Book of The Dead

Gathering his horde wasn’t as simple a task as it had been in the past for Tyron. He already had minions put in the wasteland, but there were many more still roaming the city. Thankfully, he could push most of the work onto the wights. There was really only one conversation he really needed to have directly now that his students were making their own preparations.

He found Master Willhem in his own workshop, a space the demi-lich had created to continue pursuing his passion: enchanting. The transition to undead had robbed Willhem of much of the assistance he received from the Unseen. His Class had changed, some abilities had been lost, along with a significant loss of stats. On the other hand, he retained all of his knowledge, any mysteries that he had, which was likely to be a few, and he now had an infinite amount of time to perfect his craft.

Despite the setbacks, he was still a better Arcanist than everyone else in the Western Province. Even now, Tyron found it staggering the sheer amount of things that old man knew.

As he approached the workshop on foot, an honour guard of his best undead around him, he heard a living voice inside, chatting away, the murmured voice of the demi-lich replying as if from a great distance.

There was only one person who could get Master Willhem talking like that. Tyron hadn’t expected to run into her here, and, to be honest, he didn’t want to.

“It is what it is,” he muttered to himself.

He knocked on the doorframe, then walked inside without waiting for an answer. Inside, he found Willhem floating slightly over the ground as all the demi-liches did, working with a pliance at a waist-high bench. Sitting at a table in the middle of the space, his fellow graduate, Annita Halfshard.

She did not look pleased to see him.

“How dare you show your fucking face here,” she growled, glaring up at him.

“Am I supposed to be grateful?” she growled. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Tyron shook his head.

“I’m going out to capture the closest rift, and I’m taking Master Willhem with me.”

Master Halfshard stood from the table, slamming her hands down on the surface. She was exceptionally short, but so fiery it was easy to overlook her size.

“Like hell you are. Haven’t you done enough to him?”

“I wasn’t the one who killed him,” Tyron replied. “It was the Nobles who did that.”

“You turned him into a monster.”

“I gave him life.”

“That isn’t life!”

“Enough.”

Master Willhem spoke, a hint of emotion breaking through into his normally flat voice. Slowly, the demi-lich turned to face his two former pupils, eyes burning with the purple light of the dead.

“Don’t speak of me as if I weren’t here.”

Master Halfshard hung her head.

“I’m sorry, Master Willhem.”

“I apologise, Master Willhem,” Tyron said.

“That’s better,” the lich scowled. “I’m trying to work.”

“What are you working on?” Tyron wondered, curious.

“We were trying to find a more efficient design for your magick storage,” Annita sniffed.

“I wouldn’t really call it mine. I did the conduit work, but the rest was all Master Willhem.”

“Yes, but he’s been weakened, he can’t do it as well as he wanted, so I’m helping.”

“Be quiet,” Willhem grumped at them, then waved Tyron to lean closer. “What do you think of this?”

The Necromancer looked down on the work they’d done, carefully scanning the hundreds of runes gathered into multiple arrays, their positioning and placement relative to each other, and the intricate lines of power that bound them together. This was no sketch or rough design, Willhem and Halfshard had been creating on the fly, engraving their still-forming ideas directly onto a core.

“It’s good,” he said finally, “better than what we have in place right now by a fair margin.”

“And the conduits?” Willhem said.

“Need a little work,” Tyron admitted.

“Blast it!” the Master swore, throwing his pliance down in frustration. He held up his skeletal hands and curled them into fists. “They don’t move the way they’re supposed to! How am I supposed to work when my hands don’t listen to my damn head?”

Annita glared at Tyron as Master Willhem let out his frustrations, and Tyron could only sigh, reaching out to grip the demi-lich by the forearm bones.

“It will get better,” he promised. “Your hands are the most sophisticated marriage of bone weaving and spirit flesh I’ve ever created. There’s no lich, revenant or wight who comes close to the fine motor control you have. You’ve lost Skills, but those can come back, in part. Right now, you expect your hands to move a certain way, but they can’t keep up, not yet.”

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The demi-lich dropped his arms and mastered himself, becoming cold and dispassionate once more. This was the attitude Tyron had become accustomed to seeing from his old Master since he had been raised, and he would be lying if he said it didn’t bother him.

“What is it you want from me?” Willhem asked. “I presume you haven’t come for no reason.”

Annita’s eyes glinted at this and her glare intensified further.

“That is the case,” Tyron admitted. “Right now, I’m gathering my horde for an all-out assault on the closest rift. The Slayers are going to support the push as well. We want to seize the rift and take control of it.”

“What does that have to do with me?” Willhem asked.

“Because I need your help implementing never-before-seen sigils into arrays that are designed to weaken the rift over time, draining away its power and destroying the magick coming through.”

“That’s not even possible,” Master Halfshard burst out.

“It is, if the Old Gods haven’t lied to me,” Tyron told her, shifting his gaze. “They revealed certain things to me which, if true, might hold the key to saving this world from corruption.”

Master Willhem had fallen into a contemplative silence, but Annita was more than willing to argue in his place.

“If such sigils existed, why have they never been found until now? We’ve been trying to close the rifts for thousands of years!”

“Have we?” Tyron countered. “I don’t see any evidence of that. The rifts expand, year on year. There are breaks, every dozen or so years. If that doesn’t sound like a managed, staged increase in the levels of magick in the realm, then what is it?”

“Are you saying the Slayers and Arcanists have been conspiring to keep themselves in work?”

“I’m saying the Five Divines require enormous levels of magick for whatever reason, and they will do, and have done, absolutely everything they can to ensure the pipes keep getting wider.”

Tyron matched his fellow apprentice's glare. If she wanted a contest of fire, he had anger to burn until the realm was ashes and dust.

“These runes likely have been found before, probably many times, but then suppressed or destroyed. The Empire as a whole has never worked to close the rifts, or even manage them properly. Are you really going to suggest they couldn’t prevent breaks by stationing gold ranked Slayers around rifts? It’s not just about control, they want the rifts to widen.”

“It’s a pointless conversation anyway,” Halfshard half conceded. “If these runes exist, you want to drag Master Willhem out there, put him in danger? Why can’t he work from here?”

“Because he’s not an Arcanist anymore,” Tyron stated bluntly. “His new undead Class is related to enchanting, it’s true, but he can’t properly level it without fighting. I’ve been as gentle as I can with Master Willhem, out of respect for the great man that he was and is, but I can’t use kid gloves any longer.”

“So you’re going to fucking command him?” she challenged.

“If I must,” Tyron replied firmly, eyes boring into hers. “For the sake of my vengeance, and to save the entire realm, I can do no less.”

“Vengeance comes first, does it?”

“Always.”

The two matched glares until Master Willhem spoke up again.

“I really wish you two would shut up,” he groaned. Drifting over the floor, he moved to the side of the room and collected the bone staff that Tyron had prepared for him, a masterwork that Willhem had enchanted himself. “Being undead isn’t all bad,” he said to Annita as he drifted about, collecting various items from around the workshop, such as his pliance. “My back doesn’t hurt so much anymore, and my fingers used to ache something fierce when it was cold. Also, I can still work, which, aside from the two of you, is the only thing I ever really cared about.”

Annita looked down at the table, but not so quickly that Tyron didn’t see the welling of tears in her eyes.

“And you,” Willhem continued, speaking to the Necromancer this time, “turned me into a slave, brought me back from the dead without my permission. That is not something I can just forgive.”

“I’m sorry,” Tyron apologised, genuinely sorry for the pain he had caused his old Master.

“You aren’t sorry you brought me back, though, are you,” Willhem stated.

“No,” Tyron admitted. “No I’m not. I can only promise that I will end your unlife, or remove any control I have over you, the moment the work is done.”

“It will have to do,” Willhem grumbled, finally grasping a satchel of tools and drifting toward the door.

“Thank you, Master Willhem.”

After the demi-lich had gone, Tyron and Annita Halfshard remained in the workshop, the latter still simmering with anger toward the former.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for what you’ve done to him,” she said flatly.

“I’ll live with that,” Tyron replied. “You can hate me as much as you want. Just don’t get in my way.”

Leaving the workshop behind, he headed outside and checked in with the various wights around the city. Most of the skeletons had been gathered outside of the city already, armed, armoured and ready to fight. Walking back to the temple, he dropped in to find his apprentices were also ready to go, their travelling supplies packed and stowed. There was a great deal of excitement from the three, each keen to head out and test their latest minions in the field.

With all of their undead gathered outside of the city, the Necromancers joined their minions and began the trek out over the wasteland together. It would take time for them to reach the Slayer camp on foot, but they could only move so fast.

“Why are zombies so slow?” Briss demanded of Georg. “They have muscle tissue, they should be able to move faster than a skeleton.”

“We’ve been over this,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Muscle tissue weighs a hell of a lot more than bones do. They’re heavier. It takes them less magick to move around, because they can power themselves somewhat, but they have more meat to move.”

“Can you make them move faster?” she pressed him. “Some spell or ability that gives them a boost?”

“Yes, I can, but that would mean I’m spending magick that I need for fighting. Why don’t you get your skeletons to give my zombies a push if you’re in such a hurry?”

“Can you two stop bickering?” Richard asked. “I think Master Tyron is thinking.”

“You’re not bothering me,” the Necromancer said. “I was checking in with my minions closer to the rift.”

He shook his head, as if to rattle loose the sights he’d seen, then turned his gaze to the undead of his students. Much like himself at that point, they didn’t have that many servants. Georg had the most, thanks to the lower maintenance requirements of zombies. There were several trade-offs he made for that benefit.

“None of you zombies are contagious, are they, Georg?” he asked.

“No, I passed over that option,” the former farmhand replied. “There are other ways to make zombies a viable minion, I believe.”

“I look forward to seeing what you come up with.” Tyron turned to look at the skeletons of Briss and Richard.

“You’ve done good work,” he complimented them. “You’ll lose a lot of these minions, but they’re sure to net you some levels first. You can be proud.”

Working with his guidance, they’d been able to learn his techniques and had implemented them as best they could, to varying success. It was interesting to see the differences between them. Briss was significantly better at weaving than Richard was, but he was a better ritualist and spellcaster, which showed in the quality of his artificial minds.

The three students, however, couldn’t help but compare their own undead hordes with their teacher’s. Rank after rank of smooth-walking skeletons, skeletal mages, archers, revenants, wights and demi-liches marched beside them, a literal army, which would only grow once they caught up with the army already out in the field.

The four continued to talk amongst each other as they made their way out to the Slayer camp, debating Necromancy and their likely paths forward.