Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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Shilu led the way, down into the labyrinth of the tomb.

Eseld knew from bitter experience how easy it was to get lost in these barren caverns of grey metal. The top six floors of every tomb were always identical — fresh revenants were always ejected naked and shivering into the smooth passageways beyond the resurrection chamber, always laid out in the same quasi-biological pattern of thick arteries and tiny branches of capillary. Those first six floors could be memorised, and left behind in a matter of minutes.

Below that — past the security checkpoint where Shilu had fought Lykke — each tomb’s architecture became recognisably human, with proper corners and doorways, with corridors studded by entrances into vast echoing chambers, with tables and chairs, little cells, barred doors, raised platforms for meetings, or plays, or rituals. Many of the rooms contained equipment, though none of it was ever useful; every object was always broken or irrelevant. Eseld had spent more than one brief resurrection clawing through the abandoned rubbish, praying to her absent God for a weapon or a shield among the refuse. But she’d never found anything useful, not even a solid length of pipe or a fist-sized chunk of metal, just dead machines and useless detritus. Every surface and item was always swept clean of dust and dirt, as if preserved in stasis since God’s lonely death.

Below the sixth floor, the tomb was never the same twice; Eseld often recognised individual features or spaces, as if they had been reused in different configurations, but the layouts were never identical.

These spaces were bait — meaningless rooms and empty chambers, drifts of pointless junk, false promises of hope and hiding places. Staying there was death. Stronger revenants would search every nook and cranny for the nanomachine-rich flesh of newborn undead.

Survival and exit depended on movement. Run. Don’t look back. Don’t slow down.

Eseld had eventually learned how to navigate these floors, how to win the exit as quickly as possible: go down and out. Stairs, outer wall, down and out, down and out. Never stop running, find those stairs, get to the exterior wall, keep moving, and sooner or later the gate would be there, waiting for another morsel of undead flesh to join with the corpse of the world.

Eseld could reach the tomb gates in under an hour, allowing for dead ends and failures and doubling back.

Shilu had a different destination in mind.

The fallen angel — or risen demon, or pretender to God’s throne, or ‘Fae Lady’, or whatever she was — led the trio of naked zombies at a brisk walk. She did not follow Eseld’s technique of prioritising the outer wall to locate the next set of stairs on each floor; instead, Shilu made a beeline for the closest stairs down, as if she possessed perfect knowledge of the tomb’s layout. She made better progress in fifteen minutes of walking than Eseld could in half an hour of terrified flight. Shilu strode with detached confidence down echoing hallways of bare metal, through vaulted rooms dominated by gigantic meeting tables, past tangles of abandoned equipment and broken parts, all without so much as a sideways glance to orient herself. She took each set of downward stairs two at a time, without effort or sweat or even a deep breath.

Eseld scurried to keep up, eyes darting left and right, shoulder blades itching at every blind corner, heart clawing into her throat at every jagged shadow; Shilu walked with head high and eyes forward, as if Lykke was not still stalking them through the empty halls and passages of this echoing shell.

Eseld knew her meagre strength would count for nothing next to Shilu’s, if they were attacked a second time. But she wanted to help, she wanted to be useful. She wanted to do what little she could to warn this angel of death.

Sky and Cyneswith stuck close. The fight at the security checkpoint had changed them both. The two no longer held hands. Cyneswith was calmer than before, clear-eyed and curious. She looked with wonder upon everything they passed, even the broken junk. She would learn soon enough that her curiosity was irrelevant, which saddened Eseld a little. Sky’s earlier terror had calcified into tight-faced tension and nervous motion; she placed herself between Cyn’s smaller, more vulnerable body and every open doorway and deep shadow, acting protective, trying to shepherd the smaller woman. Cyn often picked up her pace to match Eseld, sharing a hesitant smile as she hurried ahead and left Sky behind.

Eseld could not return those smiles. Sky was volatile. Would she be jealous? Too much of a risk.

All three zombies were rapidly shedding the resurrection slime which had dried on their skin, leaving a trail of flakes behind them as they walked. Eseld shook out her russet hair and raked it back over her skull to keep it out of the way, then licked her hands clean. Cyn peeled the dry slime off her own skin and followed Eseld’s example, touching her tongue to the edge of the papery, translucent membrane.

“It doesn’t taste of anything,” Cyn whispered. “What is it?”

“Eat it,” Eseld grunted.

Sky caught up and spoke in a hushed voice: “It’s like placenta, or amniotic fluid, right? Nutrient bath. Stem cells of some kind? Our new bodies grew from it, didn’t they?”

Cyn’s eyes widened. “New bodies?” She touched her fingers to her own cheek. “But I … I look just the same as always.”

“Don’t think about that,” Eseld hissed. “Eat it if you’ve got any left. We’ll need every scrap.”

“Mm,” Sky grunted. “Understood.”

Shilu led the trio down and down and down — three floors, six floors, falling deeper. Eseld kept an ear out for sounds of distant combat filtering upward from the tomb’s gate, but she heard nothing except a growing static murmur. After Shilu’s victory by the security checkpoint, rain had been falling against the window — but there was no way a rainstorm would be audible this deep inside the tomb. The raindrops would have to fall like bullets.

Lykke showed herself, thrice.

The first time she appeared as a shadow on a wall. The group was traversing a long room filled with low tables, halfway across the yawning darkness between one corridor and another. Cyn and Sky had fallen into complete silence, since even the whisper of bare feet returned haunting echoes from the shadowy ceiling of the stone-walled space. Eseld watched Shilu’s back as best she could, keeping her eyes on the dense gloom beneath each table they passed.

Lykke’s outline — a chimera of twisted flesh — burst onto the left-hand wall all of a sudden. She flickered and jerked as if cast by a roaring hearth-fire, fifty times the size of her already enlarged and monstrous body.

Cyn smothered a scream with both hands, scrambling forward to shelter behind Eseld’s back; Sky turned a yelp of surprise into an angry shout, raising her fists in hopeless resistance.

But Eseld followed Shilu’s lead, and Shilu did not react. Shilu strode on, unconcerned.

“Ignore her,” Shilu said. “It’s nothing.”

The second appearance was all whispers and white-wreathed wraiths. Shilu led the way down onto a spiral staircase which descended into darkness as it reached toward the floor below; the walls to either side were beyond sight, either too far away or cloaked by some clever trick of vision. Once Shilu and all three zombies were suspended on a stretch of staircase seemingly floating in a void, a teasing voice began to buzz and sigh at the edge of Eseld’s hearing.

She could not make out any words, like a howling scream lost amid the storm-winds deep in a forest. Any human speech was muffled and blurred. The whisper was accompanied by a flickering ghostly white in her peripheral vision, wisps and streamers of phantasm which vanished when she turned her sight toward them.

Cyn did not take this apparition well. “Am I the only one of our party besieged by ghosts?” she asked, voice quivering, clinging to Eseld’s arm with one hand. “Can none of you see this all about us? Am I touched? Am I haunted?”

Sky snorted. “Sensory interference. It’s nothing. Ignore it, like … like Shilu said. I’ve had worse. Got a heads-up rig hit by a custom ECM blast once. Shit had me seeing straight up gore splash for a week. Blindfolded myself in the end, waited it out. This is weak stuff.”

Eseld shook her head. “It’s her. It’s obviously her.”

“You’re right,” Shilu said from ahead, descending the staircase quickly. “It’s Lykke. Ignore her. Keep moving.”

The ghosts and phantasms vanished by the time they reached the next floor.

Shilu took the group outward, toward one of the exterior walls on this floor of the tomb pyramid. The static murmur intensified, growing louder and clearer. Eseld cocked her head; she picked out individual gusts of wind raking against the black metal of the tomb, followed by pounding sheets of precipitation throwing up rolling waves of dense sibilance. Distant booms and cracks and thumps punctuated the haze.

“Is that a storm?” Sky asked. “Sounds heavy.”

“Yes,” Eseld replied. Her throat was going dry. How could a storm be heavy enough to penetrate a tomb with such clamour? “A big one.”

Shilu said nothing.

The noise grew and grew — and then burst into view as the group stepped into a wide atrium. The room was walled on three sides in light brown stone, and on the final side with a slab of toughened glass, easily twelve inches thick. A wide skylight matched the window.

Rain was lashing against the glass in drumming sheets of wind-whipped grit and grease, a wall of water hurled about by the tendrils of the storm. This was an exterior room, on the edge of one of the pyramid steps which formed the tomb, but the corpse-city was barely visible through the torrent of rain churning in the air. The sky was a sagging gyre of black, like a distended stomach about to burst from accumulated rot.

Eseld had seen plenty of rainstorms, both in life and during her many resurrections, but nothing on this scale. The sky looked as if it was trying to reach downward and scoop up the land. Eseld wanted to retreat deeper into the tomb, away from the windows.

Before anybody could comment on the storm, Lykke made her third appearance.

The hem of a white dress fluttered in the depths of the corridor ahead, vanishing around a shadowy corner; the fabric was followed by the darting white motes of several bloated flies.

No footsteps. No laughter. Nothing which could be heard over the raging storm and heavy rain.

“Fuck!” Sky spat. She reached out to grab Cyn’s arm, to halt her as well; Cyn winced at the tug on her wrist, but she stopped. “That thing is hunting us, making fun of us, trying to rile us up! She was right there! Right ahead of us!”

“No,” Shilu said. “She’s not.”

But Shilu paused as well, several paces deeper into the atrium. Eseld did the same, examining Shilu’s expressionless face and wide dark eyes.

Shilu paid no attention to the spot where Lykke had vanished into the shadows. She stared out of the window, at the storm.

“Then what the fuck did we just see?” Sky demanded.

Eseld bared her teeth at Sky. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Sky narrowed her eyes at Eseld. “Don’t ask questions? Don’t try to protect ourselves? That was her, her dress, her fucking disgusting flies, that was her, she’s hunting us—”

“She is, yes!” Eseld snapped. “But we can’t do anything about it! You got a knife on you? A gun? No, huh?”

Sky let go of Cyn’s arm and tightened her hands into fists. Eseld kept showing her sharpened teeth.

This was bad — why had she leapt to Shilu’s defence? It wasn’t as if Shilu needed the help. Sky was large and strong and aggressive, exactly the type who tended to make it further and start eating other people first. Sky was dangerous and Eseld knew it all too well. Eseld glanced at Cyn, but Cyn was edging away, clearing the way for a fight, eyes darting back and forth.

“Lykke,” said Shilu, “is reconstituting her inter-nanonic definitional matrix.”

Sky snorted. “And what does that mean, when it’s at home?”

Shilu turned her head to stare at Sky for a moment. Sky swallowed.

Shilu said: “She’s putting herself back in her body. We’re seeing echoes of the process moving across the local network. It’s not Lykke, not really. It’s her reflection.”

Eseld said, “How long do we have?”

Shilu sighed. “Good question. I don’t know. The process should be instantaneous. She should not take this long. As I told you, I do not have the means to disrupt her in this manner.”

Sky snorted. “So she’s faking. Winding us up.”

Cyneswith cleared her throat. “Trying to get us to fight each other, perhaps? That’s always a risk. You should never listen to voices from the forest. Don’t listen to anything you can’t see, especially if it’s trying to tease you.”

Shilu looked back at the windows. “No. She has no need for that. She knows I cannot defeat her a second time.”

Eseld said, “Is she maybe … ‘limited’ as well? Somebody else holding her back? Something like that?”

Shilu blinked. Her eyes tightened — a new expression. “Perhaps. I do not understand who would do that, or how.” She pointed at the window. “Especially in this new context.”

Sky frowned. “The storm?”

Eseld said, “It’s not natural, is it?”

Shilu did not explain. She crossed the atrium and walked right up to the wall of windows, putting her face close to the glass. Eseld shared a glance with Sky and Cyneswith, then hurried to follow. The freshies trailed behind.

Eseld could barely see the revenants in the tomb’s outworks down below, obscured behind a wall of thickening rain and constant swirls of high wind, in addition to the gritty, greasy, black-oil residue on the glass itself. Anybody down there would be drenched to the bone if they were not under cover — which was not dangerous for a revenant, freed from the indignity of hypothermia and the maintenance needs of an immune system, but deeply unpleasant all the same, and very difficult in which to fight. The rain was so heavy that visibility must be terrible, footing treacherous, communications garbled.

Some movements were still visible even through the dense rain — large chunks of rubble and rebar picked up by the wind and tossed through the streets beyond the tomb. Walls were shivering in the wind, concrete debris stripped from exposed edges, crumbly brick collapsing before the storm.

Shilu was staring upward, at the dark and churning clouds on the jagged horizon; the storm was mounting the back of the graveworm.

Eseld said, “The worm is blocking the worst of it, isn’t it?”

“Mm,” Shilu grunted. “Not for long.”

Cyn spoke from behind Eseld: “That’s real pretty. A really pretty storm. I always loved storms.”

Sky said, “Shit, we have to head out into that? Can we grab some coats first? We’re not gonna be naked, are we?”

“No,” said Shilu. “That storm would kill the three of you. That’s a hurricane.”

“What?!” Sky said.

“Those gusts down there are hitting a hundred miles an hour. The heart of the storm is to the north. Sustained winds of one-fifty, maybe one-sixty miles per hour. Likely higher on the far side of the graveworm, two fifty to three hundred miles per hour. Maybe higher. I can’t get exact measurements without network access, only what I have on-board. It’s heading directly toward the tomb. Perhaps half an hour until direct contact.”

Eseld knew what was happening.

“It’s Lykke, isn’t it?” she whispered.

Sky laughed — a horrible jerking sound on the edge of hysteria. “You’re kidding? You’re joking, right? That monster can — what, summon storms? You’re telling me it’s trying to kill us with a storm? It—”

“Fairy magic,” Cyn said. “Command of the weather.”

“Shut up!” Sky snapped at her. Cyn flinched. “Shut up! It’s not magic, there’s no such thing as magic, or ghosts, or—”

Eseld rounded on Sky and showed her sharpened teeth. “It may as well be! Stop shouting at her!”

Sky’s face flashed with anger.

Shilu turned away from the windows. “There are no atmospheric convection cycles to begin a hurricane, and no liquid water left in the oceans with which to form one. Even if that was not true, we are thousands of miles inland. The storm is impossible. It is being sent on purpose.”

“By Lykke?” Eseld prompted.

Shilu shrugged. “Unknown. I doubt she has network access enough for this. This is not unprecedented, but it is very rare.”

Eseld hurried on. “It’s a way to drive us to ground, or to create a lot of confusion to cover for something else, so … so Lykke wouldn’t need to do that, not to kill us, I mean. It’s something else, something trying to stop her? Or to confuse her. Or make sure she’s finished the job.”

Shilu stared at Eseld for a moment. “You think quickly, zombie.”

“Just trying to survive.”

“Yes. And somebody is trying to kill you, you three zombies.”

Sky blinked several times. Cyn just nodded.

“Not you?” Eseld asked.

Shilu shook her head. “The storm is little danger to me. The tomb can withstand winds ten times that intensity. The graveworm could survive much more. The only threat is to exposed zombies. Whoever sent it wants to keep you in the tomb. Or perhaps they aren’t taking any chances of Lykke failing. But it gives me a perfect opportunity to escape. I could break this window and fly to the ground. The hurricane will soon introduce enough local network interference to give me a chance. But it would kill the three of you.” Shilu sighed; for the first time her expression went further — she scrunched up her eyes with frustration. “I don’t understand why any of this is happening.”

“Does this change our plans?” Eseld asked.

Shilu’s eyes snapped open. She shook her head. “No. We go to the gravekeeper.”

“Then let’s go!” Sky snapped. “Before that plague-ridden bitch finishes putting herself back together. Cool? Can we move out now, ma’am?” Her voice dripped with sarcastic deference.

Shilu turned and set off again, heading deeper into the tomb. “We’re almost at the elevator. Not far now. No more stairs.”

For ten minutes Shilu led them deeper into this floor of the tomb, heading toward the core of the building, worming through increasingly tight passageways and narrow corridors, with lots of awkward blind corners. The pounding of the storm grew and grew as the zombies burrowed deeper into the ossified meat of the tomb, a standing wave of background static pounding against the exterior walls. Eseld could barely imagine the growing fury outdoors. Such a storm would have ripped trees from their roots and flattened buildings to kindling.

Eventually Shilu stopped about twenty meters shy of a sharp left-hand turn in a long corridor. Eseld almost blundered into her back, scrambling to a halt. Cyneswith let out a little squeak. Sky hissed, “What is it?”

Shilu said nothing for a moment. She stared through the metal of the corner, as if she could see through solid matter; Eseld guessed she probably could. The corner did not look any different to Eseld.

Then Shilu said: “This is unexpected. I may be about to die. If I do, turn back and run for the exit.”

Eseld shared a look with Sky. Cyn shrugged and mouthed ‘fairies’.

“Stay here,” said Shilu

Then she strode forward, heading toward the corner. On the last step she paused for a split-second, then stepped out of cover.

Nothing happened.

Shilu stood beyond the corner for several seconds, staring at something Eseld couldn’t see. Then she turned and gestured to the trio of revenants, pointing toward the corner — a clear instruction: do not advance further until ordered.

Eseld hurried to the corner, with Cyneswith and Sky at her heels. All three zombies pressed themselves against the wall, as Shilu indicated.

Shilu said, “One of you will have to take the same risk I just did. Decide who.”

“But you just did it, right?” Eseld asked. “What is it, what—”

“Guns. They may respond differently to zombies. One of you volunteer, quickly.”

Cyn started to say: “What if we—”

“Quickly.”

Sky snapped, “Why, what’s wrong? Spit it out!”

Shilu pointed back the way they’d come.

The outline of a human figure was extruding itself from the grey metal wall which they had just passed, like a person pressing their whole body against a sheet of canvas. Facial features were sharpening and clarifying, individual fingers popping free of the metal surface, limbs gaining substance and shape with every second. Textures grew from metal layers — bouncy curls and fluttering sundress frills, splaying forth in fans of simulated fabric, stiff and grey.

Lykke was emerging, pressed from dead matter into living flesh.

Cyn clapped both hands to her mouth, recoiling into Eseld’s arms. Sky spluttered and slapped her own right thigh, reaching for a weapon which wasn’t there. Eseld bared her teeth and spat.

“Quickly,” Shilu repeated.

Eseld started to move, intending to step out next to Shilu and accept whatever this godless fate had decided for her — but then Sky said, “I’ll do it!” and darted past Eseld.

Sky stepped out of cover and threw her arms wide, eyes bulging, ready for a second death.

Nothing happened.

“We’re clear,” Shilu said. “Go.”

Shilu took off at a sprint. Sky blinked in shock, then reached back and grabbed Cyn, sweeping the smaller woman off her feet and into Sky’s arms. She darted after Shilu.

Eseld glanced back. Lykke had both arms free from the wall now, half her head and torso out, legs trailing behind. The metal surface of her skin was gaining colour, flushing with pale skin and white sundress and blonde hair. Her eyes were still dead grey, empty of life. Her hair was stiff as metal shavings. Her head twitched.

Eseld scrambled around the corner and after the others — then gasped, almost losing her footing in shock. She caught herself, got herself upright, and broke into a sprint.

The corridor was kinked in three places as if to create a trio of choke points; it terminated in a steep switchback ramp which climbed toward a raised, walled platform or second level, from which an observer might look out over the choke points below.

The walls and ceiling bristled with firepower.

Hard-point weapon emplacements cradled all manner of guns and cannons, none of which Eseld could name. Black-mouthed machines tracked Eseld and the others with empty muzzles as they ran down the corridor toward the ramp. Shilu was not spared the battery’s attention; clusters of lance-structures swivelled to follow her, backed up by multi-barrelled monsters ticking and clicking in time to their internal engines. Many of the guns whirred with the sounds of tiny motors as they twisted and turned, or hummed with the infernal buzz of power-packs and on-board reactors.

Hundreds of automatic turrets and gun emplacements tracked the zombies and the fallen angel down the length of the jinking corridor. Eseld felt as if she was sprinting down a length of intestine, lined with waving cilia.

Shilu hit the ramp first and reached the observation platform moments later. Sky went next, hurling herself upward, cradling Cyneswith in her arms. Eseld was last, mounting the ramp and hauling herself to the top. She collapsed against the wall-lip of the platform, heaving for breath.

A pair of large metal doors stood half-open on one side of the platform, ten inches thick. Beyond them was a blank metal box.

“It’s a dead end!” Cyneswith wailed.

“No, that’s a lift,” said Sky, tipping Cyn back to her feet. “We need to get in the lift! Where does it lead?”

Shilu turned to face the corridor through which they had just passed. She held her arms out to either side and made her hands into blades, extending flesh and bone into lightless black metal.

“Shilu?” Eseld hissed. “Shilu, this is a dead end, and I know it too. You said you can’t fight Lykke again, what do we do?”

“I have no idea,” said Shilu. “None of this is meant to be here. These guns should not be here. And they should have killed me.”

Sky whirled on Shilu. “What now?! Do we pile into that lift? We can’t just stand here and die!”

“There’s no point,” said Shilu. “Not unless the guns wake. And I don’t think they will, I think—”

“Shishi!”

Lykke’s bright and burning warble filled the air with laughter.

An apparition in white stepped around the far end of the jinking corridor, hands raised in playful surrender.

Lykke looked exactly as she had when she had first appeared — a young woman with luxurious blonde hair, wearing a sundress and fancy shoes — except her colours were greyed out, washed thin by her rebirth from the wall. Her joints did not appear to work properly, as if she was suffering a restricted range of motion. Her hair was stiff and artificial. Her eyeballs were fused in place.

“Shishi, really!” Lykke said. “That’s more than enough of making me run about. Now I need to limber up and oil down and you just—”

Every turret in the corridor whirled to point at Lykke.

Her eyes went wide. Her mouth formed a little ‘oh.’

Shilu shouted, “Into the li—”

The battery of guns opened up with a deafening roar, filling the cramped corridor with a storm of firepower; the slam of bullets and plasma bolts and sabots drowned out the distant drumming of the hurricane’s fringe, punctuated by the kick and thump and whine of a hundred magazines and motors and mechanisms.

Lykke’s grey-washed form vanished beneath a hail of gunfire, blotted out by the flash of energy weapons, swallowed by the explosion of debris. The end of the corridor collapsed into metal slag and flying fragments and molten droplets of melted steel. A cloud of shrapnel burst against the platform, whizzing and pinging through the air.

“Into the lift!” Shilu howled above the noise.

Sky swept Cyneswith off her feet again; Cyn was screaming, hands clamped over her ears. Eseld sprinted for the gap between the lift doors and hurled herself through, into the darkness. Sky shouldered inside after her. Shilu slipped through last and slammed the doors shut, blotting out the worst of the cacophonous gunfire.

A two-button control panel stood to the left of the doors. Shilu slammed the ‘down’ arrow. A tiny red light flickered on.

The lift jerked, then began to descend.

Three pairs of lungs panted hard in the dark. Cyn held back a sob, gulping for air. Sky muttered, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

The sound of the guns above did not stop — but the furious roar started to slow, growing quiet, as if the turrets were falling silent one by one.

“That didn’t stop her,” Eseld said. “Did it?”

Shilu’s gaze crept upward, watching through the wall and the shaft as the lift descended. “No,” she said. “Not for long.”

“What do we do now?” Sky said. “What do we do, how do we get away from her?! How do we fucking kill her?”

“We don’t,” said Shilu.

“There has to be a way, you were listing them earlier! We’re heading to an armoury, right? You mentioned fire, heat. What’s in there? Do we have thermite? A flamethrower? You need an ECM bubble to stop her re-downloading her imprint? I can rustle up something if we have a powerful enough plasma charge and some kind of shield to contain the—”

“We do not have the means,” said Shilu. “Nothing in a tomb armoury will be enough to stop one of us.”

“Nothing?” Sky swallowed. “Nothing at all?”

Shilu considered this for a moment. “There may be a flamethrower. The flame will not be hot enough. She might retreat from it regardless. Maybe.”

Sky clenched her teeth and raked her hands through her dark hair. How naive, Eseld thought, how childish. One could not turn at bay and fight demons and angels, not with all the weapons in this dead world, not with anything she’d ever witnessed, or could imagine. One could barely turn and fight stronger revenants, let alone true cosmological actors in charge of their own destinies, like Shilu. Their only option as zombies was escape — or the salvation of this ‘gravekeeper’.

Silence stretched on. The lift continued to descend. Shilu said nothing, staring at nothing, her sheet of flawless black hair hanging like frozen obsidian. Cyneswith shuffled closer to Eseld, then wormed her hand into Eseld’s grip. Sky began to pace. Eventually the sound of the guns was gone completely, replaced with the distant thundering howl of the hurricane outside, battering the tomb with walls of storm and surge.

Over two minutes later, the lift stopped.

Shilu turned to face the trio of zombies. Her skin flowed and flowered and hardened — back into the nightmare scarecrow of black chrome, covered in blades and sharp edges, standing on a pair of spear-point feet. Her face was a pale mask, inhumanly perfect.

Cyneswith went stiff and still. Sky snorted. Eseld attempted to show no fear.

“There are two chambers beyond this door,” said Shilu. “I am going to step into the second chamber. Do not follow me. One of four things will happen. The gravekeeper may kill me, or it may kill Lykke. It might kill both of us. Finally, it might do nothing. Those are the four outcomes. In the event it kills me or kills both of us, you should arm yourselves and attempt to escape the tomb.”

“It won’t kill us?” Eseld asked.

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Shilu smiled — a pair of tiny curls at the corners of her pale polymer mouth.

“You are beneath notice, zombie. Even with a storm sent to pin you in this grave. To a gravekeeper you’re not even there. If I die here, do not linger. Good luck.”

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A storm’s a-comin’, but who sent it? Who but gods can call the thunder and lightning their own?

And who turned on all those guns?

Ahem! Well! Here we are, plunging deeper into arc 11 than I ever expected. Originally I thought this arc might be like 5-6 chapters, but now I’m not so sure. I am experiencing the novel sensation of having my outlines thrown into chaos by characters who aren’t even on screen. Which is … new! So this arc might actually end up longer than I expected, but I’m not sure how long, not yet. Meanwhile. Shilu stays on target, Eseld is trying her best, Sky displays worrying behaviour, and Cyn is just rolling with the punches. And how about those ghostly presences, eh?

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

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Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I’ll be sharing more chapters ahead with patrons!

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And thank you!!! Thank you for reading my little story about zombie girls and spooky monsters and bones and guts and brains. I hope you’re having as much fun as I am! Onward we go, deeper into the tomb, fleeing toward the conquering worm. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Body horror, the usual
Torture (sort of)

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Shilu — the nightmare of seamless metal and obsidian spikes into which she had transformed — cut Lykke into three pieces.

Her shoulder slammed into Lykke’s chest, ramming lances of black steel through the revenant’s ribcage, shattering bone and pulping flesh. Blood spluttered from Lykke’s mouth in a strangled cough. Shilu’s bladed arms blurred outward to either side, then scissored inward. One sliced through Lykke’s white sundress and opened the soft flesh beneath, bisecting her at the stomach, passing through skin and spine like a hot wire through cheese; the blade was out and trailing an arc of blood before Lykke’s breached intestines boiled forth in a ruptured mass. Shilu’s other arm scythed through Lykke’s delicate neck. The decapitation was so swift that for a moment Lykke did not appear wounded, but then her neck exploded in a fountain of gore. Her blonde curls tumbled aside. Blood splattered against the grey ceiling, falling as crimson rain. Lykke’s head hit the floor with the crack of a skull fracture; her torso followed, landing with a wet splat of splayed guts and spilled fluids, bile and chyme pumping and pooling from the ruin of her belly. Her legs and hips remained upright for a split second — half a white sundress drenched with scarlet, fancy white shoes stained with blood, painted toenails drowned in red. Then the legs followed the rest of her corpse, slumping to the floor.

Shilu stood amid the dripping gore, her front and face speckled with misted ruby droplets.

She had abandoned her human disguise, her soft brown skin, her long silken hair. ‘Shilu’ was a machine figure of black chrome and lightless blades. Her feet were spear-tips. Her face was a pale mask. Wide dark eyes stared down at Lykke’s remains.

Eseld could do nothing but watch. She was still immobilised, frozen by some magic or science beyond her comprehension.

Eseld had witnessed and experienced many strange horrors during the unending cycle of her damned unlife. She had seen zombies so changed by nanomachine consumption that they were barely recognisable as human; she had hidden from revenants who were capable of tortures and cruelties she could not have imagined in true life; she had witnessed weapons and artefacts which seemed to her like infernal wizardry and alien invention. She was surrounded every day by the world-corpse of the city, reminded every hour of her status as a microbe inside a rotting leviathan. She had met monsters and predators, seen miracles of technology, been shot and killed by guns she could not begin to understand — and been devoured by living horrors at the very edge of mortal madness.

But she had never been frozen in place by the whim of another, like a mouse before a snake. She had never seen a revenant’s entire body flow like molten metal and reform into a living knife. She had never met anything like Shilu. Whatever Lykke was, she had not stood a chance.

The crimson splatters on Shilu’s black-metal skin began to vanish. Shilu’s body was absorbing the blood.

Eseld needed to scream. She needed to run. She needed to curl up in a ball on the floor and sob and weep and pray this end would be a quick one, for an angel of death stood before her, unveiled in terrible glory.

But Eseld could not move a muscle.

Shilu opened her pale polymer lips, and spoke to Lykke’s trisected corpse.

“Get up.”

Lykke’s mangled intestines jumped like a nest of snakes. Severed ends writhed and wriggled and rose into the air. The two halves of her sundered bowels found each other and clung together, braiding themselves tight like rubbery, blood-stained ropes. Lykke’s legs jerked and bucked, kicking against the slippery grey floor; her arms flapped and slapped amid the reeking fluids. Bones cracked and snapped as she rose — knee sockets enlarging, elbows turning backward, femurs expanding. New joints burst from inside her legs and arms — twists and knots of muscle and bone. Her hands grew thick and wide, planted flat on the floor, fingers tipped with
long white claws. Her spilled blood and viscera and intestinal fluids flowed back upward into her open wounds, sucked into the rents in her flesh, or simply absorbed into her skin. Lykke’s legs and torso heaved upward and stood — not in the upright pose of a human being, but as an upside down curved bridge, hands and feet planted on the floor like the four paws of a beast.

The stump of her neck sealed over with a blood-red plug, then extended into a barbed tail. The open mess of her guts remained parted, intestines waving like tentacles. Her white shoes fused into gnarled hooves. Her white sundress shimmered and shifted, then burst into a cloud of bloated, glistening, milk-white flies.

The monster was now twice Shilu’s height and several times her body weight. Eseld had never seen a living thing this large except the graveworm. Lykke was larger than a bear — larger than Taran. Eseld did not understand where the mass had come from, but the revenant had grown into a giant.

Shilu stepped back.

Lykke picked up her own severed head with a cluster of gut-tendrils. The bouncy blonde curls became razor-sharp twists of bleached steel. She held the head over her own groin, suspended on a neck of intestines. She pointed the face down at Shilu.

Lykke’s eyes snapped open, glowing a bright and toxic green. A grin ripped her mouth open like a bloody slash in pale flesh. White teeth had turned jagged.

“You sneaky little cunt!” Lykke shrieked. Her new voice hurt Eseld’s ears, shook her guts and eyeballs, and made the floor vibrate. Lykke’s plague-fly dress buzzed in time with her words. “You have more permissions than you were letting on! Enough to get all up inside me! And I don’t let just anybody do that, hahahahahaha!”

Lykke’s laugh made Eseld’s eyes water. She couldn’t even blink to clear the tears and blot out the pain.

Shilu didn’t answer. She raised her blades.

“Whatever,” Lykke spat, turning sour. She pawed at the floor with one white hoof, gouging the metal. “You won’t land the same trick twice! Your flesh-mask is off now. What are you going to do, spring at me again and hope I fall for it a second time?”

“Stand down,” Shilu said. “Go back to the network. This is a mistake.”

“Shishi,” Lykke purred, backed by the chorus of her pestilent aurora. She raised her severed head higher as she spoke, on a neck of tangled guts. “You can’t fight forever, not without access. You’ve got nothing outside ambient. But I can go for days on a droplet of honey. I’m infinite. I draw on an endless well. What are you going to do, fight me until you’re exhausted, just to show that you’re a good little doggy? Nobody cares!”

“We can debate later, when the mission is over,” said Shilu. “Stand down or get out of my way.”

Lykke sighed — a sound like a roaring fire consuming human flesh. “Okay, now you’re boring me.”

Lykke charged.

Shilu dived aside, rolling across the grey metal floor. Lykke galloped at her like a steed from the mouth of hell, all open entrails and slavering tongue, clad in a buzzing cloud of bloated flies, denting the metal with her hoofed feet and the claws of her modified hands. Shilu dodged the first charge and came up on one knee, raking a blade-arm down Lykke’s flank as she passed. Shilu’s blade parted a fan of ribs and flowered open the monster’s hipbone.

But Lykke didn’t care. Her open ribs transformed into teeth, the wound becoming a dripping maw, snapping shut inches shy of Shilu’s head. Her shattered hip twisted like an opening blossom; a gleaming point glittered in the centre of the bloom. That point shot forth and tried to spear Shilu through the leg with a tendril of metal-tipped flesh. Shilu turned the spear aside with a flourish of one sword-arm — but she staggered back with the impact.

“You can’t beat me off by cutting me up, Shishi!” Lykke screeched. She bounced off the wall with a clatter of hooves and a splatter of intestinal tendrils, rearing up to crush Shilu beneath her bulk. “Is this how you won so much favour, by hitting things with swords!?”

Shilu tried to dive aside a second time, going left. Eseld saw the mistake and wanted to scream, but her lips and vocal cords were as paralysed as the rest of her. Lykke had predicted the dodge; she fell upon Shilu’s intended trajectory with hooves and tendrils and spears of stabbing flesh.

But Shilu turned her leftward dodge into a rightward jink, flickering through the air so fast that her black metal body blurred against the grey background. She twitched her hips; three spikes of lightless metal extended from her skin like the stinger of a wasp, slamming through Lykke’s chest and side, retracting as fast as they had shot forth.

Lykke howled — with laughter.

The blood trailing from her three fresh puncture wounds hardened and rose, turning into a trio of thick tentacles, each tipped with a fist of stiffened crimson.

Three fists crashed into Shilu’s metal torso. The angel of death went flying, knocked off her feet. She hit one of the windows with a clatter of metal on glass — and a sickening crack-a-crack as the window fractured under the impact.

But the window held. Shilu dropped to the floor with a crunch.

Lykke raised her tendrils, her tentacles, her ghoulish severed head. “You can’t win a contest of arms against infinity, Shishi! If you don’t want to lose, you may as well cut off your own head. Isn’t that what your people used to do, back in life? Something like that, anyway. Come on, let me see you cut your own throat!”

Shilu rose to her pointed feet, framed by the endless rot of the corpse-city and the black skies beyond. The clouds were churning and thickening with an oncoming storm. A dribble of blood trickled from one corner of Shilu’s mouth. She wore no expression on her pale mask.

“Internal bleeding?” Lykke said; she seemed surprised. “Oh, you really are fragile. Wow!”

Shilu raised her swords.

“Stand down and return to the network,” she said. “I won’t warn you again.”

Lykke clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “And there you go ruining all the fun. Shishi, it’s not worth playing if you don’t show any—”

Shilu leapt at the monster.

The black-metal scarecrow and the white-clad demon moved faster than Eseld’s eyes could follow. Shilu and Lykke traded blows in close proximity, blades and tendrils and teeth and spikes flashing and cutting, snapping shut and lashing through the air. Shilu sliced into Lykke’s flesh again and again, opening bloody rents in her pale skin — but each wound closed with a wet slurp or opened into some new horror, fanged and dripping, full of digestive juices or sucking membranes. The monster spouted new limbs from the ragged orifices of her wounds, grew eyeballs in her back, flowered open her ribcage and hips into snaking tentacles of blood-slick bone.

Shilu’s metal skin turned aside Lykke’s teeth and claws, but she could not withstand the kinetic force of every blow. She was knocked aside, pushed back, thrown off her footing.

Lykke raised her decapitated head above the fray. “Bored now!” she announced.

The swarm of bleached and bloated flies about Lykke’s body suddenly flowed toward Shilu, taking advantage of a moment during which she was off balance. A river of insect bodies pushed in through her parted lips.

Shilu turned aside and vomited — heaving up a mass of fused and melted flies, their pale bodies turned to slush in an instant, cooked by her inner fires.

Lykke did not press the opening. She stepped back.

Shilu tried to raise her sword-arms once again — but then she blinked, twitching and shivering, taken by a fever, by the chills, by a hand inside her body.

Lykke grinned. She raised a hoof and hit Shilu with a lazy side-swipe, catching Shilu in the middle. Shilu went flying a second time, her black-metal body gone limp. She sailed in an arc through the air, beyond the limit of Eseld’s restricted vision. Eseld heard Shilu land with a clatter of metal on metal, smashing into the detritus of the security checkpoint. She rolled across the floor, then lay still.

Lykke cackled. “Without permissions, you don’t even own your body! Come on, Shishi. Get up and let’s finish this off so I can crack your shell and root around inside.”

Eseld heard Shilu stand up, metal clacking against metal. She walked back into view. Something was very wrong with her body — she kept twitching and tensing up.

She stopped well short of Lykke and raised her swords.

Lykke grinned. “One more round? Really?”

“I told you I wouldn’t warn you again,” said Shilu.

Lykke rolled her eyes. “You’re mine now, Shishi. Fine! Come hereeeeee baby!”

Lykke charged, galloping across the blood-smeared grey metal.

Shilu twisted one foot, as if bracing for a fancy riposte.

Eseld still believed in God. She believed that a loving God had created the world and everything in it. God was all powerful, knew all things, and loved all things. This love was sometimes beyond human comprehension, which was why evil things happened; this was also why good people sometimes suffered and bad people often prospered. But Eseld had long since accepted the fact that God was dead; the throne of heaven lay empty and cold. Even God’s inscrutable love was missing from the world. During some of her early resurrections she had attempted to figure out what had gone wrong. Had God aged and died? Had God been killed — by humans? By the devil? By something else? In time she had accepted that the exact events did not matter. All that mattered is that creation had been abandoned to madness and decay. All the angels were as rotten as the world, and could offer these pitiful mortals no hope at all, for they had surely perished along with God.

But here, for the first time in so many cycles of death and resurrection, with so much of her mind worn away by time and pain and grief, Eseld knew she beheld a demon.

Lykke was a demon, intimate with the taste of victory.

The demon slammed into Shilu at full speed; Shilu’s metal spear-tip feet scraped across the floor as she caught the charge. Hooves battered at Shilu’s head and shoulders; bone-tipped tentacles whipped at her torso and constricted about her chest. Dripping maws snapped shut on her limbs and hips. Body weight pressed down on her, threatening to crush her against the floor. Bloated flies mobbed Shilu’s ears and eyes, swarming over her skin, looking for another way in to infect her with more twitches and shivers. Lykke’s severed head descended, razor teeth gnashing and snapping to bite off chunks of Shilu’s metal body. A dozen more mouths opened in Lykke’s fly-shrouded flesh, to pull Shilu apart by the arms and legs.

Shilu let it happen. Her blade-arms sank deep into the soft and spongy flesh either side of what had been Lykke’s groin, all the way to Shilu’s elbows.

Lykke screeched: “Bet I can freeze you like I froze those zombies, Shi—”

Shilu’s black metal skin crackled with a blue shimmer, like lightning flashing across a storm’s underbelly.

Lykke screamed.

Her white flesh and bloated fly-cloud recoiled from Shilu like shadow from flame.

The scream turned into an ear-splitting note, then descended to a blood-choked gurgle. Lykke’s body lost definition, her sharp edges melting into rubbery blue translucence. Her cloud of flies died all at once, falling upon her like droplets of rotten, milky rain. Her legs collapsed, folding up as they lost rigidity. Lykke’s mass hit the floor with a wet slap of blubber, then appeared to shrink, as if draining away through a hidden grate. Her face melted, eyeballs running down her cheeks, mouth vanishing amid the mess. She turned to slime, then to nothing.

Within ten seconds no trace of Lykke remained. Not even a drop of blood.

Eseld was released from the spell binding her limbs and lungs; she toppled backward, heaving for breath, shaking all over. She caught herself on one of the metal tables bolted to the floor.

Shilu straightened up. She did not twitch or jerk. Her blades melted back into hands and forearms — not of soft brown flesh, but more of that lightless chrome and black metal. She flexed the mechanical fingers of her right hand, then looked down at her fingertips. A droplet of white formed at the sharp point of her right index finger, the exact colour of Lykke’s plague-fly dress. Shilu watched the droplet for a second, then flicked it onto the floor. The droplet vanished.

Eseld felt an emotion she had not experienced since true life — awe and wonder, like looking up at a starry night sky from within a forest clearing, and knowing that God had made the world good, for her.

A choked sob came from behind Eseld. She tore her eyes away from Shilu.

Behind her, the fresh meat was having a breakdown.

Sky — the tall and strong one with the reddish skin — was collapsed on the floor, sitting on her backside, weeping openly, hands clawing at her own cheeks, on the verge of hyperventilating. Cyneswith, the smaller but older one with all the freckles, was still on her feet, staring at the point where Lykke had vanished, mouth agape with wordless fascination.

Cyneswith met Eseld’s eyes. She closed her mouth and swallowed. “Fairies are terrifying.”

“ … yes,” Eseld said. Fairies, demons, what was the difference? “Yes, they are.”

Cyneswith raised both hands and put her palms together, as if praying. She bowed her head. “Thank you, Lady Shilu.”

Shilu turned away from her vanquished foe. Wide dark eyes stared without expression.

Eseld swallowed. “What are you?”

An angel, she told herself. An angel of death. Or a demon, a fallen angel like—

“All three of you stay exactly where you are,” Shilu said. “Do not move. Disobey and I will kill you. Do you understand? Answer verbally with yes or no.”

Eseld said: “Yes! Yes. Yes.”

Cyneswith froze, head still bowed. She murmured a tiny ‘yes’.

Sky was hyperventilating now, heaving for breath. She managed to speak: “No! No, I don’t— no, no— what was that, how was that possible, what—”

Eseld snapped without looking back, “Do as she says!”

Sky gulped twice. “I’m just— I’m not moving, I’m just sitting here, I— o-okay, yes, yes.”

Shilu walked up to Eseld. Her spear-tip feet tapped on the grey metal floor. Eseld focused on those feet and wondered how Shilu kept her balance — if she didn’t think about that, she might scream and scramble backward. Eseld held herself perfectly still to avoid flinching away from the angel of death.

Shilu stopped, close enough to touch, or to impale and rend Eseld’s body on her blades and spikes and black metal angles.

“Look at me,” Shilu ordered.

Eseld raised her gaze and looked into Shilu’s wide, dark eyes, the only part of her which still looked human.

“Don’t move,” said Shilu.

She raised her right hand and made it smooth, so the edges would not cut. Then she cupped Eseld’s chin and leaned forward, staring deep into Eseld’s eyes.

Wide and dark as a sea of oil; Shilu’s eyes shimmered with a sudden glitter of emerald light.

“Ah!” Eseld winced. Pain bloomed inside her head. Her vision blurred and her hearing went dull. Her brain was full of cotton wool. Her skin tingled all over, as if pricked with a million needles. She gasped and jerked in Shilu’s grip, but Shilu held on tight, squeezing Eseld’s jawbone.

Then the pain passed and Eseld’s senses cleared. Shilu let go of her chin. Eseld staggered back, gasping for breath, blinking and twitching, rubbing at her face. Her knees were weak. Her skin was flushed. She felt fragile and vulnerable, violated somehow, as if Shilu had been rooting around inside her skull.

“You’re free to move and speak,” Shilu said.

Before Eseld could react, Shilu stepped around her and repeated the process with Cyneswith, cupping her chin and staring deep into her eyes. Cyneswith winced and flinched, gasping with pain, writhing and whining. She arched her spine and bucked in Shilu’s grip. Shilu held her longer than she had held Eseld, until Cyneswith was panting ragged, caked in sweat, flushed all down her front, hair stuck to her scalp.

Then Shilu let go. Cyneswith’s knees gave out. Eseld darted forward and caught Cyneswith under the armpits.

“You’re cleared,” said Shilu. She moved onto Sky and said: “Get up.”

Sky shook her head. “I-I don’t think I can, I—”

“Get up or I’ll kill you,” said Shilu.

Sky lurched to her feet, still panting for breath, eyes wide with delayed panic and the onset of trauma. Shilu grabbed Sky’s chin — reaching upward this time, because Sky was taller. She stared into Sky’s eyes until Sky snorted with pain, then shook all over. Sky’s eyeballs rolled into the back of her head. She gritted her teeth and tried to resist, but gave in with a deep whine in her chest, heaving and spitting.

Shilu let go. Sky staggered back, but kept her feet.

“W-what was that!?” Sky demanded. “What was that, were you reading data off my retinas? What—”

“None of you are compromised,” Shilu said. “You are what you appear to be. But all three of you contain scraps of anomalous code.” Shilu paused, then said: “I don’t understand what this means.”

Shilu turned away to face the bank of windows, staring through the glass which had cracked under her own body weight. She looked down at the ground, at the tomb’s outworks beyond the walls.

“I don’t understand what any of this means,” she repeated.

Eseld made sure Cyneswith could stand before she let go of her. “You alright? Cyne— Cyneswith?” she hissed. They were both still shaking from Shilu’s examination, both flushed, both covered in sweat. Cyneswith was bright red beneath her freckles, eyes full of tears.

Cyneswith nodded. “Cyn. Yes. I can stand.”

Sky was hugging herself, trying to pull herself together, staring at the ground and struggling not to slip into hyperventilation again. Eseld nodded toward her. Cyneswith took her meaning and went to touch Sky’s arm. Sky flinched; for a moment, Eseld thought Sky might attack Cyn, but then she backed down.

Eseld turned back to Shilu — a black-edged scarecrow of blades and spikes, outlined by the cracked glass and the corpse-world beyond. The sky was darkening with the beginning of a storm. Droplets of greasy, gritty rain speckled the windows.

Eseld crept closer, but made sure to stay to one side. She did not want to surprise Shilu.

“May I … ask a question?”

Shilu answered without looking. “You don’t have to ask permission. I am not your master.”

“What … what are you?”

“The same thing as Lykke.”

Fallen angel.

Eseld wanted to ask so very many questions. What are you really? What was that fight about? Why is any of this happening? Why did you stare into our eyes and ransack our souls? What do you mean we’re full of ‘anomalous code’? What’s your mission?

Instead, she said: “What do we do now?”

Shilu didn’t answer.

“ … Shilu?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Shilu answered. She stared into the gathering rain. “None of this makes sense. Events are moving beyond my control.”

“But … you beat the demon, right?”

Shilu looked directly at Eseld. Her pale mask was more expressive than her fleshy face had been, brow furrowed, eyes narrowed. “The what?”

“Lykke. You beat Lykke. That’s pretty under control.”

Shilu blinked. “No. I didn’t kill her. She’s still nearby. I only disrupted her current physical matrix. The same trick will not work twice. In fact, it should not have worked even once. She should have been knocked off balance, perhaps disoriented for a few moments. Instead she acted as if I had disrupted her inter-nanonic definitional matrix.”

Eseld swallowed. “Can you make it permanent? Can she be killed?”

Shilu’s mouth twitched — was that the hint of a smile?

She said: “Ambitious, zombie. Yes, there are certain methods by which a physical matrix can be permanently disabled, but they are beyond my current access and permission levels. As for physical damage, mm, maybe. Application of gravity, heat, enough electromagnetic force to pull her atoms apart. Fire would work, but it would need to be very hot indeed. And she would need to be signal-caged so she doesn’t just slip into any nearby high-density nanomachine hosts. We lack the means.”

“Then shouldn’t we be running? We’ve got to get out of here. Can we outrun her?”

“Unlikely. We’re marked in the network. She has full access. Doesn’t matter how fast I move now. Besides, I believe she’s playing with … ”

Shilu trailed off. Eseld finished for her. “Playing with you?”

Shilu blinked again. She examined Eseld, looking her up and down. Eseld felt exceptionally naked in front of this machine-person of black metal and burnished chrome and blushless polymer.

“Or with you,” Shilu said. “I’m not sure.” Then: “Why do you look at me like that?”

Eseld let her eyes flicker up and down Shilu’s form; she wasn’t sure if she should answer, or if Shilu would find that offensive.

“Oh.” Shilu said. Her skin suddenly broke and re-set, like oil sliding off the surface of pottery.

Shilu transformed back. Light brown skin and long black hair, human and short, with ordinary feet and hands. Her expression remained identical.

Eseld shook her head. “Y-you don’t have to—”

“It is better to keep the truth concealed from other revenants,” Shilu said, then sighed. “What am I saying? What am I doing? You cannot possibly be important to any of this. One of those girls back in the resurrection chamber might have been. I should have been decisive and protected them all. But you three? I’ve checked you. You’re not. Nothing but scraps and leftovers. Then again, I do not have access to the network. I do not know what to do. I do not understand what is going on.”

Eseld didn’t know how to react to that. If Shilu didn’t understand what was going on, then what hope did Eseld have?

All Eseld knew is that Shilu was the strangest thing she had seen in all her many resurrections — and Shilu had slain a demon, if only temporarily. On an intellectual level, Eseld knew that Shilu was not an angel and Lykke was not a demon, at least not literally. She understood computers and nanomachines, she knew what the graveworms did and how firearms spat bullets. She had learned so much about science and technology from other zombies, even if only in bits and pieces, early in her cycles of death and rebirth.

But Lykke was a demon, and Shilu was the same — a fallen angel.

Eseld began to feel an emotion she had not entertained in many resurrections.

Perhaps not every angel was dead. Perhaps the throne of heaven could be filled once again. Perhaps hope was not all poison in her belly and brain.

And right now, Shilu was still her best chance of getting out of this tomb, and her only chance at escaping that monster if it returned again. Cyneswith and Sky stood even less chance of survival. Sky was calm now, though her eyes were still wide and alert, her muscles tight, her face pulled taut — a professional killer, her trauma neatly packaged and ready to go. Cyneswith waited for instructions as if born to take orders, clinging to Sky’s arm and listening to the ‘fairy ladies’ with rapt attention.

Eseld took her chances: “I think we would all like to get out of here. Please, Shilu. We should be moving, shouldn’t we?”

Shilu said nothing for a moment, then sighed again. “Alright. I’ve changed my plans. I’m going to the gravekeeper’s chamber. That’s my best shot at getting rid of Lykke, and that’s also the location of the armoury. We’re going in the same direction. If you keep up, you may have a better chance of survival. If you get there, you’ll be in a good position.”

“The … the what, pardon?”

“Armoury. Where they keep the guns.” Shilu turned away and started toward the stairs.

Eseld gestured at Sky and Cyneswith to follow, then picked up her feet and scurried after Shilu.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Eseld said. “I know what an armoury is, though I— there’s an armoury inside the tomb? And what do you mean, gravekeeper’s chamber? Somebody tends to this place, between resurrections?”

“In a manner of speaking. Don’t think about it, zombie. You just focus on getting your hands on some guns.”

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Shilu has no idea what is going on here. None of this makes sense. To get technical about it, and perhaps a little bit too wordy, shit do be real fucky with this here resurrection.

Well! That sure was a fight scene! I hope you enjoyed it! This chapter spiraled wildly beyond my control. Originally the fight was meant to be like 500 words, followed up by the events of what is now the next chapter, but Shilu and Lykke went much harder than I planned for. Necromancers, right? Like trying to herd cats.

No patreon link this week, since it’s almost the last day of the month! If you were thinking of subscribing right away, do feel free to wait until the 1st!

In the meantime, I want to share another piece of fanart: this wonderful illustration of Thirteen Arcadia fighting the ‘Disco Ball’, from the first chapter of her three part interlude (by FarionDragon). I love the different ways that different readers have imagined Thirteen Arcadia’s post-Change look!

As always, there’s still a  TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!

And thank you! Thank you for reading my little story, dear readers! I hope you know I could not do this without all of you, and that I’m still amazed Necroepilogos has come as far as it already has. I’ve said this a few times, but it really does feel like we’ve still barely scratched the surface of this world. I have so much more to show you. Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Albeist language

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Eseld followed Shilu out of the resurrection chamber. The surviving pair of freshies followed Eseld; there was nowhere else to go.

The fresh meat pair stuck close to Eseld’s heels, holding hands as they tiptoed around the smears of blood and gore, careful not to slip or to dirty their feet. Eseld paused at the threshold, next to the metal lockers which were always present in every resurrection chamber; the lockers had already been ransacked. The girls who’d made it out first had grabbed the stun batons. There was no point pausing to wriggle into the grey jumpsuits. The clothing was always a waste of time.

Eseld looked back at the freshies. They were both terrified, faces smeared with the remains of snot and tears, hair still slick and damp with slime.

Eseld put a finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh. Quiet. And fast. We have to keep up with Shilu.”

The freshies nodded. Behind them, the clean white illumination of the resurrection chamber was fading, plunging the carnage and corpses into darkness.

Eseld turned away and stepped from the dying cradle.

In the smooth grey corridor outside, three pairs of bloody footprints led away to the right; the prints were uneven and overlapping, dusted with flakes of dried slime. Three runners, sprinting for freedom. A streak of blood stained one of the walls, ending in a big smeared splat on the floor. Hand prints showed where a revenant had scrambled to her feet. No corpse, no evidence of more killing. In the opposite direction, a trail of fresh glimmering gore led deeper into the warren of featureless passageways. Eseld knew from experience that was the wrong direction to reach the first downward ramp. Distant screaming whispered from far away, funnelled down the tangle of metal. Eseld’s initial guess had been correct — that trail of smeared blood was not a revenant dragging a companion to safety. An injured zombie had been hauled off by an opportunistic predator, hoping for a private meal.

Shilu was already thirty feet away, to the right. Her long black hair swayed with her stride.

The freshies were both staring off to the left, eyes wide at the sound of far-off screams.

Eseld hissed: “Ignore it! We can’t do anything!”

One of the freshies — the smaller one — said: “But—”

Eseld grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. The girl flinched, then gasped at the sight of Eseld’s mouth, full of sharp teeth. “Move or we’re dead! Move! Come on!”

She let go, turned away, and hurried to catch up with Shilu. The freshies dithered for a second, whispering to each other, but then they scurried after Eseld, bare feet pattering against the cold grey metal.

Eseld had always hated the upper six floors of each tomb, with their featureless smooth passageways and omnidirectional pale light and little branching capillaries. They made her feel as if she was being expelled from a dying womb, the soft tissues replaced with metal and stone. On her first resurrection she hadn’t found the way out. She had wandered the silver grey passageways for about six or seven hours, sobbing, hyperventilating, calling for her parents, screaming the names of her friends. Eventually she had curled up to rest, weeping herself to sleep in the pitiless light and cold eternity of these hallways.

She had assumed that these empty passages were the afterlife, and that something had gone horribly wrong with heaven. This couldn’t possibly be hell, of course, because Eseld had been devout and faithful all her life. She had kept God’s commandments and accounted for her meagre sins — a little lust here and there, some fury and envy, but who did not feel those? She did not lie or cheat or steal. She worked hard to hunt and trap, and shared her meat with her family, her neighbours, her friends. She practised charity whenever she could. She prayed — infrequently, to be sure, but she meant it whenever she did, especially when the weather was good and she stood beneath the vault of the sky and felt the world was a good place to be. She obeyed her parents, despite her tendency to keep to herself, to wander the woods and spend her hours on archery and hunting. So, this could not be hell, not unless God and the priests and the entire Church had lied to everybody.

Or unless Eseld had committed some terrible sin she did not comprehend.

She had decided, back during the screaming, weeping, mad hours of that first resurrection, that it was all because of Taran’s balls.

That hunt was one of the few clear memories which still surfaced on occasion, especially in those hours after resurrection, when Eseld could think and recall with greater clarity.

When Eseld was fifteen years old she had spent two summer months hunting a bear — a very special bear who had developed a taste for human flesh. The man-eater had killed and partially devoured an old miller from the village of Rockport, that spring. The miller had been elderly, unsteady, and dying of cancer, easy prey for a curious and hungry bear. But then three weeks later the bear had killed two small children in Deepsbridge; a few weeks after that, a woodcutter in Lower Boot, then a trio of hunters who had gone into the woods in order to deal with the creature.

Eseld’s parents had not wanted her to hunt the bear. It was too dangerous. The King was sending men, apparently, but they didn’t know the woods, and Eseld did. The King’s park rangers and professional fur trappers would blunder about the peninsular forests, spear some starving old she-bear, and claim victory. But Eseld knew the truth. The man-eater was a giant, twice the size of any other bear. It had eaten something in the woods, some foulness from the ancient world, a taint of witchcraft which had made it clever and strong. It knew where and when to hide. It thought almost like a person. Eseld had glimpsed it once, and it had stared back at her in return, with eyes that saw and understood.

She named the bear ‘Taran’, but had not spoken that name before any living soul, only to her little brother’s gravestone.

The hunt had taken all summer. She and Taran had learned each other’s routines, tracking each other in spirals through the deep woods. She had endured more than one ambush, and almost died twice. She had eventually bested the bear with a combination of snares, a metal jaw-trap she’d bartered for with threescore fox hides, and over two hundred arrows. Taran had looked like a pincushion when he’d finally closed his eyes.

Eseld had eaten Taran’s heart and testicles. She had told nobody about that, not ever. That was old magic, the kind her grandmother had whispered to her, from her own grandmother’s time, before the Churches and the Christians. Eseld had taken Taran’s head to the magistrate and claimed the reward, while Taran’s secret strength had boiled in her belly.

Bear killer! Single handed. Very few had believed it.

Such an irony that she would die a few years later to a broken leg and a sadistic master of hounds. Eaten by dogs, guts first. That first resurrection had rung with fresh memories of Eseld’s own death. She had drifted off in those grey metal arteries thrice, awoken each time by her own screams as her hands had tried to shovel entrails back into her belly.

After six or seven hours the undead predators had found her, and eaten her all over again.

Now, after so very many deaths, Eseld knew the way out of the grey tunnels by memory and instinct; everything below the top six floors of a tomb was jumbled and new each time, but the initial passageways were always identical. She had also learned that the many side-rooms full of biological experiments and nanomachine-flesh were not accessible without heavy weaponry; she had battered herself to pieces on those doors once before, and gained nothing from the experience but bruises and cuts.

Shilu knew the way out.

Shilu strode without looking back, chin and shoulders high. Shilu didn’t even bother to check the corners as she passed. Shilu’s long black hair shone like oil on the sea, clean of resurrection slime; Eseld was still picking the drying flakes off her skin and cramming them into her own mouth, running her fingers through her russet hair and licking the tasteless goop off her hands.

Eseld did not know what Shilu was.

That shape-shifting knife-arm trick back there was unlike anything Eseld had ever seen before, and must have required a truly gigantic store of nanomachines. But highly evolved revenants and predatory zombies did not make a habit of saving and protecting random fresh meat and bottom-rung scavengers. Nobody with power had ever saved Eseld before.

So, what was Shilu?

Not a zombie? Not a revenant. Something else. Something from outside all this?

Eseld did not dare ask.

Shilu led them to the first ramp, then down to the next floor. She didn’t speak. She didn’t look back. She didn’t spare Eseld and the fresh meat a single glance.

The fresh-meat pair — ‘Sky’ and ‘Cyneswith’ — did their best to keep up, scurrying in Eseld’s wake.

Halfway across the second floor down, they started whispering to each other.

“We’re in a fairy mound, aren’t we? We’re miles below ground, inside a fairy mound. I remember dying, it was horrible, just horrible. I should never have eaten the poisoned stew with the mushrooms, I knew it was bad and it was my own fault. The fairies must have brought us all back. And she — Shilu? — she’s a fairy! She must be! She’s part of the court, one of the aristocrats. She’s been cast aside or abandoned!”

That was Cyneswith. She was small and slight, though she seemed older than Eseld by a few years. Feathery blonde hair fell past her shoulders, shedding flakes of slime from fluffy little up-curls at the tips. Her face was dusted with freckles over pale skin, pinched and tight with manic energy. Her eyes were wild with caged panic. She did not look strong.

“We’re all uploads,” hissed the other one — Sky. “Brain uploads and re-prints. But that doesn’t make sense. My last imaging was two years ago, but I … I remember dying. I remember the bomb going off, just to my right. I saw it just before I went. I was too slow, had the perp to the ground, thought he was wearing a vest, but he’d already planted it. Fucker. Fuck! How can I be here with that memory if I was imaged two years back?!”

Sky was tall and muscular, though younger than Eseld. Dark hair lay in a thick twist down across one shoulder. Her skin was a ruddy red-brown colour that Eseld had never seen in life, but had encountered plenty in this Godless emptiness. She was bright-eyed and alert and checked her corners with care. She had the face of a professional killer.

Cyneswith had been resurrected without any visible bionics. She probably had something internal. Sky’s entire left side was bio-polymer synthetic skin, the seam barely visible unless you looked directly at the line.

Cyneswith hissed to Sky: “What are you talking about, madam? Are you a magician? Can you talk to the fae for us? Can you negotiate?”

Sky just tutted.

Eseld realised that she had no idea what she was doing with these two.

She had never left a tomb as part of a group before. Every prior exit had been a race to the gates, to get out before being caught, before the tomb was overwhelmed by raiders and predators from outdoors. Every successful exit was followed by a desperate scramble to escape the inevitable battle at the foot of the tomb, where monsters fought over the right to get inside.

Eseld did not know this fresh-meat pair. She had rescued them on an emotional whim, but she had no idea what to do, how to shepherd them out of here, or how to stop them dying, or how to explain the world to them. She had no idea how they would react under pressure, or if they would turn on her.

She twisted to look over her shoulder, without slowing her pace. “Both of you are wrong. Both of you shut up and concentrate!”

Sky whispered: “You seem to be pretty well informed. Thank you for saving us, earlier. But what’s going on here, where—”

“God’s dead and this is hell,” Eseld hissed.

She hadn’t meant to say that. She had wanted to say something like ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll get you out of here’, or perhaps ‘This is the end of all things, but we’re still around’. Instead she felt a hysterical laugh tug at her lips, fighting with a wet sob. These two girls had no idea what they were about to face. Eseld wished she could spare them that. Maybe dying in the resurrection chamber would have been more merciful. Maybe she had condemned them by saving them.

Cyneswith’s eyes widened again at the sight of Eseld’s sharpened teeth. She wet her lips with a dart of a little pink tongue. “And you’re a fairy, too. Are you Shilu’s attendant? Her knight?”

Sky said, “Shilu called us ‘zombies’, what did that mean?”

“Means we’re all dead,” said Eseld, struggling not to sob or bite down on a laugh. “Don’t— don’t think about it! Don’t think at all! Just move. Just walk. Just— just don’t!”

Sky shook her head. “And what was all that killing about, back there? Look, I’m no stranger to death and corpses, but that was madness. And that— that thing, with the teeth and claws, that was like a bio-mod job but it wasn’t based on anything, it just—”

Cyneswith let go of Sky’s hand and veered to the side. “You are all fairies and magicians, and none of you will use proper words! Please!”

Eseld hissed: “Panic and you’re dead. Keep moving, keep—”

Shilu stopped, turned around, and stalked back toward the trio.

All three scrambled to a halt. Eseld hunched her shoulders, dipped her head, and lowered her eyes.

Shilu stopped six paces away, then said: “Don’t do that.”

“ … don’t do what?”

“Grovel. Bow. I’m not your master. Stop that.”

Eseld forced herself to straighten up and look directly at Shilu. Wide dark eyes were framed by soft brown skin. Shilu wore no expression, like her face was a mask of flesh over an iron skull. Despite the shared nudity, Eseld felt naked and vulnerable.

“I should probably be sprinting,” Shilu said. “But that would leave you all behind. This pace is a compromise. Stop to argue and I will give up on you. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Eseld said. “Yes.”

Cyneswith bobbed her head several times. “Madam.”

“Sure,” said Sky. “Thanks.”

Shilu turned away and walked on. Eseld shot the freshies a look, then scurried after Shilu. A moment later she looked back; Cyneswith and Sky were holding hands again, hurrying to catch up.

Shilu led the trio through the warren of passageways, descending the metal ramps between the floors, worming through the top slice of the tomb. She did not stop again, nor speak another word. Eseld concentrated on the side-corridors and capillaries ahead of Shilu, ready to screech a warning if she saw any movement. But she never did. The three zombies who had escaped the carnage in the resurrection chamber must have sprinted for their lives, and the predators ascending from outdoors had not yet reached this level. Cyneswith and Sky whispered to each other again, but they kept their voices low, and did not ask any more stupid questions.

Eseld needed a plan, but she did not know what to do. Shilu’s protection was unlike anything she had ever experienced. She could do nothing but follow in Shilu’s wake.

After the usual six ramps downward, the tight and twisty passageways of smooth grey metal terminated in a security checkpoint. This landmark was always present in every tomb, at the junction between organic metal and the more human lower floors. None of the machinery ever worked — the metal detectors and body-scanners and computers were all dead and dark, swept clean of every speck of dust and dirt, preserved exactly as they had been in some distant past.

Shilu strode through without pause. Eseld scurried after her, then turned back to make sure the freshies didn’t get confused.

Cyneswith eyed the arches and barriers with uncomprehending fear, but Sky seemed to know what they were, and guided the other freshie past the checkpoint. The trio emerged together onto the tiled floor beyond, among the orange cones and little yellow arrows.

This space was nothing new to Eseld; she had passed through the ancient checkpoint and sprinted past the waiting area so many times. Metal tables and chairs were always scattered on the right, before the bank of windows from wall to ceiling. Broken computers always stood on the desks to the left, always with black screens and empty innards.

It had been many dozens of deaths since Eseld had paused to stare out of the windows. She had long since given up the hope of ever seeing any sign of change. Staring down at the charred corpse of all creation was not good for one’s mind, even one already bruised into madness. The first time she had made it to this floor, Eseld had fallen insensible upon the ground, weeping silent tears at the rotten cinder of the world.

But Shilu had stopped. She was standing by the windows, looking through the glass.

Sky and Cyneswith stumbled past Eseld. Cyneswith gaped, letting out sharp little gasps as if she was suffocating. Sky went very still and very tense, eyes tracking back and forth across the ruins beyond the tomb, lips pressed into a tight line. Cyneswith began to sob, shoulders jerking, tears pouring down her face. Sky took Cyneswith’s arms in a gentle grip and tried to soothe her.

Eseld watched. Would Sky get violent if Cyneswith didn’t stop crying? Probably. Eseld was starting to make judgements about the freshies. Sky was a potential predator. Cyneswith would give up after one death and resurrection.

Eseld gave the fresh meat a wide berth, and edged up to the windows. She left a six or seven foot gap between herself and Shilu.

Beyond the toughened glass lay the corpse-city which covered the world. It was never the same twice, but it also never changed, like a preserved cadaver. Rotten towers scraped at the blackened underbelly of the sky, as if trying to tear it open and devour the sagging entrails of the dead sun; one corner glowed with faint red, embers trapped behind cold iron. Ash and mould and grey streaks of crumbled concrete spread out through the lower buildings like a skin disease upon the hide of a dying animal. Roads and railways snaked out into the city like capillaries and arteries plugged with congealed blood, gone black with decay and poison.

Far away to the left, Eseld spied the segmented grey line of the graveworm, the one which must have seeded her inside this tomb. Taller than any building, like a mountain range shorn of life, the worm was still. Post-partum. Recovering from the latest raid on heaven.

The black metal of the tomb pyramid descended toward the ground in gigantic steps; each layer was studded with long-dead weapon emplacements and sleeping cannons; Eseld had never seen those guns twitch or turn, let alone wake or loose their payloads. At the foot of the pyramid, the tangle of black metal walls and funnels and bridges were the same as ever, the same old killing ground, the same narrow exits, the same gauntlet leading out.

Except this time it was already packed with the undead.

Tiny black dots darted back and forth, far below Eseld’s lofty vantage point — zombies, hurling themselves into cover, or scurrying along trenches, or mounting assaults on opposing groups. The tomb’s outworks were a hive of violence, in the middle of a battle joined long ago. As Eseld squinted downward, she saw the orange blossom of a detonating warhead, the whirling machinery of a miniature armoured suit, and the flow of a hundred zombies charging up a ramp. The battle was not confined to the tomb’s outworks, but seemed to be spilling over from the edge of the city; the ruins teemed with revenants, with groups scurrying among the concrete and brick, highlighted here and there by the flash and puff of small-arms fire. A massive cloud of debris and masonry dust swirled in the air just to the right of Eseld’s view, down beyond the tomb’s outworks. Something down there was throwing up vast amounts of shrapnel, pounding the buildings with fire, shaking the ground beneath.

Shilu spoke.

“Doesn’t make any sense. Does it?”

Eseld almost jumped out of her skin. Shilu was staring down at the battle too. Eseld waited, but Shilu did not elaborate, nor look up.

“Right,” Eseld murmured. “Lots of them. More than usual. And they’re early.”

Shilu sighed in the same manner as she had back in the resurrection chamber. She raked one hand across her scalp. Her long waterfall of black hair shimmered in the dying light of the red sun, more like metal than keratin.

“Yes,” said Shilu. “A battle of that size should already have penetrated the tomb, two or three hours ago. A fast moving predator should have already reached this floor, or even the main birthing chamber.” Shilu gestured to her left, toward the rest of the security checkpoint room; a left hand turn in the corridor led to a set of stairs down into the rest of the tomb structure. “But we are not yet attacked.”

“Yeah,” Eseld said softly. She did not want to interrupt Shilu’s train of thought.

Shilu raised her eyes from the ground outside and looked directly at Eseld. Her eyes were so dark, like a starless void. “Why?”

Eseld hesitated; was this a test? “Because … because something is blocking them at the tomb’s gate?”

Shilu nodded. “Something is blocking them at the gate. Most likely. How many times have you been around, zombie?”

Eseld shrugged. “Don’t remember. More than fifty seven.”

Shilu looked at the fresh meat; the pair had stumbled closer. Sky had one hand on the windows as she gazed down at the dead world. Her other was wrapped around Cyneswith’s wrist. Her breathing was ragged with near-panic. Cyneswith was still crying, but slower now, as if in grief rather than horror. She held onto Sky’s arm like a little girl.

“What am I looking at?” murmured Sky. Tears were gathering in her eyes. “What happened? Nuclear war? I don’t … no. Who struck first? Us, or the Sudmercians? Did we burn the world? Did we burn it all down?”

“It’s hell, it’s hell,” Cyneswith whispered. “The fairies said, it’s hell. It’s hell. It’s hell and we’re dead. It has to be, it’s the underworld.”

“Shut up,” Sky said through clenched teeth. “Shut up!”

Shilu raised her voice. “You won’t survive an exit from this tomb, not through that battle down there. Your only chance is to move in my wake, but I doubt you can keep up with the necessary speed. Try if you like.” Shilu turned away from the windows, toward the stairs. “If I were you, I would make for the armoury, but I cannot spare the time for—”

Shilu stopped.

Eseld heard the footsteps a moment later. Click click click click — smart heels on solid floor, ascending the stairs.

A figure stepped around the corner.

Blonde hair fell in curling ringlets about snowy shoulders, framing a low neckline. A white dress made for the sun’s kiss clung to generous hips and caressed slender calves. Matching white leather shoes clicked across the floor tiles — high-heeled, toes exposed, nails painted red. Bare arms shone as if beneath a blue sky. Glittering green eyes danced in a glossy, healthy, plush-cheeked face. Red lips parted with a wet click. Delicate hands held a severed head by the hair, dripping a trail of fresh gore onto the floor as the figure approached.

A woman in a sundress, smiling with mischievous joy.

Eseld recognised the severed head — it was one of the three girls who had escaped the carnage of the resurrection chamber.

The sunny woman stopped and smiled with explosive delight. “Shilu! Soooo sorry I’m late for your party!”

Eseld backed away and bared her sharpened teeth; this revenant was beyond her comprehension, just like Shilu. Cyneswith and Sky went silent.

Shilu looked unconcerned. She said nothing.

The sunny woman pouted, swinging the severed head in one hand like a fancy bag. “You don’t recognise me, Shilu? Awww, Shishi. Tch, you’re being rude to amuse yourself. You always were like that, even with no constraints. Such a ratty little bitch.”

“It’s been a long time,” Shilu said. “Forgive me.”

The sunny woman rolled her eyes. “As if you would ever offer a real apology.” Her glowing green eyes darted sideways, glancing at Eseld and the pair of freshies. “And who are these three morsels? The big one looks yummy.”

“Nobody,” Shilu said. “Zombies.”

The sunny woman laughed and tossed the severed head to the floor. It landed with a moist thump. Both the freshies flinched. The head rolled until the eyes pointed toward Eseld; she tried not to look at them.

The sunny woman said: “You were always terrible at jokes, Shishi. Running around with zombies in tow, really? Now you’re just making more work for me.”

Shilu’s eyebrows twitched.

The sunny woman’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oh, Shishi, you weren’t joking. You don’t recognise me, do you? Because you can’t. You’ve been crippled. Wings clipped. Gotten the snip-snop.”

Shilu answered slowly. “I do not have full permissions. Something has gone wrong.”

The sunny woman laughed again, louder and brighter this time, opened-mouthed to show off her clean white teeth. “Gone right, more like! Is that why you’re all fleshy, not doing your robot-girl shtick? Oh, thank my lucky stars. You really don’t recognise me, Shishi?”

“All I can see is the face you’re wearing.”

The sunny woman tutted and pulled a flirtatious pout. She put her blood-soaked right hand to her chest — but it left no stain on her white dress. “Lykke, my dear little insufferable bitch. It’s Lykke. Remember me now? Do you like the new look? I stole it from a very determined zombie. She told me she would ‘force her shit down my ancestor’s throats’. Very creative. I wanted her face.”

Shilu said: “Are you my backup?”

Lykke smiled and ran her tongue over bright red lips. “You’ve been a very naughty girl, Shishi. I’m here to send you to the naughty step.”

“I’m following orders.”

“Mmmmmmmm-nope! Don’t think you are!”

Shilu sighed. “I am following explicit orders from central. Go back into the network or get out of my way.”

“You first.”

“I can’t.”

“Oh, yes, because you don’t have a full permission suite!” Lykke giggled. “How can you be following orders when you don’t have permissions? Don’t be a silly cunt, Shishi.”

“There’s a war in heaven,” Shilu said. “All I know is that I’m following—”

“Orders, yes yes yes. Who cares?” Lykke stretched her arms above her head and rolled her neck from side to side. “I want to pull you apart and make you scream, especially if you don’t have full permissions right now. I’ve always wanted to know what one of us sounds like if we can’t get away. It’s going to be so much fun, Shishi! I’ll even leave this face on for you, it’ll be sexier that way.”

Shilu raised her hands; her fingers and palms narrowed, sharpened, and extended, transforming into a pair of black metal blades.

She turned her head slightly to address Eseld and the fresh meat: “This one won’t treat you with mercy. When we fight, I suggest you run.”

Lykke said: “How about no?”

Suddenly Eseld couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe, or twitch her fingers, or even blink. Only her eyeballs still belonged to her, swivelling inside their sockets. Panic clutched her guts, but she could neither scream nor whine nor flinch, not even shiver. The same appeared to be true for the freshies too, though Eseld couldn’t see them from her current position; they’d gone silent.

Shilu said to Lykke: “Why bother with the zombies?”

Lykke shrugged her bare shoulders. “You’re probably not the only air-dropped bullshit around here, Shishi. Everything in here dies, back to the network, shoo, shoo. You, them, whatever else I can find. Those are my orders. And my pleasure.”

“Orders from who?”

“From central! Where else?”

“My orders also come from central,” said Shilu. “One of us is lying or mistaken. I suggest we stand down. You return to the network for further instructions.”

Lykke winked one brilliant green eye. “I’m going to follow my orders. I get treats when I’m done! Do you?”

Shilu took one step sideways, away from the windows. “That battle at the foot of the pyramid, is that your doing?”

Lykke raised both hands and wiggled her blood-stained fingers, as if preparing to do magic. “No, that’s some zombie nonsense. Lots of meat making a big fuss. Who cares?”

Shilu took another sidestep, so her back was no longer to the windows; clever, that way she couldn’t be knocked through the glass. Eseld cheered inside, to hold back the terror.

“Are you the only one here?” Shilu said.

Lykke snorted. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Oh, that’s right, you can’t! No network access! Gosh, it’s been a long time since I talked to one of us with actual words. This is fun. Oddly. Maybe this form helps. Should I be the old man again, what do you think that would be like?”

“There is no such thing as us,” Shilu said. “I am nothing like you.”

Lykke rolled her eyes and gestured at Eseld. “You think they see any distinction, Shishi?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the difference?” Lykke sneered. She kept wiggling her fingers. “You need actual weapons, while I’m just going to pull your guts out? You’re going to menace me with swords — swords! — which bounce off my skin? You’re just meat, while I’m nanomachine and data without any pretence of impurity? Pfffft. Maybe you’re right, Shishi. We are different. You’re still a human being underneath all that, with all the same old vulnerabilities. Jumped up pond slime, only useful as the generative organs of your own machine descendants. But me?” Lykke spread her hands and winked. “I’m a shard of God.”

Shilu shook her head. “That’s not the difference I was thinking of.”

Lykke sighed and let her shoulders sag. “Then what is?”

“The difference between you and I is that I don’t need a full permissions suite to take you apart.”

Shilu kicked off the floor and darted toward Lykke. The smiling monster just laughed; she made no effort to defend herself.

“Shishi, at least give yourself— ahh!”

Lykke’s cackle curdled into a sudden gasp.

Six feet out from Lykke’s throat, Shilu became a scarecrow of black chrome and razor-sharp blades.

She crashed into the sundress and soft flesh with an explosion of blood and bone.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Necromancer vs Necromancer. Fight!

Seems that Shilu isn’t the only weird thing about this resurrection. A Necromantic agent sent to slaughter the fresh meat, an out of control fight beyond the tomb, and something blocking the doors. Wheels turn within wheels, as angels and others put their plans into action.

Looks like arc 11 is going to be longer than I thought, probably! Right now I’m looking at 6-7 chapters, maaaaybe. Unless these girls pull the controls out of my hands and take over, which, well, I’m not saying I won’t let them! Onward we go!

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I am still very much trying to build up some kind of a backlog of chapters, and when I do, I’ll be sharing more chapters ahead with patrons!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps! Thank you!

And thank you for reading! Thank you for reading my little story, thank you for enjoying my work. I couldn’t do this without all of you, after all! Necroepilogos will continue to get weird and rotten and splattered with blood and filled with curious and dangerous zombie girls. Until next chapter! Seeya then!

Content Warnings

Child death/death of children
Gore
Cannibalism
Grief

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Frigid flesh quickened with furious flame; frozen meat melted into metabolic motion. A stilled heart stirred with a single beat, then hammered hard against a cage of bone. Lungs inflated with a clotted breath, sucking air down a slime-clogged throat. Eyes flew open, blinded by viscous residue. Lips parted with a slick wet rasp.

Eseld woke screaming, clawing at the inside of her resurrection coffin.

She screamed until her throat bled and her ears rang. She clawed until her fingertips were bloody and bruised.

She screamed to purge her respiratory system, splattering the grey lid of the coffin with blue-stained mucus from inside her windpipe and lungs. She screamed for the friends and companions once again left behind in the yawning abyss of death. She screamed with the realisation that she had been ripped back into unlife once again, dumped into this grey metal box once again, pushed into the abandoned, overgrown, rotten garden of the world once again, to die, once again. Once again. And again. And again. And again.

The cycle had begun anew, and all Eseld could do was break her nails against the coffin lid.

Eseld’s memory was a jumble. Always a jumble! Death and time stole everything except hunger. But this latest death felt different.

She had been asleep — sleeping for real, with closed eyes and softened breath, not the sleep of death in a heaven plundered and emptied by the demonic machines of this accursed future. No, she had been curled up in a dark hole with Su and Mala and Andasina, huddled beneath some threadbare blankets they’d found in the waterlogged entrails of a collapsed building. They’d been cuddled up, warm and tight, when—

Or was that the death before this last one? Or one before that? Eseld’s memories felt like shifting through tar with a toothpick. She had known her latest trio of friends for only a few months, and could barely remember their faces. Just another short-lived pack, bonded by sensation and shared meat, barely holding back from eating each other. They were little different to all previous faces, all previous flesh, all previous incarnations.

Eseld had died so many times. She had lost count long ago. She had stopped trying at fifty seven deaths — half because her mind could not take any more, half because fifty seven was a special number. Fifty seven was the year the king had ascended to the throne, which was also the year Eseld’s little brother had died. The number fifty seven had endured where so much else had turned to decay and fallen away; Eseld could not recall her brother’s name, nor the name of the king who she had never seen. She could not remember her parents’ faces, or the feeling of sunlight, or the sound of birdsong.

There was very little left of ‘Eseld’. She knew this with greater clarity, in these brief respites after return to unlife.

Eseld stopped screaming and stopped clawing at the lid of her coffin. She panted for breath, though she knew she did not strictly need to breathe. It just felt better to fill her lungs. She snorted clots of nanomachine slime and glue-like mucus out of her nose.

She had long ago given up recalling the exact circumstances of each death; there was nothing to learn, no improvements to be made. Eseld had harboured those illusions for her first few dozen deaths, when she had first been ripped from heaven and cast into this pit. But like everyone else, she had eventually given up and surrendered to eternal torture. Why make it worse by remembering the pain of being shot, stabbed, run-through, dismembered, disembowelled, crushed, and eaten alive?

But this death felt different — why? Eseld struggled to remember, gritting her teeth and hissing with frustration. She closed her eyes and focused. She had been sleeping, when—

Andasina!

The realisation hurt. This death was different, because relief had briefly interrupted the torture.

Because Eseld had liked Andasina.

They had met over the corpse of a fallen revenant — a real monster, covered in bio-mechanical augmentations, her flesh ripe with nanomachines, slain in a personal duel over some lofty consideration far beyond the ken of scavengers like themselves. Eseld and Andasina had stumbled across the corpse by chance, at the same moment, in the brief window before stronger predators had moved in to claim the resources. Fighting each other over the corpse would have been a useless waste of time, for they were both emaciated and starving; a fight would only have delayed them until the bigger girls turned up, and then they would both have come away with nothing — or died. So they had leapt at the corpse side-by-side, unspeaking, sharing only glances, tearing into the fresh and steaming meat, stuffing it into their mouths, clutching the bloody gobbets to their chests, working as quickly as they could to secure whatever nutrition they could steal.

When the well-fed revenants had descended with their guns and their body armour and their bionic limbs, Eseld and Andasina had fled together, back into the dark alleyways of the city. They’d giggled as they fled, over a caper shared.

Chance had brought them together, with full bellies and a wordless truce; touch and sensation had closed the remaining gap. Andasina was cuddly and small, perfect for tucking up against Eseld’s front, like a hot stone wrapped in cloth, warm in the freezing nights of this empty and Godless world. At first they had snuggled for sheer physical comfort. Over time they had grown used to the behaviour, made it a routine, the foundation of something new amid the rot.

Eseld had grown sharp teeth, after about a month together. Andasina had said that was cool, even though it sometimes made her lips bleed when they kissed each other. Eseld couldn’t remember how they’d picked up Su and Mala; Andasina had done the work, coaxing the fellow scavengers to safety one night with a chunk of wet and bleeding meat. Then they were four. Friends, or something more.

For a little while, companionship had eased the pain of eternal life without grace.

But then — last night? No, in the morning!

Light had been filtering through the broken bricks of their night’s nest. Su had heard footsteps outside the hole in which they’d been sleeping, footsteps approaching down the alleyway, one pair booted and heavy, the other clawed and quick. Stronger revenants, hunting for prey. Nowhere to run — the building was too clogged with ruin and rubble. Mala had tried to wriggle through, but all she’d achieved was ragged cuts down her shoulders and back. Andasina had hissed for silence, in the forlorn hope that the predators would pass them by, but they all knew that wasn’t true. Strong revenants did not poke around in dark holes unless they were hunting for meat.

All four of them had wept quietly, hoping the predators would turn away or take another route. But they hadn’t.

In the end, Eseld and Andasina and Mala and Su had put their heads together in the dark, skull to skull, tears intermingled. Eseld had kissed Andasina so hard that they’d both bled. Su and Mala had torn at each other’s clothes in premature loss. They all knew what was coming. There was no way out. They had no chance of beating stronger revenants, those who had thrived and flourished on cannibalism, and freed themselves from the cycle of torment. Those zombies approaching down the alley carried guns and wore armour. They may as well have been another species.

Eseld knew she was prey, no different to the rabbits she had trapped and eaten in life.

But she knew from experience that a rabbit with some fire still in it could twist in the snare and bite the hunter’s hand. A dying rabbit could still draw blood.

She and her friends had boiled from their nest and into the alleyway, screaming and shouting wild defiance. Eseld had snapped her nice sharp teeth, showing off what she’d made. Andasina had a knife, hidden somewhere inside her clothes. Clever little Anda.

Eseld didn’t recall much after that, only pain. She’d stared down the barrel of a shotgun, then been slammed sideways, smashed to the ground, her chest opened to the cold air. She had lain face-down in a gritty puddle of her own blood, wheezing and twitching, choking on her bodily fluids. A zombie had hoisted her up by her hair, to cut her throat — a true monster, a shining giant with glowing purple eyes and a shock of pure white hair, skin so clean and glossy, body armoured in plate, armed with death-spitting machinery that Eseld could barely dream of holding.

Eseld had turned away from it, toward Andasina, already lying dead on the ground. She had not wanted her last memory of that resurrection to be the face of some unknown zombie. She died with Andasina’s name on her lips, spoken through bubbles of hot, steaming blood.

Then, oblivion, for but a moment.

Death never held. Now she was back, in a resurrection coffin, weeks or months or a million years later.

She would likely never meet Andasina again. They were parted like two leaves in a storm, never to touch once more.

Tears cut tracks into the slime on Eseld’s cheeks, sliding down to join the shallow film of blue gunk in which she lay; with the gnawing hunger briefly sated by the mechanics of resurrection, her thoughts were clear for the first time in months, and all she felt was grief.

Eseld tried to scream again, but her voice emerged as a wet and withered whimper.

She had to be quiet and quick. Survival demanded she repress sorrow.

This resurrection coffin was identical to all the others in which she had woken — a grey box barely large enough for her naked flesh, with little room to move her arms across her body. A cold blue glow came from left of her head, from a tiny screen with the usual rows of buttons beneath. She did not bother to glance at the screen, because it never said anything different. Her pale, freckled skin was coated with a thin layer of nanomachine slime, already being absorbed into her body. But her build was no longer as emaciated as when she’d died. She was lithely muscled, supple and athletic once more, as she had been in true life. Eseld was gifted with compact, elegant muscle, from twenty years of climbing trees and cliffs to pluck eggs from bird’s nests, from scurrying about the woods to hunt rabbit and pheasant, and from a solid diet of oats and game meat. She could not recall the taste of those foods now, only that of human flesh.

Russet hair was slicked to her skull, soaked with slime. She ran her tongue across her teeth and discovered they were still sharp — she had retained the nano-biological adjustment, for once. Not much use in a fight. Perhaps she could use them to intimidate?

Noises filtered through the metal of her coffin — screaming, crying, thumping. The usual. The rest of this batch of resurrections were waking up. Some of them sounded as if they were already out of their boxes, sprawling on the floor, pounding the metal in their frustration, screaming to the empty heavens.

That was bad; the slow risers and the last out made easy prey. Eseld needed to get on her feet.

At least it didn’t sound as if the killing had started yet. That still gave Eseld a decent chance of sprinting for the door. Most of the weeping and babbling was coming from her right, but that didn’t mean anything; it was impossible to tell where one was in relation to the door before one actually broke the seal and climbed out.

This could be one of the rare groups which did not descend into instant cannibalism, of course. Eseld had learned long ago that was a poor wager.

Eseld wriggled both arms up, so she could press on the underside of her coffin lid.

It didn’t move.

“Fuck! Fuck, no! Move! Let me out! Move!”

She pulled a fist back and thumped on the metal; she prayed to God’s empty throne that she was not one of the few who needed help, stuck inside her own unbroken egg. That practically guaranteed she would get eaten, pulled live and wriggling from her shell and gutted with her first breath of open air.

She thumped again. Nothing happened. She gritted her teeth and tried not to scream. These deaths were always the worst, the ones which came before the hunger set in, when she still held onto shreds of hope. Eseld’s face scrunched up with cold tears.

“Please,” she hissed through her teeth. “Please. Please. I want … I want to see her again. I know— I know I can’t. It’ll never happen. But please.”

God did not answer her prayers, because God was dead, like everyone else.

Eseld slumped, giving in, giving up, giving—

Shick.

A black knife cut into the side of the coffin, six inches from Eseld’s face, slicing through the invisible seam between the lid and the base.

The blade broke the seal. The coffin lid clicked, then began to open.

The knife retracted as fast as it had appeared.

Eseld’s resurrection coffin opened on smooth hydraulics, lid rising with a gentle hiss. Cold air rushed in and coated her slime-soaked skin. The lid tilted to one side, blinding her with the clean white illumination of the resurrection chamber. Eseld had missed the red-alert stage, slept too long in the embrace of death. She was late to rise.

She gathered herself and grabbed the sides of her casket, feet slipping and skidding in the slime as she tried to get her footing. She found her balance and scrambled out of the box, down over the edge, onto the cold grey metal floor of an echoing vastness.

This resurrection chamber was like all others Eseld had witnessed; they always varied in the smallest details, but not in the larger aspects. Besides, who cared? The ceiling was higher than the vault of any Church or Cathedral she had ever seen, encrusted with great looping lines of cable and wire and pipe, hung with vast dripping orifices, their ends ragged with the afterbirth of the revenants below. Infernal machinery stretched off to the left and right, rows of semi-transparent obsidian glittering with inner lights — ‘computers’, running equations to tear souls from heaven; Eseld had not learned the word ‘computer’ in true life, only here in this empty and abandoned shell of creation. The rear wall of the resurrection chamber was dominated by a gigantic screen of silvery, liquid metal, flowing and scrolling with nonsense words and strings of numbers, as the devils in charge of hell chattered to themselves. Before the screen stood a human-scale control panel covered in buttons and switches and dials, same as always.

Clean white light burned upon every surface. Two rows of grey metal coffins faced each other in the middle of the room, raised on plinths, like caskets in a tomb.

Eseld was unlucky — her coffin was at the head of the rows, right next to the control panel, above which towered the unintelligible text of the liquid metal screen. The door was in the opposite direction, past the screaming, weeping mass of slime-soaked zombies.

This was a big batch. Twenty coffins. Poor odds.

Eseld glanced at her tomb-mates and tried to estimate her chances of survival if she sprinted for the door. Previous experience told her that one runner would set off a general panic, and trigger any wolves hiding among the flock.

Seventeen coffins had opened successfully; three revenants were still in the process of climbing free to join the others, but everyone else was out. Most of this batch was fresh meat, first-timers — eleven of the seventeen births looked dazed and awed, sitting or sprawling on the floor, gaping at the resurrection chamber, or clutching at where their mortal wounds had slain them in life. Harsh white light highlighted shivering, naked, sticky flesh.

Some of them were beginning to voice questions in halting speech.

“Where are— I was— I was sleeping, I was sleeping—”

“What is this? What is this?! Who are you people?! What is this!?”

“Father? Father, you were right there, where are you? M-my eyes were closed only for a moment. Father?”

“And peace and tranquillity and safety will come to all, will come to a-all, oh God, oh God, where am I, where—”

Eseld knew this was misleading. Some of those ‘confused’ and ‘stunned’ girls were predators, play-acting, planning on biding their time among the sheep.

But one of the fresh revenants tugged at Eseld’s heartstrings, no matter how she tried to resist; a young girl was up on her feet, walking between the two rows of coffins. She was one of the youngest zombies Eseld had ever seen, a little girl no more than eleven or twelve years old. She had bright blonde hair stuck to her skull with nanomachine slime, and the widest blue eyes, staring at everything with blank surprise.

One coffin appeared to have malfunctioned and melted into a twisted lump of slag — that was new, Eseld had never seen that before, but it didn’t matter. Two coffins had opened to reveal abortions — girls whose bodies had not finished forming, just meaty slurry and half-cooked organs in a soupy mass of tainted blue. One revenant was busy sticking her head into the melted flesh of the aborted births, slime and gore trickling down her chin, hands shoving the filth into her maw. Some of the others were beginning to stare at her in shock; any moment, somebody would ask what she was doing, and a panic would ignite.

Two additional revenants were covertly picking themselves up and eyeing the door. They knew the score, just like Eseld. One of them — a short and stocky girl with a weird twist of greenish hair — locked eyes with Eseld for a moment. Eseld bared her sharp teeth. The girl looked away, back at the door.

They were all trying to guess the best moment to run, but they were blocked.

Bad news: at the far end of the rows, closest to the doors, a highly modified zombie was rising to her feet. Bionic legs, bionic arms, all four limbs glistening with chrome casing and bio-polymer muscle. Her torso was a mass of armour plates set into dark skin. Her head bristled with additional sensory equipment embedded into her skull. Her joints were lined with pistons and armoured motors, giving her massive leverage. Two bright green eyes like headlamps opened in a narrow face. She must have been very well-stocked to carry all those enhancements over from her death.

The cyborg grinned as she straightened up, casting hungry eyes across the assembled prey. Eseld tensed, ready to sprint, sharing a silent glance with the other two girls who knew what was about to happen. The moment that cyborg committed to a target, that would be their opening to escape.

The cyborg’s glowing green eyes fixed on the little blonde girl. She tilted her head to one side, as if curious.

Eseld’s heart soured with disgust. But she could do nothing. She was prey.

But — wait. A shiver went up Eseld’s spine. If there was only one cyborg here, on the other side of the room, where had that black knife come from?

Who had freed Eseld from her coffin?

Despite her better judgement, Eseld tore her eyes away from the precipice of violence. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the control panel and the liquid metal screen.

A final revenant was standing right there, not five feet from Eseld’s back.

Soft brown skin, slender build, very little muscle on her frame. Long black hair fell all the way to the tops of her thighs — already dry, free of nanomachine slime, hanging in a glossy dark sheet. She had no visible bionics, no modifications, no bio-mechanical additions.

She was gazing upward at the vast liquid metal screen, as if she could read the machine’s words.

Before Eseld could back away, the final revenant lowered her gaze from the screen and looked right at Eseld. Her eyes were wide and dark, like oil at night. She wore no expression. Not a scrap of nanomachine slime was left on her skin or in her hair, dried or otherwise. How long had this one been awake?

“Don’t thank me,” she said.

That voice and that face froze Eseld’s blood inside her veins and turned her stomach to a leaden fist. Her legs went weak. She broke out in cold sweat.

This zombie was calm, collected, and unconcerned.

Eseld had never seen anything like this, not in all her resurrections.

“Wh-what … ” Eseld croaked, then cleared her throat. She wanted to retreat, but her own coffin pressed against the small of her back. “What do you mean? Was that you, with the knife?”

The calm woman said: “Forget it. Forget you saw me. You—” Her eyes flickered past Eseld’s shoulder. “Oh. Tch.”

From behind Eseld, a tiny voice spoke up, soft and gentle amid the weeping and babbling.

“Hello,” it said, angelic and happy. “Do you not want to be here?”

Eseld turned away from the calm woman.

Three coffins down, the little blonde girl had paused in front of a crying, confused, fresh-meat revenant — an older girl with pale skin and dark hair, face streaked with snot and tears, clutching at her stomach as if expecting to find a wound there. The little blonde girl really did look like an cherubic angel, smiling with open kindness, blue eyes burning bright amid all the shivering flesh.

Eseld wasn’t the only one staring. The little girl’s voice had carried to all the other zombies in the chamber. Others were watching, stilled to silence.

The heavily modified cyborg was stalking down the row of coffins, heading straight for the little girl. That one didn’t want just food, she wanted sport. But why was she frowning like that?

“Ah,” said the calm woman, behind Eseld. She sounded bored. “I don’t have the patience for this.”

Eseld prepared to break for the door. As soon as the cyborg began the violence, that would be her opening. She eased around the side of her coffin, ready to move.

Three coffins down, the weeping fresh-meat blinked up at the little blonde girl. “W-what? What?”

The cyborg raised her voice into a shout, breaking into a run, bionic legs pounding against the metal plates: “Don’t answer her!”

The little blonde girl ignored the cyborg. Other zombies leapt out of the way, scrambling back, yelping, shouting. The little blonde girl just smiled wider and repeated her question.

“Do you want to go back?”

The weeping freshie nodded. “I … yes! This isn’t real! I’m having a nightmare, I’m having a nightmare! I want to go back, yes! My— my guts are inside me, they were never spilled, it was just another part of the nightmare. I do want to go back, I do, I—”

The little blonde girl’s body opened like a mouth.

The diminutive figure unfurled, fleshy membranes expanding outward like the petals of a carnivorous flower, coated with crimson slobber and caustic saliva. The maw-body was lined with dozens upon dozens of foot-long, razor-sharp, envenomed fangs. Lashing tentacles uncoiled from between the teeth, whipping at the metal floor with tiny spikes and claws of bone. Eye stalks and suckers and bloody orifices snaked forth in a cloud of quivering flesh. The girl’s shining blonde hair hung backward and upside down from the rear of the monster, her face twisting with a giggle and a grin of childish cruelty and gluttonous glee.

An ambush predator, in no mood to wait.

The fresh-meat revenant was paralysed by the sight of the transformation, but her shock was lived-short; the ambush predator reached for her with tooth and tendril, grabbed her tight in a dozen lacerating limbs, and tore her to pieces with a single spasm of muscle.

A detonation of blood and bone and viscera splattered across the cold metal and the faces of nearby revenants. The ambush predator’s tissues flushed deep red, sucking the gore in through her skin, extending delicate tentacles to absorb the blood, shoving gobbets of minced organ into her many mouths. Even as she ate, she reached for her next victim with half a dozen grasping limbs.

The resurrection chamber exploded into panic.

A few girls tried to flee for the door. Some of them even got away, but the general chaos revealed other predators hiding among the flock — not like the true horror which had shown itself, just regular zombies who were skilled enough to pretend they were true fresh meat. Eseld saw girls go down, snagged at the ankles, heads bashed open against the sides of resurrection coffins. The ambush predator tore apart a second girl as quickly as the first, threshing her to pieces in an instant of flying blood and shattered bone.

The huge cyborg crashed into the ambush predator. They tumbled together, smashing into the floor, rolling across the cold metal. The cyborg won the tussle briefly, coming out on top. She reared up, a grin ripping across her face; her bionic limbs emitted some kind of near-field electric pulse that the ambush predator could not grip. Tentacles and tendrils slapped at the air, unable to find purchase on her foe. The little blonde girl — the ambush predator — squealed and screamed.

“The fresh meat is mine, slug-bitch!” the cyborg roared. “Down!”

The ambush predator replied with an ear-splitting squeal and a squirt of steaming acid into the cyborg’s face. Flesh hissed and smoked. The cyborg howled with pain and smashed a fist into the tooth-lined meat.

Eseld did not need to see who won. If she stuck around, the victor would eat her alive.

She leapt into a sprint, and broke for the door.

The resurrection chamber was chaos, covered in blood, full of girls eating or being eaten, fleeing or pursuing, or standing in frozen shock, still not quite believing that this was real. A few were staring at the fight. Eseld ducked past two awestruck freshies, leapt a puddle of blood, darted past the end of the coffins and—

Somebody grabbed her right ankle. Eseld went flying, then hit the floor, face first. She spat blood and heaved for breath.

An opportunistic predator swarmed over her, all teeth and fingernails, going for her throat and eyes. Eseld fought like she always had, biting and kicking, spitting blood into her opponent’s face. They grappled together on the floor, rolling against the side of a coffin. Eseld saw nothing of her opponent but a pale blur, a pair of wild eyes, a set of bared teeth. She was larger than Eseld, stronger, quicker.

The bigger revenant somehow got Eseld’s head in both hands and slammed her skull against the coffin-plinth. Eseld’s head rang with the impact; the world went dim and dark, throbbing black at the edges of her vision. Her opponent grabbed her throat and pinned her to the floor.

Eseld leaned forward and bit down.

That earned her a scream. Her fancy sharp teeth came in useful after all; Andasina had been right all along — her new chompers were very cool.

Eseld bit down again, chomping and biting and gnawing, until her mouth was filled with the hot iron taste of blood and ragged scraps of fresh meat. She clung on and kept biting until her opponent stopped moving, until she was slumped atop a blood-soaked corpse with the throat ripped out.

Heaving for breath, half-blind with a concussion, Eseld rolled off the other revenant. She never even got a good look at the girl’s face. She lay on her back for several moments, wheezing and whining, knowing she had to get up, had to move, had to go! She staggered to her feet.

The resurrection chamber was saturated with gore, all over the coffins and the grey metal floor. Beyond the bloody mess, the dark obsidian computers and the liquid metal screen carried on glinting and scrolling, as if calmly cataloguing the carnage. A few girls seemed to have reached the door and won their freedom, but most were dead. Corpses and limbs and offal lay everywhere, blood and guts and shit in great smears on the floor and up the sides of the coffins. A long streak of blood led to the door — somebody had dragged a wounded friend, or more likely a corpse, to find a quiet spot to eat their kill.

The huge cyborg lay in a tangled heap in the narrow passage between the coffins, bionic limbs shattered and broken, face melted away and torn off, ribcage hanging open.

Aside from Eseld, only three revenants were still alive.

Two fresh-meat girls clung to each other, both young, both smeared with gore, both faces covered in snot and tears and screaming in horror. They had collapsed in retreat against the obsidian blocks to one side of the resurrection coffins.

The ambush predator was advancing toward them, having killed and eaten everything else in the room. Teeth and tentacles whipped the air, dripping with fresh blood, flexing rows of tiny teeth and claws. The bright blue eyes of a little girl still hung upside down from the monster’s back, set in a face giggling and grinning with childish glee.

Eseld had a clear path to the door. The ambush predator — the little girl — was distracted. With any luck, it would stay up here and eat its fill.

The fresh-meat pair were seconds from death; they closed their eyes and pressed their heads together, skull to skull, tears intermingled.

Eseld hesitated, chest torn inside with an empathy she would never have felt when hungry. She felt almost truly alive.

For the first time in so many deaths, she broke in a new direction.

Eseld sprinted toward the fresh-meat pair. “Get up!” she screamed. “Get up! Feet, now! Door! Run to the door! Door!”

They didn’t seem to understand. The pair lurched to their feet, clinging to each other, bewildered. Eseld skidded to a halt between them and the onrushing nightmare-zombie. Eseld turned and spread her arms out wide, placing herself in the path of the killer. The thing was giggling, playing with its food.

“Run to the door!” Eseld screamed, waving her arms up and down. “Run! Run! Here! I’m here! Eat me, eat me first you bitch, you—”

She realised the fresh meat were not fleeing. They were sobbing, babbling pleas for her to follow, tugging on her arms.

“No!” she screamed, throwing the pair of them off. “Just run! Run, go, go!”

Then the ambush predator was upon her.

A wall of whirling teeth and tentacles was inches from Eseld’s face. Tendrils reached out to grab her and pull her into the monster’s muscular embrace. She kept her eyes wide open and opened her mouth even wider; she would bite down on the first thing she could reach. She would die, but at least this death would be quick. She would take a chunk of this bitch for herself, she would make these two behind her see that not everything in this Godless emptiness was hate and predators, that there was still something worth protecting, even if it was just a moment of respite, a moment of—

A figure appeared, standing right next to the ambush predator.

It was the calm woman — the one with the very long black hair, with no expression on her face, with absolute lack of concern.

She extended her right arm. The hand narrowed and sharpened, lengthening into a black blade — slamming through the predator’s body.

The calm woman ran the predator through with a ten-foot lance of lightless metal. She did not even have to thrust with her shoulder, or brace her hips — her flesh simply hardened and extended, until her right arm was a sword of black steel. She hoisted the girl-predator with effortless strength, lifting it off the ground and into the air. The predator squealed and hissed, like a squid on the end of a spear, animal noises mixing with the terrified weeping of a small child.

The calm woman held the predator in the air until it stopped moving, then lowered her arm and let the zombie slip from her blade. It fell in a bloody heap, and did not move again. The blue eyes had gone blank in death.

Eseld stared, mouth hanging open. The pair of fresh-meat girls clung to her shoulders, peering at their bizarre saviour, speechless and panting.

The calm woman flicked her sword-arm; it became flesh again, wrapped in soft brown skin. She flexed her fist. She stared at the dead predator for a long moment. Then she seemed to dismiss it, casting her eyes across the carnage of the resurrection chamber. She still wore no expression.

Then she looked at Eseld.

“Why did you do that?” said the calm woman. “Why did you protect those two? Do you know each other?”

One of the two fresh-meat girls said: “N-no! No! I don’t know where … what … what any of this, is? Are we in a fairy mound? Are you one of them?”

The other one nodded. “Yes. I mean no. No. We don’t. What— what—”

“Stop talking,” said the calm woman.

Eseld groped for her own voice. “What … what are you?”

The calm woman looked at Eseld again. “Answer my question. Why did you do that?”

“Do … do what?”

“Why did you attempt to sacrifice yourself?” said the calm woman. “Tell me the truth. I’ll know if you lie.”

Eseld shrugged; she wasn’t quite sure. “I … they— these two.” She reached back and patted one of the hands clutching her shoulders. “They reminded me of … myself? I didn’t want them to be separated. Not again.” She shook her head. “What are you?”

The calm woman sighed; it was the first emotion she had displayed. She looked away, up at the liquid metal screen. The scrolling text was slowing down, the clean white light growing dimmer by the second. The tomb had done its job, now it was dying.

“I don’t have all the permissions I was promised,” the calm woman said. “This is wrong. Somebody fucked up. Or somebody’s fucking with me.”

Eseld glanced at the fresh-meat pair, still touching her shoulders. Both of them shrugged and shook their heads.

Eseld said: “Permissions? What does that—”

“Never mind,” said the calm woman. “Don’t ask that question.”

Without another word, she set off toward the door.

“Wait!” Eseld said, scrambling forward. The freshies followed her, with nowhere else to go. “Wait, please, what are you? Can we— can we follow you? You saved me. Twice! You were the one who opened my coffin, weren’t you? Why did you—”

The calm woman stopped and turned around. Her eyes were wide dark pools. Eseld halted instantly, holding herself as still as she could. The freshies blundered into her back, but she kept her feet; the idea of accidentally touching the calm woman — let alone offending her — terrified Eseld in a way she had never felt before. She eyed the calm woman’s right hand, the one which had turned into a blade.

The calm woman echoed the question: “What am I?”

Eseld shivered inside. One of the two freshies whispered, “Maybe we shouldn’t ask that? Maybe we shouldn’t!”

“Yes,” Eseld repeated. “What—”

“Shilu,” said Shilu. “My name.”

“O-oh! Eseld,” said Eseld.

The freshies piped up too: “Sky!” “Cyneswith!”

Shilu showed no reaction to the names. Wide dark eyes considered the trio one by one, with little interest. Those eyes were cold and distant.

Eseld swallowed. She had to try. “Can we follow? You— you helped. We could get out, together? At least to the—”

Shilu said: “Follow me if you wish. I won’t stop you. But I doubt that’s a good idea. I think I’m about to get fucked over. You may not want to be nearby when that happens. Good luck, little zombies.”

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Fresh meat.

Ahem. Welcome to arc 11! Welcome back to the birthing chamber, back to the tomb, back to another bloody and ragged start. Just a bunch of zombies, with absolutely nothing strange or unique about them, right. Totally normal. Not a Necromancer among them. Promise.

Oh hey Shilu, didn’t see you there!

Haha! Serously, welcome to arc 11. And to Eseld, and Shilu finally crashing back into fleshy incarnation. What’s everybody else up to? I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.

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And thank you, dear readers! I know I say this literally every week, but I really mean it. Thanks for reading my little story! I couldn’t do it without you! Necroepilogos plunges onward into the second major narrative movement, and I’m so very excited for what I have in store. Seeya next chapter!