
"One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-and-Sixty-Five years."
The voice rings in your head, as if someone were leaning over your shoulder and speaking the words directly into your ear. But you know there's no phantom speaker. There's no one behind you at all. You know exactly where the voice comes from.
"That's how long I waited in that hole, waiting for some worthy hand to pull me out."
The voice comes from the unsheathed longsword clutched in your hands. The blade is long and straight, the shine belying its purported age. Runes of some dead language follow the blood-gutter nearly down to the straight guard. The runes glow with a blue light that's painful to stare at, but provides enough light for you to see a few paces along the dank catacombs you've lost yourself in.
It feels as if you've been down here for hours. The sword has given you light to navigate by, but it doesn't know the way out any better than you do. Apparently, the catacombs had grown considerably in the past millennium and a half.
The corridor you're in now is particularly ghoulish. You cannot see the stone walls for the ranks of skulls piled against them. The floor itself is paved with long bones that crunch underfoot. You walk into a faint breeze that you hope leads outside, but the moving air also passes over the hollows in the skulls surrounding you, making an unnerving low whistle that sets your teeth on edge.
There's a sound behind you that isn't the sword or the whistling bones.
"What was that?" you whisper, unsure where the sound had come from, or even what it was.
Then you hear something skittering behind you, scraping across bone.