Deathless Reign: Ch. 02

Years had passed since he was in this horrid prison. Unable to move on beyond. His body had stopped deteriorating. The dissonance between spirit and flesh was a living torment and deeper and deeper did his spirit retreat deep into his mortal shell. No carrion bird feasted upon their carcasses. No beast of the land dared venture close for the ground was tainted and more.

His body decomposed not and neither was he able to feel anything. The kiss of the wind on his flesh, the smell of the earth. It's as if every sound of the world had been sucked away leaving things locked in dull grey.

His only solace was that in his solitude he had a peaceful view of the countless stars above as he went on his eternal vigil.

The forest was unable to heal but life, in some ways, found a way. The mass grave of his comrade, their final battle was undisturbed and untouched. And that was closest to anything to true death he had.

How much time had passed? he could never tell. His own name blurred into oblivion inside his own mind and that was a pain unlike he ever conceived of thinking. Time, it seemed would have forgotten them.

Until an explosion of Fellpower, containing the barest hint of that creature that dares to call itself God. The earth cracked in his tomb. An old wakening of hate and fury as the he relived the very last moments when his own heart still beat. This was no simple remembrance but an actual reliving of the events. The sensations he felt, those moments etched so clearly. And then just as fast as they came it was over.

Long buried hate resurfaced. Too long had he not moved, Far too long had he been immobile.

His spirit has the knowledge to run and yet his body had completely rebelled to him. For the first time in a thousand turnings of the sun and moon, his bones began to move and groan.

He stumbled a dozen times, a pathetic attempt at making a single step. When his legs failed him, he used his very hands to pull him towards the Source of that power. It spread in the air, green sparkling light that brought colour in his dour, dead world.

He breathed the fell light and his body groaned for an instant and as if finally remembering, his legs finally knew how to function as they had been.

A multitude of voices called to him. Guiding him through the underbrush. Promising him of hope and peace but he knew exactly what they were. False promises.

He burst out of the trees and saw a multitude of those like him. Pitiful remnants of flesh and broken souls barely held together by loose emotions and leftover desires. They moaned and hungered. The basest instinct of all that remained was the animal in each man. The identical hunger present in each soul that would never be filled. The dead such as they are drawn to the living.

He cast his eyes towards the direction they headed and presumed correct. Stacked up woods of a homes and abodes. The golden glow of the living was prevalent in these.

However, he found himself drawn to another kind of light, tracing it amidst the air and found himself looking at the twisted light of green and gold atop a small hill. They numbered three and he could smell the malice through his dead nose. His boney hands cracked and teeth gnawed as he burst sprinting towards them. Perhaps he would finally feel something in all this lost time. The feel of corrupted flesh against the fury of his bones.

To see a Risen undead move like that was a perplexing sight. They would amble and shift their legs pathetically and to see a single undead may be a cause of concern but it was a simple enough to escape it. Barely held together by rotting flesh and tendons and some sporting much of their body already in bones. Their only strength lies in their near overwhelming numbers and unconventional means to eradicate them as opposed to living men.

The three apprentices watched in mesmerized stupor as the undead covered five hundred yards between them in five bounds.

From the looks of it, the man had only been recently dead for his face was a of a moonlight complexion without any color and still undefiled by rotting. His hands were all bones with the entire right arm reduced to bones up to the shoulder. A large piece of his cheek was gone and showed bone white teeth and apportion of his jaw.

Their eyes locked for that one second. And then it barreled straight to them. The more experienced of the three instinctively recognized the threat that it was. He mustered all his will, directing their undead army to attack the dangerous newcomer.

"Don't just stand there fools! Destroy that thing!" Cold sweat erupted from his back as he tried to rally their dead back to them.

"Why destroy it when it can be ours?" said one, stepping forward with his arms to his and breathing deep.

"No! There's something not right with it!" he screamed above the din but it was unheeded.

The enterprising fool let loose the walls of his soul and grasped towards the undead grunt's soul. His will reaching out to the sprinting creature, eager to claim it as his own personal lapdog. The prideful apprentice had grown bored of the slow, shambling undead servants he had made for himself. It was a task he had done dozens of times and was akin to like molding clay. The remnant being of an average undead dredge was almost tar-like even. Soft and malleable.

That was not the case with this thing.

His will was supposed to grow through, to go beyond the decomposing flesh and grab hold of the viscous shards of his desires and mold it to his whims. Instead, he was blown back ten feet from where he stood. His will might as well have just rammed straight through a spiritual granite wall, causing him to slam right straight to it.

"Pull yourself together! Raise your - -*BLUGGHK!!"

Too late.

The lead apprentice had never been punched in his life, he may have been a second son but he was still nobility and was afforded the privileges of his station, all be it reduced. He knows being punched wasn't supposed to be this strong. He expected his back to immediately hit the ground.

He waited and waited.

By the Dark god, how long had he been in the air?

When he finally stopped flying in the air, he didn't feel the impact. Couldn't move his legs to stand, much less lift a finger. He can only lift his head. The undead man stood directly over him. A splattering of fresh blood decorated his only cheek. The apprentice stared deeply into this undead's eyes. He could feel that it might as well be his final act in life.

They were not dull, glazed eyes as was the norm.

They were seeing and focused. Glowing and sizzling frostily with hints of green about them. He looked to him and seeing eye to eye.

The apprentice's eyes went wide.

There was something alive in those eyes. Dead and yet at the same time alive.

To carve out a wealth was not all that the apprentice desired. Perhaps in another life he could have been a scholar for he was attracted to the dark arts for the mystery and possibilities of what mortals deemed to be what should be in the world, as if it was theirs to master. The apprentice was also lured by the unknown, before his ambition took hold of him.

Something unknown now stared at his dying body. He would've loved to study its nature but all he could fell was weightlessness. Almost like going to sleep but his consciousness was drifting upwards.

He found the undead creature looking up to him.

Wait, why was he looking up? when did the apprentice got to higher ground? It was surreal but it didn't matter. He was so tired.

The last thing he saw was the creature bent over his lifeless body, illuminated by the green glow being sucked from his corpse and devoured by the undead.

*-*-*-*-*

The women of the village huddled close to one another. They dare not go close to the barricaded windows. Last time Blanche peeked through, she immediately scurried away as a horde of undead descended towards their little village. She had thought to have heard a booming noise but saw the others unheeding of it.

Such a chilling sound, a multitude of groans and rotting limbs and flesh shuffling in a rambling chorus.

It went on for a little while before it got worse. The sound of something hitting the doors and the ground outside. It is said that an undead would screech upon seeing a living soul and try to devour it. A horrid soul-grating noise it did make. Now imagine it repeated thirty times in unison. It's as if the very earth was being cracked from within with the cacophony that followed. Wood splintered. Flesh torn apart.

Where the others alright? They heard no humanly screams piercing through the raucous din. They dreaded the moment the endless dead would come pouring in through their makeshift barricaded.

They waited and waited.

The huddled women and old would think it over only for them to hear a solitary groan of a rotting throat followed by a nasty squish akin to smashed vegetable. They had no doubt as what it truly was.

And then true silence. Absolutely nothing save for their scared rasped breathing with their dried throat as the villagers waited.

Blanche could not tell what she feared most, to be stuck in that moment of cowered stillness or for the dead to take her apart. She broke from the huddled group and peered through the slit in the barricades. They tried to stop her but were so afraid to go near the barricades.

What Blanche saw was utter carnage.

The dead lay truly still and splattered from the wooden walls of homes to the grounds of the road. She was reminded of overripe vegetables hitting the ground fast and hard. They littered everything from the roofs to the walls as if they were thrown there. Even so close to the barricade lay one, its head dangled directly to her right and only an inch of feeble, old wood separated them.

But it really seemed that it was over. Whatever it was that had happened. She turned to tell the others when the carcass began to slide down. Or at least she thought it was about to slide down until it turned its head and gazed at her with empty eye sockets, flesh devoured by still lingering maggots and muscles so blackened by decay it was charcoal coarse.

A scream stopped dead in its tracks of Blanche's throat. Followed by the unearthly scream of the undead. The other villagers reeled back, some crying and covering their ears.

And then SPLAT!

The screaming head exploded into a hundred fragments of soft flesh and bone. Some sputtering Blanche in the face. All eyes on the windows as the telltale thud of a footstep sounded. A shadow blotted out the feeble light of the sun.

Blanche carelessly looked the figure in the eye.

For a moment their eyes stared into one another. A sudden chill went to her spin and she nearly stumbled back. His pallor was that of a recently dead. A piece of his cheek was gone, revealing bone beneath. And yet it was the eyes that was the strangest of all. They almost glowed green and white. And they stared directly right into hers.

And just like that, the thing turned, its footsteps receding, until they can be heard no more.

That was no undead, thought Blanche. There was something truly alive behind those eyes.

Thinking.

Feeling.

What had awakened in the deep forest?