The shard in Kael's arm burned hotter with every step toward the Necromancer's Keep. The sky had turned the color of a fresh bruise, swirling with unnatural storms. Before him, the Keep rose like a jagged fang, its gates woven from human teeth, still bloody at the roots. The air smelled of rot and ozone.
Arm (whispering):
"Home sweet home."
Kael flexed his cursed hand. The shard pulsed, making the gates shudder open.
Screeeeeeech, like bones dragged across stone. Inside, the walls breathed. Faces pressed against the stone, mouths open in silent screams; black ivy crawled with baby hands for tendrils, and a grand staircase made of fused spinal columns.
Kael:
"Vorthax's palace was bad. This is worse."
A shadow detached from the wall, a wraith in tattered royal robes. Its voice was dozens layered together.
"Kael Arcanis. He's been waiting."
Arm (tense):
"Don't trust it."
Kael gripped his dagger.
"Who's 'he'?"
The wraith laughed and dissolved into smoke.
* * *
At the Keep's heart, a corpse sat on a throne of crystallized blood.
A Skeleton, but with Kael's face stretched over the bones, crowned with shards of the same obsidian embedded in Kael's arm.
"Took you long enough."
In a shocking revelation, the Necromancer is revealed to be Kael from another timeline, one where he succeeded in killing Vorthax, only to become the very darkness he despised in his quest to 'fix' the world, with the scattered shards being fragments of his shattered soul.
"You're a fucking hypocrite."
Necromancer (laughing):
"And you're my last hope."
The Necromancer snapped his fingers; the throne room melted, replaced by a vision:
The sky is choked with smoke, the air thick with the stench of burning timber and charred flesh. The Church's airships loom like vengeant gods, their hulls bristling with cannons, raining fire upon the cities below. Cathedrals crumble, streets run red, and the screams of the faithful are swallowed by the roar of infernos.
This is not conquest; it is purification.
To the east, the earth trembles beneath the march of Vorthax's legions. The demon horde spills across the countryside, a writhing mass of fangs and fury. Villages are reduced to kindling, their people impaled upon jagged spikes or dragged, still shrieking, into the abyss. The rivers run black with blood, and the crows feast like kings.
This is not war; it is annihilation.
But worse, far worse, is the thing that slithers from the Witchwood.
At first, it seems like mist clinging to the trees, then like roots burrowing through soil. But no root pulses like a vein, no mist hungers. It spreads in tendrils, glistening and alive, swallowing farms, roads, and even fleeing stragglers from the war. Where it passes, the land changes. Trees twist into grasping, skeletal hands. Beasts melt into writhing amalgamations of flesh and thorn. The very air hums with a sound like a thousand whispering voices, Kael's voice, murmuring of order, of an end to suffering.
And then, the vision shifts.
A figure stands at the heart of the corruption, clad in tattered robes the color of old blood. The Necromancer. His face is hidden, but in his outstretched palm, a shard glows, one of many. The whispers grow louder.
"No more war. No more chaos. Only peace."
The land itself screams as the veins tighten their grip. The Church's fires gutter out. The demons falter, their forms unraveling into the morass. And the vision ends with a single, terrible truth:
This is not destruction. This is rebirth.
The world ends in three days. Unless you take my place."
The voice echoed through the chamber, cold and inevitable.
Become the new Necromancer and command the dead, reduce the Keep to rubble and set the undead free, or turn away now and let the war consume itself in endless fire."
Arm (urgent):
"He's lying. Probably."
Kael lunged past the Necromancer, past the promises, driving the shard deep into the heart of the throne.
The Keep howled, stone and shadow tearing at the seams.
"You fool!""We could have saved them all!"
Kael bared bloodied teeth.
"I don't save. I slaughter."
Then the world came apart.
The keep crumbled but the undead didn't fall. They tore into each other, a writhing storm of teeth and rot. Kael ran, the Necromancer's crown seared into his flesh, its weight dragging at every step.
Then the voices came.
A thousand dead tongues scraped against his mind, murmuring secrets, pleas, lies.
Kael flexed his cursed arm.
"Well"
"This'll get annoying fast."
Kael's crown-arm seared with every step into the Plague Barrens, a festering hellscape where even the air writhed with disease. The ground heaved like rotten meat, bile-yellow pustules bursting open to vomit flies that swirled into shrieking faces; corpses lurched in grotesque loops, flesh stitching and sloughing in equal measure, never alive, never dead, just trapped in the crawl between.
Above, the sky hung like a gangrenous wound, oozing light that reeked of scorched hair and necrotic sweetness.
"Ah, remember the good old days?"
His arm mused, tendons creaking with laughter.
"When murder was just murder? No thinking. No voices. Just… clean butchery."
Kael clenched his jaw. The crown's whispers were worse.
* * *
A figure peeled itself from the mist, a woman with skin like warped glass, her veins pulsing with black worms that writhed toward the surface.
The Plague Saint smiled, her teeth splitting like cracked bone.
"Kael Arcanis. You brought me a gift."
Her gaze locked onto the crown fused to his flesh.
The truth hit him like rot in the lungs:
The Barrens weren't just a wasteland.
They were a living plague.
And she was its beating heart.
She'd been waiting. Hungry for the crown's power to twist her realm into something worse.
Kael flicked his dagger free.
"Try taking it."
The Saint's laugh was the sound of a corpse hitting water.
"Oh, I don't need to."
She raised skeletal fingers.
"You'll give it to me."
Kael's left eye ruptured, not with blood, but with squirming tendrils that braided themselves into a pulsing mold-green orb. His ribs splintered inward, forming a second jawbone beneath his skin, teeth clicking in silent hunger. The crown shrieked in his skull, burrowing deeper into his arm like a lover.
His arm hissed, voice fraying with static.
"Shit. She's rewriting your fucking DNA!"
Choices flashed:
Fight: Tear out the infected eye, lose depth, keep his crumbling self.
Embrace: Let the plague remake him, gain power, become her weapon.
Control: Force the crown to leash the disease and lose another piece of his soul.
Kael dug his fingers into the writhing socket.
Squelch-CRACK.
The tendrils snapped like rotten rope, flinging black ichor across the sand.
A shadow swallowed the sun, the Talon, Veyra's warship, its hull grafted with demon hide, engines howling like damned choirs.
Veyra's voice boomed through the smoke:
"Heretic. You burned the Keep. Now you burn with it."
The ship's belly split open, dropping a twitching cage. Inside: a skinless demon, its exposed muscles carved with glowing hymns, whimpering as its own flesh bubbled away.
The Saint staggered back, glass skin cracking:
"Oh. They weaponized the Scourge."
The Scourge: A plague that eats dimensions. Last outbreak: a kingdom erased, not dead, undone.
The cage hit the ground. The lock clicked open.
The Saint's mutants lunged, melting as they touched the Scourge's unlight. Veyra's cyborgs ignited the air, holy promethium turning the Barrens into a crematorium.
Kael sprinted through fire, dagger aimed for the Saint's cracked-glass heart.
"Too slow."
Her bone spike punched through his gut, lifting him off his feet.
Above, the Scourge latched onto the Talon, dissolving steel into screaming vapor.
Kael's crown flared white-hot, purging the infection, scorching his veins clean
Cost: A chunk of his past, sliced away. A woman's face (mother? lover?), smile smeared to static. The taste of citrus (why did it ache?).
The Saint wrenched her bone spike free, glass body webbed with fractures as she blurred into the smoke, retreating, but not defeated. Behind her, the Talon plowed into the wastes, its demon-flesh hull peeling away in smoldering strips.
The Scourge was gone.
But where it had walked, the earth wasn't scorched or rotted, it was erased.
A yawning void, edges still crumbling inward like a wound that refused to close.
Kael collapsed to his knees, clutching his gut as the crown's purge left him hollowed-out and shaking.
"We need to find Veyra,"
He panted, spitting blackened blood.
"She knows something."
His arm twitched weakly, voice drained to a whisper;
"Yeah. Like how to kill us better."
Kael touched the hole in his memories. Then the hole in his stomach.
"Priorities."