The Sellsword

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The Journeyman was surrounded by ghosts. He sat at a small desk in one of the rarely-used archival basements of the Great Library of Palanthas. The shelves were crammed tight with volumes and reached all the way up to a ceiling shrouded with cobwebs. Bearing the soot from a thousand years of oil lamps and the dust from a thousand years of being barely browsed, the archival basement was creepy enough. The ghosts made it downright macabre.

The Journeyman’s lamp, perched on the edge of the desk between a pile of historical treatises and a large omnibus of Nordmaaran horse poetry, sputtered as yet another spectral figure sailed by. They were the ghosts of Aesthetics who chose not to pass on through the Gate of Souls to the hereafter, but instead preferred to continue their work in the library, just as they had when they were living.

The ghosts were visible only by the light of a naked flame, which revealed the translucent outlines of dead librarians drifting back and forth. Upstairs, where the living Aesthetics worked, the ghosts were never glimpsed; the magical lamps set into the fine polished desks of the East Wing couldn’t reveal their presence. Down in the basement where all the old and unused books came to die, a candlelit parade of souls was omnipresent.

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