These Hallowed Bones - [Monster Evolution, Dark Fantasy, Heroic Undead]

The march from Haven's shadow carried no sound of mortal armies. No cadence of bootfalls, no grumble of tired soldiers, no jangle of supply wagons. There was only the dry, whisper-thin clatter of bone against stone, the soft scrape of ancient armor, and the silence of three thousand warriors who had already died once for this world.

Five days. The word held no meaning for us. We did not measure our advance in the rising and setting of a sun we no longer saw, nor in the gnawing hunger we no longer felt.

We measured it in leagues of corrupted earth reclaimed, in the scent of decay that lessened behind us with each outward stride.

I am what remains of Commander Cid Ikkert, the last general of the unified legions. Or perhaps, I am merely his bones, given form and purpose anew by the will of my lord, Death's Champion.

This march is penance.

This war is redemption.

The distinction between what I was and what I am matters less than the duty. He commanded me to strike at the heart of the Endless Rot, and so my legion marches.

Yet in the hollow spaces between bone and purpose, I remember. I remember commanding living men. I remember the weight of their trust, the burden of their lives in my hands.

I remember how that burden broke me. How I led them into slaughter at the Field of Broken Banners, and how none remained after.

Death's Champion was never a living thing. He only leaned on borrowed bones for a while, taking what was needed from the fallen to serve his divine purpose. But I am a dead thing that remembers being alive.

I remember the taste of wine, the warmth of sunlight, the sound of Carida's laughter echoing through our halls. I remember love, and loss, and the crushing weight of failure.

Within Death's Champion, I existed in a hollow space, not consciousness, but echo. A fragment of will preserved in bone and sinew, giving counsel, sharing memories of tactics and strategy.

Now I am something more and less. Given form again, but not life. Granted purpose, but not peace.

The plains that stretched from Haven gave way to sour marshland where the groundwater seeped black and oily. Gas bubbles rose from the muck, popping with a sound like dying breaths. My warriors waded through it, their hollow frames immune to the filth that would have sickened a living army in hours.

The echo of my former self stirred, a phantom memory of living soldiers cursing the cold, the wet, the stench. This silent legion feels none of it. They are perfect tools of war, and that perfection is a constant, grim reminder of their sacrifice.

We left no trail of broken reeds, only the silent passage of bone through decay.

Beyond the marsh, the true border of the Rot began. The land itself grew sick. Trees stood in skeletal groves, their bark peeling back to reveal flesh-like wood beneath. Thorns sharp grew around their trunks.

The ground became a spongy carpet of sickly green moss that pulsed with a faint, internal glow, as if the very soil had developed a malevolent heartbeat.

My memories held no record of this. The Rot in my time was a distant threat, a creeping blight in the elven forests far to the south. Now it was a kingdom of its own, a living, breathing entity of decay that pressed against the rest of the world.

We passed the first signs of its influence, the corpse of a monstrous bear-like thing, its fur sloughed away, its skeleton entwined with vines that had burrowed through its ribcage and erupted from its eye sockets.

My soldiers ignored it.

The corruption here was different than what Death's Champion had faced in his campaigns. This was not the brutal directness of demon fire or the alien hunger of the Arkashoth. This insidious.

It transformed rather than destroyed, changed rather than consumed.

For two more days, we pressed deeper. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of overripe fruit and things left too long in the sun. The canopy above became woven so tightly that they blocked the sky.

Leaving the only light the blue fire that burned in our hollow sockets, the sigh of our master. Death's Champion.

The legion moved with a discipline that no living army could maintain. Three thousand skeletal warriors, remnants of the armies that fell where I led them to die, now marching as one. When we crossed treacherous ground, they did not slip.

When we navigated narrow ravines, they did not falter.

Each warrior bore the memory of their death.

They remembered their failures as I remembered mine. But where my memories brought guilt, theirs brought only resolve. They had died once in service to the world.

Now they marched to die again, and again, and as many times as needed until the corruption was driven back.

And I, their Graveking, led them. My form, forged by the Champion from the Field's most potent remains, towered over them. Twelve feet of bone and ancient plate.

On the seventh day since departing Haven, the land offered a gift, a series of low, stone ridges that rose from the spongy ground like the knuckles of a buried giant. A defensible position. A place to establish a foothold.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

With a pulse of will that resonated through every warrior, I commanded a halt. Three thousand pairs of burning eye-sockets turned to me, awaiting orders. The connection between us was deeper than speech, more immediate than gesture.

They were extensions of my will, fragments of my purpose made manifest.

From the highest ridge, I surveyed our new domain. Below, the Rot stretched in every direction, a sea of twisted vegetation and pulsing fungi. Somewhere in those depths lay the source of this corruption, not the Demon King's realm, but something older, something that had fed on the world's wounds until it became a cancer in its own right.

This was the front line. The bulkhead from which we would launch our campaign.

My will commanded, "Scouts. Assess the perimeter."

Twenty warriors detached from the main force, moving with the silent grace of things that cast no shadow. They disappeared into the skeletal woods, seeking weakness in the enemy's defenses. The rest began the work of fortification.

We did not build walls of stone or timber. We built walls of bone.

My warriors tore bone-thorn trees from the ground, their skeletal hands immune to the razor-sharp spines. They arranged them in a jagged perimeter, their sharpened branches facing outward.

A barrier to slow a charge, to channel attackers into prepared killing grounds.

Others worked with the stone itself, their strength allowing them to lift and place boulders that would have required siege engines for living men to move. They built not just barriers but chokepoints, elevated positions for archers, sally ports for swift counterattacks.

While they worked, I walked the perimeter. My thoughts drifted between past and present, between memory and purpose. I thought of Haven's walls, so small, so fragile compared to the fortifications being raised here.

I thought of my descendant, Serrah, bearing the weight of my failure and my name. She commanded with wisdom to survive, where I had known only desperate courage.

And I thought of my daughter. My Carida. Her essence, her unwavering will, now a permanent, anchoring part of my lord. There was pride in that, a strange and hollow comfort.

The scouts returned. Their memories flowed into mine through our shared purpose, images and impressions cascading through the connection that bound us.

The woods teemed with Rot-Walkers, things that were once human, now shambling husks animated by the corruption. But there were other things as well. Larger forms moving in the deeper woods, creatures with too many limbs that hunted with a cunning that suggested intelligence remained beneath their twisted forms.

Some had been animals once, great stags whose antlers had become razor-edged bone, whose eyes wept acidic tears. Others showed signs of having been human, but stretched and warped until only hatred remained.

They moved in hunting packs, coordinating their movements with predatory intelligence.

Good. This would not be a simple matter of cutting through mindless hordes. The enemy here possessed tactics, strategy. They would test our resolve, probe for weakness.

This was war as I remembered it.

The scouts also brought word of something else, structures deeper in the Rot. Not the crude huts of corrupted survivors, but deliberate constructions. Towers of twisted wood and bone that pulsed with the same sickly glow as the moss.

Observation posts. Command centers.

The corruption was organized. It had learned from its encounters with organized resistance. That made it more dangerous, but also more predictable.

I could work with predictable.

That night, as my legion stood in silent vigil, the first attack came.

They emerged from the treeline as the gloom deepened, a shambling horde of Rot-Walkers carrying crude weapons. Rusted blades, sharpened bones, clubs wrapped in thorny vines. They moved with the hunger of things that had forgotten everything but the need to consume, to spread their corruption to new flesh.

They saw our ridge and charged with a hunger that knew no caution. My warriors did not stir as the horde approached. They stood in perfect formation, discipline holding them motionless as death itself.

Only when the first wave reached the bone-thorn barrier did they react.

The barriers served their purpose. The first attackers impaled themselves, their bodies creating a gruesome rampart that slowed those behind. But the Rot-Walkers felt no pain, knew no fear.

They climbed over their fallen, using the corpses as stepping stones.

With a gesture of my bone fingers, two hundred skeletal archers raised their bows. Their arrows were of sharpened bone, fletched with spectral energy that would find its mark regardless of wind or distance.

They drew in perfect unison, the creak of bowstrings lost in the moaning of the approaching horde.

A single, silent command of will. "Loose."

The volley was a whisper of death. Two hundred arrows found two hundred targets, piercing corrupted flesh with the precision of a divine instrument. The Rot-Walkers fell in heaps, their bodies adding to the rampart of their predecessors.

But more pressed forward from the woods, an endless tide of corruption that cared nothing for losses, nothing for tactics beyond the simple imperative to overwhelm through numbers.

Another gesture. "Shield wall."

Four hundred warriors moved to the front line with mechanical precision. Their shields locked together with the sound of steel clanging on steel.

They formed an unbreakable line, a wall of iron and resolve that had been tested once by demon steel and found wanting. This time would be different.

The Rot-Walkers crashed against them like a wave against stone. Their crude weapons shattered against ancient steel. Their claws and teeth found no purchase on bones that remembered the agony of defeat but no longer feared it.

My warriors stood firm. They did not push back, that would break formation. They simply held, each shield bearer supporting his neighbor, each spear thrust calculated to wound without overextending.

This was the discipline that had made the old legions feared across the world, refined by death into something approaching perfection.

The battle raged for what would have been hours for a mortal army. The Rot-Walkers threw themselves at our line with mindless fury, and we cut them down with methodical precision. No berserker rage drove my warriors, no fear clouded their judgment.

They were death made tactical, warfare reduced to its essential elements.

When the last of them had fallen, their bodies forming a rampart of their own around our position, I gave the final command.

"Advance."

The shield wall parted with parade-ground precision, and my heavy infantry marched through. They moved in perfect formation, two ranks deep, their great swords rising and falling in rhythm.

They passed through the field of fallen Rot-Walkers like harvesters through grain, ensuring nothing that had fallen would rise again.

The work was methodical, thorough. Each skull was crushed, each spine severed. The corruption could animate dead flesh, but not scattered fragments.

When they finished, only mulch remained of what had been an army.

When the work was done, the silence returned, deeper than before. The ridge was secure. Our bulkhead was established.

I stood atop the highest point, looking out over the conquered ground. This was the first victory in a long campaign. A single step on the path to redemption. My lord, Death's Champion, had given me form and purpose renewed.

He had sent me to reclaim this land, to push back the corruption that festered here.

But this was also personal. This corruption had fed on the world's wounds, grown strong in the chaos that followed the great defeat. It was another consequence of my failure, another price the world paid for my inadequacy as a general.

I looked at my skeletal hands, at the great sword I carry, at the legion of fallen warriors who answered my will. We were the line that had already broken once. We had failed when failure meant the end of everything.

We would not break again.

I am the Graveking, and this is the war my master has granted me.