The stench of death struck his nostrils as the anima serpent broke through the barrier separating Maldraxxus from the rest of the Shadowlands. They flew over a land that seemed more like the diseased flesh of some giant being than actual land. He wondered if maybe he had made the wrong decision in coming here.
The serpent landed him in the middle of an arena. One of the flesh golems standing on the edge invited him to join in the fight with a giant made of lava-rock. Seryth was about to answer when a hunk of it came crashing down next to him, and other combatants ran past, shouting and dragging him along in their wake.
The giant slew his Drust voidwalker, burying it in fire, though Seryth didn’t feel the punch to his gut as had happened when Ormmoth, his Nathsyssn’s voidwalker, had been slain in the past. How long ago that seemed! Perhaps it was because this voidwalker had not been bound to him in the same way. Seryth pocketed its stone core, which had come from Drust Var, to perhaps fill with Shadow energy and reanimate later.
For now, he only summoned his felsteed — it didn’t appear as if the Necrolords would mind him using darker magic while in Maldraxxus — and approached one of the flesh golems on the side to ask directions. He couldn’t figure out what was animating the creatures, for they seemed intelligent, yet all of them were undead, and not quite human in their looks.
The flesh golem seemed reluctant to answer his questions about anima, and it instead proclaimed him a winner of the bout and gifted him with an urn.
“There’s more where that came from if you serve us,” the flesh golem said coyly — if coy was an appropriate term to use for a giant zombie missing most of its teeth.
Seryth didn’t like the sound of serving anyone, but he didn’t have very many options. The flesh golem sent him to test his mettle against enemies outside the arena.
When he first touched down in the Spearhead, Seryth couldn’t tell who was fighting who: it was a field of flesh golems and zombies fighting over an inchor-drowned field. He finally relied on whichever the zombies attacked him first.
He made a sizeable dent in the aggressive flesh golems before falling back behind the lines of the ones that seemed more well-disposed to him. One gestured at another, who Seryth took to be a quartermaster, and he was granted another urn full of anima.
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