Book of The Dead

Some people said that a good Mage was similar to a good musician. A good musician understood the structure of music, was able to manipulate harmonies to create sounds that tugged on heartstrings and dropped women’s drawers. Those people claimed that a Mage, similarly, knew the sigils and words of power like the back of their hand, could weave them together as if playing an instrument to create a song of magick.

In Dove’s opinion, those people were fucking stupid.

Musicians and bards were illiterate arseholes half the time, and stuck-up arseholes the other half. One hundred percent of the time they were more interested in getting their pants down than they were in being useful. Even more irritating, without exception they thought they were the gift of the Divines to the world. Thankfully, being dead meant he wouldn’t have to listen to another bard wax lyrical about the power of his or her craft and its ability to make them feel.

On more than one occasion, Dove had offered to use his own craft to make a bard feel something, but they’d declined each time. A pity.

No, completing spellwork was nothing like plucking strings and making people cry. It was harnessing the fundamental fabric of the universe and making people dead.

He had no clue where the insistence of linking Mages and musicians came from, or why it persisted so long. Probably the bards spreading it to elevate their strumming above its station.

A week had passed and Dove had spent the majority of that time discussing magick, theory crafting different aspects of Necromancy and helping the kid broaden his repertoire of sigils.

If anything, it had helped solidify just how monstrous of a prodigy Tyron really was.

A gifted musician was said to be able to hear a melody and understand what the next note should be. Or they could hear a song only once and reproduce it perfectly, their memory for pitch and tone so flawless they could absorb swathes of music at a time.

Tyron, was not like that.

Like all truly great Mages, he wasn’t an artist, he was an engineer.

When he examined a spell pattern, he didn’t reach for the next, perfect note, but considered a hundred options, each with its own merits and flaws. He understood that new words of power weren’t phrases or chords, but materials that could be shaped and reformed into a million different things.

He was a builder who, when given a single chisel, could turn a pile of rocks into a cathedral.

With more time and tools at his disposal, the kid would create something nobody had ever seen before, Dove was sure of it.

That notebook Tyron carried with him had been given a workout over the last seven days. Page after page was covered in runic scrawl as the two had debated back and forth, refining the kid’s ideas, or expanding them depending on what specific knowledge Dove could bring to the table.

It was unfortunate they couldn’t test their theories much, locked into the basement, cowering beneath a seemingly endless stampede of rift-kin. If they used too much magick, they would weaken the very seal that kept them hidden. Now, finally, the noise above had begun to diminish and it was time to emerge at last.

Tyron was nervous. The past week had been, all things considered, the best seven days he’d had since his Awakening. Finally being able to work through his theories with an educated Mage had been a delight, and now that he had so many different avenues to test, he honestly struggled to know where to begin.

The refined magick channel they’d cooked up might reduce the amount of energy needed to maintain a minion by as much as five percent! If it worked as they thought it would, the efficiency gain would be tremendous.

But now, after a full week of huddling in a musty basement, it was time to get back into the real world. Some sun would do him good. His skin was going pallid and the damp air was starting to get into his lungs. Once again, he had cause to be grateful for his relatively high constitution. A normal mage would be too fragile to cope with what he’d been forced to endure, yet despite the privation, he was relatively fine.

”How do I break this safely?” he asked his teacher and friend as he gestured towards the runes guarding the cellar door. ”Anything I need to be wary of?”

”Kid… turn me around so I can see, would you?” the skull complained.

”One sec.”

Tyron grabbed Dove up with practiced ease. The two had grown accustomed to the Summoner’s new existence during their time together and moving him around had become part of their routine.

”Right. So taking this down carefully is actually a little tricky. And I do recommend that you do it carefully. If it collapses too fast, the magick will leak out, basically a smoke signal for rift-kin. Basically, you stuff it up and we die.”

Tyron nodded seriously.

”You die,” Dove corrected himself. ”I receive the sweet release of freedom from my cursed existence.”

”I think the monsters would just leave you alone and you’d be trapped in that skull forever,” Tyron frowned.

Dove thought about it for a moment.

”You’re right, don’t fuck it up.”

The undead mage stepped his younger counterpart through the delicate process. Tyron disconnected each ’node’ in the matrix one at a time, slowly draining the magick from the array piece by piece until nothing remained. For the first time in a week, the two stood unguarded, nothing protecting them from the hordes that had rampaged outside.

”Boneheads up front and let’s take a look,” Dove prompted and Tyron nodded slowly.

”Alright, let’s do it.”

The skeletons had barely moved for a week but it hardly mattered to them. Musculature formed of pure magick had its advantages after all, the strings fused directly into the bones never cramped or seized. After a moment of hesitation, Tyron gave the mental command to his skeletons and they pushed open the door and began the march up the stairs, pushing open the cellar door and emerging into the interior of the house.

At least, it had been the interior of the house.

With his four minions in front, Tyron came up the rear carrying Dove in his left hand. Both were silent at what they saw. The house, which had once stood with four sturdy wooden walls, was now teetering. Holes had been clawed and chewed through the wood, letting in the early morning sun. The once orderly domicile of a frontier family was now broken and strewn with litter. Almost no furniture remained whole, splintered wood lay strewn everywhere.

Skeletons in the lead, Tyron picked his way forward, careful where he placed his feet. Glimpses of shattered fences and dead livestock could be seen through holes in the walls. The place looked as if it had been abandoned and ransacked for months rather than a week.

Eager to check if his most valuable resource remained unharmed, he rushed to the bedrooms in which he’d stashed the bodies. He looked down on the ruins of what had so recently been tidy, if sparse, sleeping quarters now torn apart, along with several of the bodies he’d tried to hide.

He looked down on the torn apart and chewed on limbs of the famers and felt weary. They may not have been the best people, goodness knows how many they’d robbed just like they’d done to him, but surely they deserved better than this. Surely even being raised as a minion was better than having rift-kin tear them apart.

The stench was horrendous and Tyron clapped a hand over his nose.

”Holy Mother,” he swore, ”this is why zombies were never an option.”

”Almost makes me glad I can’t smell anymore,” Dove quipped. ”The rift-kin really did a number on this place. I can’t imagine how many came through. Normally they don’t care about the dead but they must have been whipped into a frenzy.”

”Hopefully, they left us something to work with,” Tyron muttered.

”Better check the ranch first. Make sure nothing is lurking about. The bulk of the kin will be riding the crest of the wave, so to speak, but there’ll still be plenty of the pricks for us to deal with.”

”Right,” Tyron nodded.

It was good advice. He gathered his minions together and prepared himself to cast his support magicks if they were necessary. With Dove in hand, he stepped outside the house and for the first time took in the full scale of the devastation. Most of the fences had collapsed, along with the barns and storerooms. Chunks of dead animals, a lifetime of work for the people who’d lived here, were everywhere.

A low, persistent clicking sound could be heard and Tyron tensed, his free hand raised, ready to cast.

”Kid, put me down,” Dove hissed urgently, ”you need your hands.”

”It’s fine,’ Tyron kept his eyes sharp, scanning the area, ”I can cast the basic stuff with one.”

”Of course you can…” Dove muttered.

Most mages didn’t bother to learn one handed casting, even for basic magick. Why bother when two hands would be faster? The really basic stuff could be done with just words, or even the mind alone, but when hands came into it, two was always better.

Tyron turned as he heard something shift to his right and was treated to the sight of a monster crawling out from inside of a cow. Covered in gore, the beast clicked menacingly as it uncoiled itself.

”No,” Tyron growled.

Magick flashed through his hand and rolled from his tongue. Before the creature could charge, he brought his mind crashing down on it, using Suppress Mind to freeze it in its tracks.

It felt distasteful, he could feel the boiling rage of the monster, its blind hate as it thrashed and struggled within his grip. He showed it no mercy.

Frozen in place, there was nothing the creature could do to resist as two skeletons bore down on it, putting it down with sharp stabs that crunched through its hide.

He repeated the process several times as the small group prowled through the area, careful to check every corpse in case it hid another rift-kin. Luckily, none came at them as a group and he didn’t need to reach for a more complex strategy. Preserving the four minions he had left was at the forefront of his mind. Without them, he’d be in such a vulnerable state, it didn’t bear thinking about.

They patrolled the property in this manner, but Tyron hesitated to step beyond the boundary of the outer fence, almost none of which remained standing.

”We can cover the rest later,” Dove agreed, ”as long as you aren’t going to get jumped while you raise more minions, it’s enough. I’d recommend not casting any magick more intensive than that until you’ve swept a larger area, though.”

Tyron nodded in agreement. As much as he’d love to continue experimenting with his more powerful rituals, especially Beyond the Veil and Appeal to the Court, with the refinements and knowledge on sigils related to inter-realm and inter-planar magick that Dove had been able to provide, he was eager to experiment with both to create a safer spell-form. If he was able to actually commune with the Abyss, rather than just have their whispers attempt to shred his mind, who knew what he could learn? And surely, the Court would provide similar opportunities, no doubt accompanied with similar dangers.

They returned to the house and Tyron shifted some torn wood to clear space and sat down, ordering his skeletons forward to perform the labour.

”Keep one close,” Dove advised. ”You’re a bit helpless without them. I learned that the hard way early on as a Summoner. You always keep a trick up your sleeve to keep yourself safe, no matter the situation. With even one skeleton by your side, you have a lot more options than otherwise.”

The Necromancer hesitated before he nodded and pulled one of his minions back. The skull spoke truly. Even his most potent trick right now, using Suppress Mind to incapacitate an individual rift-kin, was useless without a minion to capitalise, as Tyron himself couldn’t act when he used the spell.

”Did you ever worry that you were too dependent on your Summons?” he asked.

”Psh. Fuck no,” Dove retorted. ”First of all, Astral beings are partners to their Summoners, we are a package deal who voluntarily enter a binding contract. I have their back and they have mine, it’s more like having friends you can call on.”

”Friends who contractually get to eat you if you annoy them.”

”Fair’s fair,” the skull observed. ”Secondly, Summons are fucking badass. Unkillable beings of pure spirit from another plane of existence? Hell. Yes. No, I never felt bad about being able to depend on those gorgeous bastards.”

”They aren’t unkillable…”

”Losing their form on this plane and going home to recover cannot be considered ’death’ by any stretch. Aren’t you a Necromancer? Don’t give me this shit, as if you don’t know the difference between life and death.”

Tyron sighed. There wasn’t much hope of arguing against Dove when it came to Summoners. He was a complete supremacist when it came to Classes. Summoner at the top, followed by Necromancer, as it bore similarities, then mages in general, followed by a hundred kilometre gap, then the rest of the ’plebs’ as he put it. Apparently ’tamer’ style classes didn’t enjoy Dove’s favour in the same way, the lack of magickal nuance condemned them to the bin along with the rest.

The two rested quietly and watched as three skeletons dutifully got their bones busy clearing out the interior of the house, dumping the refuse in a large pile a distance away. When things were relatively clean, he shifted his minions to the more distasteful task of corpse sorting. One by one, the bodies of the farmers were dragged out of the house and under the open air. When it was done, he looked down on twelve rotting corpses in various states of completion laid side by side on the grass, each in the process of decomposition. The swarm of flies that clung to them was surprisingly noisy, and Tyron shuddered to think of the maggots worming their way through the dead flesh as he stood there.

The remains of the children had been placed on the other side of the house, and as he went to fetch his butcher’s tools, he ordered the three skeletons to begin digging graves.

”Now this is why I don’t rate Necromancy quite as high as Summoning,” Dove observed when Tyron placed him to the side. ”I don’t mind getting my hands dirty from time to time, but this? No way.”

The young man shrugged before he took a piece of cloth and tied it over his nose and mouth. As cloying as it was, any protection from the stench and flies was more than welcome. Preparations done, he grit his teeth and stepped forward. Time to get to work.

”Hey, kid! Turn me around, I don’t want to see this shit! Hey!”

He was ignored.

Several hours later, Tyron stood hunched over, his hands on his knees as he took deep, slow breaths. He spit on the grass a few times, just to clear the taste in his mouth, a mix of dead flesh and stomach acid. In a way, he was proud of himself, he’d only puked twice during the entire process, a new record, as these things went. The skeletons, fresh from digging, then filling holes, were now back at it; armed with pilfered shovels from the farm they were busy burying the midden pile Tyron had created.

He’d been able to salvage ten complete skeletons from the farmers, better than he’d feared when he first saw what the monsters had done. He likely could raise all of them and support having fourteen minions, if only just, but he’d realised just how important it was for him to have the wiggle room to cast supporting spells. He’d bring himself to an even ten, and store the rest for when he inevitably lost minions on the way.

”That… was disgusting,” Dove observed. ”When that eyeball popped, with the maggots inside? I thought I was going to chuck, and I don’t have a stomach. Holy shit.”

Acid burned the back of Tyron’s throat as his bile surged again. He took several more slow breaths before turning to glare at the skull.

”Really?”

”That’s what you get for making me watch.”

Grumbling, the young mage found the well and washed out his mouth before bringing the bones over and washing them down too, carefully placing them on the ground in the correct positions, ensuring none were lost. With that job done, he launched into the next, his fingers flexing as he called on the threads of magick and began to weave them in complex shapes.

Dove watched the kid work and marvelled at the ease of it. It wasn’t even the deft and nimble movement of the fingers that impressed him, but rather the constant and steady flow of magick. That level of control wasn’t easy, was anything but easy, but Tyron did it effortlessly.

Patiently, brick by brick, the kid constructed something incredible. Beautiful engineering, artistic construction. Nothing like fucking music.