I stood back in the garden of my childhood home, the flowers were pretty.
They smelled like nothing, nature was silent.
The trees stood all in lines, perfect lines.
There were no trees, there was only one.
It repeated over and over, my childhood home had disappeared and only this tree existed.
The ground was no more, the sky had been replaced.
The tree was everywhere.
I shuddered and as one of the reflections died, withering away from old age.
Another caught fire, was cut, another uprooted, one was devoured by termites.
I bore witness to all of this one tree’s possible fates, thousands of them played out in front of my eyes as I was unable to look away or think.
My vision faded to black.
My childhood home was back, the tree stood in front of me and I was made to bear witness to another fate.
The true fate.
-Extract from Quideos Audit’s most recent vision
Following from a distance, Loimos could see that the trio of hunters were debating something, they wouldn’t be gone for a little while.
He listened in on their conversations, having been privy to many conversations amongst the goblins, he already had an idea what the three designated messengers were busy talking about.
They were discussing whether to go to the bark dwellers camp first or last.
Thankfully, the living had plenty of exploitable weaknesses, their need to keep their stomach full and their bodies hydrated was one of their biggest ones.
The undead knew that they would travel alongside a small stream, not all tribes were close to the lake and if they wished to gather more food during their travels, sticking close to the lake wasn’t ideal, the line of sight was too broad, animals and monsters would see them coming from far away.
These goblins weren’t expert fishers as well, not patient enough and with rough equipment, they never bothered to even try.
With this knowledge in mind, Loimos ventured ahead of them, running at his full speed next to the stream.
As an undead, Loimos could sprint at his maximum possible output constantly and without ever having to stop, even if he wasn’t very fast, he had no issue leaving the three hunters in the dust.
They walked to conserve energy, had to sleep when night fell, eat and drink, utterly meaningless activities.
The undead arrived upstream way before they did, it would take them a few days to get up to his position, meanwhile, Loimos was free to put his plan into action.
Laying his body into the small stream, he began to work on growing as much of his putrid flesh as possible, constantly oozing rotten blood.
After experimenting with it and learning more about himself, he had managed to willfully produce the flesh, after he had slayed the goblin in the tribe, he felt his control grow.
It wasn’t simply due to what the system called ’Experience’ or ’Stats’, reaping a life had simply granted him a greater understanding of his own nature.
The flowing water wasn’t affected in the first few hours, but after a whole day, it took on a darker taint as the rot kept growing.
Unlike before, instead of simply remaining there without doing anything, the pieces that detached from his bones stuck to other surfaces, trying to expand all on their own.
They had no mind of their own, they simply inherited of Loimos’s goal and tried to grow over life and snuff it out themselves.
Remaining in place for days and doing nothing but growing decay, Loimos stood up and suddenly began to travel back downstream.
Eventually running into the three goblins.
They were dehydrated, not willing to touch the water after what had happened to it.
It seemed like they had wanted to move away from the stream and toward the lake, but their intellectual inaptitude had caught up to them.
They had eaten meat from a contaminated animal.