Chapter 1- Decorating the Trees

The sky was cloudy and gray, the sun could only be guessed at somewhere on the horizon. The hills were bare. The grass was thin and yellowish in the wind, like after a long drought in midsummer. Only occasionally did you see a few trees or even a small forest. But actually there were no longer forests in that sense, but rather groups of dead or withered trees and bushes. They no longer had green leaves or buds, even the branches and trunk seemed to be a different color that went slightly black instead of a brown.
A frightening silence lay over this extinct land, no bird twittered its happy song, no humming bees to help nature blossom. Not a single animal romped over meadows or in the woods. The whole country had the atmosphere of a dark tomb, the sun never shone here and one never saw the blue sky on the horizon. A misty haze stretched over the land all the time, which occasionally made you breathe, so you got the feeling.
Somewhere in this gloomy land a few trees lined the path. Right there, some people were kneeling or crouching in a row. They could not flee, they could not leave, they were guarded; guarded by the undead.

One of these guards walked off the line of this plague. Like the other warriors of his people, he was commissioned to kill these people. How they should kill these feeble creatures was entirely up to them. After all, a few hours ago they decided to treat themselves to a joke and hunt them down one by one. There wasn't much else to kill time with!
He walked slowly along the line of people, but only let his gaze roam briefly over these pathetic figures. Instead, his full attention was given to the goings-on of his comrades. They made fun of killing another defenseless person in a bestial way. The undead watched his friends spellbound. In doing so he unconsciously slowed down until he finally came to a stop in front of a girl, or rather a young woman.
Just like the other people, she also knelt in this long row. The hands of this young woman, who went by the name Ailana, were tightly tied in front of her body. She had lowered her head slightly, her long brown hair hanging over her shoulders and so easily covering her face. She wrinkled her nose slightly when the undead guard stopped right in front of her. You disgusted her! They gave off a barbaric odor of putrefaction. Their clothes were full of holes and smelled moldy. Some also had no more hair on their heads or they were only hanging down sporadically and very straggly. Her skin was deathly pale, with others it even shimmered green, gray, or bluish.Well, like skin, you couldn't really call the rags they wore on their bones anymore. Because with some of them there wasn't much left of this so-called skin. Through the holey clothes, which some even just hung like rags, occasional beige-colored bones protruded. Some showed the ribs, others the thighbones.
Ailana looked up slightly and looked at the guard in disgust. With this undead standing directly in front of her, his spine in particular stood out from under his rags. His greasy, disheveled and yet very little hair hung relatively evenly from his head. Its rotten flesh had turned gray over the years. The face was slightly sunken and all around his lower jaw almost to the neck there was no skin or muscle so that you could see every one of his rotten teeth. It was a mystery to her why his lower jaw had not fallen off long ago, what muscles was it still supported by? His eyes were deep into his face and were almost completely black. One of his bony and rotten hands was always on the hilt of his sword, as if he had to defend himself from something at any moment. How silly, as if their people could still do something!
Suddenly he laughed, it sounded like he was suffocating, apparently he liked the spectacle he had been watching the whole time. Ailana didn't follow the undead's gaze. She didn't need to look to know what had happened there again, she would have loved to kill him if he hadn't already been dead.
The undead finally resumed its patrol and again walked leisurely along the line of people. Ailana finally averted her gaze from this monster and her gaze returned to her right.

There were dozen other people like her kneeling and tied up there. Some cried, some prayed quietly, and still others stared into the distance as if they were already in a better place. Her heart contracted painfully at the sight.
Ailana's gaze turned briefly to the left. A few hours ago there had also been a long line of fully kneeling people. But they were all gone. They now hung like jewelry on the now dead and dark looking trees. Bizarre. At some point she had switched her gaze from her left side to her right side. Perhaps because their death was getting closer on the left, for the undead guards paced the entire line of people one by one. To be free from grace, whether young or old, whether woman or man. They made no difference. Their mission was solely to exterminate the plague.
Now and then she had looked again at the increasingly disappearing row of people on her left. She seldom watched a person being hanged or stabbed to death again.Rather, she was watching the man next to her. He was middle-aged and seemed to be finished with himself and his life. To be perfectly at peace with everything. He had such a peaceful expression on his face, he was perfectly calm and serene. He was already completely absent in his mind and no longer in this hideously horrible place, full of fear and death. She envied him this state of mind. She didn't know if he really wasn't aware of what was happening around him. At first he was just like everyone else. Restless, fearful and desperate. But at some point, she couldn't say exactly when, he seemed to have finished everything. He had already found his peace.
Suddenly Ailana saw her own death again and she felt a heavy lump in her throat. Even the otherwise calming presence of the man next to her could not prevent this oppressive feeling inside her. In fact, she had vowed to stay strong in the eye of death, not to show fear. She did not want to give this victory to her enemies. She would stay strong! Or? Unfortunately, she found that her determination was crumbling more and more and had been for a while. You were already so close. You should be afraid, it was your right to be afraid! She was going to die after all. Who wasn't scared? She felt the urge to scream, curse, cry and beg for her life. But she knew it was useless, so many had tried before her. She had heard that, oh yes she had. For hours!
She was shocked to find that the undead were already so close and although she didn't want to, she watched the next human being torn from the line. They couldn't take their eyes off it. She felt so miserable. It was almost as if she was seeing her own death because, after all, she was going to die that way too.
It was a young man. The whole time he had been speaking softly to himself, probably praying one last time. He was put on his shaky legs and dragged to one of the nearby trees along the way. He did not fight back and yet one of the guards grabbed his neck very roughly while the other maneuvered a rope over one of the branches at the end of which a noose was attached. Finally, the undead who had roughly grabbed the young man's neck pulled the noose over his head and put it tightly around his neck. Not a second later the other guard pulled the rope and the young man was pulled into the air with a jerk. The other end of the rope was attached to the tree trunk so that the young man was three meters above the ground. He choked, wriggled and was probably more alive in the last few moments than in the past hours, remaining in line. In the series of death.
While life twitched weaker and weaker through his body, the undead, who had just put the noose around the young man's neck, turned to his next victim.The next victim in line


- A little girl ...

They weren't far from Ailana, and soon it was her turn. Soon it was time for her to die. Her body had been shaking for hours, but the closer she got, she believed, the more her body was shaking. She probably just imagined it, but the queasy feeling in her stomach got bigger and bigger. And they were almost there! Soon it was over, soon it was all over!
Her thoughts raced wildly through her head.

The little girl cried as the guards dragged her to the nearest tree.

It got worse and worse, they couldn't think clearly.

The girl sobbed bitterly.

Ailana was scared so terribly scared, she didn't want to die yet.

The little one screamed. For help.

She felt sick, she wanted to get away from this terrible place. She still wanted to experience so much, fall in love, get married and have children. She was still so young.

She was crying.

Her heart was racing. Was the world really that mean to her? To their people? But why? Why only her?

A rope was thrown over a branch.

Tears made their way, she hadn't shed any more for hours, but now that her death was so imminent, she could no longer hold her composure.

A jolt. A crack.

A few silent tears ran down her cheeks. What had she done to die? What only? Wasn't she always good? What had she done to deserve such a death?

The little girl was dead.

A shiver ran down her spine, while her gaze was still on the small, but now dead, girl. She couldn't believe the cruelty of the undead. A little innocent girl who didn't understand anything about these confused times had to pay for it? Just for what? That was beyond her mind. Was it the mere fact that they were still alive as humans, and that this new race of the undead, who called themselves the Forsaken, had already exhausted their lives for years? But she couldn't help it that she had been spared the plague back then. It wasn't her fault that she was still human and not a forsaken, undead. Fate had