Track 35: Halls of the Undead

Track 35: Halls of the Undead sits cool in my palm—a circular brass disk, edges scalloped with a subtle green patina, its surface etched in a tight lattice of runes that converge on a central sigil like a doorway half-swallowed by stone. A thin slip of parchment is pressed into a shallow notch at the rim, the ink faded to a cold gray, and when I tilt it toward a lamp the scratches beneath reveal a map of footsteps along a corridor long forgotten. The texture is smooth yet honest, a little resistive where my thumb lines up with the grooves, as if the disc remembers every time someone pressed it to ear and listened for the echo of a hall that time forgot. The weight is reassuring, not precious, and it carries a whisper of damp air and old stone—the kind of thing you instinctively cradle when you’re cautiously stepping back through a memory you’ve earned rather than borrowed. Lore threads tangle around this track with the same care a historian gives to a relic found in a ruined shrine. The Halls of the Undead are spoken of in hushed tones among scholars who catalog the city’s long shadows—an ascent into a vaulted maze where the dead once gathered, where necromancers of a vanished order attempted to impose order on unrest. Track 35, some say, was pressed by a choir of custodians who sang to guide the wards that kept those halls sealed. It’s not a weapon or a key, but a trace—an aural breadcrumb that hints at who walked those passages, and why the walls remember. When you cradle the disc and listen, you feel the room widen, as though the memory itself is drawing breath. Play it, and the track becomes less about the sound and more about the mood you carry into the game’s spaces. It’s a collectible music track, but in practice it acts like a small lantern: switch to it when you’re creeping through damp catacombs or recounting a tale in a tavern about a city that slept with the dead and woke to whispers. The melody leans toward low strings and a careful, almost chanted cadence, punctuated by distant chimes that feel like careful footsteps echoing through stone. You don’t gain power from it, you gain presence—an atmospheric companion that nudges how you narrate a run, how you pace a dungeon, how you envision those long corridors as living memory rather than cold, empty space. Market life adds its own cadence to the story. In the dockside market, a stall known as Saddlebag Exchange often calls out such rarities with a practiced air, offering this track at a price that fluctuates with mood and demand. I’ve watched it move from a modest two silvers to something sturdier when a collector’s curiosity kicks in, occasionally softened by a tale or a barter: a short anecdote from another traveler, an old coin, a small trinket that carries its own history. The exchange is patient, a steady drumbeat in the rhythm of trade, reminding you that even a music track can be a bridge between explorers and their stories. So, Track 35 endures as more than a relic. It’s a doorway you can carry, a reminder that sound can anchor memory and that history—even undead history—remains legible when you listen closely enough. In the end, the halls may sleep, but the music keeps a careful vigil, inviting the living to walk their remembered paths once more.