The silence was broken with the scrape of bone. From the side tunnels, they came slow at first with shapes staggering out of cracks in the Hollow's skin.
Corpses were stitched in necrotic fire, while their veins lit with crawling runes that pulsed like dying embers.
Some had once been soldiers, with armor still fused to their rotting flesh. Others had been beasts dragged down into the fissures, which were forced into mockeries of war machines. And the hybrids of those were the worst.
A wolf's skull upon a man's torso and ribcage that spread wide like a cage of fangs. A horse's frame with its body flayed and dragged upright and eight arms sprouting where legs should be, each limb jerked in spasms.
They did not moan like ordinary undead, instead, the swarm whispered in layered voices, repeating fragments of words that had belonged to the dead.
"Help me...Stand fast, for the king...."
