Murdu set his shoulder against the swollen wooden door and shoved as hard as he could - which wasn't much. The undead man was little more than rotten bones and charred flesh, and probably weighed less than the door.
Still, the will of the Forsaken counts for a lot, and the door scraped across the stone floor and opened a little. Rubbing his ruined hands together, Murdu slipped inside the room.
The Keep had lain abandoned for a long time, and scavengers had picked it clean for the most part, but there was always something left behind; scraps that were more valuable than they appeared. Murdu had made a fine living off scraps - there was money to be had shaving coins and snatching up the castoffs of others.
He stumbled over a chunk of wood on the ground, and paused to pick it up. It was a shattered table leg, gnawed on by rats, but Murdu just saw perfectly good oak. At worst, he could get something out of the ash. He jammed it into his satchel, already bulging with finds from the rest of the keep, and carried on. He'd been a bit surprised to find a closed door, honestly - every other door in the place was either bashed open or missing entirely.
It was pitch black inside the room, and - grumbling at the expense - Murdu reached inside his satchel and withdrew what could only be called a torch because it was slightly too large to be a matchstick. He glared pointedly at it, and after a while the end of the torch started to smoke, and then burst into a weak flame. He nodded absently and lifted the light over his head, gazing around the room.
He nearly dropped the torch.
Someone was living here.
The room wasn't much bigger than a prison cell, but someone had shoved a bed in one corner, and a bookshelf and desk in the other. An unlit oil lamp - the value of the oil remaining and the lamp itself totaled into a pleasant number in Murdu's head - sat on the desk, next to an open book and a set of calligraphy tools. Quickly, he lifted the glass cover of the lamp and touched the torch to the wick - a warm orange glow filled the cell, and he blew out his torch, stashing it back in his satchel.
The bookshelf was bowed with weight, holding a plethora of books, scrolls, ink pots, quills, crusts of bread, and other odds and ends that had Murdu's mind spinning with tiny numbers and thoughts of nice, cold little copper pieces. He looked down at the book lying open on the desk, wondering if he should wait and come back later to steal the completed work instead.
The page was mostly blank, except for a small paragraph of text written in fine calligraphy:
Murdu frowned, but, well, what could you expect from someone who lived in a ruined keep? He flipped through the rest of the book, and it was the same - each page was devoted to a little bit of unsettling script. A few simply ended abruptly, never finishing the thought. Murdu paused on one for a while, feeling unnerved somehow:It waits in the desert, in Ahn'Qiraj, and the sands keep it. Time does not pass, in Ahn'Qiraj. There it sleeps, there it waits. Do not wake it. Do not name it. It lies there dead - it waits to live. Ia! Ia! C'thun Qiraji!
The book showed him tiny glimpses - he turned a page, and read an entry about a hundred-handed beast - like something spotted in murky water; a flash of a fin, a toothy smile, a single, cold and baelful eye. A small piece of something alien and wrong. He shivered, and - skeletal hand shaking - he returned the book to the way he found it. He would not, he decided, steal from this person.The Dreamer dreams in fitful sleep; restless, it yawns wide, and a thousand thousand teeth flash in the deeps. How terrible its dreams, how deep its hunger: Nazjahotep.
The ink on the last page was smudged. It was still wet.
The lamp-flame guttered and died.
Murdu yelped, voice catching in his throat.
The darkness answered: "Gul'kafh an'shel, Murdu."