The explosions and voices outside woke Trollope.
The mayor was exactly as Dorn the thief had described him: shriveled all over, like a corpse that had just crawled out of its coffin.
Anyone standing near him would also feel waves of icy cold.
That was a special trait of a "Wraith."
Yes, Trollope was a Sequence 5 Wraith.
At that moment...
He went to the window and looked outside, seeing flames everywhere in town.
They were under attack.
Hurried footsteps sounded outside, followed by a knock at the door.
"Something's happened, Lord Trollope."
"We're being attacked by thieves from the Starfall Mountains."
The door opened, and a man in a worn jacket rushed in to report the situation in town.
After listening, Trollope shook his head. "No, if they were merely thieves..."
"They couldn't possibly have dealt us such a heavy blow."
"Take a few men and head down the Shadowy Mountain Path to notify the outpost at once."
The man in the worn jacket hurried away.
Trollope then took out a flute made of bone and blew hard into it.
Although it made almost no sound, he could feel spirituality rippling.
However...
His messenger did not appear.
Trollope had intended to use his messenger to report the situation here to Abidos immediately.
Yet his messenger had failed to appear?
Trollope immediately realized something was wrong.
Pale flames suddenly ignited in his eyes.
In the garden behind the house, the soil suddenly loosened, and pale hands reached out of the ground.
Some of those hands were so badly rotted that their bones were exposed.
Fat maggots wriggled in and out of the skin of others.
Corpses crawled out of the garden soil, men and women, old and young.
They were all zombies.
Then...
Transparent phantoms flew out of the garden's