Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead

After the two soldiers hidden amongst the populace were put under arrest, and rescued by faith, multiple days passed in the blink of an eye, a manner of speech that may not be so soon, even if summer had ended and autumn begun, this great shift in the cycle of night and day was deeply abnormal, the sun only rose at around noon, only to set ten hours later, the people were not only worried about this simple event, but also the fact that this meant that the crops received much less sunlight, and even the light they were allowed to bathe in seemed frail, paler than normal.

Some had first assumed that it was due to the miasma climbing upon the life barrier, but it had not progressed nearly enough to force such a situation, no, it was as though the sun itself was being affected by the presence of death.

After all, even if they did not know much of it, Belliste did have its own sun, a single sun unlike Viridis.

Hidden away within a small, cosy room that was to be found somewhere inside the great undead wall, the two prisoners were not being whipped, being boiled alive, skinned or otherwise tortured by the mind peelers, even if all of the above were within the repertoire of the torturer caste, no, Alisiana was no liar, never would she dare to be deceptive when acting as death's voice.

This little chamber was adorned with the featureless statue of a woman, carved from pale stone, the idol no larger than someone's forearm, sitting upon an altar of black stone, arms arranged as if welcoming someone into a gentle embrace.

A prayer room that had been intentionally made especially confined, Alisiana felt that it made everything more personal, the humongous cathedrals and churches were nice as a sign of praise to divine death, but closeness was also an important aspect.

The area was illuminated by candles lit by simple flames, the way of dark was perhaps a bit too harsh for those two to follow yet, or so the missionary assumed.

"You two shall delve deeper into the way of compassion, you're going to love it!" clapping her bony hands together, making a sound that was nothing like a clap, she pinched their cheeks.

Truly, when Grigri had come to check on the two prisoners, he had not expected the undeads to be true to their words, because who was willing to believe corpses whose ambition was total eradication of life? Loimos was transparent on this fact, the vanguard was a force that was to conquer all that there was and boot life out of this world once and for all.

But the headhunter had to admit that the undeads were not as homogeneous of a group as he seemed to initially believe, it was just that the vanguard was constructed by and around the central figure of Loimos, so they naturally shared his genocidal ambition for the most part, but the church of death was an entirely different can of worms it appeared.

Still, even after confirming that the captured soldiers were not in as precarious of a situation as believed, something still felt off, it was undeniable that this entire situation had occurred in the first place because he had failed to get to that one soldier in time, but the entire thing had looked like a show to him, for the simple reason that they had spoken in the pale tongue instead of the death tongue, Grigri could comprehend both of them, to a lesser extent for the latter but for the southerners, only the pale tongue was understandable to their ears as both Frenand and Alisiana wore the great item allowing for translation.
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All undeads preferred to use the death tongue amidst one another however, from the regular rank and file to the great lieutenants.

'Is it an attempt to create sympathy between the people and undeads by showing kindness to soldiers? This might work for some… The Bellistian people are more likely to respect a ruthless enemy though…' such a concept was something Ourlst was certain to know, so perhaps it really was just Alisiana alone that had brought about this change.

'No… They have been searching for the spies intently, the left hand wouldn't pass up on intel from one of them…' slipping away from the area before he was seen snooping around, Grigri was confused.

His living mind was falling short, he couldn't wrap it around whatever logic was at play here, and he did not have time to bother with this, Grigri had more work to do, manoeuvring the crooked wall fortress, the headless scoured for more information, but mostly counting the undeads and remembering what caste they belonged to as any other sort of intel was hard to come by.

What he mostly stumbled upon were meaningless conversations between soldiers, which were rather diverse, but not of importance, some of them even a bit scarring.

"Did you hear about that blood ice sorceress? The one on her way to get acknowledged by Sir Loimos?"

"Oh, Ilyad I believe? I heard that she was quite the sight, they say that getting a look with darkness awareness is a must…"

"Huh, I am more of a skeletal kind of guy…"

"Unbelievable, it's clearly best when the flesh is fermented"

"Oh, I got wind that Lord Nosferatu is looking to train minor vampire lords, and that many of the trainees are lookers"

"Of course, Lord Nosferatu has very good tastes, you know, with hands as big as his, the surface area needs to be larger to accommodate for it-"

This one in particular had been torturous as Grigri had had no other choice but to listen to those soldiers discuss whilst sounding perfectly serious, like they were a bunch of scholars discussing the various applications of mana.

The headless left this area with much knowledge that he rather would have not known, never had he questioned the logistics of corpses having relations of this sort before then, and certainly not zombies and skeletons.

'Thank the gods I can't puke…' walking around for some more time, Grigri would not stumble upon anything of substance, he attempted the same thing for multiple more days, but he had to give up eventually, instead opting to deliver Isilt's report in his stead at last.

Grabbing hold of the now sealed corneau horn, hiding within his uniform before vanishing once again into the night, beginning a long crawl to get to the place where it was to be delivered.

He did not know how it would then be given to however was further down the chain, but he felt confident, the undead did not know about that woman, they didn't even suspect her.

As usual, he got there at night.