Cutting a broad swathe through the tall, ramshackle slums, overlooked by the imposing Amethyst college, is the largest of Morr’s gardens and routes to the underworld in the Empire – the fabled haunted Cemetery of Old Altdorf. It is surrounded by a high, spiked wall, beyond which grows a thick tangle of black rose trees. The wall is in disrepair in many places along its great length, but few dare to breach the sanctity of Morr’s realm – especially in this place of ethereal notoriety.[1a]
Beyond the wall are countless ancient graves and mausoleums of generations of Altdorfers, some simple and plain, some bedecked by ornate and looming skull-headed statues. There are also thousands of shallow, unmarked graves of those hastily interred after the devastation of the Red Plague in 1786. The dead rest uneasy in their graves and their spirits still roam the garden to this day, and the proximity of the Amethyst college is certainly no coincidence. At the centre of the cemetery is the mortuary: a great, plain slab of a building in black granite accessed through a foreboding stone portal.[1a]
For most of the year, the garden is forbidden to Altdorfers, who leave their dead at the iron gates with a few of their possessions and money to pay for the burial. Only the priests of Morr are allowed in the garden and they rarely leave. But, upon the Festival of Morr the living, should they dare, are permitted to enter the garden to feast and celebrate with their deceased friends and relatives. For some, it is quite literally…[1a]