There are many maladies that await those who walk beyond the walls of the fort. The creeping death of malevolent fungi, the flora that awaits underfoot, the dead that roam, the almost-wolves that howl at corrupted lunae. All these are hazards one learns to accept; yet still, even in places of apparent safety, evil stalks this world.
There are three of them left; they have slept for four months now and taken neither sustenance nor succour. Water from the runes wakes them not, nor does it silence their tormented screams, neither ease their horrified thrashing. The sleep found them one night; there were once twelve, all from different walks of life with no common ground nor place of rest. They just failed to wake one day while within the fort.
This would, perhaps, given the fates that wait without, have been considered a mercy of sorts, were it not for the onset of the nightmares. The first screamed of eyes watching before his teeth cleaved through his tongue and drowned him in his own blood. The fourth begged them not to take her fingers before they rotted away to dust, the seventh cried out for her legs as pestilence took them in hours and the ninth begged them not to take her skin. The remaining three form no words, they gibber mindlessly in the face of whatever cosmic horror holds them thrall.