Deus Necros

Chapter 537: Report

“These guys are unbelievable,” Ludwig said as he approached the tree. His anger was clear as day; with a heart now, rage did not just smolder behind the bone, it moved hot in his chest and shook his breath on the way out. The cavern breathed with him, slow, damp exhalations from cracks in the stone, and the light from tar-sputtering sconces crawled over roots like worms. Every other sound died under a single, steady thud. He heard the same heartbeat from within the tree, only several hundred times more, a chorus of wet knocks layered so deep the stone itself seemed to keep time.

“I don’t think we should get anywhere close to that, that doesn’t look safe,” the guard said. Her voice came thinner than she meant; the place stole confidence from the lungs.

“It isn’t,” Ludwig said. He did not stop, but he measured each step, putting his soles on ground he had already judged and letting his weight settle only when nothing groaned. “This is a dark ritual, it’s something that I’ve seen before or at least similar. The one I saw tethers something to this world, binding their souls to the tree, giving them immortality at the cost of others’ lives. But who’s here using this? And it looks slightly different.”

His gaze drifted over the cages first, not the roots. Whimpering people slumped within iron that had long learned their shapes. The whimpers were weak not only from pain; it was the sound of throats that had decided not to hope loudly. No Djinn awaited in the gloom. No shambling demonic shape exhaled ash from a corner. Only the fetor of neglect, damp straw, stale fear, and human waste. Even that, to Ludwig, was a mercy compared to the sweetly rancid perfume of true corruption, the cloying, oily stink those creatures wore after swallowing parasites with eagerness.

He walked between the cages. Eyes followed him, flinched from him, returned. Ludwig did not flinch back. He looked, one by one, counting, measuring, noting. Scars that were too clean, blade work. Scars that were too messy, beast work. Bones set wrong by someone in a hurry. Teeth clenched around rags to keep moans from disturbing keepers. The system’s panes fluttered and stacked and dissolved before his eyes, neat text attempting to flatten people into lines.

[Human – Civilian – Critical].

[Elf – Civilian – Severe].

[Beastkin – Civilian – Maimed].

It told him nothing he couldn’t smell.

“Doesn’t seem like the perpetrator, or even the one who is tethered to the tree is here,” Ludwig said at last. His voice steadied against the heartbeat. He moved to the trunk. If trunk was even the word. It rose like a tumor of wood, all grain knotted back on itself, skin pocked with budding growths that were not buds at all. He reached up and took one.

The fruit came off too easily, like a scab pulled by an impatient child. It was ugly, a wrinkled knot with the puckered geometry of a brain and the pallor of something that never saw sun. In his palm it shivered: once, twice, once again. A rhythm, not random. Beating. That was the sound. Not the tree, this.

He split it with his thumb. Pulp tore. A film of slick membrane stretched, parted. Inside, embedded like a pearl grown wrong, lay the same small pill he had taken from a dead man’s jaws above. Not a pill. A seed.

“That’s what the tree is,” he said, more to himself than to the guard. “Not the same Profane Ritual. Not a throne built for one soul to squat upon the living. This one grows the seeds.” His mouth tightened. “And those seeds grow something else.”

“What in tarnation is that?” the guard said. Her dialect slipped when her stomach turned. She had one hand on her sword, knuckles pale, the other rather uselessly hovering near her nose as if two fingers could filter wrongness from air.

“This is what we’ve been fighting,” Ludwig said. He let the halves fall. They hit the root with a soft, wet sound and rolled, leaving a smear. “They’re breeding demons using this ritual tree…”

“Help us,” one of the women in a cage said. Her voice arrived late, as if she had tossed it and then waited to see whether it would be allowed to cross the air. She held the rotting corpse of a child in both arms with a mother’s gentleness, still trying to keep the head from lolling. Her eyes never left Ludwig. If she knew, if she accepted, if she cracked, she would break entirely, so she did not know that her child was long since gone from her embrace to that of Necros. Others found their voices when hers did, quiet pleas that climbed walls and stuck there, soft insects of sound. They had learned not to cry. But the hope a stranger drags on his boots is a terrible thing; it breeds quickly.

“This is…” the guard muttered. Her jaw went hard. The point of her ears twitched and flattened with every groan. She cut a glance at Ludwig. Duty and disgust wrestled behind her eyes.

“I don’t think you can take them in,” Ludwig said, softly. He did not waste either of them with false choices.

“I personally don’t mind, but my tribe…” the guard stalled. It sounded like an apology spoken to ten different people who were not here to hear it. Her shoulders formed the familiar, miserable hunch of someone trying to fold her sympathy small enough to hide under armor.

“I understand,” Ludwig said. He understood ugly arithmetic. If the elves took them, they would lead the world back to the branch. The empire already knew, but the empire is not the populace; and the populace is a tide that does not ask where it floods. When the tide sees a cliff, it claws.

“One second,” Ludwig said. He reached within his coat and drew the communication crystal. The stone woke like an eye, light coalescing into a narrow window of another place. Sleep-tangled hair. A nightgown a commander should never be seen in. A hand flung out to dim something off-screen.

“Why are you calling in the middle of the night? Are you giving up your mission?” she asked, voice dry. The hologram finished stitching her into focus. She stood taller as the rank returned to her posture.

“Commander, this is serious,” Ludwig said.