1055: Story 1055: The Warlock’s Tomb 1055: Story 1055: The Warlock’s Tomb In the southern swamp of Daggerfen, where lantern bugs glow green and the fog tastes of copper, there lies a tomb older than memory.
Buried beneath layers of time, moss, and madness, it waits—unopened since the world was still sane.
They say a warlock lies within.
Not dead, but dreaming.
And he dreams of return.
Juno Morell, a graverobber with debts in every corner of the Deadlands, had heard the rumors.
She didn’t believe in stories—not until a map carved into a flayed man’s back led her to a twisted willow that bled black sap when touched.
Beneath it, a staircase spiraled into the earth.
Torch in hand, she descended into the dark.
The tomb pulsed with unnatural life.
Walls of bone, stitched with sinew.
Runes carved in languages that didn’t obey the laws of time.
Stone coffins lined the chamber—each filled not with corpses, but offerings.
Skulls with mouths sewn shut.
Jars of weeping blood.
Still-beating hearts in iron cages.
In the center stood a sarcophagus made of obsidian and bound in chains made from vertebrae.
Juno grinned.
Gold or eldritch—she’d take either.
She cracked the seal.
The tomb exhaled.
A wave of rot and lightning poured from the broken lid.
The torches blew out.
Juno stumbled backward, blade drawn, but the warlock didn’t rise—not yet.
Instead, shadows oozed from the crypt’s corners.
Tall, thin silhouettes with elongated limbs and stitched faces.
Caretakers.
They bowed to the coffin.
Then turned toward her.
Juno fought like the desperate do—wild and without grace.
She shattered one with salt bullets, another with fire.
But they kept coming, whispering praises to their buried god.
Behind her, the warlock stirred.
Not flesh.
Not ghost.
A being of runes and ash, draped in cloaks of whispering fog, with a face that flickered between a thousand lives.
His voice came from the stones themselves.
“Who awakens me with greed in their blood?”
Juno tried to run.
Chains shot from the walls, wrapping her limbs, pulling her toward the sarcophagus.
The warlock leaned close, his eyes endless galaxies of decay and fire.
“You have opened my door.
Now wear my key.”
The tomb sealed again.
The willow above wept black blood into the marsh.
And Juno Morell?
She walks now by night, her eyes aglow with forgotten runes, her skin stretched tight with hexes.
A wraith-bound, servant of the old magicks, whispering riddles to passing wanderers and dragging the curious beneath the roots.
The warlock dreams once more, now through her.
Waiting to walk again.