“The flap of a butterfly’s wings could be the slight breeze that would eventually start a hurricane, half a continent away and many years later.” - Old philosophical saying.
“Okay, now you guys have to be shitting me,” said Celia with not a little incredulity in her voice at the sight before her eyes.
The three of them were on the final leg of their trip towards Tohrmutgent, the capital of Ptolodecca. That evening, they stopped to rest at a small village roughly a day’s away from Tohrmutgent by foot, planning to spend the night there before continuing on with their trip to reach the city before noon the next day. It was also there that Celia saw something which made her question her sanity.
Overall, the village itself was almost a textbook quaint little village, barely thirty households or so, clearly a relatively recent one rather than a place that had been there for ages, as could be seen from the buildings. Like the other towns and villages they visited on their trek so far, skeletal sentries covered the perimeter of the village, were interspersed amongst the lush fields around it, and stood guard untiringly.
What was not something Celia had seen at all was the presence that stood at the very center of the village square.
Right in the center of the village square, a single figure stood tall and firm. At a glance one might have mistaken it for just another skeletal sentry, but a closer look quickly revealed that it was a much different thing altogether. Unlike the other skeletal sentries, the skeletal figure in the village square had a thicker, more solid build, almost as if it was wearing armor at some places, and a wolf’s skeleton was draped over its skull almost like a helmet.
Even someone who wasn’t particularly sensitive to mana like Celia – in general people with greater ability to use mana were more sensitive to it, whereas Celia’s capacity for magic was overall poor – could feel the dense magical power that seemed to emanate from the undead figure in ways that reminded her of some sort of baleful aura.
Yet that same figure simply stood firm, its spear planted into the ground with one arm stretched out to the side, while several of the village children – some of them no more than toddlers who were often so bundled up due to the cold weather that they looked almost like walking furballs – played around and on it, some of them even swinging around while holding onto the undead’s arm bones with their arms.
“Oh, him?” replied Aideen rather nonchalantly at Celia’s flabbergasted look. “There’s a bit of a story behind him, honestly. I think the locals call him the ‘Wolf Knight’ these days, but yeah, as you suspected, that’s not a regular skeleton. That’s a Death Knight personally raised by Grandpa Aarin himself, around… damn, time sure flies… It’s already been almost three centuries since Grandpa rebuilt him…”
“Anyway, back then, this guy was just another regular skeleton, one posted as a sentry right around here. The kids of the local farmers liked to play with him for some reason, and that day, a wild wolf happened to attack them. It was this guy who defended them from that wolf, getting himself broken to pieces as a result.”
“That’s not the whole story, isn’t it?” asked Celia.
“Of course not. Grandpa happened to be passing by on his way back with me and my brother back then. This was like, shortly after I rose as an unliving. He saw the whole thing happen and noticed the children crying over the broken skeleton, so he called for the carriage to stop and repaired the skeleton,” said Aideen as she continued her story. “Grandpa being Grandpa, he didn’t just fix the skeleton, but also combined the remains of the dead wolf with it, infusing some of his own mana into the resulting construct.”
“As a result, that undead being used as a playground by the local children is probably one of the strongest of its kind in the Lichdom. It’s rare for Grandpa to personally create just one Death Knight, as he usually created those in batches,” she added. “As a result, this one naturally became more powerful just from the attention it received.”
“And the children still play around it after all that?”
“But of course! In fact, this little village was founded a few decades after that incident, by the very same children who happened to be playing on him that fateful day. Their children had played around and on him ever since, and their children’s children continued the tradition,” Aideen explained.” By now it must have already been at least ten generations of children that grew up playing on a Death Knight, and they’re unlikely to stop the tradition anytime soon.”
“I swear… just when I thought I got the measure of this place, you keep bringing me new surprises like this…” muttered Celia under her breath as she shook her head. Her experiences in Ptolodecca so far had been surprises after surprises, as things that often defied the common sense she had grown up with were commonplace in the Lichdom.
Like how even a small village of thirty households had water canals built strategically to irrigate their fields, despite the village’s location being far away from the nearest source of water. Then again, with undead labor freely available, that sort of work was likely easy for the locals to afford. It was something nearly unthinkable in most places she had seen in her travels.
And the Lichdom clearly had enough leeway to place an undead creature that would have easily given many elite warriors a run for their money in such a village out of sentimental reasons, too.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts as she followed Aideen and Calais into the village. The accommodations the village happily provided for them was far better than she would have expected for a village of that size, the prosperity of the Lichdom evident in the way how even the small villages produced food in excess of what they needed and thus lived comfortable lives without worry.
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