
The room was full of the dead.
All of them facing the stone table. All of them facing the Shaman.
The Shaman raised both arms.
The staff in its right hand caught the light from the markings and threw it back amplified. The small blade in its left hand still had Hiroshi’s blood on it. It held both arms up and the speaking stopped and for one mont the room was completely silent despite being packed wall to wall with the shapes of the dead.
Then the shapes started moving toward the table.
Slowly. All of them at once. The goblin shapes from the floor level and the human shapes from above. Converging on the center of the room. On the stone table. On whatever the Shaman was building toward.
Hiroshi pulled against his chains.
They didn’t move.
He pulled again with everything he had left. The pain from earlier was still in his muscles and the strength multiplier had long since faded and what remained was just him and whatever he could produce without it. The bolt points in the floor held.
He watched the shapes drifting closer to the table.
He watched the markings on the walls burning brighter.
He watched the Shaman standing with both arms raised and its yellow eye closed now for the first ti since it had entered the room.
Then sothing moved in the shadows near the low door.
Moving along the wall close to the floor. Keeping to the edges where the drifting forms of the dead were thinnest.
It reached him and crouched down.
Elias.
He looked exactly the sa as he always did. But still sothing about him looked different to Hiroshi. He looked at the chains on Hiroshi’s wrists and then looked at the Shaman across the room and then looked back at the chains.
He pressed two fingers against the bolt on Hiroshi’s right side.
That faint pressure moving through his hand into whatever he was touching.
The bolt ca out of the floor cleanly. No sound. Like it had never been properly set in the first place.
He moved to the left side and did the sa.
Hiroshi pulled his wrists up and the chains ca with them but they were free from the floor now. He could move. He kept the movent small and controlled and didn’t look at the Shaman.
Elias leaned close. "Can you stand."
Hiroshi didn’t answer. He just started getting his feet under him.
His legs were bad. The hours on the cold stone floor had done sothing to his joints that standing up made very clear. He moved slowly and used the wall behind him to get upright and stood there for a mont while his body decided whether it was going to cooperate.
It cooperated. Barely.
Elias was already looking at the room. At the ritual. At the shapes still drifting toward the table. His expression was the sa as always but his eyes were doing sothing different. Taking it in with a familiarity that wasn’t shock. Like he was assessing sothing he had seen variations of before.
Hiroshi looked at the stone table.
The shapes were close to it now. The closest ones were almost touching it. The markings on the walls were at full brightness and the room had taken on a sound that wasn’t quite sound. A vibration that lived below hearing and moved through the stone and through the floor and through Hiroshi’s feet and up into his chest.
The Shaman still had both arms raised. Still had its eye closed. Fully committed to whatever point in the process it had reached.
Hiroshi looked at the table. At the markings radiating outward from it. At the lines connecting everything in the room back to that central point.
He looked at Elias.
Elias looked back at him and said nothing. But he stepped aside. A small deliberate movent. Clearing the path between Hiroshi and the table.
Hiroshi looked at his own hands. The chains hanging from his wrists.
He looked at the table one more ti.
Then he crossed the room.
He moved through the drifting shapes of the dead and they moved around him. The Kobolds saw him. Two of them reacted and started toward him and Elias was already between them before they got two steps and what happened to them was quick and quiet.
Hiroshi reached the table.
He raised both arms with the chains hanging between his wrists and brought them down hard on the surface of the stone table with everything he had left.
The sound it made was enormous.
The stone cracked down the center. A single clean fracture running from one end to the other. The markings on the walls flickered. The shapes of the dead stuttered in place like a fla in wind. The vibration in the floor cut out instantly.
The Shaman’s eyes opened.
Both of them. The clouded white one and the yellow one. Wide. Looking at Hiroshi across the fractured table.
For the first ti since entering the room the Shaman was completely silent.
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