Chapter 22

Nakaba's leather gloves clamped around Didé's forearm and hauled him upright with surprising strength for her lithe frame. No sooner were his boots under him than a dismayed shout tore from her lips.

"Down!"

She shoved him sideways, narrowly avoiding the shambling lurch of another desiccated revenant erupting from the fog. Nakaba's curved baraka blade was a blur of gleaming steel as it scythed through the air, neatly separating the undead monstrosity's leering head from its shoulders. Its headless form stumbled two more paces before slumping in a thud.

"Maker's breath," Didé wheezed, barely keeping his footing. "How many of these waking nightmares did that damned voice summon?"

Nakaba spat on the twitching remains, shooting him a cocksure grin. "Enough to keep me well practiced, but not so many I grew bored waiting for your royal backside to grace me."

A piercing shriek split the air, as if in vindictive answer. Didé's head whipped around, half-expecting another wave of corrupted horrors surging from the gloom.

"Quickly!" Nakaba seized his arm again, hauling him into a stumbling lope between the brackish cairns of dismembered undead. "I'll not test my luck against their foul whisperer tonight!"

They broke into a staggered run through the murk and remains. Didé chanced a look over his shoulder and immediately wished he hadn't.

There, uncoiling from the fog like a serpent, stretched a multitude of desiccated appendages - claws, talons, and boneless limbs endlessly extruding from that choking vapor in a sickening mockery of life. Within their tangled mass, crevices yawned and snapped, as if whatever ungodly presence animated these abominations was fighting to fully manifest its gruesome visage.

A reverberating murmur rolled forth, chasing them toward the dimly visible outline of Didé's rearing horse amid the gloom.

"You cannot flee from me, Sun of the North..." The vile whispers wormed into his consciousness like a nest of grave-spun leeches. "This realm belongs to the Eternal Night, as you soon sssshall..."

Didé shuddered, stumbling ahead with Nakaba practically dragging him the final strides. They flung themselves onto the saddle, the terrified stallion shuddering and skirling beneath them. With a harsh grunt, Nakaba drove her heels into its flanks and it bolted forward, hooves churing the sucking mire to a froth.

Behind them, the shrieking chorus of aberrant jaws splitting wide in agony and revulsion echoed through the gloom.

Didé couldn't quite shake the dread certainty that the vile voice's final promise would linger...and someday, like the undying crest of a loathsome tide, find its inevitable purchase upon his soul.

They rode hard for a long time, Nakaba pushing the exhausted horse until the shrouded village was far behind. Only when dusk began to fall did she finally bring the lathered stallion to a halt.

Didé practically tumbled from the saddle, legs numb and body aching from the frantic escape. He stumbled a few paces away, leaning heavily on a nearby tree as he gulped in ragged breaths. A lingering sense of dread still gripped him from that unholy presence, as if its vile whispers had burrowed into his very bones.

The crunch of boots announced Nakaba's approach. Even in the fading light, her expression was severe, eyes boring into him intently.

"Are you going to tell me what the hell that was back there?" she rasped, lips curled back. "Or do I need to guess what foul nature summoned those...abominations?"

Didé gripped his dagger hilt tight, gaze flicking to the streaks of black ichor coating her skin and leathers.

"You wouldn't believe me if I tried explaining," he muttered with a shake of his head. "I can barely make sense of it myself."

Nakaba closed the gap between them until he could make out each fleck of drying filth on her pallid cheeks.

"Try me," she challenged, words like a doubled-edged blade. "We've seen too much together to hold anything back now."

Didé held her stare a moment more before sagging with weariness. Swallowing dryly, he simply said: "It has been called many names over the years - the Lightless Dark, Whisperer of Waking Graves, the Eternal Night ...Bane of the Living ...."

"Yes? Yes? What the devil is it?"

"Evil ...the birth of it."

When he said that, Nakaba slowly nodded, face inscrutable again.

Didé continued. "Every young princeling learns the Song of Nyame, the retelling of the Second Age. A time when darkness consumed the world of men." Didé gnashed his teeth as he found Nakaba's eyes again. "The events we have just witnessed are reminiscent of the tales sung in those ancient songs. Men, women, and children twisted into ravenous beasts, driven to convert others. There was no cure for this maddening affliction... only death."

Nakaba shot him a sidelong glance but remained silent, recognizing the pensive weight behind his words.

Didé's gaze went distant, as if replaying verses ingrained since childhood. When he spoke again, his voice carried a recitative cadence.

"To hear its shrieks was to feel your essence unmade, pulled into a tormented existence. Yet its worst atrocity was reanimating the slain or unslain into abominations even fouler than lifeless flesh..."

Nakaba watched him closely, her features thrown into stark relief by the emerging moonlight. "You heard it speak, then? To you directly?"

Didé's mouth tightened into a grim line as he gave a slow nod of affirmation. "Did you hear it too?"

"I heard no such whisperings amidst its shrieking brays," she said at last, voice catching in her throat. "Only the piercing shrieks themselves lancing through my skull like white-hot sickness."

A tense silence hung in the cloying night air as Nakaba processed Didé's grim recounting. Her features shifted through pages of emotions - from edge-of-the-blade determination to...unease?

"If that presence could worm its foul whispers into your mind," she began slowly, eyes boring into his with naked intensity. "Why did it single you out for such...violation?"

Didé's gut clenched at the memory of those corrosive murmurs seared into his soul. He started to speak, but Nakaba pressed on.

"It sought to claim you, did it not?" Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial rasp, sending a thread of ice slithering down Didé's spine.

"Not a conversion..." Didé heard himself mumble, hardly aware of the words leaving his numb lips. "It wants my flesh. My essence. As if I were some...delicacy to be consumed whole."

Nakaba recoiled slightly at that, brow furrowing as if to reject the implications behind his hushed confession. When she found her voice again, it was tinged with a peculiar rawness.

"...Why? Why would this unholy thing crave your soul specifically? Unless..." She trailed off, leaving the unspoken question hanging like a gibbet between them.

Didé knew there was no easy way to impart the full extent of what precisely made him such a succulent prospective addition to the Whisperer's grotesque ranks. Wounds too old and horrific lurked behind that obscene longing to utterly subsume him into its blighted entourage.

So instead, he abruptly shifted the topic with all the grace of a mallet's blow.

"Nakaba, there's only one place the answer to banishing this corruption can be found." He stumbled upright, suddenly restless with an urgency bordering on desperation. "But I must redouble my search for Ona at once. I cannot leave her out there ... unprotected."

"Your father should be consulted first!" Nakaba was on her feet now as well, glaring at him through the gloom. "If the ancient evil that once birthed this revenant has truly reawakened, His Majesty has advisers and seers."

But Didé was already moving, scooping up his discarded scabbard and making for the shuddering silhouette of the saddle-lashed horse. "There's no time - you would have to travel back to Kingswatch to report to His Majesty"

He swung himself up into the saddle with a grunt, looking down to find Nakaba standing with fists clenched, a muscle jumping in her corded neck.

"And what would you hope to accomplish without me at your side, princeling?" she bit out, practically vibrating with frustration.

Didé simply leveled her with an uncharacteristically solemn look that smothered any retort before it could arise.

"Return to Idollo and report to my father what unliving nightmares we've faced." His voice brooked no argument, already hardened into that detached cadence of royalty. "Enlist whatever aid and holy wards you deem necessary."

He gathered the reins with hands that had stopped trembling for the first real since their ill-fated village detour. When next he spoke, there was an edge of that old, familiar resolve that flashed in his eyes.

"I'll find Ona and bring her back to Kingswatch, one way or another."

Nakaba opened her mouth as if to protest once more, but seemed to think better of it. She simply held his stare for a few protracted heartbeats before giving a shallow nod.

As she turned to stalk off into the trees, Didé called out, "Come find me when you can, my friend."

Nakaba paused briefly, then continued on, quickly swallowed by darkness. For several breaths, Didé heard the crunch of her retreating footsteps.