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(Disclaimer: Rhainnon is not my character and is used with permission.)
Rhainnon was walking down a long road in the dark night. The wind was cold and a thick fog concealed the road that strecthed on in front of her. She looked ahead and searched around desperately for any form of shelter that could keep her from the chilling breeze. She felt a need to stretch from huddling herself together for so long. She did so quickly, but a freezing gust instantly blew away the last degrees of warmth from her body. She began to start a speedy dash for a shelter. Suddenly she saw a tall mansion that was graceful to see. The windows were shut although light could still be seen through the shutters. The door had a pure golden knocker and the door had a beautiful design engraved into it. Rhainnon knocked on the door, but as she knocked on it the first time the door flew open and she fell forward crashing into the floor. "Ouch....hello? Anybody home?" She looked around to find herself in a room that had a staircase leading to a higher level of the house. There was a chair in front of it and a man dressed in a formal tuxedo suit was sitting in it. He stared at Rhainnon with a gaze that made her spine tingle. Suddenly the door behind her slammed shut and Rhainnon twisted around at the sudden shock of it. When she turned around she discovered the whole house had changed in a flash. The door was old and creaky, but it stayed shut tightly. The house was old and run down. The chandelier that had been hanging on the ceiling was now cracked and the glass from it was scattered across the floor. She got up instantly. She looked towards the man and only saw a rotting skeleton. She ran into the kitchen and a dead body was lying there on the table. "What the......?" Rhainnon was terrified beyond imagination. She watched the body with wide eyes. A grunting sound was heard coming from the body and it began to lift itself from the table. It seemed to be a zombie and it was heading straight in her direction. However the rotting zombie could only walk slowly. As it reached nearer and nearer to her it's foot thumped on the ground. Rhainnon was frozen until she saw the zombie lift it's arm preparing to attack. Before it could strike Rhainnon kicked it down to the ground hard. The zombie just got up and it walked towards her once again. This time she ran back into the first room with the staircase. The skeleton had come alive as well. It too had a killer intent as it made it's way towards her slowly. She searched frantically for something to use as a weapon. "Come on.....anything!" She found a sword mounted from a sword rack on the wall. She tore it away from the rack and she readied it and pointed it towards the zombie. She quickly stabbed it in the chest killing it with a pierce to the heart. It fell to the ground, but the skeleton seemed unintimidated at her new kill. She just easily kicked the skeleton down to the floor and it scattered all over the floor spreading chunks of bone and marrow across the ground with the shattered glass. Suddenly there was a dark feeling in the air that seemed to steal Rhainnon's breath away. A dark figure seemed to emerge from the wall and he stared into her eyes menacingly. He had a flaming skull for a head and wore a black trench coat with a white shirt underneath. He also had spiked shoulder pads and his pants here dark black and also had spiked knee pads. The figure's eyes were pitch-black and cold, but soon a vortex of fire formed inside them and the figure seemed to instantly fill with life. "Welcome to my home Rhainnon! I see you have already been greeted by my last visitors." Rhainnon listened to his words with sheer terror. She kept on staring into the person's eyes as if spellbound and couldn't look away for she was being held down by some sort of gravitational force. "Yes I am sure you know what I meant by that last statement. You are not the first guest that has stepped into my home. However you seem to be abit stronger than many of them were. Every person that steps into my home dies a gruesome death and joins my legion of the undead. When they pass on I rearrange them into terrible beings by replacing bones with blades and taking away vital organs that could be used as quick kills." The man still stared into her eyes with the fire in his eyes swirling and raging constantly as he spoke. Rhainnon's heart began to beat inside her chest like a drum and beads of sweat poured down her face from her obvious fear of the being. "Although killing innocent lives and adding their bodies to my collection is fun, I have longed for some real entertainment. I know.....why not play a game of Life....or Death!" Rhainnon's eyes grew wide and her heart was threatening to burst. "I will give you a chance to prevail over my forces of Death. There are five stories to my grisly home. You must fight your way through all of them and make your way to the top where you will have a chance to combat me in person! I am already beggining to enjoy this. There are also some survivors throughout the halls of my home, but they are all tied to death traps of my own creation. You may choose to free them......but if you do there will be a consequence. If you do then you will be forced to feel a fraction of the pain they would have faced had you not spared them the horrible deaths they were meant to face." The man smiled even broader then before. "Now.....I leave you with this parting gift." The man dissapated into the ground and a snake suddenly appeared on the handle of Rhainnon's sword and it bit into her hand hungrily and fiercely. Rhainnon tried shaking it off, but the jaws of the snake were clamped shut and seemed to be unopenable. That was when Rhainnon dropped the sword and began to slam the snake into the wall. The snake screeched as it felt the pain of being smashed into the wall. Rhainnon continued to pummel the snake viciously against the wall until it burst onto the wall in a short gush of blood. Rhainnon inspected her wound and was releived to discover that the snake was not a venomous species. She looked through her pack that she had with her for some sort of bandage to cover her stinging bite wound. She dug through her possesions until she came across a glove. She took it out and placed it on her hand and tightened it with a ribbon she also found in the pack. She flicked her wrist and felt only a small fraction of the pain she felt before and smiled at her triumph. Although she had a somewhat renewed sense of courage, she was still very afraid of the dark mansion. She was unaware of the dangers that the darkness of the building would hold. Although she was afraid she began to reluctantly, but steadily, continue to make her way through the mansion. She found the chair that the skeleton had once sat in and saw that it was blocking off the stairway. Rhainnon pushed the chair out of the way and began to step onto the first steps when suddenly she heard a loud snap behind her. She hardly dared to look back, but her curiosity overwhelmed her and she couldn't help but look. Her eyes widened as she witnesseds that the steps behind her were breaking and underneath the steps was a pit of tall, razor-sharp spikes that would instantly end her life if she couldn't make it to the top of the staircase in time. As she realized this Rhainnon noticed that the step was weakening and preparing to crack under her foot. She instantly began to jolt up the stairway just barely escaping her premature end by a heartbeat. She began to break a sweat from the strain and effort she put forth to run up the staircase and she noticed that the steps broke more rapidly now. As she noticed the step under her foot break she leaped to the top of the staircase and she grabbed onto the top of the stairway and held on for dear life as all of her provisions that fell from the pack landed onto the spikes below. As they fell she pulled herself up and looked below hopelessly at the fact that all of her food and other things that could have been used as bandages and such were all gone. As she was looking downwards she heard a loud moaning sound behind her. Her head twisted around instantly as she heard the sound and she saw that it was a decaying zombie. Flies surrounded the zombie's fleshy body like a shoud and they layed their larvae in it's body. The zombie walked straight towards her slowly, but surely. Rhainnon took out her sword and readied it incase the zombie decided to put up a fight. The zombie continued walking towards her and Rhainnon watched it slowly progress. As soon as the zombie decided to strike at her with it's decaying arm, Rhainnon stabbed the zombie through the heart and she lifted the zombie in the air. As the zombie struggled to lift itself from the blade it only moved downwards. Rhainnon swung the blade and the zombie flew from the blade and onto a jagged spike from below the staircase. The zombie continmued to struggle, but it would have no success in doing so. As Rhainnon had beleived she was safe again she heard two more moans........to be continued.