God Within Us

Do not be afraid!” was Vasilisa of Belnopyl’s call, a mountain echo over the rattling shrieks of madness.

The crossbowmen on the walls were shaken from their terror by her call - the voice of a lord, a warrior, even, clad in armor as she was. As the dead and the Sleepers swarmed over the dark pools and sucking mud, the first rank of Rovetshi men drew up to the battlements, cheeks pressed to their crossbow stocks and…waiting…waiting…

And then, there came the cry of, “Shoot!”. And a hundred bolts cut a song of feather-and-steel through the air.

Against the deadly rain dozens of Balai townsfolk fell, and ragged cheer came up from the men, but it died quickly. The approaching tide did not slow, and those who collapsed were merely crushed underfoot by their own kin and the dead, pushed deeper into the muck.

“My lady, they’re not stopping!” one crossbowman shouted up to her, and then another gave a cry as he pointed further to the south. “Look! More, coming from the trees!”

From where she stood atop one of the town’s wooden watchtowers, she saw another swarm of shadows emerging from the southern woods, moonlight glinting off yellow-white skulls, scythes, and pitchforks. She heard the distant shouts and the hail of bolts as the militia all along the gatehouse roused to meet the tide, but they were too few, and the dead too many. Everywhere, they’re coming from everywhere. Come to swallow this town whole.

But then there was another voice within. No - do not let it break you. Do not let your spirit die.

“Keep shooting!” she yelled down to the men on the walls. “Your words will not send them back to their graves, so keep shooting! Loose!”

The second volley brought down more dozens of the maddened townsfolk, but still, the tide did not halt. By the time the men on the easten battlements loosed their third volley, the swarm was so close Vasilisa could feel their high shrieks like a rotting blast, causing her skin to crawl - and then they smashed into the palisade, a ram of hundreds living and dead.

The wooden battlements trembled beneath the sheer bulk of maddened flesh and bone - the eastern walls creaking and groaning as they had not for an age. For a moment it felt as though the tide would simply smash through the palisade, but the ancient walls did their duty, and held before the swarm. When she looked down from the watchtower, Vasilisa saw the crossbowmen shrink back from the impact - and feared they would break just at the sight of the dead up close. But when the grasping hands of the dead and the sleepers snatched only at thin air, the men held firm as their walls, and some found the courage to lean over the battlements and more bolts at the growing throng around the base of the defenses.

The crossbows’ thrumming and the thumping of bolts striking home became a strange, rhythmic tune of their own, playing out from all across the walls as the dead charged in from every direction. All around for a half-mile, Vasilisa saw the ground was now choked with ever more bodies of the slain, and yet the madness of the watching stars drove the sleepers and the dead ever on, like more and more cattle. The dead fell in droves about the base of the walls, piling higher…higher…

No, came the thought with the realization. The corpses of the sleepers were piling ever higher. A ramp. They’re building a ramp.

No sooner had the thought come to her mind, she saw one of the ancient dead suddenly scramble over the mounting bodies and leap for the walls. The dead man’s bony fingers found purchase on the edge of the battlements, followed by a screech as he climbed over. When one militiaman rushed forward to push the skeleton from the walls, the dead man buried his rusted axe in the crossbowman’s face - then dragged both axe and man over the wall to join the ramp of dead flesh.

Behind the lone ancient warrior, more of the raised dead began to climb over the grisly ramp, dozens of slain packed tight into a steep slope that settled against the walls. The skeleton who had killed the militiaman with an axe had its own skull smashed to pieces by another militiaman's club, sending fragments of starlight drifting into the air. The man with the club laughed, until a rusted spear caught him in the chest and turned his laugh into a gurgling scream. Another skeleton climbing over the walls thrust his sword so hard through a man's belly he was lifted into the air, showering his brothers with blood as they dropped their crossbows…and ran.

It happened quickly, just as she descended from the watchtower. One crossbowman fled, then two, and then all along the eastern wall men were throwing down their crossbows and abandoning the walls to the tide of rattling, shrieking bone. The skeletons at their backs rushed after them however, and killed whoever fell behind, slaying them with weapons or, for those without, ripping through padded armor and supple flesh with bony claws.

All along the walls, she saw the militiamen pouring down from the battlements and into the streets - their courage fleeing as their walls fell to the dead. In the distance to the south, she saw Serhij struggling to shove back some of the men into the fight, but his men only pushed past him, and then the magister himself began to flee when the dead drew nearer. The militia surrendered block after block as they ran, and their ranks swelled with townsfolk who fled before the retreat of the men sworn to defend them.

When she landed on the battlements, Vasilisa nearly fell to the ground as men pushed past her in their rout. One man slipped to the ground in front of her feet, but before she could help him up from the floor a skeletal hand grasped the edge of the wall.

There was no time to shout, or even think. Vasilisa ripped the Kladenets from her back, and cleaved down at the dead man as he vaulted over and landed in front of her. The toothed blade shattered through the skeleton whole, shearing through ancient iron, bone, and marsh debris, scattering starlight and bone fragments to the air as the body came apart.

“Stand and fight!” She shouted to no one, everyone, and her warrior's voice awakened into a roar of scraping stone and cracking glass. The men nearest to her faltered in their retreat - and then they stopped, drew axes, nail-studded clubs, and cleavers, and turned back to face the dead men by the side of their lady who stood alone.

The living fought, the living screamed, and the living died in droves all along the streets below, where some of the militia fell back to the hasty barricades of piled debris and, seeing their comrades on the battlements rally, they stood to give the swarming dead battle. Vasilisa struck apart another skeleton on the walls, and her blade carried through the first to crush the skull of a second. She took an axe-strike to her arm, and a sword cut to her stomach, but the castle-forged maille turned away each blow with a metallic rattle as she pressed on.

More and more dead were smashing into the palisade, and the rocking of the battlements nearly threw her from the walls once more. As Vasilisa smashed another dead man into bone dust, she heard the terrible groaning and snapping of collapsing wood sound from behind her, followed by calls at her back of, “Below! Watch out below!”

When she looked back, she saw the dead swarming over the watchtower where she had just stood, and a dozen axes and claws hacked apart the rotted wood, sending the whole tower leaning over the battlements - and then it collapsed, careening for the streets, the militia and townsfolk below.

No.

The buzzing in her chest had never felt so powerful, so terrible as in that moment. She reached her hand out in the direction of the falling tower, and the strength of the gods whose names she did not know filled her soul.

She sensed a strange force snake across her outstretched arm, and as it flew free from her fingers it grew into a terrible, unseen claw that she felt wrapping around the disintegrating tower, clutching it in the palm of her hand. The debris fell to a sudden stop in the air, ten feet of rotting, shattered wood and rusted iron bands hovering just above the ground. Shouts of confusion and terror sounded from the fighting men below as the tower hovered overhead, its fall seeming frozen in time, blanketing them in its looming shadow. Then Vasilisa raised her hand, and cast the tower from the streets below as far and hard as she could.

Her buzzing heart felt as though it would rattle to pieces as she sent the great tower crashing down against the dead on the battlements. Three dozen raised souls did not give so much as a final shriek before the tower's bulk crushed them, and from beneath the shattered ruins of the watchtower trailed a swarm of flickering lights into the waiting night sky.

The militiamen roared a warcry, and those who roared brought their brothers from the precipice of despair, and all plunged once again into battle against death itself, raised from the marshes. Then, pounding down the streets, Vasilisa heard the clattering iron and steel of the armored druzhina who made their stand at the gatehouse and streets fighting their way back to her, rallying fleeing stragglers as they went. Green as they were, the druzhinniks were still men trained since childhood for war - this was their destiny, and they cut through the raised dead in droves with axes and warhammers, while rusted blades and bony claws simply shattered against lamellar, leather, and maille.

The druzhinniks cleaved through the swarm, and then before her eyes, Vasilisa saw the swarm begin to fall back before the charge of armored men and the militia in their wake. Fighting the maddened dead as madmen themselves, the Rovetshi defenders first forced the dead from the barricades, and then pushed them from the town proper entirely, screaming all the way with the fury of men forlorn.

“Druzhina of Rovetshi!” Vasilisa cried out to the warriors, guiding them to her with the Kladenets. “With me! Throw them from the walls!”

“ROVETSHI!” came the roar of the druzhina in reply, drunk with battle-fury. Then, cries of, “VASILISA! VASILISA! VASILISA!”

The druzhina fighting along the streets rushed to her side up on the walls, and the dead men gave their shrieks in return as they met the household guards with their rusted blades in hand. Their lines clashed, and in the middle of it all Vasilisa stood, surrounded by death on all sides as druzhinniks screamed, died, and fought by her side. Yet it was only in the midst of battle, with death all around, did she feel truly, beautifully alive. Power, raw and electrifying, intoxicating, flowed through her entire soul - and she let herself surrender to the song of her heart, and the rhythm of battle.

A cry for Belnopyl, for her home, for her family, for love, escaped from her lips in another mountain echo, and then she rushed ahead. The terrible, unseen claw of hers that had grasped the fallen tower turned, and by her will it plucked from the battlements a skeletal man wielding a mud-covered greatsword - pulling him into the air.

As the skeleton flailed wildly in her invisible grasp, she crushed her fingers together until his ancient bones were ground to dust in her palm. The bone dust floated to the ground in a white flurry, and then she swept the claw downwards, sending her invisible hand crushing through and through the rattling, shrieking ranks, sending dozens who stood against the druzhinniks tumbling down to the cobblestone streets where they shattered.

With every crushed skull, with every skeletal body smashed by hammer, mace, and claw, the lights of the stars drifted up to the sky freed from the ancient bones, washing the town in a pale blue light. Beneath the many fading, flickering lights which illuminated night into day, Vasilisa saw her people die all around her.

One green druzhinnik at her side fell beneath three skeletons, who twisted his helmeted head from his shoulders in a gory spray before she could hack them off the boy. Further along the battlements at the gatehouse where the fighting grew thickest, she saw another skeleton shattered to pieces in a single blow by a druzhinnik's two-handed axe, erupting in a blinding flash of starlight before the bones fell to the ground without life once more. In the streets, a militiaman pressing a wound to his gut swung his short club with screaming abandon, shattering a skeletal hand, then the ribcage, and then the skull into tiny fragments before falling to the ground and not getting back up.

Her people fought, and her people died in agony and glory. But they were winning. At terrible, grinding cost, they were winning, they were forcing them away.

She found herself lost in the terror, the intoxication, the sorrow of battle which came to her all at once - it was her whole world, to hack and cleave with the Kladenets, to sweep and crush with the dread hand of the gods only she could sense. She moved with the dread hand in front of her, crushing the dead men into dust while she hacked down at grasping hands and leering skulls where they appeared beneath and beside her, pushing on and on. Eventually she realized she had reached the gatehouse, though where there had once been twenty, there now remained only a half-dozen men by her side to meet the druzhinniks on the other end of the gatehouse. The rest of the men, commoner and noble alike, lay scattered along the walls where their life essence dripped from the battlements to join the bloody tide glutting the town and the earth.

As her hand swept another horde from the walls, pushing ever nearer to meet the armored warriors, she saw from the corner of her eye a shadow play across the battlements. When she turned to face the dead man climbing the wall to her side however, it was too late. She felt a strike to her gut knock the breath from her, forcing her back several steps until she felt herself hovering over the edge of the walls - and through the agonizing pounding of her head, she could make out screams of alarm from the men down below.

When she looked down, she saw five feet of rusted iron and rotting wood protruding from her left side, clutched in the hands of an ancient spearman with a bony, eternal smile, mocking her.

She moved on instinct, on power. The rising tide of death had never made her feel more alive, more untouchable, more unkillable. She had feared death and let spears harry her once in Balai, but no longer - nothing could stop her now, nothing and no one could kill her as long as she drank in the lust for slaughter. She grabbed the spear with one hand as the skeleton tried to twist it from her body, and with the other she cleaved the Kladenets through the rusted iron fittings and rotting shaft of the spear in one blow. With her second strike, she swiped the dead man's skull from his shoulders, sending it hurtling over the walls with the last of the undead who fell with starlight in their eyes, and shattered into pieces on the stacked bodies below. The spear shaft that remained stuck in her side wept blood, but she felt no pain, and staggered to her feet tall and proud, raising the Kladenets to the air.

The druzhina cheered long and loud, followed by the militia and the ragged townsfolk, and then she with them. The walls were still theirs. Their town was still theirs. Their lives were still theirs.

The shrieks of the dead still rang in her ears - but when she lifted her helmet to wipe the great torrent of sweat that ran down her face, she realized it was not some faint echo of the past. There was yet more screaming - more rattling cries carried by the rotten winds of the marshes. The huffing druzhinniks and militia glanced about ponderously, searching for where their next battle lay, and then Tikhon, the warrior who had helped armor her, was standing by her side. He lifted his sword to point to the west, the abandoned docks and the burnt merchants’ quarter. “My lady…look.”

She turned her gaze west, to the only part of the town without walls, for it was defended by the Cherech itself, wide and black and seemingly without bottom. The husks of the cogs and skiffs remained where they were, sinking slowly into the mud…but then she drew her sight to the abandoned docks, and she saw.

Rising from the black waters of the Cherech, more dead men emerged from the waters, bloated and gray, covered in sopping wet rags, weeds, and mud. Dozens were already shambling through the corpse of the market square, and with every passing moment the Cherech disgorged another bloated, rotting dozen clutching branches, oars, and mud-slicked rocks. Their rattling cries echoed through the market square again as Vasilisa jammed her helmet on once more.

“I will lead - all of you, with me!” She shouted to the gathered soldiers, but as the men milled about into formation, there came another shout from the gatehouse watchtower.

A crossbowman leaned over the railings, and pointed to the south. “The spirit! The spirit is coming!”