• The job came down from the guild—clear out the town of Imbus.

No glory in it. Just pay. A flat bounty per head, plus salvage rights. And most of Imbus had already been picked clean by wind, rot, and time.

Once, it had been a proud little place—a fishing village perched stubbornly on the fjorded ice, halfway between the mines of Selvik and the old salt paths along the coast. Not much, but enough for a life. Stone cottages, rope lines, low smokehouses, a shrine to Kveld long since torn down by weather or grief.

Then came the long dark winter two years back. The silence set in like frostbite—first in the hearths, then in the souls. Those who didn’t starve froze. Those who didn’t freeze vanished. And when the thaw came, so too did the dead.

With this past summer being mild, what was buried didn’t stay buried. The ground softened. So did the corpses. Something below the bones began to remember itself. They rose slow and low, like kelp drifting up from black water. And now they wandered again.

The Big Evil Beast rolled in at dusk—smoke-choked, sled-rigged, and bristling with rust-bit armor and salvage spikes. She made more noise than she should’ve, but in these jobs, noise was part of the deal. It was how you let the dead know they were being hunted.

Tarris wanted to join the crew on the ground, blade in hand, boots in slush. But the captain had other ideas. “Nest post, lad,” he barked. “You’ve got eyes and the spine to hold ’em steady.”

So Tarris took the crow’s nest, high atop the BEB’s rigging mast, clutching the crank-handle for the high-lens spotlight. No argument. Just duty. He was a good lad that way. He didn’t drink, didn’t spit, didn’t even snore. But he could sweep a beam straight through mist and not blink, and in these jobs, that mattered more than courage.

From up there, the light could punch through the ruin—the broken nets, the crumpled boats, the slumped remnants of stone homes half-swallowed by moss and thaw rot. Tarris moved the beam slow, deliberate, and that’s when he saw them.

Frozen. Motionless. Scattered like old statues among the stones.

At first, Tarris had taken them for wreckage. But when he swept the beam back, he saw it—their eyes glowing faintly blue through the frost.

Watching him.

They didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. But their gaze tracked the beam as it passed, patient and unblinking. Like wolves in ice. Or mourners beneath glass.

Tarris clenched the spotlight crank tighter, said nothing. Just kept sweeping.

The Greys. Ten of them.

Staggering things in salt-worn coats and barnacle-bit boots. Faces all eaten through. Eyes like rain-polished bone. They’d once been men—some maybe even noble—but here, in the mist, they were nothing more than carrion pulled back on puppet strings.

None of them matched the old work logs. No locals. No fishermen or miners or salt-cutters. These were outsiders.

How they came to rest in Imbus was a question for softer folk. For the men on this crew, the only truth that mattered was that they had risen. And what rises must be put down.

Steel sang. Picks cracked through skull. Hammers met jaw. One of the Greys clung to life longer than it should’ve, gurgling out a sound like a rope stretching underwater.

They say the humans have comfort in their beliefs—that the mind rots before the soul can suffer, that the vessel turns to sludge and whatever once was is long gone.

But the dwarves know better.

The dwarves know the dead do not sleep.

They simply endure. Trapped. The joints lock up. The limbs stiffen. But something beneath the rot remains aware. Eyes open in darkness, unable to scream. Just waiting—for warmth, for movement, for the tide of decay to tilt back toward hunger. And then they rise. Always, they rise.

Dwarves fear that silence more than any scream.

So they burn them. Always.

Flame on cloth. Flame on bone. The smell turns your stomach even when you think it can’t. But it’s the only way. Ash forgets. Smoke forgets. But meat remembers.

As the last of the Greys crumpled under hammer and hook, the captain called the clear. The men didn’t cheer. They didn’t drink. Not yet. They piled the bodies on driftwood and rope and set them alight beneath the northern stars.

Tarris stayed in the nest long after the job was done, watching the glow from above.

The mist was rolling back in, thick and quiet.

The snow began again, soft as breath.

And somewhere deep in the woods past the fjord, something else moved.

But for now, Imbus was still.

And stillness, for a time, would have to do.