Book of The Dead

Tyron had largely recovered after a few days had passed. The weakness that had clung to his limbs and the fatigue that had weighed down his thoughts were mostly gone. Untainted food and water had gone a long way to helping him recover, and for once the Necromancer had been disciplined and ensured he got sufficient rest.

A good thing he had, since there wouldn’t be any time to indulge in such luxuries again any time soon. A week after emerging from the Realm of the Dead, Tyron had no idea how much more time he would have before the Empire’s army would catch up with him, and he had an awful lot to do before they could.

Whenever he was awake, Tyron became the centre of a monstrous, undead workshop. At times, he felt as if he no longer had a physical form of his own. Instead, his own body remained quiet and still as he manipulated a dozen others at the same time, all of his focus and concentration dedicated to controlling his undead.

A crude production line had been created, taking in his skeleton soldiers, unmaking them, repairing damage, and then processing them to become ashflame skeletons. Treating the bones themselves, then laying them in the Ossuary’s receptacles for saturation, restitching, adjustments and the eventual cast of the Raise Greater Undead ritual.

In this way, Tyron was able to convert a hundred skeletons a day to their new, improved form, whilst simultaneously conducting research on his new methods. Despite feeling like his brain was fragmenting along ever-widening fault lines, he continued to push himself harder and harder. His control over his minions was growing stronger and stronger by the day, and his ability to split his focus grew apace.

Between exploring new conduit magick techniques and methods that the Unseen had unveiled for him, investigating the possibilities of Soul Magick and the orb he had created, carving up the ghoul he had captured and testing the possibilities of its flesh, there was so much to do. Through it all, he contended with the rising resentment of the souls he had enslaved and turned into the demi-liches he now manually controlled. It wasn’t enough that he had stolen them from their gods and shackled their spirits to their own reanimated corpses, not enough that he bound their minds with limitations and unbreakable loyalty, but now he robbed them of any agency at all, making them dance like puppets on the ends of his strings.

Unable to act against him, their spirits wailed and thrashed within the cages he had created for them. He didn’t care, only sparing enough attention to ruthlessly quash their anguish when it became too distracting.

“Tyron… Tyron! This can’t be healthy. Hey, are you even in there?”

With a grimace, the Necromancer split a fraction of his focus back to his own body, cracking an eye open to see Dove leaning down and poking him. Filetta stood nearby, watching over his body as she had continued to do over the last few days.

“Yes, I’m in here,” he replied. “Do you have something you want to say, or are you just being annoying? If you’re being annoying, you know what’s going to happen.”Only recently had Dove been let loose from the pole they had tied him to on the outskirts of the camp. With a spell of silence cast over him, nobody had been able to hear his foul yelling except for himself. Of course, nobody had told him about the silence spell, but he’d figured it out after a few hours of nobody telling him to shut up.

“Fuck! Relax a second, will you? Of course I have something to say.”

“Which is?”

“Well,” the onyx skeleton scratched at the back of his skull. “I was wondering if you were planning to move from this spot. I went for a wander the last few days, and I think we’re fairly south. If you don’t get moving, the Empire is going to just pass you by without realising that you’re here. Which might be the plan, how the heck am I supposed to know? Just thought I should mention it.”

“Are you actually worried about the people in Granin?” Tyron asked, genuinely confused. As far as he knew, Dove no longer genuinely cared about anything. His transformation into a foul-mouthed undead nihilist seemed to have been completed a long time ago.

“Of course not,” Dove laughed, “but I thought it might be a good thing for the world if your aunt and uncle weren’t also murdered by the Empire. You’re scary enough as it is.”

Tyron sighed and picked himself up off the ground before brushing down his pants and cloak.

“I wasn’t going to let them die,” he said gruffly. “I was just… distracted. I have a lot of things to work on.”

“Well, if you would like to maintain living relatives, you might want to focus up.”

Dove actually being helpful was somewhat suspicious, but in this instance he wasn’t wrong. It was time to move.

“Alright fine,” he said. “We can get this show on the road.”

With a flex of his will, he withdrew from the many undead he was controlling and gave them a new directive: prepare to leave. There wasn’t much left of the camp to be packed up, but the many projects he was currently working on did need to be tidied up. Thankfully, the Ossuary remained the perfect portable storage, and once everything that needed to be stored had been put away, he dismissed the entrance himself.

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At that stage, the horde had gathered itself together and he was surrounded by neat, organised ranks of skeletons, some of which were now emitting faint wisps of ashen smoke. He hadn’t tested the limits of his new skeletons yet, but Tyron was confident he would be impressed when the time came. Hopefully they would find some kin roaming the grasslands soon.

“Where are we headed?” Filetta asked him. “Straight to Cragwhistle? Since that’s where the crossing is, it’s safe to assume the Golden Legion will pass through there.”

“Not necessarily,” Tyron disagreed. “They’re all gold ranked, remember? It’s possible they can cross pretty much anywhere.”

He pondered for a moment.

“We should still head north-west. If we’re somewhere north of Cluffton, then we should keep going until we hit the Fox River. It splits the province in half, roughly. There’s no major roads heading west after Foxbridge, so the Legion will probably follow the river from that point on. We can meet them there.”

“Foxbridge?” Dove said curiously. “Isn’t that where you were born?”

“It’s where I grew up,” Tyron confirmed. “I’m not sure exactly where I was born, but knowing Magnin and Beory, probably while they were travelling.”

“We’re going to your hometown?” Filetta said. “That’s kind of sweet.”

The Necromancer looked at her as if she were odd.

“We’re going to turn it into a bloody battlefield. Not to mention, all the people I grew up with have either been slaughtered by the Empire or fled for their lives.”

“My definition of sweet has changed since I was alive,” Filetta dismissed his words with a wave of her hand. “You’ll know what I mean, eventually.”

Well, that was a cheerful thought.

Tyron climbed up onto his four-legged construct without another word. A short mental command was issued, and the horde was underway.

Seated atop the walking skeletal construct wasn’t necessarily the most comfortable ride, but Tyron didn’t mind it too much. He was capable of enduring truly inhuman levels of punishment, so the discomfort didn’t bother him, but the bumps and rocking made it harder to concentrate.

Before they’d gone further than a few kilometres, he was determined to remake the thing from the ground up.

Fortunately he was able to push through the distraction and continue working on his new methods and techniques. Every time he thought he understood something as well as it could possibly be understood, the Unseen proved that his knowledge remained so shallow. Given bricks and mortar, he had pushed his methods to their limits, taking the materials he understood and creating elegant, complex works that filled their function as well as they could.

Now the Unseen pulled back the curtain and revealed entirely new materials, new ways of thinking and constructing magick that unlocked entirely new possibilities. Working with them was harder, they were more limited in some ways and required workarounds or companion magicks to reign in their flaws and harness their strengths, not to mention simply creating these new spell components required truly enormous volumes of raw magick.

In a sense, Tyron had been sent back to square one. What he could build now was completely different from before, and all his careful artistry simply wasn’t relevant anymore. Yet, the more he investigated, the more he was sure his time wasn’t wasted. Having learned how to push his techniques to their limits once, he knew how to do it again. Starting from first principles, he was again racing to reconstruct his understanding of what was possible.

Dimensional Conduit Magick was, of all the new things he had learned, perhaps the one that intrigued him the most. Tyron had laboured over conduits for years as he’d worked as a student under Master Willhem. He was confident there was nobody in the province who understood them better than he did, which meant access to this ability was limited by the Unseen and either nobody, or only a select few, even knew it existed.

It was mind-bendingly complex, taking everything he knew about conduits and turning it on its head. He hadn’t even begun to try and incorporate it into his new undead, as he knew it would take weeks of effort to try and gain enough understanding to make use of it.

When he did, the possibilities that he half-glimpsed through the barely remembered threads of information he had promised some extraordinary utility.

He devoted his time to perfecting his new weave designs as they travelled, while manipulating other undead to improve the weapons and armour of the already upgraded ashflame skeletons.

After several hours of travelling, they came across something that surprised Tyron. This area was largely used for raising cattle and farming crops. The further south one went, the drier and dustier the land became, eventually giving way to the desert in which the Dust Folk lived.

So it was relatively sparsely populated. Other than Cluffton, there were no major population centres, aside from the Slayer Keeps themselves. And yet, not two hours into their journey, Tyron saw a skeleton shambling across the land.

Naturally formed, it was as crude as an undead could be, ungainly in its movements and acting on only the basest of instincts. As the horde drew closer, it didn’t react, continuing to aimlessly amble its way along the trail they were following. Only when Tyron himself was close enough did it finally react, sensing his living flesh.

His immediate guards defeated the skeleton in an instant, but refrained from destroying it. The bones were gathered and stored in one of the wagons still being pulled along behind them. No need to waste precious materials.

Why was it here? Surely the Golden Legion had been at pains to ensure the dead didn’t rise after they had completed their purge of the province, burning the dead as they went? Something wasn’t making sense.

It wasn’t until they travelled another ten kilometres down the trail that the answer became clear, encountering another three wandering skeletons in the process.

Precautions were always taken when someone was buried to ensure they weren’t raised as an undead. Normally, the concentration of Death Magick wasn’t high enough for it to be much of a concern, but certain areas would contain more or less, affecting the level of risk.

In these remote communities, villages and farmsteads usually found a safe place to make a communal gravesite. If the Empire hadn’t swept through slaughtering millions of citizens, this site would never have had an issue. Unfortunately, such mass slaughter was bound to create concentrations of Death Magick.

Situated a small distance off the trail, Tyron would likely never have noticed the graveyard and passed right by if not for the walking dead moving through the area.

He considered for a moment, then gave a command. Immediately, twenty skeletons and a wight peeled off the column, followed by one of the carts pulled by another ten skeletons.

If the materials were going to climb out of the ground and come to him, who was he to say no?