The last light of day clung to the horizon like a dying ember. The world had not known peace for years—only echoes of it, drifting like smoke through shattered lands. Once, the field where they stood had been alive with laughter and song. Now it was a graveyard disguised in flowers, each bloom drinking from the blood of the fallen.
Elias tightened his grip on his sword. The edge was dull, the tal pitted from countless battles, but it still felt like a promise. Beside him, Mara adjusted her dented armor. Her breathing was steady, though her eyes betrayed the storms within. The two stood close, their foreheads touching, drawing strength from each other as shadows crawled across the crimson sky.
“They’re coming,” Mara whispered, her voice breaking the silence that had hung between them like a fragile thread.
Elias didn’t need to look. The dead always ca with the wind—slow, deliberate, unending. Their silhouettes erged one by one over the ridge: shambling figures, broken and twisted, their hunger unbound by death.
“How many?” he asked.
“Too many,” she replied.
For a mont, neither moved. The field rustled as if alive, the flowers bending under the breath of decay. Sowhere beyond the hills, the ruins of the old kingdom burned faintly, a mory of what humanity once called ho.
Elias closed his eyes. He could still hear the screams, the tearing, the endless night when the sky had fallen and the earth had turned against them. He could still see his brother’s face—half human, half monster—before the fire consud him. That mory was a scar he carried deeper than any wound.
“We can’t keep running,” Mara said, stepping back to et his gaze. Her eyes were tired, yet fierce—the kind of fire only loss could forge. “If we die here, we die fighting.”
He nodded. “Then let’s make them rember us.”
The first of the undead reached the field, its rotting hand brushing against the petals. Elias raised his sword, feeling the tremor in his arm. Mara drew her blade beside him, and together they stood—two fading souls against an army of the endless dead.
The wind carried the stench of rot and ruin. The flowers trembled, and the sun dipped below the horizon, casting the world into twilight.
Then the scream ca—high and broken—from the darkness. The horde surged forward, a tide of death crashing against the last fragnts of life.
Elias t the first creature with steel and fury. Its head rolled into the flowers. Mara followed, cutting through the swarm like a spirit of vengeance. Blood—dark, thick, no longer human—splattered across her face.
For a mont, they fought as one heartbeat.
And then, the ground beneath them shook.
From the shadows of the ruins, sothing massive stirred—an ancient roar splitting the dusk. The zombies halted, as if even death feared what had awakened.
Mara turned to Elias, her eyes wide with dread.
“That... wasn’t one of them,” she whispered.
The night answered with thunder.
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