Role

Chapter 1

Tombury Blackblood's mama lost her ass,
got knocked up by some dark-elf bloke
Tombury Blackblood was top o' his class,
cut people open and fixed what was broke

Tombury Blackblood went to the battlefield,
swooned like a lass and was piled with the dead
Tombury Blackblood woke up sick'n squealed,
somethin' snapped deep inside o' his head

Tombury Blackblood's crazy as a loon,
pray he ain't comin' to fix you soon

- Child's rhyme in the townships of Seven Pines and Easthaven, northeast of
Voralian City

It doesn't take long for dead bodies to stiffen - just a few hours. Most
people know that. After a few days, though, they soften up and bloat with gas
as they rot. Most people don't know that. And almost nobody knows that like
Tombury Cooper.

There he was, tossed into a pile of dead dark-elven bodies, after a
particularly brutal skirmish in the mountains north of Voralian City. He was
there as a field medic for the Voralian guard.

He passed out as he witnessed his first bloody battle and fell into muck.
Unfortunately, he looked very much like his drowish father, and some soldiers
- either due to an honest mistake or to torment the half-breed, piled him in
with the dead.

And so he slept atop a soft pillow of bloated corpses, within a tangled cage
of stiff bodies, still luke-warm and intertwined in a rigid orgy of decay.

Imagine the horror when poor Tombury woke up.

You can't.