Chapter 3: The Necromancer’s Keep

The shard in Kael's arm burned hotter with every step toward the Necromancer's Keep. The sky had turned the color of a fresh bruise, swirling with unnatural storms. Before him, the Keep rose like a jagged fang, its gates woven from human teeth, still bloody at the roots. The air smelled of rot and ozone. Arm (whispering): "Home sweet home." Kael flexed his cursed hand. The shard pulsed, making the gates shudder open. Screeeeeeech, like bones dragged across stone. Inside, the walls breathed. Faces pressed against the stone, mouths open in silent screams; black ivy crawled with baby hands for tendrils, and a grand staircase made of fused spinal columns. Kael: "Vorthax's palace was bad. This is worse." A shadow detached from the wall, a wraith in tattered royal robes. Its voice was dozens layered together. "Kael Arcanis. He's been waiting." Arm (tense): "Don't trust it." Kael gripped his dagger. "Who's 'he'?" The wraith laughed and dissolved into smoke. * * * At the Keep's heart, a corpse sat on a throne of crystallized blood. A Skeleton, but with Kael's face stretched over the bones, crowned with shards of the same obsidian embedded in Kael's arm. "Took you long enough." In a shocking revelation, the Necromancer is revealed to be Kael from another timeline, one where he succeeded in killing Vorthax, only to become the very darkness he despised in his quest to 'fix' the world, with the scattered shards being fragments of his shattered soul. "You're a fucking hypocrite." Necromancer (laughing): "And you're my last hope." The Necromancer snapped his fingers; the throne room melted, replaced by a vision: The sky is choked with smoke, the air thick with the stench of burning timber and charred flesh. The Church's airships loom like vengeant gods, their hulls bristling with cannons, raining fire upon the cities below. Cathedrals crumble, streets run red, and the screams of the faithful are swallowed by the roar of infernos. This is not conquest; it is purification. To the east, the earth trembles beneath the march of Vorthax's legions. The demon horde spills across the countryside, a writhing mass of fangs and fury. Villages are reduced to kindling, their people impaled upon jagged spikes or dragged, still shrieking, into the abyss. The rivers run black with blood, and the crows feast like kings. This is not war; it is annihilation. But worse, far worse, is the thing that slithers from the Witchwood. At first, it seems like mist clinging to the trees, then like roots burrowing through soil. But no root pulses like a vein, no mist hungers. It spreads in tendrils, glistening and alive, swallowing farms, roads, and even fleeing stragglers from the war. Where it passes, the land changes. Trees twist into grasping, skeletal hands. Beasts melt into writhing amalgamations of flesh and thorn. The very air hums with a sound like a thousand whispering voices, Kael's voice, murmuring of order, of an end to suffering. And then, the vision shifts. A figure stands at the heart of the corruption, clad in tattered robes the color of old blood. The Necromancer. His face is hidden, but in his outstretched palm, a shard glows, one of many. The whispers grow louder. "No more war. No more chaos. Only peace." The land itself screams as the veins tighten their grip. The Church's fires gutter out. The demons falter, their forms unraveling into the morass. And the vision ends with a single, terrible truth: This is not destruction. This is rebirth. The world ends in three days. Unless you take my place." The voice echoed through the chamber, cold and inevitable. Become the new Necromancer and command the dead, reduce the Keep to rubble and set the undead free, or turn away now and let the war consume itself in endless fire." Arm (urgent): "He's lying. Probably." Kael lunged past the Necromancer, past the promises, driving the shard deep into the heart of the throne. The Keep howled, stone and shadow tearing at the seams. "You fool!" "We could have saved them all!" Kael bared bloodied teeth. "I don't save. I slaughter." Then the world came apart. The keep crumbled but the undead didn't fall. They tore into each other, a writhing storm of teeth and rot. Kael ran, the Necromancer's crown seared into his flesh, its weight dragging at every step. Then the voices came. A thousand dead tongues scraped against his mind, murmuring secrets, pleas, lies. Kael flexed his cursed arm. "Well" "This'll get annoying fast."

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