THE DEAD WOULD not stay still.

Zores fought to free the glowing ruby atop the closer ziggurat. His chanting voice carried across the cavern, words of a language Ulrem vaguely recognized as Erid. Years ago, he had traveled with a half-blooded Erideshi, and learned enough to sing some of their songs. The sorcerer’s building, shrill incantations were nothing like those bawdy tunes.

Whatever he was doing, Ulrem had other business to attend. Heaps of bones climbed to unsteady feet, eyes glowing with icy blue points of light that seemed all the more terrible for the ruddy cast of the gem above. Braveblade flashed in Ulrem’s fist as he hacked one down after another, keeping them away from the steps.

Always, more bones were pulling themselves together, rising, grasping at the rusted hilts of crumbling swords, and taking up ancient, pitted spearheads.

“Clear a path to the sarcophagus, Slayer!” the sorcerer shouted. Ulrem looked up sharply. Zores was holding the heart-shaped gem above his head. It pulsed angrily. “Now!”

Ulrem parried an incoming thrust with his blade and stepped aside. The skeleton bore a bronze buckler. He wrenched at it, ripping the arm free of its socket and sending it clattering across the ground. He kicked the creature in the ribs, shattering it and sending a leering skull rolling between the legs of yet more horrors.

They came on slowly, but they came in numbers, shuffling their feet, blades dragging limply behind. Ulrem retreated, giving himself ground, and worked his arm into the buckler’s handle. With a fierce roar, he charged forward, battering a path through the enemy.

“We could use a hundred men now!” he called, coming close to the foot of the second ziggurat.

“Push them back!” Zores’ voice was strained with effort, close behind in the rift torn open by the young savage’s charge.

“I am! There’s no end to them! Where is all your magic, old crow? Give them some lightning!”

Zores barked something like laughter. “We’re not in my lair now, boy. Move your feet!”

Stabbing blades and cutting knives came at them by the score from the gloom, their crumbling edges flashing with the eerie, blood-chilling blue light of their unseeing eyes. Teeth clattered as jaws worked, unable to make any other sound. Flesh had dried along stick-thin limbs, and knots of something unspeakable writhed beneath the surface of their skin, swarming, shivering, forcing the bodies to press the attack.

Ulrem used his shield as a bludgeon, batting aside swords and spears and sweeping in broad arcs with Braveblade, cutting down one slow-moving target after another. But it was never enough.

He was drenched in sweat as he did his gruesome work, for the heat coming off the ruby in Zores’ hands was brutal. The old man issued no complaint, but Ulrem saw that his robes were soaked, and his skin seemed loose, hanging from him like a starved man. Even still, he cast gouts of flame at their flanks, igniting the closest thralls into brief pillars of stinking fire that illuminated the shambling ranks behind them. The storm and the blade pressed on grimly, but Zores was panting under the strain of his burden, his fire growing weak. Ulrem was left fighting ever more desperately to keep the tide at bay.

They broke through to the foot of the ziggurat. Zores staggered up the steep steps towards the pinnacle. Ulrem came up behind him slowly, kicking and spitting like a raging cougar at the revenants that pursued them. He bellowed in outrage as a sword caught him, slicing his calf.

Ulrem brought his blade down on the culprit’s head, cleaving the skull. It crumpled to the ground, bones spilling vacantly down the steps. He turned and dashed up the remaining stairs, heedless of his wounded leg, of the bright pain where he still bore stitches from his fight with the Proud Hawks. Something wet and hot was working its way down his back, and he was certain it was blood.

It was not until he had reached the top of the ziggurat, and saw the old sorcerer standing by it, that he realized the enormity of the stone sarcophagus.

“The shade we will encounter is but a starved fragment of the thing my forebears buried here. Even still, it will be deadly. We must keep it from becoming whole again, and cast it back into the abyss forever.”

“I do not blink when death calls my name,” Ulrem growled. “But I prefer it not to linger. I cannot see a way out of this burial pit you’ve brought me to. So good, let them come! Let’s finish this and be gone!”

“Those thralls are my master’s work. Guardians against the very thing we are about to do.”

“Guardians? What in the hells are you about to do?” Ulrem snarled as he drove the next wave of undead back. He had a sinking feeling about what Zores was planning, but more spears hove up at him. He drove them back with wild howls and broad sweeps.

“No man alive has killed me yet! You dead have already lost your claim on me! Back!” he roared. The spirit of war was upon him now, the battle-rage of the conqueror striding beneath the bloody sun like a lion over his hunting grounds. He had seen worse straits than this—or had he?

At the Fields of Iranor! boiled one echo within him.

At the Gap, during the Reclamation!

They clamored in him, each naming a glory. He could have lost himself in those memories, which were part of him, part of the ring, but not his own. Save for the glowing blue eyes of his adversaries, he would have succumbed.

Those dead lights grounded him. He would win his own glory, here and now. But not by leaping to his death among a hundred spears.

There was a jagged noise of glass breaking behind Ulrem. He stole a glare over his shoulder to see that Zores had smashed the great ruby upon the lid of the sarcophagus. The magus’ good eye looked woefully up at him. Zores seemed to have aged ten years in mere minutes, his robes billowing about a withered frame that seemed too frail for life.

“It is done.” A beating heart three times the size of a normal man’s thumped wetly on the stone lid amongst the shards of its case.

All around the chamber, the undead began to collapse. Whatever spirit animated them fled their desiccated limbs in an instant, the spell or curse upon them broken and gone. Shields, spears, and swords clattered back to the earth; skulls rolled blindly about, their baleful grins leering up out of the dark that washed over them.

There came a sound like distant thunder emanating from the depths, like the deep bones of the earth being snapped by devilish hands. Ulrem staggered, all his senses tuned to the enveloping blackness and a rising, noxious presence.

A thunderclap struck the room and shattered the stone lid of the sarcophagus. Zores scrambled backward. He gripped Ulrem by the front of his tunic and shouted, “Hold your ground! For this, I have brought you here!”

Ulrem stared incredulously at the old man scuttling down the ziggurat’s steep face and into the shadows below. Something shoved the ruins of the sarcophagus lid aside. Long, twisted black fingers wrapped themselves around the rim and a horror pulled itself up and out.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

For the first time since his exile, Ulrem felt true fear. Not the uncertain anxiety of awaiting a charge, or the shock at the sight of his own blood. True, soul-chilling terror rose out of the sarcophagus, and the waves of its contempt washed over him like icy water. It was as unlike a man as an empty barrel to a cavern.

Ten feet tall, the fiend’s skin was a depthless black that reflected no light. Its limbs were long and grotesque, shaped at odd angles more arachnid than human. They clicked when they moved, a sound that made Ulrem’s skin crawl. The edges of the creature seemed to ebb like shadows at twilight, limned by the beating red of the huge heart it held in one claw.

Above sharp black shoulders that tapered to rising points, it had a death’s visage for a head. Bone-white and broad at the base, the skull tapered to a narrow, jagged nasal cavity. Two twisted black horns curled above wide eye sockets that glared with hellish light. Beneath the muzzle of the bull’s skull, a black tongue writhed, thick as a drowned man’s swollen arm.

“I am returned!” the Deadtongue whispered with horrible, malicious glee. The words cut into Ulrem’s mind like a garrote.

A demon, mused the echoes. Ulrem could feel them gnashing their teeth in outrage and disgust. Old hate given flesh. Strike it down! Send it screaming back to the hells!

He would not break before this thing. His job was to hold back this monster. To buy Zores time to finish the job. The young savage grit his teeth and shifted his stance to balance on the balls of his feet.

“You won’t pass me,” Ulrem said. His voice sounded small in the huge hollow. The great lich was near twice his size. Yet he stood his ground, blade in hand, ready to meet his doom.

It finally seemed to notice him. The heat and light emanating from the heart had grown stronger now for being held by its master.

“An Inheritor put me in the ground. Another greets me as I wake.” The Deadtongue laughed with the inscrutable mirth of the damned. “Alas, you are but a pale flame before Dunorr’s crucible.”

The beast thrust its left hand high above its head. There was a shifting and grinding on the floor of the chamber below. Ulrem staggered, trying to keep his balance. The fallen bones of the thralls rattled noisily down the sides of the ziggurat and the whole world seemed to buck and tumble. Stalactites crashed to the floor, sending fragments of stone as large as men hurling across the chamber. Two of the columns that lined the sepulcher collapsed, crashing to the floor.

“Rise! Rise!” the Deadtongue cackled. His upraised hand crackled with loathsome energies and vile sorcery. “With this heart, I reclaim my buried soul, and rebuild that which was cast down! The Thunderhawk’s triumph is undone!”

On the floor below, where once had been a flat plain covered in the bones of the fallen, now emerged the third ziggurat. It grew with impossible and terrible speed, and amongst the darkness below, Ulrem caught a flash of movement skulking towards the new platform. He turned back to his enemy.

The lich was moving now, sliding forward with a sickly, oily speed, foul tongue lashing. Ulrem attacked.

Howling like a wolf on the heels of its prey, he surged forward and slashed at the Deadtongue’s inhuman legs. His sword connected, and the fiend hissed shrilly. It leaped away from him and crouched, the scarlet lights in the sockets of the bull’s skull studying him.

“I know your scent, Imaahis! You waged war against my brothers in the south. You butchered the giants and hounded the gray men deep into the earth. But you are old and weak! Give up this hopeless chase! The flesh of this whelp you wear is crazed and diseased. How you must seethe against his wildness!”

“Lies! I am Ulrem the Slayer!” the savage roared, attacking again. The fiend drew a great black sword out of thin air. Nearly as long as Ulrem was tall, it was all he could do to meet the vicious parry. He narrowly avoided being impaled on its deadly barbed point.

The Deadtongue cackled, its rotten tongue flashing under square teeth. “You shall be the first and mightiest of my new thralls. My lictor!”

Ulrem’s answer was a mindless roar. He caught the Deadtongue’s backslash on his shield and ignored the shock of his arm going numb from the blow. He drove his blade into the fiend’s exposed flank, halfway to the hilt.

The Deadtongue reeled, hissing like a thousand snakes, and toppled off the ziggurat. Ulrem roared triumphantly, lifting Braveblade high above his head in salute.

But the day was not won, the battle not yet through. Below, on the ground, he saw the Deadtongue regain its feet. The skull it wore had been knocked aside, revealing a nightmare where a face should have been. It had neither eyes nor nose: its face was a huge, slavering mouth filled with fangs and that horrid, thrashing tongue.

It was an abomination out of the deepest nightmare of a deranged man. Ulrem’s cry was choked off as it bounded towards the third platform. Toward the Stormrider.

Half-crawling, half-running, the Deadtongue crashed through the bones that littered the stone floor of the sepulcher. The crimson light of the heart in its hand bounced wildly around, unpredictable as dice thrown across a table crowded with cups.

Zores was halfway up the stairs, dragging himself up one step at a time. At the top of the newly raised ziggurat was a plain-looking stone jar set atop an altar of black stone. Ulrem saw all of that in a glance, but it was not what held his eye.

The old man was aging rapidly now. His hair was falling out, his skin mottled and pale. Even from afar, Ulrem could see that the years were passing through him like water through a sieve. What had happened? He knew little of magic, nothing of the lore that drew such men into hateful, shadowed haunts.

The old sorcerer cast a terrified glance over his shoulder and saw the fiend coming for him. He shrieked wordlessly and pulled himself up the next step.

Ulrem bounded down the stairs, hurtling over the bones that pooled at the bottom. He charged into the Deadtongue’s side with all the force he could summon from his powerful legs.

He passed through as if the fiend was made of naught but air and shadow, and hit the ground on the other side. Ulrem had just enough time to spin about, catching its savage return blow on the shield. That was more substantial.

The force of it sent him hurling a score of steps away. Ulrem landed painfully on his back in a pile of bones and felt the air explode out of him. He sucked for breath but caught none. Dark wings flapped at the edges of his vision. He felt his heart pounding painfully against his ribs, and the panic curling the base of his spine.

Stand! A dark figure loomed over Ulrem. Tall, powerfully built, with a lion’s head above broad shoulders banded with iron muscle. Yellow eyes with black slits glimmered down at him. No, not a lion, but a fierce-faced man of immeasurable majesty. A king out of the deepest age. It held out a hand to him. We are the fury! The conquering flame! Slay the beast, and bury this tomb!

Ulrem grasped the hand and felt depthless strength flow into him. Golden light leaped from his ring, filling the chamber, scouring away the tortured shadows that writhed around the hideous columns, and which nestled under the bones of the dead men who had given their all to silence this great evil.

On the third ziggurat, the Deadtongue now held Zores Stormrider up in the air by his throat. The old man thrashed and kicked, lashing at the lich with plumes of fire and flickering lightning, but to no avail. The monster laughed venomously, its heart held high in triumph, tongue flashing back and forth.

But in the light of Ulrem’s ring, everything changed. He saw the truth uncloaked: the fiend was nothing more than a wretched man shrouded in centuries of fear, and hate, and black promises. A slave of darkness; a restless puppet even in death.

It reeks of the old Foe. The echoes in him spoke now with one harmony, deep and dire as a war drum: Slay it.

Ulrem started forward, Braveblade in hand, power thundering through him like never before. The Deadtongue turned to look at him, and terror filled its baleful eyes. The illusion was shredded by Ulrem’s approach. It released Zores, and the old man fell bonelessly to the side of the altar.

“No! I will not go back!” the Deadtongue raved, shielding its eyes and conjuring its black sword, but it was no longer ten feet tall. The closer Ulrem came, the more it diminished until it stood no taller than any man. Naked in the light of Imaahis’ ring, it was a pitiful thing indeed.

Ulrem met it full-on, letting out a savage warcry, and slapped the lich’s blade aside. He punched it in the mouth, feeling old teeth break.

The Deadtongue collapsed to its knees before him, gasping. Its wretched, shriveled mouth worked around a shattered jaw. The voice that emanated from its burst throat was no mortal sound, but something deeper, more hateful…and more horrible for it.

“For all your fury, you will burn in your last hour! You will hear the raven call of death and thundering hoof on your day of triumph—but short shall be your victory, Lionborn!”

“Then I will break you again in the Hells.”

Ulrem cut the fiend’s head off with a single stroke. The chamber was filled with silence. Still clutched in the lich's nerveless fingers, the pulsing, ruby light of the heart began to weaken.

Disgusted, with none of the triumph he had expected, Ulrem kicked the body aside, unable to banish the Deadtongue’s final words. Many years later, when he placed the crown of Isgart on his fierce brow, he would recall them. And he would shiver when he heard the shrieking of the ravens feasting on the killing ground outside his hard-won fortress. But that was a day yet to come.