With roars of primal rage the orruks launched themselves at the undead defenders, crude choppas hewing apart joints and splintering bone. Scores of them lay dead already, their blood running down the ruined stones to turn the water around their beached ships red. Still more skeletal warriors lay around them, reduced to scattered piles of bones and fractured skulls.
At the centre of the swirling melee, Elanor continued her incantation. She could feel the ebb and flow of the battle around her, the deathly energy of the fallen orruks and the dissipating necromancy of her own sundered followers. However much she wished to join her people in the fight, she knew she could not afford to tear herself away from the ritual, each second they brought her bringing its culmination that much closer. All around her, the ritual ingredients burned with witch light, the pale green flames adding to the stench of death that pervaded the ruined fort.
“Let the fallen know no peace, bind them to the grief of their ending, bind them together with this shared sorrow, united in damned piety,” she continued, reading from the tortured script of the Book of the Deep even as the words seemed to writhe across the page.
A deep bellow and rending of metal announced the arrival of the orruk’s warboss. One arm fashioned into a giant metal claw, he smashed his way through the defenders and charged head on towards Elanor as she stood alone within the ritual circle.
A spark of metal on metal and the screeching of blades stopped the warboss before he could cross the boundary. Standing before the brutish warrior, holding the claw against the haft of his halberd, stood Wight Captain Taldire. Elanor could feel the necromantic energy coursing through the wight’s body as his skeletal frame struggled to hold the might of the colossal orruk in check. The two broke apart and squared off again, Taldire’s decrepit boots planted firmly in front of the ritual line.
Twice more the warboss came on, his blows landing with a speed that almost matched their thuggish strength. There was no strategy or elegance to his attacks, merely pure aggression that left no room for anything but desperate defence. Twice Taldire held him off, his halberd catching those blows he could not avoid and striking forward with what openings he could find, driving the orruk off and buying the captain a brief moment of respite before the next flurry of attacks. On the first exchange the claw sheared a portion of Taldire’s tattered cloak, on the second, a great gouge was rent in the captain’s gauntlet. Throughout it all, the warboss bellowed wordless battlecries as it vented its rage and frustration while across from it, Taldire stood unflinching and silent.
“Fight propa’ ya’ coward!” the warboss yelled as it charged once more.
This time, its blows did not relent and the barrage saw one strike Taldire’s hand as it gripped his halberd, shattering his grip and sending the wight reeling. It was all Elanor could do not to cry out in shock as she saw the blow land and the great weapon clatter to the floor. The warboss closed in for the kill. As it did so, Taldire grabbed a nearby warrior with his good hand, throwing them into the orruk’s path. The unfortunate soldier was caught unawares and reduced to splintered bone by a single strike of the claw. Two more were sacrificed to the warboss’s rampage as Taldire staggered away.
“Haha, run ya git, I’ll still get you!” laughed the warboss, swatting away another skeleton.
Once more, a skeleton was thrown to the warboss, and once more it smashed them to pieces with glee. This time though, as the shattered bones fell to the floor, Taldire came forward, blade of the last fallen soldier in his one good hand. Before the warboss could recover from the last strike, Taldire drove the rusted sword hilt deep into the orruk’s throat.
“I’m not running,” Taldire replied coldly.
The only response the warboss could manage was a bloody, gurgling cough, and a look of blazing, but impotent rage. It remained standing for a moment, claw hanging over Taldire’s head as if about to strike. Then, at last, the last of the life left the beast’s frame and it crashed to the ground, the hilt still stuck in its throat. Slightly swaying, Taldire stood resolute over the body of his adversary.
With the death of their leader, the remaining Orruk’s lost their momentum. Wasting no time, the skeletal legions of Tira Gnok went on the offensive, driving the greenskins back and buying themselves a measure of ground.
Such was Elanor’s relief with her captain’s victory, that she did not notice the assassin until it was too late. In the chaos of the battle they had slipped through, and with Elanor distracted and Taldire preoccupied and injured, they had struck. With a single leap they covered the radius of the ritual circle and landed next to Elanor, their dagger plunging forward. She cried out in pain as the blade cut through her cuirass and pierced her lung, a hair’s breadth from her unbeating heart.
“A gift from Mistress Nikos,” the assassin smirked in Elanor’s ear.
The assassin tried to withdraw their blade to strike again but Elanor locked their arm in place with her free hand. The other still clasping the book, she continued the incantation as panic began to bloom in the assassin’s hooded eyes.
“The eternal night, unending darkness that comes for all souls, salvation and damnation both, a truth across time and realm, shared by aged ashes and fresh blood.”
With the last word, she turned to the assassin, barred her pointed fangs, and ripped his throat out. She felt the intoxication of the warm blood flowing down her throat, smothering the pain and fatigue while the struggles of her would be killer weakened in her grasp, as the animating force left his body. As his body fell limp in her hands she let it drop to the ground and turned back to Civilia, raising her hands towards the darkened sky.
“I call ye, dead of Civilia, the forlorn spawn of great floods, savage brutes, and heinous betrayal. Rise once more, rise upon the shoulders of those that fell before you, draw strength from the legacy of cessation that permeates the place. This land is yours, it has always been yours, it shall always be yours. Rise now, and reclaim it. Civilia is dead, let the dead take it!”
Necromantic energy flowed through the circle as the pale green fire whipped up into pyres, entirely consuming the ritual ingredients. The flame and smoke twisted and swirled around Elanor, its energy feeding into her frame until it felt it would tear her apart. The power was not her’s, not the ritual’s, both of them were merely conduits, catalysts for something far greater. The loss and violent ending of a thousand thousand souls cut down by the fury of the realm and the machination of mortals. In her, that disparate, moribound energy gathered, strengthened, and found purpose.
Just before she was torn asunder by it, the energy exploded outwards, a wave of necromantic force that rushed over the still living orruks and reduced them to piles of bones and ash. Onwards it went, a suffocating green tide of fog and smoke that cut across the waves and sank down into dark depths of the drowned city.
Like tiny flames alighting amidst the dark of night, she felt the presence of the dead rising from their slumber. In ones and twos at first, then quicker and quicker as the energies of the ritual spread across the ruins until it seemed as if the night blazed with their presence.
They were not hers to command, such power was far beyond her, they were of Civilia, and Civilia was theirs. Those that defiled their home with warm breath and beating heart would be driven out or dragged down to the depths. Slowly, inexorably, the dead of Civilia set about reclaiming their home.
Elanor allowed herself a contented smile before collapsing.
The wound in her side burned with unimaginable pain, and the ritual had greedily fed on her own energy as well. Darkness encroached upon the edge of her vision and she found she lacked even the strength to stand. Overhead, she could just make out the cracked visage of Captain Taldire as he knelt down beside her before she lost consciousness entirely.
