Chapter One
Risen
I awoke. The dream ended. The nightmare began.
Consciousness crept upon me stealthily as the swirl of memories began to recede like fog fleeing from the morning breeze. There had been a woman that I loved and a child whose eyes were like mine. A dog, a house, friends I knew from a happier time. There were darker things too, however - corpses scattered across the ground, as if tossed there carelessly by the hand of a bitter god. The stench of rotting flesh and ash in the air, dark blood dripping from my hands...
I opened my eyes. Evermore, my life would be divided into before and after.
The transition was jarring. I shut my eyes again, hoping to find my way back to the beloved dream people whose names I couldn't remember. There were echoes of laughter and singing in some corner of my mind, but they were interrupted by ominous rumbles of thunder, and then silence overcame them both, leaving me alone, awake, and very lost.
I stood in a dusky forest, quite unfamiliar. There was a pervasive sense of unnatural, eerie silence. There was no breeze through the boughs of the trees; what leaves remained were quiet. It would have been an autumn scene, with large mats of rotting foliage carpeting the ground, but there was no hint of red or gold to them. The air was cool, but heavy and humid. A faint mist hung in the air - the sort that can only be sensed when looking off far into the distance. The trees, although half-barren, were closely packed together, and shadows filled the spaces between. Overhead, a dark green haze blotted out the sunlight almost entirely. What feeble rays of light that managed to reach the forest floor did very little to alleviate the gloom.
Awareness was slow in coming. My mind felt numb, trapped in the same haze that saturated the landscape. I was acutely aware that there was a great wrongness about many things, but I wrestled with the specifics. The small details came first, while the larger problem itself stayed out of focus.
Where were the animals, the birds? The soft cacophony of sounds that twittered in the background of the world's forests had been replaced here by oppressive stillness. I saw rotting logs, but the piles of wood splinters and dust that marked the handiwork of beetles had been replaced by a omnipresent green fungus on the bark.
As I glanced around myself, my gaze came to rest on a peculiar wooden shaft. The pole was smooth, worn down by hundreds of hands that had grasped it over the years. It looked like the shaft of a spear or pole-arm. It was very close to me, I reached out my hands and touched the surface. The wood was smooth, or rather, I was unable to feel the texture. I frowned, certain that this was not as is should be.
I raised my hands to my face, scrutinizing the tips of the fingers. Again, I was struck by a sense of wrongness, but I couldn't tell what it was that was so wrong. As I rubbed the fingertips together, I could feel the pressure, but the sensation was blunted. Didn't I used to have a delicate sense of touch? Suddenly I couldn't remember.
Again I looked at the pole, frowning further. It was suspended in the air in front of me, horizontally, several feet off the ground. How curious. Slowly I ran my fingers along the near end, and then stopped. The shaft pierced my abdomen, just above the umbilicus. There was no wound, no blood, as if the skin had healed itself over the shaft. Intrigued, I turned to look behind me, only to discover that all this time I had been with my back against a tree - pinned to it by a spear.
I distinctly remember a tiny voice in the back of my mind shouting at me that this was all wrong, that I should run, or fall down, or cry for help, or something. It's hard to remember why I didn't do any of these things. Instead I focused on the point where I had been pierced, trying to work out why there wasn't any blood. There should have been blood, I was certain of it.
Eventually I came to the task of getting unstuck, which was harder than it seemed at first. After several attempts, I bent forward over the shaft and grasped it with both hands, while lifting up both feet and bracing them against the tree. The shaft of the spear, running through my midsection, was supporting me entirely. Rather than slide myself off, I gripped the spear tightly and used the leverage of my legs to pull the spearhead out of the tree itself. I crashed to the ground like some undignified apprentice witch on her first broom-riding attempt.
With a self-satisfied smirk, I easily pulled the spear out of my midsection. The spear-blade was wide and long, in the tradition of the old Arathi Longspear infantry, and it had the stamp of Lordaeron on it. It was old, but still solid and sharp, and it brought a smile to my face. If nothing else, my king knew how to make a good spear.
Blood leaked from the open hole in my abdomen. It dripped on the ragged trousers I wore. This pleased me. The blood was darker than I expected - almost black, and it was more of a trickle than a gush, but at least I was bleeding. I was supposed to be bleeding with a wound like that. I gripped the spear easily in my hand, confident now that somehow things would start making sense.
I walked for hours, spear in hand, through the grim forest. A certain familiarity with the woods gnawed at the back of my mind, but since I couldn't recognize any specifics at all, I simply picked a direction and set out.
It became apparent that there had been a scattered skirmish in the area, long ago. I came across a number of corpses of men, greatly decayed, and overgrown with the ubiquitous green moss that seemed to cover almost everything in the forest. Many of the bodies had been mutilated or burned, and in some cases, both.
After a few hours of walking, I came up on a narrow track in the wood. It wasn't wide enough to be called a road - it was likely most traveled by local farmers and peasants going from one farmstead or village to another. Not long after I started to walk along the track, which was overgrown and underused, I rounded a bend in the track and stopped suddenly.
Lying across the track, not twenty feet in front of me, lay an old corpse of what was likely once a horse. There was little left of its flesh; it was mostly a heap of bones with some tufts of fur and skin, grown around by moss and grass, with the remnants of a saddle in the middle. Bent over it, pulling at the bones - more like digging, was the figure of a man.
Without hesitation I opened my mouth to greet whomever it was, but words did not come out. I wasn't sure if it was some dysfunction of my voice, or the look of the figure's face as he suddenly whirled around. If the thing was human once, it certainly wasn't now. Desiccated flesh hung loosely from its gaunt skull, its nose and part of the jaw having been shorn off. Only blackness looked out from empty eye sockets. It's left arm had been cut off short of the wrist, and the bones poked out of the bloodless flesh at odd angles. The right arm, intact but fleshless, grabbed a rusted sword in its skeletal hand and it ran toward me.
At that moment, for the first time since waking, I heard a noise other than that of my own feet in the grass. It was a hoarse, raspy wail, long but with an abrupt end. I didn't realize until later that it came from my own mouth, not my attacker's.
The hours walking through the woods had not cleared the fog from my mind, and I was slow to react, despite the thing's lumbering run and initial distance from me. It raised its quivering left arm stump at me even as the right arm brought the sword down on an arc toward my neck. I tried to raise the spear to block his stroke - another second and I would have been cut in two. As it was the sword bit into my left arm, opening the flesh from the wrist to the elbow.
I fell backward onto the grass of the track. Another sword strike came down toward me. This time, however, I reacted quickly - mind and body both had been shocked into readiness. I rolled to my right, and with surprising dexterity I jumped to my feet. I swung the shaft of the spear at its side, striking the left shoulder with a solid blow. A man would have been winded and bruised, to say the least. This thing, however, responded only with another swing of his sword, which I stumbled backward to avoid.
Instead of standing my ground and fighting a thing that couldn't be hurt, I made a dash into the trees. As with the rest of the wood, they grew close together here, with dense underbrush and mossy logs creating further obstruction. I intentionally ran toward such blockades, thinking the thing would be less adroit than I. Surprisingly, it kept pace, and I could almost feel the sword cutting through the air mere inches from the back of my neck. I ducked and dodged, trying - and failing - to gain any separation.
The ground sloped downward in front of me, into a pool of brackish water about twenty feet across. A single fallen log spanned the pool, and I jumped onto it and scurried across, again hoping that it would slow down my pursuer. Instead of wading into the water, however, the creature jumped right onto the log behind me. Its weight, or ours combined, broke whatever it was that was holding the log aloft over the water, and with a sudden lurch, the far end of the log dropped down into the pool. I slipped on the moss-covered wood, and into the pool I tumbled.
The pool wasn't deep – not quite up to my knees, but the bottom was a layer of muck like mortar. I came up, still holding the spear, to find the thing standing over me, once more cutting an arc through the air with its blade toward my head. This time I stayed low, almost crouching in the water, and raised the haft of the spear at an angle above my left shoulder, gripping tightly in both hands. Instead of deflecting the blade, the spear hit the creature's wrist instead. Dry bones cracked, but did not break. The thing's sword, however, slipped from its grasp into the water.
I then swung the long end of the spear-blade down toward its waist. The blade bit deep into ragged scraps of cloth and chainmail that covered what was left of its flesh. I felt the sharp edge hit bone and knew it had met the spine. The creature lurched to the side, but did not fall, and suddenly I was in a poor position to defend myself. Barely missing a beat, it swung its right arm at my face. The hand, bereft of its sword, sported five fingers with long, sharp claws.
I jerked backwards, pulling my face out of the path of its swipe, even as the spear, still embedded in my enemy's side, twisted out of my grasp. I tried to pivot, but the thick muck of the pool bottom grabbed at my left foot and only grudgingly released. The delay gave the creature an easy shot at my left chest and shoulder. As I tumbled backwards into the water once more, I felt its claws rake through my skin and muscles, and a searing pain erupted across my chest.
It reached down for me as I lay on my back in the murk. One clawed hand and one bony stump closed in toward my neck. All I could do is raise my feet to ward it off, knees bent. It did not seem intent on pushing my legs out of the way, but instead almost threw itself on me, with my feet planted against its chest. Its clawed hand reached so close to my face that I had to throw my neck back and plunge my head and face under the water.
I kicked.
If ever there was a setup for launching some undead creature several feet into the air, this was it. The thing was lifted clear out of the pool, murky water spraying in all directions, and it fell backwards against the fallen log. There was a wet crunch of bones as it struck, but I knew that a couple cracked ribs would do nothing to stop this thing.
As I struggled with the muck to right myself and rise out of the water, my right hand closed on something hard and metallic – the handle of the creature's sword that had fallen into the water. By the time I was standing again, the thing had righted itself as well, standing with its back to the log, the empty eye-sockets fixed upon me.
Instead of waiting for the thing to come at me again, I lowered my head and advanced. I didn't think this thing had much imagination, and indeed my maneuver didn't seem to surprise it at all. It just reached out again with its arms, seeking to at last find my neck and rend the life from me.
I grabbed its right wrist with my left hand and stepped into it, ignoring the sharp bony ends of its severed arm even as they poked into my flesh. I had the edge in momentum, and I pushed it back onto the fallen log, bending its body back over the soft wood. Then I brought the thing's sword down, holding it like a dagger, plunging the blade through its rib cage and feeling it bite deeply into the soft wood of the log. I staggered backward.
The thing thrashed and kicked as it was pinned against the log. I quickly picked up my spear, which had escaped its flesh and fallen into the water during the melee. I expected that the creature would free itself and I braced myself for another attack, but it wasn't necessary. Lacking any creative problem-solving strategies, the monster struggled to stand, but the crosspiece of the blade held it down. Its arms reached out to me, grasping and clawing, but never once did it try to grasp the sword hilt and free the blade.
I let out a long breath, and for the first time, I was able to study the creature I fought. It was undead, clearly, and from the looks of things it was a simple minded thing of killing. A shiver went up my spine. I realized with great distress that although it had startled me when I came upon it, I was not surprised to see it here.
Why was that? Of course I knew of necromancy, I knew of the undead - Lifeless creatures raised to serve their masters with dark magics. Implacable fighting machines, as remorseless as they were deadly. They were monsters of shadowy places, of dark cabals, of...
I pulled my gaze away from the still-struggling creature and looked around me, at the unnatural gloom of the wood, the fungus and rot, the stillness. I staggered backwards as a vision came to me of a thousand such undead creatures, marching inexorably toward the homes of those I loved. I took in a sharp breath. Worst of all, I wasn't running away from them, I was marching along with them.
A sudden sharp clarity struck me then, so invasive and staggering that my legs faltered and I sunk into the water on my knees. I held my hands before my face, as I had hours ago, but this time I could see what was wrong. The skin of the fingers was thick, pale, and cyanotic. The nails were sharp enough to scratch the bark of a tree. These were not my hands.
The cut I had received on my forearm, which should have been bloody and disabling, had already started to heal. There was a faint blue glow where the muscle, sinew, and skin had laid back down in their appointed places on the bone, and were already sealing back together. I glanced down at the hole in my abdomen; it was long since gone, replaced by smooth, pale skin. I didn't need to see my chest to know that where the creature had clawed me, healing had already begun.
And as I gazed down, a sudden break in the clouds and haze above provided an ill-timed shaft of filtered sunlight, illuminating a reflection in the water of a man what was not me. Could not be me.
Two eerie points of blue light started back up at me, and its face twisted into a look of sheer horror, even as its mouth opened wide to let out an agonized wail that carried across the twilight woods.
So I started to learn what it was to live life in a dead body.
Of course I was only dead in the most technical sense of the word. Namely, that I had already died, and somehow I had been returned to life. It wasn't a benign event, however, brought about by some benevolent spirit. It was dark, unnatural - a thing of forbidden magics and necromancy. I think in those first few days, had I been able to, I would have tried to destroy myself. At the time I did not realize that the undead are not capable of such a thing. Apparently necromancers create fail-safe mechanisms into their monstrosities to prevent them from suddenly developing a conscience and trying to kill themselves.
I still had a pulse, although it was difficult to find anywhere but my neck. I pictured the dark blood moving sluggishly through my veins. I suspected that if I sat down for more than a few minutes it would stop altogether and only start again under protest.
I was glad to discover that my body was far more intact than the thing that had attacked me. My limbs all functioned, and were thankfully covered in skin, even if it was of the pale, rubbery sort. Although my eyes glowed with a faint, otherworldly blue, I was greatly pleased to note that I had actual eyeballs, instead of empty sockets.
Studying my image in the water, I noted that I seemed to have acquired a pair of intricate tattoos. A complicated rune of overlapping circles, triangles, and more mysterious symbols was indelibly printed on the skin of my forehead, under my shaggy mop of brown hair. Its twin was carved onto my chest, right over my heart. Both of the runes glowed a faint, cobalt blue, to match the glimmer of my eyes. Despite having been clawed across the chest, the rune over my heart showed not a trace of disruption, as if I was only looking at the projection of something fixed much deeper in my body.
In truth, I will admit, despite the trauma I had just experienced, and the shock of it all, I stared for many minutes at these strange runes. They gave me a bizarre sense of pride, of reassurance, that although I seemed to have shared a similar fate as the thing thrashing away on the log, we were not the same. It was something to grasp on to, some shard of new identity. I didn't realize then just how desperately important that was.
Plus, I've always liked that particular shade of blue.
Eventually, I had to do something. Shock had given way to practicality. Since I didn't really want to wait for my undead companion to figure out how to free himself, I grabbed my spear and hiked back to the narrow trail through the woods. I rather doubted that the creature was a particularly gifted tracker, and as I trudged along the path, my thoughts brooded on my condition and my attacker was forgotten.
I tried for hours to recall something - anything - from my life. I was haunted by brief images, fragmented sounds, even smells, and yet I couldn't tell if they were from my life, or something else entirely. I couldn't recall my own name, but others' would suddenly pop unbidden into my mind. Who were they? People I knew personally, or names of people I had heard of, or even characters from a story. I didn't know.
This is how my old life returned to me – my life from before - in bits and pieces scattered like breadcrumbs across the landscape of my new life.
Time passed strangely, sometimes going so fast that I barely noticed the rising and setting of the sun, and sometimes so slowly that it seemed an eternity between footsteps. It wasn't my body, but my mind. I had moments of clarity and rapid, expansive thought – like when these strange memories would suddenly appear – encompassed by hours of numbness, when putting one foot in front of the other was my only occupation.
One thing I discovered about being undead was that my muscles did not tire. Even after the tension of fighting the undead creature, or the seemingly endless expanse of woods through which I traveled, I never sensed the need to rest. I would never say there was anything good about being undead, but perhaps there were a few compensations.
One evening I was surprised to suddenly hear noise and chatter of a flock of bats streaming forth from a nearby cave. As they were some of the only animals I had seen to that point, I stopped to watch. Apparently, I looked like a giant, edible moth, for a number of them swerved from their course and flew right at me. Almost without thinking, I swatted at them with my open hands. To my great surprise, I knocked two of them out of the air as they went by. It seemed that my reflexes had been greatly enhanced.
Several days passed thus before I realized another side effect of my present condition: the undead don't need to eat. Or drink. But there was a hunger, a gnawing need somewhere so deep within the body that it was hard to say if it was physical, mental, or otherwise. At times I was sure I needed to eat, but edibles were scarce in my new home. When at last I did come across some roots that did not look completely poisoned by whatever disease had stricken this forest, I found I could not stand to consume them. There was no taste on my tongue except for ash, and I discovered that my mouth was so desiccated I could not possibly chew anything. When I did manage to choke down a meager root, it sat in my stomach like a rock.
Perhaps the undead were meant to eat rocks instead, but I was in no mood to experiment.
I walked east, which seemed as good a direction as west. I stayed to the track, since the track was somewhere, which in my estimation was infinitely better than nowhere. I pressed on with a growing sense of urgency, although at the time I don't think I knew where it came from. I desperately wanted to find someone - anyone - but at the same time I feared they would be no different than the creature that was still pinned to the fallen log by its own sword.
Eventually, I got my wish.
After about five days and nights of walking (the undead don't need to sleep either) the track joined with a larger road. While still essentially a dirt swath cut through the woods, this one was much wider, had wagon tracks and hoof prints, and clearly saw much more recent use.
Opposite the point where the track joined the road, there was a 10' section of wooden fence, and on the other side, a very large tree stump. The stump was at least ten feet in diameter, making it one of the largest trees I had seen to that point. The top of the stump was smooth - it was clearly cut, and many years ago at that. Fixed into the wood of the stump was a signpost, and hanging from the signpost was a stylized wooden sign with gaily painted red arrow and lettering (albeit a bit faded) saying "Brill, 1/2 mile"
Suddenly I was rocked by a vivid image of a brighter time. Cool breeze blew through the trees, relieving the heat of a summer sun. A woman with auburn hair, rosy cheeks, and a playful smile stood sitting on the edge of the stump. Next to her was a little girl, four or five years old, with a face like her mother's. She stood on top of the stump, one hand grasping the signpost, the other waving. At me.
"Callie." My lips formed the word, but I spoke only in my mind. I wasn't sure if that name belonged to the woman or the girl.
I was torn from my reverie by the sudden realization that I and my memories were not alone.
Not fifteen feet down the road stood a silent figure. Unlike my previous encounter, this one was not ragged and unkempt with snapped off bones protruding at inconvenient angles. Instead, it was wrapped in a stylish - and new - red robe, complete with deep cowl. It covered most of the figure's person, save for leather boots underneath, and a gloved hand that rested lightly on the hilt of a dagger on it's belt. Two faint blue points of light glowed from within the darkness under the cowl.
I squared my shoulders against it and raised my spear, but the figure made no aggressive move. Instinctively I knew that it must not be the same sort as the one who attacked earlier – such things as that would never hesitate. Instead the two of us quietly regarded each other for several moments.
The figure took several measured steps forward, and pulled back its cowl. It was a woman. She had long, dark hair, pulled back into a braid behind her head. Her skin was alabaster, lips full and a starkly contrasting crimson, eyes cobalt. She had familiar runes traced across her forehead in the same fluorescent blue.
"Step forward," she said in a strangely familiar voice.
I did not sense that she meant me any harm, even though it was not hard to guess that she was also one of the undead. Hesitantly at first, then with more conviction, I approached.
When I got within a few feet, the air above her left shoulder started to shimmer, and I suddenly noticed that there was a creature perched there. Like a chameleon, it blended seamlessly into the scenery behind it. It's body was something like a monkey, covered with near-transparent scales instead of fur, with many-jointed limbs ending in prehensile paws. It had a long curling tail that wrapped around her shoulders and flicked playfully. Above the shoulders, however, it was nothing like a monkey. Instead it had an elongated, human-like face, with an over-sized bulbous nose, intelligent eyes, and enormous pointed ears that curled around in long arcs and wound up beneath its chin. Perhaps the dozen or more intricate earrings were weighing them down. The look on its face was less than friendly, but it said nothing.
"Throat dry?" she asked.
I nodded. She pulled from a pocket within her robes a metal flask, the sort that used to be popular to carry gin on one's person. She handed it to me, and although I wasn't too optimistic that it would taste better than mud and water, I took it and drank. To my surprise the liquid tasted of cherries and fire, warming my mouth, stomach, and whole body. I felt instantly invigorated.
"Better?" she asked. I nodded.
The creature on her shoulders cupped its hand over its mouth and whispered into her ear. At my curious expression, she explained. "Gabnip says he doesn't think you're Scourge." She turned to give the thing a pointed look. "As if I needed an imp to tell me that."
The imp rolled its eyes and muttered something else.
Turning back to me, she suddenly tilted her head and frowned. She reached out and grabbed what remained of the leather jerkin covering my chest, pulling it down to reveal the blue runes that seemed so similar to hers. She sucked in her breath, and then quickly reached upward to my forehead, roughly pulling back my hair. She was quite a bit shorter than I, and had to resort to standing on tiptoes. She stared a moment at my forehead, then stepped back.
The imp let out a low whistle. "Well, well..." it said in a high pitched voice.
Her mouth remained slightly ajar as she fixated on the runes. Pressing closer, she traced her finger along some of the blue lines. Gabnip the imp, meanwhile, recoiled from me even as the woman moved in, muttering something about "personal space". He flickered like a mirage seen too close, and was gone.
"Impossible," the woman breathed, "these are the same as mine! That would mean we were raised by the same..." Then she arched her head and neck upward toward mine, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed.
Her eyes suddenly grew wide, and she recognized me in the very same moment I recognized her.
"Sorin!" she cried, her throaty voice suddenly rising an octave. "It's me! It's Katrina!"
Suddenly she was the same teenage girl again, harboring a secret crush on me. If her skin could have blushed, it would have. She hesitated awkwardly for just a moment, then threw herself into my arms, hugging me tightly. "Isn't it wonderful? You've come back, and Risen, too! You're one of us now!"
"One of us?" I croaked, arms moving haltingly to return the embrace. My voice, still not quite ready to be used, was little more than a harsh squeak.
"Yes, one of us!" she cried, grinning broadly. Her eyes glowed brighter for a moment, with a hint of violet. "One of the Forsaken!"