He knew it was a little odd, but with each passing day, he found the mortal world harder to understand and had come to think of these waxy, shrouded shapes as his friends. Their stillness comforted him and sometimes he would give them voices; replying to himself as though the dead were answering. His talk was endless and anodyne: the changing of the seasons and the consistency of his porridge were the most regular topics. He doubted the corpses minded though. After all, his were the last mortal thoughts that would ever be directed at these poor, lost souls. The garden of Morr at Elghast was a humble temple, but its crypt was a bewildering maze of tunnels and chambers. The priest’s flickering lamps had only ever illuminated a small fraction of it. Four generations of his family had tended the dead in this place, but as far as he knew, no one had ever attempted to map out the full extent of the catacombs. The limestone arches had once been ornately carved in the likeness of skulls and black rose petals, but over the centuries the pillars and cornices had shrugged off their sculpted edges, reasserting their natural, ragged shapes.
