They were heartbeats, once -- they were laughter, and smiles, and sadness, and cheer. They were love and hatred and emotion-incarnate. They were humans, and dwarves, and elves, and gnomes; they were svirfneblin, and trolls, and drow ...
.. all turned bones. All turned corpses, all exhumed -- they were children and wives and men and priests turned mindless, moaning, flesh-hungry beasts.
They marched against Myrken, on an autumn night, by the hundred. One by one, they fell under brave swords... and all the while, their general had been laughing.
Frost settles now on lifeless, rotten bodies -- the fields are strewn with the remnants of the walking dead, with limbs and heads and broken jaws. Spades were fallen, and shovels jutted from the earth where undead hands had dropped them. The smell of fire still lingers in the air where whiskey had been burned about the Broken Dagger.
Silence ravages the landscape -- the smell of dead flesh is abound and sickening. Their eyes are turned up towards the skies, against moonlight and sun alike .. but they are not eyes -- never had been. They are balls, simple and chrome, set into sockets where life once lingered.
The soldiers move the bodies, one after the other .. but still so many remain. Still so many stare. None of the bodies had identities -- they were from lands far away, from lands unexplored. They were from the underground, from graves so far away. They were not of Myrken. From whence had they come, and how?
Salvation of Myrken lies in those cold eyes. Far below, Audmathus laughs.