Deus Necros

Chapter 554: The Risen

Misty could only watch in shock as Ludwig’s head rolled in front of his body, the Hero of Tulmud who bravely fought against odds far higher than normal, who battled and defeated the great calamity named Morde’Xander, the Guardian of Solania. A young figure the soldiers whispered about when fires were low and fear was high. A man who carried too much weight with a steady gait. She watched him fall to a simple fakery of his enemy. The clean, obscene trick of a corpse choosing not to stay a corpse.

She couldn’t blame him. She wouldn’t. She hadn’t expected something that was clearly cut in half to simply stand up and pretend it still had a right to stand. The line between wrong and impossible blurred into a single ugly smear in front of her eyes. Her grip on the anchor’s haft tightened until the chain creaked.

“Huahhahahahaha.” the former servant of Necros laughed as he rose, his body stitching together by what looked like invisible threads. Limbs climbed back to sockets like obedient pets. Torn edges found each other in the air and decided to be whole. “It’s on you to give your back to your enemy, foolish whelp.” The voice had a child’s delight in a cruel trick finally sprung.

The stitching raised the hair along Misty’s arms and made her collarbone feel cold beneath her cleric cloth. It was wrong in a way her training had no litany for. Like watching a seamstress mend a doll in one smooth pull while the doll’s eyes followed the needle. Only this one was meat, bone, memory. In front of her. Breathing because it remembered how, not because it needed to.

“Now then,” he said as he approached Ludwig’s fallen body and grabbed him by the head. Fingers buried themselves into hair still warm from the fight. The other hand found the jaw as if weighing how it would look on a wall.

“Put him down.” Misty howled as she propped her anchor up, willing to risk everything so Ludwig’s body wouldn’t be desecrated another breath more. She set her feet, felt the chain through her palm, readied the heave. She could already see the arc. She could already hate it.

Her words fell on the smooth stone of his glee. The man bemusedly shook Ludwig’s head by the hair, gently at first, then with a little flourish as if testing how it would dance. “Wouldn’t this make a great addition to my collection. The head of a servant of Nec-”

The sentence broke off. The man stalled. Something in his grip changed temperature. A wrong texture met the pads of his fingers.

The head in his hand changed. Terror spilled into both faces that could still feel it. The former servant flinched in surprise that had nowhere to go.

Ludwig’s entire face began to decay. The pinkish skin of life, which had only just begun to turn the paleness of death, deteriorated faster than normal. Alive became day-old. Day-old became a decade underground. The color ran out of the lips and then out of the cheeks. The smell changed from iron-warm to cellar-cold. Skin gave up its tautness, sank, and let bone announce itself in sharp, quiet lines.

From alive, to very much very dead. As if a hundred years had crawled across that face in a handful of heartbeats. It lost its luster, its color, and then its flesh. The leather of old graves showed through. The eye-sockets deepened and shadow pooled where pain had been.

The skin and the texture of the dead. No, in this case. The Undead. There was a small dignity to the stillness. A decision in it. The lines of his cheek did not belong to a victim. They belonged to something that had made peace with a longer season.

“Took you long enough.” Ludwig’s mouth moved as it spoke. The jaw clicked once on the consonant and then learned the path again. Unbeknownst to the assailant, Ludwig’s headless body had already stood up.

In that moment a sword stabbed right through the man’s back and out his chest and tore up, the same motion as before, same line cut through softer cartilage, same economical cruelty that didn’t need a second try. The strike was too sudden for a hand drunk on triumph. He dropped Ludwig’s head, but his own body reacted fast in grabbing his own. Before it hit the floor, he raised it and simply pressed it to his neck as if afraid it would forget its address.

However the way he set it on the neck was calm but very wrong, it was backward. The room tilted the way rooms tilt when a thing looks at you from the wrong direction. He then grabbed his head with both hands though one was still holding Durandal and twisted it, the soft grind of bone returning to place echoed through the chamber. A turn, a click, the promise of tendons remembering their old work.

After his vision corrected and everything felt ’Right,’ A simple twist of his neck and cracking of bone assured Ludwig that everything was in place. He rolled his shoulders. The chain under his sleeve settled like a snake that approves of its burrow.

“Didn’t really want to show this form to anyone.” Ludwig said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “Especially not to a servant of the Order. Now you’re going to make me do things I didn’t want to.” The words had no heat. They didn’t need it. The threat lived in the absence of anything like it.

“You. That’s not fair. Why do you still get to live after death.” the man said as he backed away while laying on his ass. his body trying to stitch back together. His threads kept working, but slower now, as if each stitch had to argue to be made.

“Well, there are a lot of unfair things in life, and this is simply one of them.” Ludwig said. “Not to mention, you cut my head off.” He weighed the sword in one hand with the same care someone gives to a mug after a long march. An ordinary motion. A patient one. It made the next breath in the room smaller. “And I didn’t like that.”

“No.” the man howled as he began creating more arms. Flesh around his ribs bulged and rolled, old seams split to make room for new tools. But Ludwig was already inside the next shape.

“Since the cat is out of the bag. [Madness]. [Enfeeble], [Taint].” Ludwig’s words were faster than the spells. They leaped ahead of his breath and were on the target before the lungs could finish their work.

The body in front of him buckled. Poison ran under the skin like ink finding riverbeds. Overtime damage stacked into a quiet swarm that knew where to bite. The spine lost some of its proud memory. The mind rippled. The thoughts inside that hood stumbled and tripped over themselves, then kept trying to stand in a room that kept moving sideways.

[Your spell application has doubled in potency due to the shaken mental of your enemy]

“Rise Undead.” Ludwig uttered the forbidden spell.