Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 63: Collapse

Darion came back through the trees and found Garren exactly where he had left him, standing at the edge of the treeline, not sitting or leaning against anything, just standing.

The knights were further back, among the trees, like shapes in the dark. He could hear the occasional small sound of equipment shifting, a horse adjusting its weight and someone breathing. It was quiet enough. Nobody had done anything stupid while he was gone, which was the baseline he had needed from them and they had delivered it.

Garren looked at him when he emerged.

Darion held up a hand. Good. Then pointed at the ground beside him. Wait.

Garren moved to stand beside him at the treeline edge, and they both looked at the settlement.

For the first ten minutes, nothing visible changed.

Gonnb sat in the dark the way it had sat before the operation, watching fires dying down, shapes of huts against the slightly lighter sky and the occasional movement of someone still awake going about whatever end-of-evening business kept them up.

The outpost watcher to the north was still in his position. The eastern one had apparently finished his patrol and was somewhere Darion couldn’t locate from this angle.

He raised the perspective glass and worked through the settlement section by section.

Still nothing. Which was correct, the venom took time, and the bats had been moving fast enough that most of the contacts had happened in the last ten minutes of the sweep. The earliest bites were only now approaching the window where the effects would start showing.

Garren said nothing. He had been told roughly what to expect and he was watching for it.

Fifteen minutes.

The first visible sign was subtle enough that Darion almost missed it.

A hut on the northern side, one of the larger ones: a light inside it, which had been steady and low for the last half hour, began moving.

It was not the gentle movement of a flame in a draft, but the jerky, irregular movement of a lamp or candle being carried by someone moving without coordination.

Back and forth across the interior, hitting the walls of the hut in terms of the light it cast, stopping, moving again.

Then the door opened and a man came out.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, one hand on the frame, and then walked three steps and sat down heavily on the ground.

This did not look the sitting of someone who had decided to sit, instead it was the sitting of someone whose legs had made the decision for them.

He stayed there, not moving, his head forward.

Darion lowered the glass slightly and looked at Garren.

Garren had seen it too.

Twenty minutes.

More movement now, and less of it was the normal movement of a settlement at night. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Another light inside a different hut doing the same irregular pattern, someone awake and moving wrong.

A woman came to the doorway of the hut nearest the eastern approach, looked out at nothing, said something over her shoulder, and went back inside.

Two minutes later she came back out and looked again, carrying the look of someone who had heard something from inside their own house that they couldn’t explain.

Then a voice from somewhere in the northern section. This was not a shout, it was more of a raised question, the tone of someone calling out to another person and not getting the response they expected.

Darion kept the glass moving.

The man sitting on the ground outside the northern hut hadn’t moved. Someone came out of the same hut, saw him, crouched beside him, said something.

The sitting man’s response, if there was one, wasn’t visible. The person crouching beside him straightened up and looked around at the rest of the settlement with a different quality of attention than anything Darion had seen in the last thirty minutes.

That was the shift. That was where confusion became something with an edge to it.

Twenty-five minutes.

The voices were more frequent now, and some of them had the sharpness of people who were frightened and trying to understand what they were frightened of.

Lights moving in multiple huts. Someone running between two structures in the northern section, which was the first running Darion had seen since they arrived.

The outpost watcher to the north had left his position, he could see the tree where the man had been sitting and it was empty.

Garren made a quiet sound beside him. It was not words. Just acknowledgment of what they were both watching.

Thirty minutes.

The settlement was audibly less quiet now. Not an alarm, there was no alarm because nobody understood what was happening well enough to name a threat.

It was the sound of people in multiple locations discovering that something was wrong simultaneously without the information to connect those discoveries into a single picture.

They were just trying to check what was wrong with the people affected or themselves even.

Voices calling between huts. Someone retching audibly near the western edge. A light that had been moving inside a hut going suddenly still in a way that confirmed the person carrying it had stopped moving.

The man still sitting on the ground outside the northern hut had company now, two more people sitting or lying near him, one of them making sounds that carried across the open ground to the treeline.

Darion lowered the perspective glass.

He looked at Garren.

Garren was watching the settlement with an intrigued expression. He hadn’t seen Darion’s undead venoms at work before so this was...interesting

Then, from somewhere in the center of the settlement, a shout.

A real one this time, sharp and loud and with a specific pitch to it. The shout of someone who had moved from confused to afraid and was no longer trying to keep it between themselves.

It was answered by two more voices from different directions, equally sharp, the settlement’s fragmented alarm finally coalescing into something loud enough to be called one.

Darion folded the perspective glass and put it in his jacket.

He turned to look back at the knights waiting in the dark among the trees, the shapes of them and the horses just visible. Then he turned back to Garren.

"Move."