North gate creaked open
The wind howled through the cracked battlements of the North Gate—once called Temple Gate in the old tongue—as five young Wall Stormers slipped into the eternal twilight beyond the walls. For one hundred and thirty-seven years, the undead had clotted the lands like a festering wound that would not heal. Inside the city, generations had starved, clawed back from the brink, and forged a desperate new society of scavengers and dreamers. But the lure of the outside world never died. Tales whispered in the taverns spoke of bold lads and even women returning heavy with unimaginable wealth: rusted gold, ancient relics, treasures from a dead civilization. Heroes, they called them.
Gordon—Jordon to those who knew the old pronunciations—led them, his axe gleaming dully in the gray light. Beside him strode Gason (Json), Jreg (Greg), Jayson (Garson), and Geoffrey (Jeffery). They were young, reckless, eyes bright with visions of glory and overflowing pouches of Pg—the pitted coin of the reclaimed world. "We'll return as kings," Gordon had boasted at the gate, ignoring the hollow-eyed guards who muttered warnings about the shadows that lingered too close to the walls.
They had not gone far before the Customs House rose before them, a squat, malevolent tower built into the wall itself. Its stones seemed to drink what little light remained, windows like empty eye sockets staring down at the intruders. "Stay clear," the elders had warned time and again. "That place devours the living. Built wrong. Cursed from the first brick." But youth and greed are deaf. The lads forced the iron-bound door, boots echoing in the dust-choked halls.
The tower fought back.
What happened inside remains a blur of screams and splintering bone. Gordon and Jayson, the strongest warriors among them, vanished into its depths first. A low groan rose from the foundations, like the earth itself awakening. Shadows detached from the walls—rotted hands clawing, jaws unhinging with wet hunger. The survivors fled, hearts hammering, leaving their brothers to whatever fate the Customs House claimed. No bodies were found. Only silence, and the faint, wet sounds of feeding that echoed long after they sealed the door behind them.
Shaken but unbowed, the remaining three pressed on, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and that damned tower. They came upon an old smithy, its forge cold and black, tools scattered as if the smith had simply walked away mid-strike one hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Gason rifled through a warped workbench and uncovered a strange, leather-bound book. Its pages crackled with forbidden knowledge: meticulous notes on the forging of a "sledge hammer," a weapon of terrible weight that could wield a mighty stone head capable of shattering undead skulls like overripe fruit. His fingers trembled as he read—power, real power, lay in those diagrams.
Jreg, meanwhile, discovered yellowed parchments nailed to a beam. They spoke at length of a shadowy deal between the old guilds to complete the Customs House tower. Vast wealth had poured into its construction—gold, labor, secrets. Yet it had been ruined before completion, abandoned in haste. "Something stirred beneath," one note read in a frantic hand. "The stones... they listen."
Emboldened by these finds, they moved to the nearby Guild Hall, its grand doors hanging crooked on rusted hinges. This place felt right for Gason and Jreg—halls of knowledge and craft, ripe for plunder. They scoured the echoing chambers, boots disturbing layers of dust that smelled of rot and forgotten oaths. But the dead do not rest easy.
Jeffery wandered too far into a side gallery. A sickening scrape of bone on stone alerted them. Two zombies—twisted remnants of guild scribes, their quills still clutched in skeletal fingers—pinned him against a crumbling pillar. Their eyes, if they could be called eyes, burned with an ancient, patient malice. Jeffery's screams tore through the hall as decayed hands tore at his leathers. Jreg and Gason charged in, blades flashing. They saved him, barely—hacking the creatures apart in a spray of black ichor that burned where it touched skin. Jeffery gasped, bleeding, eyes wide with the knowledge that the walls had claimed another piece of them.
Yet the Guild Hall yielded treasures amid the horror. Jreg pried open a sealed cabinet and found a cache of rare fountain pens and shimmering ink vials, untouched by time, worth a small fortune—50 Pg at least in the markets behind the walls. Gason, hands still shaking from the fight, unearthed a stack of history books detailing the Northern Temples. Their pages whispered of older horrors, rituals that once bound the dead, and secrets that might explain why the siege had never truly ended.
As the three survivors limped back toward the distant lights of the city, the wind carried new sounds—low, wet laughter from the Customs House tower, and the shuffle of countless feet stirring in the ruins. The wealth they carried felt heavier now, tainted. Gordon and Jayson were gone, swallowed by the bones of the old world. And in the deepening dark, the lads realized the truth that every Wall Stormer eventually learns:
The undead do not simply wait outside the walls.
They *build* the walls. They *haunt* the treasures. And they never let the living leave unchanged.
The North Gate loomed ahead, but behind them, something vast and patient stirred once more. The siege was far from over.
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While we have our misgivings over AI, sometimes I like to dabble and see what direction it goes.. Todays AI written story comes from these notes:
Customs house, no treasure, Gordon dead, Gason dead. Smithy, treasure: lore & metal working. Guildhall, Jeffry fails, but saved, story lore and small treasure, Temple Jeffry dead, treasures found.
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