Deep beneath the scorched stone of the Infernal Wastes, silence held fast.

  On the surface, it had already broken.

  They came in the hundreds. Infected shapes lurching out of the ashen plains, things that had once been prey running alongside things that had once hunted them. Skeldraks and ash-stalkers moved in the same tide as carrion birds and demons, none of them tearing at the others, all of them moving in the same direction with the same blind, grinding urgency.

  No signal passed between them. No sound of coordination. Only the unified direction of things that had stopped thinking for themselves and started moving toward something they couldn't name.

  They converged on the ruins of Nethervale without slowing, throwing themselves at the ground.

  Clawed hands scraped against charred stone. Fangs tore through debris. Creatures rammed their skulls against slabs of masonry, shattering their own jaws to wedge the stone open. Smaller creatures swarmed into the cracks, using their bodies as living wedges to pry the earth apart. When claws broke, they used bone. When bone snapped, they used the stumps of their limbs, grinding flesh against stone.

  Under Nethervale, something was humming.

  - - -

  In the dark, a drop of black blood hissed as it struck stone. It splashed across coffins buried in the heart of a crypt, sarcophagi bound in chains of cold iron and Cindercrest runes. The infected's blood began to eat away at old enchantments that kept the container sealed shut.

  Inside, Velcryn the Severed awakened.

  He did not breathe, for he had no lungs. But he felt the heat return. Memories of searing flame, the crushing weight of the earth, the humiliation of defeat.

  During his time, humans and demons stood shoulder to shoulder, burying him alive, along with his brother. They had thought them dead. They had thought stone and pitiful bindings of firecraft were enough.

  Fools, Velcryn thought. You cannot kill a lich by breaking its bones. You must erase the name.

  Cindercrest wasn't privy to the old rites. They had sealed the vessel, but they had left the soul tethered. And now, the lock was breaking.

  The ceiling above them groaned. A spiderweb of cracks appeared, leaking dust and gore. With a sound like a breaking spine, the masonry gave way. Infected creatures dropped into the chamber, a rain of twitching bodies and loose shale. They fell upon the coffins at once, shrieking, hammering, prying with tusks and bloody stumps.

  Even wrapped in chains, buried in granite, and suppressed by runes, the darkness inside was leaking out. For over a century, the liches had lain in the dark, their essence regenerating in the silence. The dense leymotes of the Infernal Wastes penetrated everything, even these prisons. It had fed them.

  The infected felt that potential. To them, the miasma emanating from the sarcophagi was a frequency they were desperate to tune in to. Their purpose was hierarchical. It was designed to receive commands, yet none arrived. There was a screaming void in their collective mind, a hollow space where a master's voice should be.

  Since the first wretch stumbled bleeding from a crypt only a day ago, the swarm had spread with a terrifying speed. They spread the rot not just to multiply, but to widen the net, searching for a signal strong enough to fill that silence and bring the chaos to heel.

  Here, buried in the dark, they found a pulse.

  It wasn't the right one; it lacked the blood's specific resonance, but it was loud. It was powerful. It was the closest thing to a master they had found in the silence of the Wastes.

  One creature gored its own throat open, not in suicide, but in offering. It convulsed, spewing a torrent of black, infectious sludge across Velcryn's lid, trying to bridge the gap between the rot on the outside and the ruin waiting within. The moment the filth touched the runes, the temperature in the chamber plummeted. The black sludge froze.

  Hoarfrost raced across the stone lid, blooming in fractal patterns from the inside out. The heavy granite groaned, the structural integrity failing as the cold turned the stone brittle. With a sound like a glacier calving, Velcryn's lid shattered.

  It detonated outward in a storm of frozen shrapnel. A shockwave of frost blasted the surrounding infected, freezing their blood in their veins before they hit the ground.

  Velcryn sat up amidst the falling snow of his own prison, the movement regal despite the ruin. His midnight-blue robes were stiff with rime. He looked at the frozen sludge clinging to his shoulder and flicked it away with a skeletal finger. Empty eye sockets erupted with icy-blue energy before narrowing in utter distaste.

  "Sloppy," Velcryn rasped, his voice sounding like cracking ice. "Crude. Over a century of silence, broken by a shower of offal."

  Velcryn ran a skeletal hand along the fractured edge of the sarcophagus. For a century, he had leaked power into this cramped container, filling the tomb like water filling a lung.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "Amateurs," he sneered, crumbling a piece of the rune-etched stone into dust. "Did they truly think a box of rock could hold a lord of the dead? We were already bursting the seams. This filth..." he gestured to the infected, "...merely opened the door a decade early."

  Beside Velcryn, in a second tomb, the temperature soared. A sickly, viridian light pulsed through cascading hairline cracks. Granite hissed, not melting, but disintegrating under the assault of a fire. The light intensified as Myrrakhael the Black-Eyed stirred.

  The pressure reached its breaking point.

  A column of emerald fire roared toward the ceiling, incinerating the infected standing too close. It was the ghost-fire of the dead, stripping the spirit from the bone.

  Myrrakhael floated free from the inferno, his feet hovering inches above the sarcophagus. His green robes trailed mist, and his eye sockets ignited with fierce, viridian flames. He stretched his arms, vertebrae popping after an age of stillness, the green fire licking against his skeletal frame.

  "Who cares for elegance?" Myrrakhael cackled, spinning in the air, the movement manic. "The door is open, brother! The seals are ruined!"

  He plucked a dissolving ward from the air, a fragment of Cindercrest orange unraveling into nothing between his fingers. He turned it once, studying it the way a scholar might study a child's first attempt at letters. Green fire crawled across his skeletal palm, swallowing the rune whole. It died with a quiet pop.

  "They thought it would hold forever." His eye sockets gleamed. "Isn't that sad?"

  He drifted toward the nearest infected creature, a snarling demon, his fingers twitching with hungry green sparks. "Look at them," he whispered, delighted. "So messy. So... loud."

  The chamber was a disaster zone. The explosive awakening had blasted dozens of the infected against the walls. Some ran without direction, wreathed in green fire that didn't consume their flesh but tormented their minds. Others waited for a command. They had found a source to tame them.

  Velcryn sighed, the sound like wind moving through a graveyard. "They are leaderless. A weapon without a hand."

  He raised a skeletal palm. "Quiet."

  The horde slammed to the floor, pinned by an invisible, crushing weight. Velcryn drifted over them, his shadow freezing the blood on their skin. He stopped above a single, twitching drone.

  Then, he cut the tether of his levitation.

  With a heavy crash, his skeletal feet struck the floor. The impact was violent; the stone beneath him spiderwebbed, groaning under the unnatural density of his form. Liches did not walk; they hovered above the muck of the world. To touch the ground was a rare necessity.

  He sank to one knee, the movement almost reverent, his tattered midnight robes settling around him like a pool of ink.

  The horde reacted. Drawn by the sudden proximity of such power. Every pair of unblinking eyes fell on him. Velcryn ignored them. He reached out with his hand, cupping the chin of the creature before him. He dug his thumb into its skull, cracking the bone to touch the wet meat of the mind beneath. He tasted the hive-mind, the chaos, and the desperate silence where a leader should be.

  "Someone made a mess, Myrrakhael," Velcryn murmured, his thumb still embedded in the creature's brain. "There is a source out there, screaming into the void like a lost child."

  Myrrakhael looked up, his green eye-sockets gleaming with amusement. "It is pathetic. But now, it is ours."

  Velcryn withdrew his thumb with a wet squelch. The creature collapsed against the cracked stone, twitching from the violation.

  The lich didn't bother to stand. He simply willed gravity to release him. He rose into the air, his dense frame leaving the cracked floor behind. His midnight robes settled around him as he ascended, looking down on the swarm from above.

  "It is raw material," Velcryn corrected. He surveyed the cowering army of monsters. "The world has grown savage in our absence. Look at these things. They don't know how to serve. They only know how to break."

  Velcryn raised his hand, tracing a complex rune in the air. It burned with a cold sapphire-blue light. Myrrakhael mirrored him, his skeletal fingers etching a reverse sigil in smoking viridian fire. With a synchronized gesture, they pushed the runes together.

  The glyphs collided in mid-air, bleeding into one another. Blue frost met green fire, twisting into a single, complex hex that swirled above the cowering horde. At its center, a core of emerald flame burned inside a shell of ice.

  "They are fractured," Myrrakhael rasped.

  "Bind them," Velcryn commanded.

  The hex detonated.

  It rained down. Hundreds of tiny, crystallized spikes of ice, each holding a spark of green fire, shot downward into the skulls of the gathered creatures.

  The spikes pierced the bone and sank directly into the brain tissue.

  One demon, a frothing husk that had been tearing at its own face with a rock, froze. The rock hovered inches from its gouged cheek. The scream died in its throat, cut off as cleanly as a blade through a cord. Its jaw hung slack, trembling once before snapping shut with an audible click. Slowly, the hand holding the rock lowered to its side. The madness in its eyes was overwritten.

  The infected shrieked in unison. As the ice melted inside their skulls, the green fire seared itself over their cortex, branding the command into the meat of their minds. The screaming stopped. The trembling ceased. The aimless running ended.

  Every infected creature in the room rose to its feet in perfect silence. Their eyes, once milky and wild, now burned with a dull, obedient green glow.

  Velcryn's icy eyes flared. "Now they answer to us."

  He looked down at the gathered army, who stood motionless, awaiting his will.

  "We will take this filth and raise a glorious host from their wretched bodies."

  Velcryn surveyed the obedient horde. A century ago, a coalition of demons and humans had thought it sufficient to seal two liches in a box of rock and walk away. He looked at what that decision had grown into while they slept.

  "They buried us," he said, "and forgot to finish the job."

  He turned to Myrrakhael.

  "We will search for our own. But do not look to the sands. It is doubtful any others sought refuge in this scorching desolation. We are likely alone in the Wastes."

  Velcryn's gaze lifted, looking past the stone walls to the unseen world beyond.

  "If others survived the purge, they will be scattered across the breadth of the Underworld, buried in the sunken cities of the Deep Reach or the ebony vaults of the far north. We will secure this land first before extending our reach."

  Myrrakhael laughed, a rattling sound that echoed off the walls. "The Grand Necromancer didn't finish the job. A mistake."

  Velcryn turned to the exit, his tattered robes flowing like a king's mantle. Myrrakhael lingered, his green flames throwing long shadows across the obedient horde. He tilted his head, studying the nearest creature.

  "Something made these," he said, his voice carrying the soft, wondering tone of a man who has found an unexpected present on his doorstep. "Something wild and stupid and magnificent." He looked at Velcryn. "It didn't mean to build us an army, did it, brother? It was just... screaming. And all of this came." He gestured at the waiting creatures, his fingers trailing green sparks. "I want to find it. Not to destroy it." A slow smile split his jaw. "I want to see what it does next."

  Velcryn's gaze lifted, past the broken stone, past the ruins above. "The Wastes are too loud, brother," he said. "Let us bring them silence."