The heat of the forge was replaced instantly by a dead, lung-freezing draft that smelled of damp grave-soil and old copper.
Bran did not hesitate. He kicked his boot against the heavy wooden rack by the coal bin, knocking free a rusted billhook and a two-handed iron wood-axe. He thrust the billhook into Ronan’s trembling hands, his grip so fierce it bruised the boy’s skin.
"Stay behind me," Bran snarled, his voice stripped of all paternal warmth, hardened into the raw fury of a trapped animal. "Run for the crags if the line breaks. Do not look back."
Without waiting for an answer, Bran bolted out of the smithy into the choking white fog that swallowed the lane. Ronan stumbled after him, the heavy billhook dragging in the frozen mud. Around them, the village was a nightmare of screams and sudden, violent silence. Peasant men, farmers and herders whose only previous experience with violence was slaughtering autumn pigs, stumbled out of their huts with pitchforks and butchering knives. Bran roared, rallying the terrified serfs near the central watering trough, forming a desperate, pathetic wall of bodies against the creeping tide of corpses.
Out of the unnatural frost rode the vanguard of the dead.
At their head came a towering monstrosity clad in rusted, notched plate armor that groaned with every movement. An undead knight, its flesh entirely rotted away from a skull that still wore the iron remnants of a noble bascinet. In its bony right hand, it dragged a greatsword notched and blackened with centuries of dried gore.
Bran charged first, swinging the heavy wood-axe with all the savage strength of a blacksmith who had spent decades crushing iron. The blow caught the undead knight squarely across the breastplate, sending a shower of gray sparks flying into the fog. But the creature did not stagger. Its empty eye sockets flared with a sickly blue malice.
Before Bran could recover his balance, the undead knight drove its blade forward with effortless, unnatural speed. The rusted point punched straight through Bran’s leather doublet, exiting his back in a spray of dark, steaming blood. Bran gasped, his massive hands dropping the axe as he clawed desperately at the steel buried in his chest. The knight twisted the blade with a sickening crunch, lifting Bran off his feet before tossing him aside like a broken doll into the mud.
"Father!" Ronan screamed, his voice tearing raw from his throat.
A sudden, fierce weight slammed into him from behind. Eileen had sprinted from the dry-house, wrapping her thin, trembling arms around Ronan to shove him toward the narrow gap between the stone huts. She used her own body as a shield, thrusting herself outward with a kitchen cleaver raised against the advancing horde.
She never saw the blade that took her life.
An infantryman of the dead, its jaw slack and hanging by rotting sinew, thrust a short, jagged sword forward through the mist. The rusted metal pierced Eileen’s back with a wet, heavy thud. Her grip on Ronan slackened instantly, her breath hitching in a harsh, dry rattle before her weight collapsed entirely against him.
Ronan stumbled backward under the sudden dead weight of his mother, his boots tangling in the frozen mud. He tried to catch her, his fingers sliding against her blood-soaked tunic, but as she fell away, the same jagged blade continued its momentum.
A searing, white-hot agony tore through Ronan’s lower back, ripping forward through his ribs with a force that knocked every fraction of air from his lungs. He choked on a scream, his eyes widening in blank, uncomprehending shock as the cold steel pierced completely through his chest, pinning him to the frozen earth beneath his mother's cooling body.
The sounds of the village, the frantic clatter of the bell, the shrieks of dying neighbors, and the crunch of bone and frozen iron, began to warp, stretching into a distant, hollow ringing.
The frost closed over his vision, turning the pale fog into a heavy, suffocating sheet of absolute dark.
The last thing he saw was black.