Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

It was night.

After the morning’s activities with Kistana, he had spent the afternoon with his freshly post-partum wives and two new sons, Balthus and Tybalt, Junior.

The evening belonged to Vidalia and Mariella - they had elected to share their nights recently - which meant much less lust than it once would have implied, and much more cuddling and watching Junior and Balthus.

The babies’ wide-eyed gaze at everything made Tybalt feel oddly old by sheer proximity. Everything was new to them. Everything was fascinating.

Things that Tybalt had taken for granted were watched with fascination, joy, or suspicion by these infants.

We have two whole little people we’re completely responsible for, the necromancer thought a bit giddily. And, I’m not sure I can be trusted with this responsibility.

Gradually, the evening wound down. Bedtime came before Tybalt knew it.

Time for visions, as was their custom.

With Vidalia’s powers still growing as she and Tybalt fulfilled vision after vision together, it was possible for her to ease their path to sleep.

First, she coaxed the babies into restfulness. Though they still couldn’t sleep through the whole night without feeding, she could ensure that the wake to sleep and sleep to wake processes were smooth.

Then the women arranged themselves, sandwiching Tybalt and the infants between them.

And Vidalia used her powers once more.

In a matter of seconds, Tybalt, Mariella, and Vidalia dreamt together.

They came to awareness in a vast open blackness.

“Where should I take you, lovers?” Vidalia’s voice asked from behind Tybalt. Mariella was positioned in front of the necromancer in the dream, and she took his hand as he thought about the question.

“Show me the ogre horde first,” Tybalt said finally. He had not yet received any news from Baldwin, or the two Beastkings he had dispatched with the revenant and the ogre horde. There was no reason to be worried about Bloodlady Ragga and the ragtag army following her.

And yet the necromancer felt a slight, strange foreboding about them.

“That’s a good idea,” Mariella said. She ran a hand over the necromancer’s arm. As he looked into her eyes, he could tell that she felt some of his tension.

“As you wish, my king,” Vidalia said quietly. “I’ll reach out and try to find some activity…”

The world dissolved and remade itself. A scene unfolded itself before their eyes.

It was the black dark of a moonless night outside, but to the three floating above, the world was lit up by Vidalia’s power. They found themselves on the outskirts of a large village. Below and ahead of them, Tybalt thought he estimated around thirty to forty structures, mostly small houses.

More directly beneath the necromancer and his wives, a dozen wolf beastfolk crept along the ground, approaching the village silently from both ends.

As the trio watched from on high, the wolf beastfolk found the meager security of the village, a handful of men walking around at night time. The watchmen patrolled with such lax attention that the wolfmen managed to draw within striking range of their adversaries on both sides of the settlement without setting off any alarm.

The men were bored, talking amongst themselves. Three of them were throwing bone dice, engrossed in some sort of game that probably involved gambling from the coppers on the ground. It seemed obvious they had no idea a threat was coming.

The wolfmen punished that carelessness.

They swept up out of the long grasses that grew around the village in two smooth sets of movements and rushed the men.

The watchmen managed to briefly cry out, but then they were butchered, hacked apart in less than thirty seconds with the long daggers the wolffolk had brought with them.

They hadn’t managed to do a thing to their ambushers.

There was only a small stir from the village.

A child’s voice cried out. “Mommy?!”

Another voice from the opposite end of the village, groggy. “Did you hear…?”

The lead wolfman, who Tybalt recognized as Wolflord Karel, put two fingers to his lips and whistled.

Then, without waiting for any further signal, several hundred ogres appeared at the periphery, beyond where the necromancer had been observing. They charged into the village, body first, slamming into walls without even using weapons, then bringing down clubs and stone axes on those they encountered once they had made contact.

The village roused, but far too late to do anything about it. As the first adult male heads poked out of huts, they were frequently just in time to be crushed to bloody pulp under the crude weapons of their attackers.

The second wave of reactions was mostly women and children screaming as their husbands dropped dead in front of them.

Then the ogres reached the women and children.

“What are they doing?!” Mariella exclaimed.

Neither the necromancer nor the foxgirl answered her.

Tybalt and his wives had arrived just in time to witness an entire village being slaughtered - and not just that, though that would have been objectionable enough, especially to Mariella.

The ogres here were back to their old ways. Killing, yes. Smashing the heads or ripping out the hearts of every resident, from the frailest old woman to the smallest child. Also eating the flesh of their victims, half-raw, half-cooked on the fires that the brutes used to burn their homes down around them. And they didn’t stop at that.

The males had their way with the human women, too.

It sickened even Tybalt, who had seen much the same thing done to beastgirls repeatedly in the past. Those victims weren’t humans, the thinking went, and they were destined for death on the Kingdom’s spears, so they had no rights to any dignity at all.

Tybalt had never agreed, but he had turned a blind eye, once.

He had thought that part of his life was long past him now. He had thought that he had changed how war was waged in his part of the world. Brutal and bloody still. That was a given in warfare. He hadn’t had any illusions that he could transform that, especially not when he had chosen to take control of the ogre horde.

He could not turn his nose up at thousands of troops.

At least, he had felt that way at the time.

But the necromancer thinking he was in any way better, because his undead army did not commit the same atrocities, had been a vain delusion.

As Tybalt, Mariella, and Vidalia watched the ogres brutalize the helpless civilians, the necromancer shared at least some of the fire mage’s outrage. He was human, too. These were fellow human women and children. It had bothered him when this happened to beastfolk, until he had been involved in so many bloodbaths that he grew numb.

Seeing this done to humans was fairly new to him.

Seeing it done in his name, by troops nominally under his command, was something intolerable. There were no undead with this force - it appeared to be in the hundreds, a mere splinter of the horde off on its own - or Tybalt would have demanded to be woken up immediately so he could Teleport over there and slaughter the ogres.

As things stood, he had no way of precisely locating the village.

Vidalia, Tybalt observed, did not share his and Mariella’s visible tension. Her little brow furrowed, but he could not see the same outrage on her face that he knew he and Mariella felt.

It made sense. The beastfolk all harbored some amount of desire for vengeance. On some level, maybe she wanted to be happy that the humans were reaping some of what they had sown. Except that now she had a human husband, a human co-wife, and a human son.

How did that affect the emotional equation? What was his little vixen thinking about while he and his fire mage were respectively observing what was going on and stunned into silence?

It’s not really my business, Tybalt thought. Even if she was enjoying watching it a little bit, I wouldn’t love her any less for that. I have a little sadism in me too.

“Have the two of you seen enough?” Vidalia asked quietly. “The babies will wake up soon, wanting a feed.”

“I want to listen for names,” Mariella said, her expression shifting into a snarl. “I want to memorize the faces of the participants. I - I’ll burn them alive. I told them—”

She stopped as Tybalt placed a hand firmly on her shoulder.

“You’ll do no such thing,” the necromancer said.

“What? Do  we just accommodate this? Is that what we signed up for when you subdued the ogres? I thought you won the dominance struggle with Ragga. I…”

Tybalt gave her a hard look, and she trailed off.

“Sorry,” Mariella said after a moment. “But you know my feelings already.” She looked away, but at least she didn’t try to shrug off Tybalt’s hand.

“I didn’t say we accept or accommodate anything,” the necromancer said evenly. “But you’re a handful of weeks from having given birth. Those are fucking magic-resistant ogres. You’re not going to go and burn them alive. That’s a very stupid plan. We’re smarter than that. They wouldn’t stand still for being burned to death, no matter how many dominance struggles I’ve won. Plus… as a whole, the ogre horde with its associated human and beastman components, has almost as many soldiers as we do. Whatever we do, we’re going to be smart about this. But no, I don’t accept this. I won’t allow it to continue.”

“Maybe the ogres are a weapon we can’t point at civilians,” Vidalia said quietly, speaking for the first time since they had entered the dream. She reached over to Mariella and took the fire mage’s left hand in both of her small, delicate ones.

Tybalt felt some of the tension leave the fire mage’s body.

Then the dream began to fade.

When the necromancer opened his eyes, he saw Mariella’s face first. They had slept in that position, with the Tybalt and the babies sandwiched between the two mothers, the necromancer’s back to Vidalia and front to Mariella. The adults all slept bare-chested. That allowed each infant to feel the warmth of both its parents at once.

“You—”

“I’ll be all right,” Mariella said. She wiped away the tears gathering in her eyes - the first thing Tybalt had noticed upon waking - and continued speaking. “I’ll be all right if we actually solve this problem.”

“We will,” Tybalt said. “The problem might be the nature of ogres itself, though. We gave them a very clear directive. If the problem is the ogres…”

Mariella sucked in a breath and looked down. At almost the same moment, as if mother and infant were in perfect sync, their son began to cry.

“I’m going to feed Balthus,” the fire mage said quietly. “Then I should take a bath. Just a quick one. I don’t want to keep you two from sleeping. But I… feel dirty. We should probably resolve this first…” She bit her lip, still not looking at him.

But Tybalt could tell what she was thinking. He heard it in her voice. The reluctance. There was a part of her that didn’t want to be in the room for this conversation. He could guess why. She demanded a solution to this issue. But she thought the solution would be horrifying. Something that would make them no different from the Kingdom. And perhaps she couldn’t be present for that, couldn’t support it even if it was the only answer to what she demanded.

Mariella shifted slightly, raised baby Balthus to her left breast - slightly more swollen with milk at the moment than the right - and began to give him what he needed. As the fire mage fed her infant, Tybalt could hear Vidalia beginning to do the same thing from behind him.

“How do you want to solve this, darling?” Vidalia asked over the sound of small, suckling mouths working.

“We still need the ogres for the moment,” he said. “But you’re right that I don’t want them turned on civilian targets now. If they can’t follow orders, if they just destroy whatever they see and… despoil it, then they’re no better than rabid dogs. I was hoping we’d actually recruit some people from these destroyed villages, and I told Ragga that. Now they’re a bunch of corpses in condition that makes them less than ideal even for undead. Even if I was willing to tolerate the actual acts the horde has committed, they make us look monstrous. We want the Kingdom to fall into our lap when we take the capital. If word of this spreads too far, the ogres will spark rebellions against our rule before we even take the throne.”

“I think this is a part of the ogres’ nature,” Mariella said very quietly. “I think… they’re not like the beastfolk.” She swallowed, obvious guilt spreading over her face.

“You’re right,” Tybalt replied frankly.

Her eyes flickered up to examine his expression.

“Am I?” She had been hoping he would disagree, he saw now. She wanted to be wrong.

“They’re a lot dumber than we are,” Vidalia said. “To start with.” She let out a little chuckle.

“I need to find out if Ragga actually passed on our orders to the ogres under her command,” Tybalt said. “If they’re actually incapable of obeying, I need to find a medium term solution to that, some way to avoid them devastating the whole population. If it’s Ragga’s fault, I need to remove her personally and assume direct command.”

“It would be nice if it was Ragga’s fault,” Mariella said, stroking her baby’s dark-colored hair as she spoke.

“It won’t be,” Vidalia said simply.

“I’m going to go take that bath now,” the fire mage said, giving Tybalt a slightly nervous, guilty look. She rose, carrying Balthus with her, and entered the bathroom. Tybalt heard the sound of water running, and then the door closed.

“You can always share your burdens with me, darling,” the foxgirl said from behind the necromancer.

He turned to face her. Despite the implication in her words - I will plot with you, whatever heinous deeds must be done - she looked the picture of innocent, angelic maternity, their little sandy-haired boy clasped to her bosom, her features still lit with the glow of pregnancy, blonde hair like a halo around her rosy cheeks.

“I don’t want to kill all the ogres,” he began.

“Right.” She waited.

“But I think Mariella and I are questioning whether it’s even possible to coexist with them peacefully. I’ve never heard of peaceful ogre settlements.”

“Me neither. Half-ogres seem to be all right, though. My people have detailed histories. There have been ogre-beastfolk marriages in the distant past. They seem to be drawn to our features. Some people think animal ears and tails are cute, right? Anyway, the offspring aren’t… like what you saw in the dream. At least, they seemed to show some self-control. It wasn’t something the histories noted as a negative.”

“So, what? We breed the impulsive violence out of them?” He gave a short laugh.

“If anyone can do it, you can, my king,” Vidalia said with faux seriousness. Then her expression became more sincere. “Truly, I think that is an actual solution. Perhaps the only… palatable one.”

Right. Mariella had left, Tybalt presumed, because she believed that total ogre extermination might be on the table, and she didn’t want to be a part of that conversation.

“All right,” he said, gritting his teeth as he recalled the Kingdom’s similar policy toward the beastfolk. They would not commit… those acts. “I’ll come up with short and medium term solutions myself. In the long term… we establish an ogre outbreeding program.”

I won’t repeat the Royal Army’s crimes. I’m better… No, I will be better than that. The people around me need me to be. Mariella needs to be able to look me in the eye. All of them need to be able to raise sons and daughters who can look up to their father.

And that wouldn’t be possible if he committed ogre genocide, even if a part of him thought that was a rational solution to this.

“That’s enough on that topic,” he said. “Before we know it, Mariella will be done with her bath, and you’ll put us all back under. When we go back in, I want to see our present and near term threats. And we should probably check on her father…”

“Are you all right, darling?” Vidalia asked quietly. “I know how Mariella feels, and we’ll comfort her together… but you. Are you all right?”

He forced himself to shrug. “Me? I’m just pissed that they’re disobeying my orders. I’m their king. I wanted them to destroy villages and burn the countryside, but I also explicitly said to try and recruit new forces where possible, not to commit atrocities like eating people and violating women.”

“Right?” the foxgirl said. “Who do they think they are? Humans?”

The necromancer grabbed Vidalia’s waist, turned her towards himself, and lightly slapped her on the ass.

“You know what I mean,” Tybalt said. “You saw what I saw. They’re worse than the Kingdom’s soldiers… or even bandits.”

“That they are. But it won’t be easy to break them of that. In the short term, it might not even be possible. And you know as well as I do, this problem does have a short term component.”

“Every tool has a proper use.”