When Death Follows

For years untold there was nothing, only darkness, no glimmer no spark. And then one day it happened, there was a crack in reality a place for a soul to see.

It was small at first like light through the prick of a pen, but after countless and unceasing nothing it may well have been the sun. It sat in a dank cavern for a time, perhaps it was 10 minutes or perhaps it was 20 years.

A sound assaulted ears that were no longer capable of hearing. A man with grime-covered armor and sword entered the decrepit place, stern and serious. He was the vanguard of a larger force, three others trailed him in just as quietly, just as cautiously.

The spark of light waited in the dark, not because it wanted but because it was, this was its sole purpose. A life some might say, or a lack of one according to others.

The warrior took quick steps as did the others, but the man pulling up the rear stubbed his foot on a metal helm lying in the middle of the floor as if it was placed there to orchestrate that moment in question.

Tearing themselves from the wall were mockeries of men, grotesque in the way sloth and neglect were. They were once men, except their skin was torn away, loose, dust, and only old gray bones remained affixed with the trappings of whatever it was they were in life.

They possessed no life, no spark; they were mere constructs of bone. With a cobwebbed rusted sword it swung at the man in the rear of the party. He was the least armored and only wore loose-fitting clothes.

Two bone men pulled themselves together from a haphazard pile and threw themselves at the man with no hate or knowing. They did as they did with no regard for right or wrong, morality, or immorality, for time or context. They sat in the dark for so long it was hard to know if they even knew why.

The man under the rusted sword quickly reached for a pouch on his belt, said words of power, and transformed the very air into fire. Brilliant orange charred gray bones black.

Whatever force bound them to existence fell away as they crumpled to the stone, nothing once more. This event, though small, created a cavalcade of others. More dark things that dared not die tore themselves from walls and pulled themselves together from years untold of darkness.

The pinprick of consciousness, of will, pulled itself from the wall as well. It moved towards life intent to snuff it out.

The armored warrior kicked, slashed, and bashed, with the urgency and fire of life. The consciousness began to lurch for that fire, more drawn to that lingering emotion than whatever its mandate was.

The party of four fought to live, to not become that which they killed. Though their skills were far superior than the things without flesh, or will, sheer numbers began to overwhelm them.

The man who stirred these mockeries brandished a symbol. The weak consciousness had now seen a light. The light became brighter and brighter until it was all-consuming.

The consciousness could move no further. It… I, I could move no further.

The light turned me back along with a handful of the wretched mockeries compelling us to flee. The light utterly destroyed others, but I, and those that remained were driven back into deeper darkness.

The light in me swelled. I was still a passenger in it, unable to do anything other than to snuff out and extinguish things that carried the very light that grew inside of me.

Though I may have had will, there was no passion to feed it. Countless nights that folded over eternity rolled on in the dark, how was I to know. Light happened, movement.

A woman in robes pale as reality was bright emerged. I noticed the symbol first, then the woman’s dangerous curves that slid off the light and collected the dark.

“These will do,” she declared to no one. The woman beckoned me along with her finger as she did all the other wretched mockeries of my kind. She took us from the black of lightless depths.

We were greeted by the night sky and my eyes burned. I felt the ridges of my face and there was no skin there, no eyes either, yet I saw. Questions I never bothered to ask before.

I was brought into the fold of a large force, bones, them all, from wet to dry, amassed on the outskirts of a sleepy hamlet. The woman that led us from the dark rose in the air as if propelled by sheer will.

She hovered overhead with the same predatory opportunism as a mosquito. With a single gesture, and pointing finger we descended the hill we all perched.

We need not be given commands because our murderous instincts were quite enough to fill in any holes in the clarity of her intent. We battered at doors. Fire flew overhead and landed squarely on the roofs of houses. The horde put many of the desperate humans to the sword mercilessly and methodically. I joined in the slaughter.

Unforeseen pain welled up inside of me, starting from the cavity where my heart might have been, then spread like a cancer everywhere else.

A man crossed my path. I raised my sword to strike but the light inside me told me no, it was wrong to extinguish the light of others. I paused, before I could give it a second thought, a dry bones ran the man through, having none of the existential pain that I was enduring.

The humans fell.

The force of those dead but not dead rolled over the town with little resistance. The woman commanded us to gather the corpses of what was left. With magic her ally, she called some measure of life to the bodies of the slain, forever enslaving them to the fold. Any that fell became unwillingly recruited into an army of the dead, thus swelling the size of the army with each battle instead of diminishing it.

We moved endlessly in that time, destroying life like a plague against humanity. I was amongst the first of my kind, and through the will of the divine comedy that was life I did not meet my end. I waded through every battle with no great skill, or advantage, other than luck. I was not special, just one of many, ready to fight and die on command.

My growing consciousness began to question the orders that were laid out in front of me, at the same time I was unable to fight back in any meaningful way. I was an instrument of death trapped in a form I had no control over.

We marched on a golden city. Half the population of the country fought the other as undead mockeries. The woman took to the sky on a dragon of bones. Passions flared and battle joined. My life was one endless battle. I was a tool to will greater than my own.

The city of gold held its borders with magic to match the woman in command of the vast army of undead. Those of the golden city that followed the way of the arcane batted her out of the sky. Her cruelty on the world was quashed, but my spark did not extinguish.

I wandered aimlessly away from humanity, from the misery of life, to sit with my sentience as a burden. I was cursed with life with no purpose. Every day rolled out the same as the other, every night dark and pointless. Through grass, through stone, through mountain, I trudged. Through hot, through cold, wet, or dry I shuffled.

I found a place, tranquil and isolated, a place for the dead to rest. While my body never tired my mind was weary. I lay down at the foot of a grand tree for a time, wrestling with the pain of existence and the nature of nothing.

With all the time in creation at my side I let the world mold me into whatever it needed, becoming the earth, sinking into the soil. New life grew around me, inside of me. I didn’t sleep, I could not, I could only watch the world through the slowly widening window of the soul.

Many seasons passed, winters, summers, falls… and I endured. Half buried in the earth I was content. The ocean of time washed over me for times untold. Before long I nearly forgot what I was, lost in the dream of nonexistence.

I watched as a man disturbed the tranquility of eternal sleep, or in my case a mere respite from the pain of being. I did not move, hoping that he would pass along and I could continue being the earth.

After he dug up the first body, he commanded it to rise and dug the next. He created a network of soulless minions retrieving the next body for his purposes. The man sat under the huge tree that had been my home since the rise and fall of countless nations.

He noticed the off-colored white of bone, and he dug me out. The roots of the tree wrapped around my rib cage, worms used my skull as their home, flowers grew from my eyes. My sword was nothing more than rust, unidentifiable as anything but undefined mineral.

He wore all black robes along with armor underneath. He had a symbol of power around his neck, that he focused to bring just enough of my spirit from the beyond to animate my already animated bones.

I chose not to stand. I chose not to move. If I had lips I might smile. The man looked to me with a furrowed brow, unsure why his magic hadn’t bound me to his will. He brandished his symbol of power and commanded me to rise. I did. I slowly stood, back in the service of a mortal’s will.

I joined the newly risen bones and began digging up more bodies that had been sleeping in this sacred cemetery. This was by no means the numbers of the grand army I was in that nearly conquered the world, but a small force of mindless.

We walked towards a ruins. The man commanded us to kill a small group of men and women with swords and arrows, when he assumed they were sleeping. I was handed a mace and made to smash the sleeping people to death.

I took a step towards the unaware party, then back towards the man in black. He looked to me quizzically and pointed his symbol of power at me. I shook my head from side to side negatively when he demanded me to kill.

The party of mortals woke and didn’t hesitate to fight for their lives, their souls. The man ignored me for a time, deciding it best to deal with the mortal threat over the undead one. The group of mortals were swarmed by numbers, an entire graveyard versus five. The man in black laughed manically. I had no choice but to fight.

I raised the mace high and smashed it in the back of the head of the man in black. He fell unmoving, claimed by death.

All the ragged bones stopped attacking, unburdened by purpose without someone to command them.

The party of adventurers postured defensively as if I were the next threat to dispatch. I dropped my weapon, no longer needing it.

The biggest of their crew surged forward to smash me with a hammer, but the small one with dual daggers held him back. The party of five began walking away, but not before turning to me. The smallest one beckoned me forward with a welcoming gesture from his hand. It wasn’t a command, but an invitation.

I chose to step forward.

I chose to follow.