The evening air hung thick with dread as Didé and Nakaba sat atop their horses, eyes straining to pierce the encroaching gloom. The last of the village's residents had fled, leaving the pair as lone sentries against the unknown terror looming.
An unnatural fog rolled in, borne on no wind, quickly swallowing the modest huts and narrow lanes in a blanket of impenetrable gray. The chill it carried seeped through Didé's cloak and leather, raising gooseflesh on his arms. Nakaba pulled her wolfskin tighter, her grip hard-knuckled on her stallion's reins.
"You feel that, princeling?" she hissed through chattering teeth. "Like the grave itself has opened to claim us."
Didé's hand strayed to the hilt of his sword, fingers caressing the worn leather wrappings. The metal pommel was ice against his palm. "Yes. Best keep watch." He said under breath.
The fog thickened until the pair could scarcely make out the horse's swishing tail before them. A profound silence consumed the village, broken only by their stallions' nervous snorts and stomps.
Then, from somewhere in the vapor, a shriek split the air. The sound lanced straight into their bones, dripping with unmistakable malice and hunger. Nakaba clutched hard at her reins as the shriek stretched on, rising in pitch until it pierced the heavens themselves.
The horses reared, crying out in panic. Didé sawed at the reins, struggling for control. "Steady, damn you!"
The shriek cut off as abruptly as it began. A deathly hush smothered them once more, tension coiling tighter and tighter around their pounding hearts.
"Princeling..." Nakaba's voice was no more than a rasp. "I don't see anything, but i feel eyes on us."
"As do I," he murmured, swiveling to scan their nebulous surroundings. "Whatever foul presence brought this gloom, we must-"
Another shriek, this one much closer, shredded his words into silence.
Didé's heart seized as Nakaba's piercing scream cut through the fog, abruptly choked into silence. He whipped his head around just in time to see a shadowy form slam into her horse's side, wrenching woman and horse into the milky void.
"Nakaba!" he bellowed, as he reined his panicked horse. His stallion neighed as Didé lurched forward, sword drawn and raised, squinting futilely into the void.
"Nakaba! To me!" Only the clank of his mail and the stallion's frenzied whinnies answered his cry.
Nakaba was simply...gone, swallowed by the unnatural haze.
Didé spun in a tight circle, sweat beading on his brow despite the chill. The fog seemed to press in from all sides, muffling his movements, his shouts. He strained his eyes until they burned, desperate to catch a glimpse of the thing that took her.
Then, that shriek again - guttural and vile. But this time, the sound coalesced into mocking words that raised the hackles on Didé's neck.
"Didé ...Stormborn...the Sun of the North." The voice was a bestial rasp, dripping with sadistic glee. "You reek of flesh...and blood."
Didé's grip tightened on his sword hilt until his knuckles shown pale. "Coward!" he snarled, turning toward the reverberating whispers. "Show yourself!"
A low, rumbling chuckle seemed to emanate from the murk itself. "My hunger is not so...discriminating, Sun-child. Though you may prove a tenderer morsel than your woman, hmm?"
Didé's blood ran cold at the insinuation. He pivoted again, blade at the ready, straining to pinpoint the creature's location. "If you've harmed her, I'll--"
Another slam of invisible force sent Didé sprawling from his horse to the ground in a heavy thud, his sword lost in the void, as the shrieking voice cackled. "You have no powerrrr here. I know your deepest fears, Stormborn, for they are etched upon the ffffffabric of your being like scars upon flesh. I am the voice that echoesssssssss in the silence, the chilling wind that whispers your demise."
The voice was a sound so chilling, so unnatural that it seemed to leech all warmth from the air around it. It slithered and coiled like a nest of serpents, hissing out from the impenetrable fog in a ceaseless litany of hunger and malice.
There was an undercurrent of wet tearing, as if whatever unholy thing was producing the shrieks was ripping apart its own vocal cords with each guttural exhalation. Yet the sound only seemed to grow louder, more piercing with every rasping breath.
The voice twisted into something even more viscerally horrific as it addressed Didé again. It was no longer mere sound, but anguish and torment made audible.
"Ssson of Idollo..."
The words carried a sense of looming dread, each syllable a death knell for all existence. They chipped away at Didé's sanity and courage, leaving only a hollow husk alive to its own meaningless suffering.
"There issss nothing for you...hereee" The pauses were filled with the screaming silence of centuries of decay.
"Only...pain and desolation."
Didé shuddered as the dreadful voice fell silent once more, eyes straining against the unnatural gloom.
"Ssssssurrender to me, Sun-child, and let our souls merge as one. Together, we can unlock boundless potential and achieve greatnessssss beyond imagination."
A faint breeze stirred, parting the dense fog enough for a small figure to coalesce in the milky distance.
His heart lurched with a flicker of desperate hope. "Nakaba...?"
Clawing his way back to his feet, Didé squinted at the tiny silhouette. As he drew nearer, warily advancing with a hand outstretched, dread realization doused his fleeting optimism like an icy deluge.
It was no Nakaba awaiting him in that dismal shroud, but rather...a child? A little girl, clutching a simple doll of woven palm fronds to her chest. For the span of a gasped inhalation, Didé's whiplashed senses seized on the pitiful sight. He remembered frantic mothers gathering children as they fled the village. She must have been left by her mother.
As he neared to within an arm's length of the unmoving child, any semblance of innocence twisted into a fresh waking nightmare. Her eyes were narrow pits of abyssal darkness, pupils and whites alike consumed by utter nothingness. A crimson froth oozed from her misshapen jaws, sloughing in viscid ropes from a maw that stretched too wide...much too wide...
In the span of a thunderous heartbeat, Didé flinched back as that tiny hand whipped out with preternatural speed, fingers terminating in hooked talons that could have been rived from the flank of a gigantic bird of prey. A piercing shriek unlike any uttered by mortal lungs split the air as the thing reared up, jaws distending in a way that set Didé's stomach roiling.
He backpedaled furiously, choking on scorched air as realization washed over him in searing waves. All around, emerging from the fog like deep-sea creatures drifting up from the crushing depths, moved other twisted figures. Some shambled on broken feet, leaving snail-trails of oily corruption in their wakes, while others skittered on too many limbs, the jerky mechanisms of their unnatural motions hitching with boneless fluidity.
But each bore those same soulless pits where eyes should have been, those same unhinged mouths churning with hoarded screams of the damned. A whole abhorrent congregation of undead-yet-unliving gathered around Didé on creaking joints and desiccated stumps.
Realization dawned on Didé with sickening clarity as the undead horde converged. These aberrations were once human, twisted into unholy monsters by the same corrupting evil that had ushered them forth. Familiar features from villagers past peeked through their decayed, feral masks of desiccation and hunger, revealing their grim origins.
A frothy, corpse-like figure in tattered robes that may have adorned an elder. A smaller form - the child Didé mistook for the missing girl, her innocent semblance long erased by the malevolent unmaking.
This chilling epiphany snapped Didé back to the deadly peril surrounding him. Jagged claws and talons flashed from the fog's shroud, shredding his cloak as he whirled to face the onslaught. His sword was lost in the haze, leaving only a small dagger at his belt to fend off the massing undead.
The dagger's modest length was hopelessly outmatched by the sheer number of corrupted assailants. Yet it stood as Didé's only defense against joining their cursed ranks for eternity. He clung to tattered shreds of courage, fending off their snapping fangs and hooked talons with desperate parries.
Steel sparked against brittle bone and rotted sinew, but severed limbs and wounds barely slowed their relentless press. They multiplied with every retreating step Didé took, unfazed by dismemberment as they clawed for his living flesh and vitality. Only obliterating their skulls or decapitation stilled their insensate trammel towards reanimation.
It became a frenzied dance of fang, blade and desperation as Didé gave ground until his back thudded against an unyielding oak trunk. The shambler's brackish spittle rained down, their gasping breaths promising unending torment if he faltered.
With a defiant roar, Didé lashed out in wild desperation, severing limbs and shearing jaws in a squalid frenzy. For precious moments, the undead mass recoiled from the cyclone of his dagger's flashing edge. But their sheer numbers would inevitably overwhelm him in an unstoppable tide of corruption...
He felt his heel catch on the root of the oak tree beneath the carpet of desiccated limbs and shredded garments covering the ground.
With a strangled cry, Didé crashed backwards, vision swimming as the back of his head bounced off the packed earth with bone-jarring force. Stars burst across his darkening sight as the corrupted horde surged forward, amorphous shapes bearing down like a tsunami of gibbering malice.
This was it then - the Crown Prince of Idollo destined to be unmade and reborn as one of these shrieking aberrations for all eternity. Didé clenched his eyes shut against the inevitable, bracing for the first bites and rakes that would initiate his profane resurrection.
But the expected lancing agony never came. Instead, a strangled gurgle followed by a heavy thump nearby snapped his eyes wide in shock.
There, rising from the swirling chaos like a specter of retribution, stood Nakaba in a low crouch, one hand braced against the earth. Her other arm was extended, gripping her curved baraka in a bloodless arc before her. A freshly decapitated horror collapsed at her boots, its torso and skull separated into sloppy ruin.
"Miss me?" The feral grin splitting Nakaba's features was equal measures relief and sadistic glee.