Book of The Dead

Foxbridge, the once-buzzing hub of river trade in the Western Province, was transformed in the space of a day. No longer merely a windswept tomb, the town became infested with the dead and blanketed in a cloud of black miasma. No longer did the sunlight touch empty streets and ruined buildings; instead, hundreds of skeletons swarmed amongst the buildings, making them ready for the battle to come. Placed equidistant around the city, cauldrons of bone spewed a constant stream of black smoke that filled the streets and hung over the town as a cloud of darkness.

Within the market square, the heart of this dark industry could be found, and Tyron was right in the centre of it. Seated on a comfortable chair with his eyes closed, his consciousness boomed through the conduits, rolling through his minions like the tide. Like marionettes on strings of magick, the souls trapped within his trusted undead danced according to his will, silently raging but unable to act against their master.

As usual, he paid them no mind. All of his focus was required for the work.

Sorting the various bones into complete skeletons was the easiest part of the process, and Tyron leaned on his wights and revenants for this task. It was a painstaking labour, but by now even the least experienced of his minions was growing familiar with it. With dozens and dozens of skeletons helping, work progressed rapidly, any loose bones thrown into a separate pile to be processed into weapons, shields and armour.

From there, the completed skeletons received all of the treatment and preparation that Tyron could give them. Inside the Ossuary, he had stored all the materials needed for cleansing and reinforcing bones, though these stages needed to be expedited more than he would like.

Cleansed and hardened, the bones were then ready to be infused and remade, forcing an absurd volume of Death Magick within, along with the delicate structural work to hold them together. Fortunately, Tyron discovered the Ossuary’s altar applied to this work as well as it did to stitching and the Raise Dead ritual, multiplying the bulk of the effort across many sets of bones at a time. Even better, in fact.

When copying the weave of magickal muscle, the Ossuary’s inability to account for differences in dimensions between bones forced Tyron to only do part of the work on the altar, lest he be left with a great deal of misaligned threading to undo later.

Not so with this.

The lattice of Death Magick in noctic bone was entirely internal, saving him from having to account for the neighboring bones. Even the bones’ surfaces barely mattered at all to this process. If a humerus on the altar was larger than one in a recess, then the Ossuary simply stopped replicating the magick when there was no more material to apply it to. If the one on the altar was smaller instead, then the one in the recess would just be left with a small amount of bone unfilled around the edges, which was hardly a problem to finish on each individual bone afterwards.

Enchanting came next. With the help of Master Willhem, Tyron worked on each skeleton, scratching the sigils into each and embedding them with simple cores, taken from the stockpile he had brought with him out of Granin. Using his incredibly fine senses and the absurd saturation levels of noctic bone, Tyron was easily able to identify appropriate locus skeletons to act as the central conduit for each squad. With that hub in place, his finely tuned enchanted conduits flowed perfectly, power humming along the arcane lines between the undead.Indeed, formed of noctic bone, the skeletal remains seemed to share and grow Death Magick between themselves even faster than before, accelerating the energy generation within the horde.

A repository of power was carved into each, and they were bonded together in groups of twenty, sharing magick between them faster and more easily. A crucial step for reducing his minions’ overall demand on his personal reserves of arcane energy.

Once those were full, it was time for the stitching.

Now on his second complete design, Tyron was well satisfied with his progress in utilising the combined thread technique. Seventy percent of the weave was still made utilising the newer thread, but by interlacing the weaker thread, he was able to create more flexible joints, leading to a more versatile design. The new thread was much stronger, but also much, much harder to weave, making intricate joint-work very difficult. In his initial design, Tyron had been forced to get creative with the unfamiliar material, using all of his knowledge and creativity to force it into shapes it didn’t want to be in.

Lacking in elegance, the design had frustrated him to no end, but now he had something he was much more pleased with.

Utilising the Altar, he could weave for many undead simultaneously, although finer adjustments needed to be made for each skeleton afterwards. This was a crucial step to ensure that each skeleton would be able to properly function and one he refused to skimp on, even if it took the most time.

Once every skeleton was prepared, he would infuse them with his power, then cast the Raise Greater Undead ritual, bringing his undead creations to unholy life.

Outside, the demi-liches would be pouring their power into the discarded bones, moulding and shaping them under Tyron’s control, forming the shields, swords, arrows and bows needed to arm his most simple minions. As they filed past, each new skeleton would be armed, then given a simple chest plate and helmet. It wasn’t much protection, but even with the abundance of loose bone and the capacity to use his demi-liches to take on the task, he worried he may run out of either materials or time if he pushed for more than that. If he found himself with an excess of both in the end, then he’d add more. Otherwise, this minimal armour would have to suffice for his simple infantry.

Whenever there was a gap in the production line, Tyron filled it by dismantling an existing member of his horde, breaking them apart and rendering them back to an inert skeleton before repairing any damage and going through the steps needed to construct them anew.

In this way, he slowly remade his entire horde while adding to it constantly. More and more undead began to spill out into the streets, filling up what was now a city of the dead. Without any pause or break, the minion foundry worked every hour, every minute, churning out the highest quality minions Tyron could create in the circumstances.

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If only he had more materials to use for the creation of wights and revenants. He would need harder-hitting undead to match the Golden Legion, regular skeletons would never be able to cut it on their own, they needed support.

With the abundance of horse skeletons available, he also took the time to work on his limited number of cavalry, converting the existing mounted skeletons and their mounts while creating new recruits. In a surprisingly short amount of time, he managed to more than double the number of skeletal horsemen. The ashflame undead horses were truly an intimidating sight, especially after their thick armoured plating was completed and applied.

While he was at it, Tyron also recruited more ghosts, binding the spirits of the townsfolk and sending them out to broaden his net. Despite covering the town of Foxbridge in a permanent cloud of shadow, there was still a chance the Golden Legion would pass by without realising he was here, and he wanted to minimise that chance.

Of course, he expected ghosts to be worse than useless against gold ranked soldiers and mages. At that level, his foes were more than capable of slicing through the flimsy magickal bindings that held the spirits together, yet they were still useful for covering ground and much more expendable than his precious skeletons.

Although he was working hard on producing minions, that didn’t mean that research and experimentation wasn’t being conducted. For once, Tyron had decided to entrust some of the work to some of his more capable arcane minions.

Dove, of course, wasn’t a minion, but he was a capable and properly educated mage. Alongside Grand Magister Tommat and some of the more capable magisters he had enslaved, he had created an undead study group to consider the problems he had posed to them.

Not that he trusted them to work on something as critical as the creation of undead, that would be ridiculous. Instead, he had tasked them with testing and reworking the new spells and abilities he had received. Armed with the notes he had prepared so far, he hoped they would be able to show some sense of progress at least.

A loud noise drew Tyron’s attention, and he opened his eyes to see Filetta had sat down beside him, the plates of bone she wore scraping against the cobbled stone.

“Just returned from the south. We cleared out three villages and a half dozen farmholds. More bones that I expected.”

“Did you keep the complete skeletons together?” he asked her sharply, only for the former thief to roll her undead eyes.

“Of course,” she said, offended. “Do you really think I can’t do something that simple?”

Several of the other wights had failed to do it properly….

“Why are you holding that thing? Is it important?” she said, pointing at his lap.

Tyron looked down at the orb resting in the palm of his hand, with the two differently coloured clouds of magick within still locked in their seemingly eternal dance.

No matter how much he was focused on his minions, a sliver of his mind continued to focus on the orb and the all-important soul magick contained within. It had unfathomable power and possibilities, he could feel it, but unlocking them was proving to be almost impossible. A fit of inspiration had led him to create the orb, but he had no idea how to extract any power from it without throwing off the balance within, nor was he entirely sure what could be done with it.

Although, he was confident of one thing: his studies of the ghoul he had captured after the battle in the Realm of the Dead confirmed that its specific brand of undead flesh was forged using soul magick. Tiny traces of green fire had been found within the creature’s tissues, a sure sign of the involvement of Soul Magick.

“It’s important. Very important,” he said, then hesitated. “At some point, I may need to entrust this to you. If that happens, make sure you don’t lose it or break it, no matter what.”

“What? Why?” she asked, baffled.

“Just a hunch I have,” he said, contemplating the power swirling on the palm of his hand. “There are… certain things I may be able to do, but only with this orb, you understand?”

“So why wouldn’t you keep it with you?”

“Don’t question it too much and just agree,” Tyron sighed. “I don’t have the free mental space for a proper conversation right now.”

Filetta looked around at the small army of undead involved in the production line, churning out minions at a ferocious pace.

“You… aren’t controlling all of them, are you?” she asked hesitantly.

“Of course not.”

Just most of them. His capacity to control his minions had truly risen to an absurd level, and his ability to split his focus was growing constantly. It wasn’t that hard once he’d gotten used to it.

“How many do you think you’ll be able to make in a day this way?” she said.

Tyron wasn’t sure himself. With his ‘undivided’ attention dedicated to minion creation, the process was ticking along much faster than before. Every time he used the Raise Greater Undead ritual, a hundred new skeletons marched out of the Ossuary. The issue was the assembly of the skeletons, the enchanting, and the weave adjustments. Those steps were finicky and time-consuming, no matter how well he refined the process.

“A thousand?” he shrugged.

Filetta made an odd gesture, as if she went to gasp, but couldn’t actually inhale to create the necessary sound.

“That’s… a lot.”

“We need a lot of undead,” Tyron said. “There’s no choice but to ramp up as quickly as possible.”

Idly, he considered some of the souls he still had locked away. He hadn’t been confident that he could properly utilise them before, but perhaps now he would be capable enough.

Raising Lady Erryn had been something of a risk, given her powerful connection to the Five Divines. Tyron had been hesitant to raise many of the other powerful nobles he had captured, lest they have some way to fight back against his control.

Now that he was platinum… perhaps it was possible. Maybe he did have enough materials for wights after all….

“Alright,” he said, leaning his head back and closing his eyes, “back to work.”

“Wait… me too?” Filetta asked, pointing a skeletal finger at herself.

“Of course you too. I need bones.”

Tyron waved a vague hand towards the outskirts of the town.

“Go get them. There are dozens of villages and farms within a day’s walk of Foxbridge.”

“I just got back!”

The Necromancer smiled ever so slightly.

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you? You can rest when you’re dead.”