At first, it was easy to miss—bleached fragments jutting from the dry-cracked soil like driftwood. But as they continued, the scattering grew thicker, more deliberate. Ribcages curled half-buried in the ground, hollow eyesockets stared skyward from skulls weathered by time and sun. Some were small, animals perhaps. Others… weren't.
A long femur, blackened at one end as if burned. A split jawbone with teeth too sharp, too many. Splintered spines that ran far too long. There were no burial mounds, no signs of violence. Just pieces. As though the earth itself had chewed up what had once lived here and spat out what it couldn't digest.
Seta said nothing, but her construct hovered lower still, its wings twitching erratically, like it didn't want to fly here.
Renn was the first to stop moving. "We shouldn't be here."
Terron nodded grimly. "We're already in it."
The wind carried no scent, no birdsong. It felt like walking through the aftershock of a scream.
Maia reached for Koda's hand unconsciously, and he didn't pull away. Every footstep stirred up dust the color of dried blood.
No one dared speak above a whisper. Even Elise, usually flippant, walked as if the bones might wake at the sound of her voice.
And perhaps most unsettling of all—there were no flies.
Not one.
It was as though this scar in the world wasn't just dead—but forbidden.
They pressed on single file now, the silence dragging behind them like a second shadow. Even the light seemed thinner here—filtered through a haze that hadn't been there before, dulling the shine of morning into something pale and uneasy.
The red iron veins in the ground grew thicker, coiling like roots, slick as rusted glass and pulsing ever so slightly beneath the dust. They didn't dare touch them. Even the air above them felt warmer, charged, like the hum before a lightning strike.
Renn kept an arrow nocked. Eno walked backward more than forward. Terron's hammer was already in hand.
They didn't speak. No one needed to say it.
They were being watched.
Not followed—there was no sound of footsteps behind them. Not stalked—there was no rustle in the skeletal remains scattered around them.
Watched.
Every time a rock cracked underfoot or a breeze shifted something dry through the air, someone flinched. Elise whispered a curse when a wind-flung piece of ash brushed her cheek. Even Maia had stopped praying aloud. Her hands held steady to the edge of her cloak, but her knuckles had turned white.
Koda kept leading, jaw tight, gaze locked forward. He could feel the old part of him stirring again—whatever had survived Oria's siege had been forged for places like this. Places where the silence had weight. Where the wrongness wasn't something you could explain, only endure.
Seta's construct had gone still in the air, wings frozen mid-beat, hovering like it too feared the ground below.
And then, finally, they saw it.
The hills dipped, sloping down into a wide hollow, a basin carved in stillness. At its center—half-buried in iron-veined rock and bone—something massive slept beneath the dirt.
A fractured ribcage arched toward the sky like broken cathedral spires, wrapped in dark chains that didn't rust. Stone markers encircled it, weathered but still standing. Shapes were carved into them—script none of them recognized. Not ancient. Not divine.
Warning.
They didn't step closer. Not yet.
No one breathed.
They felt it before they saw it.
The air didn't shift—it shuddered, like it recoiled from what was about to happen. That charged silence broke, not with thunder or flame, but with something far worse.
Clatter.
Dry, brittle bone against stone.
A femur twitched near Terron's boot, then rolled—unaided—into place beside another. Behind them, something rib-like slithered along the iron-veined ground, bumping in fits and starts as if drawn by an unseen thread.
The dead were rearranging themselves.
Monstrous skeletons, unlike any natural beast, began to rise—not from the ground, but from what had been left upon it. Spine by spine, claw by claw, the remains assembled with jerking, unnatural precision. Hulking torsos stitched together from the bones of different creatures cracked into alignment—wolves with talon-tipped wings, serpentine things with too many legs, twisted hybrids that could have only come from beyond the veil.
Their teeth chattered—not in speech, not in hunger—but like a wind-up toy that hadn't learned how to die properly.
Elise had already drawn both blades. Eno cursed under his breath and drew back his bowstring. Maia reached for her relics, lips already moving in prayer, though her voice trembled on the syllables.
Then the hollow shook again.
Not from the steps of bone… but from something worse.
At the basin's center, where that ancient ribcage loomed, the very air began to split. Tear, like parchment caught in fire.
A thin seam opened in the world.
The sky above the hollow darkened—not with cloud, but with absence—and the tear widened until it yawned into a black scar. And from it, dragging itself through like it had to remember how to move in this world, came a thing shaped like a man but built from desecration.
A lich.
Its bones were fused with metal—old, ceremonial armor scorched black with time and sin. One arm ended in a hand, clawed and bound in chain. The other was little more than a warped staff, fused directly into its wrist. Its back cracked as it bent, its head turning all the way around before its body followed.
No flesh. No eyes. Yet it stared.
The ground wilted beneath its feet. Iron veins thickened like they welcomed it home.
Koda stepped forward, sword already drawn, voice a low growl. "Form up."
But the lich hadn't attacked. Not yet.
It simply tilted its head. Watching. Waiting.
As if amused by their fear.
The silence shattered as the first skeletal beast lunged.
It came on all fours—part feline, part vulture, ribs yawning outward with every step like breathless lungs. Koda met it mid-charge, blade flashing in a clean arc. The creature fell apart in a clatter of limbs and vertebrae… only to twitch, shudder, and begin pulling itself back together.
Before he could strike again, another beast barreled in—a canine form, six-legged, jaws flaring with twisted tusks. Koda parried with a grunt, nearly losing his footing on the loose, brittle ground. It didn't feel like a battlefield. It felt like a trap.
"Two more left!" Elise's voice cut in sharp from the flank. "No—five! They're coming out of the ground!"
Bones stirred everywhere. Clattering. Grinding. As if the very land had become a mass grave trying to exhale its contents.
Terron was already moving, hammer cleaving through a serpentine skeleton that coiled up from the earth like smoke. It shattered—ribs flung wide—and yet, impossibly, it pulled back together again, vertebrae wriggling like worms. He cursed under his breath. "They won't stay down!"
Renn loosed three arrows in quick succession, each one punching through skulls and ribs, pinning limbs. Nothing. Moments later, the bones wriggled free and began crawling toward one another, inch by inch. Eno tried fire next, slinging a wrapped torch forward—the thing burned, but the heat barely fazed it.
"They're reforming," Maia said, voice tight with disbelief. "I don't think they can die."
A breath passed between them. A terrible stillness. That creeping kind of fear that doesn't come in roars, but settles in the spine like ice.
Koda adjusted his stance, eyes tracking the creatures circling them—none of them moving like soldiers. No tactics. No plan.
Just malice. Craving.
"I'll take front," he muttered. "We hold formation—back-to-back. Don't give them the chance to surround us."
Terron stepped in beside him. "Not much ground to give."
The skeletons pressed harder. A monstrous hulk—bull-shaped, thick with fused bones and multiple jaws stitched into its spine—plowed toward them. Koda gritted his teeth and slammed into it with full force. The bones exploded outward, but even then, even then, they started crawling together again. Piece by piece.
Elise danced through the chaos, blades singing in short arcs. She severed limbs and cracked spines, but nothing stopped them. Not fully. Not for long.
Seta's breath hitched. "They're… dragging the bones of everything they've killed. Just folding it into themselves."
It was true. The ground beneath them writhed—torn-up earth littered with shards of ivory and rust-colored marrow. Half-formed beasts jerked into motion where enough pieces had piled together. Some were abominations—multiple legs, heads with mismatched jaws, human hands curled into claws.
Maia's magic flickered, shielding them in golden pulses. But she couldn't keep it up forever. "They're not just remnants," she said, eyes wide. "They're being controlled. Every motion… it's orchestrated."
Her gaze shifted past the horde.
The lich had not moved.
Still wreathed in that unnatural stillness, its body twisted at sharp angles—like its bones had been assembled by someone who didn't quite know how people were supposed to look. Its fingers curled slowly through the air, as if plucking strings. The undead answered the gesture like puppets on command.
It was playing. Not attacking. Not advancing. Just toying with them.
And all around, the bone field was coming alive.
Koda ducked under a sweeping claw, parried another snapping jaw, and stepped back just long enough to breathe.
Everything moved in patterns. Even chaos had rules.
Seta's words rang in his ears: They're just dragging bones into themselves…
He turned, scanning the battlefield. Dozens of skeletal forms twisted and lunged, broken pieces rebuilding themselves into nightmarish shapes. But each had something in common—no matter how mangled, no matter how unevenly rebuilt, there was always one skull.
One. Singular. Central.
The rest of the body could be chaos, but the head—the skull—always held court.
He spun as another beast came for him, something vaguely feline with a lopsided spine and jutting ribs. Koda didn't dodge this time. He stepped in, let the thing come to him, and with a sharp grunt drove his pommel down in a savage arc—straight through its skull.
It cracked like brittle pottery, collapsed beneath the weight of his strike and turned to dust. The creature fell in a heap, twitching.
But it didn't rise.
Not immediately.
Instead, the bones around it quivered, shifted. And then—like iron filings drawn to a magnet—they scattered, crawling away from their host. Fragments of ribs and claws dragged themselves across the bloodied ground, inching toward another undead like soldiers retreating to reinforce.
It wasn't death, not in the truest sense.
But it was severance.
"That's it," he murmured, watching the pile stay still, hollow and broken. "That's it."
He spun around and bellowed, voice cutting over the clash and shrieks of bone against steel.
"The skulls! Take the skulls! Crush them—don't let them stay whole!"
A pause in the storm.
Then—
Terron roared as he switch from swing his hammer around to control the crowds to slamming it down into the head of a charging brute. Skull shattered, body collapsed, bones twitching listlessly.
Seta adjusted her stance, her next blow snapping through the temple of a leering skull—and it, too, dropped like a marionette with its strings cut.
Elise darted past two undead, blades flashing not at torsos, but straight for their heads—precise, controlled.
The tide began to shift.
Maia, wide-eyed, caught on at once. Her next burst of energy didn't blast a group back—it focused like a laser through the eye socket of a skeleton mid-charge. It fell apart instantly.
Even the lich seemed to hesitate. Its fingers paused in the air, just a flicker, just enough to be noticed.
Koda's jaw clenched.
He raised his blade high, voice louder now, firmer. "Crush the heads! That's where they live—take their minds, and they fall!"
And one by one, the monsters began to stay down.
But what remained… was becoming worse.
The battlefield, once filled with a chaotic tide of animated bones, was beginning to still—but not in victory. The weaker shells, the hastily formed mockeries of beasts, had been torn down and crushed. Their skulls shattered. Their essence spent. And yet, the air hadn't lifted. The weight pressing on their lungs only grew heavier.
The silence that followed was not relief—it was raw anticipation. A held breath before the blood curdling scream.
Then came the sound. A low groan. Like glaciers grinding beneath the earth, like marrow grinding in a cracked femur.
They turned to the center of the field. To the place where the bones had been drawing. Gathering. Twisting.
It was building something.
At first, it made no sense. Bones piled, writhed, shifted—hundreds of femurs, ribs, jaws, claws, tusks, and spines, all forming a monstrous mass, like some nightmare forge had spat out a beast too large and too wrong for any one shape.
It had no face. At least, not a consistent one.
Instead, the skulls of dozens of beasts adorned its bulk like ritual beads—some set as shoulders, some nestled like growths down its twisted spine, others embedded in a nest of ribcage at the crown. A dozen jaws snapped at the air from where a head should be. Three spines led to a single hulking torso. Clawed limbs jutted at odd angles, some far too small to support the weight, others dragging behind, hooked with barbed joints.
It stood—if one could call it standing—on a mass of tibias and vertebrae fused into pillars that resembled legs. Its arms were like siege towers, bones locked into sharp plates and hinges, swinging with unnatural grace despite their grotesque construction.
One leg moved. The ground trembled. Another step.
It turned toward them—not with eyes, but with instinct. Hatred. Hunger.
A cold wind swept across the clearing, and even the Lich, looming behind it like a conductor before an orchestra, tilted its skull as if offering its final hand.
Seta muttered something too low to hear, her breath clouding in the sudden drop of temperature. Renn and Eno drew back instinctively, arrows notched, but unsure where to aim. Elise, ever poised, blinked slowly—calculating, silent. Terron tightened his grip on the hammer with a grunt that was more dread than readiness.
Koda took one step forward.
His mouth was dry. His heart pounding in his ears.
The thing was watching them now.
Waiting.
And the final battle of the bone yard had only just begun.