The three remaining undead worked for another forty minutes.
It was a tiring work.
Darion stayed in the tree the entire ti, perspective glass moving between the entrance guard, the far corner, and the two torch positions in a rotation he didn’t let himself break even when nothing was happening.
Especially when nothing was happening. The mont he stopped watching was the mont sothing moved.
The entrance guard slept. The far corner guard slept. The mid-wall position stayed empty.
He felt the bindings moving steadily through the rotation, the three undead working through the room the way he had instructed, one bite, move on, no lingering.
It sothing thodical and patient.
The loyalty holding clean at the numbers he had drilled them to, the commands sitting in the binding without the drag or resistance that the low twenties had produced.
When he judged they had done enough — not as many as he had hoped, the lost undead had cost him a section of the room — he brought them out.
That was enough.
They returned to the entrance, sa movent, one at a ti.
They ca back through the door the sa way they had gone in. First one, past the sleeping guard, into the dark outside the torchlight. Second. Third. All three clear of the entrance and moving toward the wall.
He had them regroup at the base of his tree, recalled all three into inventory, and sat in the branches for another five minutes without moving, watching the entrance.
The guard slept on.
Darion collapsed the perspective glass, tucked it carefully into his jacket, and began climbing down.
He had his feet on the ground and was moving toward where he had tied the horse when the first shout ca from inside the barracks.
It was a scream, more of a sharp, startled sound, the kind a person made when they woke suddenly and didn’t know why.
Then another voice, louder. Then several at once, overlapping, the confused noise of multiple people waking in a confined space in the dark.
Then the entrance guard’s head ca up.
’Well, that was early, I had been expecting hours or sothing.’
Darion was already walking.
Not running, running made noise, running was a decision that announced itself, but walking, covering ground as efficiently as possible, while producing as little sound as doing so allowed.
Each step placed carefully, moving through the treeline parallel to the road rather than crossing open ground.
Behind him the noise from the barracks was building. More voices, soone calling for a torch, the tallic sound of equipnt being moved. The entrance guard was on his feet now, calling sothing toward the door.
Darion kept walking.
The horse was where he had left it, tied to the tree he had selected specifically because it was unremarkable and set back far enough from the edge of the treeline to be invisible from the road.
He untied it, walked it further into the trees before mounting: hoofbeats on soft ground were quieter than hoofbeats on the road and he needed quiet for another few minutes, then turned north and rode.
The sounds from the barracks faded behind him as the distance and the trees absorbed them.
He didn’t look back.
Mission successful!
An hour out from Valdenmoor’s territory, on a stretch of road that had returned to the cracked and uneven surface of the borderlands, his eyes started making their own decisions.
He had been awake since before sunrise the previous day. The tree, the waiting then the concentration of directing four undead through a silent operation while monitoring six different exterior points through a perspective glass, it had used sothing that sleep was the only thing that would replace, and his body had apparently decided that the ergency portion of that resource was now exhausted.
His eyelids dropped. He caught himself, straightened and kept riding.
They dropped again.
He looked at the road ahead, it was empty and dark, the treeline on both sides close and dense, and made a decision.
Falling asleep on a moving horse in the dark on a road he couldn’t fully see was a way to end up on the ground with a broken sothing and no way to get back to Percvale.
A few hours of controlled sleep was the less dangerous option.
He turned the horse off the road into the treeline, found a space between the trees that was large enough, and dismounted.
He summoned the wolf.
It appeared beside him in the dark, the green eye adjusting imdiately, the half-flesh head turning to scan the treeline in both directions with alert efficiency.
"Guard," Darion said instructed the wolf. "Anything that cos close, human or animal, you deal with it. Don’t let anything reach or the horse."
The wolf looked at him for a mont, then turned outward toward the trees.
He tied the horse’s reins to his wrist (crazy stuff actually) loosely, just enough that if sothing spooked it he would know before it was fifty feet away, wrapped himself in the riding cloak, put his back against a tree trunk, and closed his eyes.
He was asleep in under a minute.
He ca back to consciousness because of noise about an hour or less later.
He had woken but a fight, solid sound of two large animals in contact, weight against weight, the grunt of sothing being hit and the snarl of sothing doing the hitting.
He was on his feet before he was fully awake, his hand on his sword, husy eyes finding the source.
Ten feet away, in a gap between two trees, the wolf had sothing pinned.
It was large, roughly the size of a mature pig but built differently, the body heavier through the shoulder, the legs shorter and more muscular, the snout broader.
It had coarse dark bristles along its spine and small eyes that caught the moonlight and reflected it back pale and flat. It had clearly co through the treeline quietly enough that the wolf had engaged it at close range rather than intercepting it further out.
It was not, currently, having a good ti.
The wolf had it by the back of the neck, the bone-and-flesh jaws locked in, the animal’s legs churning against the ground without finding purchase.
The creature was strong, it had solid, low-center-of-gravity strength, and it wasn’t giving up quickly, twisting and driving with its back legs, trying to get leverage.
The wolf didn’t shift.
It adjusted its grip once, repositioning to sothing more secure, and the creature’s thrashing beca less coordinated.
The undead wild wolf bit very deep at the side of the creature’s neck.
And it was THE FINAL BITE for sure.
Darion could tell because the frantic energy of the animal’s movent changed quality, becoming less directed, the legs still moving but without the purposeful push of before.
Thirty seconds after that it stopped moving entirely.
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