Fourth of Attor, in the year 218 after Deadhaus Today, I write of a great victory in my crusade against Deadhaus. After months of fruitless searching, after losing men under my command, narrowly escaping with my life and risking execution if my research was ever discovered, I have at last found what I was looking for. Word was sent from a small township in the Eastern Reaches that a grave had been plundered, the
remains taken. I set out at once. While common thieves may sometimes take from the dead, they typically leave the body behind. Upon reaching the cemetery, I found the gravesite unearthed and the coffin shredded. By the claw marks on what remained of the dead and the strength required to accomplish such a task. I knew I was dealing with a ghoul. It is known that ghouls are one to feed upon corpses and often ransack cemeteries for this very purpose. As luck would have it, they ever know
other towns for many miles. And being so far within Thacian territory, these graves would be the ghoul's best source of sustenance. It is here that I would lay my trap. Knowing that a ghoul would stay hidden away from the village by day, I used that time to prepare for its arrival the following night. At first, I set a series of rudimentary bear traps along every entrance to the cemetery.
Night came and passed, yet the following morning none of the traps were sprung and a second grave was plundered. Did it notice my traps? Did it somehow recognize what they were and purposely avoid them? All accounts I've read on ghoul behavior suggest that they are purely instinctual creatures, driven only by a voracious hunger for flesh. Surely someone would have noticed if they were intelligent. Perhaps it was not entering by the same path a human would. Perhaps it was climbing over the walls.
The next day, I repositioned my traps directly above each grave in the cemetery. Anything trying to dig there would inevitably be snared, but just to be absolutely sure, I covered them all with a layer of leaves. Night fell, dawn broke, and not a single trap was sprung, but another grave was emptied. The concealed trap was found some feet away, as if it had been purposely tossed aside. But surely not. On the following night, I waited in the cemetery myself.
The mayor offered to lend me his guards, but he was clearly terrified, and I suspected that the ghoul wouldn't show if a crowd was present. I hid myself as best I could in shadows at the far corner of the cemetery. I waited all night, but it never showed. Was this a coincidence? Do ghouls not need to feed every night? Maybe that it wasn't hungry that time. My next attempt was to string twine near the ground through various pathways. Each line would run out of the cemetery and
some distance away. There it would be hung with little bells. If something snagged a string with sufficient force, the distant bells would ring. This time, I took the mayor on his offer to provide me with guards, and instructed them to wait for me for the sound of the bells. That night, many hours passed in very silence, listening. When the bells finally rang, they crept into the cemetery. We saw it under the light of the moon, an emaciated, hunkered
creature with thin wisps of hair. There it should have had eyes, lobes of folded flesh had overgrown. But somehow, it spotted us nearly immediately. Hissing in inhuman outrage before it scrambled for an exit, one of the damned guards got caught in one of the damned traps trying to chase it. I devised a much more thorough strategy of approach into the cemetery for the following night. But it didn't matter. Bells didn't ring this time, and yet the following day, another grave was emptied.
There was no doubt this time. That thing was far more clever than I was led to believe. Many days and nights came and went. Many traps and plans were formed, and many graves were emptied. If anyone was present, the ghoul would not appear. Numbers and force were counterproductive. I realized that more drastic measures would need to be taken, and approached the mayor with a new plan. All of the bodies in the cemetery were to be exhumed
and burned, all except one. Of course, the simple man was horrified by this. "Had I not come to prevent the bodies from being taken?" he asked. Having very little patience left from being consistently outsmarted by something that goes about on all fours, I simply invoked imperial decree. The bodies were burned as per my plan. The last one was left out in the open, inside an iron cage that had been fitted with a mechanism to close once anything entered. Three days passed, and three nights. Yet
the body remained untouched. The mayor urged me to reconsider, like the sniveling little coward that he was. But their ingenuity may have failed me. patience did not. I knew that time was on my side. I knew that each day that passed, as clever as the ghoul might be, that body would look ever more appetizing. On the fifth night, I was awoken by a clanging and howling. I could not help but smile. I came to the cemetery to find my quarry, thrashing within its cage, shrieking so that the
guards balked at a distance. But I was not deterred. I approached and looked upon the ghoul. It did not seem to notice me, thrashing about in its prison. I saw what appeared to be markings, some kind of symbol carved into the flesh of its face. "Are your accommodations not your liking?" I asked. The ghouls cried slowly, as if it registered that I was speaking to it. "We'll see if we can't make you more comfortable at the capital." Alaric von Beller, Grand Inquisitor of the Thacean Empire.