Arc 1: Chapter 34: Smite
When I stepped outside, I no longer stood alone on the hill. The restless dead gathered in the bell tower’s shadow. Mistwalkers all, clad in the raiments of a dead kingdom, pallid faces framing hungry eyes.
They had emerged from the marshes at the hill’s base, or crawled out of upturned graves beyond the road, mud still clinging to them. Waiting for me.
Well enough.
Dawn had come and gone. Thunder rumbled above. A light rain began to fall.
“You were a fool to come back.” Vaughn faced me from the center of the scattered pack of undead. Encased in a set of old, battered armor, he was tall as me, his wide shoulders made into metal hills by studded pauldrons. He held his heavy broadsword in his fist, the nicks of many campaigns marking its blade.
Unlike the rest, he had a mount. A brutish chimera of a kind I hadn’t seen before, perhaps brought over from the continent or bred in the baron’s labs. A massive hyena, long tailed, its purple tongue lolling. It snickered at me as the ghouls spread out to cover the church yard.
More than a dozen ghouls surrounded their vice-captain, forming a half ring around the front of the church. In the rain and mist, their armor seemed formed of pale shadows and their eyes gleamed with odlight.
No sign of Catrin. No warning from her about this ambush, either. She’d betrayed me after all, then. Perhaps this had always been her plan. Had she known what waited inside the church?
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the task I’d been given. The doom in my hand. I tightened my grip on the axe.
“We should thank you for offing that William boy,” Vaughn continued, his tone conversational. His mount lurched forward, letting out a hungry cackle. He forced it back with a savage jerk on the reins. “He would have been a problem.”
I started to understand this strange situation better then. It didn’t change my next steps, or my goal, but a clearer picture formed in my mind of the previous night’s events.