"It's pretty bad. You can't go to Nott without running into a corpse."

Shoulders tight, Wilhelm shudders at the memories of close encounters he's had while out running errands around town. He'd never seen an actual dead body before — Erik's casket was closed by the time he got to say good bye to him. Even so, every last one of the ambling corpses reminds him of his brother, and it comes as a punch to the gut every time.

"There's a rumor going around about corpses coming up from the dungeons in the castle, but it's all like, 'I heard from a friend, who heard from someone, who heard from someone else.'"

Suddenly, the air turns foul. His foot thuds into something solid on the ground, and a sound startles from his throat.