They rode across a field of dead.
Too many. And his dead strode at his side, they didn’t lay crushed in the mud.
“You always were a mad little shite,” said his father.
Bedeckt fought with his axe, struggling to draw it from where it hung at Arsehole’s side. He didn’t have the strength.
“I’m already dead, you daft bastard,” said his father, shaking with laughter. “No one escapes their dead.”
Bedeckt gave up wrestling with the axe and slumped in the saddle, defeated.
Zukunft squeezed his ruined hand again, the pain cutting through his fog of misery.
“We ride a carpet of corpses,” she said. “Did you—”
“I didn’t kill all these,” said Bedeckt, not sure if he was lying. Peering into the muck, he saw the corpses wore the livery of Gottlos. While he had on occasion fought both for and against Gottlos for various would-be usurpers, he definitely had not killed this many. And he had no memory of crushing men flat. “Not my dead,” he said, confused. Whose then? Who hallucinated these half-buried corpses?
Arsehole picked his way over another body with exaggerated care. This one looking like a rabid tiger had been trapped within and torn its way free.
“These aren’t mine,” repeated Bedeckt.
“No shite,” said his father. “Brainless tit.”
Ahead, a disturbance ran through Bedeckt’s dead. A body, bent backward at an impossible angle, cartwheeled by, eyes wide with surprise.
“What the hells?”
A monster of mud and stone and wood stumbled out of the dark, knocking Bedeckt’s dead aside with earthen arms, scattering them like toys. A knife, jammed in what should have been its face, caught Bedeckt’s attention. The weapon shone bright, polished and flawless.
I know that knife. Bedeckt gave it to Stehlen—returned it, really—when they first found each other in the Afterdeath.
Stehlen is here.
Suddenly aware he clung to Zukunft’s hand like she might protect him, might save him from suffocating in madness, Bedeckt released her. He drew his axe and lifted it over his head. With a mindless roar he drove Arsehole forward.
His dead drew steel and followed, issuing screams of their own. Even his father sprinted at his side, roaring through clenched teeth.
Battle raged around Bedeckt and he lost himself to the fury of carnage, the madness of utter chaos that came with every combat. The very earth rose up against him and he hewed it apart with his axe. The world hated him. He was an abomination, his madness savaging reality.
This isn’t me. I’m sane.
Somehow this all had to make sense.
Bedeckt saw a mob of corpses drag a mud creature with arms like trees to the ground, hacking and tearing it apart. For a moment, he thought his dead would prevail, but the earth creatures weren’t alone. Swarms of demons, wraiths of smoke and horror, swept among the dead, twining about them, clawing with hooked talons. He watched in horror as a demon tackled his dead friend with the knife in his gut and dragged another demonic wraith from within the man’s corpse. His friend came apart as whatever was within burst forth.
They’re freeing their inner demons. He’d heard of such things, Wahnist Geisteskranken who thought people were infected with vile spirits and who believed they could free them, driving their demons out. But not on this scale. Thousands of phantoms flitted about the hellish scene.
Bedeckt remembered the carpet of dead beneath his feet. They were fresh, crushed by creatures of the earth, their inner demons torn free.
“This isn’t real,” said Bedeckt, chopping down a walking tree as it pulled one of his dead apart, scattering the woman’s limbs.
A rock monster knocked him from the saddle and Arsehole fled, the stone chasing after. Bedeckt rose from the mud.
At his side his father laughed and laughed.
A high pitched scream snapped Bedeckt from his killing frenzy. Zukunft, where was she?
Abandoned her already, have you?
Snarling, Bedeckt spun and charged back the way he came, swinging the axe with mad abandon. The earth grabbed at him, clutched at his legs, fought to drag him to the mud. One of his boots came free and he staggered on, leaving it behind. A demonic wraith circled, clawing at his mind and he laughed and roared “My demons are already free!” in its face. Reaching Zukunft he stood over her, battering a shambling clay monstrosity to ruin and kicking its remains away.
They surrounded him, tearing with clawed branches, pummelling with stone fists, breaking bones, and shredding flesh.
Something tore his right ear off and he felt it dangling against his neck, hanging from a strip of bloody skin.
Bedeckt laughed and killed whatever it was.
This isn’t real.
He chopped the wood arms from some tree-creature and then split the trunk of its body.
This isn’t real. I am sane.
I shall not fall.