Atop the mountain sat the great manor, the Castle Ragothrim, it’s many twisting towers and chambers weaving across the many peaks of the shattered cliffs. The path was thin and winding, climbing slowly up the mountain with the imposing manor glaring down upon it the whole way. It rained upon the path, it rained upon the manor, it rained upon the entire countryside and the rain drained down into the cracks in the shattered mountain and fed the cold depths beneath. The cold depths that rose and rose, making their own way toward the manor.

On the path a figure walked, hunched and wrapped in a thick cloak they dragged a small cart behind them covered in a black pall. Before them they carried a staff with a lantern swinging and swaying on the end. The figure climbed and atop them beat the rain and above them glared the manor and around them burned the cold.

The figure made it to the imposing gates, iron bars spiked and thin, held closed with a metal lock in the shape of a human skull, the symbol of Ragoth. They did not wait long before Shaoul Ragoth emerged. He was human, so it was said, but his sunken eyes and pale face filled with thin thin lines told of something else. The figure asked not what though, they were not paid to ask.

Shaoul unlocked the gates and the figure trundled in, leading their cart behind them. The gates closed with a clang and together they walked into the castle proper. Shaoul thin and imposing in his black fitted clothes, the figure hunched and small, their lantern swinging before them.

Inside the rest of the castle waited for them. The family of King Vickard Ragoth and their household. Shaoul and his lined face unsettled them but they have lived with him for a long time and have grown used to it. They understand what he does and they accept it easily. None of them understand what the Bone Collector does and they have a hard time accepting it.

The Bone Collector took off their cloak and set aside the great staff with the dangling lantern. Then they followed Shaoul to the King’s bedroom, behind them the cart, and behind that the whispers.

Loran Ragoth sat calmly in a plush chair and watched them go. “What sort of man be that?” he asked his wife standing tautly beside him.

His wife is Eyr Ragoth and she is the king’s eldest true child, she is pale and cold just as the rest of her family and like them she wears old clothes magnificent in their day but now worn of colour. “That is no man,” she replied. “That is the Bone Collector.” She said no more.

Loran shrugged and snorted softly in derision. She didn’t like talking much, his wife. None of them did in this castle.

The children were gathered as well, they sat in the middle of all the adults and played with their toy soldiers. No one wanted to tell them what was going on. Bremin Ragoth knew though, he’d heard the screams when they’d found the king and he knew what it meant when the Bone Collector arrived. His soldiers hung uselessly in his hands as he stared off down the corridor where the cart had trundled along.

In the bedroom of the king the Bone Collector was setting up. They had taken out their instruments from the cart and were picking over the dead body. Shaoul stood by and watched, no expression on his face, there rarely was.

“The water is rising,” the Bone Collector said as they worked. “Soon the castle itself may flood.”

“That is none of your concern,” Shaoul replied, still watching with his sunken eyes.

“It becomes my concern when you and your family can no longer live here,” the Bone Collector began to cut. “Who will pay me then? There are few in the market for my kind of work.”

“Perhaps you can find work as a pack horse, you drag that cart of yours so well.”

“Perhaps,” they whispered. “Are you going to stand there all night? This will take hours.”

“I will leave then, if you need anything ask for me, and don’t let anyone else in here until you’re finished.”

“Don’t worry Shaoul, I have been doing this for a long time. No one else will enter.”

Shaoul left and strolled away to his own quarters. Meanwhile the rest of the castle remained together in the front room, whispering and muttering to themselves.

Loran grew impatient, he only recently arrived in the castle and is unaccustomed to the way things are done there. “How long are we going to wait here?” he asked his wife.

She shrugs, marring her perfect posture just briefly. “Last time it was all night.”

“All night? Are we forbidden from the rest of the castle for the entire night?”

“No, it is just safer we remain here.”

“Safer? What is this Bone Collector going to do to us if we leave?”

Her voice drops and she whispers, barely audible against the rain outside. “It is not the Bone Collector who is dangerous.”

“What, Shaoul? It is high time you all stopped fearing him for those thin lines all over his face.” Loran leapt from his chair and strode away into the castle, the rest of them watched him go. Eyr reached to try and stop him but he was already gone. Gone before she could tell him it wasn’t Shaoul either that they should be afraid of.

On the walls of the castle stood a guard. She looked out into the rain with beady black eyes. She peered between the walls and looked down into the lake below, onto the ripples that splayed out across it with every raindrop running off the castle walls. A figure ran past her and she started, falling from her perch. She plummeted toward the water, through the walls and cliffs of the castle. Then she spread her wings and flew off to her master.

Loran, stomping through the rain, shooed at the bat as it fluttered past.

Eyr Ragoth strode calmly through the castle after her husband. There was a great commotion back at the gathering as to why he would leave like this. Why she couldn’t keep him under control. Why she should never have brought in an outsider into their family the way she had.

She felt sad about all that. She had tried and Shaoul and the King had given her their blessing for she had truly loved Loran. But she found it difficult to tell him things, often she didn’t realise she needed to tell him them at all. To her they always seemed so obvious. She hoped that he would be okay.

She reached their room and entered it, searching for him. It was dark and cold, nothing had been touched since they’d left it to join the gathering hours before. She had lost Loran in the confusion and he apparently hadn’t come this way. Where was he then? She thought but she didn’t think very much before she heard footsteps behind her, footsteps that did not belong to him.

The Bone Collector worked in silence, taking instrument after instrument from their cart to the king. Working slowly and carefully and cleaning everything as they did so. It was slow work, painfully slow, and painfully exact as well. Yet there was a time limit, the Bone Collector was well aware of the pressing time limit.

There was a knock on the door and they stopped slowly, careful not to start at the sound and upset the delicate exactitude. They carefully set down the tools and called out to the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me,” said Bremin from the other side of the door. The Bone Collector frowned, it had been a long time since they’d seen the young prince and couldn’t place the voice.

“Who is me?” they asked.

“Bremin Ragoth, son of-”

“Yes yes I see,” they remembered him now. “What do you want?”

“I am looking for Shaoul. Is he there?”

“No, I believe he is in his chambers.”

“Thank you,” Bremin replied and he walked off. The Bone Collector waited to be sure he was gone and then picked up their instruments again. Now it was time to start on the bones.

“You are lost Bremin?” Eyr said to the boy behind her, slowly turning.

“No,” he replied. “I followed you.”

“And why would you do that?” she asked, reaching into one of the pockets on her faded old dress.

“Because you wandered off. It’s dangerous to wander off.”

“Exceedingly so,” she said and felt the cold hilt of her dagger. Her heart was hammering in her chest but she remained tall and composed, she looked down at the boy. He was unarmed, but on his shoulder sat his bat. Some part of her knew she should have gotten one of those from Shaoul instead of his blessing on her husband.

The bat was fast but she was faster, embedding her dagger deep into its throat as it flew toward her face. But it still slammed into her and by then it had grown to the size of a large dog. She cracked her face against the hard floor and slid into her bedroom, the vampire sliding after her and still growing. Bremin slammed the doors of the room behind them and rammed a chest in front of them, ignoring the scuffling and scrabbling from within as they fought. Then he went to speak to the Bone Collector.

Loran did not like Castle Ragothrim much, it was cold and dark and always raining. But worst of all he was constantly getting lost, so it was a long time before he arrived at Shaoul’s chambers, having built up just enough time to grow increasingly annoyed. He knocked loudly and Shaoul answered coldly from within.

“Loran?” he asked, no one else in the house would knock in such a way.

“Yes may I speak with you?”

Shaoul had not sighed in exasperation since he’d fallen from the tower long ago, he had hardly been the emotive type before then either. But Loran had a way of making him feel all sorts of frustration he’d never had to worry about before. What did his sister see in him he often wondered.

“Yes you may enter,” he said and Loran entered, wet from his walk on the battlements. There were ways through the castle that reached Shaoul’s chambers without going outside but Loran was not permitted to know them. “What is it you wish to discuss?” Shaoul asked from his desk where he had been writing a letter.

“I would like to know what it is that’s going on here! I want to know what exactly you’ve done to make all the rest of this castle so utterly terrified of you so as to stay in one room for fear! I would like to know what scheme you’ve cooked up with this Bone Collector so that you suddenly rule the place when the king dies and more importantly I want you to know that I’m having none of it! I am not afraid of you just because you look sick and frail and have a few lines on your face! Eyr’s told me you’re a bastard son and you have no claim to the crown so I won’t have you-!”

“I have done nothing to make anyone in this castle fear me,” Shaoul said calmly. He said everything calmly but he was considering breaking that tradition. “I am the castellan, I watch over the day to day affairs and I make no pretensions at claiming the crown. But I am not a bastard,” he dropped his voice for that and glared up at Loran with cold dead eyes. “I am a natural son of the king just as Eyr is his natural daughter.”

“She is his oldest true child! His heir! How else would-!”

“Am I interrupting something?” Bremin asked from behind them and Loran spun around to look at him.

“What are you?” he began.

“I merely wish to speak with you Loran, in private,” he said politely, looking toward Shaoul fearfully. “About him,” he whispered.

“Well I-”

Shaoul stood up now and glared down at them coldly. “I may not like Loran child but this is blatant even for you. He does not know our traditions or our manners and I will not let you take advantage like this right in front of me.”

Bremin looked surprised, he was ignoring Loran and staring at Shaoul, thinking hard.

Loran was sick of being ignored. “Just what do you-”

“He’s trying to stop me from helping you,” Bremin said. “He needs to be stopped, we must throw him from the window.”

Shaoul sat back down. “As if he’ll believe that.”

Loran was very confused. He looked at Shaoul, then at Bremin, then at Shaoul again. Then Bremin lunged, drawing a knife from somewhere he came at Loran’s throat while he was looking away. But Loran had trained long and hard in days gone by, many a time with Eyr as they’d fallen in love. He was not going to be skewered by a child.

Bremin felt an arm, impossibly strong, push his knife away. Then he felt something hard and fast slam into his face and he crashed to the floor, blood splattering from his nose. Loran took the knife and pointed it at Bremin, then at Shaoul.

“What is-?”

“He’s trying to usurp the crown,” Shaoul said calmly, getting back to writing his letter. “Once I was the heir but then I died and the Bone Collector brought me back, as he is now doing to the king. But a dead man cannot rule the living so the crown will pass to Eyr and her children rather than me and my children,” he looked down at Bremin. “Unless of course my child were to dispose of you and Eyr, then the crown would pass to him.”

“But-”

“I’d imagine the vampire I gave him would have been sent after Eyr while he thought he could kill you without one. Very foolish, I’m almost ashamed I raised him that way.”

“So the danger was-”

“Was the rest of the family? Not me or the Bone Collector? Why of course, we have no motive to hurt anyone.”

“Actually I was going to say the danger was the vampire.”

“Oh yes that’s also true, I suppose you’d better go find Eyr and make sure she’s alright.”

Loran looked down at Bremin who was trying desperately to stop bleeding. He couldn’t do the cold calculating look the Ragoth family had so perfected but he could still glare and he could put all his passion and fury behind it. The knife held in the bloody hand helped too.

“She’s in your bedroom,” Bremin squeaked and then Loran was gone.

Bremin lay on the floor and cried. Shaoul finished his letter and tied it to one of the vampires he bred. He sent her off into the night and then knelt down on the floor to help his son.

Eyr staggered hurriedly to her feet and watched the shifting growing form of the vampire do the same. It was coughing and hacking at the knife in its throat but it took more than that to kill a vampire. She grabbed her sword from the umbrella stand and fell into a fighting stance, it felt wrong doing it in a dress but she’d have to adjust.

The vampire climbed onto the bed, bleeding everywhere, and glared at her with black eyes. Then it screamed and it took all the willpower she had not to cover her ears and curl up in a corner, so high was the pitch.

It lunged and still reeling from the scream her cut was clumsy and it skipped out of the way, scrabbling along the wall with its bat claws, its wings splayed out around it. She cut at it and it jumped over the sword, huge fangs opening toward her throat. She let go of the sword as its body crashed into her and grabbed the pommel of the knife, buried in its throat, forcing its snapping jaws away.

She crashed to the ground beneath it and felt her head crack against the stone floor but she held strong and pushed it away. It screamed and thrashed on the end of the knife, its claws cutting huge rents in her dress and in her skin, but she didn’t give in. Still she pushed and the pommel drove deeper and deeper into its throat, into its neck, and into its spine.

It slowly stopped thrashing and collapsed on top of her, its reeking bat fur filling her nose, but she was too tired to move it. Loran found her there and tore the vampire corpse off her before wrapping her up in his arms. They locked the door and waited there, covered in blood, and waited for the Bone Collector to finish their macabre work.

King Vickard Ragoth emerged from his bedroom and slowly descended into the front room where his family awaited. They were all still waiting there, unwilling to brave the castle because while there was no king the traditions said that the old laws took effect. There weren’t many old laws.

They watched him walk down the corridor, followed by the Bone Collector, dragging the cart behind them. The king’s skin was pale and his eyes were sunken and his face was covered in thin thin lines. Lines that had once been cuts made to open up the skin and replace the bones.

He spoke with his family and heard from Shaoul all that had happened. He persuaded Eyr and Loran to emerge and then took the crown from his head and placed it on the head of his daughter. For the dead cannot rule the living.

The figure descended the mountain, walking away from the towering castle and the shattered cliffs. They held their swaying lantern in front of them and dragged their cart down the winding path. They had fixed the king in time, they were proud of that. Bone collecting was tricky, you had to get all the bones back in before the rot began. Now the king’s bones were under the pall in the cart, trundling along behind.

The sun was rising but the Bone Collector didn’t extinguish their lantern, it wasn’t just for seeing in the night. The path continued on down the mountain but they didn’t take it, they turned off and went down another path, a secret path. A path leading into the cold depths of the mountain, the cold depths filled with water.

The path didn’t go far before it reached the water, time was you had to go all the way to the bottom to get there. Now it was just a few steps, soon there would be no path at all. By the path were moorings with ropes tied to them that disappeared into the lake. Some of the moorings were already under the water, the Bone Collector would need to move them soon. They took off the pall and gathered up the king’s bones in a sack, tying it firmly to prevent any of them from escaping. They drove in a new mooring and tied the sack to it with a long rope. Then they cast the bones of King Vickard Ragoth into the Lake of Zarapeth, to soak and prepare for the next Bone Collection.