Book of The Dead

The acknowledgement of the Unseen was more than just a number on a page. It was more than just recognition from one’s own progress, the advancement of knowledge and execution of a Skill.

It was both of those things, but it was also a measure of support the Unseen, whatever it may be, offered to a person. The higher his Skills levelled, the more power the all encompassing entity that swallowed this world would push alongside him.

Secure in this knowledge, Tyron couldn’t wait to get to work.

Twenty fresh corpses awaited his attention. These weren’t for experimentation, these would not be ground up and dumped into the sewer. For the first time since he’d left the mountain above Cragwhistle, he would raise the dead.

However, there was a lot of work to do before he reached that step.

Eagerly, he pulled his butcher’s tools down from their spot on the wall, giving each blade a quick check to ensure it was sharp and free of nicks. Hakoth had always obsessed over the condition of his knives, and Tyron had found it a good lesson to learn. He didn’t particularly enjoy butchering human remains, to put it mildly, and the less time he spent doing it, the happier he was. Well-maintained tools ensured the work progressed smoothly.

With his unnatural level of hand coordination and strength, he finished all twenty in a little over two hours, dumping the flesh into the main sewer stream connected to the river. Next, he cleansed the bones in his alchemical solution, wiping away every trace of blood and other organic material, leaving them glistening and clean. He’d constructed a wide bath for this purpose in an attempt to expedite the process.

A steel plated, layered shelf had been attached to the wall, the top row about level with his head. He could fit five skeletons at a time, using a mechanism to lower the entire rig down into the prepared solution. After ten minutes, he could raise them up and shift the rig along pre-prepared grooves in the wall to the next station, into which he lowered the shelves again. In that ten minutes, he’d finished loading another set of five into another steel shelving rig, which were placed into the cleansing solution.

It had taken him longer than expected to come up with a working model of the null-magick field. Master Willhem had probably overestimated him, or understated the difficulty, but after three weeks, he’d learned enough to return the books. Effectively, the enchantments did what he had attempted to do with Dove, but in reverse. Rather than feeding in ambient magick and converting it, he leeched out energy that contained affinities, and returned it to neutral.

Naturally, that arcane power then had to go somewhere, it would diffuse into the air naturally, but Tyron siphoned it into a power array. May as well put it to use.

“This is a little more sophisticated than I remember the process,” Dove observed from the table. “From what I recall, all you needed was knives, a flat surface and a cave.”

“I’ve been tainted by civilisation. What can I say?” Tyron replied as he carefully laid out the next set of five skeletons on their trays.

Getting all this metalwork, and the sliding racks, and the large metal baths installed had been quite a process. He couldn’t do it all himself, obviously, what did he know about carpentry, or metalwork. He hadn’t wanted to rely on Yor for the task either. He’d been getting too comfortable doing that. In the end, it had been Elsbeth and her contacts amongst the followers of the Old Gods who’d delivered a metalworker who could do what he asked, and someone to help him install it all.

He’d been reluctant to allow someone else into his study, but someone sworn to silence by a god was about as reliable a person as he was likely to find.

When the first set of five were done in the leeching array, he lifted them up, shifted them along the track to the right, and brought in the next five, moving each set along. Then he took them and slid the skeletons off the rack, one at a time, laying them on a stone slab, still atop the stiff metal sheet they’d been placed on.

“Good thing bones don’t weigh that much,” he muttered, pulling the next from the rack.

The metal was heavy, but for a bronze class slayer like him, it was more than manageable.

Using this system, he had all the skeletons cleaned, cleansed and sitting on their slabs, with density tests and death magick sensitivity testing complete within an hour.

“What’s next?” Dove asked.

“Still have to test for gaps and leaking power in the bones,” he said, as he walked around placing small tokens at the feet of each skeleton.

“And what the fuck are those?”

“Oh. These are just little reminders of what each skeleton is going to be used for. Those three will be archers, too brittle for anything else. Those six are pretty dense, they’ll be sword and board, the rest will be spears.”

“Can you make bone spears?” Dove asked.

“Not yet.”

“What about swords and shields?”

“Also not yet.”

“You’ve got a lot to work on. What the fuck have you been doing all this time?”

Tyron muttered something under his breath but focused on his work. The old method of surrounding the bones in a cloud of his own magick to find weaknesses and leaks in the material was long gone. He’d created a new lens for that purpose and he employed it now. Whenever he found a gap, he used his bone moulding Skill to manipulate the bone until the problem had been resolved.

“Hang on… what’s that token. It’s different from the others. Is that one not going to be a spear-skelly?”

“Don’t call them spear-skelly’s,” Tyron frowned. “And no, that one’s a little special. Actually, thanks for reminding me.”

He stepped over and shifted that particular skeleton to the most central slab, ensuring it was surrounded by the others.

“This is the skeleton most conductive to death magick of these twenty. It’s going to be… a locus skeleton, I guess you could say.”

“A locust? It’s going to grow wings?!”

“No you idiot, a locus. It’ll be easier to explain after I’ve started working on it.”

“Alright. But if I see a skeleton bug, I’m leaving.”

“I can’t work with anything non-human right now,” Tyron told him. “Eventually, I’ll be able to raise other creatures, but not yet.”

Tyron moved from skeleton to skeleton, completing the process, then he infused each with a tiny amount of Death Magick, kick-starting the saturation process.

The initial stages of Corpse Appraisal and Preparation were complete. Tyron leaned back, stretched his spine before he laced his fingers and flexed them.

“Time to put those magick hands to use,” Dove told him.

“Yep. I feel like I’m a little out of practice doing this.”

“By the way, magick hands was my old nickname.”

“Shut up, Dove.”

Weaving the artificial musculature and ligaments was one of the first things Tyron had ever learned to do as a necromancer, and in his opinion, it remained one of the most fundamental and key Skills in his arsenal. This was where a true master of Skeleton minions differentiated themselves from the less dedicated. He was determined to make every aspect of his minion creation as flawless as it could be.

Stepping to the first skeleton, he began to work from the toes up.

All his fears about being out of practice fell away as he continued to work. With the Feats and Skills he had, along with the bonuses he received from his enchanter sub-class, his hands were incredibly dextrous, his fingers danced as he laced together the weave with an effortlessness a younger Tyron would have gaped at.

Despite the ease with which he worked, it still took hours to complete all twenty skeletons.

“Done for today,” he said to the skull resting on his table. “I assume you want to sleep here?”

“Oh, I thought I’d get up and do a fucking dance. I don’t want to sleep here, but I will. What other choice do I have?”

Tyron could only sigh.

“We’re going to work on your body once these twenty are done. I promise.”

“Your promises aren’t worth that much to me at this point.”

“But they’re all you’re going to get, unfortunately.”

The resentment Dove held towards… everything… was perfectly understandable, and there was nothing Tyron could say to make it better. Rather than offer platitudes and words, he decided he would simply speak as straight as he could to the former-summoner.

“I’ll see you in the morning, Dove.”

“Fine.”

It was difficult for Tyron to sleep, he was so excited by the prospect of raising minions after so long, until eventually he forced himself to rest, using the Sleep spell to quiet his mind.

In the predawn darkness, he awoke and descended to his study immediately. Before anything else, he grabbed his Death Lens and carefully examined each skeleton, noting the progress of the death aligned energy in each.

“Good morning to you too,” Dove noted, grumpy.

“I didn’t want to wake you unnecessarily,” Tyron said as he continued to work.

“Well, I’m actually interested in watching this. You should have made a lot of progress over the last few years.”

“These will be the finest minions I’ve ever created,” Tyron assured him.

Satisfied with the progress of each skeleton, Tyron turned to his bench, reaching beneath it to remove a thin, long wooden case. Grasping it carefully in both hands, he placed it next to Dove, whose eyes glowed with curiosity.

“Got something good in there?”

Tyron grinned, happy to share the fruits of his labour.

“This is why I became an enchanter in the first place. Take a look!”

He flung the case open and pulled it in front of the skull so Dove could see the contents.

“I see… shitty cores. Shitty cores arranged very neatly.”

“Bah,” Tyron scoffed. “What you are looking at is a precisely calculated, intricately worked array. In fact, it’s an array of arrays. Each of these will go into one of the twenty skeletons. This is my masterpiece.”

“So… what does it do?”

“Essentially, they gather and store power, as well as share it between the twenty linked arrays. Thanks to what we learned working on your skull, I’ve even been able to improve them beyond my original vision, changing the gathered power into Death aligned energy before feeding into the network.”

“Your skeletons are going to be able to passively gather their own magick? Do you want them to cast spells?”

“No. I just want to have to pay less magick to upkeep them and fuel their movement. With this attached, these skeletons will cost nothing to maintain, and will likely not need to draw on my energy even when they’re walking around. Only when fighting will I have to pay anything at all!”

“Which means.”

“Which means… I’ll be able to maintain an army of skeletons ten times the size of what I could before. In fact, with the added death magick flowing through them, the skeletons may even be stronger just from that.”

Grinning happily, he pulled the first of the core arrays out and began to set it into the first skeleton. He fused the enchantment to each skeleton in the same place, inside the ribcage on the spine. It was the most protected spot, difficult for an opponent to shatter or target with spells and arrows.

Eventually, he might find a way to shape armour for each of his skeleton minions, and this area would be the most important to reinforce. Damaging the array wouldn’t harm the skeletons, but it was a lot of work for him to remove and replace them.

When all twenty were set to his satisfaction, he returned to the bench and removed another, smaller case. Inside was another array, more elaborate than before.

“And this one is?”

“This one is for my locus. Think of it as a power storage and regulator. It’ll manage the amount of energy being distributed through the array, evening it out and supplying extra where it’s needed.”

“So one of the skeletons is going to be… like an Arcane battery for the others?”

“Exactly. Skeletons share energy between each other naturally, we know that, but this is going to supercharge that process.”

With the utmost care, he placed the larger array around the first on the central skeleton before he connected the two. When it was done, he leapt back to the bench, snatching up his Lens and examining each of the skeletons in turn. He grinned.

“It’s already working,” he gloated. “The energy is flowing.”

He was so pleased, he clapped his hands together in glee. How many skeletons could he maintain like this? A thousand? And when he advanced his Class? How many then?