He stood at the log picket barrier around the Ebon Hold, looking to the east where the flying necropolis Zeramas hovered over a dead and polluted land. Reanimated corpses shambled aimlessly under it, sometimes attacking their brethren or being attacked and eaten in turn. Towering flesh golems with their rotting guts hanging from smashed bellies circled endlessly, the land trembling from the weight of their malignant flesh.
It was just a dream of course, the same one that came to him often of late. This time he was holding a white kitten in his arms that showed toothless pink gums while it mewed. Its eyes were still closed and it squirmed in his grasp as if afraid of what it was hearing. In other dreams he had held a white bird with broken wings. One time it had been a white fawn, its eyelids closed and sunken over empty sockets.
He shivered as a cold force roared over his face as if he were lying in a river and then he felt its icy touch run down his stomach and legs. The dream always unfolded in the same way with a cold that bit deep as if he had died again. That sensation was a part of him as if the memory had been imbued into every scrap of his being. He steeled himself and waited for what he knew was going to happen next.
"The moon," he heard her whisper, her voice a thread of sound braided with fear. "... rises over a sharp hill that becomes my raised knee. The glowing orb dances over my ruckled clothing, rushing at my face and exploding into sparks beyond number. I float among the clouds while below me an ocean of voices cry out in heartbreaking sorrow. HELP ME! - a scream of agony, ripped from dying flesh pierces the darkness – and I am among them, swimming through countless souls lost in nightmares; all lost in a great devouring darkness."
He shuddered awake, the echoes of her scream ringing in his ears as he trembled from head to foot in the thrall of her anguish. He had to go find her or go mad.
His eyelid ... itched. A strange sensation for a dead man to experience, he thought. He'd never known another after being raised by the Lich King. Never to know how things felt other than his body's own faint memories, now understood in terms of pressure and weight. He sat up and touched the affected skin with a cautious finger. Moisture. Engrossed with the slickness of the drop of liquid, he rubbed his fingertips together until it was gone. Then he realized he could feel the ridges and the patches of dry and roughened skin on his hands.
Why now did he dream of her? She had been gone for years. The first time they had met he had grabbed her by the neck and shook her as if she were but a bit of cloth. Her screams and her tears had meant nothing to him. Then something had reached through her and bound his soul with hers so that what she heard and saw and felt burned him as well. He had roared then as another life once dead to him had taken him again; the pain of remembered joy once lost and the knowledge he would soon lose it again; doomed to be forever cursed by the void.
He realized then that he was being haunted by a living soul. A strange bubbling sensation tickled him under his ribs. He hoped it wasn't ants again.