Book of The Dead

“I don’t think you understand how dangerous this is.”

Tyron grunted, not bothering to give Dove any more of his attention than he absolutely had to. This obviously drove the skeleton to be as annoying as possible.

“Hey. Are you listening to me?” he demanded. “If you get caught wandering around out here with your dick in your hand, you will spend the next thousand years regretting it! You have no idea what sort of fucked up tortuous shit the Death Lords can do. Have you ever heard a soul cry?”

“Yes.”

Dove fell silent for a moment.

“Well… I suppose you would have.”

“I’ve heard you cry.”

“Bullshit. I’ve only cried once in my life, and that was the day I touched my first boob.”

“Well, are you including excessive moping, complaining and whining as crying? Because I hear that out of you almost every day.”

They walked together in the centre of a column, Tyron’s entire horde arrayed around them. In the centre of the formation, he had gathered all of the wights, demi-liches and revenants together, all of those who possessed a soul. It seemed most likely to him that if anyone were to be sweeping the dunes, it was souls that they would be looking for, so he was keen to try and conceal them as best he could.Testing the wards he’d created had been difficult, since he didn’t know how the Death Lords searched for soul-aligned energy. Depending on the method they used, the best way to hide it would change, but he had done the best he could to try and minimise the chances they would be found from afar.

If they were able to find him and engineer a fight on their terms, then he would surely be annihilated. As exhausted as he was, Tyron had to hope he was able to keep his wits about him long enough to get what he needed from the Realm of the Dead before he managed to make his escape.

To do that, he would need bait, and he would need to be careful. Extremely, careful.

“Of course it doesn’t count,” Dove scoffed. “Complaining is my right and one of the few things that brings me joy. You know what doesn’t bring me joy? The thought of being captured again. That’s the opposite of joy.”

“When we get what we need, we will leave.”

A small troop of skeletons had remained behind to help secure their exit. Even now they were piling arcane crystals onto the circle, ready to power the gate he had established. Examining the crystals had led to a shocking discovery, and it was good he had decided to leave when he did. Even crystallised and stable, the magick hadn’t been able to escape the pervasive corruption of this place. As it invaded his flesh and weakened him, it had also invaded the shards he had brought with him. Half of them had turned to Death Magick, crumbling beneath his fingers, the energy within totally unsuited to be fed into an array. The remaining half would be enough, but if he’d waited even another day more… perhaps it wouldn’t have been.

“Stop distracting him,” Filetta scolded Dove. “You want to avoid getting captured, but you won’t stop yapping at the only person who can give you what you want.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” the skeleton insisted. “I want to make sure he knows the danger he puts himself and me into. Unless he properly appreciates it, I can’t be confident he is making the right choices.”

“You want me to take him away?” Filetta asked Tyron.

“Leave him. His nattering is helping to focus my mind.”

Oddly enough, it was true. Through his fatigue, it was difficult to keep his thoughts running along a single track, but with Dove issuing a steady stream of complaints, he had something he could use to centre himself.

A ghost brought the first warning, and Tyron’s eyes sharpened as his minions responded. The endless rolling dunes were home to many creatures, and the more they marched, the more they seemed to find. Were they getting closer to something they avoided? Or closer to something they hunted?

Either way, they were exacting a toll on his undead. With his most powerful minions restrained, forced to remain close to him, only the weakest could fight, which meant some were inevitably destroyed.

Still, he knew the Unseen would reward these victories highly, and this was a price he needed to pay.

Flicking his gaze to look through the eyes of his minions, Tyron saw he had finally found what he had been looking for. It appeared that Soul Eaters were much more rare than some of the other beasts, since this was only the second he had encountered.

As before, the creature came, snuffling and scratching, its disgustingly distended maw hanging loose. No matter what steps he had taken to conceal the souls in his group, it wasn’t enough to blind a monster like this. The minions barely had time to form ranks before it came bounding forward, its powerful limbs swinging with devastating power as it tried to cut its way through to the centre.

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Tyron controlled his minions while raising his hands to cast, forming a wall of bone shields and skeletal bodies to hold the beast back. In moments, the dark smoke of a Death’s Fist snaked through the air, reaching, fingers curling toward the soul eater. More intelligent than a kin, it saw the spell coming, twisted away, and leapt to the side. The smoke tracked it, causing the creature to gurgle hideously before launching itself high.

It was trying to jump over the skeletons and get to the middle of the formation, but couldn’t quite make the distance. It fell a few metres short of the outer ring of revenants in a tangle of skeletons. Kicking and slashing, the soul eater inflicted hideous damage before enough skeletons managed to pile onto it, stabbing their blades deep into its strange, half-dead flesh.

Tyron allowed his revenants to streak forward, using their better skills and weapons to put the beast down. As its final, haunting death rattle filled the air, Tyron could only wince at the cost it had extracted in the brief scuffle. A dozen skeletons had been torn apart, another two dozen had been damaged.

Without the time to heal them, they would have to fight on as best they could.

There was only so much he could expect from such basic minions, especially when his options to support them were as limited as they were in the Realm of the Dead. Even so, Tyron felt his mouth twist. He wasn’t satisfied with their performance, but then again, he probably never would be.

Exhausted, he left the butchering to the wights, letting his new spell and the fragments of information the Unseen had placed in his head fill his thoughts.

He didn’t know if it was luck, or if every soul eater had a half-digested meal in its gut, but his undead extracted another bezoar from the carcass, exactly what Tyron needed.

With both bezoars clutched in its claws, the wyvern flew far ahead, ranging ahead of the horde before Tyron was able to identify a fairly unoccupied area with few beasts in it. Swooping low, the undead dropped the souls before turning back, wings beating hard and fast to rebuild altitude.

Kilometres away, Tyron pulled his horde in close, hunkering down and reestablished the wards which would hopefully conceal them from prying eyes. If they didn’t, he was about to be in trouble.

Cautiously, he strung out a few skeletons, forcing them to lie down and blend into the crushed skulls that formed the dunes. Looking through their eyes, he settled in to wait, and watch, keeping the souls in sight at all times.

In the still air of the Realm of the Dead, the only thing Tyron could hear was his own breath, a hint of a wheeze starting to creep in. His condition was continuing to worsen, even though he had the former priest of the Three standing right behind him.

The corpse, stuffed with divine power, was faring little better than he was. Visibly rotting, it was doubtful the body would hold together more than another week, despite Tyron’s efforts to treat it. Something about this place was eating away at it faster and faster.

“Tyron,” Dove said into the stillness.

“Shut up, Dove.”

“Any chance I can persuade you to leave?”

The Necromancer frowned, turning to his former teacher. Something about Dove’s tone caused him to think that, just perhaps, he was being serious and had something worthwhile to say.

“Try,” he said.

The skeleton leaned back, looking upward into the darkness.

“No need. I think this is going to convince you just fine.”

Tyron snapped around, looking into the distance, but he didn’t see anything change. Above the souls was nothing but darkness, though several beasts had come sniffing. Spying through the eyes of his minions, he kept watch, unsure what Dove wanted him to see.

He felt it before he saw it. A shift in the magick, not subtle, massive, like a frozen river thawing in just a few seconds. A mass of power snaked out from a vast distance. After a few seconds, the change became visible. The sky over the souls unfolded, no longer blank darkness, a hollow eye, filled with guttering purple flame, peered down from above.

Swallowing, Tyron pulled his minions in closer. If this Death Lord decided to look too closely, they would doubtlessly be found. He wished he’d decided to hide a little further away from the bait, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

The eye peered down at the half-digested souls, then swept over the surrounding area. As its gaze drew near, Tyron felt an overwhelming pressure pass close by, as if he were being stared down by a near-divine being.

Luck was on his side. As the eye circled the area, it stayed closer to the bezoars he had thrown out, then winked out as suddenly as it had appeared.

For several long minutes, Tyron lay still, wondering if the eye would return, but the Realm had returned to its eerie stillness and silence. Even the beasts that had been sniffing around were nowhere to be seen, slinking away the moment they had the chance.

“How could you tell?” Tyron asked Dove.

Somehow, the skeleton had known well before the Necromancer had been able to sense anything.

“The beasts,” Dove replied, not bothering to hide his knowledge. “They have very keen senses. I could see them cringing as they felt the eye coming.”

Considering that, Tyron nodded. That was useful information. After waiting another few minutes, he stood and began to brush himself off.

“What the fuck are you doing? They could come back!” Dove hissed.

“Don’t we want them to come back?” Tyron asked him, brow raised. “The whole point is that we set up an ambush.”

“You. You want them to come back. Not me. I want to get the fuck out of here.”

With a mental command, Tyron sent the wyvern scrambling forward. It launched itself into the air before swooping down on the souls, snatching them up before circling back towards the concealed horde.

“I think you’ve gone insane. You know the Death Lord is coming for that. More than one, probably, if someone else sensed the first one looking!”

“And they will know it’s an ambush.”

“Of course they fucking know it’s an ambush! They weren’t born yesterday, or the day before that.”

“So why would I sit here and wait for them to encircle me? I’ll take the souls and head back towards the gate. Unless I miss my guess, they’re going to follow, but I refuse to fight here where they can cut me off from my path of retreat.”

Dove was silent for a long moment before he shook his head.

“Fucking hell, kid. You have one set of ponderous balls on you. When you die, they should be preserved and put in a museum. To be clear, this is absolutely insane, but it’s also ballsy.”