Author's Note: I own nothing.
2 Bad Decisions
Dani glanced down at the map in her hands. She had passed Skulker's Island so she should be coming up on the castle any moment. There! The red castle loomed ahead of her. Dani paused, something about the castle seemed to make everything around it go still, and dark. Even the usual swirling green atmosphere grew dark around the red stones. Dani took a deep breath and headed toward the imposing stone structure. She reached the doors with dread in her heart. Maybe this was a bad idea. But something in her told her to press on, curiosity maybe. She wanted to know if legends could be true. Maybe it was something else that pulled her into the castle. But either way she slipped through the great black doors. The inside of the castle was no less scary than the rest of the place.
Rusty red stone made up the interior of the castle as well, dark chambers leading off in every direction. Dani frowned floating in the massive hall for a moment. She landed and the moment her white boot met the cold stone floor torches of green fire burst into life leading up a great stone staircase, red as the stones around it, but chipped scoured and burned as though this had been the place of some massive battle. She took a deep breath of the musty air and floated up the stairs. She wasn't sure why she knew which way to go but the booby traps were a pretty good indication. She winced. One of the axes had been just a bit faster than her, a small cut on her side oozed green as she landed gently pressing at the injury. It wasn't too deep but it was still leaking ectoplasm as she made her way down the next hallway. That was about when the walls started moving in. At the last moment, before she would have been pressed into oblivion she remembered that Humans couldn't be harmed by ghostly measures in the Ghost Zone. She transformed back into her human form just as the walls closed.
She took a deep breath as she slipped through the walls and made her way up another set of once grand stairs. Her every footfall raised a layer of dust that she hadn't known the Ghost Zone could have. It made her wonder how many centuries this place had laid dormant and why no ghost had moved in. But before she could give it too much thought she came to a large room. It might have been grand once upon a time but that time was so long ago she doubted that anyone living or dead could remember it. Torn tapestries lined the walls, so threadbare and rotted that Dani couldn't have made out what they had once depicted even if she tried. She was a bit distracted though by the skeletons laying on the ground.
They were clearly human, or had been at one point. They almost didn't look it anymore, they were too tall, too many vertebra as if half an extra spine had been jammed into a regular skeleton. They had no teeth, save the canines which Dani could only define as fangs that easily passed what remained of their bottom jaws. The empty eye sockets were dark and dusty like the rest of the palace. But Dani would guess that if they had ever been living they had died at their posts, two by the door she'd come in through, four on the only two other doors out of the room. In the center of the room was a dais, cracked red stone a deep contrast to a bright purple jack-o-lantern that sat atop it. The unnatural color of the gourd wasn't what had Dani's teeth on edge as she stepped up to the dais though. Sunken into the miraculously rot free pumpkin was a sword.
Dani would admit she knew more about swords than most teen girls, having spent a good few years in middle school obsessed with the Lord of the Rings. This was a double handed great sword, if it had once been made of some Earthly metal Dani had no idea but she somehow doubted the sword had started off as a glowing green blade practically alive with ecto-energy. The pommel of the sword was a green grinning jack-o-lantern that was an eerie mirror of the pumpkin the sword was buried in. She hesitated again but caught sight of the time on her watch. It was now or never, if she was going to use the sword as her centerpiece and finally show Dash up at something she needed to take it now and get back to the haunted house. For a moment she thought about taking the whole thing, pumpkin and all but she wasn't sure if it would set off another booby trap to move the pumpkin so she reached out and pulled the sword free. She had to use both hands to do it, though the sword was surprisingly light it was unwieldy with its sheer size. For a moment nothing happened and Dani frowned.
"Well that was anticlimactic." She said and winced as a grinding noise sounded through the room. The dead skeletons were rising. Dani whirled on them raising the sword on instinct as they glowed back to sentience, Dani couldn't in good conscious call their grating grinding movements life. But the skeletal creatures made no move to attack her, instead dropping to their knees all six of them facing the dais. Dani whirled, nearly tripping backwards as the pumpkin behind her disgorged a cloud of acrid smelling green smoke that swirled into a cloud of fowl steam that resolved into a figure in black armor.
He wore head to toe black, his spiked helm hiding all signs of the face beneath save for the glowing green eyes, which appeared to have no iris or pupal. The plume on his helm was purple fire, that matched his cloak. His gauntlets were a deep gray, and seemed to end in fire as well. At the apex of his noticeably empty sword-belt was a skull that was so detailed Dani had a sneaking suspicion that it had once been a real head, not solely made to decorate this knight. He stretched to his full height towering over Dani.
"Child, you have freed me, and for that I thank you." His voice was not what Dani expected. She'd expected rasping and rattling not silky smooth tones that could have been mistaken for soothing if it weren't for the rest of him. "Now, return my sword to me and my reign of terror will begin." He took a step closer to her and Dani matched him with a step back, transforming back into Phantom as she went.
"I can have it back by midnight." She joked, glancing over the Knights shoulder hoping that maybe she could get around him to the pumpkin that had held him captive in the sword but either its removal or the Knight's appearance had shattered the pumpkin into pieces, now scattered around the dais. There would be no trapping the Knight like that. He tilted his head at her curiously.
"A half-ling? I have never seen such a being before. But it makes no difference, give me my sword child." He sounded curious but there was an edge of danger to his voice and Dani recognized the threat in it. Dani shook her head as the skeletons took a collective step towards her.
"Or you could all go back to sleep!" Dani sang it, feeling ridiculous at first until the skeletons dropped back to the floor as one, the Knight was brought to his knees and Dani took her chance, fleeing with the sword from the castle as the Knight roared with anger. Dani fled through the portal slamming it closed behind her and shooting through the house, off to the haunted house, hoping Sam would be there with the book about the Fright Knight, she could only hope the door to the portal would hold him long enough for them to figure out how to beat him.
