Europe burned.
By 1812, the continent groaned under the weight of Napoleon Bonaparte's ambition. His Grande Armée, the largest military force Europe had ever seen, marched east through the endless Russian wilderness like a steel tide. Muskets slung over their shoulders, bayonets gleaming under the pale sun, and drums pounding like the beat of war gods, they moved with precision and pride.
But pride was no shield against the cold.
The Russian campaign, which had begun with glory and thunder, was beginning to stall. The cities were ashes, the people fled or hiding, and the land itself turned against the invaders. Starvation gnawed at their stomachs, frost cracked their boots, and rumors—terrible rumors—began to slither through the ranks like serpents.
It began in a small village called Ostrozhye, three days ride from Smolensk.
The village had once been peaceful. Snow lay thick over the slanted rooftops of wooden houses, smoke curled from crooked chimneys, and chickens clucked in frozen yards. But when Colonel Étienne Lacroix and the 12th Light Infantry arrived, they found silence. Too much silence.
The chickens were still there—but dead, frozen mid-stride as if turned to statues. No signs of violence, no blood, no broken doors—just an absence, a stillness that unsettled even the battle-hardened veterans.
Lacroix dismounted his horse slowly, boots crunching in the snow. The frost nipped at his trimmed mustache, and his breath puffed like steam from a kettle.
"Form ranks," he ordered, his voice steady but low.
The soldiers moved like clockwork. Thirty-two men. Veterans of Austerlitz, Wagram, and Jena. Men who had stabbed with bayonets, watched comrades bleed out in the mud, and marched through hell and back. And yet, as they moved between the houses of Ostrozhye, their eyes darted like those of green recruits.
Private Davide Morel, barely twenty and trembling beneath his shako, pushed open the door of the village chapel. It swung slowly, revealing the interior lit by beams of winter sun. Pews were overturned. A crucifix had fallen from the wall. And something scratched faintly from beneath the altar.
Morel stepped forward.
"Private, wait!" Sergeant Vallois called out.
Too late.
The floorboards splintered.
A hand—gray, with black fingernails and rotting skin—lunged up from below and grabbed Morel's ankle. He screamed, stumbling backward as more arms clawed through the floor. Men in tattered Russian uniforms. Their eyes were milky white, their mouths twisted in grotesque snarls.
One of them moaned, an awful gurgle like wind in a broken flute.
"Back! Back!" Vallois roared, firing his musket into the wood.
The shot tore through one of the things, but it didn't fall. It kept crawling, dragging itself toward Morel with broken legs.
"God in heaven," whispered Lacroix, backing away from the chapel as a figure burst through a side window. A Frenchman. Uniform half-rotted, eyes dead, jaw slack and bloodless.
"That's... Corporal Lefevre," said Captain Armand, face pale. "He died last week—dysentery. We buried him near Vilna."
Lefevre lunged, sinking black teeth into a soldier's neck. Blood sprayed onto the snow.
Panic erupted.
Muskets fired, bayonets plunged, and men screamed. But for every corpse that fell, three more rose. From the church. From the frozen earth beneath the village. From the woods.
It was an ambush—but not by Russians.
Two hours later, the survivors—if they could still be called that—galloped south through the forest. Lacroix had lost his horse, one eye bloodied and closed, and half his coat torn. Only eleven men rode with him, wild-eyed and shaking.
"We need to report this," Vallois said, his face streaked with soot. "To the Marshal. To the Emperor."
"What do we say?" Armand snapped. "That the dead walk? That we fled a village because corpses clawed out of the ground?"
"Then what do you call it?" Vallois retorted. "We saw them. You saw them. These weren't deserters or mad peasants. They didn't bleed. They didn't die when shot. They... they just kept coming."
"I know what I saw," Lacroix muttered. "And it chills my soul."
They reached a frozen stream, and the horses stopped to drink. The air was thick with falling snow, and the forest pressed in like the walls of a coffin. Lacroix looked west, toward the smoke still curling from the distant village.
"How could this happen?" he asked aloud, not expecting an answer.
Private Morel, face ghost-white, whispered, "Maybe it's punishment. For what we've done. For Moscow. For Spain. God's vengeance."
Lacroix said nothing.
Because deep down, a part of him feared the boy might be right.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in Paris, a sealed letter arrived at the Tuileries Palace. Stamped with the insignia of the 12th Light Infantry, it was intercepted by a quiet, sharp-eyed man in the Ministry of War. He read the contents twice, then burned it in his stove.
Later that night, he met with a hooded man beneath the catacombs. Their conversation was brief. Coded. Filled with references to "the breach," "the old infection," and a name never spoken aloud—La Peste Sombre. The Dark Plague.
Something forgotten was awakening.
And it would not stop with Ostrozhye.
As night fell across the Russian front, the snow stirred.
From beneath the white blanket, fingers twitched. Eyes opened. Soldiers long dead—French, Russian, Prussian—began to move. Some dragged broken swords, others nothing at all.
The war was about to change.
The dead had returned—and they were hungry.