The dwarf checked his bags to see whether they'd lost anything in the confusion. As he looked through them, his gaze suddenly stopped on something to Jess's right.
Jess glanced over. A skeleton lay there, buried up to its chest in weeds. Its bones were scattered out of position, but all the pieces seemed to be there. Jess was sitting on its right leg.
Jess closed his eyes. "Damn it. I'm not going to get poisoned, am I?"
"At least you brought a change of clothes. I've got to admit, you were thinking ahead, brother," Gred said with a mocking edge.
"I brought a shirt. I didn't bring another pair of pants."
Jess slowly stood up and noticed that the skeleton was missing an arm. Maybe it belonged to the arm they'd just seen.
"The rest of the body is nothing but bones, but there's still flesh on that arm. How does that work?"
"My guess," Gred said, "is that a zombie scratched his arm and infected him. He cut it off so he wouldn't turn into a zombie himself."
Jess looked at the empty skull, covered in dust. "Then did it work or not?"
"Cutting off your arm hurts," Gred said. "If I'm right, that human had real courage and knew how to act fast. Maybe the pain knocked him out, or he lost too much blood, and some small wild animals ate him afterward. If it'd been something big, like a bear, it probably wouldn't have left such a complete skeleton."
"That's a pretty detailed explanation," Jess said doubtfully.
"This sort of thing happens all the time. I saw an elf die like that in the Hinterlands," Gred said. "Only it wasn't a zombie that bit him. It was a spider."
Jess had vivid memories of the spiders in the Hinterlands.
He'd once been a little afraid of spiders. While doing the quest about the spider god there, he reached the last step and had to kill the boss. When the enormous spider mother suddenly appeared, he got goose bumps all over while fighting it.
That spider god had a really memorable name, too, but he couldn't recall it. After thinking about it for a while, he became obsessed with remembering.
"Sha... Shad..." he tried, sounding it out.
"Shadra," the dwarf supplied. "The spider god worshiped by the Amani trolls. You know quite a bit."
"That's it. That's the name." Jess felt much better. "There are troll ruins in Lordaeron too, around Hillsbrad. It's not strange that I've heard of it."
Without the metal fence or low wall between them and the cemetery, the grounds felt even colder. A thin morning mist still hung over everything.
Jess felt as though he'd exposed himself completely to the cemetery, with nothing left between him and whatever might be waiting inside. If danger suddenly appeared, he would have nowhere to hide and nowhere to run.
They stayed close to the fence as they walked around the edge of the cemetery. Gred watched for anything strange in the center, while Jess held his scroll and searched nearby for unusual plants.
They searched for an hour or two. By the time the mist had thinned a little, they'd found only three clusters of Silverleaf in different sizes. They weren't even sure one of them was Silverleaf rather than a similar plant from the same group.
All in all, the harvest was poor.
Worse, they'd checked several gravestones near the edge of the cemetery and found no trace of Grave Moss at all.
This wasn't a game. Real herbs didn't glow, and moving a mouse over them wouldn't tell you that you could interact with them. Of course, there wasn't even a mouse pointer to move. You had to rely on your own eyes and hands.
After two hours of staring so hard, Jess's eyes hurt. The herbs barely covered the bottom of his bag, and they were all cheap Silverleaf.
"We have to go deeper," he admitted. "There's nothing good around the edges."
He pointed at a stone building nearby, guarded by animal statues. "See those tombs? Maybe there's a whole pile of Grave Moss waiting inside, while we're out here walking in circles and missing chance after chance to make money."
"Lead the way," Gred said.
Jess looked at him, let out a long breath, and said, "Fine. I will."
Then he walked straight toward one of the tombs.
Gred licked his dry, thick lips. He seemed a little surprised by Jess's courage. But if the human was already leading the way, there was no reason for a dwarf to fall behind.
The tombs were made of stone and brick, but most of the doors were wooden.
After years without repairs, the door of this tomb was cracked. One swing of an axe looked like it would break it open.
Jess tightened his grip on his axe, but the silence all around stopped him from swinging. The whole cemetery might hear that blow.
"I'll do it," Gred said.
He stepped forward, peered through the crack to make sure no walking corpse was hiding behind the door, and dug his hands into the gap.
"Hnnngh..."
The dwarf strained until his face was red, the veins stood out, and spit flew from his mouth. With a sharp crack, he tore off a large chunk of wood.
The chain swung loose. Gred casually broke the remaining boards and stepped inside.
Jess thought it was like bringing a battering ram along.
The tomb was surprisingly spacious. A passage led farther underground. Judging by the inscribed stone tablets around them, a Stormwind noble whose family name was no longer known had been buried here.
The noble had died during the Gurubashi Empire's invasion decades ago. He'd also been a war hero.
For thousands of years, the Gurubashi trolls had controlled the land from Elwynn down to Stranglethorn Vale. But as the humans of the Kingdom of Stormwind grew stronger, centuries of conflicts, large and small, gradually pushed the empire's actual border south. At last, the once-vast empire that had controlled half the continent was confined to Stranglethorn Vale.
Twenty years before the Dark Portal opened, another clash broke out between Stormwind farmers and the trolls of Stranglethorn. That was the start of the Gurubashi War.
The Gurubashi leaders and their greatest warriors came out in full force. They could no longer stand to see their already small territory shrink. This time, they intended to teach the humans a lesson for good.
Once the ancient empire struck back with all its strength, it seemed unstoppable. Stormwind's forces retreated again and again. In less than a year, the troll army had reached the walls of Stormwind City.
But this time, Medivh was waiting for them.
Only in his twenties, Medivh used some terrible magic of unknown origin to wipe out the entire troll army beneath the city walls in one blow. The Gurubashi leader and all the empire's finest warriors were destroyed in an instant. Only a small number of survivors escaped back to Stranglethorn. They hid in their capital, Zul'Gurub, and several troll cities farther south, and hardly dared venture out again.
Medivh's magic didn't just terrify the trolls. It frightened the humans, too. The Wrynn royal family deliberately played down the power of the spell, claiming that favorable weather and the defenders' bravery had driven the trolls back.
Of course, although the humans had turned the war around and won, they had paid a terrible price. From the dates in the memorial inscription, this noble had died during the first wave of the troll invasion.
"Didn't expect the man buried here to be a war hero," Jess said.
"Maybe he was a knight," Gred said. "Then he might've been buried with a sword and armor..."
"We're here to gather herbs, not rob graves," Jess said. "Besides, do you really want to carry a whole suit of metal armor weighing dozens of pounds while ghouls chase you?"
Gred smiled smugly. "If I had a full suit of Stormwind knight's armor, why would I need to run from a ghoul?"
"One spray of corpse poison in your face, and you're in trouble unless you seal every gap around your face with mud."
"Oh, screw you."
Gred tossed a small stone at him, which Jess easily dodged.
They took a torch from a rack near the entrance, lit it, and went down together. Despite the tomb's size, most of its coffins were empty, and there weren't many burial goods either.
The farther they went, the darker and quieter it became. Their steps grew slower.
A faint, damp, foul smell followed them the whole way, suggesting there was a corpse somewhere inside.
And if there was a corpse, there might be Grave Moss. According to the books, Grave Moss grew by feeding on the deathly energy coming from dead bodies.
Something that should have been frightening had become a reason to hope.
Only their footsteps could be heard inside the tomb. Gred went first, and Jess followed. Before long, Jess suddenly heard water splashing right next to him.
"What was that?"
"I stepped in water."
Gred lowered the torch. Only then did he see that he'd stepped down off a stair and the floor below was completely flooded.
He waved the torch around and realized the flame couldn't light up anything even a few yards away. That was why they hadn't noticed the water ahead.
"What's going on here?" Gred asked. "Why is it so dark it even swallows the firelight?"
"Isn't it the same outside?" Jess asked back.
He said that, but it wasn't until he stood here and felt the darkness hanging over Duskwood that he truly understood how terrifying the darkness inside Medivh had been.
It had seeped into every corner of the forest, gathering in every hidden place deep underground. Here it grew thicker and darker, tormenting the living and denying rest to the dead.
"Let's get in and out fast," Jess said. "If whatever makes up this darkness is poisonous, we don't have any way to treat it."
"You're only warning me now?"
Gred waded into the water with his torch raised, walking faster and faster.
Some geological shift seemed to have squeezed and partly collapsed the tomb. The walls were cracked in many places.
The stone floor had given way to bare earth. Strange kinds of cave algae grew here, none of which Jess could identify or match to any herb he'd read about.
They soon reached the deepest chamber. Only one half-submerged stone coffin remained ahead.
Jess held the torch close to the water and searched below the surface. Apart from some water plants, there was nothing that looked like Grave Moss.
Gred felt along the wall for a while. Then he turned toward Jess and shook his head too.
The entire tomb had been searched, except for the one stone coffin that was still shut.
Jess's scalp prickled. The thought of opening a coffin made anyone uneasy, especially when you didn't know whether the body inside was really dead.
"No matter what the person inside is wearing or holding, don't touch it," he stressed.
"You couldn't pay me to take something off a dead body," Gred muttered as he approached.
He clenched his teeth and pushed the stone lid aside just enough to make a narrow opening. Then he immediately raised his sword and watched it for a moment. Only when he was sure the corpse wasn't reaching out to scratch him did he keep pushing.
Jess came closer and shone the torch inside. Suddenly, the darkness within began to churn violently.
"What the hell is that?!"
Gred nearly launched himself backward and landed in the water. Jess retreated several steps and pressed himself against the wall.
A mass of black things poured out through the narrow opening like boiling mud. In a tomb this dark, they were almost impossible to make out.
"If we don't earn a gold coin from this trip, I'll tie you up and sell your ass in the Old Town!" Gred shouted, moving closer again.
"You'd... have to find someone willing to pay for it first."
Jess brought the torch nearer, and the two finally saw what the black things were.
Countless beetles, packed together!
They streamed out of the coffin like a flood and crawled into the water. Gred could barely hold his sword steady at the sight.
But the beetles didn't seem interested in attacking them. They were fleeing the torchlight, scattering through the water.
Gred seemed to understand. "Those beetles aren't ordinary living insects anymore. They're creatures changed and kept alive by necromantic energy. Many tomb torches are made by the Church of the Holy Light, especially the ones in noble family tombs. They have a little power to drive away evil. That's why the insects are running."
"What if they bite us?" Jess asked uneasily.
"We might get sick, throw up, feel dizzy, that sort of thing. But one or two bites wouldn't carry enough poison to turn you into a zombie. Now hurry up and see if there's Grave Moss inside."
Jess moved closer again with the torch. Most of the beetles had fled. A rotting corpse lay flat in the mud. Strange dark-green plants clung to the exposed bones, sticking like patches of spores to the leg bones and blackened clothes.
"That's Grave Moss," Jess said, fighting the urge to vomit.
Gred sighed. "Goddamn, I wish you'd said it wasn't."
Jess pressed his arm hard over his nose, although he knew it wouldn't do much good.
The body was as rotten as he could imagine, yet the smell in the air wasn't especially strong.
"Why doesn't it stink much?"
Gred pinched his nose. "Bodies affected by necromancy don't have the same awful smell as bodies rotting naturally. It's more of a strange, fishy odor, like this. Being underwater might make it a bit weaker, too... Can we stop talking about this and get to work? The sooner we're out of here, the better!"