Book of The Dead

Tyron woke in great pain.

“Holy shit,” he groaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

His stomach burned with acid, his head pounded, and every inch of his skin felt as if it had been scraped raw. What had happened to him? Trying to remember was too difficult. Trying to think was too difficult. He grit his teeth and forced himself to sit up.

Sheets fell away and he realised he was in his bed, upstairs in the shop, yet he had no idea how he got there. The moment he straightened, his vision swam and he felt bile burning in the back of his throat. Had he not managed to catch hold of the bed head with one flailing arm, he would have fallen.

In all of his days, he didn’t think he’d ever felt so weak.

Light stabbed into his eyes so he clamped them shut, trying to create a moment in which he could think. Instead, a door opened and he heard soft footfalls as someone entered the roam. There was a gasp, then they approached quicker.

“You’re awake,” Elsbeth said softly. “You shouldn’t try to sit up so soon. The Venerable thought it would take you several days to recover.”

The Venerable? Recover from what? Nothing seemed to settle into place, but images rose unbidden in his mind. Hundreds of people, chained in cages. Blood draining into golden vessels. Statues of flesh and bone. Red, red eyes.

“Argh!”

An explosion of pain and light in his head caused him to cry out in pain and he slumped to the side. Elsbeth rushed forward and caught him, steadying his head as she held something to his lips.

“Drink this. It won’t taste good, but it should help settle your head. A little, at least.”

As it was, Tyron felt like he’d eat dung from a stable floor if it would relieve some of his pain. Blindly, he sipped at the tea, and it was indeed truly revolting. Bitter and pungent to an extreme he hadn’t thought possible, his guts nearly rose in revolt as he forced himself to choke it down. After a few minutes, the storm in his head eased slightly, and he opened his eyes to see Elsbeth looking down at him, concern etched on her features.

“Elsbeth?” he groaned. “What happened to me?”

She didn’t answer immediately, instead brushing his hair back from his forehead. He was sticky with sweat, and individual strands clung to his skin. With a frown, she reached down beside her and he could hear small splashes. A moment later, a cool cloth was pressed to his temples and he almost gasped in relief. Patiently, she wiped him down, and began to answer his question as she worked.

“You happened to you,” she sniffed. “Well, I would say that if I were being uncharitable.You incurred a debt to the Scarlet Court. They demanded you visit their realm as payment.”

Flashes of blood. So much blood.

“You sent me a letter before you left explaining that you were going and expected them to do something to you while they had the chance. You wanted me to summon the Venerable to help cure you, which I did.”

Tyron frowned. Everything seemed fuzzy when he tried to recall what had happened. It was disconcerting, to say the least. He felt as if he had lost control of himself, like someone else had been piloting his body for an undetermined amount of time.

“According to the Venerable, you had done your best to fortify your mind, but it hadn’t been enough. Your protections and their manipulations went to war in your head. You nearly died.”

That would explain why he felt so weak. A twinge of pain on his left forearm drew his attention and he squinted down at it, then double checked when he realised what he was looking at.

“Are there bite marks on my arm?” he whispered.

“Yes. Yes, there are.”

“... Why?”

“Because you bit yourself.”

He blinked once, then twice, then three times as he tried to process that. He’d been gnawing on his own arm? Why?!

“It was Dove, wasn’t it? I didn’t bring him back like I’d promised, so they demanded payment.”

“I don’t know, but that sounds possible.” She hesitated. “We aren’t sure the Venerable was able to completely undo whatever it was that they’d done to you. To ensure it was removed, he would have had to… scour parts of your mind away.”

Each passing moment, Tyron gained a tiny bit of ground against the pain and his own mind. With difficulty, he pushed himself further back in the bed until he could prop himself up against the bedhead more firmly. Once stable, he leaned back and closed his eyes with a sigh.

He couldn’t remember much, but what Elsbeth said sounded true to him. He recalled returning to the city, sans Dove, and the conversation he’d had with Yor. From the moment he’d met with her at the Red Pavilion, things started to get hazy. The more he tried to recall those events, the more the pain returned, so he left them alone for the time being.

“Doubtless, that was as they intended,” he said. “I doubt the vampires expected their manipulations to go unchallenged, but as long as something remains, they’ll be able to make use of it.”

By his bedside, his friend fell silent as she continued to tend to him. After wiping down his back and chest, she rinsed the cloth once more and rose to fetch him some water to drink. Each sip was like rain in the desert, soothing his parched throat and bringing relief to a thirst he hadn’t been aware he’d had.

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“Are… are you still going to work with them?” she eventually asked. “After what they’ve done to you?”

“I doubt they’ll give me a choice,” he forced a chuckle, which came out more like a cough. “If it’s any consolation, I expect they’ll be very generous for the next little while. After a stunt like this, it’ll take a lot of work to get back into my good graces.”

“Will they? Get back in your good graces, I mean?”

Tyron stared at her flatly.

“Of course not. I’ll make them pay, one way or another, for what they did. Gods know how I’ll pull that off, but I’ll find a way, eventually.”

Elsbeth smiled at him, a touch sadly.

“One impossible revenge quest at a time, Tyron. Try to pace yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

~~~

Apparently, having one’s own mind go to war on itself was bad for one’s health. Who would have known? It took Tyron three days of bed rest before he was able to be up and about, and he was a terrible patient the entire time. Waspish, bored and frustrated, he snapped at everyone who came in to help take care of him, though Elsbeth took it with remarkable good grace. After the first day, she brought him some tools, his pliance and a few cores so he could at least work to pass the time, which helped.

When he had finally recovered enough to care for himself, he’d awkwardly thanked his childhood friend before she’d left, unable to properly convey the depth of his gratitude. Something in her eyes told him she was aware of how he felt, but still he resolved to make it up to her as soon as he could. Without her intervention with the Old Gods, who knew how terrible of a state he’d be in, with Vampiric nonsense running rampant in his brain.

It had been an extraordinary effort, even by his standards, to recreate the mental fortification enchantments from the ring he’d taken from Magister Poranus. Unable to raid his master’s library for such sensitive sigils, it had been extremely difficult to learn the techniques in the short time he had available, but he’d managed it, somehow. Combined with some… less than legal fortifications he’d been able to procure through Filetta and her associates, he’d done everything he could to improve his mental defences, but it hadn’t been enough.

Once he was able, he threw himself into his work, churning through the backlog of enchanting tasks needed for the store in one, forty-eight hour burst of activity. Flynn had staggered out of the store looking like a zombie when it was done, and Cerry had been less than pleased with Mr Almsfield. Tyron hadn’t insisted his apprentice remain in the store as he worked, but the man had done it anyway. At least his endurance was improving. A good sign, in Tyron’s eyes.

Following that marathon, he retreated to his room to rest again, making sure he got all the sleep, water and food he needed, before he could no longer contain his impatience. Stepping into his study once again was a soothing balm for his soul, the light dust that covered the stone surfaces the first task that required his attention in this sanctuary.

Once it had returned to its austere, spotless self, Tyron sat at his desk, hands flat on the table as he pondered. Placing enchantments and arrays around the room to prevent magickal scrying was essentially done, but he still needed to beef up the measures he had in place to prevent Death Magick from leaking out of the room. One whiff of that energy detected by the Magisters would have this area under investigation before he could blink. If there was one thing they didn’t want in a city of millions, it was the dead beginning to rise on their own.

Getting that finished took several further days, after which he had to do more work for the store. By the time he was finally free to resume his studies, Tyron was practically shaking from having to maintain his patience.

Summoning the gate within his study for the first time wasn’t difficult, but it was nerve-wracking. He’d taken all the necessary precautions and created a permanent ritual circle on the stone floor, as well as used a high quality ritual focus to contain the energy of the spell. Even so, he was nervous.

Fortunately, nothing went wrong, and Tyron stepped within the Ossuary for the first time since he levelled. Immediately, he could tell there was a difference. The Altar, inert and unmoving the last time he was here, now thrummed with energy, sigils glowing softly across its surface.

Excited, Tyron rushed forward to study them, but was ultimately left disappointed. Much like the vampiric text that Yor had given him, these sigils were written in a form he didn’t recognise. It would be possible to translate them, but only after a great deal of time and effort had been invested. Just another thing on his impossibly long list of tasks to investigate.

Turning his attention to the surface of the Altar, it seemed as if whatever the arrays did, they would act upon whatever was placed on top of it. He still had several sets of bones within the Ossuary, which remained as they had before, perfectly saturated with death energy, yet inert, tucked away in their individual repositories.

He grabbed one set of remains and laid it out carefully on the altar, every bone in its proper place, then stepped back to see if anything happened.

Nothing did.

Tapping his chin thoughtfully with a single finger, Tyron considered. It was likely that whatever the altar did would affect the undead created atop it. He’d need to go through the process of preparing these bones to be raised before he could see what would happen.

Given they were already saturated, however, he wasn’t willing to remove them from the Ossuary via the still-open door back into his study. If he did so, they would likely begin to form a wild undead the moment the bones were free of whatever influence was preventing them from doing so inside.

It didn’t sit well with Tyron to create an Undead that was anything less than as perfect as he could possibly make it, but he was dying to learn what the altar did, so he shrugged his reservations aside, raised his hands, and conjured the ghostly strings of magick he would use to form the flesh and sinews of his latest minion.

The moment he began to work, he felt the altar come to life. Power thrummed through it, and Tyron stared eagerly, keen to see what would happen, only for it to fall silent the moment he stopped moving his hands.

Slowly, he resumed his movements, weaving with the expert skill he had cultivated over hundreds of iterations, and the altar sprang to life once more. However… something curious was happening. The power contained within didn’t reach out to the bones sitting atop the altar, but toward the recesses in which those saturated sets of bones still remained.

With a frown, Tyron continued to weave, unable to see what the altar was doing while he was concentrating on his hands. Once he’d completed one leg, he tied off the weave and stepped away, watching as the altar fell inert once again. Shaking his hands lightly, he stepped over to the closest recess that contained a skeleton and leaned down to study it.

The bones themselves appeared… unchanged. He ran his eyes over it carefully, trying to sense any change in the condition of the remains. As far he could tell, nothing had changed. The weaving on the leg appeared to be intact, no different from the skeleton on the altar….

In one motion, he whipped his head to the altar, then back to the bones before him. There was no mistake, the weave on the right leg was identical, exactly identical to what he’d just done to the skeleton on the altar.

Eyes wide, he looked around the Ossuary, examining all of the recesses embedded into the walls.

This… this was going to save a lot of time.