The skeletons the four of them had been following entered the town, and Pan and his group followed after. There was no fence around the town, which allowed them all to walk leisurely through its borders.

  “It’s a village,” Athena had argued. “And we’re in a game, after all. Villages are a good thing for the player in these kinds of games.”

  “Not abandoned villages,” Apollo had retorted.

  “This one clearly isn’t abandoned.” At this she had gestured to it, and, it was true, it was about as lively as a maggot-ridden corpse. They could all see the hustle and bustle even from this distance.

  Still, they had approached cautiously. They hadn’t called out the skeletons they had been following, though they trailed behind the blackened bones by quite a bit. Of them, only Athena didn’t twang with apprehension.

  “Hey!” came a cry. Pan almost activated his Miasma card. As one, they turned to see one of the blackened skeletons calmly approaching. He had held back and blended in with the volcanic rock of the immense cavern. “You finally made yourselves known.” He, for the voice sounded masculine, spoke the words like an accusation.

  Pan braced for a fight. This one’s going to attack, and that’ll summon the rest of the town down onto us.

  But before they could decide to strike first, he had reached Athena and abruptly held out his boney hand.

  “Welcome to Gravestone. I’m Maurice,” he said.

  “Athena,” said Athena, shaking the proffered hand. As she did so, she shot a smug look at the rest of them.

  “Apollo,” said Apollo, next to shake the skeleton’s hand. Athena was looking at the ash residue the skeleton had left on her palm.

  “Don’t worry about that,” the skeleton said, rattling his ribcage and conjuring a grey cloud, “It’s just a fact of death. Who are your-“ the skeleton started to ask, gesturing to Horse and Pan.

  “The Whispering Horse,” Horse said in his Dark Knight voice.

  “I see. You’re a bit of a surprise. We’d seen your mates following us. White togas and gleaming metal in this pitch darkness? The old eye sockets get used to the dark. But you? I didn’t see you.”

  “I’m only seen when I want to be seen,” Horse said grimly. “And by then, you’re already dead.”

  Maurice remained silent for a moment, considering the Skulk’s words. “Well, someone’s already beat you to it. We’re all dead here. And who might this be?” He turned to Pan and crouched down, hand bones on knee bones.

  “I’m Pan. As a matter of fact, I’m a Faun. We’re part deer, not part goat.”

  “No you’re not. I can see you’re a Cursed. What were you before? A human? Or a centaur like your friend here?”

  “How do you know that?” Pan asked, shocked.

  The skeleton pointed a boney finger at Pan’s purple bracers. “I can see your class. Only Cursed get purple bracers. You sorry sot. Who’d you piss off?”

  “I-“ Pan started, but realized he didn’t know. “I’m not sure who it was. She appeared in a cold lake in the middle of a grove.” He carefully left out the matter with the deer. He still hadn’t had a chance to process what had possessed him to kill the celestial hart.

  “Yeah? What dungeon was that, then? Was she your guide, or your host?”

  “I wasn’t in a dungeon. I was in the overworld, I guess.”

  Maurice pulled up to his full height to think, scratching his chinbone. “Hmm,” he said. “Hurm.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Her name is Hurm?”

  “H-wha? No, son, I was thinking. Nope, I can’t think of a woman who shows up out of a clear pond in any groves. But Gravestone is a big place, full of people from way back. Someone might know who she is.”

  The skeleton’s words filled Pan with unexpected hope. He wanted to know more about the mysterious goddess he had slighted.

  “Wait,” Apollo said, “So, are you guys, uh…” He trailed off, but Maurice only looked expectantly at him. He started again. “Earlier, we saw you guys fighting with those goblin creatures.”

  “Hobbs,” Maurice said, cutting him off.

  “Yeah. Hobbs-“

  “Goblins are nastier.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. You were fighting and we saw you guys using class cards, not just basic attacks like most mobs. Are you all stuck here like us?”

  The skeleton looked thoughtful. “You mean, are we vagrants like you?”

  Apollo nodded. Pan had been starting to wonder the same thing.

  The skeleton shook his head. He held up his arm and pointed to it. “No bracers. We’re just simple folk unliving our afterlives. I used to be a human, but when the mountain exploded, I died.”

  “Aww, that must have been awful,” Pan said.

  The skeleton waved away his concern. “Didn’t feel a thing. Well, I heard a boom, and had just enough time to think ‘What was-‘ and by the time I got to ‘-that?’ I found myself here, burned to a cinder.”

  Athena nudged Pan and whispered to him, “So these guys are NPCs. Not playable characters, but they have some class features like we get.”

  He nodded as it was coming to him. In the story, this whole town must be vassals of Dreganan. But then what purpose does the village serve the dungeon?

  “My whole family came with me,” the skeleton continued, “and we all eventually found most of our ancestors, too.”

  “You founded Gravestone together?” Apollo asked.

  The skeleton chuckled, his jawbone clattering. “No, goodness, no. It was already here. There’s more than just my clan. Like I said, you’ll find people from all over around here. Come, I’ll show you around.” He walked past them and into the village proper.

  As the group had seen from afar, Gravestone was bustling. But it wasn’t full of only volcano-roasted skeletons. There were shambling zombies with tattered clothes as well as pristine ivory colored skeletons. Undead horses drew coffin carriages along the streets, and inside the buildings all manner of undead people were going about their – what had Maurice called it? – their un-lives.

  “And this is the barbershop,” Maurice said as they passed a glass-paned shop front.

  “Athena, look,” Pan said.

  “I don’t want to see it,” she grumbled.

  “It’s a barber shop. That skeleton is-“

  “I don’t. Want. To see it,” she said slowly.

  “-getting its hair cut,” Pan finished lamely.

  And there was the ivory skeleton, sitting in a barber’s chair and draped in a smock, having his skull tended to by a cinder skeleton. The charcoal skelly was busily clipping rusty scissors close to its client’s cranium.

  “What is even the point?” Athena mumbled under her breath, consumed by the ridiculousness.

  Apollo approached Pan, breathless. “Pan! Did- Did you see it?” He pointed back at the barber shop.

  “I did!” Pan said excitedly.

  “I love this place!”

  Athena paused to look at both of them, then grunted. “This place is stupid.”

  She turned and almost tripped over a skeleton sitting on the street. It was an ivory skeleton, not a cinder skeleton like Maurice.

  “Can you spare some bones?” the creature asked in a hopeless and creaky voice.

  Athena recovered from the surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t see you there.”

  “Can you spare some bones?” The blackened skeleton held out both hands, an approximation of a beggar’s bowl.

  “No, I don’t think I have any bones on me at the moment,” she said, patting her clothes. It took Pan a moment to remember that there were no pockets in the togas they were wearing, and that their inventory was held in some kind of card-themed pocket dimension.

  Maurice, back-tracking to see what the commotion was, intervened. “No, no bones. They don’t have anything to give you.” He spoke to the creature like it was an invalid.

  The homeless skeleton put its hands down and hugged its knees. It didn’t meet Maurice’s eyesockets with its own.

  But Maurice was staring intently at it.

  “Great-gammy Theresa?” he asked in a small voice.

  This caused the homeless skeleton to look back up at him, as though surprised.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Uriel’s son,” he held a hand to his rib cage where his heart would have been.

  “Little Uriel had a baby?” the old skeleton asked with the childlike wonder of the senile.

  Maurice hugged her. There was an unsettling clatter of bones as he did. “Great gammy Theresa!”

  She patted his spine almost uncertainly.

  “But what are you doing begging on the street? I thought you were given a magnificent burial.”

  The skeleton of Theresa had no answer for her great-grandson.

  “I need to get you home right now,” he said, lifting her. She didn’t resist, but moved like one under a compulsion. “You all can find the inn without me.” He gave them directions. It was close by. Then he walked the opposite direction while fussing over the begging skeleton.

  “What a whirlwind,” Apollo said. “One moment he was leading us by the nose, the next he’s gone.”

  “Why was she begging for bones?” Horse asked. “They’re made of bones.”

  No one had an answer for him.

  “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m bushed,” Apollo said. “I say we take his advice and get some rooms.”