Chapter 31: Rise of the undead

Snow and Leon arrived at the pillar. The moment they got close, they saw the timer like Gag had always been seeing it.

"Somehow, looking at it now makes my body crawl with fear," Leon said. He looked distraught, eyes locked onto the pillar.

"You are only thinking about the worst," Snow said. She walked closer to it and placed her hand on it. There was still no feeling even after so long.

"It’s shocking how everyone forgot about it even when they knew there was something up with it," Leon said and folded his arms. He was appalled by the fact that humans had given up that easily.

"I do not think it’s fair on them, to be honest," Snow said. "They did not see what we saw, so it’s only fair to understand that they would not have the same level of urgency as us," she explained.

Leon looked at her and then sighed.

"I wished I had your level of patience and maturity."

While he said this, the timer came down to a ten-second count. The both of them faced the pillar, knowing fully well that the time had come.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

When the timer hit zero, they expected something to happen immediately, but nothing did.

Nothing happened.

The silence that followed the countdown was the kind that had weight to it, pressing in from every direction, and Leon stood in it with his eyes on the pillar and his body telling him something his mind had not caught up to yet.

He looked at Snow.

"Move back," he said.

The urgency in his voice was not something he had decided to put there. It came out on its own.

She looked at him and then looked at the pillar and opened her mouth to ask why, and the markings answered for him.

They lit up.

Green, deep and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the color itself and everything to do with what the color was attached to, the carvings on the pillar burning with it all at once, every line and symbol and pattern igniting simultaneously from the base to the top in under a second.

From the sky above, the magical circle formed.

It was massive, large enough to blot out a significant portion of what was overhead, the same green burning through its lines, and for one moment it simply hung there, and Leon thought in that moment that he had never in either of his lives seen something that looked so completely like the end of something.

The beam came down.

It hit the pillar, and the world ended for approximately three seconds.

The shockwave that came off the impact did not arrive the way shockwaves arrived in fights, with a clear origin point and a direction. It came from everywhere at once, lifting the ground and the air together, and Leon was in the air before he decided to be, the force carrying him and Snow in opposite directions across hundreds of feet of open space before the ground came back up and collected both of them.

He hit the earth and rolled and rolled and came to a stop face down with his ears producing a sound that was not a sound so much as the absence of all other sounds replaced by a single high-pitched frequency that filled his skull completely.

He pushed himself up.

His arms were bleeding where the ground had found them during the roll, long scrapes that burned cleanly, and he got to his knees and then to his feet and stood there swaying for a moment before his balance agreed to participate.

Snow was already standing.

Of course she was.

He looked at the pillar.

His eyes were still adjusting, the aftermath of the beam having done something to his vision that was not quite right yet, everything carrying a slight blur at the edges, and through that blur he watched the ground begin to move.

Not crack. Not shift. Move, the way ground moved when something beneath it had decided it was done being beneath it.

It started close to the pillar and spread outward in every direction, the radius of it expanding faster than he could track, moving toward the town, moving toward where he was standing, moving in every direction simultaneously with the particular speed of something that had been waiting under the surface for a very long time and was done waiting.

The skeletal hands came first.

One broke through to his left. Then two more ahead of him. Then too many to count individually, each one digging upward through the soil and finding the air above it and pulling the rest of what it was attached to up after it, the groaning that came with every emergence layering on top of the others until it was not individual sounds anymore but a continuous low register that sat below hearing and was felt in the chest instead.

A green fog moved with them.

It rolled outward from the pillar in every direction, low to the ground, carrying a smell that Leon did not have a word for and did not want one, and everywhere the fog touched, the ground continued to open and continued to give up what was beneath it.

Most of them had nothing in their hands. They did not need to. The ones that did carry weapons held them with the particular grip of something that had not forgotten what the object was for even after however long it had been down there, and the green flame that burned in their eye sockets was not decorative.

One of them came up directly in front of Snow while she was still pushing herself to her feet.

Leon moved before the thought finished forming.

He pulled the wand from his waist and fired a fire spell point-blank into the undead’s chest. The impact scattered it, bones going in every direction, and he reached Snow and grabbed her arm.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and the panic in his voice was not something he tried to control because there was no time for that.

She smiled. Even now.

She looked at the scattered bones of the undead.

They were moving.

Each bone finding the others, the skeleton reassembling itself.

"Leon," she said.

"I know," he said.