Humans can be such fickle creatures. In a moment, in the blink of an eye, the collective of the human race can go from ignorance, to an entirely biased hatred towards a single individual. No names in the history of this once great planet have ever been hated as much as Alyria Nekratic and Achilles Castor. Or rather… The Aphotic Wraith and Cain Rathe.
To clarify: Our world has ended. Once lustrous rolling hills of emerald green and speckled cream now fester and rot, gray and lifeless beneath the icy breeze of our new gods’ breath. Nights once cool and fragrant now bare little more than a bitter chill that bites one to their very core, rattling their bones and slowing their hearts.
Eight years ago, the world every man, woman and child knew and at least fragmentally adored, shattered, collapsed, and tore itself to pieces. A single moment, a single betrayal acted as the catalyst for the collapse of human existence. I remember that night as clearly as if it had just happened.
My name is Samuel Reicht, and I am… Was… An author. In these days, no man reads. None recall how, and none desire to do so. Myths have been forgotten, histories and cultures withered into dust as the nights now bare a chill too harsh for one’s mind to collect itself enough to retain anything of entertainment. Survival is all that exists in the human mind, and I suppose that is where I space myself from my kinsmen.
Insanity has gripped me, according to my fellow survivors, as I still pride myself with the ability to think and formulate tales, recollections and idle means to pass the time in a futile attempt to starve off what I see as insanity. Their opinions on my mind mean little, even if every insult, every witless ironic crack bites me to my very core.
Parchment and what little ink I still possess weave the fabric for stories forgotten by those of a lesser mind, and act as sustenance for what little intellectual prowess I still possess. I know how to hunt, I know how to kill, I know how to destroy those that oppose our existence, yet nothing in the world could ever have prepared me for that fateful day.. That starless night, unholy night.
It was the dead of winter, back when this world still possessed seasons. The night was cold, yet not as cold as it is now. Endless powder rolled across the hills of the Calaenian Mainland, the Empire’s glorious protective stretch. The writers’ eternal curse had gripped me that night, and forced me into the meadow to ponder upon my existence, and various other trivial philosophical ramblings. Suddenly the sky was alight with brilliant fire, and the heavens roared as if they had been split by the hand of Zaddukan himself. The fire split and stretched, burning gloriously across the firmament with a vigor no man had ever seen before. It burned for what seemed like an eternity, shifting the ebon sky into a brilliant shade of royal indigo.
No man in Calaen knew what that fire was, or why it occurred, not for a long time. It had been an expedition into the blackness, a futile attempt on behalf of the traitorous knight, Achilles Castor: nephew to the emperor, to slay the Wraith of Mesacana. That night, before the damning fires, he had relinquished his soul to the Wraith, and vowed allegiance to her side. The fires brought with them a plague of which the world had hoped to never see again, a plague so vast that the very foundations of the world crumbled and withered beneath its awesome force.
The first year was horrid. Humanity began its descent, as crime escalated and the empires of Calaen and Syrovakia began to crumble beneath their own anarchy. Those affected by the toxic breath of the Wraith began an unending spiral into twisting, wretched pain and a listless yet faithful servitude to Her. When the victims would finally succumb to the embrace of death, they would rise again, cold and lifeless, yet animated by the magicks of the forsaken lich. Anarchy was no longer a human creation, but that of the undeath. Chaos ensued unlike anything any of us had ever experienced before. Husbands devoured wives, turned them to this fetid curse; children butchered parents in their beds at night; dogs would consume their masters…
It was in the second year I contemplated the ending of my own life when I was forced to butcher my wife, who had turned to become one of them. I have never cried so hard in my life. I loved her, adored her, and in retrospect see that spending her final days by her side without a pleasure of my own only hurt me more. Yet it was a necessity, it forced me to change, harden, grow into this new world. The sky was blistered by the third year, rippling with maroon and indigo magicks that swirled like tidal waves crashing against one another in opposing currents. Her magicks were expanding, growing, thriving with every corpse that joined her army.
In the following years, the world only continued to decay while the armies grew. Once anarchistic, raving animals, the undead formed ranks under their new leaders. Cain Rathe, the Death Guard to Death’s avatar, herself, had taken prominence in the shattered wasteland, basking it in the blood of the ruined Syrovakian empire. More corpses came to his side, overwhelming both sides of the Polloxian War, and crushing the cities of both.  Syrovakia’s final stand was at the gates of Zebar-Dai, Reiki Akahara’s grandest city and jewel of Syrovakia. Cain sundered the walls with his overwhelming numbers and sent his foes routing into the sea; he cared not to expand his army, only watch those that stood before him die. The Redblade, Reiki Akahara who was consumed by death just as his former protégé, stood amidst the endless horde, destroying wave after wave with single, elegant strikes of the famous sword. I recall rumors of the Redblade’s final words before being felled by Cain: “As you stand beside me, your breath as icy and dead as mine, I shall ensure that your betrayal will be for naught. Your corpse will join mine, as I will grip your soul with bony fingers, and crush it beneath my deathless grasp… Matriel!”
Reiki Akahara was felled by a single swipe of the corrupted sword, Xaiveld, and his glowing heart was torn from his body, crushed under the palm of the Death Guard.
Calaen was not spared. My former home, by the sixth year, had split into multiple factions, none of which worth naming. For a long year, they battled with one another and against the growing threat of the Aphotic Wraith, yet it was all for naught. As the tribes crumbled, a startling surprise attack on the Wraith occurred. All of the clans had suddenly reunited and moved inward, to the heartland of Sercena to assault the Wraith’s fortress of undeath. Needless to say…
All of the tribes were slain in a matter of days.
Curiously enough, their bodies were used to create a new threat, a mobile, crawling tower the Wraith uses to assault surviving villages and the pockets of resistance that stand outside of her grasp. Hundreds of feet tall, shining with hundreds of corpulent pus-lined eyes, the tower roams the land with no apparent goal, yet all who see it on the horizon know that it is time to leave their temporary homes, or a curse blacker than any undeath awaits them.
Our world is dead, yet there is much lef-

“Attack!! The dead are coming!! Arm yourselves!!”
Samuel snapped to attention, his quill splotching the parchment resting upon a small wooden stool beneath him. Hastily he stood and picked up a short sheathed blade. Moments  later, he was out of the door of his house, brandishing dull steel and locking his eyes on the horizon. A forest, skeletal and gray, shivered with a sudden gust of bitter wind.
“Where are these beasts, Marcus?” Samuel demanded. The crier, a man in his late fifties turned and glared at Samuel critically.
“I saw it! Armored, baring its teeth at me! I’m not crazy…” Marcus snarled through his gums, his wooden staff gripped tightly under bony fingers.
“Where did it go, then, old man?” Samuel snorted, lowering his blade.
“I saw it go back towards the woods…”
“Unless it were a Death Guard, I doubt it’d have the intelligence to-”
Suddenly a piercing howl sent the hairs skyward on the back of Samuel’s neck. His eyes shot for the woods, and he took a cautious step back, arms quaking.
“Th-That was…”
“Dreadhound!!” Marcus yelled.
“Not just any Dreadhound… Oh Cai, spare us such a fate…”
Two or three more people emerged from the cluster of pitiful straw huts, each baring a weapon of their own without an ounce of courage to back it up. Samuel took another step forward, his blade still readied, though the tip shivered heavily.
“The beasts are strong, but without their head… With shattered ribs, these creatures will shake in futility!”
“We can’t destroy a pack..” A woman whimpered from the back of the growing crowd.
“This is suicide. We should run.”
“No! It’s what they want!” Samuel exclaimed.
“Lunatic!! Heretic!! He wants us to die!! Oh Cai, save us! Luceria, get the children, we’re leaving!” One man armed with a pitchfork yelped before diving back into his hut.
“If you leave now, you will die!”
Another roar split the sky, joined by three more. Samuel’s arm transcended from a shiver to an earth-shattering quake.  He stepped back, though his blade refused to lower. His arms were locked, and sweat began to trickle down his neck and his arms, yet his legs wouldn’t move any more.
“Scouts cannot tell their masters… Scouts can’t… They can’t… Not if they’re dead…”
“Fool!” Marcus cried, throwing his arms into the sky and bolting back to his own hut. “Our foes ARE dead!!”
The crowd quickly broke formation and scattered in feral instinct. Some leaving their children and wives, some returning to slam shut their doors, others bolting off for the woodlands. Samuel, however, suddenly sprang forward and charged for the source of the howl, releasing a furious war cry that, he seemed to think, shook the very skies.
However, the source of the skies’ quake was far from Samuel’s projection. Skeletal wings sheared the clouds, and a lone figure fell from the crackling lightning high above. The ground followed the firmament’s shiver as the shaded silhouette smashed into the stony planet’s surface. A blade extended outward, resonating with the swipe and a moment later, an entire hut sheared in half. The figure stood, quite casually, to its full height of a modest six feet five inches. Clad in thick black plates, bound by metallic wires and seemingly patched together by skeletal bones, the warrior’s face was concealed by a mask that exposed only burning amber eyes and a bony white jaw lined with fearsome fanged teeth, each chipped and broken as testament to its time spent in battle.
Samuel whirled around, and instantly lost balance, dropping to hit the ground on his twisted knee, which cracked loudly on impact and forced Samuel to audibly scream. The figure turned to glance at the frantic man, but soon turned back to face the village. People poured out frantically, scattering in all directions. The armored goliath raised a single hand and snapped its fingers, and no more than a moment later dozens of monstrous armored corpses erupted into existence to give chase.
The first of the titan’s victims happened to be a family of three, a man in his thirties who threw himself at the knight’s feet, hands clasped over his head in a horrified plea. Amber fires blazed down upon the man, and the knight growled. No more than a moment later, the father’s head exploded in a spray of gore, and his body hit the ground. The mother, terrified, grabbed her daughter by the arm and bolted off, tears bursting out of her eyes. But it was too late, the knight moved with an impossible speed, slowing as he caught up with the woman and struck. His blade sheared through her flesh and bone as if it gave as little resistance as the air. Whilst the woman’s upper half soared forward, her lower half kept running awkwardly for a few seconds before slamming to the ground in a spray of scarlet gore. Crying, the girl released her gasping mother’s hand, and tried to run as well, only to be caught around the neck by an armored claw. She found herself being lifted into the air and terror flooded her veins. She tried to scream, but everything went black as the claw tightened with a wicked crack. Her body was discarded a moment later.
Samuel clenched his teeth at the sight of such atrocity, such horrid sin being committed before him without mercy or remorse. Instinctually he grabbed his sword and pulled himself toward the monster, waving his sword wildly, screaming like a terrified animal trying to frighten away its foe. Little more than a moment had passed before the behemoth bound its iron-clad claw around the dulled edge of the sword and bent it with little more than a curl of its thumb. It was forcibly jerked from Samuel’s hand seconds later, creating another crack.
“Are you that foolish?” The knight spoke in a multi-tonal, hollow voice. Its jaws moved slowly, out of coordination with its booming voice, though it wasn’t the jaws that Samuel was focused on. Amber eyes… Burning amber-red eyes bored holes through the poor, broken man’s skull and sent poison burning through his veins. He knew, at that very point in time, what the monster was doing… And who this was.
Without another word, the knight passed, a tattered cape flowing elegantly, hauntingly behind him. Seconds later, the knight was joined by the howling goliath from the woodland, another walking corpse that snarled and growled with blazing fire for eyes. Stringy entrails draped over and through its ribs, gripping loosely to black metal armored plates at its shoulders and flanks. A hound, a fetid Dreadhound, yet not any; No, this beast was Aburaxinos, Father of the Dreadhounds. Rumors had spread to human resistances of such a beast, a goliath of a monster that followed in the wake of Cain Rathe himself. Master and Hound, side-by-side burning another innocent village into oblivion.
The corpses mutilated the humans, leaving no gap for survival, but an impassable wall of armored decay, one by one, families were shattered and lives were torn away. As hope faded, and the village burned, the corpses dissipated, and the Death Guard watched on. It had all happened in minutes, such carnage, such unrelenting rage, though in these few minutes, tears had found their way to Samuel’s eyes and had rolled down his soot-stained cheeks and to the ashen ground below. He cried out in a raging fury, clenching his mobile hand into a fist and pumping it at the knight.
“Why?! What have we done to you?! We just want to live!! We don’t want to interfere with you! We just want to survive, we just want to be happy!”
The Death Guard turned back, and his jaws clacked in an irritated response.
“And how can you be happy without sacrifice? How could you know happiness if there were nothing to be sad about?” The armored figure turned back, stepping audibly with a clattering rumble. “If you were permitted to live, permitted to be happy, then it would indubitably be at another’s expense. We live in a perfect equality, a servitude to a greater cause. Though our power differs, we are equals who all stand in an equal cause. You, however…”
“Then kill me! It hurts so much… You killed her… You killed my wife!”
“Perhaps I did,” The Death Guard growled, his voice resonating in Samuel’s ear. “Or perhaps her death was justified. Perhaps she saw the cause in which I exist for: Equality. Our happiness exists at your expense.”
“Then how are we any different?!” Samuel cried. “Tell me how we are different!”
“Because you are animals to us. Just as you must slay a pig to enjoy a ham dinner, just as you would bleed it dry and roast it to suckle the flavor from its flesh, we will bleed you dry, roast your kind, and allow them to transcend into a higher state of being. The only reason we are any different from you, human…” The Death Guard spoke, leaning down to grapple Samuel around the neck and lift him up to his feet. “We don’t require the humiliation, the degrading of our own kind to reap the rewards of happiness, fulfillment.”
“Monster…”
“Am I? You see in me a beast devoid of mercy, yet here you… Stand… Refusing to listen to my logic. Because my ideals are not your own, they are inferior and worth mocking? Petty human… This is why we differ,” The Death Guard snarled, gripping at Samuel’s collar more tightly. “My logic lets me stand, lets me walk. If yours can do the same, then I will accept it, and I will bow to you.”
Samuel’s eyes widened in surprise as the monster’s grasp loosened on his collar, and Samuel found himself standing. His breath quickened as hope energized him. He was standing, he was defying the monster before him.
“You stand, just as I stand here now… Then I demand you walk.”
Samuel said nothing, he merely put his aching limb forward and set it down, wincing. Pain bolted up and down his entire body as he did so, and he could feel the bones rolling about wildly within the confines of his skin and muscle, yet he breathed in deeply and looked back to the knight.
“Then you must walk.”
Samuel raised his foot. Pain suddenly gripped him, shooting wildly through him once more as he found himself falling, and heard his bones grinding against one another. His knee expanded and twisted again, and Samuel was screaming once more on the ground, tears boring out of his skull and soaking the ground beneath him. Flames licked at his home, his writings, his life for the past four months. Blood joined with his tears, and his vision blurred red a moment later. All he could see was the armored heel of the one who had caused him so much pain.
“Your logic is flawed, and now you lie crying like a child upon the ground,” The Death Guard sighed, lowering his blade’s tip to Samuel’s cheek. “We desire not to slaughter you all… That much should be apparent. There is no beauty in obliteration, yet there is beauty in the struggle of an inferior thing; A bird with a broken wing escaping from your palm. You smile, watching it struggle desperately trying to fly away from you, yet you control its fate, its every move. You could crush it in your hand, you could kill it in a second, yet watching it suffer… Watching it suffer in fear, turmoil, desperation is a delicious treat all in itself.”
Samuel said nothing, for he could say nothing, only sob. His voice was choked by his tears and his tears were fueled by the pain of complete and utter defeat. He couldn’t combat his foe, and he knew that his foe was right, even if he didn’t want to admit it. He outstretched his broken hand, as if begging for mercy, but it too dropped into the blood of his kinsmen. Samuel began to cry even more.
“I will not end your pain. Only you can end your own misery, just as I did. You are an intelligent man, throttled by the ignorance of those surrounding you… I can taste it. So, human child… If you will accept us in time, we will cease the pain. We will end the contradiction. We are immortal, we are irrefutable, we are infallible. Angels fallen from the grace of the heavens, bound by vines of twisting ebon; no longer bound by iron coil of mortality, we can grow in ways your kind had only dreamed of… I look forward to meeting you again, creature.”
The figure turned and walked into the flames, its hound trotting happily behind it. Fire engulfed the twisting black cape of the armored knight, and just like that, he was gone. Samuel was alone. Cold, terrified, going numb… The night was falling; A cold, starless embrace of ebon black, a vortex, the torrential nether that engulfed all life, all hope.
There was nothing left.
Nothing at all left.
Nothing but rage.
Nothing but pain.
The Wraith would burn.
The Knight would burn.
His revenge would be exacted, and the kingdom of undeath would burn.
Just as his world had.
Revenge would be bitter,
Yet it would be sweet.
Ever, ever so sweet…