Book of The Dead

Magick poured out of the rift so powerfully, Tyron felt he was wading through water. He could see it, could feel it. The hairs on his arm were raised, he could feel tiny shocks rippling over his skin, points of flashing heat. It was too much energy, even for his body, as absurdly resilient and soaked in power as it was.

From atop the platform, he turned and shouted to the students.

“Move back!” he yelled. “Stay at the very rear of the column!”

It had been a mistake to bring the new apprentices this close. With skeletons to protect them, they would likely be safe enough since the horde and Slayers would be blocking the rift itself.

He could see the students moving further back and instructed some of his less combat-focused undead to keep watch on them. Then he turned, raised his hands, and began to speak.

The Imperator ritual was the key component of his current Class, a spell that empowered all of his minions, allowing them to draw magick through the ritual itself. In a place like this, the spell would suck in an absurd amount of power to feed to the undead. He cast the spell, his voice thundering into the air, cracking the space around him further as his will worked upon a pocket of reality already weakened to the point of breaking.

He used the staff his mother had gifted him to anchor the ritual. Finely crafted with rare components, it was capable of handling the torrent of power that would flow through it and into the permanent ritual circle carved into the platform.

Words of power rolled from his tongue and he spoke each word clean and controlled, with precision and power that resonated throughout his being. It was a shame magick brought such horrors, when it was also capable of such wonders.

He snapped out the final sigil and thrust his hands downward. The circle beneath his feet blazed with magick, a deep purple flame that licked around his ankles, then spread. His minions lit up, a few at a time, as if a candle ignited within each of them. The flame spread quickly, until he was surrounded by it, a sea of skeletons connected to the ritual, and to him.

Forward.Unspoken orders rippled through the entire undead horde, and they obeyed his commands. His wights took the reins, extending their minds to control the skeletons around them and lead them onward. His mages and demi-lich specialists prepared spells of their own, defensive magick to cover Tyron atop the platform and offensive spells to inflict harm at a distance.

With the army on the move and the ritual in effect, Tyron continued to cast his spells. Death Blades needed to be maintained at all times, along with the Blessing of Bone. Deadlier weapons and faster minions were the baseline of what he needed to provide in this place for his army to succeed.

The rift-kin never stopped coming. Some of them were huge, as big as houses, with massive tails that could sweep through half a dozen ranks of skeletons at a time, if he let them. Lances of bone pierced them. Pillars rose up to block their way, then shattered into deadly shards. Arrows whistled through the air, Death Bolts, Death’s Fists, a barrage of spells that flew alongside his own. Revenants stalked along the front lines, ready to pounce on any monster that drew close enough, and many did.

An ear-splitting roar shattered the air, and a colossal monster loomed out of the dark. Four-legged, with a thick, bulky body that moved far more quickly than it should. Ossified rock pierced out of its flesh in shards at each of its joints and down the sides of its head, which snapped at the horde with teeth the length of a man’s arm.

Tyron’s hands never stopped moving as his words continued to crack the sky. Blood poured out of the beast, flying through the air towards him and forming a spherical shield around him. Overhead, dozens of Bone Lances flickered into existence before rocketing forward to stab deep into the beast’s flesh. The front ranks of skeletons spread out, moving to surround the creature without letting themselves get stomped while his revenants rushed forward, blades dancing in their hands.

The monster roared again, its unfathomable anger enough to deafen most people in an instant. Raising up on its hind legs, it staggered once, twice, then came down again like an avalanche.

The ground quaked and Tyron’s spider-legged platform lurched dangerously as he was mid-cast. He controlled it, lowering it down while continuing to shape the magick and let it flow. Hundreds of skeletons had been unable to keep their feet, knocked down while the wights relinquished control in order to keep themselves upright. The monster pounced, crushing several beneath its clawed feet.

Tyron focused, then unleashed his spell.

A bone spike a metre wide and a dozen tall stabbed upward out of the ground, plunging into the kin and sinking deep. Black ichor flowed like a river, gushing out of the wound and covering the ground, but it wasn’t enough. Twisting its body, the monster snapped the spectral bone like a twig, roaring once more.

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Back on their feet, his skeletons advanced, using their spears to harass and annoy the beast, darting forward to strike before retreating, aiming at its legs and flanks. Cut a thousands times, the monster eventually collapsed, the ground shaking once more as it fell. The horde stepped around it and continued on their way.

Every patch of ground beneath the platform was soaked in blood by the time Tyron’s walker passed over it. Kin always congregated around the rifts, as if they held some instinct to protect them, or help tear them wider. They seemed endless, and indeed, they were. An entire world lay on the other side of the rift, birthing maddened creatures driven insane by their unnatural existence. They would never stop coming so long as the rift was large enough to allow them through.

Finally, they slew a dense pack of monsters and Tyron’s horde stepped over the corpses with their skeletal feet to reveal the rift itself.

The people of the Empire thought of them as singular rifts, but in reality there was always more than one. As a rift grew, as the magick around it thickened and the dimensional weave thinned, more and more cracks would open between the worlds. Not all of them would be the same size, and they wouldn’t all connect to exactly the same place, but kin could emerge from all of them.

Tyron saw dozens of tears in reality, some so large you could fit a barn inside them and then build another on top. Through each, he caught glimpses of what appeared at first to be a world of verdant jungle, filled with lush growth, but the longer he looked, the more he suspected it was a lie. The trees and foliage were thick, but they were green, they were like ash, as if they’d petrified into stone.

Several hundred metres around the basin in which the rifts had formed, Tyron saw the Slayer army, in position and ready to advance. He held up a bright globe, and someone on the other side did the same.

It was time.

Careful with his magick, Tyron cast the Shivering Curse once more, ensuring he only filled his own half of the basin. As creatures of flesh and blood, the Slayers were not immune to the effects of the magick, and wouldn’t thank him for freezing them as they fought.

Out of the rifts, a stream of monsters pushed through, emerging from one world into another. Screaming and insane, they staggered once they were through, unbalanced and disoriented as they adjusted to a new world. Tyron’s army descended into the basin, arrows and spells flying overhead into the screeching throng of beasts.

Undaunted, unfeeling, the skeletons levelled their spears and advanced, no backwards steps. The Necromancer paid no mind to the horde, focusing on his own spells.

For the first time, the cauldrons were unlidded, dark smoke boiling out from within to cover the undead as they fought. Wreathed in darkness, Tyron cast spell after spell. Deadly mist rolled outwards from his feet, saturating the battlefield. He pushed more energy into the spell, spreading the first further, while making sure to keep it on his side of the battle. Immediately he began to feel life flowing into him, red pockets of mist that flowed back to him before being absorbed into his feet.

As soon as he started to receive the healing energy, he turned it back into his undead, turning his own vitality into regeneration for his skeletons.

It was a shame his cavalry were on foot, he’d gotten too used to having a mobile group of powerful minions he could throw at a problem when it showed up. With the unstable nature of reality in this place, he doubted the horses, undead or not, would be able to keep their feet.

Magick boomed like the tide as Tyron continued to cast. His vast reserves were poured out like water onto the sand, but there was still so much more. Eventually, he began to pull Death Magick out of his shadow, using it to fuel his work. Once the energy was exhausted, he opened the vent once more, pouring out everything that had regenerated inside since he’d last opened it.

The horde thrummed with power, his skeletons able to draw on more than ever before. Enhanced with powerful blessing, they became killing machines, each orchestrated and directed by the wights who marched along their lines.

In the distance, the Slayers assaulted the rift from the other side, rampaging through the kin, their gold ranked abilities tearing through flesh and shattering bone.

Hundreds of rift-kin died, but there were hundreds more, fresh monsters emerging from the rift at a constant rate. Every now and again, there would be an ear-splitting roar and another massive creature would shoulder through before staggering and stumbling its way into the fray.

Tyron watched the battle carefully as he kept up his pace of casting. He was steadily losing skeletons, but those were unavoidable losses. Any that were heavily damaged but still viable were moved to the back. The only losses were those who were shattered in a single strike or trampled beneath the feet of the larger beasts.

Tyron raised his hands once more and sent a hail of Bone Lances raining down across the monsters before him. As they died, more life energy was returned to him, and he poured it all back to his skeletons, healing their damaged bones.

Taking a breath, he drew deep on his power, moved his hands and spoke. Beneath his feet, the ritual circle flared. Magickal flames of deep purple roared up to his waist, but they gave off no heat. The circle drank deep on his magick as he poured in more and more, charging the spell to unfathomable heights. When the circle was filled with power and flames licked up to his shoulders, they vanished in an instant, sucked down into the circle.

The platform beneath him pulsed, filled with roiling power. After a heartbeat, the flames flickered, then blew out. From the platform, a wave of magick rolled out over the horde. As it passed each undead, they drew in a fragment of the energy, greedily absorbing all they could to empower themselves.

When the wave finally reached the edges of the horde, each of the undead burned brighter than before, their energy reserves filled, their candle now a blazing flame.

From within the largest rift, a mighty roar echoed, and reality cracked as something tried to force its way through.