Another cold, wet night in Lordaeron, another cart of freshly slain corpses. Pierre, the night's cryptkeeper, began the graveyard shift the same way he always did. He unscrewed a flask, unleashing an odour strong enough to dissolve a human nose, and began to drink a mixture of formaldehyde, alcohol, and something there wasn't a name for, but could only be found in oddly-shaped alchemical bottles with several pictures of skulls and crossbones pasted on them. The foul concoction was called rotgut, and it went straight to the rotten hole where Pierre's liver once was. He didn't bother worrying about his health anymore. In life, his wife often chided him for his drinking and the way it made his doughy stomach jut out over his britches, but since he died the weight began falling off--in great fleshy handfuls.

"Ah!" Pierre gasped. If he had any blood left, the burning taste of rotgut would have brought colour to his pale, lifeless cheeks. He shambled out of the crypt he was charged with overseeing, heading into the freezing rain to meet a rickety wooden cart trundling up the hill. Two figures sat in the cart's bench behind a skeletal horse. The creature, seething with necromantic energies, was barded in torn purple cloth. The driver wore his usual threadbare russet coat and doublet, quite possibly the same outfit he died in, and beside him another undead gentleman defended himself against the rain with a thick black robe. Occasionally, the man in black would awkwardly scratch under his hood.

"Ho, traveller. Dark Lady keep you. What d'you have for me tonight?" Pierre asked the cart driver. He jerked his flask at the man in black, swilling around its contents. "This one's already been raised."

"He's some priest, or so Apothecary Quinn's writ told me," the driver said wearily, "and he's here for a prentice."

"Hello," said the man in black in a hoarse whisper, barely audible over the rain lashing down on the gravestones.

"Yes," said the driver, "and he's been like that all the way since Andorhal. I think we've managed 'hello' and 'need a prentice' and 'look' so far. I'm going mad, Pierre. The road is a lonely place, and I need someone to talk to. Ask me something. Anything!"

"Er," Pierre began, "alright. How's the weather?"

"Shit!" the driver replied, throwing his arms up.

Pierre held an awkward silence for a moment. He offered the driver his flask, who snatched it up in a bony claw and began guzzling rotgut down like a parched man in a desert.

Several fluid ounces later, Pierre asked, "Do you feel better now?"

"No. Not really." The driver crossed his arms and sulked.

"Well, that's life." Pierre offered the driver a sardonic grin, flashing an uneven set of yellowing teeth. Only a few of them were Pierre's originals--you could tell which by the petrified cavities. "That's life, and then you die." He raised his chin to the man in black. "What's your name, lad?"

"It's Branford," Brandford said as he climbed down from the cart. The driver looked at him incredulously. "You never asked."