The three thousand strong force of ill prepared southerners continued to trudge its way through ever-increasing amounts of snow and ice. With every step they took, the air seemed that much colder, the number of snowflakes raining down that much more numerous and the wind blowing that much harder. Eventually, even the most optimistic members of the General’s entourage had to acquiesce to the fact that they had made a hasty decision that had turned out rather poorly. They had made less than 60 miles of progress compared to where they were just mere hours after passing through the fog wall, but to go any farther was beyond foolhardy.

The snow was already getting to the point that the wagons and carts had to be pushed by tens of men to even move more than a few inches, and the bitter cold was to the point that some of the least well equipped people of the army (and its followers) had simply fallen dead of frostbite and/ or hypothermia, whichever came first. It was time to turn this whole force around and hope that they could make it back before anything bad happened. Of the 3,000 soldiers that had crossed into Darksol (not counting the General, his aides and the many, many followers that came along with the army for various reasons) less than 2,000 of them remained alive, and they had barely gone more than 70 miles from the wall of mist that marked the border!

As a certain person would have exclaimed, “Now that’s a lot of damage!”

However, if you, dear reader, had paid attention to the ending of the last chapter (or even the whole novel itself), you would know that, when facing Darksol, things can, and often will, get worse.

…

It had been two and half days of fighting the cold, the snow, the ice, and the wind, all to manage to retreat from a war that should have been easy to wage. After all, how dangerous could a bunch of walking corpses be? It should have been a cake walk, but instead he had been duped by his associates into taking the worst path. No doubt the other Generals were enjoying wild successes, plundering valuable materials, and bringing the holy word of Almighty Solinaye to the unwashed masses. It was beyond humiliating to have sworn to bring glory to the new, more holy Sultanate, only to return not only empty handed but with less than half of the troops he had set out with.

Still if memory served, the fog wall would be in sight soon. All they would need to do would be to turn this one corner and-.

His horse refused to move forwards. Odd. The poor beast was already nearly dead due to the cold, but even in the face of the freezing temperatures it had pushed on, even with himself upon its back. Now, however, it was refusing to move even an inch forwards. This was most bizarre, and what made it even more curious was that his steed was not alone. Any horse that came too close to the edge of the hill simply would not move forward, no matter what was used to spur it onwards.

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“You, there! Go up around the hill and see what is keeping the horses from moving. Perhaps some foul sorcerer has laid a charm that would need removal.”

His orders were clear and he had Almighty Solinaye’s divine approval to do whatever he wanted (or so was claimed by the clerics and believed by the soldiers) and so despite the track record behind them the soldier gleefully left his place in the column and rushed forward and around the hill. The soldier got to the point where he was just in eyesight before he stopped and even from that distance he could see the color (or what remained of it) drain from the trooper’s face and a look of shock and horror filled every fiber of the grunt’s being.

…

The soldier took a step back, then another, and then one more before turning and running as fast as his nearly frozen legs could carry him back to the General. The soldier managed to make it back safely despite looking over his shoulder every few steps and nearly fell flat on his face as he stopped in front of his commander.

“Well?” the General asked. “What has you so startled?”

“Undead….” The soldier mumbled, still overcome with fear.

“Excuse me?”

“UNDEAD! More undead than I can count! They are everywhere! The ground is covered with them and the sky is black with them! We were played like fools! They waited until we were tired and weary before-!”

“ENOUGH!” the General yelled before ordering his still disobedient horse to put its hoof down on the soldier’s skull, killing him almost instantly.

The General then dismounted and gave the order for his attendants to do the same. Together they led the army, which by some miracle had not lost the entirety of its morale, forward. They all passed the edge of the hill that had been blocking their view one by one (or in some cases, line by line) and each person/ line of men that could see clearly had their jaws drop and both their morale and sanity dealt a serious blow.

Before them lay the same force of undead that the supposedly foolish civilian ‘scout’ had described. Zombies, Skeletons and Dire Wolves stretched from one side of the world to the next and above them swarmed more Fel Bats than anyone could reasonably count. All of the undead (and the living Fel Bats) were tinged blue and seemed to emit a chilling aura that made the already cold soldiers think twice about coming too close to them.

The General turned back to his aides and the few clerics of the Solinaye Church that had managed to survive up till this point before his gaze then fell back to the undead. He was sure that this would either be his final battle or that something miraculous would occur. Either way, his reputation would be damaged, either because he failed to take his assigned objectives or because he would have lost more than half of his men trying to navigate Darksol’s territory.

It was then that he spoke the infamous words that doom nearly all who speak them.

“Well, on the bright side, things can’t possibly get worse than this, right?”

It was then that a pile of heavy snow a few hundred meters away popped open to reveal an obviously powerful undead wielding a massive sword that looked to be made of solid ice. In a thick Ruskian/ Russian accent, the undead spoke one word in its native tongue while vocalizing it in a disinterested and rather apathetic tone.

“Privyet.”