The Undead #2
The wards shimmered ahead, closer now, though they still felt impossibly far away. The dead closed around him in a suffocating wall of grasping hands and snapping jaws, their numbers thick enough to blot out the path ahead. Colsar’s roar tore across the frozen sea, raw with exhaustion and fury.
Flame burst from his throat.
Fire rolled outward in a blazing arc that swept across the ice, catching the nearest corpses and turning them instantly into shrieking torches.
The air filled with the bitter stench of burning rot as their bodies collapsed, blackened bones snapping beneath his claws while he ran straight through the wreckage.
The fire did not stop them. They kept coming.
One corpse clamped its teeth into his hind leg and wrenched him sideways across the ice while another hauled itself onto his back, its clawed fingers digging blindly at his wings.
Teeth sank into his shoulder, his flank, the torn muscle of his abdomen where the wound had never truly closed.
Pain flared through him bright enough to turn the edges of the world white.
Colsar forced himself forward anyway. Snow and blood sprayed beneath him as he fought through the swarm, sometimes dodging the lunging bodies that reached for him, sometimes simply tearing them apart when there was no room left to maneuver.
At one point their weight finally dragged him down completely, the mass of rotting flesh collapsing over him as dozens of clawing hands reached toward his throat.
For a terrible instant the sky vanished.
Cold bodies pressed in from every side, their weight suffocating, their teeth snapping inches from his face.
Then rage tore through him. With a roar that seemed to shake the frozen sea itself, Colsar heaved upward, throwing the corpses from his back as he surged to his feet once more.
The wards stood close now. He could see them clearly at last, a towering wall of pale light stretching across the narrow bridge that led into the city.
Their glow shimmered against the falling snow, ancient power humming through the barrier like a living thing.
Only a few dozen strides remained, but the dead were thickest there.
A shadow cut through the storm. It dropped out of the clouds fast and without warning, one moment nothing but gray sky and snow, the next a violent rush of red and black tearing downward.
The wind twisted in its wake, the mist ripping apart as something vast struck the horde ahead of him.
The ice shattered beneath the impact. Bodies crushed flat.
Others were thrown outward, limbs snapping as the force of it tore through the dead like they were nothing at all.
Claws followed, fast and precise, ripping through bone and spine in a series of violent, efficient strikes that left the swarm collapsing in pieces.
For a moment, the pressure around him broke. The dead shifted, turning toward it, their movement faltering just enough to leave a gap where there had been none.
Colsar lifted his head, vision blurring as he tried to focus. He caught only pieces of it through the snow. Red. Black wings. A flash of something like eyes, bright and wrong against the storm.
It moved again, fast, precise, cutting through another cluster of corpses before rising in a powerful sweep that sent snow spiraling in every direction. For a brief, disorienting moment, it seemed to circle, as though searching the chaos below—
—and then it was gone.
The sky closed, then the dead surged back in.
Colsar blinked hard, his breath dragging unevenly through his chest. For a moment he wondered if he had imagined it, some last trick of an exhausted mind on the edge of collapse.
Then another corpse lunged for his throat, and the thought vanished with everything else. They swarmed across the final stretch of ice in such numbers that the ground itself seemed to writhe, their bodies pressing together until it looked as though the entire path had begun to move.
Colsar staggered as another bite tore into his side.
Blood flooded his mouth when he coughed, hot against the bitter cold. The world tilted, and for one dangerous moment he considered stopping. Considered letting the cold close over him and end the long, grinding exhaustion of the past six months.
Instead he lifted his head. Beyond the shimmering wards lay Alarna. And somewhere within those distant walls waited Asharin.
He saw her as clearly as if she stood before him, the bright flash of her smile cutting through the gloom of memory, the fierce spark in her eyes whenever she believed he was being particularly insufferable.
Another corpse lunged toward him. He tore it apart without even looking.
The wards loomed only strides away now, their pale surface blazing brighter as he approached.
Even from this distance he could feel the power in them, ancient and absolute, a barrier that had stood against the world for centuries.
Once, perhaps, he might have been strong enough to challenge such a thing. Now he could barely remain standing. Colsar slowed only for a moment. The world had offered him very little worth keeping.
Except her.
He drew a ragged breath that burned all the way down his lungs. “I’m coming, Asha Bear,” he whispered hoarsely, though he knew she could not hear him. Then Colsar lowered his head and hurled himself straight toward the light.