Deus Necros

“If you keep following me,” Ludwig said, his tone dry, “you’ll probably end up dead.”

The Hunter offered a grim smile. “So far, I’ve seen death everywhere but next to you, Sir Davon.”

Ludwig didn’t respond. For a moment, he didn’t even know how to. The irony of it burned at the edges of his awareness, because if there was any place more associated with death than Ludwig, it had not been named.

He was Death’s favored. His apostle.

And that was not a comfort.

“Just keep up,” he said at last, his eyes already sweeping the edges of the glade for an exit.

He moved fast, skirting the perimeter of the Queen’s floral circle, tangled thorns, fleshy blossoms, pulsing vines thick with fluid. The others followed. The Knight was quiet, sword sheathed but ready, keeping pace. The Hunter’s steps were less sure, but his will held.

“Got any plan on where we’re going?” the Hunter called as he ducked under a whipping branch.

“Anywhere but here,” Ludwig replied. “And thankfully, it doesn’t look like the woman’s been taken by the Perturbants or the Queen. Which means she’s still out there. We keep looking.”

He didn’t add what he feared.

That they might find her too late.

Just as Ludwig reached the outer edge of the cursed clearing, something blurred past his peripheral vision. A dull whistle cut the air.

Two Perturbants flew by, no, were thrown. Their forms sailed like discarded puppets through the forest before crashing into the underbrush, limbs twisting in ways bodies weren’t meant to move. One smashed spine-first into a boulder and collapsed into a tangle of roots and black ichor. The other hit a tree and didn’t rise again.

Ludwig paused.

Bones had been shattered. Arms severed. Heads crushed inward like overripe fruit.

These things had not simply fallen. They had been crushed and obliterated.

He turned toward the deeper woods. Shadows shifted there. A pulse of something else, some presence, made the hairs on his neck stand upright.

“Someone’s there,” Ludwig muttered. He moved forward, blade lowered but not sheathed.

The Hunter hesitated. The glade behind them, for all its horror, was at least lit. Paladins. Fire. Chanting.

The forest ahead was nothing but shadows and silence.

But then he looked back, at the Queen, still strung like an inverted god, at the way her thorns curled as if tasting the air, at the paladins who still had not moved.

And he chose.

“Yeah, no,” he muttered, and ran after Ludwig without another word.

The Knight caught up on Ludwig’s right, panting. “Sir Davon!”

Ludwig turned slightly as they ran. In the Knight’s hand was a torn strip of cloth.

“This,” the Knight said, holding it up. “This is a piece of my cape. It was tied around her earlier. If it fell here, she should be nearby.”

They didn’t have time to reflect on that.

Because only a few strides further, Ludwig saw her.

The smell hit them first.

Copper. Hot and wet. It clung to the undergrowth like steam. The ground here was slick with disturbed moss, dragged roots, and ruptured bark. Signs of a struggle, but not a long one.

Ludwig slowed. His boots crushed through leaves matted with blood.

Then he saw the corpse. Or many of them, some still drew struggling breaths.

One of, a paladin. Or what remained of. The armor was peeled open, chest plate torn like paper. The ribs beneath were splintered and exposed, the exposed flesh gored and half-eaten. His helm lay several feet away, dented inward. His face was still inside it.

Ludwig didn’t speak.

The woman was crouched above him.

Her form was still recognizably human, but only barely. She was hunched, her shoulders rising and falling in uneven, ragged breaths. Her hands, once bound by holy nails, were now dug into the paladin’s chest cavity. The blood coated her arms to the elbows. Her body twitched, her spine arching slightly as if something inside her were pulling the strings.

Muscles that should not have held together still did. Tendons moved. Bones flexed. Even though large portions of her flesh had been cut open, branded, or charred black from the stakes and flames of her torture, she moved with raw, unnatural power.

It was not graceful. But it was fast. And it was strong.

Ludwig’s eyes narrowed as he stepped forward.

Embedded in her side, jutting just beneath her ribcage, was a shard of metal. A broken blade. It was slick with blood, and clearly recent. That hadn’t been there before.

A fight probably, that she clearly had won. Even with all those injuries… what a magnificent willpower, and power Ludwig thought. She was incredible in all the meanings of the word.

She lifted her head slowly.

Her eyes met his.

No longer milky-white and glazed in agony. No longer hollow and stunned from pain.

They were green now. Brilliant emerald, sharpened with focus.

Then, before his eyes, they changed again.

Crimson. Bright and fevered. Her pupils shrank to narrow slits as the red bled into every part of the iris.

A low hiss came from her mouth, but it wasn’t speech. Her jaw hung open unnaturally, twitching. An attempt at speech using vocal cords that long since been turned to ash.

She moved her head toward the dead paladin’s neck again, but it wasn’t hunger in the traditional sense. Her jaw couldn’t close properly, too many teeth were still broken or gone entirely. But she was trying.

Trying to feed.

Not on flesh.

On blood.

The Knight behind Ludwig halted mid-stride. The cloth in his hand dropped.

The Hunter stepped back, voice hushed and dry.

“Oh,” he said. “Guess it was a vampire after all.”

The woman didn’t look at them. Her attention stayed fixed on her victim, her breath catching in shallow pulses as if she couldn’t decide whether she was breathing or growling.

The Hunter’s hand moved to his weapon again. Slowly. But not out of fear.

Out of respect.

“And from the looks of it…” he added, eyes narrowing as he watched her posture shift, as her back straightened slightly and her form adjusted, “it’s not your everyday lesser vampire.”

Ludwig stood still, just outside the circle of broken brush and blood-soaked moss. His sword lowered an inch, not out of mercy, but uncertainty. The woman didn’t move, but her presence had changed entirely. The tremble in her limbs was no longer weakness. It was restraint. Like a predator clinging to a thread of civility that could snap at the brush of a breath.

The Knight said nothing, his fingers flexing unconsciously at his side, his eyes flicking between the vampire and Ludwig, unsure if he should draw or step back.

The Hunter was more direct.

He stepped forward by half a pace and leaned in slightly. “You see it too, don’t you?” he said, low and quiet. “That’s no fledgling. She’s not just turned or even had been turned, she was born this way. There’s memory behind those eyes. Old instincts. Maybe even hunger born of something worse than pain.”

Ludwig didn’t answer, instead he got closer, the woman flinched but Ludwig’s weapon long since removed gave her a sense of alertness and not danger.

He crouched down, a vial in his hand, one of the paladins, dying, right next to his feet, a large gash on his neck. Ludwig crouched down, placed the vial right under the seeping crimson.

It filled almost immediately,

The woman watched with attention as the vial was being filled, and only then did Ludwig hand it over, not to her hand she was still not trusting of them enough, but just near her arm’s reach.

“What are you doing Sir Davon?” the Knight said.

“He was dead anyway,” Ludwig explained, “She still has hope. She couldn’t feed due to her broken teeth… all she got from them was small droplets of blood, I doubt it’s enough to either sate her hunger or fix her injuries… Not to mention, I doubt by being hostile to her we’d be able to subdue her, she’s too strong,” Ludwig’s gestured with his face at the dozen paladin bodies all over the place.

The woman snatched the bottle from the ground and chugged down its content without a second thought. Blood, red, and warm fell down her charred throat, wetting some of her broken lips.

Her jaw clicked once, the bone shifting back into place with a faint crack. What few remaining teeth she had glinted wet and jagged, almost visibly correcting themselves and healing. Her lips were torn, but curing. The blood on her chin hadn’t dried it was steaming. Faint trails rose from her flesh like mist.

She blinked slowly.

Once.

Twice.

Her gaze fixed on Ludwig.

And for a moment, just a moment, recognition passed through her expression. Not warmth. Not relief.

Recognition. Like remembering a scar.

She opened her mouth, her jaw stretching slightly wider than it should have. A breath shuddered out, dry and stifled, like wind passing through a corpse’s lungs.

“I don’t think she’s gone yet,” Ludwig said. His voice wasn’t hopeful. It was factual. A cold calculation. “She didn’t attack us. Not yet.”

The Hunter’s brow furrowed. “That doesn’t mean she won’t.”

“I know.”

Behind them, the forest groaned.

It wasn’t the same groan of wind or tree.

It was the Queen.

She was still hanging in her floral crucifix of vines and thorns, but now the air around her felt heavier. The reverence that had once cloaked the glade had curdled into silence. No more chants from the paladins. No more trembling prayers. Just the sound of breathing. Shifting roots. A building pressure behind the bones.

“She stopped singing,” the Knight said, hushed.

Ludwig nodded, but kept his gaze on the woman. “I guess she realized where the Wrath Core is, I suspect she’s watching us, maybe from these very roots.”

The vampire moved.

It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t hostile.

She simply stood.

Her movements were sluggish but deliberate. Muscles twisted beneath her damaged skin. The burned flesh across her arms flaked as it tried to regrow. Her bare feet pressed against the blood-soaked moss, and wherever she stepped, the ground seemed to breathe with her.

She didn’t attack.

She looked up, past them, toward the direction of the glade. Toward the Queen. And then she bared her partially healed teeth. The expression wasn’t human. It wasn’t even hungry. It was defiance.

Ludwig then asked “Do you remember us?”

No reply.

But her head tilted slightly. And her fingers, still bloodied, curled loosely at her sides. Not into fists. Not into claws. Just tension.

A memory of being restrained.

“I pulled out the nails,” Ludwig said. “You don’t owe us. But if you’re not planning to kill us, you’d best come with us. The Queen wants to consume you for that which had fused into your body.”

The woman blinked. Her eyes, still crimson, flickered briefly.

Then she moved. Not toward him. But past him.

Into the trees.

“She’s running again!” the Hunter snapped.

“No,” Ludwig said. “She’s leading. And we should follow.”