Erika opened her eyes, above her the brown rough leather of the tent rustled, all around her she could heard the snores of her comrades and in the distance the scratching. It was so faint, so far away, that she should barely have noticed it but… but something in her gut told her that it wasn't a good noise.

*scritch scritch scritch*

Raising herself up onto her elbows she concentrated, the noise seemed to come from everywhere at once… ah but she could deal with this!

Grinning in the dark Erika activated [Graft: Warg] and listened carefully, it was so strange to hear like this but Erika’s magick let her process the new information, a moment later she had homed in and found the noise was… above her? Yes, above her which meant it was coming from the roof of the vault?

* scritch scritch scritch*

Erika pulled her robe of office on, stroked her hair straight absentmindedly and prowled out of her tent. Outside it was… dark, not even the faintest glow of Sol’s light could be seen around the edges of Yggdrasil’s trunk, the moon hung in the inky black sky and the dark city sat below it, stars glimmered above her which Erika could only just see behind the clouds, all this she could see through the tiny slitted and barred windows. There was no other light… shouldn’t there be?

Erika came to a stop in the darkness, did the people on watch have torches or anything? No, they couldn’t right… people couldn’t sleep if they did?

* scritch scritch scritch*

Erika nodded to herself and took a deep breathe to calm herself before scurrying forwards like a mouse, skittering past the rows of tents Erika smiled as she recognised Katlin’s (a palace of lacquer and leather covered in armour plates) then Bjorn’s (a roughhewn wooden box with a pillow) and finally Alvis’s (A cocoon shape of silk and bone), exiting the field of tents Erika stood in what had once be a sort of vault waiting room, expanding outwards from the stairs and the gleaming vault door. Erika could still taste the Odium in the air so the runes were still working… the stairs didn’t go up either.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

* scritch scritch scritch*

What was that damn noise? Erika shook her head, her warg ears fixed on the roof as she stumbled along the floor. She needed to get to the roof, she needed to…

Erika stopped dead.

“Why?” She muttered in the silence, the musty dustiness of a dead city. They had stayed because they had to, they’d chosen the vault since it was… it was the obvious choice.

They’d checked though, for traps and… they’d closed the door…

The door without a key.

They couldn’t find the key.

* scritch scritch scritch*

Erika didn’t think, she knew she wasn't particularly smart or wise or kind or anything like that, but Erika trusted her intuition more than anything.

She only knew two cross pillar spells, the first was the Gorebeast and the second…

“Magick rises like a flood

I cast you down into the mud

Unleashed by my hand [Burning Blood]”

It burned her core, sucked dry her well, caused pain to shoot like coloured coldness along her arms but Erika managed it, a third circle equivalent spell, a ball of burning blood the size of a droog… which she threw upwards.

Half collapsing half crouching Erika covered herself in her cape of office as the explosion echoed throughout the bank. In the tents to her left Erika heard sudden shouts, oaths, curses and screams, but above her.

Something thumped down next to Erika, then another, then three more. Erika peeked out from under her cloak and saw… something. A twisted caricature of a person, half insect half man, that why the sound had been wrong, why she’d needed to graft just to trace it, the sound wasn't coming from outside, they were already inside the vault, climbing on the damn roof!