The forest which surrounded the Lichyard was known as the Blackwoods, and that name was one made very literal by the shade of the bark upon every tree in sight. The trees were black, almost solidly, with streaks and stripes of grey from the undergrowth and bark beneath the surface. Branches that splintered off were bone-white in the center. The woods were devoid of color, and in a sense it made the woods feel devoid of life itself.

Which wasn’t lessened at all by the movements of mindless skeletons between the trees. Though there was motion, it was made by avatars of death and unlife. Skeletons mindlessly shuffled through the trees. They saw the narrow passes and thick canopy as if it was their stoney womb of the catacomb tunnels. Their eyes were blank, or rarely, had flickers of light within them like distant candles wafting in a lethal breeze.

One skeleton had bright, blue eyes, sparked with a madness of individuality beyond the reach of the rest of his kind. His eyes stood out like beacons and warning lights in the deep mid-day darkness which only grew darker as his lost wandering continued.

Ozzy crept through the bush as silently as he could. His steps were light, aided mostly by the lightness of his body. He was less than 30 pounds from toe to skull. Even walking normally across the grass made nearly no sound, and he chose to creep very stealthily. He was silent, but visibly still easily compromised. He was a mass of starched white stuck in an environment of deep black and grey.

His only real destination was away from the lichyard. He could still sense it, through the blind mass of trees, at his back. It was an ominous presence, a chill through a wall he could feel. He had no compulsion to return, only to flee.

Ozzy stopped for a moment to collect his thoughts. He stayed covered in a small patch of trees and watched as a few wavering specters of bone in the distance walked toward one another. The two mindless skeletons saw one another, then turned away and walked in separate ways. Their patrols did not intersect. They were vapid, but not completely instinct driven. Their mission was still to protect the entrance to their home.

I’ve been walking for twenty minutes or so and I haven’t found a road. The path from the gate just led to a ditch. I could double-back and circle the exterior of the lichyard but….

Ozzy felt a disgust deep in the pit of his body, where his stomach should have been.

The one thing I have hope for is in talking. If I can find some living people and convince them I’m harmless they might be able to lead me further away from here. Or no - I should be the one leading them! Marrowbane is a monster, there’s no way any normal person could fight him!

….

He looked at his hand.

They might not be normal people. From what I’ve seen so far nothing is normal. The people might be strong enough to survive. But still….what can I do to help them? How can I be a hero?

Ozzy sat in the dark forest for a while with one thought laying heavy in his head. It rolled around on the inside of his skull like a loose ball bearing, like a single nut in a tree hollow. How could he be the hero he said he would be? Hero to whom, for what? It was still his only clear ambition, the only goal that brought him joy to think about.

The thought made him drift back to his old memories of his life before. The thought of saving someone in the road took precedence over his own livelihood just long enough to push them away and end his own life. Before then was a messy blur of random snippets, pieces and parts of his human history that weren’t clear in his mind’s eye.

Then he found a flash of inspiration. A short glimpse to his further past, his childhood. Back when he was much shorter. He remembered standing in front of a scared girl as three boys surrounded him. They were on a playground in broad daylight, but their shadows loomed over him. They were bigger, they outnumbered him, but he stood dauntless before them.

“I’ll take you all on!” Ozzy’s past self declared bravely. “You won’t get her!”

He remembered them swarming him, picking him up and throwing him down a grassy hill. The tumble was short and sore but not all that painful. He felt much more grateful than anything. Grateful to protect another. And then another memory came to him, of the girl smiling at him. It was bleary not from his amnesia but from the way he first saw it through bruised and swollen eyes.

I’ve always wanted to be a hero. To protect people. But those people were weaker than me. They were in danger that I could prevent. Right now, I’m the weak one, and I’ve needed the most protection. Sort of. I mean, I did obliterate a pretty important undead guy. If I can just tap into that power again….

Ozzy focused on his hand. He laid it flat out like he did before and tried to remember that exact moment. The eruption of light, blue like his eyes, was clear in his mind. His feeling at that time was one of quiet determination, a resolve to do well. A very slight sense of heroism.

The wind blew. Nothing happened. He didn’t even feel the chill of the dead forest’s air. But he did feel the dread of failure. There was some power within him he couldn’t wrench out or make use of. He was strong in a way he didn’t know, and it pained him to know that.

Ozzy’s quiet lament was disturbed by sounds nearby. He heard a clatter over the brushing wind through the dead trees. He looked over and saw the wandering skeletons joined up to make a lurching jog through the woods. They were approaching something. Or someone.

Someone who might need help.

Ozzy picked himself up and ran through the woods without a plan. He was mid-step in a long, airy leap when he realized what he was doing and tried his hardest to think before he arrived. He couldn’t do much, and from an outsider’s perspective, he would surely just be another charging skeleton added to the mass. That thought pushed him upward. He jumped up for a low hanging branch and started to climb through the upper boughs of trees as he neared the covered path in the forest.

He held his vantage overhead and watched the scene from below. There were people, real actual humans, wearing medieval armor and tunics out of a ye olde faire ground. Three of them, two men and one woman.

One man with a dark goatee and a tight chain-link coif around his head wielded a flain which he swung into and through the fragile skull of a skeleton guard. The other man had a tall shield rimmed with studded metal which he rammed into the throat of a skeleton, shattering vertebrae which toppled its skull off whole. The headless skeleton fought on with claw-swipes of its stabby fingers, and he finished it off with a thrust of his long-handled hammer.

The woman of the group stayed in the back with a long staff that held a brilliant opal jewel at its top which glimmered with a radiant aura. It lit up the colors of their tunics, the eggshell whites checkered with grassy green, the first lively looking color Ozzy had seen since he was given his skeletal eyes.

The skeletons fell one by one in fascinating ways. Even disassembled they could still fight. Once their skulls were thoroughly smashed, the bodies connected to them went limp and disassembled on the ground as just piles. Then, in the light of the staff, they disintegrated and left behind nothing but lumps of hard crust on the ground.

“Miserable things,” the goatee’d knight grumbled. The group looked around as they recuperated. The shieldbearer took point and held his long hammer up like a spear on the corner of his tall shield. The woman in the back wiped her brown with her sleeve.

They speak English! Ozzy silently exclaimed. He pumped his fist affirmatively. Communication was possible! His slight movement drew the attention of the staff-bearer, who looked up at him with an initial reaction of worry and then rage.

“Up above!” she called. She pointed her staff at Ozzy. The light flooded into his eyes and blinded him with a flash of white.

“KKKKKHHHHH!!!!!” he hissed. His body was rocked from its rest and he fell down a foot through the branches, only to remain tangled up in them a little further down.

“Careful,” the goateed man said. “It’s preparing to attack.”

The light faded from Ozzy’s sight. He managed to recover and found himself in a hammock of dead branches.

“Wait a -.”

He tried to plead for peace but the branches beneath him started to give way. Some lodged themselves through his ribs and pelvis. When he sat up to talk he snapped them off and loosened the platform he was on. Then he slipped and fell all the way through with a panicked shout. Ozzy landed on his feet and hopped out into the carven path, face to face with humans for the first time. They didn’t like him.

He held his hands out, which made them flinch, so he raised them up high over his head. They flinched again, certain he was about to do something. He held still and hoped for peace.

“Uh,” he began, “I -.”

“Before it can make its magic,” the goatee man instructed. The shieldman stepped forward with his hammer-spear in a thrusting position. Ozzy hopped back along the path.

“Don’t let it get away,” the woman called.

“Wait a second!” Ozzy insisted. The knight stopped in place. He looked gobsmacked. The other two were speechless. Ozzy had taken them by surprise at last, with his unfounded ability to speak. “Okay. Please. I don’t mean any harm. I’m just….lost.”

The goatee man looked at the woman with shock on his face, which twisted into fury. “What sort of trick is this?” he asked, exasperated.

She held up her staff once more. A beam of light glanced over Ozzy’s body. He held his hands up to block his eyes until the brightness faded.

“It is no trick,” she said. “It is a skeleton.”

“Y-yes,” Ozzy admitted. “I came from the lichyard - which is a bad place! There’s a giant in there, made of hundreds of skeletons! It’s dangerous, you should turn back -.”

“What a novel tactic,” the shielded knight proclaimed. “The Lich cannot stop us with force, so it’s sent a false ambassador to discourage us with confusion.”

“I’m just trying to -.”

“Pay it no mind,” the goatee man said. “Strike it down and let us be on our way.”

“Hey! I’m not -.”

“Their dark magic grows stronger,” the woman declared. “I could not even sense evil within him, it is veiled by some other force.”

“I’m not evil! I -.”

The knight thrust his hammer forward and ended the tip at Ozzy’s face. “Just hold still,” he warned. “I’ll send you back to your master.”

Ozzy was interrupted one time too many. Even with heroic ambitions, with a heart full of help, he still had a limit. He grabbed the hammer end and yanked it to the side, much to the surprise of the knight who held it.

“Shut up!” Ozzy demanded. He spoke with the forcefulness of an insulted human - with his soul deep inside his skeleton body. “I’m trying to help you out! I’ve seen what’s waiting in that graveyard and you three aren’t enough to handle it! If you’re scared of unarmed skeletons wandering around mindlessly in the woods you’re not going to last a single minute against what’s coming up next. And that’s even before you enter the underground. I’m telling you this for your own good: Turn. Back. Now!”

The group took a moment to consider Ozzy’s words. First, they considered that such words of stern warning came from a skeleton, their sworn enemy. That gave them the determination they needed to turn on him with even greater ire than before.

Ozzy could see he was in far greater danger than they were. He turned to the woods and made a break for the dark before the long hammer could lift up and swing his way. He heard the woosh of iron through the air after him as he sprinted through the trees. He ran past a few skeletons on his way who all turned to fill in for him.

You’re all in danger too!

Ozzy ran blindly until he stumbled into another clearing, and found himself at a small encampment of four ragged looking warriors in flowing garments. They looked like they were wearing fancy living room rugs and curtains, but as clothes.

“Skeelig!” one shouted. The woman stood up and drew a long staff with a curved ax blade on the end. “Wer dis austag vurm di skeelig mos?”

“Uh,” Ozzy began, with his hand held up in peace. “Friends? Friendly? Not a threat?” It was his worst nightmare come true. Not just hostile humans - hostile humans that didn’t speak his language.

“Hmph,” a larger, thicker woman scoffed as she stood up - nearly seven feet tall. “Ey vurm Tahlly skeelig , mos di valm uhs maekilrik.”

The band, all women, shared a derisive laugh. Ozzy ushered up a timid, frightened laugh with them. Then the biggest woman picked up the log she sat on, one adorned with carvings and scrimshaw of large humans crushing smaller beings with heavy rocks and trees held like great hammers. A hieroglyphic premonition of her intention.

Ozzy clearly knew he would get nowhere by staying, so he ran once more into the dark of the woods, hopeful that if he ran far enough in one direction he’d manage to reach the edge. It wasn’t just skeletons that made the Blackwood frightening. Any human that entered knowing full well that it was populated with the horrors of the underground was strong enough to be a threat. He finally understood why a monster like Marrowbane was needed above ground in the first place.

He wondered if he’d ever see Marrowbane again….