Book of The Dead

“I have to admit, the look is growing on me.”

“It’s not really meant for aesthetics. It’s for protection, and to increase your magick supply.”

Dove struck a pose, flaring his skeletal arms wide as his hollow sockets gazed meaningfully into the distance.

“No matter how hard you try to eliminate the drama, when you’re working with bones and black magick, things are just going to look badass, no matter what.”

Unlike Tyron’s armour, which was largely formed of smoothed, condensed bone plating, Dove had insisted on… a few modifications to his own. Spikes here and there, a cape, for some reason, pauldrons far wider than they needed to be.

All these changes did was reduce the utility of the armour, but the former slayer didn’t care. In order to add all of the absurd components, Tyron had been forced to hollow out almost all of the armour, thinning the bone to the point it was hardly more resistant to damage than normal bones. He had to keep the weight down, though. Heavy armour would only drain his limited magick all the faster, since he needed it to move.

In truth, the only part of Dove’s body that actually needed to be protected was his skull. Within there lay the engravings that bound his soul to this realm, and only if they were destroyed would he be freed from his onyx body.

“Are you fluttering that cape yourself?”

“It adds to the effect.”

The cape in question was made from a spare blanket, so it perhaps lacked the dignity a normal, ceremonial cape of office may hold. Tyron sighed. Ultimately, he didn’t care how ridiculous the skeleton appeared, so long as he was happy with the work.

“So you’re satisfied with it? No more complaints? No more modifications?”

“I am extremely pleased. You’ve outdone yourself.”

Another dynamic pose.

“I feel so powerful! Haiyah!”

With a loud exclamation, Dove thrust forward a bony palm and unleashed a sizzling bolt of dark magick that shot through the air and impacted a tree with a sharp crack.

“Do you mind?” Tyron frowned. “There’s no need to pollute the mountain with stray Death Magick.”

Dove turned to him, ire blazing in his undead eyes.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You’ve got hundreds of minions running around, and you’ve been casting rituals, shaping bones and doing all sorts of shady shit! I’ve been pissing drops of Death magick while you’ve been firing off like a fucking hose!”

“But I clean up after myself,” Tyron insisted, “and removing traces of death energy from living things, like trees, is a lot harder than scrubbing it from the ambient magick. You know that!”

The Necromancer had gone to great lengths to try and keep the signs of his temporary inhabitance on the mountain to a minimum. On the same day he’d arrived, he’d placed arrays to passively filter out the arcane energy that radiated from his undead, rituals and spells. Of course, when he did something like create the Ossuary, those hadn’t been enough, and he’d had to step in himself.

Dove flipped him a rude gesture.

“Fine,” he harrumphed. “I do have a lot more energy than I did before, I can feel the flow.”

“You can?”

That was interesting. Tyron himself contained hundreds of times more than Dove could contain, but it was always difficult to perceive just how much he held, or how quickly it was coming in. Human senses weren’t designed to work with magick, not even when it was inside the body.

“Of course I can. Can’t feel much else, really. Pretty much every sense has been lost, but for whatever reason, undead seem to be more sensitive to magick. I swear I can see it sometimes.”

Another intriguing lead. There were so many piling up in Tyron’s head he was sure he was going to go mad if he didn’t get them down onto a page in time. With great effort, he pushed away this curious thought so he could turn back to his current project. With Dove’s armour out of the way, hopefully he’d stop interrupting his work.

“So. Any luck on that ritual?” Dove asked before Tyron had taken a second step away.

The Necromancer ground his teeth and turned back to his friend and mentor.

“Obviously not. When would I have had time to do that? You do realise that if I were to actually manage to concoct a new status ritual that interfaced the Unseen directly with a soul, I would almost certainly be rewarded with a mystery, right? This isn’t going to happen overnight!”

“Hey, I was just asking,” Dove shrugged. “Of course its going to be fucking hard, but you’re the only genius I can rely on. I need that ritual, kid. Not having the touch of the Unseen, my Class and Skills. It’s eating me up, and the more magick I get, the worse I feel.”

For a moment, there was real, genuine pain in his voice, and Tyron couldn’t help but sympathise.

“I know, and I haven’t forgotten. Unlocking this secret will be immensely useful for me as well, but at this point, everything is theoretical. I’ll need weeks, maybe months of work to break through on this. In the meantime, I have a million things I need to work on.”

“Like your skull ball.”

“It’s not a skull ball. It’s a Necromantic construct.”

Dove stepped closer and placed a hand sympathetically on Tyron’s shoulder.

“Kid, it’s two skulls fused at the ass and glued to a ball. It looks fucking creepy, and quite ridiculous.”

“I can’t help it if spheres are the most common shape for enchantment work. They have good, even surface area.”

“There’s also a reason that after designs get nailed down, they change away from that shape as soon as possible. It looks dumb.”

“Well, at least it works. That’s all I care about.”

“Sure, it’s effective, but unless you want your enemies questioning your taste, you’re going to have to come up with a better design.”

“Shut up, Dove.”

The construct had worked, very well. In fact, it’d worked so well that now Tyron was running into a brand new problem. The conduits between his minions weren’t sufficient to contain the amount of power he was feeding into them. A good problem to have, all things considered, but it meant he needed to go back to the drawing board and restructure the conduit network between his undead from the ground up.

It was frustrating, but he had never expected he would be pushing anything like this volume of arcane energy to his undead, so bolstering the magickal connections between them would have been a waste of time and resources.

“So you’re going to try and fatten up the conduits? Make ‘em thick and powerful?” Dove observed, peering at the construct.

“Not sure I’d phrase it that way, but yes. With more magick, the skeletons are stronger, faster, so if I can supply more energy, I need them to be able to handle more. It’s going to take a long time, so it’ll have to wait until we get back.”

Before he could work on the skeletons, he would need to finalise a new design. That meant drafting, testing and experimenting to find the exact ratios he wanted.

“Ah. Time to move onto another project then? I can suggest one, if you need any ideas,” Dove leered suggestively.

“Yes, I’ll need to move on. Luckily, I have a long list of things that are demanding my attention. Next on my list: the Ossuary.”

The skeleton slumped.

“Prick,” he muttered.

Tyron rolled his eyes, not taking the bait. The Ossuary was the key to his new Class and he fully intended to draw out all of its secrets, but he needed to be cautious. Making use of the new space without understanding it could leave him vulnerable to calamity.

The first order of business was to once again summon the door. Thankfully, this wouldn’t require nearly as much effort as creating the Ossuary had. After all, the space had already been created, all he needed to do was manifest it.

A little food, some water, and a quick splash of cold water on his face was all Tyron needed to feel rejuvenated. The more he grew, the more his Constitution improved, the more absurd his physical endurance became. He may not be strong, he may not be dextrous, but he could walk up and down this mountain for days on end without suffering much fatigue. The mental burden of working, calculating, casting magick and directing his minions was far more draining to him than his physical exertions at this point, but thankfully he had always felt strong within his own mind.

Before he could cast the ritual, he felt his minions engage in battle and took a moment to direct them from where he stood. Repeated casts of Minion Sight allowed him to follow the fighting from different angles and coordinate his undead appropriately. Thankfully, his army of skeletons still heavily outnumbered the packs of kin that flooded from the rift and were able to leverage their numbers for relatively easy victories.

Releasing a breath, he came back to himself and smiled. Killing rift-kin this easily still felt ridiculous to him. He was barely approaching a fraction of the power his parents had held, what had it felt like for them, battling against monsters all this time? Oftentimes, they’d been sent into dangerous situations, into breaks, into rifts through which new, more powerful monsters had been seen. However, a lot of the time they were sent to kill ordinary kin when the local slayers had been overwhelmed. Already, Tyron could kill hundreds of low-levelled kin with only a small exertion of effort. For Magnin and Beory? They could hold a rift like the one at Cragwhistle, quite literally in their sleep.

He shook off the thought. Disturbing his mind with emotional thoughts before casting a ritual was a foolish mistake he refused to make. Spending any amount of time dwelling on Magnin and Beory was like asking for the rage inside him to boil up and consume him. To work with magick, he needed to be in control.

Once he was certain he had centred himself, Tyron made his way to the ritual circle, raised his hands, and began to cast. As the words of power thundered into the air, he concentrated. Dimensional magick was extremely difficult, and he was far from an expert, but all he had to do was follow the guidelines the Unseen had given him. The door to the Ossuary had already been made, it existed half within his own realm, and half within whatever place that room had been created.

Reaching it was relatively easy.

After ten minutes, he was done. The door once again rested upon the circle as it exuded an unearthly purple light from within its arch of bones. Tyron lowered his hands and rolled his neck before he took a deep breath, then another. When he was ready, he strode forward, opened the door, and stepped inside.

Or at least, he tried to.

“Move over, I want to take a look,” Dove said, pushing in front of him.

“Dove… what the heck?”

But it was too late. The former slayer had pranced through the entrance and into the Ossuary, vanishing into the darkness within. Tyron followed close behind.

“Light,” he growled, placing several globes around the room and flooding it with magickal radiance.

The first time he’d been inside, he hadn’t had the power to spend illuminating it, but now he could finally take a good look at it.

If anything, it looked like a crypt, or mausoleum. Except, inside the Ossuary, there was no dust, or cobwebs, or any of the detritus one might expect to see in such a place. It was spotless, the unfurnished stone clean-cut and without blemish. Some blank and sterile, the only defining features of the space were the recesses along the walls, and the altar in the middle.

The altar from which a constant and steady flow of almost absurdly dense and pure death energy continued to flow.

“Holy mammaries. This place positively reeks of Death Magick!” Dove exclaimed, peering about with his ghostly vision. “It’s insane. I can feel it trickling into me. I feel… stronger.”

“Which is why I didn’t want you in here,” Tyron said flatly, and the skeleton whirled on him.

“So I wouldn’t get stronger?” he exclaimed, filled with outrage.

“Because I don’t know what it will do to you,” the Necromancer rebutted. “Am I the only one who remembers a particular Summoner who insisted on caution and proper testing before playing around with hitherto unknown or unexplored magick?”

“What the fuck? I am that guy!”

“The fuck you are!” Tyron glared. “That Dove wouldn’t be striding into this room without having the faintest idea what would happen to him. You don’t even know where this is!”

“Do you?” Dove challenged him, stalking forward to poke Tyron in the chest with one bony finger.

Tyron brushed his hand aside.

“No, I fucking don’t. That’s why I’m being cautious. Now are you going to leave on your own or am I going to kick you out?”

“You want me to leave? This place is amazing, something is happening here, Tyron. There’s no way in hell I’m leaving!”

The Necromancer narrowed his eyes.

“You had a choice.”

In his weakened state, there was no chance for Dove to resist him in a battle of wills, and Tyron quickly Suppressed him before he picked the skeleton up and threw him out the door.

He released his hold just as Dove started to come back to himself, scrambling around to glare as Tyron was shutting the door on him.

“Oh you mother fuc—”

Thud!

Unbelievable. To think that the man had lost this much of his sense of self preservation. Soaking in all this death magick might empower his soul, it would certainly flood the cores Tyron had placed on him, but it may also be destructive. Was it possible for a spirit to take in more energy than it contained? Could it hold a corrupting influence? More importantly, where was it coming from?

Limitless, free magick was not a thing, and yet here he had a seemingly inexhaustible supply streaming into this cross-dimensional space. It was coming from somewhere. Only extensive research and testing would help him learn what that was. Shaking his head, he forgot about Dove. That idiot would have to cool his heel-bones outside for a while.

Once again, Tyron inspected every inch of the space, only this time he was in a better state of mind. Leaving no stone unturned, he went slowly and carefully through each recess, each segment of floor, then carefully examined every line and curve of the altar itself. Sadly, this didn’t reveal anything new. As it stood, the Ossuary was a fairly straightforward place. The only way to gain new information would be to put it to use.

He opened the door and stepped outside to find Dove standing with arms folded across his ribs, tapping his foot impatiently.

“—ker!” he yelled triumphantly, then sighed in relief. “I hate leaving a curse half-spoken.”

Ignoring him, Tyron went and collected some bones, as well as ordering a skeleton to accompany him while Dove walked alongside, heckling him with questions.

“Hey, are you going to apologise for that shit? You can’t just knock me out! Are you going to let me back in there?”

By the time he’d made it back to the door, Tyron had run out of patience.

“Shut up, Dove! No, I won’t apologise. No, I won’t let you back in. And NO! I am never making you a dick! Go away and let me work so I can try and understand this space!”

So saying, he yanked open the door, shoved his chosen skeleton through the entrance, then slammed it shut. Once he was alone on the other side, he slumped and sighed. He’d probably been too hard on Dove, but the former-Summoner’s increasing lack of care for his own existence was a worrying trend that Tyron wouldn’t allow to endanger his work. Vengeance was a project of far greater importance than the feelings of an undead-slayer, even if it was his friend and mentor.

He ordered the skeleton to wait by the door, as far from the altar as it could get, before he took the collection of bones he had gathered and began to place them inside the recess.

What would happen when they were all in place? He was excited to find out.