Deus Necros

The group left Solania through the northern military gate.

No cheers followed them.

That was probably for the best.

The soldiers stationed along the repaired walls watched in silence as the small company moved beyond the last maintained road and into the white slopes beyond the city. There were too few of them to look like an army and too many strange presences gathered in one place to look like ordinary scouts. Ludwig walked at the front with Durandal at his side and the Codex resting hidden close. Kaiser moved beside him, hands tucked into his sleeves, looking irritated by the existence of weather. Thomas hovered near Ludwig’s shoulder, his ember wings trembling faintly in the cold wind. Redd walked with his pack slung over one shoulder, nose occasionally lifting to catch old scents beneath the snow. Celine moved lightly despite the uneven ground, cloak snapping behind her. Cain followed near her, silent, eyes half-lidded and watchful.

And then there was Tull.

Freezing wind tore down from the mountains like a living thing. It slipped between rocks, slammed against slopes, and cut across exposed skin with a sharpness that made ordinary winter feel like a soft suggestion. The sky above them was pale and hard, the sun barely visible behind layers of gray cloud. Snow hissed across the ground in thin sheets, never enough to blind them completely, but enough to make distance feel dishonest.

The cold did not bother most of the group.

Ludwig’s Living Vessel acknowledged temperature as information and little else. Kaiser complained, but mostly because complaining was one of his forms of breathing. Thomas grumbled and kept closer to Ludwig’s collar, though spirit fire kept him safe from true harm. Redd’s beast blood ran hot enough that the wind only made him look annoyed. Celine and Cain, both true vampires, moved through the cold with the mild indifference of creatures who had long since stopped needing warmth in the way humans did.

Tull, the only actual human among them, coated himself in aura and still looked deeply offended.

"I hate this," he said.

Redd glanced at him. "You’ve said that six times."

"Because I still hate it. Didn’t expect we’d be walking into the frozen armpit of the world with a group of supernatural monsters who don’t care if their blood turns into ice."

Kaiser looked back. "Technically, several of us do not have proper blood."

"Thank you," Tull said. "That makes me feel much better."

Thomas peered down at him from Ludwig’s shoulder. "You have aura, though."

"Yes, little candle, I have aura. That does not mean I enjoy spending it as a blanket."

"It’s spirit," Thomas said. "Fire spirit."

"Noted, little blanketless flame."

"You’re just weak." Kaiser snorted.

Tull tightened the aura around his body, a faint shimmer rippling over his armor and cloak. "I’m surrounded by undead, vampires, a werewolf, and a flying fireplace. Forgive me if my sense of normalcy is struggling."

Cain’s eyes shifted toward him. "Noise wastes warmth."

Tull stared at him. "You are not helping."

"I was not trying to."

The path grew harder as they climbed.

Solania shrank behind them, its walls becoming a dark line against the white land. The farther they moved, the less the world felt repaired. The battle had ended days ago, but the north still carried its wounds openly. Black stains marked places where unnatural blood had soaked too deep into the ground to be hidden. Here and there, they found remains of the creatures that had withdrawn with Sloth’s army but failed to survive the trek.

Some had collapsed against rocks, bodies frozen in positions that almost looked like rest. Others had torn themselves apart, perhaps from wounds sustained during the battle, perhaps from the simple cruelty of distance after their master’s retreat. Pale giants lay with limbs missing. Drowned things had frozen solid with their mouths open, water still crusted around their throats. Smaller warped beasts had been picked clean by scavengers, though Ludwig noticed there were fewer scavenger tracks than there should have been.

The north did not feed easily.

Redd crouched near one set of remains, sniffed once, then stood.

"Dead for days," he said. "No fresh movement here."

"Sloth’s army left stragglers," Tull said.

"Not stragglers," Cain replied.

Everyone looked at him.

Cain studied the frozen corpse ahead, a bent creature with ribs protruding through gray skin. "Discarded weight."

The wind blew between them.

Ludwig looked at the dead thing again.

That felt right.

Sloth had withdrawn. Not fled in panic. Withdrawn. Anything too slow, too broken, too costly to carry, had simply been left behind. It was not cruelty in the hot sense. Not Wrath’s destruction or Envy’s theft. It was colder than that. The decision that effort was not worth spending.

Kaiser bent over one corpse and poked it with his staff.

Redd stared. "Why are you doing that?"

"Checking if it explodes."

"Does it?"

"Not yet."

"That is not reassuring."

"Many important discoveries begin with not yet."

Ludwig kept walking. "Try not to discover anything loud."

Kaiser then absorbs the corpse into the staff’s storage space. For things Ludwig wouldn’t want to ask about.

The day stretched.

They followed the retreat trail northward, not because it was difficult to find, but because it was too large to miss. Sloth’s army had carved a passage through snow, rock, and broken road. Tracks overlapped until the earth beneath was crushed into frozen mud. Drag marks showed where larger things had been hauled for a while before being abandoned. Several times, Redd found places where the trail split, smaller groups moving toward ridges or ravines before disappearing into old paths no imperial map marked anymore.

Cain corrected their direction more than once.

He knew the mountains differently from Tull. Tull knew patrol routes, forts, and the official border. Cain knew old things. Dead passes. Buried roads. Places where the snow fell wrong because something beneath it still remembered a structure that should have become dust centuries ago.

Ludwig noticed.

So did Kaiser.

"You have been here before," Kaiser said eventually.

Cain did not look at him. "Yes."

"How far?"

"Far enough."

"That answer is boring."

"It is sufficient."

Kaiser smiled. "Not to me."

Cain turned his head slightly. "Then suffer."

Thomas whispered near Ludwig’s ear, "I like him when he talks to Kaiser."

"Everyone does," Ludwig said.

By the time night began folding over the mountains, the wind had grown meaner. The sky darkened without sunset, the clouds thickening until the world became a blend of black stone, white snow, and gray air. They found a shallow depression between two ridges, protected from the worst of the wind by a wall of broken rock. It was not comfortable, but it was defensible, and that mattered more.

They set camp.

Or rather, Tull set camp while everyone else pretended to help.

Celine cleared snow from the center with one sweep of her hand. Cain inspected the ridge lines and returned without comment. Kaiser produced several black candles from somewhere that made Tull immediately say, "No."

"You do not even know what they do," Kaiser said.

"They look like something that curses bloodlines."

"They only curse fleas and snow bugs."

Tull thought for a second, and sighed.

Ludwig started the fire with a small dark flame, then changed it quickly before Tull could complain that even the campfire looked illegal. Thomas sat near it with great dignity, even though everyone knew he did not need the warmth. Redd unpacked food. Tull ate with the grim focus of a man replacing spent aura through spite. Ludwig took a little, mostly out of habit rather than need. Celine did not eat. Cain did not either. Kaiser complained that the food was too human.

"It is food," Redd said.

"That is generous."

"It’s dried meat."

"It died twice, then."

Redd looked offended. "That’s jerky."

"That is what I said."

The first part of the night passed with strange ease.

Not peace.

Never peace.

But the kind of quiet that formed when people accepted they were in danger and decided to save fear for when it became useful. The fire cracked. Snow slid in thin lines from nearby stones. The wind howled above the ridge but only reached them in softer gusts. Thomas hovered near Kaiser after a while, curiosity getting the better of caution.

"You’re old, right?" Thomas asked.

Kaiser glanced at him. "Rude opening."

"But accurate."

"Very."

Thomas folded his little arms. "Do you know stories from before the Empire?"

"I know stories from before several empires. Most of them end badly."

"Tell one."

Ludwig looked up. "That is a bad idea."

Thomas ignored him. "I want to hear one."

Kaiser’s smile slowly widened.

Celine looked at Ludwig. "Should we stop this?"

"Yes," Ludwig said.

Neither of them moved fast enough.

Kaiser began speaking.

At first, the story sounded normal enough. An old kingdom buried beneath black salt. A prince who wanted immortality. A saint who warned him not to bargain with things beneath wells. Thomas listened with growing interest, wings fluttering softly.

Then the story changed.

The prince did not become immortal in the way he wished. The wells did not contain spirits, but mouths. The saint did not die, at least not quickly. The kingdom was not buried by enemies, but by its own citizens, who dug downward for seven days because something had convinced them the sky was a lid and freedom waited underneath.

Kaiser told it like a man describing a mildly inconvenient dinner party.

Thomas’s spirit face turned paler with every sentence.

"And then," Kaiser said, pleased with himself, "when they finally reached the black water, they discovered the reflection had been digging upward too."

Thomas slowly turned toward Ludwig. "Why did I ask?"

"I tried to stop you."

"You did not try hard enough."

Redd stared into the fire. "That story was awful."

"Thank you," Kaiser said.

"That was not praise."

"It tasted like praise."

Tull pulled his cloak tighter around himself. "Does every story from before the Empire involve people making terrible choices underground?"

"No," Cain said from the edge of camp. "Some made terrible choices aboveground. You know, like here..."

"Wonderful."

The night deepened.

Eventually, they settled into rest.

Rest, in their case, was a flexible concept. Cain and Celine did not need sleep in the human sense, though Celine closed her eyes in a tent out of habit and perhaps because lying still gave the mind somewhere to put itself. Kaiser did not sleep. Redd could stay awake for long periods thanks to his beast nature, and even when he did doze, one ear remained alert to the world. Thomas curled into a small ball of ember light near Ludwig’s pack, sleep for him more of a nap than necessity.

Only Tull truly needed it.

He lay in his tent with his aura finally lowered, wrapped in blankets, muttering one last complaint about being the only person present with honest organs before exhaustion claimed him.

Ludwig sat outside longer than the others.

The fire had burned lower, its light red and gold against the snow. Beyond the camp’s small circle, the mountains stood in layers of blackness. There were no ordinary night sounds. No insects. No distant wolves. No birds settling in hidden nests. The north was not silent because it slept. It was silent because something had taught it caution.

Eventually, Ludwig stood and walked a short distance from the fire.

Durandal rested at his side.

The air tasted wrong.

Not like Sloth directly. Not that overwhelming futility that had pressed against Solania until action itself seemed like a childish mistake. This was smaller. Older. A movement beneath stillness. Snow shifting without wind. Darkness holding a breath.

In one of the tents, Cain’s eyes opened.

He felt it next.

The vampire emerged without a sound, cloak falling around him like a piece of the night had detached and chosen a human shape. His gaze moved across the snow, then toward Ludwig.

Ludwig was already standing beyond the edge of the firelight.

Durandal was in his hand.

Cain stopped beside him.

For a few seconds, both watched the same stretch of darkness between two snow-covered ridges.

Then Ludwig spoke quietly.

"Something’s moving in the snow."

Cain’s eyes narrowed.

The snow ahead shifted.

Not much.

A small ripple beneath the surface.

Then another.

Redd emerged from his tent half a heartbeat later, already holding a weapon, nostrils flaring. "I smell rot."

Celine stepped out behind him, blade in hand, face calm and cold. Kaiser appeared near the dying fire as if he had been standing there all along, red finger twitching once. Thomas woke with a tiny gasp, his wings flaring bright enough to cast orange over the tents.

Tull’s voice came from inside his tent. "If this is another horrible old story, I swear..."

Then he heard the snow move.

He came out much faster.

The camp stood ready in seconds.

The ripple in the snow stopped.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then a hand rose from beneath the white.

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