Book of The Dead

Worthy’s heroics had helped bring down the massive kin, but there was still a lot to do in order to secure the site.

Shaking his head at his uncle’s antics, Tyron mentally directed his horde forward. Although the majority of the kin had been dealt with, there would always be more, a constant flow, forever. If the rift could be closed, then perhaps there would be a future for this world, but that would also mean that magick would disappear, along with the Unseen.

He couldn’t even imagine what that world would look like. He couldn’t imagine wanting to live in it.

The cauldrons were shut off, and the dark clouds that billowed around the undead dissipated as Tyron lowered himself down from his platform. Before stepping off, he grasped his staff and removed it from the ritual circle, bringing the spell to an end. Instantly, he could feel his reserves begin to restore, which had been growing somewhat low. It was interesting to measure just how much he’d spent over the course of the fighting. Between all the power it took to fuel the ritual and all that his minions drew while engaged in such a battle, he’d needed to use an unfathomable amount of arcane energy.

At least, it had been unfathomable. Now his reserves were so vast that he’d been able to cast magick near constantly during a large-scale conflict. Everything he’d done to make his minions more efficient, to supply their own energy, all of it was compounding on itself to stretch his magick further and further. If he eventually made it to level eighty and ascended to platinum rank, he couldn’t imagine just how large the horde he could support would become.

He was still thinking on the battle and the performance of his army when his uncle wandered over, still limping a little from his fall.

“Tyron! Don’t you have work to do, lad?” he barked.

Snapped out of his thoughts, the Necromancer turned his gaze on his blood-spattered relative.

“Aren’t you getting too old for things like that, Uncle?” he said. “In case you forgot, you’ve retired from being a Slayer once already.”

Tyron eyed him sceptically, causing Worthy’s expression to turn incredulous.

“I just killed that bloody big bastard, didn’t I? What were you doing? Throwing pins and needles at it? Don’t go looking down on me, lad. You’ve got a long way to go.”

“That’s true,” Tyron murmured, nodding to himself.

He lacked the kind of knock-out punch needed to put a serious dent in an enemy as strong as that beast had been. His horde probably would have been able to bring it down if given enough time, exhaust it, death by a thousand cuts, chipping away over an hour. How many skeletons would he lose in a fight like that? Too many.

Bone Mage had given him a range of offensive spells to use, but the Sub-Class was capped at Level forty, like all Sub-Classes. He could use the spells to do a lot of work. With his natural gift for magick, he was able to get a lot more out of the relatively basic spells than almost anyone else could, but for the real threats, that wouldn’t be enough.

Yet, he didn’t believe there wasn’t an answer. Necromancy had proven to be so much more powerful than even he’d been willing to believe. He had to trust in his main Class. It contained the answer he needed, something to help him fight at this level. He just had to find it.

“Alright,” he said, shaking off the still-developing thoughts in his head. There was no time to dwell on this now. “Time to go to work. Are the Slayers going to mind the rifts for me?”

“Aye. That’s why I came over. As long as you and your skulls can handle this quarter, we’ll take care of the rest.”

“I can do that easily enough.”

A few mental commands was enough to do it. His wights were capable of leading the skeletons to deal with the steady inflow of rift-kin. As long as no more major threats came through, he would have enough time to complete his work.

“Just… do you have any idea how long this is going to take, lad?” Worthy asked, scratching idly at his beard.

“Absolutely none,” Tyron answered honestly, already walking towards the centre of the rift.

“I was afraid of that,” Worthy muttered. “Ah well.”

Five demi-liches emerged from the throng of skeletons, trailing in Tyron’s wake as he took the time to study the rift more closely. Up close, it was even more impressive than it had been before. The size of it was overwhelming, easily the biggest he’d ever seen. When he tried to feel out the Dimensional Weave, he couldn’t believe how tattered and thin it felt. It was as if he was no longer standing in his home realm at all.

In a way, he wasn’t. This place was almost as close to whatever world the kin were coming from as it was to his own, the boundaries between the two blurred to nothing.

“How? Why?” he whispered to himself, mind churning.

He walked around the enormous rift, clockwise, thinking while his undead floated behind him, silent and watching.

Why did the magick do what it did? That question had never been answered. At least, if anyone had found the answer, they had been prevented from sharing it. Tyron didn’t doubt the Five Divines, at the very least, knew the answer. But he was never going to hear it from them.

Magick seeped into a world, saturated it, gave birth to unnatural creatures, monsters, who overtook that world, consuming and destroying everything they found. When the cycle was complete, the world was lost, filled with arcane energy, warped and mutilated from what it had once been. Overrun with kin, desperate to find something to destroy, a rift would begin to form. Was it the kin who created the rifts, or the magick itself? Regardless, they started to take shape, until eventually the kin, along with the magick, were able to break into a new realm, a new world to devour, and the cycle began again.

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As he pondered the issue, Tyron thought back to his meeting with The Three, and what they had told him. After performing the ritual to confer with them, he’d been brought to their… home… their little pocket of existence, and stood before them.

At that time, they’d conveyed to him several truths, wanting him to use them to serve their ends.

He could still hear it, the voices of the Old Gods, reverberating in his head. Not voices, not exactly. They didn’t speak, they merely willed, and it was so. They were intrinsically linked to the realm itself, had domain over it. If they wanted something to be, it simply was.

Within limits. Magick, the Unseen, even the Five, all of these things had eroded their authority to an extent. Even so, they remained exceptionally powerful. In their presence, Tyron had been barely able to stand.

MAGICK IS NOT OF THIS WORLD, CHILD, the Crone had told him, her thousand faces mocking him for his lack of knowledge. IT IS NOT OF ANY WORLD. UNNATURAL. A CORRUPTION. ABOMINATION.

A part of him had innately rejected those words. To Tyron, magick was… beautiful. He could shape and mould it into almost anything. It was power. It was possibility. It was the only thing that still brought him any sense of joy in this world. An abomination? Never.

YOU DON’T AGREE? Crone had hissed. SHALL I PLUCK YOUR MAGICK FROM YOU, LET YOU BE TRULY HUMAN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE?

Raven flared his wings, uttering a cry like thunder, and Crone had mastered herself as Rot watched from the ground, silent.

MAGICK IS A LIVING THING, the goddess had continued, the force of her will battering against Tyron without her even trying. LIKE ALL THINGS THAT LIVE, IT CAN DIE. I WILL TELL YOU HOW.

“Why?” he’d croaked out.

Why tell him? What did they want him to do? He was interested in one thing and one thing only: vengeance for the deaths of Magnin and Beory. The world? The magick? He wasn’t interested. This was before Worthy had convinced him it would be better to be thought a hero than a villain, would smooth his path and make his purpose easier.

OUR HELP HAS COST, Raven had said. WE HAVE DECIDED OUR REALM WILL NOT DIE THIS WAY.

ENTROPY COMES FOR ALL THINGS. REALMS. GODS. BUT THIS IS NOT ENTROPY. INVADER. OUTSIDER. THE REALM WILL DESTROY ITSELF, IN TIME. THAT IS WHEN WE DIE.

The voice of Rot was like the chittering of endless rats, the slithering of worms through fetid soil, the twisting of tree roots. It filled Tyron with revulsion, but even he couldn’t help the spark of anger the words of the God had stirred in him.

Five thousand years. It had been five thousand years since the first rifts had opened, according to the Empire calendar. Possibly, it had been even longer than that. For all that time, the Old Gods had sat on their hands and done nothing. Five thousand years of blood, death and slow decay. Yet now they decided to act? Now they decided that having the realm be destroyed by rift-kin and magick wasn’t how they wanted to die?

It had been difficult to master himself at that moment. To suppress the anger he felt at the generations of Slayers who had fought and died to preserve a world for their people. He wanted to ask them, wanted to rage at them, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. What was time for them? What was mortal life? Even if he asked, they wouldn’t understand the question, or why it mattered.

After that, the Crone had imprinted the knowledge on him. The process had been… not as gentle, as what the Unseen did when teaching new abilities. His brain had been afire, as if she were branding the sigils into it with a hot iron. It had taken months for him to tease out the knowledge again, put together the secrets they had imparted.

Now, staring up at the rift, he was starting to grasp a little of how they felt about the magick.

Everything about the rift, its size and power, paled in comparison to the volume of energy pouring out of it. This close, he felt buffeted, as if a great wind were blowing past him. More than that, a storm, a hurricane. The rift spewed out arcane energy in a ceaseless tide, exactly the same as it did with kin. This energy wasn’t native to this place, it was invasive, an agent of destruction.

And… and even then, it was beautiful. Spreading his hands wide, Tyron let the power flow through his fingers, tried to feel it with his skin. Never before had he felt like magick was a physical thing he could touch or taste, but here it was so rich. Even on the other side of the rift, in a fully corrupted world, it hadn’t felt like this.

Because of the density, he reasoned. An entire world’s worth of energy was trying to squeeze itself through a narrow opening. Like the pressure of water through a pipe, it accelerated as the pipe grew more narrow. The magick was the same, blasting out of the rift as the magick squeezed through on the other side.

“Tyron?” a soft voice breathed, and he turned to see Master Willhem waiting for him.

“Master Willhem,” Tyron said respectfully. “Are you ready to begin?”

“I am. The rods are ready to be planted. Are you sure you’ll be able to work here? The ground is… disturbed.”

To say the least. Drawing a runic circle around a rift with kin constantly running out of it was… idiotic. He was going to do it anyway.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, already turning his eyes back to the flood of power.

He never wanted to look away.

With sheer force of will, he started to work. With several skeletons to aid him, he prepared the ritual ground while the demi-liches spread out to five equidistant points around the rift. There, they each planted a pre-prepared runic totem and began to chant words of power.

Tyron moved around the rift, protected at all times by the Slayers who moved to kill everything that came through from the other side. This close, surrounded by such dense, fast-moving magick, every sigil he drew crackled to life the moment he finished shaping it. The power was there, ready to give life to whatever form he chose to give it.

Spellbound, he moved around the rift again and again, layer after layer of sigils taking shape, binding together and connecting the five poles to each other. Tyron lost himself in the work, lost himself to the sensation of directing and channeling the torrent of energy. He was only siphoning off a tiny portion of what came through the rift, yet to him, it felt like a dam had burst and he was drowning in it.

It was intoxicating.

Several times, he was forced to redraw sections that were destroyed by rampaging kin or apologetic Slayers, but he didn’t care. If anything, he was pleased. Every time he did it, his hand grew surer, his mind sharper, his eyes wider.

Never before had he felt so close to the magick. Perhaps… with just another pass, he would finally understand it.

Again, he walked around, using his staff to form each sigil in the dirt. He moved with precision, every loop and whorl flawless as he drew. Tyron couldn’t say how long he worked, hours probably, five… ten? Time was fuzzy this close to the rift, and his perception was entirely taken by the magick; he had nothing to spare for anything else.

This ritual cut to the heart of the arcane energy, to the fundamental elements of its nature. He was guiding it in, controlling it, harnessing its mutability and energy to turn in on itself, break itself down and vanish, with nothing left behind.

Mind ablaze, he worked furiously, making adjustments as he went, thoughts consumed by the possibilities, the ideas that seemed to never stop coming.

When it was finally done, he was drenched in sweat, trembling, staff in hand, staring at layer after layer of sigils drawn in a grand circle around the largest rift.

“If you’re done, better activate it,” Worthy spoke from nearby, causing Tyron to jump. “Before something else jumps out and you need to start again.”

Weary, Tyron nodded, stepped forward and planted his staff. Only a few words were necessary to initiate the process, and he spoke them.

Immediately, the sigils blazed with light, the five totems igniting with a storm of power that shot high overhead.

And Tyron’s eyes rolled back in his head as he collapsed, overtaken by visions.