Fading Glory
Where he has walked, the earth is stained with ash.
Where he now walks, the earth runs red with blood.
Where he shall walk, the shadow swallows all.
Countless departed pave the road before him,
And countless corpses linger in his wake.
Death walks ever at his side,
Yet resurrection clings closer still—
Though never in a shape the soul desires.
At a single breath, the beasts shudder in terror;
Beneath a single glance, the wild forests bow low.
Unseen by mortal eye,
Unheard by living ear,
Untouched by mortal flesh,
Upon this threshold dividing life and death,
Behold, the Sovereign of the Dead stands tall.
“No matter how many times I run the numbers, I’m against this,” Peria said, crossing her arms.
Her golden eyes narrowed with fierce skepticism. “The Lich King isn’t some rabble you can compare to those bizarre soldiers. Rumor has it he’s an ancient abomination that hunted dragons for sport. I don't care how tough those grey freaks are, walking into his territory is madness.”
“Then do you have another way out of this corner?” Einzel asked quietly.
“I don't have an immediate solution, no. But there has to be something better than throwing ourselves into the jaws of a calamity.”
“If we don’t have one right now, we’re already dead,” Einzel replied, his voice heavy with grim finality. “Look at our soldiers. They haven’t had a single hour of uninterrupted sleep. If this keeps up, they’ll collapse from sheer exhaustion before the enemy even draws their blades.”
“Even so, this is—!”
To Einzel, the threat of those relentless Ashen Soldiers was far more terrifying than any myth of the Lich King. No matter how monstrous an ancient lich might be, could it truly be worse than those unfeeling, grey-clad horrors who had waited for their exhaustion to breach the ramparts and butcher everyone inside? Besides, he reasoned, however mighty the Lich King was, they didn’t need to defeat him—they just had to slip past him unnoticed.
“Unless we take a gamble like this, we have no chance,” Einzel said. “Trust me on this.”
“Why are you giving those bizarre soldiers so much credit?” Peria asked, exasperated.
She couldn't know. Locked away in the depths of his mind was the vivid memory of his companions falling one by one, the castle walls tumbling down, and the butchery that followed in the wake of their exhaustion. Einzel had lived that waking nightmare. The phantom agony still clawed at his chest, refusing to fade.
“I can’t explain it, but we have to move,” he murmured.
Peria looked at him, completely baffled. To her, it seemed as though the Hero was grossly underestimating the dread sovereign of the dead. Anyone who knew the slightest truth about the Lich King would never dream of sneaking into his domain.
“Um… I agree with Sir Einzel,” Beatrice offered timidly, raising her hand.
She harbored a quiet confidence in her holy arts. As long as she wasn't facing the sovereign himself, Beatrice believed she could vanquish nearly any undead abomination that crossed their path. In a one-on-one duel against a creature of darkness, defeat was a concept she had never known.
“Even the Saintess?!” Peria gasped, biting her lower lip.
Seeing Beatrice take his side, the rest of the vanguard began raising their hands one by one in agreement with Einzel. To the tired, beleaguered troops, the tangible hell they were currently enduring felt far more real and urgent than the legendary terror of a Lich King they had never laid eyes upon.
“Haaah… Fine. If you're all set on it, we have no choice,” Peria conceded, yielding with a frustrated sigh.
And so, the army shifted its march toward the desolate domain of the dead. Yet even as they altered their course, the grey shadows never ceased their torment, striking their rear guard night after agonizing night.
“So this is the Lich King’s territory…” Einzel murmured under his breath.
There was no need for a boundary stone. The moment they crossed into the wasteland, the air thickened until every breath felt like inhaling lead. True to the monarch's grim epithet, rotting corpses littered the barren earth as far as the eye could see.
Yet in a field choked with carrion, there should have been ravens, vultures, and maggots feasting on the dead. Here, not even a sparrow stirred. The sky above was eerily, unnaturally pristine—a vault of empty blue devoid of life.
Einzel wet his parched lips. The moment their boots stepped onto the blighted soil, a stifling pressure slammed down upon them. His nerves strung taut as a bowstring.
Every instinct screamed that a skeletal cavalcade might burst from the earth at any second to trample them into dust. The air was poisoned with raw malice, lethal stillness, and the chill of the grave. With every breath, a frosty, rancid numbness seemed to settle inside his ribcage.
Then, the first airborne creature drifted into view.
“What in the world is that…?”
Suspended high above was a grotesque orb the size of a grown man’s torso, flanked by leathery wings. It resembled no beast of the natural world.
As Einzel squinted, a jolt of revulsion shot through him. It was a colossal, flying eyeball—its surrounding flesh rotting, sloughing away in sickly chunks. An overpowering premonition of doom seized his gut.
“Shoot it down!” Einzel barked.
Before Lena could even notch an arrow to her bowstring, the winged eye flickered and vanished into the blue expanse with supernatural speed.
“Damn it…”
An icy shiver crept up Einzel’s spine, spreading outward to freeze the blood in his veins.
Did I… Did I just lead us into a fatal trap?
“Turn back,” Einzel ordered, his voice laced with sudden urgency. “This was a mistake. We fall back immediately, assess the perimeter, and—”
Before he could finish the command, the corpses strewn across the plains began to shudder. Bones popped, sinew tore, and joints twisted at grotesque, impossible angles as the dead dragged themselves upright.
“What do we do?!” Lena shouted, drawing her bow taut.
To make matters worse, the Ashen Soldiers had caught up from behind, their silent silhouettes emerging against the horizon.
“Clear a path through them! We have to escape this place, now—!”
—Thou shalt not. Foolish vermin who dare trespass upon the sanctum of the dead.
It was not a sound carried by the wind. It was a telepathic proclamation—a crushing will that pierced directly into their minds, rattling the very bones of their skulls. Einzel was not the only one paralyzed by the intrusion; around him, veteran soldiers collapsed to their knees, gasping and drenched in cold sweat.
The shambling corpses surged forward from the front while the Ashen Soldiers closed in from the rear. Within moments, a sea of rotting flesh hemmed them in on all sides.
Then, the rhythmic clatter of hooves echoed across the petrified ground. A new despair manifested.
“Skeleton Knights…”
Clad in rusted plate, the vanguard of the sovereign rode forth, baleful crimson light burning within their hollow eye sockets as their skeletal steeds charged across the bloodstained earth.
“Damn it all!”
Even the emotionless Ashen Soldiers recognized the dire peril. Instead of pressing their assault on the imperial troops, they turned their blades toward the encroaching tide of the undead.
“Beatrice, the miracles! Quickly!”
Beatrice folded her hands in fervent prayer. A beam of blinding light pierced the heavens, and a colossal mace forged of divine radiance came crashing down. The impact pulverized a dozen undead instantly, the resulting shockwave tearing through the front ranks of the corpses.
Reaching out with her slender arm, Beatrice called the ten-meter divine construct to her grasp. With terrifying physical might, she swung the enormous weapon in a sweeping arc, crushing through the lines of the dead like kindling.
“Hold the line!” Peria shouted, unleashing a tempest of fireballs. As the flames struck the densely packed corpses, the blaze leaped from one shambling horror to the next, igniting a wall of roaring fire.
For a fleeting second, a glimmer of hope sparked in the soldiers' chests.
Then the sky went dark.
Hundreds—thousands—of the winged, rotting eyes flooded the firmament, blotting out the light until the clear blue sky was swallowed by an ocean of pulsing, malevolent pupils.
“Wh-what is that?!” Sayne cried out, her stoic composure shattering. Never in all her campaigns had she witnessed an omen so repulsive.
She channeled brilliant Sword Qi along her blade, cleaving through the skeletal soldiers pressing in, but her slashes could not reach the abomination blanketing the heavens. Yet strangely, the eyes did not descend; they merely hovered, staring down with cold, mocking judgment.
“Don’t let them rattle you!” Einzel yelled. “They’re just watching, they can’t—”
The words died in his throat.
The sea of eyes parted like a curtain drawn back before an execution. Down through the rift descended a creature of nightmarish majesty: an immense dragon fashioned entirely from bleached bone, its skeletal wings beating with the force of a hurricane.
And perched atop its skull stood the master of this realm.
—Living vermin. Ye hasten toward your own demise with such eager folly.
The gaze of the sovereign flared with ghastly light. Robes embroidered in dried blood and tarnished gold whipped violently in the gale. In one skeletal hand rested a jagged staff; in the other, a forbidden grimoire wrapped in cursed chains. The sheer depth of malevolent sorcery locked within that tome was an abyss no mortal mind could fathom.
“No… This is…” Einzel stammered, his blood running cold.
They could not win. The terrifying instinct that had seized him when he first faced Grandis struck him now with double the force. The sovereign hovering before them was a cosmic disaster, an entity operating on the exact same plane of power as Grandis herself.
—Disturbing the slumber of the deceased is a transgression paid only in kind. Become one with them, and atone.
Every syllable of his telepathic decree detonated like thunder inside their heads. Soldiers dropped their weapons, clawing at their ears in screaming agony. Einzel staggered back, his trembling fingers white-knuckled around his hilt.
—And ye, wretched thralls of the Demon King. The same grace extendeth to your carcasses.
The Ashen Soldiers stood rigid, their soulless faces unchanged, yet even their formations seemed to buckle under the sovereign's overwhelming gravity.
—Hoh? What have we here…?
The Lich King stepped off the dragon's skull, drifting downward through the air. With a mantle of eerie light trailing behind him, the Sovereign of the Dead set foot upon the blighted soil.
—Fascinating. Most fascinating indeed.
A skeletal hand extended, cold bony fingers brushing against the air inches from Einzel’s cheek. Einzel found himself pinned in place, paralyzed as if encased in solid ice.
—Why doth a Hero tread upon the lands of the quiet dead? Was the Hero not forged to slay the Demon King rather than disturb my sleep? And lo, the Saintess of the Light accompanyeth him. Truly an amusing diversion.
“Ah… ugh…” Einzel choked, unable to draw breath.
—Aye, amusing it may be… but amusement doth not wash away the sin of defiling my kingdom’s peace.
The Bone Dragon slammed down onto the vanguard behind them. With that single, crushing landing, dozens of imperial soldiers were instantly flattened into a paste of blood and armor.
—I care naught for the Demon King, nor do his machinations please me. Yet none who trespass within my borders shall walk out alive. Receive now thy eternal rest.
A wall of rotting flesh crashed inward. Corpses, skeletons, monstrosities—an endless, suffocating wave. Even the imperial soldiers who fell beneath the dragon’s claws twitched, their broken limbs snapping into place as they rose again to join the horde.
Once again…
I failed.
Trapped in that agonizing realization, the world went dark as death claimed him once more.