The space behind him warped, not with a sudden flash, but with a slow, suffocating distortion, like heat mirage over black water. At first, the thing that rose was just a column, thick and slick with sothing that was not sap and not blood. It pulsed in arrhythmic throbs, veins the color of rotting bruise spreading upward as if in search of a sky that had no business looking upon it.
Then the tip split not as a branch breaks, but as flesh parts, peeling outward in wet layers that unfurled into sothing resembling a canopy. Tendrils fanned and knotted together into the shape of limbs, though they writhed faintly, betraying their unwillingness to ever be still. Eyes, lidless and milk-pale, blinked open along the thicker boughs, their pupils swimming as if they dread. The sll ca next, a dense, cloying mix of saltwater and sothing sweet left too long in the heat.
With the final twitch of those newborn branches, the world simply... stopped making sound.
[You have been afflicted with The Silence Between Notes! All sound in the periter of the Tree of Endless Dreams are muted]
[You have been silenced. All vocal spells are disabled]
The change was instant and rciless. Ludwig’s ears felt stuffed with wool, his own breath reduced to nothing. Even the faint scrape of his boots on stone vanished. It wasn’t just the absence of noise, it was the absence of its mory, as though silence had always been the only state the world knew.
His jaw moved, but his voice went nowhere, and the sudden inability to shape even the smallest spell through sound made the hair on his neck prickle. Still, he found Thomas and the Knight King’s voices threading faintly through his head, their thoughts brushing his own like ripples against a shore.
Across from them, the Lich straightened slightly. There was a faint narrowing of those pale-blue lights in his skull sockets, annoyance, maybe, but not fear. If anything, the absence of incantations seed to be a minor inconvenience to him. He did not gesture to try and even dispel it, even if it was possible. He simply shifted his grip on the staff and extended one rotting hand toward the cobblestone.
The street buckled. Three coffins burst upward from the earth, dislodging chunks of stone and sending cracks spiderwebbing across the cobblestones. Their lids slid away with slow inevitability, revealing the corpses inside.
The Lich’s command and gestural carried no triumph, no flourish, only a simple soundless statent of intent as the coffins yawned open. The first to stir was the smallest, an adolescent’s corpse, its proportions delicate and almost frail until one looked closer. Half its form was nothing but a drifting coil of smoke, the other half wrapped in layers of rotting bandages that clung to scarred flesh. The bandages swayed in a phantom breeze, revealing glimpses of muscle stitched with crude, jagged seams. From its hands grew claws that looked more bone than nail, long and curved to pierce through armor.
It didn’t hesitate. The mont its head lifted, its eyes, hollow pits filled with swirling ash, locked onto Mot. The thing’s body blurred forward, speed far beyond what Ludwig expected, faster even than the Piper before he’d been slowed by poison. The ghostly half of its form bled into the air as it closed the distance in a heartbeat.
Mot barely shifted his stance. A jagged appendage tore its way from his shoulder like a living weapon, striking with a concussive force that would have shattered stone. It smashed into the child’s chest with a sound Ludwig felt more than heard in the silence. But instead of breaking, the creature dissolved into smoke, passing around the blow like water around a stone. It re-ford behind Mot, claws arcing toward his spine, and the fight between them continued in a blur of strikes and evasions.
The second coffin gave up its occupant with far less urgency. A woman stepped into the ruined street, her movent so graceful it seed untouched by the carnage around her. She was beautiful, unnervingly so for soone so undeniably dead. Skin unblemished, posture perfect, every fold of her pale dress free of dust or blood. But her eyes betrayed her: glassy, unfocused, reflecting nothing.
She began to dance. No rhythm guided her, no music stirred her steps, yet each movent carried a strange precision. Her feet glided over the blood-streaked cobblestones without sound and without even a drop of it touching her form despite the splash. With every slow spin, every poised sweep of her arms, the battlefield changed. Corpses that had been torn apart monts before began to rise again. Limbs reattached, bone knitted, flesh reford, and each one returned to the fight more feral, faster, and hungrier than before. Their jaws opened in silent howls, their eyeless faces contorted into frenzies of mindless aggression as they sward toward Mot and the grotesque tree looming behind him.
The last coffin’s lid fell away with a clang that echoed in Ludwig’s mind even through the unnatural hush. The figure that stepped out was armored head to toe, plates blackened with age and marked with cruel etchings. A long curved sword hung at his side, and behind his shoulders rose banners tattered from wars long past.
"A Death Knight..." the Knight King’s voice was almost reverent, though edged with recognition.
"That’s a Death Knight?" Ludwig asked, eyes narrowing as he asured the way it moved.
"Indeed," the Knight King replied, "though this one has been altered. He’s... different, modified even I don’t know if this one is natural... or worse, created. Watch closely, Death Knights are masters of Aura use."
The Death Knight lifted his head, his helm tilting toward the tree, then toward Mot. In a single motion, his sword ca free, the steel igniting with a lightless aura of deep violet. Without pause, he advanced, his steps sending cracks racing through the stones beneath him. Every rising appendage in his path was cut cleanly through, violet light lingering in the air where his blade passed, eating away at the flesh of the tendrils until they withered.
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