Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The heavy oak doors groaned on their rusted iron hinges, a sound like grinding teeth that echoed into the gloom of the corridor beyond. But before the King could take another step, a figure staggered from the shadows and threw himself directly into his path.

He was as pale as a corpse, skin so translucent that the dark, blue-veined tracks on his temples showed through like bruises. He was trembling so violently that the small, dark frog perched on his left shoulder had to dig its webbed toes deep into the fabric of his ragged cloak just to maintain its grip.

"Please—wait! Wait!" the man gasped. He collapsed heavily to his knees, his hands slapping down into the pool of blood spreading across the cold stone floor. "I want to pledge my loyalty to you! I need to! My frog too—his name is MJ!"

The King paused, his gloved hand resting motionless on the latch. He turned slowly, the heavy fur-trimmed mantle of his cloak dragging across the red-stained dais. His eyes were not filled with wrath, nor triumph; they were hollowed out by an absolute, bone-deep exhaustion.

"Are you afraid of me, boy?" the King asked. His voice was barely louder than the draft whistling through the shattered high windows. "Is that what this is? A desperate ploy to keep your head on your shoulders?"

"No!" The young man shook his head frantically, spraying droplets of crimson off his trembling knuckles. "No! You’re... you’re my hero! My name is Web. This is MJ."

He gestured vaguely with a stained hand toward the creature on his shoulder before sweeping his arm in a wide, erratic arc toward the slaughterhouse the throne room had become. Dozens of nobles, guards, and councilors lay crumpled like discarded rags across the marble.

"I was one of them, but I swear to you, I’m not proud of it," Web whispered. The fear in his voice suddenly twisted, giving way to a raw, festering hatred that made his throat rattle. "They were monsters, Your Majesty. Absolute monsters. They ate human flesh in their private chambers. They tortured the servants for sport. I saw them... Gods forgive me, I saw them pull out a child’s teeth one by one with iron pliers just because the boy bit back when they abused him! I hated them! I hated every breath they took! I tried to gather the courage, the strength, anything to stop them, but I was too weak. I was a coward! I couldn’t bear living in a world built on their sickness!"

Web looked up, his pale, bloodshot eyes burning with a desperate, feverish reverence that boarded on madness.

"Your brothers were the worst of the entire bloodline," Web continued, his words spilling out in an unstoppable torrent. "And you... you just walked in here and destroyed them. You didn’t even know half the horrors they committed in the dark, yet you collected a debt they’ve owed the heavens for decades. It was karma! It was divine intervention! Whatever you just did—whatever grand, terrifying plan you have moving forward—I want to be a part of it. I need to be a part of it. I want you to know that you did nothing wrong today. Not a single thing!"

On his shoulder, the small, dark frog adjusted its footing, let out a low, solemn croak, and nodded its head once in grave, uncanny agreement.

The King stared at Web for a long, agonizing moment. Slowly, the rigid, terrifying posture of the sovereign melted away. His shoulders slumped forward. The oppressive, suffocating aura of absolute power that had filled the hall just moments ago vanished, leaving behind only a broken, utterly drained man wearing a heavy piece of gold upon his head.

"A plan?" The King let out a soft sound—a breath that was half-sigh, half-sob. "I don’t have a plan, Web. I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore."

He looked past the kneeling young man, staring into the pitch-black corridor beyond as if looking directly over the jagged edge of the world.

"It all feels too big," the King murmured, his voice cracking slightly on the edges. "The realm... the crown... the people. It feels like a giant, floating glass ball that’s bound to shatter at any second. It snaps my psyche like a dry twig."

He stepped off the lowest stair of the dais, approaching Web not as a ruler looking down at a subject, but as one ghost recognizing another in the fog.

"I just want to know if you feel the same as me," the King said quietly, stopping inches from Web’s soaked knees. "Do you ever get a little bit tired of life? Like you’re not really happy, but you don’t actually want to die? Like you’re hanging by a single frayed thread over an abyss, but you keep holding on... simply because your fingers refuse to let go?"

Web stayed frozen, the fiery speech dying in his throat, paralyzed by the King’s sudden, devastating vulnerability.

"Your body is in the room, but you’re not really there," the King whispered, looking down at his own gloved hands as if he didn’t recognize them. "You have empathy buried deep inside, but you can’t force yourself to care anymore. You’re fresh out of love, fresh out of hope, even when the world tells you it’s all around you."

He turned his back to the boy, casting a long, dark shadow across Web, across the silent observer Aria, and across the mountain of dead elite.

"Am I past repair, Web?"

Before Web could force a single word past his paralyzed lips, a sharp, unnatural chill swept through the grand hall. It wasn’t the cold of winter or a stray mountain breeze; it was the damp, suffocating frost of an unsealed tomb.

The tall, flickering torches lining the stone pillars sputtered violently. The warm orange flames snapped back, shifting in a heartbeat into a sickening, ghostly blue that cast long, distorted shadows across the architecture.

From deep within the pile of corpses near the center of the hall, a sound tore through the quiet.

It was a wet, rattling breath. A sound of lungs filling not with clean air, but with rot and stagnant blood.

Aria gasped, her hand dropping instinctively to the hilt of her dagger. "Your Majesty..."

In the center of the slaughter, Lord Harwick’s pale, lifeless fingers twitched against the flagstones. Then came the sound—a horrific, sickening crunch of splintering cartilage and rearranging bone. Harwick’s neck, which had been snapped so thoroughly that his head had hung at a right angle, suddenly twisted. With violent, unnatural jerks, his spine realigned itself, popping back into place like a snapped branch being forced back together.

His head snapped upright. His eyelids fluttered, then shot wide open.

The whites of his eyes were gone. In their place burned two spheres of blinding, violent crimson light—raw, corrupted magic pulsing like dying stars behind his sockets.

A dry, raspy laugh bubbled up from Harwick’s throat, spraying black, coagulated blood over his silk collar.

"You piece of shit..." Harwick sneered. His voice was no longer entirely human; it was layered with a chorus of dozens of hollow, whispering echoes that seemed to bleed out from the floorboards themselves. "You absolute... arrogance of a boy..."

Slowly, awkwardly, like a puppet being yanked by invisible, frantic strings, Harwick pulled himself to his feet. His broken limbs bent at grotesque, impossible angles before snapping straight with loud, sickening cracks.

"Did you really think this was over?" Harwick spat, wiping a stream of black bile from his chin with the back of a bruised hand. "Did you think a broken neck and a few dead guards would end a lineage as old as the foundations of this keep? You fool! My talent... my true gift... makes me a very, very hard man to kill!"

Harwick raised both hands into the air, his long fingers clawed like talons. The crimson light spilling from his eyes leaked down his cheeks like bloody tears, pooling at his jaw and dripping onto the stone.

"You sat on that throne thinking you were the only one holding divine power!" Harwick roared, his voice multiplying, echoing off the high vaulted ceiling until it felt as though the very walls were screaming. "You thought you were all that because you could crush a man’s throat! But you know nothing of real power! You know nothing of what lies beneath the dirt!"

He slammed his boot down onto the flagstone. A shockwave of pure, pitch-black necrotic energy rippled outward in a widening circle.

The temperature in the hall plummeted below freezing. Frost crystallized instantly over the puddles of blood, turning them into dark, shimmering mirrors.

And then, the nightmare truly began.

Across the vast floor of the grand hall, the dead began to move.

It started with a twitch of a finger here, a spasmodic jerk of a leg there. Then came the chorus of horrific, wet gasps. The twelve-year-old’s father, whose face had been frozen in surprise, let out a long, shuddering wail as his lungs force-inflated with dark magic. The woman with the cold eyes, whose hands were still wrapped around her own bruised throat, slowly uncurled her fingers and pushed herself off the ground, her jaw unhinging with a wet pop.

"Arise!" Harwick shrieked, his crimson eyes flaring so brightly they threw long, red shadows across the walls. "Arise, my brothers! Arise, my servants! Rise and tear the flesh from his bones!"

The sound was unbearable. It was the crunching of broken ribs, the tearing of severed tendons binding themselves together with black thread-like magic, the scraping of armor against stone as dozens of corpses stood up in unison. Guards with caved-in skulls, nobles with severed arteries, women in ruined velvet dresses—every single person who had perished in the hall’s massacre stood once more.

They did not stand as men. Their eyes glowed with the same violent, mindless crimson light as Harwick’s. Their mouths hung open, dripping dark sludge, their breaths coming in synchronized, rattling wheezes.

Web scrambled backward on his hands and knees, terror overriding his fanatical reverence as a resurrected guard stepped over him, blind to his existence, staring only at the King. MJ let out a sharp, panicked croak, retreating into the folds of Web’s hood.

Aria drew her blade, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. "He’s a necromancer..." she breathed, the horror of the realization hitting her like a physical blow. "He isn’t just a corrupt lord... he’s a dark practitioner. He was hiding an entire army of the damned right beneath the royal court!"

The King did not draw a weapon. He didn’t even step back. He simply turned around, his hollow, exhausted eyes fixing on Lord Harwick, who stood at the center of an ascending legion of sixty undead abominations.

Harwick smiled, a jagged, hideous expression filled with black-stained teeth. He extended a pale, glowing hand toward the King.

"You wanted to be a monster?" Harwick mocked, his voice echoing from every dead mouth in the room simultaneously. "Let us see how a monster fares against the tide of the grave!"

With a single, deafening roar from sixty dead throats, the resurrected court surged forward.

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