There was nothing but darkness, a ceaseless, endless expanse, until suddenly, there wasn’t. A small green flame appeared in the black. It was a tiny dot at first, but it slowly expanded and consumed the darkness until there was only inferno.
He awoke.
His eyes burned. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t blink to clear his vision. All he could see in front of him was a blur of brown and red with an unreasonably bright light beaming down on him.
His throat was dry, yearning for water. His skin burned as if colonies of ants crawled through his arms and legs. His head throbbed, pulsing with the pain of the most skull-splitting headaches.
Agh! It hurts!
An incredible weight sat upon his chest, like heavy flour sacks pinning him down. With struggle, he wriggled his body with all the force he could exert, eventually pulling his arms loose, helping to free him from the heaps he had been buried under. He grasped hold of something as he struggled, turning one of the heaps to see a rotten skull staring up at him, just visible through his haze.
Bodies. They were bodies.
He tried to scream, but his throat was too sore to summon the sounds. Instead, he stared at the skull in horror, then grit his teeth as he lifted himself from the pile.
With leaden feet, he stumbled onto flat land, and his vision slowly came into focus. With clear eyes, he could now witness the nightmare landscape presented to him: a field of corpses in crudely painted patchwork armor, burned catapults and wagons, and an endless sea of arrows that had fallen into the scorched soil and stone. Ash and long-dried blood had discolored the tormented earth.
His hands were no different, clad in leather gauntlets leading up to a hide protective coat overlaid with a crude steel breastplate struck with three arrows. Steadily, he reached up to pluck the arrows out with a tug and tossed them upon the ground.
Why can’t I remember anything? Where the hell am I?
In a desire to keep moving, he treaded directionlessly through the battlefield. Uncountable amounts of debris and dead men stretched far over the horizon.
A mostly intact wagon, save for some scorch marks, attracted his attention. After removing a blackened skeleton strewn over the rear tailgate, he caught a horrifying image in a square shield’s mirrored surface within the wagon’s armament.
In the reflection, he could finally see a face. However, instead of seeing a human visage’s familiar eyes, nose, and cheeks, he saw a skull staring back at him with two balls of green fire in the eye sockets. Startled, he fell back and tumbled onto the ground. He put his hands to his face and felt the hardness of bone. Panicked, he pulled off the leather gauntlets to reveal a skeletonized wrist with tiny bits of rotting flesh clinging on.
Gods, no! What the hell am I?! This can’t be real!
The sight sickened him, but despite the overwhelming urge to vomit, he physically could not. He began to hyperventilate, or at least it felt like he was. Once he calmed down, he realized he wasn’t actually breathing at all, for he had no intact lungs to draw breath. He had screamed, yet no noise was produced.
I’m dead. I’m really dead…
As he calmed down, he thought it would be best to understand the full gravity of his situation, so he began to examine his own living corpse. Most of his body was in an advanced state of decomposition. The flesh from the neck up had been consumed, likely by vultures and the rest was dried and desiccated. One bony hand grasped the other and pulled in an attempt to remove it, yet the appendage was stubbornly bound to his wrist by some unseen attraction.
The pain and discomfort he had felt were merely imagined; the more he grew aware of his senses, the more the sensations dulled. Even the hunger and thirst previously felt had all but vanished.
Why am I like this?
He couldn’t recall any memories, but he had a basic understanding of the world around him. The undead were a topic of core knowledge that he knew but could not recall where he learned the facts. He knew the legions of undead were mindless savages who violently attacked the living, and they certainly never had the capacity to ponder their mortality. How could he be among the ghouls and revenants haunting the moors and dark woods of the world?
I suppose a battlefield would be a fitting environment for lost souls…
He looked over his attire for any search of clues. A note, a message, orders, or anything! He could only find one artifact, a tag located within the inner stitching of the leather hide: Black Stone. There was no indication of which one of these colored banners he would have given his life for. Some appeared familiar, but he couldn’t recognize the lands or armies they represented.
Among the bodies, there were some fallen soldiers dressed in patterned steel armor bearing the same crests from the banners that stood near. Still, the majority were an assortment of barely equipped men and women who were likely conscripted and used as cannon fodder. Their association was just as much of a mystery as his.
He sat on the limbs of a burned catapult in thought for some time, then stood suddenly.
I can’t just stay here and rot. I need to know more to know who I am.
The undead man who returned to life glanced around his surroundings for some suggestions on how to proceed. Finding none, he turned his gaze to the setting sun in the west and began treading forward, placing one decayed boot in front of the other, carrying himself away from the dead land from which he arose.
5711 Writing 