Necromancer's Descent

5 - Sweet Black Death

I stumble awkwardly through the thickening undergrowth of the dying forest, following what looks like either an animal or human trail. Only our soft footsteps shuffling through the bushes and cracking fallen branches, seems to echo painfully in the eerily quiet forest.

I admit, it took me far too long to actually notice, just exactly the extent of how much is eerily wrong with this forest.

Where you might expect the sound of birds, insects or wind, there is nothing. Where we should have been surrounded by the buzz of swarming insects drawn to the smell of death, there was silence. I've even flipped over a couple stones after I pondered whether insects were edible, but I've yet to find even a single little insect, dead or alive...

It's just unnatural... I mean, there has to be some small life the size of insects even if they're not insects. No matter how I try to justify it, a forest with only dying plants doesn't make sense. In which case-

In which case there's something here that kills and eats everything except the trees, or something capable of driving away insects on a large scale.

Either way, it makes it high priority to get out of here.

I press my lips together and glance back to the knight zombie. I still want to undo the spell... but I can only really think of bashing his head in at this point. Even if I had the stomach to do that, I don't have the strength to do it, at least not right now. Honestly I just want to sit down and sleep.

While on the topic of my health, the 'body' menu, which opened by itself right announcing countdown, is honestly not as helpful as you would expect from a game. While it does have my mana and health written, they're vaguely written such as 'low' or 'starved', 'exhausted' and 'sleep and 'eat to recover'. Other than the mana being low, I don't think anything actually came as a surprise.

Ah, right, and my name is written as '???'... again, there doesn't seem to be any hints about who this body belonged to in the first place... perhaps if I find a human village nearby they'll know. Though I have the nagging suspicion that they wouldn't care, based on the condition of her body.

I looked up Death's Calm while walking too, and it works pretty much the way I thought it did.

Death's Calm a skill that reduces fear passively, but with the side effect that it's harder to determine whether or not a situation is dangerous. While it probably isn't good in the long run, right now this skill is probably what is keeping me alive and thinking clearly.

If I hadn't been as calm as I am right now, then I might just have run a random direction through the forest without properly looking at my surroundings, and following along an animal track. It's of course a bet, but animal trails might lead to water.

I glance up to the sky, and note the change in cloud layers coming up pretty soon. It's the best bet I have of getting out of the forest. If I assume that the unnaturally thick clouds killing the forest, and making it a permanent semi-night here, is caused by an evil monster, then that would hint that the forest will return to normal once I get out from that area. The reason I'm hoping to get there before nightfall is due to the lifelessness of the forest on this side. If something is killing everything here and I haven't seen what that is, then it might come out at night... and night is approaching rapidly. I'd rather not risk being somewhere, where the only life is dying trees, when it's completely dark and I can't see anything.

Without warning I stop up, after catching a glimpse of hope from the corner of my eye... Large, shiny black berries peek up from little leaf crowns, as though served on little star shaped platters. Some berries have clearly been eaten, but there are quite a few left.