One final time Banyan threw his shoulder into the cell’s rusted gate. Starvation had begun to eat away at what had once been an ample soldier’s frame, but desperation – or simple decay on the part of the iron door – finally came through. Hinges wheezed and popped before giving up, seeing the portal collapse to the flagstones with a crashing echo.
Banyan collapsed with it, grunting as he fell atop the door. Every part of him ached and shivered there in the dark. The fingers of one hand had dipped into a pool of what he hoped was stagnant water and feared was anything but.
Even in their madness, the ghouls will have heard that.
Banyan staggered upright and started running. There was no torchlight down in the castle prison, so he kept close to the wall, fingers questing to find any unseen passages. Occasionally something would hiss at him from the pitch dark. So long as it was a mad-eyed rat and not one of the flesh-eating cannibals that haunted this place, he didn’t care. Banyan didn’t even consider the rest of his patrol’s fate. He didn’t want to.
More by luck than judgement, he found a set of stairs leading up. Here the ghouls had managed to set torches burning, though even these seemed weak, sickly. The reek, too, was somehow worse than even in the dungeon. Someone – something – was cooking.
Crouched in the stairwell, breath wheezing, heart hammering, Banyan found a moment to glance around. The halls here were garlanded; holly smeared with blood hung from the walls, alongside dripping wreaths. He was squinting at them when he realised that they were slick intestines crudely knotted together; the realisation made him retch, though there was nothing in his bubbling stomach to hurl up. Blinking through tears of revulsion, he walked a step or two forwards. Sharp thorns prickled his hands; against the wall here the ghouls had set up some tree that looked like it had been hacked out of a local forest with manic abandon. There was still some Evenswinter snow draped upon it in places. Eyeless, rotting heads hung from its branches like baubles, flesh made blue by the cold.
