Deus Necros

The forest had begun to change.

It wasn’t immediate. At first, it was only the incline, the way the path stopped winding and began to descend more directly. Then the trees thinned out, not in density, but in species. The canopy grew higher, darker, and the leaves above no longer rustled with the wind. They clung to their branches, motionless, like damp fabric left to rot. Beneath their feet, the ground became different. The ashen ground long since gone, replaced by a thick moss that no longer crunched or squelched. It absorbed their steps with silence, as if the soil itself had grown used to being undisturbed and now resisted the memory of footfall.

Ludwig walked in front, Oathcarver bound to his back. The Soul chain he had used to carry the woman earlier was still faintly coiled around his arm, its links slack and trailing behind like a remnant of something half-remembered. The vampire had vanished into the woods ahead of them not long ago, not with speed or urgency, but with purpose. She had moved like someone following a thread only she could see.

Behind Ludwig, the Knight walked with measured strides, occasionally adjusting the piece of torn cloth still bound around his hand. His eyes rarely left the edges of the path, scanning the undergrowth with the carefulness of a man who had learned too quickly that the enemy did not always wait to be seen. He had spoken little since they had seen the mass of corpses belonging to the paladins, and how Ludwig ‘fed’ the vampire.

The Hunter brought up the rear. He had re-wrapped his shoulder since the cleric’s healing spell, but there was stiffness in his movements that betrayed the lingering pain.

Cursing occasionally under his breath how ‘useless’ their healing was, not willing to admit that the dead cleric was missing an entire arm and under the threat of the blade while healing him.

From time to time, the Hunter would pause to listen. Not for voices, but for breathing. For the sound of branches flexing under weight that wasn’t theirs. The quiet wasn’t natural. It was heavy. Not the peace of an untouched forest, but the stillness of breath held just before a scream.

This was a far-cry from his everyday hunting of monsters and lesser vampires, nothing had been this ‘exciting’ or deadly in all his years as a Vampire Hunter.

They hadn’t spoken in over ten minutes. Not because they didn’t want to, but because there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t feel misplaced in the air they now walked through. Words would hang too long here. They would not leave the tongue quickly enough. And none of them trusted the island to not listen.

It was the Knight who broke the silence, though his voice was subdued, almost careful.

“Are you sure she went this way?”

Ludwig didn’t look back. His eyes remained fixed on the shallow depression in the ground ahead, where what might have once been a trail dipped between two massive stones overgrown with black moss.

“She didn’t look back,” Ludwig replied. “She wasn’t running from us. She was moving toward something.”

“And we’re just following?” The Hunter’s tone was dry, but not sarcastic. It was the kind of question that tested reason more than it questioned leadership.

“Until I see a better idea, yes.” Ludwig’s response was quiet, not defensive. “She has the Core. Wherever she’s going, the Queen will follow. And if she doesn’t find her, she’ll find us instead.”

“That core, is that the same thing mentioned in the Baron’s letter?” the Knight asked.

The Hunter’s ears peeled listening to information he didn’t have.

“Yes, it’s basically what’s anchoring that big monsterous creature we saw at the clearing, the Vampire has it,” Ludwig said.

“Wouldn’t it have been wiser to kill her then?” the Hunter said, making sure his voice was low enough, especially for the ears of a vampire.

“Wouldn’t have worked,” Ludwig shook his head, “It’s not physical, and killing her would simply make the anchor stronger,” Ludwig said.

Though that was a complete lie, he just didn’t want to bother with explaining how Necros’s Quest was the reason he can’t just kill the Vampire.

The Hunter muttered something under his breath and returned to watching the trees. None of them said aloud that they didn’t know what direction they were heading. The red moon gleamed threateningly under the low hanging trees, giving off a blood red tint to anything the eye could see. And the island’s terrain curved and dipped with an unfamiliar rhythm, one that made even the Knight lose his bearings.

It was as if the island itself had been built not for people, but for something else entirely. Something taller. Something slower. Something that didn’t mind walking without end.

They passed under a pair of stone arches, each half-buried under a curtain of roots. The stone was smooth, carved, but the markings had been weathered beyond recognition. The shape of them was strange. Not crude, but organic, as though the arches had grown up from the earth instead of being placed there. Even Ludwig slowed slightly as they passed beneath them. The moment his foot touched the ground beyond the threshold, the air grew colder.

They continued down the path. The forest grew darker still.

It wasn’t nightfall. The shadows felt wrong. The black between the trees had depth, not just darkness. When the Knight looked too long into a thicket to his left, he saw something blink back. Not with eyes, but with movement. Like a shiver beneath a sheet of skin.

Ludwig stopped at the edge of a shallow basin. Below them, the terrain dipped once more, leading into a hollow ringed by crooked trees. In the center, something glistened. Not water. Not light. Just the shimmer of damp stone and the way it pulsed faintly in the gloom. The woman had come this way. Her footprints were faint, but visible, pressed lightly into the wet moss.

The Knight stepped up beside him and exhaled slowly. His breath was visible.

“I don’t like this,” he said. “It feels like we’re being watched. But not from outside. From underneath.”

Ludwig nodded once. He said nothing, but the lines of tension across his shoulders had returned.

They descended into the basin, the weight of the island thickening with every step. Above them, the branches hung lower. Not from wind, but from weight. Like the trees themselves were leaning in to listen.

The basin narrowed into a shallow corridor of stone, half-swallowed by roots and vines, where the ground gave way from soft moss to worn flagstones. Some of the stones were cracked, others missing entirely, their edges smoothed by time or worn down by the passage of feet long vanished. The deeper they went, the more the undergrowth withdrew, not in absence, but in deliberate clearing, as if the forest itself had grown around this path out of respect or fear. It was no longer wild here. It was preserved. Maintained not by living hands, but by memory.

Ludwig stepped carefully, his boots scraping across the darkened floor as he scanned the walls on either side. They had entered something now, though it bore no threshold or gate, no clear signal of passage. The trees arched above like ribs. The vines wound like nerves. And ahead, there was light, not from the moon, but from somewhere else entirely, refracted and low, barely visible through the shroud of mist that had begun to cling to their path.

It was the Hunter who noticed the first carving. His hand went out instinctively, brushing the side of a thick, curving wall that looked more like petrified root than true stone. Beneath the grime, there was shape. Faintly inscribed into the surface were lines, curved and flowing, not language, but pattern. He ran his fingers across the lines and pulled them back wet with sap.

“This isn’t just overgrown,” he said, voice quiet but strained. “This was carved. Something made this. It is ancient, far older than even the Vampire Hunters, the originals themselves…”

The Knight moved beside him, his brow furrowed as he scraped away a layer of moss from another panel. Beneath it lay a faded depiction, too worn to be distinct, but unmistakably crafted. There were figures there, bent in reverence, arms raised not in worship, but in offering. Above them, a symbol repeated again and again: a long, tapering arc, wrapped in what could have been rays or spines.

Ludwig took a step back to get a better look at the curvature of the chamber they were now inside. It sloped downward, following the natural lay of the earth, but the symmetry was too perfect to be accident. The walls were lined with half-sunken murals, most of them defaced or grown over, but their placement was deliberate. Even the fading fragments told of something once whole. This was no cave. It was a temple.

And the vampire was leading them further down its path.