"Hold fast!"
The cry of a human Knight captain, his voice gravelly, in armor dented and soaked in the blood of his fallen comrades.
"Hold fast!!" Watching more and more of his men fall all around him, his war cry strained into a plea into the howling wind. It was like a hapless howl.
All around him was red and darkness, and above the sky rumbld with black clouds and arcs of lightning.
He heard the last cries and wails of his comrades, their final moments replaying like a living nightmare, one after the other.
It was a the height of a war and all around him brutal battles raged.
He watched one get cleaved in half, another pummeled into the ground in a puddle of viscera, and another's limbs getting ripped from the body.
Many lives were lost, but then as soon as they were...
The dead rose once more.
Then joined the Dark Legion, and charged against the living army of the Global Alliance.
Beneath the already lightless and mouldy sky, a dark shadow was cast over him suddenly. The human Knight captain froze, flinching in alarm as his hold around the grip of his cracked shield tightened and he turned around.
A dark, standing monolith of an Undead towered over him. Shadows and darkness spewed from its eyes, nose, and mouth, and wrapped around its ominous figure like a blazing cloak of black flames.
It was the Shade of an Orc, one of the countless Damned swarming the battlefield of Heliodor, the Edge of the World.
A devastating blow to the knight captain's head sent him flying and tumbling straight into the caked ground. Fortunately, his instincts had kicked in and he had managed to raise his round shield just barely in time, absorbing most of the impact.
Unfortunately, the blow decimated the shield, leaving the side of his head to take the rest of the devastating impact.
"Ughh..." the knight captain groaned, grovelling in the caked and bloodied earth. His left eye was dislodged grotesquely in its socket, and dark pools of blood flowed down the side of his face.
His whole world fused into a blurry picture of horrible pain and confusion, the heavy impact of the blow leaving him gasping and disoriented. His arm that held the shattered shield was twisted from beneath the elbow, and his dislodged left eye kept twitching in incessant pain.
Alas, the captain couldn't cry. The unliving monster was upon him once again. The monstrous Shade of the Orc thundered towards the broken knight and raised its heavy club mace high above its head for one final, decisive swing.
However, the entire battlefield shuddered suddenly from every direction as the air shook.
The army from the Alliance all froze in place as the ground underneath their feet trembled like the earth was splitting open from the planet's core.
Simultaneously, they all turned east towards a mighty structure of towering black stone. It was a dark, magnificent gothic castle with lustreless black walls and gates. Tall, obsidian black towers pierced through the grey sky above as rolling black clouds twisted and spun like a living top above the spires.
The dark castle was immense, its outer walls of Lightless black crystal spanning hundreds of meters on each side, seemingly across the horizon, and the towers exuded a haunting sense of sinister grandeur.
But what drew the countless gazes of the warring soldiers was the singular bright beam of golden-white light piercing from deep within the walls of the glorified castle.
The massive ray of light, like an ascending pillar into the heavens, hummed and scattered bright, warm rays. It was like a cosmic representation of life and all that was warm and true in the dark, lifeless, and hopeless expanse of the Heliodor region.
The divine sunshine rays felt like an angel's embracing touch against the surviving warriors of the Alliance. Their weary and crumbling souls, weighed by hopeless despair, felt afloat, renewed by an inexplicable invigorating essence of belief and hope.
"Oh, brave Hero..." a single soul whispered among the many. Then, like a single spark to a flame, countless other voices rose among the Alliance, reverence burning like fire in the wailing wind.
"It's the Hero."
"The Hero is..."
"He's still fighting...!"
And then—
"Aarghh!" A boisterous cry resounded from the lips of the Knight Captain from earlier. With a burning defiance in his one good and flickering eye, he reached for a bloodied broadsword and severed the space between him with a single powerful swing. A newfound strength coursing through his good arm.
Affected by the divine radiance of light from the pillar, the devilish Shade of an orc was cut with a wide diagonal slash across its blackened and dark torso.
At the same time, the raised club fell, but the knight captain's voice echoed again across the battlefield.
"That's right! We have the Hero on our side!" He rolled on his right side, swiftly evading the heavy club that smashed into the ground immediately.
With the grace of a ragdoll, the Knight Captain gritted his bloodied teeth and forced himself to rise. He staggered on his feet, his limbs and joints boiling in defiance, and leaned on the heavy weight of his broadsword and inertia to swing for the orc's head.
The warm blade cleaved flesh woven from shadows and darkness, decapitating the orc in one bold yet rough swing. The knight captain huffed hot air through his nose as he watched the Shade collapse into a mass of indistinct shadow, then disperse into the wind like black smoke.
It was then he let himself stagger forward weakly, thrusting his sword into the ground before its weight would put him there first. Strong veins crawled under the skin of his face, and his eye was bloodshot.
The warriors of the Alliance who watched this unyielding display felt the spark of hope ignited from the radiance flare again. Resolve returned to the faces of many of the knights and soldiers, hope renewed once more as they turned and charged into the unliving tide of the Shadow Legion.
Ahead of them, the swelling beam of golden-white light tearing the heavens from within the walls of the Dark Castle served as a beacon of hope.
"The captain is right," one of the knights said, ducking to evade a stray swing from a Shade and countering.
"We have Lord Alaric Sinclair on our side!" Another echoed the hearts of what the knights of the Alliance felt all together.
And with renewed vigour, they persisted to push forward; light against the darkness...
The Living versus the Dead.
***
(A/N: Hey, guys. Author here. Welcome, and thank you for reading. The prologue so far is written to be intentionally... 'wordy' and abstract like this. Trust me, it'll mellow down over the subsequent chapters. But if my descriptive writing is enough to put you off until then, then it just means this work isn't for you. So thanks for trying!)