The Undead
COLSAR
Six Months Later
By the time Colsar reached the final pass, winter had set into him.
The wind off the frozen sea carried rot with it, strong enough to sit at the back of his throat, a scent he had learned too well in the months since Asharin vanished.
Snow dragged across the narrow stretch ahead, the pale surface breaking in places where something beneath it shifted and stirred.
The dead were waiting. They always were.
Six months earlier, he had begun the journey north with little more than rumor to guide him.
Somewhere beyond the mountains, people whispered that Alarna’s princess would be returning, the heir to the kingdom.
The royals of the hidden city had found a way to bring their blood back through the wards, they said.
Their blood. It had taken weeks of listening and piecing together fragments of half-truths before the realization struck him. Asharin. An Alarnan princess. He was not surprised.
Then there were other rumors. A ship had tried to enter Alarna and had been overtaken by the undead, its passengers lighting it on fire in an attempt to save themselves. No survivors.
He refused to believe Asharin had been on that ship. And if she had died there, then on this journey he would find her anyway. If she now roamed the snow as a walking corpse, he would roam with her.
She was his. Until the end.
The letter she had left with her lady’s maid had said two words: Find me. He would do it, or die trying.
What should have been a simple crossing by sea had become something else entirely on land, drawn out into months of blood and cold and things that refused to die. But he had not had time to prepare a ship, and in truth, by land or sea, the journey would have been just as dangerous.
How it had happened he did not know. How the girl who played darts and gambled and wielded a sword better than most of his soldiers could somehow be the lost blood of Alarna made no sense at all.
But none of that mattered. Only one truth had remained clear from the moment the pieces fell into place.
She had gone there without him. And he would not let her remain there alone.
The undead had multiplied in ways he had never seen before.
Once, they had been easy to kill.
Now they came in hordes, tireless and unafraid, closing in wave after wave. Fire killed them best, though Colsar had avoided using his breath for years. The memory of what it could do to living flesh still lingered too vividly for his liking.
But during the last months he had been forced to use it more than once, sending sheets of flame through crowds of corpses when their numbers grew too great to fight otherwise.
Even that had barely been enough. The bites were worse. Their teeth carried some foul corruption that worked slowly through the blood. The wounds did not always kill, but they left a deep sickness behind, draining strength until even standing felt like a battle.
Colsar carried many of those wounds now.
His hind legs ached with every step, several bites along the muscle already swollen and dark with infection. Two of his toes had long since gone numb, and he suspected at least one had been lost somewhere along the frozen shore weeks ago.
Hunger rode him hard, a constant pull beneath everything else. Game had grown scarce as the dead spread across the land, driving living creatures deeper into hiding, but the lack of it had not thinned him. It had only made him harder to kill.
Exhaustion pressed against him just as heavily. Six months of fighting. Six months of bleeding. Six months of chasing the faintest hope she might still be waiting.
Now, at last, he stood within sight of Alarna. The city rose across the water like something half remembered from a dream. Pale towers broke through the gray sky beyond a shimmer of light that surrounded the island in a perfect ring.
The wards.
They glowed faintly even through the drifting snow, a barrier that no outsider had ever crossed by force. Between him and those distant walls stretched a narrow island path of ice and stone that connected the mainland to the ward line.
And every inch of it crawled with the dead.
Colsar had already tried twice through the Broken Pass.
The cliffs nearly took him. The eastern shore broke beneath him as the dead rose through the ice.
Both times he had been forced back. So he turned south.
Through the Eastern Reach. Through what remained of Tearsar, where the roads were empty and the dead were not.
Now he stood at the last stretch that had not yet killed him.
A corpse lurched from the snow and seized his hind leg. Colsar twisted violently, tearing the creature apart with his jaws, but two more were already climbing toward him across the ice.
Their teeth found his flank. Pain flared hot through his side as he ripped himself free, blood splattering across the white ground.
Another corpse lunged from behind, claws raking across his abdomen hard enough to split flesh.
Something warm slid down his stomach. He looked down just long enough to see a loop of his own intestine slipping through the wound.
For a moment he simply stared. Then, with a tired grunt, he shoved it back inside. Blood bubbled up his throat when he coughed.
He lifted his head slowly and looked past the swarm of corpses toward the distant shimmer of Alarna’s wards. If he turned around now, he might still survive. He could retreat into the mountains. Wait out the winter. Wait for the war to burn itself down and the undead to thin.
He could return stronger. Later.
The thought lingered for only an instant. Because when he glanced behind him, movement stirred across the frozen valley.
Another army of the dead poured through the mist.
Thousands of them.
If he left now, he might never reach Alarna again. Colsar closed his eyes briefly as another corpse clawed at his side.
Asharin’s face rose immediately in his mind. He remembered the first time she had hidden beneath the bed in his countryside room, convinced she had escaped him entirely. The shriek she had given when he dragged her out by the ankle still echoed in his memory, bright and full of life.
He remembered the way she had laughed afterward.
Most women would have taken the king. Sevrin could give her a crown, power, protection.
He was the obvious choice. But Asharin had never been obvious.
Somehow, she loved him, enough to defy kings and brothers alike.
She had chosen him even after her own brother beat her bloody.
She had tried to stay. Tried to wait for him. Had even gone to Sevrin for help.
Beaten by her brother. Starved by his brother. The memory turned his stomach. There were so many people he still needed to kill.
He should never have left her alone. He hoped she would forgive him one day. He didn't know if he'd ever forgive himself.
Another memory surfaced then, quieter but no less real.
The maid’s whisper before he fled. She is with child.
Colsar swallowed hard, the taste of blood thick on his tongue.
The injuries she had suffered were severe. It was possible the child had not survived.
But if it had…
The thought struck him with sudden, aching clarity. A small child running across the grass, chasing him with clumsy determination. Asharin laughing somewhere nearby, icing on her hands from the ridiculous strawberry cakes she loved so much.
He imagined climbing into bed at night after putting the child to sleep, listening while Asharin pretended to complain that she would have to endure another night of his snoring.
He still insisted he did not snore.
The image lingered only a moment before reality returned.
The dead closed in. Alarna’s wards shimmered in the distance. His body was already failing.
Colsar drew a slow breath and looked toward Alarna one last time.
Most of his life had been empty. No real friends. Parents who barely tolerated him. A lifetime of wars, battles, and endless loneliness.
If he was going to die…
Perhaps it was fitting that it would happen while chasing the one moment of happiness he had ever found. He wished briefly that he had something to leave behind. A jewel. A ring. Anything Asharin might one day find and know that he had come for her.
But there was no time for that.
Colsar bared his teeth. “Well,” he muttered to himself.
“Fuck it.”
Then he ran.
Snow burst beneath Colsar’s claws as he drove himself forward across the narrow stretch of frozen ground that led toward Alarna, the ice cracking and scattering beneath the force of his stride.
The dead surged to meet him almost immediately, their rotting bodies spilling across the white expanse like a tide that had forgotten how to retreat.
The first corpse reached for him with stiff, grasping hands, but it never truly had a chance.
Colsar struck it with the full weight of his body, his jaws closing around its skull with a sharp crack that echoed over the frozen water.
Bone splintered between his teeth as he flung the ruined body aside and continued forward, the momentum of his charge carrying him deeper into the swarm.
More came at once.
They rushed him in waves, clawing and snapping, their ruined limbs tangling together as they fought to drag him down.
Colsar tore through them without slowing, his claws raking through brittle ribs and decaying flesh while his massive body cut a violent path through the center of the horde.
One corpse hurled itself toward his throat while another clung to his flank, its teeth sinking into muscle that had already been torn open more times than he cared to remember.
He twisted violently, rolling across the ice to crush them beneath his weight before surging upright again, snow and blood scattering around him in crimson streaks.