Spooktober 2025: Barrow

Previous part Spooktober 2025: Peril   As I crested the mountain peak I looked back. The torches behind me were slowly winding higher, weaving back down the mountain through a tapestry of fog and trees. There must have been hundreds now, though I did not stop to count them. I turned back toward the far side of the mountain and let memory, or instinct, carry me forward on feet that were not entirely my own.   The air thickened, more that it should have for the short decent I had taken, and the ground leveled into a hollow encircled by Standing Stones. A mound rose in the center of the stones, at its peak was a slab carved with a script whose shapes I was growing to recognize, even if the meaning still eluded me.   I had found a barrow.   I knew I should turn back, but I was fully gripped in this insanity now, and did not know what those torch bearers would do to me if they found me. So I approached the mound.   As I did so Starlight seemed to flow down the carvings in my staff, glacial melt flowing through mountain valleys to bring life to the lands below. When that light reached the slab I was standing on, a hum passed through the hollow, a low not felt in my bones (and even more in the throbbing bruise on my chest), and the stone slab shifted, grinding open jsut enough to allow a man to pass through.   Inside the mound the air was warm and dry. Walls glimmered with mineral veins that pulsed faintly, beating in rhythm with my bruised chest. At the chamber’s center rested a sarcophagus of black glass, its surface reflecting my face—or what I thought was mine.   The reflection smiled first.   I stumbled back, heart hammering. The bruise on my chest flared, and for an instant, I was the figure within the glass— crowned in bone, ribs laced with gold wire, hands folded over a staff identical to mine.   They always finds another way back.   The whisper wasn’t from the air this time—it came from my own throat.   I fled the barrow, the weight of that voice clinging to me like wet cloth, the mountain seeming to sigh in satisfaction behind me.   Next Part Spooktober 2025: Sting