The streets of Black Hollow were quiet now—too quiet. The screaming had stopped, the cries of the innocent swallowed by the tide of undeath. But silence did not mean peace.
Selene Nocturna stood at the heart of the devastation, her blackened lips curled into a wicked smile. A storm of laughter bubbled up in her throat, growing louder, more manic, as she surveyed her work.
Bodies trembled on the ground, not dead, not alive—trapped in a state of tormented half-existence. Her new plague was a masterpiece, not simply rotting flesh but corrupting the mind.
A woman, her body half-eaten by sickness, lay at Selene's feet.
"P-please," the woman wheezed, her once-bright eyes now clouded with the plague.
Selene knelt, brushing a decayed strand of hair from the woman's face. "Oh, darling," she whispered, her voice dripping with mock sympathy. "You're already dead. You just don't know it yet."
The woman's breath hitched, her body seizing as the infection deepened its roots. And then—
It started as a small, broken chuckle, but soon, it became a cackle, an uncontrollable hysteria that cracked her lips and shook her decayed lungs.
One by one, the infected around her began to laugh as well—a chorus of madness, their bodies jerking as if caught in an invisible dance of death.
Selene stood, tilting her head. A plague that makes them laugh until they rot? How delightful.
She turned to her revenant knight, his once-golden armor now a sickly shade of green, corroded by her toxins.
"Gather them," she commanded. "Let them spread the joy."
The knight obeyed, leading the Laughing Dead into the city's remaining strongholds.
Selene threw her head back and laughed with them, her voice ringing through the streets like a twisted hymn of ruin.
Tonight, Black Hollow belonged to the Pale Widow.