The graveyard was, as most graveyards are, a pigsty of decay. Sometime in the far past it might have been something grand, like the great cemeteries of Elenta he’d often heard stories of, but as it was now they resembled half-finished buildings, each little tombstone a tiny replica of the half-built skyscrapers of Anarchy. Modern-day Sharadastrian burial grounds just weren’t what they used to be. Granted, he hadn’t lived long enough to have ever seen the old graveyards, but he’d been told countless times by the older grave robbers that things just weren’t like they’d been. Nothing around the world was as it had been in the past, it seemed, not in the grave-robbing business. The stoic, ordered churchyards of Drekgard had dwindled with the continent’s industrialization, every bit of greenery slowly replaced with metal, and though he’d never been to Elenta he’d been told their art-strewn and gallery-like cemeteries had somehow lessened in magnificence.

Lucas Boudin, whatever the case, saw nothing but another crappy graveyard, broken and rotting and smelling so terrible he needed to wrap his face and keep a pack of herbs close at hand to stop himself gagging. He was new to his job, young, thrill-seeking: the kind of kid his business looked for, liked, even. The young were easier to pardon, easier to write off as being stupid; the young were hardly ever arrested for more than a few days. Not that it made the job any easier; grave robbers were always in danger, be it from cops or corpses. There was no way of knowing whether the next coffin you pried open would be your last. Whether it was poison gas or some other trap, flesh-eating bugs, or even the corpse itself, there was always something to worry about, and there was no way of predicting what. Even the best robbers couldn’t tell you everything; you had to come to a dig prepared.

Swaddled in protective clothing that made it difficult to move, decked from head to toe in grave-robbing essentials (he favored holy water, himself, in the rare case they might come across one of the undead), Lucas considered himself very prepared.

It was his sixth job, and this time, rather than take along a supervisor, he’d decided to go alone. He was in need of a chance to prove himself, and this, he thought, was it. His superiors thought he was crazy, he knew they did, but that was all the more reason to go alone—he’d show them! And once he did, they’d promote him, send him to dig in places other than crappy Sharadastrian cemeteries. He wanted to go to Elenta. Every really great grave robber had dug in Elenta.

He just needed a chance to prove himself.

That was why he’d come alone, and that was why he was now shoveling dirt out from around the biggest tombstone he’d been able to find. He imagined from its bottom it had once been something like the statue of an angel, and had once been white; it was now just a grey, mossy pair of feet and a bit of a robe, crawling with spiders. The dirt was hard-packed and flecked with green; Lucas was sweating as he struggled to shovel it all out. These sorts of graves, you had to dig around before you dug under. Normally, it wasn’t a grave he’d choose, requiring too much work, too much time. But he was on a mission. And so he dug, and each shovel of insect-infested earth was in his mind another step towards Elenta.