**Janus**
I woke up with the sound of Collin knocking on my door.
“Please get up, my lord, the sun is already out.”
“Okay, just give me a minute. Yawn, ehm, could you tell me…”
“Lady Gertrude is not in the mansion right now.”
“Phew, then where is she?”
“She is currently in the Baron’s greenhouse like every morning, I have been told.”
So that’s where all those tulips came from. A Greenhouse Huh, the Baron, seemed to do an excellent job if he could afford all the glass to make a greenhouse just for flowers.
After our little chat, Collin went on to the next room and repeated his action until every member of our cohort was wide awake.
Today was the day we wanted to meet the hordes of bandits on the battlefield. Despite their advantage in numbers, I wasn’t worried that they had little to no combat experience. They preferred to make their money through intimidation, theft, and bribery. The only truly dangerous part of their forces was the few mercenaries they had been able to hire. I’m not sure what kind of mercenary would believe it to be a good idea to team up with mere bandits against trained knights from the most heavily besieged fortress in the entire continent. Still, I would make sure to find out. I won’t let the bastard who forced us to abandon our post just to deal with bandit filth get away.
With the ranting in my head done, I got out of my soft, warm bed and began to dress myself in cold, hard steel. Collin assisted me with fastening the straps so they wouldn’t become undone in the middle of combat. Even Joel was getting ready dutifully. Now that I have a closer look at my brother, I notice that he has become much leaner. So much so that his usual armor piece looked too big on him, but for now, it had to do. We were just about done when guard captain Henry burst through the door. His face pale as a corpse, he screamed,
“All of you to the wall now!”
I wanted to ask what was going on, but he left before any of us could stop him. Immediately, all eyes were on me and Joel.
“You heard him, let’s get moving!”
And with just these words, the atmosphere of calm professionalism was gone, and it had been replaced by anxiety and the will for battle. Just 20 minutes later, we had all gathered next to Henry on the wall’s battlements, gawking in fear at the shocking sight below us.
Corpses.
But what kind of corpse would make a seasoned soldier freeze from fear?
Moving corpses.
The entire plain surrounding the city, all the way to the forest line 500 meters from here, was filled with groaning corpses plodding through the field, trampling the overripe crops beneath their rotten feet.
An undead army of Skeletons, half-rotten bodies, animal carcasses, and corpses that were just a few days old. But as far as I could see, there wasn’t a single living person among them. They were slow, but they came closer and closer towards the wall. With their current speed, they would reach it in about half an hour.
“Henry, what the hell were the guards doing? How did they not notice them until now?”
But instead of answering, the old man just pointed at a group of undead in the very front of the army. Ten Guardsmen were marching along their rotten comrades, their throats slit, their bodies long, cold.
“Shit, they must have had people inside Aldmoor.”
While I was busy figuring out how it even got this far and who or what was behind it, Joel was already issuing orders and had already begun to pelt the undead with arrows. The others joined in, and soon the entire cohort had spread across the wall, shooting wave after wave of arrows against the undead horde.
Where did this army come from?
There was only one answer in my head: Necromancer.
Necromancers were the stuff of fairy tales. An evil Necromancer was threatening the land, and a group of heroes rode out to slay him. I always loved these stories as a little boy. I wished I had an adventure like the heroes in my mother’s stories, but now all I wanted to do was slap my younger self for his naivety.
But whining about our plight wouldn’t help anyone; only fighting would.
But no matter how much damage they received, they would just keep going. Still, every time an arrow pierced the skull of an undead, they would fall over, unmoving, only to be replaced immediately after. It appeared like there would be no end to them. So much for not being afraid of their superiority in numbers, huh? I had the urge to slap myself. This will be a long night.