The silence shattered.
The sea of bone surged forward like an avalanche of death, utterly silent but for the clatter of bone on frozen earth and the ethereal, soul-chilling wails of the damned that floated above them. The Krag line braced for impact.
It was like being hit by a cavalry.
The first rank crashed into the hammer-wielding guards with mindless force. There was no strategy, no finesse, only an overwhelming relentless push. Axes of chipped metal and rusted iron hacked at green flesh and leathered hide. Spears, clutched in bony fists, thrust through gaps; green fists broke bone skulls. The air filled with the noise of battle: the crunch of shattered bone under Krag hammers, the clang of metal on metal, the grunts of warriors, and the soulless silence of their attackers.
"Let's go and join our warriors," Arieus said before charging in with Goruk and Varga right by his side.
Varga was the first to reach the front lines, her legs covered in a green aura that made her impossibly fast. She moved towards the flanks and slashed a skeleton wielding a sword with her axe, crumbling its skull. She was now in the thick of it, her axe became a silver blur to her opponent. She fought with focused intensity, doing her best supporting the flanks and trying to keep the enemy from breaching the entrance.
"Hold the line!" Goruk bellowed, his two-headed axe whirling in a devastating circle, clearing a space of three skeletons at once. But for every one he destroyed, two more shambled into its place.
A wide slash severed a skeleton's arm at the elbow, the axe it held clattering to the ground. Another stroke took its skull from its shoulders. Varga didn't wait to watch it collapse, already moving to the next, her eyes constantly darting around the battlefield, absorbing everything.
She saw Jorik fighting franticly beside Harken. His twin blades parrying swords and spears here and there while shattering skulls with his quick blade. "They don't stop!" he yelled, as he fended off three more attackers. He ducked under a swinging axe, taking one skeleton out with a low sweep, only to have to roll backward as a spear thrust from the second nearly found his throat.
"They are not meant to!" Harken grunted in response, using his heavy war hammer to crush a skeleton into powder. But even his veteran stamina was being tested.
The line was bending, buckling under the sheer weight of numbers. The Krags were being forced back, step by step, their boots grinding through a carpet of bone fragments and snow.
A Krag, his name she couldn't quite remember, roared as a skeleton's rusted blade found a gap in his defenses, piercing his thigh. He fell, and the skeletons swarmed over him before his comrades could react. Their blades carving and stabbing him to death.
Varga's focus returned to her own battle as a skeleton lunged and was shattered. Yet a second simply stepped over the first, and a third moved around the side.
There's still more out there, trying to get in. We can't fight forever, Varga thought, her gaze snapping to the robed figure who still stood watching. He was surely the puppeteer of this carnage.
With a roar of frustration, she smacked the second skeleton down with the flat of her axe and kicked the other away, sending it stumbling into its allies.
We have to take that necromancer's head.
"Give way!"
Varga turned her head at Arieus's voice and like always the sight of him fighting gave her that same odd feeling that she couldn't help but admit.
He was a beast.
His movements were timely and lethal, every swing of his cleaver destroyed multiple foes and opened a way for Krags to maintain their ground. Every time he swung his cleaver, Varga felt an invisible weight that press down on her. Almost like his attacks could devour everything.
Yet, even as he was surrounded, Varga noticed his eyes were not on the skeletons. They were on the spectral horrors that flowed through and over the ranks of the undead.
"Get back, I will handle them!" He said as he rushed through his own forces.
But it was too late.
A Damned Soul with a twisted flickering translucent image of a tormented human swept through the Krag's line. Screeching and groaning it Lashed at a young warrior's chest causing him to freeze. His eyes wide with an internal horror only he could see, before collapsing into the snow, his spirit extinguished.
Another shot through the line, passing straight through the chest of another warrior. This Krag also froze, his face a mask of utter horror, his eyes wide and vacant. A moment later, he dropped his hammer and fell to his knees, laughing uncontrollably, blood dripping from his eyes completely broken, before a skeleton's axe ended his misery.
"They cannot be harmed by steel alone!" Arieus roared, his voice cutting through the fighting. He then swung his own cleaver, and unlike the others, it connected with the specter. Shearing the apparition in two, causing it to let out a final fading shriek.
"Varga! Goruk! To me!"
She immediately smashed her fist into a skeleton blocking her way and rushed to his side while carving a path through the undead.
"Your Order?
"Our men's weapons are useless against the damned. Yours and mine… might be the only things that affect them."
"Goruk, get that mixture we were working on! Tell Danna to get the remaining forces ready for a counter. Dip their weapons in it and get torches lit."
"As you command, War Chief," Goruk replied with a chest salute, before turning to carry out his commands.
"Varga, handle the ones on the right flank! They will slaughter us if left unchecked!"
Varga hesitated at the command. The right flank was away from the infirmary ward. To follow his order meant leaving it exposed. She looked past the fray, to the old house. Tarlak had seen the danger and was already rallying a handful of warriors to form a secondary defensive semi-circle around the building's door.
"Arieus, the wounded…" she started.
"The living will join them if those specters are not stopped!" he interrupted, his gaze fierce. "Go! That is an order.... Truth-seeker!"
The title was a low blow, his way of reminding of her duty.
What a nasty move.
With a final, frustrated look at the old house, Varga turned and plunged toward the right flank. "You three, with me!" she yelled at the nearest Krags, pulling a small squad from the main line. "Protect my flanks! I'll deal with the souls!"
She raised her free hand, her emerald eyes igniting once more. "Kuros!" The world slowed. She saw the spectral forms not as ghosts, but for what they truly were. Patterns of malevolent energy.
Taking a deep breath, Varga suddenly lunged forward moving like a vengeful spirit herself. The Krags at her side doing their best to keep up, but they were soon left to spread out around her, doing their best to keep as much skeletons as they could away from her blind spots.
A skeleton lunged, while she sidestepped and drove her axe up through its jaw, silencing it forever. She didn't engage the ranks of bone, but weaved through them, her true target the flickering, wailing horrors that sought to demoralize and destroy her kin.
She noticed one descending upon Jorik, who was frantically trying to swat at it with his blade, the steel passing through its form harmlessly.
"Jorik, down!" she roared.
He dropped without question.
"Crushing Blade."
Varga leaped, her axe now covered in a fierce emerald light, sang a deadly song as it cleaved the Damned Soul from shoulder to hip. It erupted into a mist of light, leaving behind a piercing scream.
She landed, rolled, and immediately engaged another. Her axe still shimmering with emerald light, intercepted a damned soul inches from one of the warriors guarding her flank. It connected causing the soul to scream in what sounded like release before vanishing into nothingness.
She continued, banishing one wailing soul after another. Each one she destroyed eased the dread weighing on the warriors, allowing them to focus on the physical threat. But with every step she took away from the old house, a cold dread grew in her own gut.
As if to prove her worries, from the corner of her eye she saw the main Krag line falter.
"Fall back! Cover your sides!" Goruk's voice boomed, though she could see he was pinned, surrounded by a knot of undead. While the unthinkable happened. A section of the line broke.
"Damn the Paths!"
Her worst worries were realized. The relentless skeletal pressure had found a weakness. While the main force still held the entrance, a flanking group of skeletons had broken through over the bodies of their own fallen, circumventing the main line. They were now swarming toward the less-defended side of the camp, which included the old human home serving as the infirmary.
"The ward! They're breaking through to the ward!" a Krag shouted, his cry cut short as a rusted spear found his throat.
Tarlak and his handful of warriors were now the only thing standing between the tide and the injured. They fought bravely. Tarlak's own sword shattering skulls, hip bone and severing spinal columns, creating holes in the undead forces. For a moment, it seemed they might hold.
Yet.
A wave of twenty skeletons all having large frames, leaving no room for imagination as to what they were when they were alive. For the undead Krags had come to hit Tarlak's tiny line. A warrior fell to a spearhead buried in his eye. Another was dragged down, disappearing under clawing bony fingers.
It was inevitable that the line would shatter.
"No! Hold them!" Tarlak bellowed, but he was overwhelmed, surrounded by three skeletons hacking at his armor. He couldn't disengage. The tide of bone began to flow, unimpeded, toward the door of the old house.
The world snapped back into a horrifying focus. The ethereal wail of the damned soul she had just bisected faded into nothing, but it was replaced by a sound that carved a deeper chill into Varga's bones.
It came from the old human home. The splintering crash of the door giving way. Shouts, choked and brief, cut through to her ears. The wet thud of a weapon meeting unresisting flesh. The splintering of wood as cots were overturned. Then, a silence more terrible than any noise.
Her world narrowed to that dark, broken doorway.
"Femi…" she whispered.
She slashed through another specter without seeing it and began to run, a desperate, headlong charge toward the ward.
Arieus saw her break formation. "Varga, hold the line!" he commanded, but his voice was distant, muffled by the roaring in her ears.
He's dead. He's dead because I left him.
The thought was a spike of pure, incandescent anger, and the sudden, sharp pain it brought was worse than the gash weeping blood on her side.
Not again. Not like this.
With a raw cry of rage that tore from her throat, she abandoned her post. She forgot the specters, forgot the battle, forgot her war chief's orders. She had one purpose
Get to the cabin.
Arieus watched her break away, his face a mask of frustration. "Goruk! Cover her back!" he thundered, redoubling his own efforts, his axe and cleaver blurring as they systematically destroyed the damned souls threatening to collapse his position.
Varga became a center of destruction, no longer avoiding the skeletons but plowing through them. Every step was paid for in shattered bone. She kicked a skeleton out of her path, slammed another with her shoulder, using her body as a battering ram. She was almost there; the ward's porch steps within reach.
Then she heard it. Faint at first, from within the house. A high-pitched, fierce growl left Victim, Femi's loyal companion. But the sound was cut off abruptly by a pained yelp, then a whimper that was silenced mid-breath.
The sound fueled her more as she reached the doorway. A roar building in her throat, ready to see the worst. To see the small ratling and his loyal pup broken amidst the other casualties.
There was a thud and a crash of something heavy hitting the wall. Then a loud shout came from inside, which caused her to freeze in her tracks.
The voice cracked with pain but burning with indignant fury, rang out clear enough to stop her charge.
"HOW DARE YOU TOUCH MY DOG,"
Crack! The sound of something breaking
"YOU DOMINATED DUCKFOWEL!"
Doombom!
" YOU UNFORTUNATE MOSQUITO!"
Crack!
"GET OUT OF HERE!"
There was a loud duffel of breaking wood, and a skeleton came flying out through the front door as if launched from a sling. It landed in a heap of broken bones at Varga's feet, its skull utterly shattered. She looked up from the bones to lay her eyes on the strangest sight she had seen.
Standing in the doorway, was a figure. He was leaning heavily on the doorframe, one arm clutched around his bandaged middle, the other holding the unconscious form of Victim while panting with the exertion.
Varga blinked, unsure if it was the adrenaline or the night light, but his brown fur seemed to have a faint, almost imperceptible grey sheen. And his left eye, once a warm brown like its pair, now had a stormy grey ring around the pupil, making his gaze look mysterious.
It was Femi. And he was furious.
Femi glared down at the destroyed skeleton with utter contempt, his whiskers twitching violently. He then looked up, his strange, mismatched eyes scanning the chaotic battlefield before landing on a stunned Varga.
"Why are you looking at me as if I am a goat? My friend concentrate," he said, while bending down to gently placed the unconscious pup just inside the doorway.
"Rest up, you did well," he whispered, as he turned back to face the skeletons that had broken through the main line. His face twisting in anger. He grabbed a large, splintered piece of the broken doorframe, hefting it like a club.
"You bloody skeletons," Femi spat, his voice dripping with venomous annoyance. These creatures seem to have something against him because, he knew for a fact it wasn't normal to be jamming them twice in one's life time.
His sharp clawed fingers tightened around the piece of broken door, that had volunteered to act as his makeshift weapon and took a step forward.
"Okay, bring your head here. Let this uncle teach you respect."