Book of The Dead

Atop a floating platform lined with skulls and engraved with multiple layers of intricate ritual circles, Tyron stood, staff in hand and eyes closed. Under the light of the Grave Moon, the horde advanced, implacable skeletal footsteps eating up the ground rapidly.

”Are they going to fight?” Filetta asked him.

Without opening his eyes, Tyron shook his head.

”Ghosts can see that they’re pulling back. It looks like they’ve emptied out the border completely.”

”Cowards.”

She knew just as well as he did that this was the sensible decision for them to make. Tyron had been able to fight against the Golden Legion with a fraction of the skeletons he now commanded. Silver ranked house Soldiers and Magisters would be nothing unless they were in enormous numbers. Without every Noble house in the province banding together and fielding everything they had, he was confident his current horde could roll over them quickly.

It wasn’t hard to predict what they would do. Try to harry his flanks, chip away at the horde from a distance, whittle down his numbers while preserving their strength before attempting to defeat him in a single pitched battle. It was exactly the strategy that had worked against Arih’nan the Black before the fall of Granin.

”We keep on advancing until they stop us,” Tyron said blandly. ”They can’t let us keep on marching forever.”

To counter their strategy was relatively simple: he would advance until he found something they weren’t prepared to give up. According to the maps he’d studied, a large city was situated less than forty kilometres away, Baristaya, the shining jewel of the desert, with a population over a hundred thousand. Were they prepared to let him take it without putting up any resistance? Would the Nobles really evacuate all of those civilians and abandon their ancestral homes?

He doubted it.All across the line, his skeletons advanced, ignoring the feeble attempts of small Archers and Mages to nibble at the outer edges of the horde. His skeletons would endure, shielded and armoured as they were, any damage would be repaired by the demi-liches distributed amongst his forces, and even if a few dozen fell, what did it matter? Let them tire themselves out, expending magick, energy and arrows against skeletons that did not grow weary and felt no pain.

What they did do, however, was consume a vast reservoir of magick every passing second. So many skeletons, so many wights and constructs, including his new creations fueling the Grave Moons and miasma clouds overhead, required an incredible amount of arcane energy, far more than Tyron himself could possibly hope to sustain. He’d actually noticed an interesting phenomenon while assembling the full might of his horde out in the desert.

Their hunger for energy was so great, each individual skeleton sucking in power through their arrays, along with the far larger cores embedded on the constructs, that they created a very noticeable low-density magick area. Arcane energy, much like water, would flow inward to fill a vacuum, and he had been fascinated by the flow of power he’d seen as the horde drank in magick with its seemingly bottomless appetite.

Once their reserves had been filled, that inrushing flow had ceased, but now they were on the march, all of that stored energy being dumped out to fuel his ritual circles and drive the horde forward. Thankfully, his calculations had proven correct. With the full might of his undead army gathered in one place, they were able to generate a truly absurd amount of power. Enhanced by his feat, he felt almost giddy at the vast torrent of Death Magick flowing into the reserves.

Confident that everything was working as it should, he opened his eyes and looked forwards into the Southern Province.

Very little vegetation dotted the landscape this close to the desert, just a few scrubby bushes, low to the ground with deep roots to soak up the moisture from below. Not far away, he knew it would turn greener, as wide rivers that flowed into a delta to the north snaked across the land. Positioned right in the centre of the horde, he saw little but the smoking skulls of his minions in all directions, covering the land like a curse.

Behind him, the miasma foundry, by far the largest construct he had ever created, which would have been impossible without Master Willhem’s assistance, continued to belch out the rising column of darkness. As hungry for magick as it was, it soaked in every drop his minions produced, funneling the death-aligned energy into dense miasma that Tyron was using to shroud his army and blot out the sun.

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At night, he would power it down, funneling in the vast torrent of energy needed to fill the perfectly formed cores he had used in its construction, but for now they provided valuable cover and helped to empower his undead. Overhead, the Grave Moon burned with cold, malicious light. Drops of liquid Death Magick rained down from above, the moon sucking in power from the air and converting it at a monstrous rate. With such a high concentration of Death Magick passing over it, the land here would be transformed for years to come without an immense amount of effort being expended to purge it.

With Mantle of the Imperator rolling down his shoulders and his best iteration of bone armour yet equipped, Tyron felt quite safe and capable of defending himself. If he should fail, Filetta and his personal guard, marching in dense formation around his platform, would be more than capable of holding off anything that wasn’t a blasted platinum ranked Swordsman.

Over the land they marched, leaving the desert behind as the distance was eaten up under skeletal heels. At their current pace, it would only be a matter of hours before they reached the outer limits of Baristaya. House Soldiers continued to fall back before the horde, scattering in all directions, roving groups attempting to mount some form of resistance, but the undead continued to ignore them.

”I was expecting a bit more action,” a voice complained from beside Tyron’s platform. ”Southerners are supposed to be passionate, energetic people. Where’s the fucking passion? They’re scurrying like rats.”

Dove’s repairs had been conducted to the best of their abilities out in the field. At least he had two operable hands now, which meant he was capable of casting his full repertoire of spells. Tyron, still occupied with ensuring a hundred thousand undead were generally moving in the right direction and all of his wights understood what they needed to do, still had enough spare attention to say, ”There’s a difference between passionate and stupid, isn’t there? They’d be committing suicide.”

”There’s something to be said for passionate stupidity,” Dove said. ”That’s how I spent my teenage years. If they run away for a month, then they’ll have lost half the fucking province by the time they start fighting for something.”

”We will reach their first real test during the night,” Tyron said, still distracted with other matters. There was a group harrying the southern edge of the horde that had three Mages in it. Judging by the power and speed of their spellcasting, they weren’t terrible Mages, either. ”If they abandon the city, I’ll be surprised.”

”Really? I’m not so sure. If they didn’t want to stand and fight here, why would they when you reach the first populated city? They’ve chosen to flee like rats before the might of Dove, I don’t expect seeing a hundred thousand undead marching out of the desert is going to change their minds.”

Although the events took place too far for Tyron to see with the naked eye, they were just as close to his mind as the hand on the end of his arm. Wyverns, half a dozen of them, swept down through the clouds of darkness, diving at incredible speeds. He looked through their eyes as they fell down upon their prey, defensive magick coming far too late to make a difference. The fighting was short and sharp, the wyverns dashing the humans to the ground in a matter of seconds, crashing through their defenses and shrugging off their spells.

Careful not to damage their skeletons too much, Tyron seized control of the wyverns and dispatched his targets with sharp bites, ripping out their guts before stabbing a sharp claw through their chests to pierce their hearts. Lines of runes activated on bands of metal wrapped around the wyverns’ legs. Nearby souls had been captured, sucked into the repositories waiting within the steel.

Arrows and spells began to fall upon the winged minions as the other groups roaming around the flanks closed in on their position. Each of the wyverns snapped up a set of remains in their fanged mouths before they began to beat their ethereal wings once more, slowly gaining altitude and winging their way up into the clouds once more.

Those Mages looked as if they had some promise. Silver rank, possibly. They may make useful demi-liches, or at least some strong revenants.

”What are you thinking about?” Dove asked suspiciously. ”You seem distracted.”

”I can’t imagine with what,” Tyron said, opening his eyes once more. ”There are a few matters that demand my attention right now, Dove.”

”Yes, like me.”

Letting that comment pass him by, Tyron explained himself.

”I saw a few Mages who looked as though they might make promising recruits,” he said.

”Oh? Gave them the sales pitch? Promised a healthy sign-on bonus?”

”Something like that.”

Dove barked a laugh, perfectly aware of what had happened. Even now the remains were being delivered and stored, along with the captured souls of his victims. Soon, he would summon the Ossuary and work on them through his minions, scouring and preparing their bones before raising them as undead to fight alongside the rest of the horde.

Onward they marched, Tyron atop his platform, his mind rolling outward over the enormous army that covered a front dozens of kilometres wide, moving to encircle the city of Baristaya with the inevitability of an avalanche. Through the eyes of his minions, he saw the first of the small farming villages, completely abandoned, the people having been forced elsewhere. Clearly, they expected him to massacre everyone he came across to fuel his army.

He wondered how people would react when they realised he only wanted the Nobles and their Soldiers.

For hours they marched, until the furthest forward of his ghosts came within sight of the outer wall of the city.