A force of men three thousand strong (not counting the various support personnel and taggers on, among others) marched in formation towards the border of what on our Modern Earth would be Turkey and Bulgaria, only to be met with the same wall of fog that had surprised so many unfortunate agents. A single non-soldier was chosen to be the guinea pig and was sent through the rather flimsy barrier (if it could even be called that) to see what was on the other side. He pushed through with the same level of effort that the protagonist from the Souls series of games had with entering certain… dangerous areas, and almost immediately he had pushed his way back and described in detail the force awaiting them on the other side.

The story he wove was… interesting… to say the least. If you were to believe his words at face value, then just on the other side of the towering yet thin wall of dense mist was a force of undead that stretched from horizon to horizon and was a hundred thousand deep from one side to the other. By his own words, the skies themselves were unable to be seen from beneath the innumerable massive bats that swarmed above, blotting any light and casting the land below into an eternal night with the sheer numerical mass of their bodies.

The poor sod went on and on, but what made his story completely unbelievable was that he said that a chill unlike any he had ever experienced hung in the air. Her claimed that even the undead were touched by this ungodly cold, their bodies seemingly remade to be imbued not just with the dark necromantic energies used to raise them but also with some kind of sinister ice that somehow even the massive bats seemed to be fused with.

As for why this was unbelievable, that was simple. It was the middle of summer, and this man who they had sent though was from the Sharana Desert (Mortis’ version of the Saharan Desert). While yes, the desert did get mighty cold during the night, it wasn’t that cold, especially when compared to the stories of the Ruskian winters that had occasionally found their way down to the Sultanate via a few well placed agents. What this fool was experiencing was nothing to be afraid of, and so the general led his army forth through the fog.

…

He sighed, despite not needing to. Another idiot had thrust his nation and its people headlong into a war that even a fool could see that they could not possibly hope to win. On one side was a force made of the living, one that relied on a flimsy supply network that would have been at most the envy of a petty noble from the Dark Ages and believed that causing a massive civil war to tear their own nation to bits all while fighting a major foe was a good idea. On the other was Darksol, and what more could be said than that? Anyone who took a look at modern history in Europa could see that taking on Darksol was a potentially catastrophic idea. The more it grew and the longer it had to build up, the stronger it became. Now, here he was, answering the call to arms and bringing death in the name of the nation that raised him into undeath.

This once great man, Piotr, was not exactly thrilled with his current situation, what with being undead and all, but his new state of being dulled the pain and anguish he felt about how he got back here. Plus, if that otherworldly fool of being was to be believed, the fate of his family and himself was a far better one than many of those whom he had left behind in the Second World War. His family died quickly to the Germans, and while he was not as lucky, he still wrought a bloody wrath in retaliation before being blown up and then raised in his battered body back in this world.

Piotr sighed once again. He needed to stop remembering the past. Every time his mind went there, it was a painful exercise despite the agony he felt growing dimmer and less pronounced each time. He focused his will through the undead he commanded and saw the army, if one could call something so tiny as such, pass through the border wall.

“You utter fools… Now only a frozen grave awaits you here… You all should have stayed away, nice and warm; you would never have had to face me then.” As Piotr watched the enemy, he spoke in a tongue that sounded similar to native Ruskian, which was far from the common tongue that the former Luminas Church had forced nearly everyone to use for international coordination. However, anyone who knew both languages could tell you that the two were essentially individual dialects, born from the differences arising from the minute and sometimes quite massive deviancies of their circumstances.

…

“Sweet Solinaye, it is absolutely frigid here!” one of the many taggers-on quietly exclaimed as the baggage train made it through the flimsy fog barrier. As expected, the words of the ‘scout’ proved to be false. There were no undead anywhere in sight, just snow-covered land and nearly frozen waterways, which was very odd for the summers in that part of the world, but still nothing at all like the innumerable hordes of undead that were described. A bit of cold was nothing to sneeze at, but this… unforeseen change in the way things would be was not something that needed to be overly worried about.

“Well, at least there does not seem to be a single risen corpse in the entire area!” Laughed the General as he ordered his army and their followers forward.

As a few miles passed beneath the boots of the final man in the column, the snow behind them shifted slightly and the empty eye socket of a skeleton covered in a layer of magical ice flickered to unlife. By the time the last cart of the baggage train was but seventeen kilometers away, the land that the Sultanate’s troops had passed through and thought to be safe had become a mass of frigid undead, all of whom craved the warmth of the living and would take it into themselves one way or another.