Rebirth by Darkbringer & Steven McNeill

Author:Darkbringer & Steven McNeill
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2016-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

Thinning the Herd

Taking a moment to recover my strength, I slowly stretched out a trickle of energy back into the surrounding earth, careful for any sort of corruptive response to my gentle probing. Much to my relief, simply feeling the ground didn’t cause the darkness to react violently and attack me again. Slowly, moment by moment, I carefully increased the flow of energy outwards to seek for anything that might give me a better clue about the missing team, expanding my search along the ground in an ever-widening series of circles.

I could feel multiple swarms of the lumbering dead scattered all across the forest, within the confines of the iron circle which enclosed the graveyard. Many of the movement patterns were those of the shambling zombies and skeletons which we’d just faced, but there were some which moved along in a series of movements that I found almost impossible to predict. One moment I could feel the creatures on the ground, then they were gone, only to reappear on the ground elsewhere a dozen meters away a moment later.

Were they doing some sort of teleporting? Instant travel from one spot to another? I really couldn’t tell how they were moving; I could just feel them on the ground, then lose them, then feel them back on the ground once again. This new, unknown enemy was worrisome to me, so I made a point to try and track them as closely as possible so we could avoid them, if at all possible.

Expanding my search even further, I finally felt what I’d consider the first traces of the others, at what I can only describe as barrow mounds scattered in the forest. Some of the mounds were still sealed; I could feel the earth enclosing them completely. A few others, however, had been cracked open; I could feel where a hole had been dug or bored into them, by what I could only assume was the actions of the other group.

Some of the opened mounds were simply small, enclosed chambers where the dead lay at rest, but a few connected to a series of winding tunnels that wove and twisted together in a tapestry of confusion. Some mounds were connected together by these underground tunnels, whereas others weren’t and were connected to a completely different set of passageways. From what I could tell with my gentle probing of the earth from this far away, there was at least a dozen of non-connected labyrinths in the graveyard, and trying to follow and unwind them all from here to pinpoint an exact location of the other group was simply impossible.

“I think I’ve found us a lead on the others,” I finally told my group. “This place is swarming with the dead like we just fought, and with other creatures too which worry me considerably. At first guess, I’d say there must be hundreds of the dead moving out here, and dozens of somethings, which seem even more dangerous.”

“Tha... that’s a lot of dead,” Jess stammered nervously.

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