A/N: Check it out, I'm alive. I spent November doing Nanowrimo, which I did win, at 50k exactly - and let me tell you, that was an interesting feeling - and maybe I'll put up my nano here, but probably it will just stay in the livejournal I have set as my homepage. Anyway, here I am, going to try to update this again, so long as life doesn't eat me alive.

Hardly had the girl's cry registered in the boy's ear than he was halfway and more across the courtyard, passing the knight, who gave a cry of bewilderment and gave chase, demanding that he stop and explain himself. But having already decided that he would only obey the knight when the man spoke sense and fearing for the girl's safety besides, the boy ignored the order and pelted yet harder for the door.

He heard the jingle of the knight's mail and the pounding of his heavy boots behind him, but he did not turn and look. There were no more calls from inside the abandoned fortress, and as the boy all but flew through the still-open door, he was already certain that he would find the worst.

But instead of the bloody scene his imagination painted, the entry hall was dim and cool, and the girl, with no visible injury, clung to the neck of the singer, who also appeared to be unharmed. The boy halted, nearly tumbling over his own feet in the process, and felt his brows draw inward in perplexity. Why had she screamed, if nothing was wrong?

"Were you not tending the beasts, boy?" the singer wanted to know, and the boy chewed his lip. If there was indeed no trouble, he had done wrong by leaving his post, but if there had been, he would have done wrong by staying. He decided to look about and see if there was something that might have startled the girl, and if not, then he would return immediately to his task.

The hall in which they stood was high-ceilinged and echoing. Where the doors stood, it was only, if that were indeed the correct term, only as wide as the village green at home, but then it broadened and the ceiling rose even higher. On either side of this larger hall were two stone staircases, which each led up to a collonaded gallery with doors branching off at regular intervals. In the center of all this, on the same level as where they four stood - for the knight had arrived again by now, and he was watching the boy's explorations with his torch held high - there was an immense table, covered with a curiously preserved cloth and with the desiccated remains of a splendid meal still arranged on tarnished silver dishes, with tall candelabras spaced evenly along its length, with wax congealed all the way down to the cloth and no candles left to speak of.

In the dust of the floor, there were the singer's footprints, leading to a carved chair that had been pulled out of line with the rest, and then scuffed over as he had apparently hurried back away. To this chair, then, the boy took his investigation, and he stifled a hoarse cry of his own when he reached it, for slumped at its feet, more than half hidden by the cloth, lay a white and gleaming skeleton, dressed in tattered remains of what had once been finery fit for one in the court of a king. And when the boy looked to either side, he saw that it was far from the only corpse.