The carnage we brought upon this frozen land was spectacular, and I'm afraid we might have caused a slight natural disaster with all that fire. By the time we found a third group of these zombies, their behaviour had shifted. No longer were they akin to mindless beasts. They were getting coordinated.
Whoever this necromancer was, he finally realized that something must have been happening to his army, and made these big groups disperse into smaller ones. Not that it was of any help, mind you. We just turned up the heat, literally.
Wherever we went, the snow disappeared completely, leaving behind muddy fields that slowly filled up with water and then froze anew once we moved on.
"That one zombie was different from the others." I said Pyra once we eliminated another group numbering in the hundreds. They were trying to hide from us by lying down and allowing themselves to be snowed in. One of them stood out to me, because for a second, it resisted my flames, and by that I mean literal second. It still burned and turned into nothingness like all else, but I noticed it briefly standing while the others were already being reduced to ash.
"I haven't seen it. Do you think it was the necromancer?"
"Hmm…No, I don't think so. Clearly, it was superior to the normal zombies, and it could create the ones we've seen before, but it didn't know how to make something like itself."
"Interesting. So it's a chain of command. Do you think it was intelligent?"
"I don't care." I shrugged.
"Eh— I was just wondering if it was a mindless beast."
"Then how about we capture one if we run into it? You can run some experiments on it."
"Eww— I'm not going to be playing with corpses. Thank you very much. I was just musing out loud." Pyra's face scrunched in disgust, and she shivered.
"Well, I'm going to do it then. The magic powering it might just lead us to the main one."
"If you're sure."
"Mhm~ I am. Let's go." We then kicked off and flew back into the air, ready to search for more.
The time we spent traveling until we finally found the next group was boring as all hell, mostly because other than an occasional pretty rock, there was nothing that would interest me. But the next group was way down south, as we flew for a couple of hours before we managed to spot anything. But find them we did. They stood on what we assumed was a frozen lake, given the even flatness of the ground they were all on.
"Emily! I see one of them. Look. All the way in the front of the horde. The white one that's alone." Pyra suddenly shouted, pointed at it, and I tried to locate the target.
"That's our guy! Nice catch. I'm gonna swoop in and get this thing away from the horde." I turned my broom towards it, and dived straight at it. And as soon as I got close enough, the thing must have noticed me, because it started to scramble around and tried to get as far away from me as possible. Unfortunately for it, I had other plans.
"INCARCEROUS!" I cast as I flew by it. The magical bindings quickly found their target, causing the white zombie to fall down and desperately struggle to escape, to no avail, obviously.
I made a quick U-turn and landed by the zombie, and started to look it over.
"Wow, you're one ugly fucker, aren't you." It looked different from the normal zombies we've seen so far. The normal ones were just animated corpses really, but this thing was more like another liveform altogether. It was still an undead of some kind, don't get me wrong, but now that I was truly looking at it up close, it wasn't a corpse. I tried some of the diagnostic spells I got from Grindelwald, but the readings were all kinds of wrong.
"How the hell were you created…? It makes no sense. You're dead and somehow still alive?" I muttered to myself, ignoring the struggling thing as it writhed below me.
"But your magic is connected to something else… Hehe~ I was right." I could feel the link, and while it was very faint, it was there, connected to something way down south. Unfortunately, that was all I got after examining it. The distance was great, and even the direction was rather vague.
"ᚹᚺᛟᚱᛖ ᛞᚨᚢᚷᚺᛏᛖᚱᛋ ᛟᚠ ᚠᛁᚱᛖ!"The thing spoke. It was guttural and harsh language. Shame it didn't speak English though.
"PYRA! The thing speaks! Come check this out!" I used Sonorus and yelled out to Pyra, who was hovering above the horde and raining down hell upon them. She heard me, and after a quick burst of speed, landed next to me.
"It does?! What did it say?"
"No clue, sounded like gibberish to me. Repeat what you said!"I ordered the thing and I kicked it in the head for good measure.
"ᚹᚺᛟᚱᛖ ᛞᚨᚢᚷᚺᛏᛖᚱᛋ ᛟᚠ ᚠᛁᚱᛖ!"
"See?"
"Hmm… Well, that's just rude." Pyra annoyedly said.
"What did it say?" I asked with some interest.
"It called us the whore daughters of fire, whatever that even means." She said with the roll of her eyes, and I scoffed. What a lame insult.
"Are you going to say something else? Hmm?!" I asked, and again punctuated the question with a kick.
"ᚤᛟᚢᚱ ᛈᛁᛏᛁᚠᚢᛚ ᚠᛚᚨᛗᛖᛋ ᚹᛁᛚᛚ ᚾᛟᛏ ᛋᛏᛟᛈ ᛏᚺᛖ ᛋᛟᚢᛚ ᛟᚠ ᛁᚲᛖ. ᛟᚢᚱ ᚷᛟᛞ ᚹᛁᛚᛚ ᚾᛟᛏ ᛒᛖ ᛞᛖᚠᛖᚨᛏᛖᛞ ᛖᚡᛖᚱ ᚨᚷᚨᛁᚾ!!!" It roared with all of its might and bucked against the bindings, and maybe, if I were just an ordinary witch, the thing would have broken free right then. A pity I wasn't one.
"Pyra?" I wanted to know.
"It says that our weak flames won't defeat the Soul of Ice. That seems like the name of the god they follow."
"Oh? So you have a god? I wonder, thing… What's stronger, my fire, or your god?
"ᚾᛟᛏ ᛖᚡᛖᚾ ᛏᚺᛖ ᚠᛁᚱᛖᛋ ᛟᚠ ᚱ'ᚺᛚᛚᛟᚱ ᚺᛁᛗᛋᛖᛚᚠ ᚹᛖᚱᛖ ᚨᛒᛚᛖ ᛏᛟ ᛞᛖᚠᛖᚨᛏ ᛏᚺᛖ ᛋᛟᚢᛚ ᛟᚠ ᛁᚲᛖ. " It looked at us with so much hatred. Well, as much as its ice-like body allowed.
"Not even the fires of R'hllor were able to defeat the Soul of Ice. This R'hllor must be another god." Pyra translated.
"They're a god of fire, right?" I asked excitedly.
"I would bet on it, and from this thing's tone, it appears as if the fire god is their enemy."
"You don't say. Hey, thing! Thanks for the information, now die." I burned it, mostly because I felt like we would not get anything more out of it. Hell, I don't even know why that thing spoke to us in the first place. I just tied it up, I wasn't even burning it yet.
"Okay. This is actually great. If I don't find dragons by myself, then we just have to somehow get to this fire god, because surely, a fire god must know about fire-breathing lizards."
"I'm not sure it works like that, you know?"
"Fire knows fire."
"*sigh*...okay. What about the necromancer, though? You're not just gonna drop this, are you, Emily?" Pyra forcefully steered me back onto what we were doing before. I knew I tended to jump from one thing to another.
"Right. I'm not going to leave the job half-finished. We are killing it, preferably as soon as possible. But then it's dragon time."
—
For Benjen, this was supposed to be a routine ranging to figure out what happened to one of the nearby wildling settlements. Yet, when he got to the site, what greeted him was anything but routine.
The Watch knew about the wildling custom of burning the dead, but this was not the site of a funeral.
No, this was a huge pyre made entirely out of human bodies. Men, women, and he even saw what appeared to be the charred remains of a small child. All of it, out in the elements. It was done hastily, because some bodies were only partially burned.
"By the Gods… this must be at least half of them." Benjen muttered as he tried to gauge the number of people in the pyre. A battle took place here. That much was certain from the bodies themselves, as from what he could see, all of them had fatal wounds, but not all of them were done by a blade. In fact, most of them looked like the result of a mauling.
Finding a direction to investigate further was easy, as there were a huge number of partially snowed-in footprints all leaving in the same direction. All he needed to do was to follow them and confirm their new location.
What Benjen didn't know was that following these footprints would fundamentally change the way he viewed the world. Because after half a day of following them, he was greeted by the stuff of nightmares.
He saw something that, up until that point in time, had lived in his mind as a mere fairy tale, a thing to make unruly children behave.
"I-I have to… I have to report this… Eddard must know." He said fearfully, and tried to slowly turn back and leave. That's when the situation turned to shit because all of a sudden the temperature started to rise, the snow started to rapidly melt and a figure covered in flames was flying straight at the horde.
It landed with a great eruption right in the middle of the mass of bodies, and a short while later, he noticed another figure, hovering above it. This one didn't join the fight, and by the way it was flying, it looked like it was surveying its surroundings. Before, ultimately, turning to his position and flying to him.
"Well, shit."
—
"I think I see our guy!" I yelled out to Pyra when I finally noticed a group of zombies. It actually took a lot longer to get all the way here, because every time we found another group, we stopped and destroyed it.
Which is also how we found actual humans if you'd believe it. The fact that when I found them, they were feasting on human corpses did somehow dampen my initial excitement. What completely ruined it was when they attacked us, as soon as we stepped a foot out of the treeline. Oh, right, because the necromancer was so far down south, trees were growing here. It was still cold, but it was warm enough to support some semblance of life.
Back to the cannibals, though. We killed the disgusting savages. But from that, we learned a couple of things. First, they spoke some kind of variation of English, at least I think that's what it was, as I understood a few words they yelled at us. Second, one of them had a steel dagger. Which meant that somewhere out there was a civilization and not just these savage tribes.
"I see him too, but why is he out here with such a small group?" Pyra muttered, and I had to agree with her sentiment. The necromancer must know that if he dies, everything he made with his magic dies with him. So why risk it like this?
"Maybe he's actually strong? I mean, the weird white zombie did withstand my flames for a second, and if this one made it, he must be a lot stronger, right?"
"Theoretically yes, but now that we know that a god is somehow involved in this zombie mess, you won't be sure until you try to burn him."
"Mhm~ Which I'm about to do RIGHT NOW!" I shouted with glee, dove straight down, and unleashed my shikai while in the air. Making myself look like a shooting star that was crashing down into the earth.
"FOUND YOU!" I used shunpo to get right in front of the armored necromancer and stabbed him in the chest.
"..." It went right through him, but maybe normal fire didn't harm him? We stared at each other in confusion.
"Why aren't you dead?" The moment I spoke, whatever spell we were both under broke, and the necromancer scowled with hatred.
"Thee art th' wretch—." The guy just exploded into thousands of small pieces of ice, and all of the zombies started to fall as if their strings were cut.
"Huh? Wait, what? That's it?" I uttered in disbelief and stared at the spot where the necromancer was standing mere moments ago. What an anticlimactic ending…