Finally! Having saved a perfect round number of 100 silver coins as seed money, it was time to seek my fortune in the barrowmaze.
Three of my friends were ready to stake their lives on the chance for fortune as well. One of them, a haberdasher, managed to sell two of his fancy hats on the open market and had even more gold burning a hole in his pocket than my silvers worth of savings. Even pooling our money would not be enough to obtain real armor or weapons, but we could afford small luxuries: extra torches, a sling for all four of us, rope, crowbars. Rumor had it that crowbars worked well for prying open the shallow barrows likely to hold untapped treasures near the surface. My group of friends and some other newish adventurers decided we would try that.
The barrow we chose had two burial sites surrounded by 8 strange urns which seemed likely to be valuable. We checked the room for hazards, but were interrupted by sounds from outside; zombies were digging into the barrow from the outside, as if they knew we were there but didn’t know how to go through the open door. It seemed strange behavior, but I’m hardly an expert on zombies; tax evasion is more my area. We might have tried to wait them out, but there was one by the entrance who could definitely see us and didn’t seem inclined to leave.
We each positioned ourselves near an urn and picked it up, preparing to run out and away from the zombies before they could catch us. We did, and everyone made it out, but the urns turned out to be remarkably delicate and every single one we carried out past the zombies broke.
Disenheartened, we found a dig site some of the others had been working on and helped dig for a while. We did hit a stone door, so we were digging in the right place, but more work would be needed to uncover it.
Feeling brave, my group of four went back to the fresh barrow after an hour or so to check if the zombies were still there. They had moved on, so we very carefully extracted the remaining two intact urns. They sold for a few gold each. Less than all 8 would have brought in, but better than nothing.
