Book of The Dead

As it turned out, Filetta was quite correct in her predictions. Tyron was extremely busy as they made the mountain crossing back to Granin, despite the fact he barely moved from his seat. He was either communing with his horde through the relay that followed along directly behind him, or scribbling away in his notebook, occasionally raising his hands to flick out gestures and mutter words of power to himself.

Despite the icy cold, the bone-shattering winds and treacherous mountain path, he was exceptionally pleased by the progress he’d made by the time they reached the wasteland again. At the Woodsedge rift, the horde had fought a great battle against the kin without a living soul within hundreds of kilometres to tell the tale. With thousands of his new skeletons, along with sufficient wight and demi-lich support, he’d expected the fight to progress easily. As it turned out, he’d underestimated just how wild the rift would grow after months of being totally untended.

Insectile, scuttling monsters the size of barns, with scything arms the length of horses, had begun to push their way through. Doubtless these were the titanic creatures who’d smashed through the city walls and led the way to devastate the province after the break. With tough, thick plates of chitinous armour, they were incredibly difficult to kill and hard to keep away from his lines. In the end, several thousand of his skeletal warriors were lost in the fighting, though almost half of the casualties were able to be recovered afterwards.

No songs would be sung, no heroic tales told about the clash that occurred, or the incredible magick that he performed afterwards from the back of a wagon, taming the rift by slowly terminating the arcane energy pouring out of it. He didn’t care. For Tyron, all that mattered was the slight sense of satisfaction he felt knowing that, at one point, he had dreamed of being able to do exactly this. Full of naive hopes that he could make a difference and prove the world wrong, he had insisted on keeping his Necromancer Class, intending to show it would be effective in battling the rifts and driving back the kin.

Even in his wildest dreams he wouldn’t have imagined that he would eventually be able to perform a feat such as what he had just accomplished. Necromancers could, as it turned out, be a powerful weapon and help preserve the state of the realm.

Leaving a garrison in place, he recovered the damage to his horde as best he could before raiding any cemeteries and ruins for additional materials. This close to a rift, the magick was dense enough to make it hard to maintain a proper cemetery. Most of the bones buried at Woodsedge had already risen and needed to be put down before they could be properly utilised. Nearby farms and settlements generally burned their dead to minimise risk, so there wasn’t much to gather.

Once that was done, the bulk of the horde moved on, heading south. The rift at Cragwhistle needed to be managed, as did the larger one at Skyice. It would take a long time for the undead to travel the distance, moving from the northern edge of the province to the southernmost mountains, but they travelled surprisingly quickly.

Untiring, without need for water, food or sleep, the skeletons marched endlessly, kilometres vanishing beneath their heels. They consumed an astonishing amount of power to maintain such a pace, but Tyron was able to supply it. As the horde grew in numbers, they generated more and more of their own energy, so the cost of each additional minion lessened the burden of the whole ever so slightly. Tyron doubted there would ever come a point where the horde was entirely self-sustaining, but the lower the per-minion cost became, the larger he could expand the horde. At this stage, the growth of his army was becoming exponential.

Indeed, his ventures to the east had borne a great deal of fruit. Arriving at Weighbridge, the major trading port along the river before Kenmor itself, his minions had dug into the ruins with vigor, their master urging them on through the relays. To his delight, his store of alchemical materials was replenished after a mostly intact warehouse had been found with several pallets marked for delivery to the Magisters at the Red Tower. A lucky and somewhat ironic find, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and hurriedly stashed what he needed inside the Ossuary.

Becoming more and more familiar with the mechanics of mass graves wasn’t something Tyron had expected to experience, even after becoming a Necromancer, but he was starting to get the hang of it. Nobody could accuse the Golden Legion of being lazy, or lacking in diligence towards their work, but even they weren’t so thorough as to ensure every corpse was fully consumed by fire before they moved on. The top few layers of bodies were usually toasted, nothing left but wisps of ash, but beneath, especially closer to the bottom of the pit, the flames hadn’t properly penetrated and there were many usable corpses.From Weighbridge, Tyron managed to harvest a surprising number of whole skeletons, along with a vast supply of incidental bones he could use for crafting. With all the materials he needed close to hand, the skeletons in the area began to assemble a workshop in the centre of the ruined city.

With a delivery of cores being run over by a team of skeletons with their own relay after the battle at Woodsedge, he would have everything he needed to assemble more minions and additional Dimensional Conduits to connect with them, and day by day, the work continued preparing the remains.

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Teams of undead roamed the nearby countryside, raiding cemeteries and burial sites of the outlying towns and villages. A constant flow of materials hit the workshop and Tyron’s minions worked day and night preparing them to be raised.

Despite all of this incredible progress, it was his own personal project that had Tyron most excited.

Once the idea of trying to create his own custom magick had entered his head, he hadn’t been able to shake it off. A spell that he himself had designed, with no input or guidance from the Unseen at all, would be a milestone achievement. Of course, he had earned a few minor spells before his Awakening, but they were simple, unimpressive things. He had also gained several abilities before the Unseen had offered them to him, but those had been extensions of techniques and methods the Unseen had already provided.

This time, he was doing something entirely different, setting out to create a spell to fit the vision he saw in his mind. In a way, it was almost backwards to Tyron. He was picturing the final version of the magick in his head, how he wanted it to function, and then figuring out the spellwork to get there. Rather than starting from fundamental principles and building upwards, he was starting with a daydream and working down to the foundation.

An interesting challenge and one that he relished.

The initial question was one that tortured him for some time: just what sort of spell did he want to create? Some sort of debilitating curse to inflict upon his enemies? He already had a few of those, but he could use more, so why not? Or perhaps a spell to enhance the performance of his undead? He had a few of those already as well.

Scribbling furiously in his notebook, he envisioned dozens of different types of spells, offensive, defensive, but too often he would find himself thinking of what the Unseen had designed and granted to him before comparing his own thoughts and then discarding them.

What sort of spell did he want? A large one? A small one? Something he could cast quickly in the midst of combat, or something grand and devastating?

After seemingly endless hours of internal debate and dozens of rejected ideas, he decided to start small. As nice as it would be to create a swirling vortex of tangible spirits (something he considered), he decided to be less ambitious for his first attempt.

Something small, something direct. A combat spell that utilised his knowledge of Death Magick, Soul Magick and the foundational principles of spellcraft.

With a solid idea in mind at last, he was able to really get to work, constructing the spell piece by piece, developing the necessary arrays, then iterating on them, honing them until finally throwing them out entirely when he found a better way to achieve the same result. As each day passed, he grew closer and closer to a workable spell. After careful consideration, he began small-scale tests, never using so much magick that he couldn’t fling it away before it harmed him if things went wrong.

Although he didn’t realise it at the time, the days he spent crafting that spell were the closest he had come to being happy since his parents had died. It was pure, untainted magick, and he took quiet joy in applying his mind to the fiendish puzzle that was warping the fundamental nature of reality through force of will and arcane power.

Because it was incredibly difficult. Perhaps Tyron had grown too complacent, believing that he was especially gifted at magick. Now, creating his own spell from first principles, he realised the vast difference between himself and the Unseen. It was humbling, being forced to adapt his thinking again and again, throw out all of his work and start from scratch repeatedly until at times he wondered if he had made any progress at all.

He relished the experience, feeling as if he were a proper Mage for the very first time. Interestingly, there was no fugue-state, no dreamlike obsession. If anything, he felt like his father must have felt sitting across from the Io board on the rare occasions he agreed to play against his mother. Thinking so hard his head felt like it was steaming while his opponent danced just out of reach, slipping away from every trap and fending away every attack, no matter how incisive.

After a day of marching across the plains, Tyron stared at the page in his notebook, his gaze so intent an observer might think he was trying to burn the page with his eyes alone. Finally, he smiled.

It was complete. No matter how he looked, he couldn’t find a flaw. Each component had been tested and slotting them together had been a trial in and of itself, but finally, finally, it was done. Such a simple piece of magick and it had taken him an entire week to put together. He really wasn’t as good as people thought he was.

Yet, looking at the sigils on the page, he felt a profound sense of satisfaction. It might not have been much, but it was his.

He raised his hands, opened his mouth, and cast the spell. Without a proper target, it didn’t take hold, but the execution of the magick told him what he needed to know. It would work. He was done.

Tyron’s eyes rolled up in his head as his consciousness was subsumed. Visions of power rocked his mind while his body fell backwards into the bed of the wagon, facing up to the sky, still smiling.