As the sun rose, the men, refreshed and ready, left the house.
Gregorius, smiling and pleased with the evening, commented, "I knew the moment I laid eyes on her that she was a hidden gem."
Gundaros, frowning, replied, "We lost two good men last night. We should have killed the bitch."
Gregorius, indifferent, replied, "That's work for winter or for the savages. They won't last long in this remote place."
Dressed in a boiled leather coat and several layers of hemp, Gregorius prepared for the morning cold. Biting into a sausage, he began to count his men.
There were originally fifteen, but two had died in the skirmishes the night before. That left, theoretically, thirteen.
However, something didn't add up. Alexandros, unaware of the deaths of his comrades, questioned Gregorius, "There are three men missing, leader."
Gregorius remained silent, feeling the weight of realization. One of his men was missing, and he knew it could be the work of the savages.
Amidst the tension, Gregorius spoke loudly to the assembled men: "We will leave now! Gather your items and weapons. Let's go."
Alexandros, stunned by the decision to abandon his missing comrades, hesitated. But reluctantly, he began to move as unsettling thoughts came to his mind.
"Could it be the work of a ritual?" he thought to himself, but quickly dismissed the idea, considering it unlikely.
Then his mind turned to the woman and the man. Could it be something related to them?
Driven by doubt, Alexandros went to the abandoned house. As he surveyed the scene, he understood what had happened.
His face flushed with anger, but he sighed and continued on his way. The absence of one of the men confirmed his suspicions: he must also be dead.
Without hesitation, Alexandros mounted his horse and prepared for the journey. Gathered, the men set out from the settlement on horseback.
The journey had been long, but not entirely fruitless: they had collected cloth, books, and gold from the devastated village.
The road was deserted and silent, the air heavy and stuffy. Gregorius led the group, mounted on his horse, with Gundaros right behind and Alexandros bringing up the rear.
The others walked in formation, but the fatigue of the last few days was beginning to weigh them down. It was then that the silence broke.
On the horizon, a disturbing movement caught their attention. It was a horde. Pale bodies, with white, pupil-less eyes, were advancing slowly along the road.
Some were in an advanced state of decomposition, the flesh hanging from their bones.
Others seemed less deteriorated, but displayed a countenance of death and emptiness. The army of undead, dense and endless, consumed the entire length of the road.
Gregorius pulled the horse's reins, stopping abruptly. His eyes widened as he contemplated the scene. "What the hell is this?" he muttered, incredulous and frightened.
Gundaros, beside him, swallowed hard, his face filled with terror. "It can't be… Is this real?"
Alexandros, usually the most confident, could barely speak. He just pointed at the horde, his fingers trembling.
The other men were paralyzed, unable to react. One of the soldiers broke the silence, his voice trembling: "It's them… the Necros. They were the ones who annihilated the village."
At this, panic spread among the men. The formation broke apart.
Each man ran in a different direction, screaming and trying to escape the inevitable. "Every man for himself!" someone shouted, as the sound of armor and screams echoed along the road.
Gregorius, however, remained. He knew that running was useless. The horde was vast and relentless.
Even if he escaped for a while, death would find him. Determined, he dismounted from his horse and drew his blade from its sheath.
"If I must die, let it be fighting!" he shouted, his voice echoing in the cold air.
The undead swarmed forward without hesitation, their grotesque forms moving with frightening agility.
Gregorius raised his sword, cutting down the first ones that approached. Steel found dead flesh, but for every one that fell, three more took their place.
For a brief moment, he fought bravely. But the horde was endless.
Soon, the corpses surrounded him. He was pushed to the ground, his sword ripped from his hands as dead hands held him down.
Screams of pain and fury escaped his mouth as he was stabbed, bitten, and torn apart by dozens of the undead. Gundaros, Alexandros, and the others met similar fates.
The once-quiet road became a field of carnage.
One by one, the screams faded, replaced by the grotesque sound of the dead feeding. There were no survivors.
The undead army continued its impassive march, leaving behind only wreckage of flesh and bone.
It was dawn when the men left the settlement, leaving the woman alone in the abandoned house.
Wounded and exhausted from the night, she moved slowly, each step was an effort.
Her body bore the marks of the brutality she had suffered, but she forced herself to continue. With an almost religious care, she exposed her bruised breast and began to breastfeed her son.
The newborn sucked colostrum, but her consciousness, now inhabited by a soul from another world, was immersed in dark thoughts. The cruelty and savagery of this new world did not leave her mind.
The woman, her progenitor, had been raped before her helpless eyes. The man who was her father now lay dead, his body abandoned and beginning to decompose in the opposite corner of the room.
The scene was a cruel portrait of the inhumanity he had been forced to witness upon arriving in this world.
From the first moment of his new existence, reality had shown itself to be implacable.
Demons, murderers and mystical forces welcomed him in a terrifying way.
Two days after his birth, he was already a refugee. He remembered his father, desperate, speaking in a language that was incomprehensible to him, but familiar to his mother.
The presence of mystical powers in this world was something that excited him, and he hoped to be able to manipulate these powers.
The demons looked like zombies, and their settlement was annihilated with all the people in it being killed.
Luckily, his father noticed the army approaching and they left the village just in time. He saw the army invading the village on his mother's lap and was horrified.
His weak mother made some trips into the village to look for supplies to survive, and to collect clothes for him.
On these trips, she found a book that seemed to be a storybook.
This will help me because I will have more access to the vocabulary of this world's language and, consequently, it will make my learning of the language easier.
His mother sat in the chair, holding a leather-bound book in her hands, its edges decorated with the symbol of a radiant circle.
Curiously, he watched his mother open the book. The page, aged by time, showed a painting of Aetherios, a being of light with arms that seemed to reach the horizon.
His mother, aware of the need to communicate with the children, began to read the story even though she knew he did not understand.
"Today I will read to you about Aetherios and how he created everything we see, my little one. Listen carefully."
She began reading, her soft voice filling the room.
"In the beginning, there was only emptiness, an endless silence that covered all things. Then, Aetherios emerged, a being of pure light, born from the heart of eternal nothingness. With his first breath, he gave form to what we call time and space."
Although he did not understand the content of the book, he imagined that it could be something religious due to the symbolism in the book.
His mother, oblivious to her son's intellect, called a name that stood out from the text of the book, as if she were speaking to him.
"Athanasios."
He understood at that moment that Athanasios was his name.
"In just 48 hours, Aetherios shaped the world with his hands of light. First, he raised the land and the seas, creating places for the living to walk and for rivers to flow."
"Then, he gave life to plants and trees, entrusting them to the spirit Flora, who has since taken care of fertility and harvest. That is why we thank Flora before every meal."
After reading the paragraph, she looked at the boy and noticed a strange expression, but continued the text.
The mother turned the page, revealing an illustration of Khalion holding a hammer and sickle.
"So, Aetherios created Khalion to teach men the importance of honest work. From Khalion, we learned to plant, harvest, build, and create."
"Whenever you do something with dedication, Athanasios, it is the strength of Khalion that guides your hands."
"But Aetherios knew that men would need courage and a path to follow after death."
"So he created Anima, the spirit of the soul, to guide those who depart the river of death to eternal paradise. Anima is the guardian of our souls, the strength that encourages us when we are afraid."
She pointed to an illustration of a serene figure holding a scale.
"Finally, Aetherios gave us Lexios, the spirit of laws and peace. Lexios teaches us to be just, humble, and to live in harmony."
"When you respect the rules and act with kindness, Lexios smiles upon you."
The mother closed the book and stroked her son's hair.
"That is why we celebrate Aetherios, my dear. He gave us the world and the spirits to guide us."
"Whenever you look at a tree, or hear the sound of the river, remember that everything was created by his hands in just 48 hours."
As the days went by, life became monotonous, but Athanasios acquired a certain basic understanding of the language, and noticed a certain familiarity occasionally between some words.
And this raised a doubt in him, in his past life most European languages were descendants of an ancestral language called Proto-Indo-European, and some words could be intelligible between different languages due to a common ancestry, and also to cultural exchange.
This led him to wonder if his previous world had any connection with this one. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but he thought that something like that had a low probability of happening.
With a certain understanding of the language, he began to understand the books little by little, and he understood some things.
The undead demons were called Necros, they were part of a fairy tale made to scare children and were supposedly an ancient legend of how men defeated the long night.
However, the events that occurred after his birth left a deep mark on him and showed that it was not just an ancient legend, but reality.
As winter punished the men, Athanasios and his mother resisted the cruel winter, the months passed and finally, after a long period of scarcity, spring arrived. Cleaning the wounds and promising a new beginning.