For the first time, Barbatos considered that Elise might be more than a pleasant diversion and bed warmer. She could be forged into something greater.
"You may join," he said at last, his voice carrying finality like a closing door.
Her head snapped up, silver eyes wide. "Thank you for your great generosity, Lord!"
Excitement lit her features, though in the shadows of the hall, another reaction stirred.
From across the chamber, Maya, the high-ranking drow, stiffened. Her heart skipped. Elise — whom many believed had fallen out of favor — had just secured a place at Barbatos' side for the coming war. The implication was clear: her influence was far from diminished.
Around Maya, a cluster of noble drow women exchanged quick, calculating glances. In their world, alliances were knives, and Elise had just acquired a sharper blade than most.
Maya's stomach knotted. The careful network of support she had built these past months suddenly felt fragile — like a web in a storm, one violent gust from tearing apart. That was the truth of power without strength: it existed only so long as no one stronger chose to take it.
The dragons, meanwhile, were barely paying attention to the political undercurrents.
A black dragoness Isis, her eyes bright with curiosity, tilted her head at Elise's kneeling form. "Why does the small elf-woman have so many wipes? Do they enjoy punishing or punishment that much?" he whispered to a fellow dragon beast.
"Yes," came the quiet, amused answer from a red dragoness Freya who was beside her. "It is their way. Here, women enjoy punishing males of their species so much it's a rule… until someone greater rules over them."
Another true green dragon, Saith, nearby snorted. "Drow politics. Intrigue wrapped in silk and poisoned smiles. They would poison their own clutchmates if it meant one more step up their web of power."
And yet, from the perspective of the former dragon beasts, the drow were captivating. Their city shimmered with alien beauty — streets spiraling upward into towers carved from stone like frozen webs, bridges hanging from the cavern roof, every inch of architecture laced with both artistry and menace. The women carried themselves like predators in human form, their spider-silk gowns clinging to lithe figures, their eyes burning with the same hunger they hid behind formal courtesies.
The males, leaner and less adorned, followed a pace behind — deferent, silent, their existence an unspoken reminder of the matriarchy's iron law.
Barbatos did not care for the subtleties. His gaze was already turned outward, toward the deeper parts leading to the Gray Dwarves' domain.
"Lord Barbatos!"
The call rang out before its owner appeared — light and melodic, but with a tremor of excitement that even the most stoic dragon ear could catch.
From between the two serried ranks of Drow attendants, a small yet striking figure suddenly bounded forward with the lithe grace only a demi-human could possess. She was a bunny girl — an exotic vision — wrapped in the layered silks and spider-sigil brocade of a Drow matriarch's ceremonial gown. The black-and-silver fabric clung to her with sinful precision, caressing every dip and curve as though tailored by lust itself.
With each hurried step, the heavy silk shifted and swayed, parting just enough to reveal teasing glimpses of her plush thighs and the soft, hypnotic sway of her hips. The swell of her breasts pressed against the confines of her robe, their tempting shape accentuated by the push of movement. Her long dark hair shimmered like midnight satin under the torchlight, bouncing with each motion, while the gentle rise and fall of her chest drew the eye irresistibly.
Her long, velvety ears twitched with a life of their own — a silent, sensual punctuation to the way her lithe frame moved beneath the silks — every step a subtle, unspoken invitation.
As she ran, ears bouncing with each hurried step.
It was Shea.
Without hesitation, she reached him, her arms wrapping around one of his talons — a single hooked claw much larger than her entire torso.
A rare smile softened Barbatos's face. Even the black dragon himself could feel it; the warmth in his chest was not born of conquest or power, but of something more personal. Shea, like Westbey, Sophia, Thena, Danyla and a select few others, he regularly sleeps with; all of them were pure females and some part of his heart is on them.
They belonged to a small circle of women who had touched more than just his body — they had, in some strange way, touched a part of his heart. And Shea had been the first.
A decade had passed since they had last seen one another. Even without the binding force of a soul chain, he could still sense her dependence and happiness on him as clearly as the scent of her heartbeat.
Barbatos was not a creature given to sentiment, yet he found himself lingering on her face for a moment longer than necessary.
Around them, the gathered dragonesses exchanged glances. Many had never seen their sire like this — the fearsome black dragon Father, whose roar had made mountains tremble, allowing such a tiny creature to cling to him without rebuke.
They studied her with thinly veiled curiosity. The bunny girl looked… well… harmless. A bit dazed, even. Her wide eyes and soft features lacked the sharp intelligence they expected in someone who had caught their father's attention.
How? they wondered. How had this one claimed a space so close to him? And why had they never seen her before?
Only Eirlys, among the dragons present, seemed unsurprised.
From the dragons came a stream of quiet whispers. One, barely past fledging, tilted his head to the side. "She clings to Father like a hatchling to its dam. Is she not afraid?"
Another, older but lacking ancestral memory, murmured, "No… she trusts him. That is stranger still."
The true dragons, those whose blood carried the memories of their ancient forebears, reacted differently. One snorted faintly. "Attachment. A mortal's weakness. She will age, fade, and be gone." But there was a flicker in the old one's eyes — not quite disdain, not quite approval — as if remembering something from long before.
From the shadows at the side, Lyanna — the Black Dragoness whose own relationship with Barbatos was… complete — narrowed her eyes ever so slightly. She had no intention of making a scene, but her gaze lingered on Shea's hands resting against his scales.
Maya, the ambitious Drow who had been maneuvering for influence, saw something else entirely: danger. This little bunny girl was not a political rival by any measure, but she represented a bond formed outside Maya's webs of control. Bonds like that were unpredictable — and therefore dangerous.
Shea, for her part, was drowning in a swirl of emotions. More than ten years without seeing him, ten years of wondering if he even remembered her — and now here he was, towering and magnificent, close enough to touch. Yet before she could even begin to speak, before she could say the words she had kept locked in her heart for Moran for more than a decade…
"Shea, you stay here."
The words were gentle, accompanied by the weight of one massive claw resting lightly atop her head, the scales warm against her hair. But they were still a command.
Her ears drooped. "Lord, I… understand."
She stepped back slowly, sadness curling at the edges of her smile. She knew her place in his world — and she knew her strength was nowhere near enough to walk beside him into battle. She could only offer him small comforts, fleeting moments to ease the burdens he carried. But a part of her had hoped…
Barbatos turned away, issuing a few crisp orders to the dragons assembled. Then, without further delay, he took Lisa and a wing of dragons — black, chromatic, and metallic alike — into the air, their wings cutting through the underground currents toward the Black Lake.
Wasn't the Gray Dwarf Kingdom so eager to find black dragons? Barbatos thought with a grim curl of his lips. They will be overjoyed to find not only more than twenty of us… but our chromatic and metallic kin as well.
But the real reason for leaving the Drow soldiers behind was one few knew. Barbatos intended to turn the entire Gray Dwarf Kingdom into a necropolis — a kingdom of the dead.
There were a million souls still there in their capital, gray dwarves and slaves of other races. Not one would remain alive. Arthas' undead would harvest them all, raising their corpses into an army that would never tire, never question, and never betray.
In the cultivation hierarchy of death-aspect powers, this was a perfect foundation: a stable anchor from which to grow a near-limitless force.
The living could tire. The dead could only work.
In the cold calculus of war, dead enemies were the best kind — and in the hands of Arthas, they would become weapons.
As the wing of dragons vanished into the black distance, Shea remained behind among the watching Drow and dragon. Her fingers twitched at her sides, as though reaching for something already gone. Trying to feel the warmth she just felt. Around her, the Drow murmured in their flowing, poison-sweet tongue — the women with amused disdain, the men silent as ever, their gazes flicking between Shea and the vanishing shadow of the black dragon lord as they surrounded her.
Shea knew, deep down, that this was how it had to be. But that knowledge didn't make the ache any less sharp.
—
The Black Lake lay ahead like a wound in the earth, an abyss carved into the Underdark itself. Its waters — if one could even call them waters — were smothered beneath a suffocating veil of black-purple fog. The haze writhed as though alive, coiling in great serpentine swathes that refused to be broken by wind or ripple. Even the flapping of dragon wings, mighty enough to stir storms, could not disperse it.
It was not mist, not truly. It was death given form, a saturation of corrupted spirit-energy and malice drawn over centuries into this place, condensed into a fog so dense that even the senses of dragons faltered. Their eyes — eyes that could pierce mountains, peer through shadow, and perceive the shimmer of souls — saw nothing beyond a few paces. Even gifts like Darkvision, Danger Perception, or Vibration Sense bent and broke, smothered under the pressure of the fog.
It was not merely concealment; it was suppression. To step into the dark purple-black fog was to feel one's very soul dim, as though a colossal weight pressed down on it.
And yet, for those who dared to plunge through that choking veil, a new sight awaited.
Beyond the curtain of dark purple-black mist stretched a nightmare without end.
The Black Lake's surface was thick and sluggish like oil, reflecting no light save the faint shimmer of balefire. Along its shores, and spreading outward in a vast horizonless tide, gathered an army that should not have been. Countless undead thronged in suffocating silence, their outlines shifting and dissolving in the fog until revealed again in grotesque clarity.
The front lines were a sea of skeletons. Tens of thousands — no, hundreds of thousands — pressed shoulder to shoulder, their ivory bones gleaming whenever the ghost-light licked them. Some were crude, cobbled together from fragments of different corpses, their joints ill-matched but held by necrotic force. Others were tall and spindly, elongated beyond natural proportion, their jaws gnashing ceaselessly as if gnawed by the echo of hunger they no longer felt.
Behind them came the corpses. Not the tidy kind of burial dead, but horrors shaped by despair. Some stood like bloated giants, their skin stretched thin until it tore, revealing glistening cords of sinew. Others were starved husks, so emaciated their bones pierced through their parchment flesh. Their sockets burned with ember-light, each flicker a fragment of will stolen from the living. Clean blades still clung to bony fingers. Full shields and sundered Helms in full armors dragged behind them, whispering of wars long forgotten.
The air trembled with whispers. Shades and wraiths glided between the ranks, their corporeal bodies unraveling and reforming endlessly. Their voices merged into a chorus of despair, muttering in tongues that gnawed at sanity. Banshees screamed without sound, their faces twisted into masks of grief eternal. Each one carried the residue of lives once lived — the memories of betrayal, of slaughter, of torment — woven into their cries.
There were ghouls too, hunched and slavering, their black saliva hissing where it struck the stone. Some dragged their claws against the ground like feral dogs, while others stood upright, resembling starved men animated only by hunger. Their teeth snapped rhythmically, anticipating living flesh.
Towering above them were mummified horrors, draped in the rotting finery of forgotten worlds. Golden circlets clung stubbornly to their shriveled brows, while cracked rings bit into desiccated fingers. Their hollow sockets glowed faintly beneath cracked bandages, curses bleeding from their very skin. Wherever they stood, the air itself soured, and lesser undead seemed to shudder in their presence.
The deeper one looked, the more grotesqueries emerged. Some dragged themselves forward by their hands alone, torsos carving grooves into the damp earth. Others lurched on twisted legs that bent the wrong way, like broken marionettes. A few bore wings — not of feathers, nor even of flesh, but ragged, skinless things that fluttered uselessly, rasping like torn parchment. Chains rattled as others advanced, heavy shackles dragging grooves into the stone.
And still more — abominations so varied one could scarcely catalogue them. Forms barely the height of children, lurking in clusters, their laughter a high-pitched mockery. Giants of bone, cobbled from the remains of dozens, their frames grotesquely fused. Each new shape revealed itself only for the fog to swallow it again, leaving behind the oppressive certainty that there was always more.
The host did not simply stand. It breathed.
Like a tide of carrion, it pulsed in unison, an ocean of death pressing outward. The fog itself coiled around them, as though woven into their essence, obscuring their number only to amplify their dread. Looking once, one thought them countless. Looking twice, one realized the truth: there was no end.
The Black Lake itself mirrored the nightmare. Its surface reflected their twisted outlines in grotesque symmetry, multiplying each horror a thousandfold. Each ripple upon that oily water carried the echo of their numbers, the weight of their collective silence. The very stone of the Underdark groaned beneath them, as though the world itself resented bearing their weight.
And above them all, commanding them, sat Arthas.
He rode Nightmare, the abyssal steed whose hooves cracked sparks of hellfire upon the void. From its nostrils billowed smoke and flame, each breath a restless challenge to the living. The steed pawed at the empty air as though it were solid ground, stepping across the void with unease, sensing the hunger of its master.
Blue soul-flames blazed in Arthas' eyes, twin lanterns of deathly dominion. His gaze swept across the distant fortresses of the gray dwarves, stone citadels that ringed the Black Lake like defiant islands.
They had been spared deliberately. For years, Arthas had allowed their existence, knowing their armies would come, throwing themselves into the fog, feeding his host. Their fallen bodies rose again within his legions, and their life-essence condensed into his cultivation, strengthening his dominion over the Death.
Now, however, the time for baiting was done. The will of the Lord had shifted.
Arthas felt the command like a brand upon his soul. Destroy them.
At that thought, the soul-flames within his sockets flared, burning higher. In that moment, the horde moved.
Millions of undead turned their gaze as one, eyes glowing, jaws opening, claws flexing. The silence broke in a single moment, replaced with a grinding symphony of bones, chains, and shrieks. The weight of their collective malice shook the caverns, reverberating through stone and water alike.
The Black Lake became a stage of apocalypse.
And the gray dwarf fortresses, stubborn against the horizon, stood in the path of the coming tide.
---
At the same time, deep within the fortress of the Gray Dwarves, the commander-in-chief, Kurman, stood upon the highest battlement. Though his true years numbered scarcely four centuries—a span in which most of his kind would still wield hammer and axe with tireless precision—his appearance bore the weight of twice that age. His ashen skin, hardened and scarred like volcanic stone, sagged heavily around his crimson-ringed eyes that burned with a weary, haunted glow. Once, his beard had been a thing of pride, braided with iron clasps and streaked with the soot of the forges, but now it hung ragged and unkempt, streaked with white and flecked with ash. Years of endless war, and the burden of command had carved him into something more specter than dwarf—a Gray Dwarf that seemed already halfway claimed by Laduguer's silent halls.
His gaunt fingers dug into the cold battlement stones as he peered out across the horizon. The Black Lake stretched vast and endless before him, its surface hidden beneath a choking veil of dark purple-black fog. The fog writhed like a living thing, never dispersing with wind nor yielding to the touch of any spell or flame, as though it fed on the very despair of those who beheld it. Behind him, fortress torches burned with the sickly glow of alchemical fire, yet their light could not drive away the biting chill that gnawed at his bones.