The hour of darkness was nearly upon the rather hastily assembled fortifications of the stranded Sultanate Soldiers. In fact, this was the fight night that had come since they had been trapped on the coast of the desolate, barren, and effectively lifeless remains of what once was the most favored nation of the Luminas Church, and all of them had been absolute nightmares. The first night was hell due to the fear of being struck down by the massive black dragon that had sunk the fleet and stranded everyone onshore. The night and days afterward were not nearly as bad, fear wise, but were bad in their own way due to the seemingly unkillable group of Skeletons that would repeatedly come and attempt to proselytize outside the hastily constructed ‘wall’.

Now, on the fifth night, there was something that unnerved the soldiers and support personnel even more so than the Skeleton preachers. That thing that was putting the fear of… something into them was the absolute lack of noise coming from beyond the ‘wall’. After the first few times that the undead doomsayer and its entourage had come back, people had settled into a new normal where the sound of the undead fool preaching, only to be silenced with an arrow and the proceed to reappear again ten minutes later as if nothing had happened, was commonplace.

Tonight, however? There was no sound of preaching from the now missing undead priest, nor was there the familiar twang of a bow snapping back into shape after lodging an arrow into the skull of a risen corpse. The absence of these sounds was comforting, but also very unnerving. It was almost as if this was the calm before a torrential and horrific storm.

After an hour came and went without a single sign of the undead doomsayer, everyone began to have seriously bad feelings. It was then, five nights in, amidst a completely silent and haunting night. that things began to go from exceptionally bad to horrifyingly worse.

…

“We tried to save them, but I doubt even a single one of them opened themselves up to the world they are about to live in.” grumbled a Skeleton as it surveyed the camp of the invaders.

“What matters is that we tried, my Child.” Replied another Skeleton who just so happened to be the leader of the group.

“But Father, they will go mad after they rise, and it will be our fault for being unable to convince them!” exclaimed another Skeleton.

“It is not our fault that they chose this path. We did all we could without using force.” The leader of the Skeletons responded.

“Perhaps if we had been a bit more invasive…” mumbled another, different Skeleton, whose thoughts were quickly shut down by the leader.

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“No. We were treading on thin ice even going to preach to them, and I was willing to take all the blame if we were to be judged for such actions. As much as I would love to get a little closer and show them the truth of this place, if we had stepped any closer to them or tried to be even slightly more forceful, we may have had to stand trial for my choices.”

“Then why did we even attempt it?!” exclaimed another of the fifteen Skeletons.

“Because I knew exactly where the line was that we could not cross. We obeyed the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it, and that was enough. Now, we wait and see if, in their last moments, they accept the words we spoke unto them and take our Lord’s grace into themselves.”

“But…”

“Let us away, my Children. We will have to be gone by the time the others arrive.”

…

It was quiet. Too quiet. The crackle of a hundred campfires was all the noise that filled the air, and even then, the sounds seemed to be muffled by the stagnant and ‘dead’ air. The men watching the ‘wall’ were absurdly nervous, as this had been the second time in recent memory that a deathly quiet had occurred, and the first time was right before the gargantuan dragon with scales like obsidian and eyes like the fires of Hell had reduced the fleet to flotsam and underwater wrecks.

The silence was deafening, and all that they could do to hold back the encroaching fear was to tell jokes to each other and speak of stories from home. However, as the night drew even onwards, the jokes became less merry and started to be more along the lines of gallows humor while the stories from home began to be clouded by pessimism and other negative thoughts. It was a quarter to midnight, and the shift was about to change when there was a soft sound that seemed out of place. The noise repeated endlessly, reverberating across the area like the beating of a drum.

This sound they all knew all too well. It was the sound of a marching column of trained soldiers, and at the realization of this, the men manning the ‘wall’ sent for aid as fast as they possibly could. With the stars and moon obscured by the perpetual roof of heavy clouds, the best anyone could do to see what was coming was to use the light of torches and emplaced fires to try and look out into the abyssal darkness.

The drum-like rhythmic thumping of feet against the dust, ashen terrain only increased in volume, and eventually, the glow of countless undead eyes was visible even beyond the reach of the light cast by the flames of the Sultanate. As the numbers of those defending that one chokepoint expanded, the undead ceased their march all as one, their haunting gaze putting the fear of death and what comes after into the hearts of both those who looked at them and whom they looked upon.

…

As the last of the defenders took their place, the undead began to move once again. As both defender and attacker alike began to engage each other, the ‘Angel of Ruin’ that had for five days and nights been circling overhead began to slowly descend to deal with both of the ‘pests’ that had infested the land that his Master had purged of all life and left as a reminder as to why crossing the Abominable King was a bad idea. With the fires of hatred and wrath in his glowing eyes, Pluton prepared to drive the living to the depths of despair and send them running from their ‘safe-haven’ and into the inhospitable hell that Ititlis had become.

He would hunt them down, one at a time, but first he had to make sure that these risen douchebags were put back in the ground, hopefully, to never rise again and try to revive the nation that Lord Kain had sentenced to oblivion.