Little by little, these Night Elves imitated me. Sheltered from the moon, the runes glowed softly as they marked themselves on skulls and spines. Those who still had skin were tattooed and dried. Those who were only bones had a chain marked over their withered white skeletons. This was cemetery number twenty—humans only. Most had died during the first incursion. When they reanimated, they were merely cannon fodder, so we subdued them without many casualties. Yet they died with resentments and unfinished business in the world—exactly the kind of thing the Lich used to keep their bodies reanimating. These runes would give them an opportunity, one that few here could say they had.
The magic of runes was not difficult, but it required magical power. It meant tracing your will, line by line. The language did not matter—it only needed to be understood to fulfill its purpose. I wrote in Human; the elves wrote in a vulgar variant of their own tongue. They traced over that contingent while I did the same on their leader—a short human, evidently quite intelligent. That was important.
After two exhausting hours, we were ready. At my command, all the elves began to charge the runes. They were basically instructions to their bodies, information about whom to obey. Their souls, trapped after the reanimation of these bodies, began to enter. They looked at each other in horror. Some touched what had once been cheeks, arms, eyes. It was time. I had spoken earlier with the soul of their leader; he agreed. So I proceeded to activate my own runes. His body rose with ease, though he was missing an arm we had not found.
"Attention, you useless lot!"
Few remembered how they died—it had been too sudden. But they did remember the shouts of command. All adopted vaguely firm stances as he walked among the rows, picking up weapons and placing them in their decrepit hands while shouting:
"Men, we have fallen. The war now being fought is not as stupid as the one for money or prestige. It is for honor that we fight! The few human refugees from the plains, and even some who escaped the massacre where we perished, are nearby. This terrifying-looking lady has granted them a place in this forest to farm and survive, but they cannot do it alone. The hordes of the Lich King's agents are coming to kill them. The runes you see on your skin and bones are what prevent us from rising under their orders, from killing and eating our own. Let us use this opportunity! Let us show those stupid dead why we were the best of the Tundra Wolf squadron... What do you say?"
I did not stay for the shouts of loyalty. It was disheartening. Their troops actually wanted to flee, but the runes we carved on them were more for affinity with their kind—something those vicious Tundra Wolves never had while alive. When we found them, they were looting a supply cart from the warriors of Bloodyhammer.
When all the reanimated were armed and patrolling, the numbness hit me. In this week, I had raised dozens of them. Now that the elves could imitate me, they would handle the rest. A defensive circle of people defending their own—that maneuver did not please our lord, but he admitted it was best. Saving as many villages as we could, we brought them here, assigned them territories and skeleton warriors to protect them. In return, they farmed, and when the advance troops of human soldiers came to overthrow us, they thought twice upon seeing that there were no slaves or anything of the sort here. It was a delaying measure, as the true evil was still beyond my reach.
The keep still looked imposing, no matter how many times siege weapons reached it. I knew little of this; the leader of the Dark Elves had handled the defenses during the terrible week I spent healing the Dark Lord.
He arrived half-dead. The phoenix did not look much better. I spent days and nights healing them, mending physical and magical wounds. The potion the Dark Lord had prepared restored my magic but not my concentration, so on several occasions I had to stop to reread texts on medicine, magic, control. I even wrote a few that now served as a basis for fighting the corruption spreading across the continent.
At the entrance, a phoenix feather awaited me. Even though it asked me to give it a name, I dared not—it was a free being and should choose its own name. Yet it assured me it would serve me faithfully, even unto death if necessary—something it nearly achieved to save my lord. The message was amusing; it was a relaxed being when it had no mission. Still, the message was not encouraging. My lord was still reading.
When he could sit up, he began to read everything he had not reviewed before. Then he descended to the underground libraries, where he had first found these miserable elves imprisoned by their cruel masters of the same species. Now he visited what he called the "dream reality." It always worried me. Before reaching the library, a very strong aura was noticeable there. His magical field was so intense yet so delicate that he could deploy it with such finesse that I did not feel it—even with my own field surrounding me, I had to be very perceptive to sense that someone was here. When I entered, I saw him floating. He was still asleep, yet he read and learned. These were books that could not be opened under normal conditions—to do so would only find blank pages. They were among the things the dwarf king had left in his tomb, which was why they had not been looted. Yet in those realms, with the right strength and knowledge, it was possible to access a whole world of knowledge dating back eons.
I left him be. Since the lost battle against the Lich and the Queen of Chaos, he had immersed himself in a feverish search for some way to face the Dead King and eliminate the threat of the rift between realities. He barely slept a few hours. The rest of the time, he read or rehabilitated himself to regain a strength I did not think possible in humans—especially not in those with the injuries he had suffered.
Something woke me. An intrusion—a large one. It was so strong that it made my field waver. With difficulty, I maintained control over the shield that kept the undead and some of the weaker humans away. After five seconds, the presence calmed and stabilized. It was someone's shield—someone I would have no chance against. It was rage, hatred, so concentrated that I had to clench my teeth to keep from screaming. I ran to its source. It was in my lord's chamber. When I entered, I could not believe what I saw.
On the floor lay an elf—an ancient elf, equipped as an assassin, armed with hundreds of protections and a sword. Dead. A hole in his chest where his heart should have been. Standing beside the body, the Dark Lord—with a wound that had cut out his eyes!