The shield was gone. Nerves raw. Thoughts naked. No veil. No mercy. The Necromancers didn’t descend the steps. They didn’t rush us. They didn’t need to. They were mountain and weather. They were pressure. They stayed at the altar, and the altar became a lever. The female rose first. Not a jump. A slow, patient float. Robes like oil. Bones like reeds under cloth. She circled the altar as if it were a black sun and she was a small, bright moon. Each loop widened. Each loop pushed. She sang one word. “Submit.” Not loud. Not dramatic. Precise. A surgeon’s scalpel of sound. She made another orbit. The word slid through marrow and memory. “Submit.” Right side zombie choir answered her, soft at first, almost reverent. submit… submit… submit… Their lips barely moved. Heads tilted in unison. Empty eyes locked on nothing. My boys buckled like wheat in a slow wind. Knees touched stone. Mouths slack. Eyes up. The song folded will into neat, apologetic packages. Behind her, the male did not rise. He took one knee on the top step and placed a palm against the altar. His fingers splayed as if pressing keys no one else could see. He did not sing a different song. He sang hers with her. Lower. Heavier. The kind of bass that lives under the floor. Their duet walked through our skulls. “Submit,” she breathed. SUBMIT, he rumbled. Left side zombie choir answered him. SUBMIT… SUBMIT… SUBMIT… The sound carried weight, like shovels striking coffins. Their jaws opened wider, voices growing more guttural, more impatient. The cathedral carried it. The pews hummed. The chains overhead chimed. The hanging dead swayed in sympathy, like metronomes of meat. Every curve of carved stone sharpened the note and returned it to us with interest. We stood inside an instrument built to play obedience. Right choir, soft but sharp: submit… submit… submit… Left choir, louder each time: SUBMIT… SUBMIT… SUBMIT… Half my boys went down at once. Faces to stone. Hands flat. Next came the strong ones who believed they were stronger than they were. Boy Four. Boy Six. Boy Ten. One by one, like candles exhaling themselves. The circle widened. “Submit.” SUBMIT. The word had teeth. It bit the corners of the mind where old fear lives. It bit again. And again. I smelled blood before I tasted it. Right choir hissed their word now, more force in it, less patience: submit submit submit submit Left choir barked theirs, voices cracking stone: SUBMIT SUBMIT SUBMIT SUBMIT Boy Eleven’s forehead touched the floor. Boy Twelve’s fingers trembled and spread in surrender. Boy Five offered his throat to nothing at all. They weren’t cowards. It wasn’t that. The song cheated. It came in wearing their own voices. Boy Two lasted longer. Rear guard habits. Stubborn spine. He dropped slow, like a tower deciding to kneel. Not collapse. Kneel. Finally only three were upright. Boy One. Boy Three. And me. Boy One’s breath gunned fast. Eyes wet. He shook his head. He clenched his jaw. He stayed up. Boy Three didn’t shake. He didn’t blink. He stared at me and waited. The kind of waiting that feels like a bridge with a train on it. He wore defiance like a tight coat. Too tight. Blood crept from his ears, threading his neck. Their chorus pressed harder. “Submit.” submit… submit… submit… SUBMIT. SUBMIT… SUBMIT… SUBMIT… My knees flexed. I didn’t fall. I won’t. I am a dog. Dogs submit only to love or death. This was neither. The female’s orbit widened again. She floated close enough to brush the hanging dead, then arced back. Every pass tightened the room. Every pass made gravity feel personal. I felt a thought that wasn’t mine try to put a leash on my boys. I felt the leash tug. I was upset. Upset is a small word, but it’ll do. I have other words. Most are impolite. None are polite enough for theft. She wasn’t taking their bodies. That would be simple. She was taking my lattice. My links. My boys. That is spitting on my paws. That is pulling my tail.

A Dog and Her 12 Boys season one. GATELOCK Prime – Episode 16: Zombie Liquid. The First Note. Boy Three moved first. Always did. I pulsed the formation through the lattice. Spread. Circle. Silence. The Necromancers continued their ritual, arms weaving deliberate patterns in the air above a tall, narrow altar between them. Male and female, orbiting one another with a slow, gliding step. Their feet barely touched the stone, yet each motion carried weight, as if the air thickened around them. They hadn’t noticed us. Or pretended not to. I tasted the air. Incense. Decay. Old stone. But beneath that, something patient. A predator’s patience, not prey. It didn’t care we were here. It knew we would stay. Cloak. Psychic shroud dropped over us like fog. The boys vanished from sight, from scent, from the cathedral’s awareness. I brushed the surface of the Necromancers’ minds—thin membranes stretched over deep, dark wells. I saw flickers of shape and sound I didn’t understand. No heavy psychic armor. No obvious weapons. Just… resonance. Formation. Advance. We entered the cathedral proper. The space swallowed sound in the wrong way—our boots made no echo, yet the faint, constant hum of the choir pressed into our bones. Bodies hung in the vaulted shadows, swaying from blackened hooks, their flesh waxy and half-mummified. Every sway made the overhead chains sing in a high, brittle note, blending into the drone below. The zombie choir flanked us on either side, each seated rigid in the ancient pews. No one looked up. No one blinked. Their mouths were open just enough to let the harmony leak out—a layered, endless note that rose and fell without a single breath. Lips cracked. Teeth black. Tongues stiff and gray. Yet the sound flowed steady, as if the air itself passed through them. The aisle stretched forward in a straight line, a black river of stone leading to the altar. Every step we took, the shadows seemed to bend inward, as if we were passing through the throat of some enormous thing. Positions. The boys spread out. Boy Three took point, rifle steady. Boy Seven drifted left, almost level with the first row of pews. Boy Five mirrored him on the right. The rest formed a containment ring just shy of the steps to the altar. No one broke formation. No one breathed loud. Drop cloak. The shroud peeled away from us like mist dissolving in sunlight. The Necromancers didn’t stop. The female’s long, narrow hands swept upward in a slow arc, fingers bent like claws catching invisible threads. Her hair was bound in a lattice of bone pins, each carved with the same repeating glyph that glowed faintly as she moved. Her robe was layered silk, black over white over black, but it clung wrong, folds that suggested extra limbs beneath. The male was thicker in frame, but the robe draped oddly over his torso. His shoulders were hunched forward, as if weighed down by the ribcage of some other creature. When the silk shifted, I saw his chest was split vertically, and inside was stone—not flesh. A slab of black granite carved into ribs, every edge etched with deep-cut markings. Shield formation. Prepare. The psychic barrier slid into place around us, a glassy dome humming low. The female stopped dancing. Her head tilted, not toward us, but toward the air above us, as if she saw something we couldn’t. Then she opened her mouth. The screech was a thin, needle-point sound, aimed with surgical precision. It bypassed flesh and went straight for thought. My skull rang like a cracked bell. The right side of the cathedral answered. Forty zombie throats opened wider. They repeated her cry perfectly, not just in sound, but in tone, in psychic flavor. It was her voice multiplied fortyfold, braided into a rope of noise. The walls trembled. Dust sifted down from the beams. Overhead, the hanging corpses swung violently, their chains grinding out sharp, metallic harmonics.

Dog and Her 12 Boys. Seasoned one. GATELOCK prime. – Episode 15: The Overlook The sewer tunnel curved downward like a throat swallowing us whole. The artifact’s pulse had shifted, no longer the erratic ping of something hidden, but a steady rhythm that matched my heartbeat. Or maybe my heartbeat had matched it. Hard to tell anymore. Boy Six touched the wall as we descended. Stone. Carved stone. I felt his recognition through the lattice and concrete had given way to something older. Symbols etched into black rock, worn smooth by time and touch. Not human script. Not recent. The kind of markings that made your teeth ache just looking at them. The tunnel widened into a natural cavern. The air thickened, carrying weight and dampness that pressed against our skin like wet wool. Then the ledge, a narrow stone jutting over an impossible drop. We crouched in the shadows, looking down into a chamber that stole our breath. A cathedral. Not built—carved. Hollowed from living rock like someone had scooped out the earth’s heart and decorated it with nightmares. Impossible architecture stretched below us, all flowing curves and gravity-defying arches. No mortar. No seams. Just one continuous piece of stone shaped by will or madness. Suspended from the ceiling, hundreds of corpses swayed in perfect formation. Neither random nor chaotic. Flayed bodies hung like meat in a slaughterhouse, skin peeled back to expose glistening muscle and yellow fat. Some were mummified, leather-dark and shrunken. Others were fresh enough that blood still dripped from fingertips into brass bowls positioned beneath. Each body hung at a precise height, specific angle, creating geometric patterns that hurt to follow. They moved like wind chimes in a breeze that didn’t exist, their positions shifting with mathematical precision. Below them, arranged in neat rows like a church congregation, sat the zombie choir. Forty, maybe fifty figures in various stages of decay, all facing forward, all humming in perfect harmony. Their voices rose up to us, hauntingly beautiful, wrong in every frequency. At the altar, two figures stood with arms raised, conducting the choir with slow, deliberate gestures. Tall. Impossibly lean. Their robes hung from frames that seemed too long for human proportions, sleeves extending past where hands should end. Even from here, I could taste their psychic presence—cold, ancient, patient as stone. I studied the layout, tactical mind sorting through the musical madness. The suspended corpses weren’t just decoration, they were instruments. Resonance chambers. The cathedral’s acoustics were designed around them, creating amplification nodes throughout the space. Every surface, every curve, every hanging body served the sound. The artifact pulsed faintly, somewhere beyond this chamber. Whatever we were tracking lay deeper still, but these Necromancers stood between us and our prize. I pulsed the command: Formation. Descent. Silent. We moved down the hidden stone steps, each footfall calculated, controlled. The music grew louder as we descended, more hypnotic. Harmonies layered on harmonies, voices that should have been dead weaving melodies that made the air itself vibrate. Boy Six stumbled once, caught by the music’s pull. Boy Nine’s eyes glazed over for a moment before I pulsed a wake-up call through the lattice. The song wanted to drag us in, make us part of the performance. Not today. I crouched behind a pillar, studying the suspended corpses one last time. Each one positioned just so. Each one part of the greater instrument. Time to break the symphony. I growled low. The boys moved.