When Undying awoke, the entire world had disappeared.

Nothing moved, the darkness had shrouded everything from him, excepting, of course, the Song of Death. He could hear them, the dead, they were all around him. The orchestra roared in the darkness, bringing a moment of clarity to the death-riddled mind of the deceased Hero.

He was underground.

Undying’s arms twisted in an unnatural manner, angles which should have been snapping his tendons. His claws navigated through the dirt easily, he found purchase on a rock and began pulling himself upwards, emitting a deep guttural growl as he went. Small, sharp rocks cut at his flesh as he drew closer and closer to the surface, he cared not for them, they were nothing but a nuisance, which would be dealt with later.

It was then, that the Herald thrust upwards, his soil-covered appendage breaching the surface. The long rotten muscles jolted at the breeze of unnatural air, and his fingers convulsed, leaving his palm to signal a threatening V to the world above.

With his arm freed, Death’s General clasped onto the ground, finding good purchase on the grassy land above. The Undying growled, and the surface above him decayed, weakening the soil. He pulled himself out of the darkness below, his terribly scarred visage emerging, the light blinding his blank eyes. With half of his body out of the ground, the Herald scanned his surroundings, discovering that he was on what must have been the remains of the battlefield.

His stagnant neck flexed as the stable song of Death turned into a cacophony of incoherent sounds. The Undying’s vision blurred and shifted as his rotten mind worked through the surroundings.

A large pile of long deserted wood sat perched on a rock formation - no doubt the vessel that charged him and the others, so teasingly ghostly in its shape, but ultimately composed of matter. Dozens of skeletal remains laid strewn across the perimeter - the likely remainders of the undead he had summoned to fight for him. The mariner who commanded the onslaught was nowhere to be seen. It seemed that he and the others had left the field long ago, the Undying’s death dealer associates left forgotten in their tracks.

They had failed.

The assumption was given more ground as the hulking corpse rose in full, barely standing still after the strain of the vicious energies. His molding, misshapen head hung face to face to a stone monument. Even in the uncertain blur of the post-shock confusion, the Undying saw the hood and the eldritch lines engraved on it. The brooding Oglodi, the Warlock, must have been left a mere statue by the serpentine fighter they so hoped to avail of her shield.

“No… burial…” he vocalized in a gurgle, feeling obscure anger at the apparent loss of a valuable assistant.

The undead general’s enduring form shuddered as a wild screech erupted from afar, springing the memory of the ghastly rider’s steed in his mind. Could he have stayed, anticipating the never coming death of the Undying? From what was known to the undead hulk, it was very much possible. The Lord of Avernus had foresight which could match that of the Dead God’s servants.

His rotten head aimed to turn itself, urging the rest of his body to move along - with that, he saw a chaotic landscape, indicative of a significant passage of time. He must only have awoken decades, if not centuries after the fateful battle - the Ancient’s spark and Dead God’s will had been delayed by some means of their opponents. The Lord was likely to still be alive - albeit the Undying heard no more sounds, and felt no mist encompass the surroundings, a usual sign of the rider’s entrance.

A grim forest had erupted all around the site, consuming the remains of buildings and statues that were never there. Hungry vines wrapped around chiseled monuments, put up after the supposed triumph. Some of them were in conditions that lead him to assume that the red giant, the Axe, as he recalled his usual monicker, eventually rebelled and lead a roaring rampage through the pristine streets. Stone, chopped to pieces, concrete, stricken apart - whatever happened had to have been a site of incredible violence.

The Almighty Dirge nudged the Undying along, forcing him to look for signs and clues as his deceased mind tried to recuperate. And so he did find what made him feel the drive again - the smell. His nostrils had long ago decayed off, but the smell stayed, and he knew the smell.

Death.

It was a dead city.

His trudging leg hit an inconvenient bump, and the towering hulk bent over in a contortion that would have had anything else fall flat. The inconvenience was lost as he examined it.

A big, bulky - to anything but him - skeleton. It was of a wild beast, that much was sure. At first thought, he took them to be what remained of the Dezun berserker, who wore a similar-looking set of bones on his head and back, but then he saw more. So many more surrounded the one - they had escaped his view during the initial confusion. It had turned out that the Undying awoke rather fittingly. The dead city had become a graveyard for a deadly species.

If he had any ability to visibly express himself, he would have smiled.

“The sleepless… wake!” he commanded, aiming his long arms at a nearby pillar, and thought to bring the deceased under his control, encompassing the significantly smaller skeletons near the pile of wooden rubble.

A horrid spark of multi-colored light flashed instead, and the Undying realized that something was wrong.