[ALERT Side-Story] Home Is Where The (Undying) Heart Is [Invites Closed]

The skies were darker than normal for a typical night in Naarajärvi. The normally quiet snow-swept hills were filled with gunfire. When the horn immediately sounded, no one knew what to make of it. Then, without warning, an entire battalion of the living dead came and pushed on the town’s perimeter defenses.

These weren’t your average Romero-style zombies. These were armed walking corpses, composed of victims of war spanning the centuries. It said a lot that some were warriors armed with Tenth Century Nordic equipment, while others were reanimated Soviet conscripts of the Second World War. The warriors of pre-Christendom Scandinavia fell quickly, while the later century undead endured. All in answer to the horn, and with an overriding directive in their lifeless minds.

“Death to the Living…”

With the tactical nuance of the conscripts, one could mistake them as having more intelligence than the others. The truth was, this was little more than muscle memory and habit on display - the nerve twitches of those who had died long ago. If falling back on military training they had in life was what accomplished the stated directive of killing the Living, that’s what they will do.

Emergent behavior at its finest.

Within the hangar where his white-painted TYPE-HOGIRE power armor was waiting, Taavi Virtanen was being briefed on what was going on. It hadn’t even been a day since he got back from Ruokolahti. He’d only had enough time to eat, and go through high altitude recon footage.

It wasn’t just the living dead - supernatural creatures of all types were wandering around the world. Though, Scandinavia and Continental Europe was seeing some of the worst of the living dead walking, killing anyone who was still alive.

“You’ve got to be kidding me…” Taavi trailed. “An undead artillery team?”

“Three, in fact,” Ilona said. “They aren't very good shots, but they are getting closer. They need to be dealt with if the town is going to survive the night”.

Stepping into the power armor, the HOGIRE interfaced with the neural cybernetics needed to connect to it. The full-face helmet descended over Taavi’s face, concealing it, and the rest of the armor shielding his body from the elements. Internal climate control kicked in as the armor’s fission battery kicked in, the thrusters on the back igniting with a test fire.

“How bad is it in the rest of the country?” Taavi asked.

“Bad, though the Finnish Defense Forces are holding out well - their attackers are not as numerous or well-armed as ours,” Ilona responded. “Take out the artillery emplacements as soon as possible. If you can manage to destroy those before our perimeter defenses fall, we should have the firepower to hold out against the rest”.

Chambering the round from his Sako TRG-42, Taavi nodded. He carried five extra magazines and a few explosives.

Artillery…this was starting to feel like the Continuation War all over again.

“Roger that - this is White Glint, deploying…”


If there was any town that could be accurately be called a ghost town, Metsäjärvi was the place. Since its fall during the Winter War, the town never saw reconstruction. Very few souls passed through, except for the brave few volunteers that dared to reclaim the bodies of the fallen.

The sign that welcomed visitors with the name of the village creaked in the chilly wind. The birds had fallen into complete silence - in complete dread of what was happening. Once a lumber and fishing village, Metsäjärvi was a derelict that hosted buildings in various states of disrepair, collapse, or incineration. Other buildings had been reclaimed by nature entirely.

The lumber mill, once one of the most productive buildings in the village - its main economic backbone - had been silent for nearly a century. Rust had long set in where there had been iron on the tools, blades, and fastenings. A classic square town, roads faded from disuse and buried under snow.

Around the old village was dead silent, save for the noiseless rising of ghosts that should have remained dead. In pursuit of their goal, and in the absence of human life, the cries of dying fauna filled the sky.

This was what Eevi Väinölä was greeted with…

Floating many kilometers to the north, a cold, lifeless figure that - by all rights - should have died of the Bubonic Plague in the 14th Century of the Scandinavian region, looked out over the vast expanse. The chilling wind did nothing to phase the emaciated, shriveled, dry body of the lifeless woman. Her eyes glowed a cold blue as her leather cloak creaked in the wind.

They were in the forests of this nation - her children. The dead that she raised and gave purpose again.

There was shelter within her insanity. When the horn blew, Skadi the Lich Queen heard it. The call was to kill all mortals and go westward to the United States. Addled in her grief as she was, and with ambitions of her own, she disregarded obeying it…

But her children - her precious undead that she would spread her curse to the living with - heeded it instead. Rebelling against her, they began to kill, with no regards to the plans she had for the living.

Painful as it was to do so, she needed to put her children down, a bit at a time. It wasn’t a complete loss, though. The living that her rebellious children had cut down would repopulate her legions’ ranks - a small comfort in her accursed existence as undead.

An existence she would make all share with her…

With a determination to rebuild from the ashes, Skadi the Cruel hovered over the snowy hills and the frozen waters of the lake.