Serial: The Road Less Travelled - Part 1 (2026)
You have no sword.
This time, it was her voice.
The closer he got to the dead Man, the more she would make herself heard.
Don’t start a fight when you’re outnumbered.
Double plus one means there’s no way to defend.
Never match a sword against sorcery.
Don’t seek revenge against chaos.
Two wrongs leave two widows.
Never challenge the dead.”
Part 1 starts below. Image: Dark Fable, Etsy.
As the old coaching inn endured the onslaught of a relentless drizzle, Ollie peered from the branches of the tallest tree on the lonely hillside and thought only of revenge. The inn had received no visitors since the first Spring rain and the stout wooden door remained closed, a comforting reassurance that the Dead Man was still inside and was, for the moment at least, very much alive. In that respect, he was a lot like Rabnar’s fabled basement full of emerald wine and had to be seen to be believed.
He’s in there, Ollie thought. I know he is.
The Dead Man was a bump in the road: that’s what old Rabnar would have said had the gods not taken against him in such an unsporting manner on this very site so many moons before. A bump in the road stops your journey: you couldn’t plan for a bump because you couldn’t anticipate it. Some bumps would upset the apple cart, and some would simply slow it down.
The Dead Man was the sort of bump you didn’t recover from: the wheels would crack, the cart would roll, and before you knew what was happening there would be apples everywhere.
When the murky half-light of another dull afternoon gave way to evening, and the glow of the hearth fires began to appear in a few of the ground-floor windows, Ollie pushed back the sleep that had threatened to overcome him earlier in the day and climbed down from his perch in the tree. A tall and exceptionally broad young man with chestnut hair and a patch of beard, he cast a long shadow in the lantern light as he proceeded down the hill and entered the inn from the south gate, making for the nearest of the windows.
You have no sword.
The words, in his old master’s voice, had echoed through Ollie’s head for the best part of an hour and plagued him with the very worst mind-rotting disease it was possible to catch when you were about to attempt something extremely foolish: the truth.
You didn’t break the rules.
Oh, you could fudge a whole chapter of the smaller ones and even dodge a few of the high commands and still walk away with your life.
It was The Rules of Engagement you didn’t break. If you set out to avoid those, you did it on purpose because you felt you were so outmatched that neither common sense nor ancient wisdom was likely to save you.
You have no sword.
This time, it was her voice. The closer he got to the Dead Man, the more she would make herself heard.
Don’t start a fight when you’re outnumbered.
Double plus one means there’s no way to defend.
Never match a sword against sorcery.
Don’t seek revenge against chaos.
Two wrongs leave two widows.
Never challenge the dead.
Ollie raised his hands over his eyes and, sneaking along the south wall of the building, peered through the window at the scene unfolding inside.
I’ve got no fucking sword, he thought.
Inside the inn, shadows lengthened and seemed to creep across the room in odd shapes that bore no relation to the light.
He was attempting to see what was casting them when a sharp noise shook him from his reverie.
Horses.
Two riders approached from the east, hurriedly dismounted and made their way to the gate on foot. Both were cloaked and moved in the conceit of men, either by instinct or design. He waited for one of them to glance in his direction, not least because they were headed right for him…but the rains suddenly intensified, forcing the pair to redouble their efforts. He watched as they made their way inside and quickly found his attention caught between the drama that unfolded when they began to disrobe and draw swords and an explosion of activity at the gate, where something had evidently spooked the horses so badly that they suddenly reared up and bolted in opposite directions. One headed for The Drynwood, a place he couldn’t look upon without remembering countless childhood tales of a vast, unseen menace that lurked between the trees.
Monsters are bad, his grandmother used to say. Men are worse.
The Dead Man certainly was.
When he returned his gaze to the window of the inn, he found a pair of beady eyes looking right back at him. As he started, tumbling backwards into the furze bushes, the face at the glass twisted into a wild rictus, giving the impression of a scream that was all the more deafening for being entirely silent.
Somehow, Ollie felt that he heard the cry inside his head.
The door to the inn exploded outwards, showering the path in wooden splinters. The two visitors staggered from the doorway, wreathed in flame, their own screams entirely audible.
Amidst the chaos, he rolled onto his stomach and scrambled to his feet, making for the wall of the inn. He tripped, stumbled and then crawled on all fours around the side of the building, hoping to discover a stable in which he could hide until the worst had passed.
Despite a large number of dilapidated outbuildings that loomed on the far side of the inn, there were precious few places to take cover. The only structure of any significance was an old, ornamental water well that stood in the middle of the drinking garden and had clearly seen better days. It wasn’t an appealing destination in terms of safety, but he heard the unmistakable blast of fire magic nearby and decided that being caught between the front and rear doors of the inn was an even darker prospect.
As if in an answer to Ollie’s suspicion, some unseen mass crashed against a window he hadn’t even been aware of until the sound of cracking glass drew his attention. When the window remained intact, he launched himself from the wall and, taking the initiative to seek out a shield against any rogue magic, ran headlong for the well.
The rains began to intensify.
A cloaked figure emerged from the devastated ruin of the inn’s entrance, flanked by two overgrown creatures with the craggy grey skin that betrayed both as stone gargoyles. The smaller of the two was a solid wall of muscle and could have passed for a grotesquely human in many of the more populated cities south of the capital, while his companion’s mutated features clearly betrayed a reptilian heritage...yet both moved with the false, awkward attitudes of magical animations.
The Dead Man stole a lead on his servants and began to mutter a series of incantations that held off the worst of the wind and made the raindrops sizzle in the air several feet above the group.
‘The boy was stupid to come back,’ rasped a piercing voice from within the folds of the cowl. A cruelly disfigured hand extended from the sleeve of the cloak and placed a brass circle in the open mitt of the larger brute. ‘Use this to find our foolish friend, then take back what is mine…I’ll wait inside.’ He paused before returning to the inn. ‘Deliver the boy in one piece and do not tarry: I must return to my rest.’
As the pair began to thrash their way across the drinking garden, Ollie quickly scanned the ground for somewhere, anywhere he could hide. The screens of weeping trees surrounding the hillside were too distant, and any attempt he made to reach them would immediately break his cover. Alternately, attempting to outmanoeuvre these monsters in such a confined area would inevitably result in a fight he had no hope of winning. He cursed the impulse that led him to believe he could steal an advantage over an enemy so versed in the dark arts.
Indulging the sort of wild notion that felt like yet another moment of utter madness, Ollie grabbed the rope that draped from the winch and leapt into the well.
The darkness rose to greet him like an old friend as he crashed off the sides of the wall on his journey downwards. Fortunately, it wasn’t much of a drop: he landed on a tangled mass of branch and bone, hoping the crunch he felt beneath him was the snapping of a wooden limb and not one of his own.
No danger of that.
Ollie glanced up at the depressingly short distance between himself and the roof of the well. As the voices in the garden drew nearer, he cursed the mix of grim luck and stupid decisions that had led him to such a fate. Those creatures might not be able to reach in and grab him, but the move had bought him precious little time and no chance of escape. If they wanted to retrieve their master’s treasure, however, they would need to come into the well in order to get it.
Ollie fished around beneath him, trying to lay hands on a branch that might prove sturdy enough to employ as a weapon. Finding nothing of any useful weight, he straightened up, gritted his teeth and prepared for the worst.
The surface beneath him collapsed.
Unable to predict that the pile of wood and old sheep carcasses was merely a nested layer clogging a gap in the well’s narrow depths, Ollie had no time to brace as he plummeted feet-first into the inky blackness below.
This time, the drop didn’t end well.
Ollie plunged into water deep enough to swallow his frame but too shallow to break his fall. His legs crumpling beneath him and his arms flailing helplessly in an effort to hinder the drop, he felt the impact of the landing and swallowed mouthfuls of filthy water before he was able to recover enough to swim for the surface. Coughing and spluttering all manner of unable substances from his throat, he splashed madly in the pool as the last of the broken twigs and branches crashed into the water around him.
Now only vaguely aware of the shadows crowding at the roof of the well, his attention was immediately drawn to a gaping hole in one of the walls not far from where he was awkwardly treading water. If he could gain some purchase on the mouldering stonework, he was confident he could reach the hole and at least have somewhere to hide and regroup before the next dark turn in his fate became apparent.
Scrambling up the stones and into the slimy recess, he quickly realised that the little cave was more of a side passage and soon found himself crawling on his hands and knees in what he wanted to assume was a direction that would take him away from the inn. As he progressed through the tunnel, he found his vision clouded as a deep exhaustion threatened to overcome him: he hadn’t slept more than a few hours in several days, and he felt the tiredness battling the instinctive sense of panic that drove him onwards.
Arriving at a junction in the crawl space, he tried to make a balanced choice but ended up opting for the passage glowing with an eerie green light simply because it seemed to slope downwards and was therefore the easier option. Slipping and sliding along this new chute, he arrived in another shallow pool and soon found himself splashing along a sewer tunnel that promptly terminated in a rock-fall: the only available exit was a narrow arch barely concealing the start of a broken and largely rung-less wooden ladder that appeared to offer some way back to the surface. It also seemed to contain the source of the emerald glow that now lit the entire chamber.
How far had he travelled since he’d entered the well?
Ollie tried to figure the distance he’d managed to place between himself and his pursuers, but even his most optimistic guess would only put him on the borders of the inn and possibly still within view of the drinking garden.
Knowing his choices were limited to retracing his steps in a slippery ascent or attempting to climb what was left of this ladder, he quickly decided that the only way was onward.
He entered the new passageway and reached for the first solid rung he could find, forcing the edge of his boot between the stones to aid his climb. As he began to ascend, he tried and failed to remember how he had attracted so much ill fortune when he’d set out that day with such positive intentions.
*
The night before, as his mother lay on a makeshift bed in the tiny cottage they shared on the edge of Port Drellin, a Priest of Nourish drew near to Ollie and whispered the words no son ever wanted to hear.
‘Death will come for her tonight. She is accursed by her association with your grandmother and attainted by the gods for her lack of remorse: there is little any of us can do for her.’
Ollie watched as the clerical order paraded past his mother’s bed and firmly slammed the cottage door once the last of the acolytes had braved the rains of another dark and gloomy evening.
Kneeling beside his mother, he reached for her tiny, frail hand and squeezed it between both of his own, hoping that she could feel his presence through the pain of her suffering.
‘It doesn’t have to be this way, you know.’
The words had come from his grandmother, who had remained silent in the presence of the priests, despite what Ollie felt sure was a very great provocation.
Nevertheless, the old woman was wicked.
‘You can still save her,’ came the croaked voice.
Ollie peered into the corner of the room at a face so smothered in wrinkles that it was barely even possible to tell the eyes from creases. ‘How? How can such a thing be done? If Death wishes for a new friend, what magic exists that can save her?’
The old woman smiled wistfully and stared into the crackling fire as if she were not sharing a slow tomb with her only daughter. ‘No magic that I possess,’ she admitted, studying the lines on the back of one devilled finger. ‘There was one who did, however: long since past. No misfortune could fell him, no disease could take root in his body, and no blade edge could find the root of his flesh…all thanks to one small trinket. Buried with it, he was.’
‘How can such an immortal be buried? Old woman, your words make no sense.’
‘That’s because you don’t yet understand the exhaustion of life or those who tire of it: the man arranged his own burial and went willingly into his grave.’
‘No man alive would do such a thing.’
‘Shows what little an expensive education has done for you, boy.’
Ollie tried to concentrate all his willpower on prayer…but a sidelong glance at his elderly relative told the old woman everything she needed to know.
‘You will tell me of this man,’ he said, through gritted teeth, angry that his mother’s hour of need gave the old woman such an advantage. ‘No trickery, mind: I’m wise to your deceits.’
His grandmother shrugged. ‘You either want the story…or you don’t: the belief is also yours to apportion.’
‘Tell me.’
So she weaved for him the story of an elderly necromancer who had plied his trade on the edge of Drakewood many years earlier. She told of his life, his death and his subsequent resurrection at the hands of a servant wielding no artefact seen before or since in the magical quarters of Drellin.
‘A timepiece, it was. The sort a gentleman would hang from a fine silk garment. Small, golden, carved on the front with the likeness of a tiny scorpion. Unmistakable to my eyes.’
‘And how were you in a position to make no mistake of it, grandmother?’ Ollie asked, already well versed in the cryptic answers he would regularly get to such questions. ‘Not that I’d expect a straight explanation…even now, when your own blood is at the door of the reaper.’
‘Death comes for us all,’ she muttered. ‘Life is the road less travelled.’
The fire crackled a few times before Elentine Carver spoke again.
‘Your mother and I were apprenticed to an earl who made use of his services,’ the old woman clarified, in a remarkably frank admission. ‘She was barely old enough to take instruction at the time, but even then she showed promise…as do you. I’ve said this many times, Oliver: you’re impulsive, and you have a destructive nature – but the strength of your will has yet to be fully tested.’
Ollie ignored the statement but turned to focus a steely gaze on his grandmother. The old woman had been many things in her long and storied life: witch, wife, mother, thief, prostitute, murderess…but she rarely spoke anything but the truth.
‘The device was buried with him,’ Ollie said, returning to the story but keeping his voice even and toneless. ‘…and where was that, exactly?’
Elentine Carver smiled. ‘You would risk waking the dead?’
‘For my mother,’ said Ollie. ‘I would risk it all.’
*
After a fairly shaky start, Ollie’s only available method of reaching the surface had proved remarkably sturdy. He’d very nearly suffered a single, potentially deadly fall after acquiring a false sense of security from an entire flight of solid rungs that seemed to make up the majority of the ladder’s rotted wooden teeth…and yet the further he climbed, the more decayed each rung seemed. There were some he simply refused to put any weight on, while others appeared steady enough until his foot sank through the wood like a corrosive spirit.
Now bathed in a strong pulse of the green light that clearly originated at the trapdoor now visible a few flights above him, he covered the rest of the distance in just a few minutes, not resting until his fingers found a grip-space on the underside of the barrier. Feeling the strength of the rung on which he stood with both feet, he forced his neck and shoulders into the effort to shift the trapdoor. It gave more easily than he’d imagined it might at first sight and yawned wide.
Ollie peered into a room with glistening green walls and a strange candlelight that burned with a strong emerald fire.
The stories of Rabnar’s basement immediately leapt to mind as he searched the walls for any signs of life beyond the torchlight…but the room was vacant and still. There were no obvious exits aside from the trapdoor through which he now climbed, but Ollie felt sure that he had not discovered an oubliette and, besides, there were far worse places to spend a night.
Studying the flames that hissed and spat from the sconces on opposite walls, he suffered a sudden, overwhelming desire to plunge his hair into the fire and was completely unable to stop himself from taking the action. He watched his hand move through the green inferno for several seconds before managing to summon enough willpower to withdraw it. Upon doing so, however, he now noticed that one of the bricks in the south wall stood slightly proud of the surface. Unsure of whether this had been the case before he’d engaged with the candlelight, he nevertheless pulled at the brick and stood aside as a section of the east wall suddenly creaked open on ancient hinges, revealing what seemed to be some sort of cellar beyond.
Some wonders have to be seen to be believed.
It was difficult not to believe in the legend of Rabnar’s basement when you suddenly found yourself standing in it, and yet the rows and rows of glistening green bottles interred in the walls of the chamber beyond spoke of more than just legend: they spoke the truth.
His troubles momentarily forgotten, Ollie approached the nearest wall and drew out a bottle, wondering at the value a single volume of such a liquid would demand in the merchant’s district and then attempting to imagine the entire value of the little room’s contents. It was shocking the value some folks would put on something so small and fleeting: an experience, a heady intoxication, a taste…
…some courage.
He dashed the bottle against the wall and poured the contents from the broken neck into his mouth, gulping great swallows of the emerald liquid. It burned his throat in the way his father’s whiskey had when he’d stolen a nip as a boy: in many ways, it seemed more like a spirit than any wine he’d ever tasted.
He tried to stand still but knew by the sudden slant of the room that he must be swaying. Then came the flashes: brief, flickering recollections of the fateful night he had begun to weave the first strands of the bitter web in which he now found himself, the night his grandmother had sent him on a fool’s errand that he so willingly embraced.
*
The graveyard surrounding the mouldering chapel perfectly represented the ever-present decay of society in Drellin. Long abandoned tombs with collapsing pillars and unreadable epitaphs stood in undeniable ruin, surrounded by gravestones like rotted teeth that jutted from the ground at odd angles. The entire place reeked of death.
Ollie’s grandmother, never a verbose woman, had been curiously meticulous in her description of the necromancer’s final resting place, a sure sign that the artefact buried with the corpse had been something she felt significant enough to give her a suitable advantage. He had no trouble dismissing the notion that this last-ditch quest to save his mother’s life had been Elentine’s priority when her timely tale of buried necromancers and life-extending timepieces had suddenly been triggered from a memory as finely tuned as a steel trap.
She knew he would seek out the artefact in order to save his mother and that there might subsequently exist an opportunity for her to acquire it. That would happen over Ollie’s own rotting corpse, which may yet prove to be the unavoidable result of this endeavour.
He stomped through the graveyard, a heavy shovel wedged beneath one arm and a crowbar under the other, wondering what his friends would say if they could see him in such a predicament. Ollie had never fitted in at the academy, being too rowdy for a scholar and too sensible for wizardry. He had failed to meet the minimum requirements for the journeyman’s guild, proved too brutally aggressive for the common soldiery and too light on his feet for the shipbuilding companies at the southern docks. Ollie was a square peg in a round hole…and sadly that hole had often proved to be the acceptable shape of choice for young men in Drellin. He had slipped through the cracks and society had spurned him…and little wonder. Although he couldn’t lay all of this misfortune at the feet of his grandmother, her own twisted ambitions in the town had fast-tracked his path on a downward spiral. It became apparent during his childhood that the only thing worse than being a disgraced witch who attempted to overthrow a corrupt council was being related to one.
The rain hammered down as Ollie squelched between lines of warped trees, his eyes fixed firmly on a destination that had been plainly obvious the second he’d passed the gatepost.
One grave occupied a barren scrap of land that remained remarkably unaffected by the decomposition of the environment surrounding it. Bookended by two enormous stone gargoyles that seemed to stand sentinel over the site and garlanded at its base by a strange thread of mist, the grave served as a stark testament to the legendary figure believed to dwell below. All the adjacent stones faced away from it and even the trees seemed to bend outwards in an attempt to veer away from the little scrap of land.
The gravestone itself was enormous, at least twice the size of any in the visible distance: it didn’t contain a single piece of moss, and even the snaking tendrils of the weeds seemed to crowd the base in an unenthusiastic manner.
Ollie walked right up to the grave, tossed aside the crowbar and drove his shovel into the grass with the sort of force a man might use to begin felling a tree. The head of the shovel sank into the ground but had barely tasted the first foot of dirt before it was hurled mightily over the young man’s shoulder. A task like this would invariably take time, and time was not a luxury Ollie could afford.
He simply set his jaw against the rain and drove the shovel down, again and again, pausing only to wipe the water from his eyes as thunder began to grumble in the clouds overhead.
Expecting a lengthy ordeal, he was therefore astonished at how shallow the grave was soon revealed to be when the shovel hit wood barely three feet into the soil.
Ollie frowned, turned the tool over and began to scrape away the remaining layers of dirt, trying not to be unduly perturbed when he noticed that the rain that splashed all around the plot wasn’t actually penetrating the grave itself: the earth beneath him was dry as a bone.
The coffin lid betrayed cheap wood and a rushed, clumsy finish. He’d once worked for a relatively cheap coffin maker just north of the town and even that skinflint would have had a morality crisis about selling such a dud.
Climbing out of the grave to retrieve the crowbar, he steadied himself for the task ahead and then set to opening the coffin with a determination bordering on insanity.
*
Having assured himself that the chamber with the emerald torches was no oubliette, Ollie now felt equally certain that the room he’d come to think of as Rabnar’s fabled basement was indeed a trap of identical purpose: the snare of some magician skilled in the fermenting of wines and the construction of cosmic prisons.
…and, yet, what manner of idiot would store such priceless treasures in a long-forgotten cell?
A dark energy seemed to crackle between the bottles, but he felt sure that the effect had only become apparent after he’d taken his first gulp of the wine. He slapped himself sharply across the face in an effort to restore some sense before taking several deep and measured breaths. Then he closed his eyes and counted to ten beneath his breath before opening them again.
The room swam back into focus, and Ollie stood back to see if there was any pattern to the placing of the racks. There were three large shelving units against the far wall, covered in lichen but freestanding and clearly the work of a master craftsman. He doubted that any of them concealed a secret wall section, partly due to the size of the units but mostly because the bottles were placed precariously enough even without the added risk of the shelves collapsing. No, if there were a secret door in a room such as this…
Ollie found his eyes drawn to the barrel in the corner of the room. Twice the size of any ale cask he had ever seen and placed on its side against the east wall, it offered the only potential cover for anything even remotely resembling a crawl space.
Approaching the barrel, he clasped the lid with both hands and drew it towards him, watching as it gave with a satisfying click. Inside the barrel was a tunnel that ended shortly at the foot of a narrow stone staircase. Taking one final glance at a room to which he silently vowed to return, Ollie crawled inside and – at length, began to ascend the stairs. When he reached an old but recently restored door at the top of the flight, he fancied that he heard movement coming from somewhere beyond.
Placing one hand firmly on the surface of the door, he pushed…and found himself stepping into the cellar of what was quite unmistakably a coaching inn.
The very place he’d been trying to escape.
It was then that a rasping voice not far from his ear whispered. ‘Welcome back, thief.’
*
As lightning illuminated the sky, thunder rumbled across the valley surrounding Drellin.
Ollie looked down at the perfectly preserved corpse of the elderly man inside the coffin and somehow found the lack of decay even more unsettling than the image he’d imagined before prizing open the lid. His grandmother had warned him that the necromancer’s magic might well have frozen his body in its original death state…but seeing the old wretch lay peacefully in a dreamless sleep made the artefact he was clutching even more of a vital prize: all that remained was to see if his grandmother’s predictions would prove accurate.
The corpse was clutching a circular timepiece that looked to all intents and purposes like a large golden coin. It was held lightly in the grip of the necromancer, wedged between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands in a gesture that appeared more ceremonial than protective.
Swallowing back the anxiety that suddenly seized his soul, Ollie took one final, sweeping glance at the environs of the graveyard to ensure that the risk he took was his alone. Duly satisfied that only a madman would enter a graveyard on such a sacrilegious mission, he snatched the watch from the necromancer’s eternal grasp and hastily recoiled from the coffin, clambering out of the grave and pocketing the watch with barely a pause to catch his breath.
A path wound down from the low bulk of Drellin Chapel to a small, broken gate at the edge of the perimeter wall that surrounded the plot. Ollie wasted no time hurtling down the path, reasoning that he could check on the authenticity of the watch once his grandmother was there to advise him. It had certainly been cold to the touch and felt unduly heavy in his pocket, pressing an icy chill against the top of his leg as he ran…
…towards the gargoyles.
Practically running into the stone beast, Ollie frantically diverted and leapt the low wall of the graveyard, pausing only to gasp at the fact that he hadn’t even seen the creature move: it was simply there, in the same way that it had been there at the graveside. Its demeanour was still that of a lumbering hulk of stone brought to life, and yet the distance that it had covered in such a short spell of time….
….such a short spell…
He glanced back towards the grave and was mortified to see the horribly animated corpse of the necromancer hovering in the air over his erstwhile tomb. Moreover, the remaining gargoyle was nowhere to be seen.
Cursing his grandmother for her last words of assurance that such magic would not be unleashed unless the watch itself were pried open, Ollie turned and ran with every ounce of energy he could summon…and he didn’t stop running until the graveyard was a distant speck on the horizon. Determined not to return home and place his mother in dire peril, he gathered his breath and continued to flee, heading for the outskirts of town and the edge of Drellinwood.
His mind racing as madly as his limbs, Ollie tried and failed to think of a way he could evade such an unearthly foe in order to get the vital magic of the watch to his mother. Could such an artefact really be used in the way his grandmother described, or were her words true to form and merely a poisonous persuasion designed to retrieve the true nature of the thing for herself? If the necromancer had been locked in a fugue state while time and tide moved around him, what use was that to his ailing mother? It was more life he sought to buy her, not simply a different form of death.
The old woman had lied by omission when she claimed the necromancer had relinquished his existence due to some creeping, chronic fatigue. He hadn’t simply lain in his grave and given up all rights to the land of the living: instead, he had frozen himself in perpetuity, locked in dreamless sleep and waiting for….
….what, exactly?
It was at this moment that Ollie first began to entertain the idea that his grandmother’s plan was in some way aligned with the aims of the ancient evil in the graveyard and that he had somehow been fed to the necromancer like a lamb to the slaughter, a very specific lamb when common sense might indicate that any wandering idiot would have sufficed?
He wasn’t so sure: the old man had looked familiar.
