The night consud the last embers of daylight, and the forest was swallowed in crimson darkness. The riders thundered into the clearing, hooves striking the earth like war drums. The dead moved in unison, a grotesque tide of limbs and teeth, their hollow eyes glinting with a hunger that had no end.
Kael swung his blade in a wide arc, the steel catching faint firelight as it severed rotting flesh. A head flew from its shoulders, landing with a sickening thud, but the body staggered forward still, grasping at his leg before collapsing under the stallion’s crushing hooves.
“Elara, left!” he shouted.
She pulled her mare hard, guiding it toward a knot of corpses that shuffled too close. From beneath her cloak, she drew a short bow strung with black sinew. The first arrow sank into the skull of a zombie mid-step, its body crumpling in silence. She loosed another, and another, each shot finding its mark with rciless precision. Yet for every corpse that fell, three more clawed out of the mist.
“They’re endless!” she cried, sweat beading her brow.
“They’re being called,” Kael snarled, pointing his blade toward the figure in the fog. The cloaked master had not moved, yet its presence seed to command the swarm. It lifted its hand again, and the ground trembled. From the soil erupted more cadavers, tearing through their own burial shrouds as if eager to obey.
Kael’s stallion reared, nearly throwing him as skeletal fingers clawed at its hind legs. He cut down the attackers, his fury boiling hotter with each strike. “We cut the head,” he growled. “End the master, end the horde!”
But reaching it was near impossible. The zombies pressed tighter, forming a wall of bodies between them and their commander. Every gap they carved closed almost instantly, as if the dead had learned to protect their shepherd.
Elara’s eyes darted through the chaos, and she spotted sothing glimring in the muck at their feet—a sigil carved into the ground, glowing faintly red beneath layers of trampled soil and spilled gore. Its lines pulsed with sickly light, binding the creatures together like a web.
“Kael!” she shouted, loosing an arrow to buy a breath of space. “The circle! It’s feeding them!”
He followed her gaze, and fury burned anew in his chest. Without hesitation, he spurred his stallion forward, hacking and slashing until he reached the edge of the sigil. He dismounted in a single fluid motion, sword raised high. With a roar that shook the trees, he drove the blade into the glowing lines.
The earth scread.
A shockwave burst outward, throwing zombies back like leaves in a gale. Their bodies convulsed, black ichor spilling from their mouths and eyes as the binding power faltered. For the first ti, silence fell among the horde.
But it was not victory.
The master finally moved. From beneath its tattered hood, two eyes burned like coals in the fog. Its hand lowered, and the forest itself seed to kneel. A voice—deep, resonant, and cold—rolled across the battlefield:
“You dare break my seal?”
Kael froze, sword trembling in his grasp. Elara felt her blood turn to ice.
This was no re necromancer. This was sothing older. Sothing bound for centuries—now awakened.
And it knew their nas.
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