[center][b]44 Years Ago[/b]
[h3]Kronburg’s Fall[/h3]
[i]A Collab between Oraculum and Cyclone[/i][/center]

“Why does smoke yet rise from that hearth?” a cruel voice rasped. 

Not so far away, there was a hillock in a domineering position over the surrounding lands, and it was crowned by a walled fortress hewn from grey stone. Smoke indeed rose from the keep’s hearth on that freezing winter night, but the shadowy watchers along the walls had only a few tiny braziers to see by and warm themselves; the men in that castle were doubtless running low on firewood, or else trying badly to conserve it all as the siege stretched on.

That first question having been met only with silence, the revenant major cut right to the heart of the matter and asked another, this time in a tone that [i]demanded[/i] answer, “Why do the men cowering behind those walls still breathe?”

“Lord revenant, we’ve lost hundreds of ghouls already, trying to storm the battlements,” came one pathetic excuse. The revenant didn’t even bother dismounting from his warhorse; he merely urged the skeletal thing closer to the one who’d spoken, then silenced the fool with a single swing of his mace.

“The losses mean nothing to me,” Lord Crake practically spat back, though the sound of his voice came off strange as it always did: his lips had been entirely hacked off, or perhaps they’d just been allowed to rot away; either way, the result was that his grimy teeth always showed in a grimace (or, on rare occasions, in an even more terrifying and cruel smile) with his withered tongue like a blackened worm trapped within a cage of yellow spears. “Those ghouls are just as worthless and easily replaced as that one was,” Crake went on, pointing the cruel, rusted, and now [i]filthy[/i] iron mace to the motionless and wrecked corpse at his horse’s feet. That one blow from the weapon had shattered the wretched ghoul’s skull and killed him once and for all, with a finality and brutality that no necromantic magic could undo.

“And you sniveling fools commanding this siege will give me an answer, or you shall meet the same fate.”

The revenants minor fell to their knees stammering, a choice that only further infuriated their master. Crake dismounted from his nightmarish steed and yet still stood tall enough to dwarf all the ghouls around, gaunt though he was. This was one who even in life had been used to towering over and domineering others, and he no doubt felt slighted just from the sight of that unconquered castle looming on the hill above.

He went on, “This pathetic siege has stretched on more months, while the other contingents of my army have overrun all the rest of this country. All the highlands are ours, save for this one miserable pile of stone. Your delaying our victorious return is making me look more and more like a fool by the day, and I will not have the Great Necromancer think poorly of my service. So answer me! Or would you have me drag you to him, that you may offer him these excuses yourselves?”

“With the falling of the snows and frosting of the ground, the hillside has become treacherous. Too treacherous for battering rams or siege towers, and you see the strong walls. Storming the battlements has been futile, but the siege still makes headway. We know that they must be starving, and low on supplies, because their sorties have become more frequent and more desper-”

“They have made sorties?” Crake roared, his hand grasping the speaker by its rotting throat and lifting him into the air. What sounds came from the general’s maw, from behind that cage of yellowed teeth, were not words but rather inhuman growls of rage and frustration beyond description.

The revenant minor writhed in his grasp, but did not struggle for breath. It had of course stopped breathing longing ago, just like the rest of them. Even with the bony fingers locked in a death grip about its throat, it managed to force through enough air to slowly make words, “When they crawl out of the keep...they find us waiting...ghouls hid beneath snow...near every time we kill...more of the men that leave--”

With a guttural howl even more enraged, the general broke that captain’s neck and tossed him aside. The others, who had been silent up until now, all started murmuring and stammering.

“It’s their lord who leads the sorties--”

“--great giant of a man--”

“--mad, and horrible--”

The one with the broken neck clambered back to its feet, head hanging limply to the side even as he tried to straighten his neck again with his hands. It was to no avail; the meatworkers would have to splint its spine near the base of the skull. Still, the revenant minor spoke again unfazed by the injury that would have surely killed a living man, “Aye, the one called Bjan the Breaker. The [i]Bloodhammer.[/i] His bare hands have felled dozens of our ghouls. That ugly hammer of his, even more.”

The words had been poorly chosen. Fury, scorn, and laughter alike all came from General Crake’s grisly maw, and any one of those three could be deadly on their own.

“So you fear this cur more than my own mace? More than the Great Necromancer’s fury? [i]Fools.[/i]” Crake advanced upon them and raised his mace, ragged bits of rotted flesh and half-melted brain still clinging to its flanges.

[hr]

The hall stank of hunger, illness and rot. Mounds of fetid hay were scattered around the corners, mouldering unchanged since weeks, a nesting ground for flies and roaches. The rats were long gone, caught with bare hands and eaten to the last. Heaps of rags and rusted arms were scattered about the dusty floor, spattered with caked blood, still pervaded with the stench of those who had died in them. The oaken benches, once sturdy enough to support scores of feasting warriors, had dwindled to mangled and splintered shades of their former selves, worn away to feed the struggling hearthfires in the most inclement of nights. The long tables that had stood between them were nowhere to be seen, long ago consumed to the last.

A whiff of bitterly cold wind came in through the door as Gertre slipped in from the courtyard, careful not to get the hides coarsely wrapped around her feet caught on the ruvid wooden frame. It made little difference, for the hoary hall was full of draughts and holes that made its interior every bit as chilly as the outside. With light and careful steps she made her way along the wall, deftly hopping between filthy heaps and strewn animal bones. In her frostbitten, calloused hands she gripped an old and dulled axe, half-hidden in the folds of her worn cloak. With every breath she cursed how there was nothing better left in the whole fort to break wood. Taking that worthless piece of iron to one of the derelict benches would make all too much noise, and though the winter cold had grown so painful she almost felt ready to throw herself to the ghouls rather than endure it for the rest of the night, what that might stir from deeper in the fortress frightened her even more than the dead that awaited beyond the walls.

From behind the door at the further end of the chamber there came a loud, regular growling, like the rasp of a serrated blade being dragged through the trunk of a tree. The lord of the Kronburg was at rest, and it would have been madness to disturb him now. Always when he returned from sallying forth he trudged back to his chambers without a word to anyone and threw himself to the bare floor in stone-heavy sleep. No one dared approach him then, for as long as the bloody haze in his eyes was not extinguished by crashing into slumber he did not always discern what remained of his subjects from the revenants he fought with tooth and nail. One of the farmhands sheltering among the walls had already died that way, his skull cracked by a blind swing of the fell Bloodhammer. Miserable as her life might have become, and little as she hoped this damned siege would ever be over, Gertre had no desire to end like that.

Crouching in a corner as far away from the inner door as she could, she hunched over one of the collapsed benches and hewed away at its edge. Slowly, quietly - to no use. The snoring broke, and in a moment the door slammed open, almost flying off its hinges.

There, on the threshold, hunched to fit his head through the door frame, stood Bjan the Breaker. Every body in Kronburg bore the signs of famine and sleepless nights; all, that was, but his. One could barely notice the disappearance of what little fat there had been on him, leaving a sheer knot of muscle, wide, rough and mighty like a wooden idol. There were whispers drifting around the fortress about how he could have maintained his bodily strength, rumours too hideous to contemplate, and the stains lingering on his wild, prematurely grey beard almost deliberately made them all too easy to believe. But it was not those stains that drew the gaze, nor his matted cascading hair or perpetually gnashing, yellow-toothed mouth. It was the eyes, so dire and overflowing with fury that they seemed to shine in the dim like torches. Whenever she glimpsed those eyes they haunted her sparse and disturbed dreams for nights on end, and even now their fulminating look pinned her in place, like the mortal hypnosis of a basilisk.

“What are you scraping for there in the corner, rat?!” Bjan’s hoarse roar stirred even the flies from their cold-stricken lethargy. He stalked over, crossing the entire hall in four great strides. “You’re hewing straight at my skull with that axe. Bring me wine, now!”

“But there’s no more-” A glancing smack from the giant’s hand turned the world dark for a few moments. Between the cold and the weakness, she felt more dizziness than pain. The Breaker’s snarled words reached her even through the ringing in her head.

“I said wine, not smalltalk! Go or I’ll warm myself with your guts instead!”

Blinking away reflexive tears, she staggered further along the wall and slipped into the adjacent room to the right. The cellars had been empty for weeks, and in such a winter there was no need to keep the last remaining scraps underground. Though the final anemic wineskins and moldy hams were stashed just across from the keep’s gates, no one dared so much as come close to the lord’s goods.

Gertre felt through a desolate heap of leather vessels, trying to find at least one that held some drops. Rage as Bjan might at such a meagre draught, it was better than returning to him empty-handed. To her luck, one of the skins felt still somewhat full, though a mushy sensation here and there belied that the wine was most likely rancid. It would have to do.

When she stepped back into the hall, Bjan had already gone outside, and his harsh barking told that he was gathering what emaciated souls remained in the fortress again. Brutish as he might have been, no one could deny that his own strength was truly inexhaustible. That no one else was capable of matching it and following close maddened him to no end.

“That’s all of you?” he was bellowing when Gertre emerged from the keep. He was standing in the center of the courtyard, a barren plot of frozen mud, and the last defenders of Kronburg huddled before him. They were a sorry bunch indeed. The last of the veteran warriors of the mountain-hold had long fallen, worn away by the unremitting tide of the living dead, and all that remained was a handful of the serfs that had sought refuge in its walls when the invasion approached. It had truly been of little solace to them, for their master had begun to drag them into battle at his side when his forces had run low, and the few that had survived until now all bore scars and wounds to show for it.

“Where are the other gutless wretches? There was a half-score more of you here yesterday!”

“All dead, m’lord,” a man with a crippled leg answered, not daring raise his eyes. “Gunter’s wounds got ‘im overnight, and the others-”

The Breaker waved him silent as Gertre approached. He snatched the wineskin out of her hands, tugged it open and, without even wincing at the vile sour smell that came from it, drained it in a pair of gulps.

“Doesn’t matter. Grab your weapons, we’re going out again when night falls.”

“What?” The crippled man gaped, as did many of his companions, though none else dared voice their consternation. “We ‘aven’t eaten and barely slept, and I can’t even-”

Bone cracked against bone as Bjan’s massive fist struck him in the chest. Such was the force of the blow that his uneven feet were lifted from the ground for a heartbeat as he collapsed on his back onto the hardened dirt. He lay there wheezing, and none of his fellows, paralyzed by fright, found the courage to offer him a hand.

“We’re going out,” the giant growled through his teeth, “and if you die, I’ll bloody make sure you die as warriors. You may have the hearts of sheep, but I will be thrice-damned before I let a bondsman of mine shame the land he was born from by dying a coward. Gather at the gates at dusk. I have spoken!”

[hr]

The weary sun sagged in the sky and reddened as dusk came. The ghouls outside had not been idle. Oblivious to the flurries of snow, a great many of them had shuffled off to fell trees at their lord revenant’s order. The task demanded they go a fair ways, near every tree within a half mile having already been chopped to build and furnish parts of the holdfast that they besieged, or parts of the now-razed hamlets that had been scattered around the area as a part of Kronburg’s demesne, or to fill the now-depleted stockpile of firewood that had sustained the castle thus far. At least one past winter had come and gone with the castle under siege, and perhaps even more… Crake didn’t bother asking the ghouls how long they’d been invested in this siege, as he knew the answer was wont to just make him more wroth. This army only had a single necromancer to replenish the ranks of the ghouls that fell, a miserable little revenant that strode about with a necklace that contained a gem that glowed sickly green with Eagoth’s dark power. Though it claimed to be a ‘mage’, Crake knew that the revenant did little save expose the dead to that gem’s touch that their overlord’s power could take root in the corpse. Even so, there were hardly any suitable corpses to raise within a league, he had been told, and that this little fool had already gotten around to raising everything within that distance told him that they’d been here for too long. But he was determined that it would end now and that this army would be reporting back to the Great Necromancer for new orders within the fortnite.

For those ends, he needed timber. A few ghouls had been crushed beneath falling trees; at times it seemed that even the living lumberjacks, some of the worst and most ignorant sort of those idiot peasants that once worked the land, had been smarter and more competent. Half the ghouls had shit for brains, and the revenants minor that commanded these sorry lot were hardly better. In his bout of rage upon first arriving, he’d had half those captains beheaded, their visages mangled by piercing iron hooks at the end of ropes, and then their still-conscious heads had been left to hang them from a gibbet. Every time somebody walked past the swaying heads, they still cursed, howled, or pleaded for forgiveness as suited them, though lacking lungs and having hooks in their cheeks made the sounds into a garbled mess more often than not. Still, their incessant clamoring had the revenant major wonder if perhaps he hadn’t been cruel enough. He had half a mind to have their tongues ripped out now, but taking the heads back down to do as much would be a bother. [i]’Let the cowards on those walls see the grisly sight and despair,’[/i] he thought.

Regardless, as the afternoon came to pass, lumber soon became available. Like so many scurrying ants working to drag along a dead beetle back to their nest, the undead carried whole unbroken trees in teams to the siege lines around the base of the hillock. There, in the shadow of Kronburg and in plain sight of whatever sorry lot still defended its ramparts, Crake had his minions strip the branches from the treetrunks and lash the logs together so as to fashion a giant, primitive battering ram. Trying to charge up the formidable slope of the hill and assault the strong gates of that castle above would have been folly for any living army, but the dead did not tire, and Crake had little regard for casualties and even less fear of meeting any form of meaningful resistance. Much time had passed since their last attempt to storm the castle, and the defenders could only have grown weaker and more demoralized with every passing day. [i]‘Their mad lord be damned,’[/i] the general thought. [i]’I swear that I’ll take that miserable pile of stone, flay every maggot inside, and set their skinless corpses to work tearing down the keep’s stone walls.’[/i]

So it was that as the sun began to set, the battering ram had been finished. Ever impatient, Crake drew together the greater part of the army and assembled a horde of ghouls directly facing the castle’s main gate, with some scattered bands left around the other sides of the hill. He maintained the encirclement to counter the slim possibility of the defenders trying to lead a sortie out a side entrance and break free of the horde encircling the castle to flee into the countryside. As fun as it might have been to chase a ragged band of survivors through the hills and forests and ride them down one by one, Eagoth was growing impatient. When at last they had all been drawn up into place, the horde of disheveled ghouls looked more like some ragged mob of peasant rabble rather than any army with organized ranks or battle array, but it hardly mattered. They needed only to follow the battering ram up that hill and act as arrow fodder ‘til the gates came down, then pour in like a cascade of rotted flesh. In life Crake had been a commander of some repute, some city’s captain of guard...or was it a sellsword captain? It made no matter. He still carried some fading memories of past battles and campaigns, of leading men and devising clever ambushes and the like, but he’d found that as of late his conquests took very little in the way of strategy or tactics.

Leria’s life had been all but extinguished, the resistance grown feebler and feebler, and now the battles and conquests became a mundane and tiresome routine that brought about as much excitement and took about as much thinking as walking. So as with all things, those useful memories of life and his skills as a commander (or at least, the amount of effort and care that he put forth) had faded, and these days he was wont to simply throw waves of ghouls at his enemies until they were slain to the last. It wasn’t like he had any shortage of ghouls. So he stirred from his reverie, and from atop his dead warhorse he raised his mace and pointed it at the gate.

At the signal, the undead ranks stirred and began to march. The ones in front pushed their way up the hillside, plowing the thick layer of snow and forcing it down, packing it for the feet of all the ghouls behind. Rotting arms by the dozen gripped the crude ram and lifted it with a chorus of crackling and rasping. Slowly, but purposefully, the contraption began to move up the hillside. Around it, the mass of the dead followed it like a rising tide of filthy grey. It crept upwards, engulfing step after step of the elevation, a blight ascending to drown the last dispersed vestiges of the old world. Where it flowed, the ground itself could no longer be seen, covered as it was by the myriad soulless bodies. No whim of artistry could have conjured a more vivid image to depict the doom of the living than that, a great, formless, rotten grip closing around the walls of the fort.

And no response came from above. Though the ghouls had been so clustered together to shield the ram-bearers from arrows or stones raining down from the ramparts, no such volley was hurled, nor did any hidden cauldrons spew a flood of incandescent pitch. Indeed, the walls of Kronburg seemed wholly deserted. No sentries hurried along the battlements, no defenders flocked to the towers, no bells or horns were sounded in alarm. Only once a lone dark shape scurried out from a turret, and swiftly disappeared into another. In silence did the horde approach the foot of the fortress, and in silence it cleared the ground around the ram, leaving its bearers room to charge.

And then the gates opened.

Driven by the rusted, but still functional chains and pulleys within the walls, the robust hinges turned, revealing the court within. Darkness had descended, and little of what lay within the fort could be seen. Yet a few spots of light shone in the awning blackness of the gateway, a troop of torches crackling in the still dry air. Their ruddy glow illuminated sunken, starved faces, ragged and mangled bodies - the last defenders of Kronburg. They waved the flames and brandished their arms, but their swings and cries were feeble and hollow, driven more by desperation than courage. Yet there was one before them all, one whose head rose high above all others, and his defiant roar rolled down the hill and into Crake’s camp. The giant hefted his weapon, a great hammer redder than the torches with dried blood, and charged.

The ghouls themselves seemed almost shocked, or at least stupid and sluggish in their reactions--the closest was one that had been holding the battering ram near its head, and it was shattered by a single mighty swing of that warhammer before it could so much as loosen its grip upon the ram. But then the silence shattered like glass, the giant man’s bellowing warcry drowning out those of his feeble people, just as the utterly inhuman shrieks of hundreds of ghouls then drowned out his own shout a moment later. Those that had been manning the battering ram cast the thing down and joined in the wave of ghouls that surged towards the opened gate.

Against them came the defenders, pitifully few as they were. Most swung and stabbed almost haphazardly with weapons they were untrained to hold, their thrusting torches doing more harm to the walls of dead flesh closing in upon them than their blades. They were soon overwhelmed, forced apart, disappearing beneath piles of bodies. It only took a few moments for the undead to claim the few feet of ground outside that the defenders’ initial charge had claimed, forcing their line to give ground and back into the narrower confines of the gate and the hallway behind.

Yet this did not seem to deter their leader, who refused to yield an inch even as his fellows drew back and the horde pushed all around him. The mighty warrior’s every swing sent limbs and skulls flying, and spines and ribcages were crushed to mulch under his hammer and feet, mingling with the trampled snow into an unclean sludge. The dead encircled him on all sides, lunging at his back, his head, but his armour, the finest the keep had held though now rusted and soiled, bore the brunt of their claws and teeth. At one point his hammer was stuck in a jagged husk of armour worn by a sturdier ghoul, one that in life had stood in defense of those very walls, and remained there as he pulled back his hand after a bitterly furious blow, but still he fought. Rabid foam dripped from his mouth and befouled his beard, blood trickled from gashes and scratches over his body, his knuckles and fingers were torn raw. Still he thrashed like a man possessed in the midst of the horde. Step by step, inch by inch he had fought against the tide and made his way from the gate, and raged on the side of the hill.

But no man alone, no matter how puissant, could hope to stand against the numberless hosts of the Necromancer. His blows grew heavier and more sluggish as black exhaustion choked the flames of the wrath that drove him, and his war cries hoarser and weaker. It was then that a wedge of weathered iron pushed its way through the thronging dead - a maniple of risen warriors bearing mail and blade, their loyalties forgotten but their skill not wholly lost, come to finish the redoubtable enemy. One was torn apart in a surge of ferocity, its arms ripped from its shoulders, leaving it to stumble impotently, but the others pressed on. Merciless, their swords struck, and found flesh, biting into neck and flank.

Like the hunted bear feels its end draw near even in the depths of its rage, so too did the great warrior then falter at last. He tried to stagger back, but more ghouls barred his way from all sides. Then, in a final blaze of almost preternatural force, he hurled his bloodied body through their very thick, scattering them like twigs, before finally vanishing into the night. A crunching sound from somewhere below told he had fallen into one of the treacherous ravines that snaked along the hillside, and no doubt that would be his grave.

From afar, Crake might have smiled if he still had lips. The prodigious [i]’Bloodhammer’[/i], though he’d made for a stirring glimpse when he first charged out of the open gates, had in the end been insignificant. The giant man’s crazed flailing had been a mere ripple in the unstoppable tide that had swept through the gate and into the castle, and for all the carnage he’d wrought, the hordes had managed to push right past him into the fortress. In truth, the general had lost sight of Bjar’s hulking body after just a few moments, so great was the mass of ghouls that had been massing at the base of the walls and surging inside.

The lord revenant cast a set of baleful eyes up to the gibbet above his head. “[i]That[/i] is how you take a castle. [i]That[/i] is what you worthless maggots should have done months ago. Pray that some of the wretches inside threw down their arms and surrendered; if the ghouls have left me with some playthings, then perhaps I will be in a good enough mood to cut you fools down on the morrow.”

Stirring by its master, the warhorse began to trot up the hillside and right through the still-open gates, trampling over the mangled ruins of half-rotted ghoul and slaughtered defenders alike. He might have taken more care to preserve the bodies of those recently slain, but they had all been lean and weak little things, and most were half torn apart in any case. Better to toss them in a wagon and offer them to the butchers and meatworkers than to have them reanimated in their pathetic state.

As he advanced deeper into the fort, he saw ghouls shambling about everywhere. They flung open every door, leaving no nook or cranny unsearched. Even though a pounding heartbeat and the stench of life were easy enough to find, there was still the matter of sacking this castle, and so they looked for treasure and valuables just as much as they looked for cowards hiding in the dark.

To Crake’s chagrin they found little in the way of things that might be useful, or treasures that might curry him favor if he turned them over to the Great Necromancer. But fortunately, there [i]were[/i] some of the inhabitants that yet lived: a few that had been so sick or crippled that they hadn’t been able to join the sortie and were behind, and a few others that had broken and cast down their weapons and ran. When not in the thick of combat, the ghouls often had at least enough wits about them to not mindlessly slaughter. They could take prisoners, if they met one that wasn’t fighting too hard and if they were so instructed. And Crake had certainly instructed!

[hr]

They were inside. She could smell the foully sweet stench of decaying flesh even from above as they crowded into the keep, and their shambling steps filled the hall with an animation it had not known since the war had begun. But it was no lively, festive gathering the one that had broken into the chambers of Kronburg, and the victory that had laid its path thither was not one to be celebrated with laughter and feasting. The things only groaned, gnashed and rattled as they shuffled back and forth, listlessly knocking what remained of the benches aside without so much as an intelligible oath or exclamation. There were no curious calls from one searcher to another, no holding up of valuable finds - if there could even be any - nor any expressive grumblings of disappointment when nothing was discovered in a corner or another. This sluggish, bestial rooting about was to her more terrifying than the ravages of the most barbarous living enemies could have been.

From her hiding spot, Gertre peered down through the wide cracks between the coarse planks of the floor. No one had been paying her any heed since the gates had been opened, and so she had scampered away back into the fortress, away from the struggle and the horrid masses of the dead. It was all she could do when battle broke out, and there was little danger of Bjan’s fury turning against her when he returned - even when not drunk on bloodlust, he seldom remembered she existed at all unless he needed someone to bring him a wineskin. The small side-room above the hall, set against the sloping outer stone wall itself, was as good a hiding place as there was, and never had one been more needed than now that the unthinkable had happened and the undead had at last broken through. There had been howling, and shouts, and screams she [i]hoped[/i] came from dead throats, for a living body could only have issued them to vent some horrible torment.

Maybe she could avoid them there, wait them out and slip away during the day (did these monsters sleep during the day, as men did by night?). If she could just get out of the keep, she could go somewhere, anywhere, away from here. Maybe she could…

She heard the wooden stairs creak under the burden of many bodies, and dozens of dragging steps rustle over them. Spread over the upper floor, room by room, closer and closer. Moaning, snapping, gargling. She just had to stay quiet. If only-

The hide curtain separating one room from another was pulled aside, and they came in. Tall, lanky shapes, empty eyes, hanging jaws, exposed bone. She would not, could not look - not out of mere fear, but the sight of that mutilation and decay somehow [i]moving[/i] was sickening. The smell was unendurable. She retched, painfully, with an empty stomach, and tasted blood in her throat. The nearest one heard, and it [i]saw.[/i] Letting out a guttural sound, it clambered closer even as she shut her eyes in terror. 

Horribly strong claws grabbed her by the arms and pulled her up and away, across the floor, down the stairs. She did her best not to look at any of them long enough to notice the deformities, but they were everywhere, glaring fully into sight - the missing fingers, the half-collapsed mouths, the purulent gashes that should have ended their lives forever. Across the hall, through the door. The sound of screams, muffled by walls of stone, reached her ears. They went on, the screams growing louder as they eventually passed into the courtyard. There, where once had assembled the armsmen of Kronburg, now a veritable swarm of the unliving horrors stood in a rough circle. She saw the other last survivors of the siege, or at least those who, she had to assume, had not yet been slain. The fate of the latter seemed in truth to have been the most enviable now, for the dead had not been idle with their captives; and when she saw a raw, unrecognisable body with half its skin torn away she struggled and kicked against her captors’ deathgrip, despite her weakness. It was to no avail, of course.

In the center, standing before one of the bleeding and flayed bodies tied to a post, there was a tall and hideous wight that wore a rusted set of armor. It carried itself with a cruel intellect and disposition that radiated [i]power[/i], and there was no mistaking that [i]this[/i] was the monster that had been behind the siege. The monster turned its head for a moment to cast a glance towards Gertre, the newest captive. She looked upon its visage and wished she hadn’t, for the taut and leathery skin, the gash from chin to nose where flesh was missing, and the terrible look in those dead eyes all inhaled hope and courage as a ravenous fire inhaled good air and belched back terror just as flame spewed ash.

But Crake was too preoccupied to pay her much heed...yet. To Gertre’s horror, she realized that the flayed person still clung to life, if only just.

“Is there treasure in this keep?” the revenant major asked, a bit of entertainment creeping into its voice. For a response it received only an agonized moan. “No, we’re not finished yet,” the revenant laughed, and then he grasped at a loose flap of skin hanging off the person’s arm and slowly tugged to peeled it back even further, pulling until the strip tore completely free. Fresh blood and fresh screams came as a result. One of the ghouls held a dull skinning knife and waited silently nearby, ready to start flaying in a new spot when needed. And peel it did, at Crake’s command. The revenant took its time, drawing out the process, yet never going so fast as to make the unfortunate victim lose consciousness. Over and over, the general asked his questions: [i]is there treasure in this keep? Where is it hidden? Do the surrounding villages have treasure? How wealthy was the lord of this castle? Is there treasure in this keep? Where is it hidden?[/i]

And to his questions, Crake received many answers. He ‘learned’ over the course of this interrogation and those that followed after that there was a vast trove of gold in the cellar beneath the tiles, that there was silver candlesticks stuffed in some attic, that gemstones had been thrown down the nearby village’s well to deny the Necromancer at least that small triumph and wealth, that Bjar the Breaker had been poor, that there was no wealth or treasure to be found at all, and so on. It was hard to tell if Crake took note of the discrepancies and all the answers, or if he hardly even cared about the truth of the matter and only did this for amusement.

Eventually that first victim grew weak and quiet and then eventually died, probably from blood loss. So the undead moved to the next prisoner, a man that had taken a terrible wound to his leg in one of Bjar’s mad sorties. The leg was probably broken, and the open wound had furthermore festered and blackened, so the sickly man could hardly stand. In truth, he could hardly even remain lucid either. Crake had him nailed upright against a tree, and when his answers to the questions came mumbled and slow, he was eventually impaled. So they moved on the next one, and this time went back to flaying. Crake intended to make good on that promise he’d made to himself, after all. [i]Flay them, then set their corpses to work tearing down their own damned fort.[/i]

All of a sudden, there was a crash against the gates of the fort, which had been drawn closed to prevent any escape from within. Some alarmed howls and shrieks from the ghouls outside followed, and then, with a thunderous bang, the mighty panels swung open. There, faintly visible against the outer dark, loomed a figure imposing as a juggernaut. Moonlight glimmered on its beaten and stained armour, and refracted off reddened, glowering eyes, illuminating a madness that, it seemed, could endure beyond death. Upon his breast, something shimmered in sickly green amid the ragged locks of his beard. The being stepped forward, and it could be seen he carried a mighty hammer that only one man in the entire land could have been strong enough to wield. Bjar raised his tremendous weapon aloft, and, silent and implacable, and strode forward. When he reached the nearest ghouls, he struck one across the head with a horizontal swing of his warhammer, felling it instantly with no more effort than if he’d just given some woman a smack from the back of his hand. The next ghoul in his way got similar treatment, crushed by a great overhead swing of the hammer. And then the next one was knocked down by one mighty punch that broke its jaw with a sickening crack. Seeing it still move after it fell to the ground, Bjar stooped down to tear off the skullcap (great deal that thing had done!) from the crown of the ghoul’s head, then used the thing as if it were a brick, bludgeoning in the rest of the sorry ghoul’s face with such fury that the helmet became stuck sideways in the collapsed ruin of a skull.

The ghouls seemed dumbstruck and confused by the violence and the attack, oddly unsure of what to do. “Slay that man! Bring me his head!” Crake roared out, his victims entirely forgotten, and the horde came alive and surged at the attacker. But the Bloodhammer’s arm and weapon started flying so fast that they became a whirlwind, blurring alongside the shards of bones and blackened ichor flying everywhere. Sickening crunches and cracks resounded through the courtyard as he shattered ghoul after ghoul with great swings of his monstrous warhammer. This was a bloodrage unlike any that Gertre had ever seen him enter, for he felled them all effortlessly and swatted them down as if they were less than flies, and he didn’t even bother to bellow or spit curses, nor did he rave and pant. Every blow had a terrible strength behind it that screamed of restraint having been unraveled like a spool of yarn tossed out the window, wild and reckless. Bjar seemed even more berserk for how he shunned any semblance of a defensive stance and gave himself solely to pressing the attack. Relentlessly he smote down the ghouls one by one like some sort of god, giving no heed at all to the bites and scratches that they inflicted upon him.

Across the courtyard, Crake’s jaw dropped--a strange and grisly sight to see for his lack of flesh on the chin made his mouth and his look seem all the more unnatural and horrifying, but nobody saw for all eyes were upon Bjar.

No, that wasn’t true.

Bjar himself, the giant who towered at least a neck over all other men, looked above the heads of the massed ghouls, his furious gaze staring holes into Crake even as he battered his way through the flesh that stood between the two of them. The ghouls were mere obstacles, and they were not enough. Crake shouted and pointed with his mace. More ghouls advanced, and some from inside the keep emerged back into the courtyard upon hearing their master’s cry.

The wroth lord’s impatience saw him quickly grow tired of beating back the flailing ghouls. What had started as a slow and deliberate walk had gradually transformed into an angrier march, and now he was [i]storming[/i] the courtyard, smashing and wading his way past Crake’s army.

The gaunt general on the other side of the courtyard finally realized the futility of setting his ghouls upon this foe, but he did not balk. He spat, or at least made the motion and half of the sound even as no fluid flew forth from his dead innards and dried mouth, and advanced forward with mace in hand. He too had a domineering form and towered over the ghouls, yet the towering bulk that was Bjar still made him look like no more than a misshapen little child that was skinny as a spear and only half as tall.

The Bloodhammer’s eponymous weapon struck an armored ghoul square in the chest, caving in the breastplate and the ribcage behind it with so much force that it sent the wretch flying. And then with that last one out of his way he was suddenly upon Crake, all the other screaming ghouls be damned, for he’d slaughtered or crippled half and the other half hadn’t been able to stop his rampage any more than one could stop the wind.

Only then, at last, did he speak, and his voice cut through the growls and mewling of the ghouls as he had through their bodies.

“The Kronburg is [i]mine![/i]” He brandished his hammer, pointing at Crake with its head. “If you would take it, meet me like a man, only us and our weapons!”

Crake sneered, but then he raised an ironclad fist and all the ghouls stopped their braying and their charges and their clawing at Bjar’s armored back, and they drew back to form a circle around the two combatants. He brought his hand back down, flexed the old and decayed muscles and joints in the fingers beneath that gauntlet, and found himself reaching for a shield upon his back that wasn’t there.

[i]’Old habit. From life, when I was a baron leading all those knights,’[/i] he thought. But then he cast the useless memory and thoughts aside, and remembered where he was. Shields be damned, he felt no more pain, and the meatworkers could reforge a crippled body if need be. So with that free hand and that boldness he drew a dagger from his belt before striding forward with mace and knife. His walk broke into a sprint, and he was suddenly jumping at Bjar with what was frightening alacrity for a corpse. For some moments, it seemed as though he might have held his ground, avoiding a pair of swipes from the ponderous warhammer and plunging the blade of his dagger between the joints of the larger man’s armour; but that was not to last. Unfazed by the wound, Bjar spun his weapon with dizzying quickness, striking his opponent square in the side and sending him sprawling with a crack of shattered bones. As Crake tried to rise, the giant was upon him, and the hammer swung down like a headsman’s axe onto his skull. There was a nauseous splattering sound, then nothing more.

Silence fell upon the courtyard. The ghouls gazed stolidly ahead, shifting their witless gazes between their former leader and the victorious Bjar in uncertainty. Gertre, still in the grip of her captors, found herself holding her breath, having been so absorbed by the sight of the struggle that thoughts of her own fate had slipped from her mind. The creature that had led the invasion was no more. Was this end at last? What of the undead that still thronged around like a bony forest?

The Breaker, however, showed no such hesitations. He lifted his hammer, cast a gaze around the courtyard, then suddenly raised a clenched fist and gave a shout. In unison, the ghouls caught it up, answering with a chorus of screeches, roars and ululations, stamping their feet in response to a boastful stomp over what remained of Crake’s head.

“This is what awaits anyone who tries to usurp the Bloodhammer! Do you understand, wretches?” the warrior barked, and once again the ghoulish horde brayed in reply. He glanced about them with a satisfied look, his cold rage seeming satiated for now. Except…

“I’ve no more need for these weaklings now,” Bjar motioned towards the surviving prisoners, towards [i]her![/i], with a dismissive snarl. “Kill them.”

Gertre tried to scream, to plead, to curse the monster - for after all, she thought in a flash of clarity, even before he had grown cold as the grave-soil, he had always been more like [i]them[/i], a thoughtless vessel of rage with no warmth nor love for anything but murder - yet it was to no avail. Vile claws clasped her mouth shut, and another vise-like grip closed around her throat. Darkness fell, for her and for Kronburg.