Book of The Dead

Rage gripped him.

Tyron’s fingers curled into fists as the breath whistled between his clenched teeth. Clear as the day it happened, he could see Magnin and Beory on the ground before him, eyes closed, faces at peace, the knife still stuck in his father’s chest.

Muscles knotted in his forearms and shoulders as he struggled to release the tension. The more he fought against it, the more it gripped him. He felt possessed, trapped inside his own body as grief and anger took control. Conscious thought was relegated to a dim and forgotten corner of his mind.

Somewhere in this city, the Magisters who had tortured his parents lived, secure in their authority, safe within their tower. Behind them, the nobles, touched by the gods themselves, with the divine right to rule, locked behind a literal wall he could not cross.

He hated them.

He hated all of them.

They had to die. The black rage that possessed him would allow nothing less.

But it couldn’t be now. He wasn’t ready. He needed time.

Gradually, millimetre by millimetre, he unclenched his jaw.

One by one, he eased the tension in his fingers.

The Necromancer sucked in a deep breath, held it, held it, then released it slowly, before he repeated the process. For ten minutes, he calmed himself, unwinding the knots in his body and heart until he was calm and in control again.

In time, he promised himself, walk the narrow path, take your time, and you will succeed in the end.

Only when he was certain he was in control of himself did Tyron swing his feet off the bed and begin to prepare himself for the day. The sun had not yet begun to rise, so the world remained dark as he changed, moving through his austere and organised chamber.

These episodes are coming more frequently. I may need to do something before it becomes a problem.

For those long years as an apprentice, living in a dorm alongside his fellow struggling students, Tyron had wedged his feelings so deep inside that there had been no hope of them emerging. To all intents and purposes, he had become Lukas Almsfield, never allowing himself even a second of respite from the relentless act.

It may well have driven him mad if he hadn’t spent his every waking moment on the study and practice of enchanting.

Now though? Now that he had his own space, now that he had begun to work as a Necromancer again, his anger had begun to break free from the prison he had used to contain it. The grief he had felt that day burned in him still, raw and abraded, like an open wound.

Sometimes, he awoke at night, a roar of pure hatred struggling to burst out of his throat.

As he walked in the city, he felt an irrational urge to strike at those around him, to take out his pain on them, the innocent citizens of Kenmor.

It was a problem that needed a solution. He needed an outlet, lest these fits jeopardise his task.

Perhaps when I return to hunting rift-kin, that will suffice.

It would be some time before he was able to enact that particular plan, however.

After he washed his face in the basin and slicked back his hair, Tyron carefully applied the glamour, crafting it with a skill and dexterity he could only have dreamed of when roaming the plains in the back of that stupid cart.

Even though it was night and nobody would enter the store for hours, there was never any need to take a risk. As long as he was outside of his chamber, he would appear as Lukas Almsfield.

Preparations complete, he trod quietly down the stairs and made his way through the secret entrance to the basement.

Time to check on his experiments.

The twenty bodies he had received in his first shipment had been stripped of their flesh long ago. After considering what to do with the remains, he’d ended up dumping them in the sewer, far from the store.

Hopefully, the rats and other nasties that flourished down there had finished the grisly work for him.

Afterwards, he’d finally been able to begin to develop and test new methods.

The first thing he’d done had been to try and create an enchanted lens he could use to scry magick, and specifically, death magick. The lens sat on his bench now, a… moderate success. It had enabled him to see death magick when looking through it, sure enough, but hadn’t been able to detect the minute amounts contained within the bones.

A fully working model would let him examine the formation and movement of energy within the remains at the finest level of detail. Many nights of complex work lay ahead of him before he could achieve that, so he’d begun sketching out his next version before moving on to other projects.

The first thing he needed to do was develop his Corpse Appraisal Skill, which meant developing and adapting new methods to learn about the bones he was working with.

So he’d focused on listing the information that was important for him to have, and then worked backwards, trying to determine the best way to achieve it.

Stuck to the wall over his desk, a sheet of paper outlined his current paths of inquiry.

Magick formation and movement: Develop Lens

Density: Construct methodology.

Unseen Influence: ?

Link Potential: Compatibility test? Related to magick formation?

Tyron stepped from one set of bones to the next. Each was still a complete skeleton, laid out in place on its own slab around the outside of the basement.

At four different locations on each skeleton sat a small tool, powered by only a single, low-grade core, one each on the left tibia, the fifth rib, the skull and the scapula.

The bones in question had been chosen almost at random, but the device was a simple thing, basically two prongs with a gap of ten centimetres between them. On the tip of one prong was a short script that sent a pulse of magick at regular intervals, which was received by a detection script on the other.

It was his own version of a similar technique used by engineers and builders to determine the grade and quality of stone. The longer the delay between the pulse being sent and received, the more dense the material between them.

Diligently, he removed and checked each device before recording the results and storing them away.

As he’d suspected, the density of the skeletons varied quite a bit. Some were significantly stronger than others. Whether more dense bones made better minions was something he wasn’t sure of, but he suspected it would be the case.

Perhaps the density is related to the amount of magick that can be stored in the bones?

An unexpected thought. If so, then his density test could be used to determine the ideal concentration of death energy in the skeleton. Of course, it would take a huge amount of tests and quite a bit of maths to work it out, but he was up for the challenge.

Naturally, the causes behind the differences between each skeleton were a mystery to him. Was it due to diet? The class of the person who had ‘donated’ the remains, and therefore, the influence of the Unseen? Or some other reason entirely?

Right now, he wasn’t sure what might be important in the Corpse Appraisal process, so it was better for him to cast a wide net and grasp as much information as possible, then later refine his methods to what was relevant.

Which brought him to his next point.

The Unseen was able to change people’s bodies, making them tougher, stronger, faster, through the levels they gained throughout their lives. Someone like Magnin had barely been human, capable of feats of strength ten regular people couldn’t duplicate.

So was there a way for Tyron to determine how much of the Unseen’s… energy? Will? Potential? Had been invested in a particular set of remains? More importantly, was it possible for him to replicate the effect?

If he could toughen up the bones himself using the same method the Unseen used to modify living human skeletons, then he could turn any skeleton into a peak product, as if it had been taken from a gold ranked Slayer.

No point getting ahead of yourself, if you can’t even detect it, then there’s no chance you can replicate it.

And that was the issue, he had no idea how he might go about measuring the Unseen. As far as he was aware, nobody had any idea what it was, how it worked, or even why it did what it did.

The only clue he had to go on was that the Unseen had arrived in this realm along with the magick that originated from the first rifts.

If it used magick, then he could work with it, of that, he was supremely confident.

Now he moved back along the rows of skeletons, his eyes focused on his next experiment. Around each set of remains sat a rectangular metal band, covered in engraved script. A small array of cores sat at the feet of each set, powering the strip of silver.

One of the things he’d come to learn, quite by accident, was that silver reacted to death magick, but only under certain conditions. As he moved from one skeleton to the next, he focused on the band. Here and there, he could see a faint blackening of the metal, as if it had begun to rot.

It was difficult to quantify precisely, but he could roughly work out which skeletons had damaged the metal more than others. This was his attempt to determine if some skeletons were able to transmit more death energy than others.

As it was, it was clear that two of his skeletons had projected more death magick, as their own strips of metal were quite tarnished, as were those of the skeletons beside them, but only on the side closest to his two suspects.

Interesting.

He hadn’t thought this particular experiment would bear fruit so quickly…. This could be an enormous discovery.

It wasn’t clear what made these two skeletons the most… prodigious movers of death energy. They weren’t the most dense skeletons, nor did he believe they’d been the highest level. There must be some other quality of the remains that led to this result, he simply had no idea what it was.

Excited, he rushed back to his desk and began furiously taking notes, rushing to put all of his thoughts on paper.

Eventually, he put down his pen, clasped his hands and thought. Ultimately, it all came back to death magick, and how little he understood it.

That particular flavour of the energy which suffused the realm was the cornerstone of the Necromantic arts, and it would be the deciding factor in his success or failure. Whether or not he could maximise his abilities as a Necromancer boiled down to how well he understood, and could manipulate, that energy.

He leaned back in his chair.

He sighed.

“I really need to work on that lens,” he muttered to himself, dragging the prototype closer.

Developing a spell to enhance his eyes to see death magick had been his first idea, but Dove’s warnings still rang in his head. Magick that influenced the eyes was dangerous. So his next idea had been to use a lens, much like the glass Arcanists used when enchanting.

Somehow, he’d actually succeeded, but not well enough for it to matter.

With a frustrated expression on his face, he began to take his model apart.

Mastering his art would be a long road, but if he was successful, his power would grow by leaps and bounds once he crossed the level forty threshold.