The letters burned cold and then held, faintly pulsing, as if whatever saw him had a heartbeat of its own. Ludwig’s jaw tightened. "That’s new."
His glance slid sidelong, a reflex he did not indulge for long. Turning one’s head in a place like this felt like showing one’s throat. Thomas floated closer. "That doesn’t bode well."
His voice sank even lower, a murmur ant for two sets of ears only. Before Ludwig could answer, another voice intruded, deep, guttural, almost amused. "Don’t go there. You’ll perish."
It rolled up from the lantern like smoke coming up a chimney, warm and unpleasant. The Lantern at Ludwig’s hip had never reacted like that, there was a sensation that the entity captured there shouldn’t be allowed to feel. Fear.
Ludwig turned his head slightly. The words had co from the lantern dangling at his belt.
The tal was cold under his fingers when he unhooked it. The little ghostly soul inside did not flicker; it watched.
He unhooked it, holding it up so the faint light glowed across his face. "You sound nervous, Lich."
The light lined his cheekbones and left his eyes shadowed; he preferred it that way. It hid the mont where caution considered obedience and then refused.
Inside, the ghostly fla pulsed faintly. "It’s protected. You step inside, you’re dead. There are creatures and wards woven into that forest older than empires. Even I wouldn’t..."
The pause before ’wouldn’t’ was not humility. It was calculation, a thing asuring what it could gain against what it might lose.
"Can’t turn away," Ludwig interrupted. "Orders are orders. Scouts from the Kingdom of Sand were last seen deeper in there. If I go back empty-handed, that commander’s going to send soone else anyway. Also it’s a novelty, seeing an Undead being afraid."
He spoke evenly, as if reciting simple sums. Duty on one side. Risk on the other. The scale never learned to stay level.
"It isn’t fear... you simply don’t value your existence, or your life."
The Lich’s voice thinned, a thread pulled tighter than prudence would allow.
"Do I look alive to you, Lich?" Ludwig’s grin was humorless.
It showed teeth and nothing warm. The question was not quite a jest. It was a reminder.
The voice inside the lantern hissed softly. "Do as you wish. But I warned you,"
The fla steadied, then dimd, like an eye narrowing.
Ludwig clipped the lantern back to his belt and took his first step beneath the canopy.
The shade closed over his shoulders like a cloak that did not ask permission to be worn.
[Your Death Point has been saved.]
The ssage slid across his vision with the bureaucratic calm of a clerk signing a will. He had seen it before, and always in places where the world did not negotiate.
His brows rose. "Oh, lovely. That’s always a good sign." The sarcasm dripped from his mouth like liquid venom.
He did not stop. He rely shifted his grip on the haft to give his right hand a fraction more play.
The forest swallowed him whole.
Shadow did not fall; it gathered. The scent changed, less swamp now, more cold loam and wet wood and the faint iron tang of rain that had not yet fallen.
He drew Nightbreaker without hesitation, the heavy weapon humming faintly as though it sensed what lay ahead.
The hum pressed into his palm and up his arm, a low sound born not from tal but from the mory sealed inside it. The air listened.
"I thought you’d use Durandal for this, quicker movent and all..." Thomas said from above his shoulder.
He watched the weapon settle against Ludwig’s back like a second spine.
"When you don’t know what’s waiting," Ludwig replied, "better to have sothing that turns mountains into gravel."
He did not raise his voice to fit the boast; he spoke it as one states a preference for thicker boots in snow.
The Knight King chuckled. "Always subtle."
The sound was brief. The silence took it and made it smaller.
The forest closed in. Branches arched overhead like ribs of so colossal beast, their leaves so thick that sunlight barely trickled through. The air was damp, the sll of moss sharp enough to sting the nose. Every step Ludwig took sank slightly into the carpet of roots and decayed leaves.
Sotis the ground felt springy, as if sothing beneath it shifted. Sotis it felt hollow, as if a palm waited an inch underfoot. No twig snapped. Nothing dared announce the direction of his tread.
Minutes blurred into hours. The deeper he went, the heavier the air felt, like wading through unseen water.
His shoulders learned the weight of it, and then that weight increased. The forest seed to make room for him and then reconsider the courtesy.
"I don’t like this," Ludwig said after a long silence.
He had held the words long enough to test the feeling against stubbornness. It did not fade.
Thomas asked, "What now?"
He kept pace at Ludwig’s temple, a guard where eyes could not look.
"My eyes. They’re... dimming. I used to see perfectly in the dark. Now it’s just pitch black. And that feeling..." He glanced sideways, muscles tensing. "That Sothing is watching. Been growing rather more and more morbid now."
The watching did not move closer; it did not retreat. It settled at the edge of sense and refused to be nad. He asured his breath and found it steadier than his skin felt.
"That’s rich coming from an undead," the Knight King muttered.
The word undead left his mouth as an old habit, shaped by years of speaking to what Ludwig had been.
"But he isn’t, not now at least" the Lich’s voice ca again, sudden and sharp.
It cut across the path like a thrown nail. The lantern’s fla brightened once in agreent with its own claim.
Ludwig froze. "Joining us again, are we? What do you an I’m not undead?"
His tone tightened, not from offense but from the abrupt stitch the words made in his thoughts.
"You were," the Lich said. "But that heart changed you. You bleed, you feel, you sleep. You’re no longer bound by the sa rules."
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