A Halfling Horror (or, How Morgan Came About His Anxiety)

It is five years long passed. Morgan is younger, though older by a year than he was at the Battle of Goblin Feld. He has taken to wearing a scarf about his scarred visage. He has buried grief with discipline and anger with adventure. He has practiced and studied the art of the blade, specializing in the gruelling disciplines of twin blades, a most trick some subset of skills. He seems born to it.

He is searching for a legendary Blade Master, the twentieth on his itinerary. He has set a long list of accomplishment before his feet and not until they are complete will he consider himself worthy of regard in the use of blades.

The sun shall soon set and so he casts about for some shelter, coming at last upon a fair rolling farmland, cut banks set with rounded doors and picturesque chimneys set at charming angles. He follows the winding path into the furfoot village. There is little activity. Morgan sees no villagers upon the street, no chickens or pigs foraging about. The windows lack inviting light and no toothsome smoke rises lazily from kitchen hearth. The shadows have begun to lengthen. He listens for music and the sounds of hearty drinking but is met only with stark silence. Morgan shivers.

‘This is queer,’ he mutters. ‘Some plague most have swept this winsome hamlet, or else some menace has sent its peaceful farmers scurrying to the local lord. Bah! The air grows dank and damp and I am chilled. To the top of the hill where the inn should meet me and there, perhaps, some measure of comfort.’

He checks his blades and begins up the main path. A clunk of an indeterminate origin catches Morgan’s ear. He pauses and is met with the absence of crickets. He continues until a pieces of slate clatters to the pavers with a crystal snap. Morgan jerks and inadvertently draws a blade.

He curses beneath his breath and roughly slips the weapon back into its sheath. A black rabbit shape tears furiously up the path and fades into the dusk.

‘Ah, a bunny. I must have spooked him.’

The horrid squeal of a dying rabbit rings out from the shadows ahead. Morgan jogs lightly up the path.

There is a frenzied scrabbling, then silence. Morgan slows and begins to slowly circle. His booted left foot encounters an unseemly squishy form. He halts, glances right, left, then down.

The rabbit has been savaged and ripped, skull shattered and emptied. Morgan feels his gorge rise and draws his blades. He tastes the wind. A foul meaty stink skirts the edges of his senses.

He shudders.

Morgan moves quicker now, nearly running up the central hill common to furfoot villages. Dark, disturbing shapes race the shadows of well-kept lawns and meticulous gardens.

Morgan begins to run in earnest.

A squealing, chittering call issues from hidden sources. A deeper mewl sets up a horrid countermelody.

Morgan is tearing up the main path with desperate speed. The inn is before him now. Firelight warms the windows of the main room.

It is a charming heap of stone and timber, shingle and plaster. Stout beams and crooked chimneys. It crowns the kill and settles snugly into it. Like all Halfling inns, it is well-built into the hill. Burrows, runs and tunnels.

Morgan skids to before the double doors. He tries the handles.

‘Damn! Locked.’

Something scrabbles in the shadows.

Morgan goes from window to window, rattling shutters and testing sashes.

‘Ah!’

He wriggles through a smallish window and drops into a darkened closet. He gasps draws many a deep breath. He sheathes a sword and sets his newly freed fingers to explore a satchel strapped beneath his cloak. He draws forth a translucent stone, formed and polished and lightly glimmering.

He hides the light and settles in to listen.

A dull dead silence.

No kitchen noises, no drunken yawps, no horses neighing, no quibbling staff.

And then, a wet shlumping sound punctuated by a hard, scratching clawing.

Shlump. Click. Drag.

Morgan breathes upon the gem and rubs it thrice upon his lapel. A low glow begins to flow from fingers loosely cupped to glimmer upon surrounding walls and dime corners.

‘Ah, the privy.’

Shlump. Click. Drag.

Morgan pivots and focuses the gem-light as Lugh had shown him.

A small figure clad in green rough-spun cover-alls and yellow blouse with quaint brown curls crowning a foul gasping face slithers suddenly upon the floor. Raw, rotted flesh and coagulating fluids ruin what was once, surely, a winsome visage.

Morgan draws back.

‘By the Unseeing Eye, its legs are gnawed clean off.’

Entrails trailing the quivering spine paint foul runes at random upon the privy floor.

Morgan’s blade flickers and delivers a professional blow to the loathsome skull. It ends the blasphemous progress of the foul and ghoulish furfoot. Morgan disposes of the twitching corpse in the only available cavity.

‘Crawl out of that muck, laddy.’

Morgan presses up against the door and listens.

Deep silence.

He cautiously trips the latch.

The corridor is dark with but a splash of moonlight falling here and there to lend menacing shadows to vague furnishings. Many stout doors line the hall. At the furthest end of the hallway, a door stands slightly ajar. Red firelight creeps around the edges. Slowly, and with great caution, Morgan edges towards the light. He gently swings the door wide enough to peer within. Ruined stools and tables litter the common room. Upended braziers have scattered coal and a series of small fires happily lick at the carpet and the drapes. Several small figures are sprawled about, leaking blood and more noisome fluids indeed.

Morgan shudders and forces down his rising gorge.

There is a disturbing scrabbling from beyond the rough-glazed windows. He quickly approaches the great doors and checks the bolts and bars. Satisfied, he carefully peers through the warped and clouded panes to scan the surrounding lawn. Many small, dark figures lurch and stumble about. One dismembered furfoot seems to be pawing feebly at the door.

Morgan draws back.

There is a gasp from behind, so he spins, twin blades drawn.

A tiny Halfling child, a wee girl clad in pink and grimly clutching the remnants of a plush toy stands before him. She takes in the slaughtered folk and the fearsome warrior. A shrill piping scream erupts from her throat.

She flees and Morgan instinctively follows, down the corridor, through several doorways and down a flight of steps until he reaches forth and snags the child by the collar.

‘Hush, child, I will not harm you!’

The Halfling daughter kicks vigorously and catches Morgan in a tender spot.

‘I’m not running from you, stupid,’ she calls as she wrenches free and flees.

Morgan stops his groaning. The groaning does not stop.

Atop the stairs, framed by poor light, several small shapes cluster and jostle. Morgan briefly flashes his glowing orb to reveal the tattered features of several savaged furfoots.

‘The very same who lay slaughtered upon the floor above,’ he muses. The disquieting moan rises and a bare, clumsy foot is set upon the topmost riser.

Morgan scrambles to his feet in hot pursuit of the child.

‘She still lives,’ he reasons, ‘therefore, she has some place of safety, some priest-hole undiscovered.’

Morgan is a worthy hunter and he quickly catches the trail of his quarry. The trail has gone deeper than the basements of the inn, deep into burrows, warrens and ancestral runs. Soon enough, the silhouette of the young girl is framed by the tunnel’s sudden opening into a larger and deeper space. A dim framework of rusted scaffolds and spanning beams is revealed behind her.

‘Stop, mister, please. You’re too big, you’re too big!’

Morgan slows and approaches with a measured tread.

‘Now the, lass, peace, I just want to ask you some questions, if I may. What has transpired here?’

The child regards Morgan with a look of stern disapproval, as if to call his very wit into question. A sharp word is framed upon her lips, only to be transformed into a swallowed squeal.

Morgan slowly turns.

Dozens of mangled, shambling Halflings fill the run. There is no more exit the way he has come.

‘Close your eyes, child,’ he calls. As once more he draws and prepares for the rigours of the hack and slash.

There is no reply.

Morgan risks a peek over his shoulder. The child has clambered deftly among the scaffolds and, with grim determination, is works her way steadily aloft. Morgan slowly retreats until he can better inspect the gaping chamber. The floor is far below and cast in semi-darkness. Writhing shapes deem to cover the floor far below.

‘By the Petty Gods of Social Awkwardness,’ he curses.

The shambling fur-footed figures have encroached upon his balcony, so he is forced to slash and chop. The task is mightily unpleasant. Limbs are severed, heads are removed and still they advance; limbs, heads and Halflings whole. Morgan knows that he shall tire and falter long before they are all attended to.

Weaving madly, Morgan searches for the girl.
She is a distant lump hid among the rafters.

‘There’s nothing more for it,’ he grunts. Morgan executes a lethal series of flourishes, sheathes his blades and leaps, catching at a rusted bar which groans and squeals and sags alarmingly. He quickly swings and shifts his weight to scrabble up into the faint safety of the rafters.

‘Tis like a web of steel and timber,’ he notes, ‘and of great antiquity.’

He regards the run he has just vacated. The undead Halflings press upon one another, eager to reach their prey. Morgan clambers further up and farther in.

Somewhere, a bolt snaps and sounds a faint tremor.

Morgan holds still, even unto his very breath. He carefully frees his glowing orb and surveys the parameters of the chamber.

‘Ah.’

The floor is two score feet below and filled with a village’s worth of furfoot zombies.

‘Mister, get off, get down!’

Morgan looks up to where the child is perched. A sharp retort is framed upon his tongue, but is expelled instead as a cry, for the rivets have failed, joins have ruptured and Morgan falls, bits of scaffolding and rotted rafters cutting the air about him.

There is a great crashing and much rising of the dust. The Halfling girl makes her way up an ancient flue, worming her way to the relative safety of the hill above. It will soon be dawn.

‘Stupid mister,’ she whispers as she climbs. ‘I told him he was too big.’

Sometime later, as she shelters in the comforting boughs of the orchard, happily swinging her stout legs and munching a bright red apple, there comes a rumbling crashing racket. She swings around in time to see the inn slowly sinking into the hill. For several hours, she sits transfixed until the noontide hour threatens. There is a disturbance among the ruin of the inn and a filthy figure crawls slowly out, a broken blade clutched in either hand.

It crawls closer, eventually gaining its feet and stumbles among the orchard.

‘…kill ‘em, kill ‘em all. I’ll kill ‘em, cute little furry feet, I’ll kill ‘em, kill ‘em all…’