Book of The Dead

Screams rang out all around him. Terrible, heart-wrenching shrieks of unimaginable pain and suffering. Through it all, Tyron stood, still restrained, physically nailed to the board holding him in place, and waited.

Tucked into the null-magick field the Golden Legion had generously provided, he was immune from the soul-rending effects of the spells he had inflicted on the camp. Through the open flaps of the tent, green and purple smoke billowed and flowed, a dense mist that carried with it the power to consume spirits. It reached out towards him, hungrily trying to consume his living soul, but the field drained away the magick that sustained it before it could touch him, dispersing the spell.

If the normal Screaming Skull infected the flesh and drained the life-force from its victims, then this version, enhanced with Soul Magick, was far more insidious. Although he hadn’t had a chance to test it, he felt confident in the mechanics of the spellform. After coming into contact with any living creature with a soul, it would latch onto it, and begin to consume it, eating away at the spirit to fuel the spell further. As time passed, it would only grow hungrier, eating faster and faster until the entire soul had been consumed, eaten from within the body.

Only then would the spell be exhausted, unable to sustain itself, and peter out.

Without a working knowledge of Soul-based magicks, it would be impossible to cure, meaning that everyone in the camps was already dead. All they could do was suffer as their souls were consumed from the inside out.

Although, he hadn’t anticipated that the process would be quite as painful as it appeared to be. Granted, that knowledge wouldn’t have stopped him from using it, but he took no pleasure in the howls of pain and suffering he heard around him.

A figure stumbled out of the swirling mist and into the tent, face twisted in a mask of agony and fury.

“Y-y-you…” they gurgled, barely able to speak.

Tyron cocked his head to the side, rattling the chains that held him and sending his frame swinging ever so slightly.

“Do I know you?” he asked, unsure.

With his expression so haggard and twisted, it was hard to say if this was a soldier he had met before. Perhaps one of those who had so generously donated a blade in the form of stabbing it into his flesh?

“D-d… die… y-y-you demon!”

Wretching with the force of his suffering, the Soldier could barely get a word out. Only through an almost superhuman force of will did he manage to draw the dagger at his waist and drag himself closer, one step at a time.

Momentarily, Tyron wondered if entering the null-magick would be enough to cure the man of his ailment, but his concerns were quickly allayed. Destroying magick embedded so deeply inside a person was difficult, to say the least. Latched onto the very soul? His spell was as close to indestructible as it could be.

There was no point arguing with this man; he was already dead after all. What good would it have done to point out that he himself had participated in the slaughter of millions, that the Empire he served was an engine of death that Tyron himself could only dream of matching?

There was no point, so he merely watched as the dead man, holding himself together through sheer force of will, small whimpers of agony leaking out from between his gritted teeth, limped towards him, one shuffling step at a time.

When he finally drew close enough to strike, he reached out and leaned heavily on one of the blades impaling the Necromancer, causing Tyron to grunt. Finally, he drew back his hand, every part of his body shaking from the strain.

A smoking blade formed of black bone pierced through the back of his head and emerged from his mouth, splattering Tyron in the face with hot, red blood.

Grimacing, he turned to the side and spat, keen to purge the taste from his mouth.

“Could have moved a little faster, couldn’t you?” he growled.

Purple light burned within the hollow sockets of the skeleton that stared back at him. A basic, soulless minion, it was the only type of undead that could move within the mist safely. Nor could it reply to his question.

Tyron shook his head.

“Don’t talk to the minions,” he chided himself.

Cut me down, he commanded silently.

Unlike his Soul magick, a basic minion such as this was very much vulnerable to the effects of the null-magick field and would fall apart if it remained within for too long.

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Fortunately, his minion was able to hold itself together long enough to cut him free and pull out the nails through his hands, finally freeing him, before it staggered back out of the field, starting to come apart.

Clenching his teeth, Tyron raised his hands and began to pull the first of the swords from his flesh. Here, he wasn’t helped by the effect of his own feats. With an entire camp full of soldiers, thousands of individuals, suffering from his magick, he was being healed at a decent rate, feasting on the life energy leeched from his victims.

Sadly, this meant his flesh had healed around the swords inside him, which made removing them all the more painful.

“Fucking… hell,” he groaned, ripping the first one free. Blood poured from the open wound, running down his side and leg before pooling on the ground. He looked at the other three still buried in his flesh.

“Damn it,” he sighed.

By the time the miasma began to dissipate, his wounds had largely healed. Monstrous Constitution had its downsides, apparently. He could endure the loss of blood and the muscular damage, which was good, but pulling a sword out of him turned out to be like ripping out of a tree, much more difficult than it should have been. As a result, the process was… messier… than he would have liked.

With the cloud gone, the spell had finally dissipated, allowing Tyron to move out of the tent he had been held in at last. Screams still filled the air, but less so. Each afflicted soldier was running out of strength, no longer able to give voice to their suffering, though they still experienced it, no doubt.

Stepping through the camp was like walking through a charnel house. The dead and dying littered the ground, tents had been torn down, temporary buildings shattered, several had taken their own lives in an attempt to stem their suffering, causing the stench of blood to fill the air. Once a neat and orderly camp, it had been reduced to this broken, stinking mess in less than an hour, and the soldiers who had built it had been the ones to inflict the damage.

Several looked up at his passing, reaching out with trembling hands, their eyes filled with rage, hatred and pain, but they were too far gone to do anything to him now. Tyron walked through the camp, completely naked, rummaging through the nearby tents looking for his clothes and equipment.

Unfortunately, he did not find them. Rather than continue to stroll around in the nude, he found a chest at the foot of a bed that contained clothing of roughly the right size and pulled them on. In truth, they were freshly cleaned and laundered and of a far superior tailoring to what he himself had been wearing when he was captured. The grime and blood that covered him instantly soiled the clothing, but they would more than do for the time being.

Suitably attired, he began to move through the camp more briskly while skeletons continued to appear through the now unguarded entrances. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. The command tent was notable for its size and location, largely central, its peak high above the surrounding tents.

Stepping inside, Tyron let his eyes adjust to the darkness and found the interior largely resembled the rest of the camp. Several officers, easy to identify due to their gilded uniforms, lay collapsed on the ground. Several were still alive, struggling feebly against the curse, while others had already grown still. Moving past them, Tyron noted the interior room, now shrouded in darkness without any lightsource, was almost empty. In the centre of the space, a four legged table stood atop a finely woven, embroidered rug of crimson and gold, a detailed map of the local topography spread out across its surface.

Seated behind the table, haggard, wheezing, hands clenched against the agonising pain, sat the man Tyron wanted to see.

“General Crow, I presume,” he said, stepping to the table and letting his fingers trail over the drawings. They were far more detailed than he might have expected, the streets and remaining buildings of Foxbridge sketched astride the river. Various notes, each scribbled with cryptic messages, had been placed around the map and weighed down with small, golden ovals. Presumably with a flat bottom to prevent them from rolling.

The Necromancer glanced toward the General and found the man glaring at him. It was the same look he had seen so many times already around the camp. Wracked with unspeakable pain, burning with unending hatred, and a fair helping of despair alongside. General Crow knew he was a dead man.

“I had hoped you wouldn’t flee the camp, as I’m sure you instructed several of your officers to do. They won’t get far, but I understand the sentiment. Trying to get word back to the central province. It’s your duty and so on.”

No healer could repair the damage done to a soul. Only the miracles provided by the Priests could hope to do anything, and perhaps not even they would have the power to remove Tyron’s curse.

“But yours was the soul I really wanted for myself,” Tyron said, placing his hands on the table and leaning down toward the trembling frame of the general. “Most of your troops are too far gone, there’s nothing left to save, but yours… it’s worth a little extra effort to preserve.”

Shaking with the force of his anger and disgust, the General peeled back his lips and spat on the floor, every inch of movement costing him dearly in pain and suffering.

“Ne–ver,” he grunted.

“Yes, well. You would say that, wouldn’t you? Murder a million peasants? No problem at all. Murder a thousand Nobles? Unthinkable. I’ll never decide which is more baffling, your loyalty, or your hypocrisy.”

No longer interested in the paper on the table, Tyron strode around and positioned himself behind the General’s chair, clamping his hands down on his shoulders and locking him in position.

The feeble struggles of the general were a sign of just how far gone he was, perhaps no more than ten minutes from death, his soul a tattered remnant of what it had once been.

“No time to waste,” the Necromancer said, clicking his tongue. “I think, in time, you’ll agree to work with me, General Crow. I can be quite persuasive when I want to be. After all, you did such a fine job leading these men and women into battle. Why not have another go?”

Lifting a hand, he placed it on the general’s head, then closed his eyes. Breaking apart his own spell wouldn’t be an easy feat, but it was within his abilities. Soul magick was unlike any other type of arcane energy; intrinsically linked with life and death, it was a part of both and behaved like neither.

“I… will… never…s-s-serve.”

Slowly, Tyron opened his eyes, then allowed himself a slight smile.

“Yes,” he assured the dying General, “you will.”