Deus Necros

Alex narrowed his eyes and let them sharpen the way a fencer pricks the cloth of a target to learn the grain. “I see. This looks strange. That,” he said, and pointed with his chin rather than a finger, “is not a river. It is something that is pretending to be. That is not water.”

Redd’s nose wrinkled and then drew itself into a crumpled knot that would have looked comic anywhere else. Here it looked like wisdom. His sense of smell was a gift and a punishment. He winced as if the air itself scraped the inside of his head. “It is filth that has been left to rot and ferment as long as time has had a spine. And if you look close, you will see the source of the smell.”

Ludwig narrowed his eyes until the surface lost its shine and gave up what it had swallowed. They were there, not hidden so much as ignored by any mind that wanted to stay gentle. Souls. They were packed into the current like reeds jammed after a flood. They had more defects than a smith would allow to live in a blade and more damage than a body can naturally gather. Edges were torn. Colors were wrong where they should have been pale. Spots pulsed with a sickness that had found a way to be a color.

The Yellow River is supposed to cleanse. It takes the patience and the shape out of mortal hurt and rinses it into something that can begin. This cut branch did the opposite. It took the filth and washed it with more filth and kept the bucket. Every length of time spent here deepened the stain. Every circle around the same thought made it heavier.

Alex moved a few steps ahead to see better. He did not pick his feet high. He placed them as if stepping through a room with sleeping children. He reached the riverbank and leaned. Bodies moved in the current, but they were not bodies. They were ideas of bodies held tightly enough to show. Some wore the memory of armor. Some wore the memory of clothes. That should not be. Souls ought not to bring that sort of luggage here.

“Lingering attachment,” he said under his breath. “This is odd. Why would a dead person have any lingering attachment to life? It should be naked.”

He began to crouch, and his hand drifted in the innocent way a mind does when it wants proof. Ludwig’s fingers closed around the prince’s shoulder. He did not squeeze. He simply set weight there that anchored bone to bone.

“Do not touch that. You will die at once,” Ludwig said. His voice did not rise. It dropped in pitch the way a bell does when it chooses to be heard in the chest rather than the ear. “It is the river of the dead. Look.”

He shifted Alex’s wrist a fraction and opened the angle of the prince’s palm toward the current. The surface reacted as if a heat had been brought near. Hundreds of souls swelled and gathered under the skin of the flow. They moved toward the warmth of life as a mass. They reached. The river bulged, a warped lens of pale faces pushed against the membrane that held them. Hands shaped from memory rather than flesh pressed up. The current refused to break. It trembled instead, a belly full of teeth wanting to bite and unable to open its mouth.

Alex pulled his hand back. A single bead of sweat had formed at his temple without asking permission and chose that moment to slide down. He stood up and swallowed, his throat working once. The lesson entered him without the pride needing to make a speech.

“I see,” he said.

“We keep to the path by the bank,” Ludwig said. “Close enough to watch. Far enough to be boring to whatever wants to reach.”

“Why are we doing all of this. We should leave. Let the Sand Kingdom handle their own filth,” Tull said. He did not snarl it. He said it like a man who has seen too many good blades dulled on other people’s stones.

“I told you before, you are welcome to leave. I encourage it,” Ludwig said. He kept his eyes on the river. He could feel Tull’s look land on the side of his face. He did not turn. He did not need to explain that the Yellow River would not take him. He did not own a soul that could be stolen. There are comforts that are not kind to speak aloud.

“No. We go with you,” Alex said. “Whoever caused this has a hand in the war between the Sand Kingdom and the Empire.”

“But your majesty,” Tull began, and his voice had the old iron in it that comes from enough days spent throwing himself at danger to blur the count.

“Enough,” Alex said. There was nothing royal in the tone and so it carried more weight. “I am not so weak that I need your help every step, Tull. I do not need you to coddle me.”

“I understand,” Tull said. He understood the command. His eyes did not assent. They stayed hard. Ludwig did not blame him. A man like Tull wears a duty that eats the rest of his clothes.

“Let us go,” Ludwig said.

They began to move, the four of them a dark stitch along the edge of something that wanted to pull thread. The sound of their steps grew strange. It came back to them slow, as if the air had to chew each footfall before returning it. The bank sloped and rose without warning. In places the clotted sand formed thin shelves where the river had gnawed and lost interest. In others it slumped toward the flow in lazy tongues that quivered and then needed to be stepped across.

The water, if it could be called water, carried things inside it that might have been shadows. Shapes paced them under the surface without eyes and still managed to look up. Sometimes the current thickened around the shapes and they sharpened for a heartbeat. Ludwig saw what might have been a soldier still wearing a breastplate dented in the exact place a heart would live. He saw a woman with a child tied to her back by a length of cloth that had been cut cleanly at the knot. He saw a monk with his hands folded as if to pray and a smile burned onto the mouth as if the heat that killed him could not resist one last cruelty. He did not look too long at any.

The air had a taste to it that grew stronger the deeper they went. It was the taste of a candle snuffed in a small room. It was the taste of a cellar where apples have gone to vinegar. It was the taste of old iron sucked after you have bitten the inside of your cheek. Redd’s breath came with small huffs. He shook his head once the way a dog shakes off river water and kept moving.

Now and then the sludge underfoot made a slow sound like someone dragging wet leather across stone. The bank gave a little and then held. The river bubbled in places where no heat could be, as if something inside had laughed without humor. Wisps of pale vapor rose and lay along the surface as if they were tired of rising.

They spoke little. Words felt too clean. The ones they needed they used like tools.

Monsters were on the prowl in the Yellow River, and they choose to hide… for now.

At one bend the bank narrowed and Ludwig raised a hand without thinking. They halted in a line. The river swelled there as if the main flow had turned its face to glance at them. The surface balled up against itself and he could see the suggestion of shoulders pressing upward in a mass. He waited. It subsided with the petulance of a spoiled child denied a toy. He lowered his hand and they went on.

Time lost its edges. The sky above the canyon of dead sand did not change its color quickly. There was no wind to move marks along the dunes they had left behind. The only measure was the quiet ache in calves and the tick of breath and the way the back of the neck knows when it has been watched for too long.

[You’re in a hostile Environment]

Ludwig once again stopped everyone. This time it wasn’t just a hunch, but the reality of the Yellow River branch revealed itself to them.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked.

Ludwig flexed his right hand, summoning Durandal and used its edge to point forward.

A random sludge along the riverbank shifted.

At first, it appeared no different from the rest of the Yellow River, its surface sagging inward, pooling unnaturally as though gravity itself had grown impatient. But the movement did not stop. The liquid clung to itself, folding and stretching, rising in slow, unwilling increments.

A shape emerged.

Not born, but assembled.

Limbs formed where the sludge thickened. A torso followed, elongated and warped, its proportions wrong in ways the mind resisted acknowledging. What should have been skin was instead a constantly crawling layer of yellow-black mire, veins of darker filth pulsing beneath its surface.

It stood upright.

Humanoid only in the most insulting sense of the word, an imitation crafted by something that had seen humanity once and despised it ever since.

Where its face should have been, the sludge folded inward, forming a shallow depression. Within it, countless dim reflections shimmered briefly… then vanished.

The river stilled.

And the thing looked at them.