By day, the reaver hid away in the attacks or the basements it could find that were furthest from the scenes of its bloody slaughters. It had killed over a hundred souls in the first week of its endless mission of suffering, and even though it was now down to only two arms and one eye, it hoped to murder at least that many again before it finally ceased to function.

The most interesting thing it found was not the blood of its victims or a weakness in the walls, though. It still had not found a way to creep into the castle and slaughter the royal family who had spat in its master’s face. What it had found, though, was a rat.

Not just any rat. The thing that it currently pinned to the ground with a claw and studied with fascination was a rat that was already long dead, and still, it moved. That had been enough to get its attention, and because the reaver’s initial assessment was that this had been some sort of proxy for the still-living mages it had not yet managed to hunt down, its first instinct had been to dash it to pieces.

Instead, it decided that this was something alien and unique enough to await the judgment of its master. So, instead of going out that night to prowl the shadows and slaughter more families, it lingered there in that disused ossuary and prayed to the Darkness for guidance for hours until it finally manifested itself.

Finally, its focus was rewarded, and the deathless Lich slipped smoothly inside its cracked skull as it began to examine all the specifics of the situation. A city in flames, a panicking populace, and a tiny zombie rat were the things it looked at the most, and the reaver could feel that its master was pleased with it.

“Who do you belong to?” the Lich growled through the reaver’s mangled voice box.

The rat gave no reply to the question, and so the Lich crushed it. However, as it did so, it wove a dark enchantment, using that rat as both focus and sacrifice, and the tiny, still corpse began to glow with a dim yellow haze.

“Know this,” the Lich continued. “You can answer me now, when I have killed a single one of your tiny servants, or when my reaver has killed a thousand more, but I will have the truth. I will find the source of this magic!”

By the time the reaver was done crushing the half-mummified rodent, it was nothing but powder, and as that glowing dust drifted on the foul air currents of the sepulcher it was hiding in, it began to illuminate all sorts of things. Suddenly, there were tiny little tracks crisscrossing the tunnels between various crevices and corpses.

Even as the Lich’s spirit left its deathless servant behind, it left a new order in its place: “hunt the rodents until you find their source. Slaughter all you find until they are amenable to conversation and use their remains to extend the spell.”

While the new command lacked the blood and suffering that the vengeful reaver enjoyed most in life, it could hardly resist. Instead, it pursued its new task with even greater gusto than before, for it was no longer limited to the dark hours of the day. It could masquerade through the black warren of tunnels beneath the capital almost constantly, and everywhere it went, it found more of this strange infestation.

Mice, rats, and even hound-sized constructs woven of dozens of dead rats filled the place, but none of them stood a chance against the reaver’s fists or its blades. Their only chance was to find somewhere narrow enough that it could not reach them, but often enough, it found a way to extract the dully glowing rodent from their hole by ripping out part of a wall.

It gave each construct it located a moment to speak as the Lich desired before it reduced it to nothing but dust and bone fragments, and with each death, the web of yellow and brown lines that connected these creatures thickened and multiplied. Who was it that was responsible for animating so many tiny creatures? What was their purpose? It didn’t know. Most of the time, it barely cared about the answers to those questions.

It had been built to hunt in the same way that the Lich had been built to think, and so that’s what it did. It hunted through mile after mile, moving from bone-filled catacombs to sewage-filled sewers and back again. In all that time, its only complaint was that the humans were often so close that it could almost reach out and drag them screaming into the depths, but sadly it was not allowed to. So they stood in the safety of their ignorance, just out of reach.

After weeks of hunting rodents, all it wanted to do was creep to the surface and bathe in the blood of the innocent. After so long without killings, they would think that the coast was clear and that everything would be safe. They were wrong, though. As soon as it fulfilled the Lich’s command and found the source of this strange infestation, it would be allowed to return to its killing spree. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The simple predator clung to that hope long after its joy in stalking and murdering such unsatisfying prey faded. In the end, it took almost a month and hundreds of murders to find the tomb. Though it practically glowed with a sickly yellow aura, the master of the rats had obviously gone to great lengths to hide it. Only a single strand of faint footprints finally led it here, but even it could see that this was the beating heart of its enemy.

As it advanced, a tremulous cry finally rose up from a chorus of rats. It was a discordant thing, but the words were understandable enough. “Cease your hunt!” they cried! “We surrender!”

It stood there in the doorway, baring their escape, and this time, when the Lich came, it was much faster than before. It took minutes instead of hours for it to reach out and make the connection.

“I accept your surrender,” it said at once. “Tell me, who do you serve?”

“No one!” came the chorus of denunciations. “We are our own master. We feast where we like on what we can!”

“You did once,” the Lich agreed, but you will serve a new master now.

“Yes!” the tiny voices screeched in unison. “Be merciful! Let us serve you!”

The vermin crumpled immediately, as expected. It was their nature. Better to eat the crumbs from the high table than be exterminated by your betters.

The light the Lich invoked as it willed a complex binding spell into existence made the floor throb with violet lines of power, and even the dead, cracked limbs of the reaver began to tingle as a massive amount of necromantic energy flowed through it, and a ghostly version of the Lich’s Scoeticnomikos appeared in one hand.

“No one, not even a single copy of you, leaves this room,” the Lich promised. “Not until I understand everything about you.”

The hundreds of rats lined up there on the niches, and the shattered sarcophagus resembled a small sea of candles in the way they glowed faintly yellow, but each time the Lich reached out to dig deeper into their collective soul with its dark powers, they flickered in they flickered dangerously like they were moments from being extinguished.

The reaver understood that much, though. The Darkness that flowed through it right now was so powerful that it could have very easily been extinguished by its master. It wouldn’t even have to do it on purpose. A mere accident would be enough to steal the spark that animated it and send it tumbling back into the maelstrom of souls that made up the Lich’s true self.

It did not fear such a fate, but only because it was made with hunger instead of fear. It had that in common with the rats, too. It, no, they were all named Ghroshian, and they were pure hunger. It seemed to the Lich, or at least it seemed to the reaver as it watched the Lich study the fragile souls of the creatures, that they had been part of something larger and stronger. Neither of the thing that studied nor the thing that was being studied knew exactly what that was, though.

This terrible conversation had started off with words and questions, but as the two things melded together in a whirling maelstrom of magic that communication became nonverbal, and eventually, it contained very few words at all. It had been imprisoned for so long that whole parts of its soul had shriveled to dust and were poorly understood. Some words like Malzekeen flickered by between the images, but it was unsure if that was a place or a person.

It was a cacophony of thoughts and images, and the revenant could only stand in mute awe as much of the details passed right through it. These rats were part of a hive mind, and they were old and already buried long before the Darkness had been born. It had been beaten by Siddrim and the other gods, as it had fought beside the worm and the wolf centuries earlier, but it had lost those names to the searing light they’d tried to purge the rodents with, and the Darkness their remains were imprisoned in afterward.

“Why couldn’t they slay you?” the Lich asked through its mouth when words finally returned to the conversation.

“Can hunger ever truly be extinguished?” the rats asked in a ragged chorus. “Can war and conflict ever reduce hunger with their presence? Famines can be eliminated, and pestilences can be defeated, but some child, somewhere, will always go to bed somewhere, and we will be reborn there and start the cycle anew. The Lord of Light thought better of it. He trapped us so that we would always exist, and a new hunger could not be reborn without us.”

The answer made no sense to the reaver, but its master seemed satisfied with it.

The meager swarm swore their allegiance to the Lich there beneath Rahkin without an ounce of deception in their heart. Only then did the yellow magic of seeking and the purple wards of binding begin to fade to black, leaving the reaver standing there in a new darkness that was lit only by hundreds of tiny red eyes and no specific orders about what it was supposed to do next.

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, it was not given back its previous mission of mindless slaughter. Instead, it was forced to assist these rats in their new order: starvation. Though it would get to do some killing yet, that would be incidental to the larger goal.

The fall harvest was coming in now, and thanks to magic, it was better than it had any right to be. The humans were experiencing hope for the first time in a year because of that, and it would have to be not just stopped but reversed for the siege that lay ahead.

“Make them rue the day that they dared refuse my generous offer,” the Lich declared to both of them. “Make them weep and gnash their teeth until they have nothing left to eat but dust as the corpses of the fallen!”