Found:
Silver crockery.
An armoury's worth of swords and shields.
Plenty of well-wrought armour.
Scuffed boots - Why are there always boots? Well-preserved, regardless.
Trinkets galore!
The city! From up close, it was so much more stunning! Whoever had constructed this place had skill, means, time and riches to spare. Some of those riches still remained, surely? This place had been avoided for centuries, ever since the inhabitants had just quietly died out.
I don't know how long I spent just wandering the streets. Tunnels, ruins and tombs are nothing new to me, I've been haunting such places almost as long as their undead inhabitants - or so it seems sometimes - but this... was different. It wasn't any of the above. It was a city, as perfect today as it had been when it had been fully occupied. Not a stone was out of place, not a single wall crumbed and yet... it was empty. It didn't feel dead to me. I've been in enough dead places and places of the dead to know what they feel like. They're usually damp, dank, rotten and drippy. This was none of that. It was dry and still. Breathless. If not for the bones lying scattered or heaped in corners, I'd have gotten the sense that this place had never died, it had just paused whilst awaiting new inhabitants.
I happened across a lot of old weaponry. Some, if not most, might have offered some value from historical significance but even had Steel come this far with me, we'd not have been able to carry it alone. Likewise with the armour. Truth be told, this stuff was well enough made that it would have fetched a pretty penny regardless, but I thought it best to seek smaller fare under the circumstances.
It was as my search continued that I happened across a few more inhabitants. Or rather, they happened upon me. Now, granted, I'm not as used to ghosts as I am to wights. Solid foes are so much easier to deal with. Ghosts... not so much. At first, they just sort of... hung around glaring at me. I ignored them. So they found a few more friends and started pressing closer. What exactly were they trying to achieve, I wonder? If they could attack, they'd have done so already and I've suffered more scorn in my lifetime then even their sour faces could muster. They threw in some moans, a bit of wailing and some very angry screams when I uncovered what I can only assume was once the chieftains' vault. If they were trying to scare me then they were stupid as well as stuck. What had I to fear anymore? Nothing was left to me. There was very little that I had ever held dear, little that I had dared to, and even that was lost to me now. Death was far from unwelcome to one with a life like mine, so... what? What could a bunch of ethereal blowhards do to me that I hadn't already suffered or didn't already face daily?
Their faces when I took the ring from the bony finger of their long-dead leader was absolutely priceless!
I considered using one of the old weapons to carve a message into the wall for good measure, but eventually decided against it. "Silver came first" just had too many connotations and whilst not inaccurate in most cases, I wasn't sure that was what I really wanted to convey.
I would have stayed longer. I wanted to stay longer. Alas, I ran horribly low on supplies. If I am to die, it won't be from starvation! Grudging though I was, I returned to the passage, to the door and to bloody, bedamnable, hateful Rohan.
Trust me to end up with impotent ghosts!
