“Oh, darling, darling. You fought so hard.”

The necromancer gathers Wulfwynn to her, cradles her head upon her lap between cold and chitinous fingers. She tries to pull away, but there is nothing left in her. Her lifeblood slicks the flagstones, wine-dark and glistening. It won’t be long now.

A caress in bone. Flesh-raking fingers tuck a sticky strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s going to be alright now,” the corpse-caller croons, her voice a sussural echo of itself, many mouthparts sequenced into step. Wulfwynn half-laughs, a slur of blood spilling up with the lurch of her shoulders.

“I’ve lost,” she says. She cannot muster a more eloquent rebuttal, and in the end, does not need one. These are the bitterest two words a knight of the Covenant can utter.

“Yes, dear, you have.” The necromancer’s jaws part and mesh, canting into a smile. She stoops low over Wulfwynn - instincts lurch within a slack and fractured body, but her left cheek and ear are not licked off, her face remains in place. Hair, colourless as bleached bone, falling loose, tickles Wulfwynn’s cheekbone. It is like silk.

The necromancer murmurs:

“There is no shame, no shame at all, dear heart. You gave your utmost, every breath, and now the time for striving has passed. Next, there comes the dark. Ah - ah – stir not, have no fear, great hero. You will not be lost. There will be an interval for you, a little while of nothingness, to balm your ragged soul. And then…”

Somewhere, the sun is setting. Behind the necromancer’s head, the first stars are opening their eyes against the black vault of night.

“And then?”

“And then you will be called. You will stir and wake anew, in the flesh your lion’s heart deserves. For the service of a kinder lord.”

Everything is passing very far away, now, and there is no more pain. Wulfwynn asks, because somehow it is the only thing she can think to ask -

“Will I remember what I was?”

“Oh, Wulfwynn. Dear Wulfwynn.” The necromancer’s mandibles whisper against her brow. A kiss. “Did I not say already that I am kind?”

Next, there comes the dark.