When the silence came, none of us were ready.
For nearly two weeks, the remnants of the Imperial army fought alongside Elven skirmishers, Dwarven paladins, Orcish blademasters and priesthoods from gods that wouldn’t be caught sharing the same street before this unexpected and final war. My own cult would have been eradicated by the Light of Antioch mere days ago, but was embraced as brothers as we chanted the litany of life alongside enemies and friends, all of us unified in a last attempt to keep the swarming dead at bay.
It created a bloody cycle.
For hours, steel clashed against bone and sinew, throwing crawling hordes from the walls, fighting the risen through breaches created by foul magic, siege engines, or the raw, unrelenting perseverance of a thousand claws raking at hundred year old mortar until blocks of stone fell loose. Human and Elven archers fought back against the flying monstrosities, combinations of skeletons, bats, and something a lot less tangible that soared on wings of hate to rip men from the walls and hurl them into the swarming hunger below.
We’d use everything. Magic, prayer, blessed weapons, hell, we’d throw heated soup down the side of a rampart if we thought it’d give us a chance. Then when the bodies filled the trenches and piled around the towers fifty meters deep, the onslaught would stop and I, along with the other priests, would call out to my brothers and sisters to begin the chant.
The chant. The words of power that identified life and called to its origins. Every element and force in our universe has its words that when woven into poem and song can fortify or destroy. Prayer is power here, and always has been, and with a thousand voices we prayed. But that prayer, here, the one calling for life against the powers of shadow - it was like wiping frost from a window pane in deepest winter using a wet rag. The moment you stopped moving, the very wetness that let you clear the glass would begin to freeze becoming exactly what you fought to stop.
Just so, the very moment we stopped chanting, the flooding power of the black valley started to rise. And how long can you keep praying when the words themselves are power and unity of speech is warmth. How long before your voice stutters or cracks or you fall out of synch with your fellows? Fatigue - a sensation our enemy did not know - was the final arbiter of when the music of prayer ceased and the song of battle began once again. We bought our soldiers time to rest, time to reload, time to reorganize and clear the bodies from the walls but we could not buy them an end to the onslaught.
Piece by piece, we were losing.
As a priest of death, I felt it every time a soldier passed, followed by the twinge of nausea as their life was ripped from the peace of an honorable passing back into the parody of existence that left them crawling upwards with the rest of the massed undead at our gates.
The fortress was cracking, but not nearly as fast as the will of our soldiers. They begged for answers, prayed for guidance, wept from fatigue and the deep, chilling knowledge that no matter how well they fought, the enemy they drove back down the walls into the pits and fields below would rise again.
So when the silence came, we all held our breath. We had all heard the failure of the chant as it fell into disarray, we had all felt the power of the prayer evaporate like a morning mist, but this time the flood of unholy shadow that had rushed forwards like a tide countless times before simply did not come. There was no cheering or celebration. Instead, silence was met with stunned silence. Soldiers held weapons in trembling hands, their skin soaked with sweat, their bodies saturated with fatigue, and their souls overflowing with despair.
We waited, breathless.
But the swarm did not come.
And we did not know why.
It was almost worse.
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