Deus Necros

The bodies were stacked with a carefulness that made them feel like inventory rather than the dead. Some were wrapped. Some were bare. Some looked like soldiers, others like peasants, others like things that had never been human at all.

The shelves of books hummed with a silent malice that made Ludwig’s spine tighten; even without opening them, he could feel the weight of forbidden knowledge clinging to their bindings. Tools gleamed, bone saws, needles, hooks, strange instruments whose purpose made the mind recoil. Everything was clean in the way of a butcher’s block, scrubbed too often.

Then the centerpiece, a coffin of Ice with a body that seemed to not have aged a day after its death. A young man’s body, close to Ludwig’s age, with dark hair and dark eyes. It had all of its body parts preserved besides one piece that was missing. An index finger on the right arm.

The ice coffin sat like an altar among rot. Its surface was clear enough to show the body within as if displayed. The young man looked asleep rather than dead, skin unblemished, hair lying neatly, features calm in a way that suggested he hadn’t died screaming. The missing finger stood out precisely because everything else was intact; the absence was a deliberate wound in an otherwise perfect preservation.

Ludwig pulled out the coffin and placed it inside the room where they stood.

The coffin’s weight was significant, frost biting at Ludwig’s fingers through the air itself as it emerged. It landed on the stone floor with a low, solid thud that the wards swallowed quickly. Cold rolled outward from it, washing over Ludwig’s boots.

His mind searched the place and found the Jar of gold. Where he also pulled it away. Placing it in the room.

The jar appeared heavy, its gold surface dull rather than shining, etched with tiny seals that crawled around it like insects frozen in place. Ludwig’s hand tightened around it as he brought it out, feeling the faint resistance of layered warding.

Just then, he inspected the body.

He leaned closer to the ice, eyes narrowing, letting his gaze trace the preserved face, the lines of muscle, the stillness that was too perfect. He did not touch it yet. Touching dead things had consequences in his life.

[Name: Unknown.]

Race: Human.

Age: 22

Status: [Dead] – [Preserved]

Lore: An unknown body that has a strange constitution. Albite dead, one can still sense magic running through its veins.

The words sat clean and cold in his sight, confirming what his instincts had already whispered: the body wasn’t ordinary. Ludwig stared a moment longer at “strange constitution,” and felt a faint irritation at the system’s refusal to name what mattered. Unknown. Of course.

“Looks too simple for something to be a center piece…” Ludwig said.

He straightened slightly, eyes still on the corpse. Simple bodies didn’t get coffins of ice. They didn’t get preserved like relics.

“That’s because it is. This body isn’t simple. It’s able to sustain more magic than that of an Eight Tier mage… though it died because of that very reason. It had too magic for its own good, and he never met a proper teacher. A body of a young man who had too little dreams…”

Kaiser’s voice softened around the edges as he spoke, the way people speak about wasted potential. Ludwig’s mind snagged on “eight tier,” feeling the scale of it, the absurdity of a young human body capable of holding that much was frightnening. Only old foggies and monsters like his master could have that potential.

“You speak like you knew him.” Ludwig’s tone stayed flat, but his eyes narrowed. Knowing was dangerous. It made this less like a resource and more like a story.

“Yes, I encountered him back when I was… Alive. And couldn’t get him to follow me to learn magic,” Kaiser said.

The pause felt deliberate, as if Kaiser still tasted the word alive, as something lost. Ludwig could almost picture the scene: a young mage, barely anything, standing before a gifted peasant and trying to sound convincing.

“Why not? Weren’t you Op back in the days?”

Ludwig’s snark slipped in easily. He leaned back a fraction as if the question itself was light, though his eyes remained sharp.

“OP?”

Kaiser’s confusion was immediate, a small crack in his composure.

“Strong, I mean powerful.”

Ludwig corrected without apology, expression unchanged, as if unwilling to waste time explaining slang to a dead man who had lived too long.

“When I met him, I was barely a second circle mage. He couldn’t trust me, and preferred to remain with his parents. They all died in a village too far away from anyone that knew what a gift he had. I even requested my teacher to take a look at him, but he refused, saying nothing good ever comes from a peasant’s body…”

Kaiser’s voice carried a quiet resentment as he spoke of his teacher, the refusal sounding like a scar that never healed. Ludwig could feel the shape of that world: peasants dismissed, talent wasted, pride guarding the gates of knowledge. “Nothing good ever comes from a peasant’s body” was the kind of thinking that killed futures without spilling blood.

“I see… I suppose you returned too late.”

Ludwig’s words were simple, but the thought of dying with potential unachieved sat ugly in his stomach. Too many people died in silence while others argued about status.

“When I was a fourth circle mage, I tried to find him, since by then I was at least more convincing and richer. But I was an hour too late. When I arrived, his body went into Mana Deviation and his heart simply stopped…”

An hour. Ludwig felt the cruelty of that measure. Not a year, not a day, an hour.

Mana deviation was basically like drowning from the inside, the body refusing its own power. He imagined arriving to see a corpse still warm, still twitching with leftover magic, and felt his jaw tighten.

“Unfortunate,” Ludwig said, “I suppose you didn’t want to bring him into Undeath then.”

He kept his voice even, but his eyes narrowed again at the preserved perfection. Undeath would have ruined this. Or perhaps Kaiser had refused for reasons less noble.

“I still believed that light magic was the way back then, so I just preserved his corpse… and when I became like this, I couldn’t use that corpse since I don’t have… your ritual.”

Kasier carried a bitterness in his words, like he could hear his younger self and despise him for it.

“And what about that Jar?” Ludwig asked.

He lifted the gold jar slightly, feeling its sealed weight in his palm. The etched markings seemed to catch the room’s dim light and swallow it.

“Open it,” Kaiser replied. “But don’t be too surprised…”

The warning did the opposite of calming Ludwig. He set the jar on a table, fingers finding the cap, feeling the resistance of seals that did not want to be disturbed.

Ludwig twisted the cap open to find a finger, a curled index finger, surprisingly matching the one that was missing from the corpse. Though this one was less preserved and more mummified.

The smell that slipped out was not rot. It was something sharper, old and arcane, like blood that had been steeped in magic for years. It was positioned almost carefully, as if it had been placed with reverence rather than stored like meat. It matched the missing piece too well to be a coincidence.

[Inspect]

[Index Finger of the Lich King Ashkar.]