Book of The Dead

Tyron leaned back from the table with a sigh. He moved to wipe the sweat from his brow, but hesitated when he caught sight of his hands. He looked around for the bucket of water he’d drawn, then grimaced when he noticed the decidedly red colour of it.

Were there chunks floating in it as well?

Once upon a time, such a sight would have sent the Necromancer running for a nearby bush. Now it merely caused his stomach to gurgle in protest. Progress.

“And yet, I can’t find it in me to be happy about it,” he muttered to himself.

Holding his two bloodstained hands up in front of himself, he pushed the door open with his hip and glanced around the courtyard.

It looked far better than it had two days ago. The first major improvement was the lack of dead bodies on stakes. He’d taken them down and decided he would put the remains to work instead of burying them. The farmers hadn’t deserved the death they’d gotten, but they didn’t need those bones any longer. The worst damage of the fight had been repaired, the fallen bandits had more than earned their place on the chopping block.

He had little choice but to grip the handle of the hand pump with one hand to get the water flowing, and from there he was able to scrub himself clean. Grime and thick blood clung to his skin and he had to be vigorous to remove it all. Red water flowed around his feet as he washed, spread across the packed dirt in oily trails.

“Ah… sorry to bother you,” a soft voice spoke behind him.

Tyron whirled to see a whisper thin brown haired woman clutching a bucket behind him.

Tyron cursed himself. He was too distracted and didn’t notice her walking up to him.

“Uh… no problem,” he said. “I’ll just… get out of your way.”

He awkwardly stepped to the side and shook his hands dry, trying not to look at the spreading blood water.

I hope to heck that wasn’t her husband.

Once the thought struck him, he had to be somewhere else, so he stammered out an apology and beat a hasty retreat. Once he was back inside, he quickly shut the door behind him and took a moment to collect himself.

“I fucking hope that wasn’t her husband,” Dove remarked.

“Gods, I know,” Tyron groaned.

“You could have just buried them. Little cold carving their family members while they’re right across the courtyard.”

“It was your idea, you bony bastard!”

“You didn’t have to agree.”

“That’s… true. I just need the bones.”

And he did. His tests had to continue. The only way for him to improve his skills was to practise and attempt new methods. In order to do that, he needed a steady supply of remains.

“I saved their lives,” he said, “so I’m entitled to…”

He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but that didn’t stop Dove from finishing it for him.

“Their husbands' corpses? Fucking hells Tyron, that is cold. My spiritual nips are shrivelling over here.”

“Oh, shut it,” he said.

He resolutely ignored the skull as he set about tidying up. With a few mental commands he had the skeletons on hand gather up the various buckets and tubs he’d filled to take outside and dump in the midden he’d had them dig.

With that done, he tried to put his embarrassment behind him as he gathered up the bones and took them to the second floor. Once he’d gotten them upstairs, he moved from room to room, adding bones to his various tests and experiments.

Having an entire second floor to work with was truly a luxury that he hadn’t experienced before. It was certainly superior to crouching over piles of bones on the floor of a cave. It was a shame he wouldn’t be able to stay long, but for now he’d take advantage of the facilities.

Once he’d disbursed his latest haul, he made another pass through the rooms, checking the progress of his various tests.

With more time on his hands, he’d been able to carefully assess each of the bones, one by one. Searching for any damage or cracking and repairing it, sealing any magick leaks, ensuring they were clean and dry, everything he could think of to ensure they were in the best possible condition.

With time and practice, his ability to use magickal senses to detect weaknesses in the bones was becoming more clear. It might not make much of a difference to the end performance of the minion, perhaps as little as a few percent, but that mattered to Tyron.

To be as efficient as possible, he needed the best possible undead. If they were going to draw on his energy to fight, then they better be using it well. Also, he felt he was being disrespectful to the dead if he didn’t try as hard as he could to create the perfect minions from their remains.

If he was going to desecrate their bones, he may as well do a damn good job of it.

He pushed the awkwardness behind him as he stepped from room to room, using his mind to peek at the minute, shifting energies contained in the various groupings of bones.

He was on the verge of a breakthrough, thanks to Dove, but everything had to be confirmed and measured before he was prepared to celebrate. After he’d checked on everything twice, he walked downstairs and sat heavily in the wooden chair in the kitchen.

“When was the last time you slept, kid?”

Tyron thought about it.

“I haven’t slept since the attack,” he admitted. “I know. I’ll rest soon.”

The skull was silent for a moment.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“You killed a fair few people in that attack. It’s going to rattle anyone.”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it, Dove.”

“Yeah, and what are you going to fucking do about it? Kill me? You locked me in this prison because you wanted a mentor, so swallow your piss weak pride, suck your balls up into your sternum and accept my wisdom. If not, that’s fine, release me already.”

The Necromancer grit his teeth for a moment, pulled in a deep breath before he released it all at once. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but he also didn’t want to lose the Summoner’s advice. Without Dove, it’d be just him and Yor, and that thought was more frightening than he’d like to admit.

“Alright. Lay it on me, Dove. What have you got to say?”

The purple eyes of the skull flared with baleful light.

“What’s that tone? Am I your fucking dad? Are you in a rebellious phase or something? Tyron, you’re on the run from the authorities, making life and death decisions in a race against time to grow your power. You do not have time to sulk about killing a bunch of shithead bandits.”

“I’m not sulking!”

“My ethereal-balls you aren’t. You’ve been working yourself, pardon the pun, to the bone over the last two days.”

“Dove, I always do that. I did that before I’d even awakened.”

“And what were you running away from then?”

Silence.

“That’s what I thought. Look, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t push yourself, obviously you need to go as hard as you can, but you need to work on your fucking mind. If you’re running away from your stress, it’ll affect your work, build up over time and you’ll blow up at exactly the wrong moment.

“You’re going to kill people before this journey is done. Probably a fucking ton of them. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better off you’re going to be.”

“I didn’t want to kill anyone, Dove,” Tyron snapped. “I wanted to hunt rift-kin to level up. I wanted to protect people. I wanted to prove that I can use this class as a force for good!”

“Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing? Good people tend to limit the number of people they put on a stake to roughly zero. I really don’t think you murdered any saints the other day.”

“Don’t say murdered,” Tyron flinched.

“Offed? Killed? Slaughtered? Laid to rest? Pushed off the mortal coil? Sent to the embrace of the Five? Torso-fucked with a sword? I’ve got more.”

“You know what, murdered is better than some of those.”

“At least you didn’t try and say it was the minions rather than you doing the killing. That’d be completely gutless.”

“The minions are literally in my head. We can’t exactly be considered separate…”

“Cowards will try anything,” Dove said matter of factly. “I know you’d rather not face up to this reality, kid, but you’re going to have to. And soon, unless I miss my guess. The survivors will either come back in greater numbers, or they’ll run east until they find the law and come back hunting with the marshals.”

In truth, the Necromancer had hoped they would come back that same night. With little time to plan, or recover from the shock, they would have been easy pickings. Two days with no sighting of the bandits, or their apparent leader, was worrying.

“How long until we have to move on?” he asked.

“Two more days at the most. This is a good place to work in, but too many people have seen you and the boneheads. When the Slayers eventually sweep through, they’ll know you were here. You need as large a head start as you can get by that point.”

“Unless…” Tyron said slowly, “I can find and eliminate all of the bandits. No one can talk if no one is alive.”

“You were feeling miserable about killing people a minute ago, now you want to mass murder? That’s fucking character growth right there, kid. I’m impressed.”

“I’m trying to stay alive here, Dove,” Tyron scowled. “That’s different from the other day. I could have walked away.”

“You probably should have, but here we are. Look, even if you kill all those pricks, you really want to put the women and kids in a position of having to lie to the marshals? That’s a crime, in case you forgot. I think their lives are going to be hard enough, don’t you?”

Tyron slumped in his chair. It was true. When he’d found the survivors of the farming community locked in those rooms, the things they’d gone through had been written all over their faces. He didn’t think he would ever forget their glassy stares. Even the kids…

With their husbands dead and the farmhands having rebelled, it would be almost impossible for them to work the land, or even hold onto it. It had taken these families generations to build what they’d had, and now it was lost.

He couldn’t ask anything of them.

“You’re talking a lot of sense,” he admitted sadly. “I’ll make plans to head out tomorrow.”

“If you can, talk it over with Yor tonight. She’ll agree with me.”

“I will.”

The two sat in silence for a few minutes as Tyron focused inward and tried to settle his roiling emotions. He felt a little better, after his talk with Dove. He didn’t think he would ever become comfortable with the thought of killing people, he certainly hoped not, but he also couldn’t deny the bandits had deserved what they’d gotten.

He just wished someone else had done it.

“Enough of that depressing shit,” the skull finally said, “how are the bones doing? Was I right?”

With a chance to talk about something else, especially his craft, Tyron’s eyes lit up as he sat forward with excitement sparking in his eyes.

“I think so,” he enthused. “Another day to tell for sure, but yeah, I think you got it.”

“Hah! Simplicity itself. Don’t underestimate a Summoner, kid, we are a cut above. It’s easier for me to see because I’m looking down from a higher angle, that’s all it is.”

The skull's boasting wasn’t anything new, but Tyron had to admit he probably should have thought of it himself.

The key question they had considered was how wild undead were created. Someone died in the wild, somewhere with strong magick, and the process started.

That much was obvious.

They didn’t know exactly how it began, but the magick would begin to change into death-attuned energy, just a tiny mote to start with. Then that speck would start to jump from bone to bone, growing and multiplying over time until the skeleton became fully saturated. At that point, the threading would occur naturally; a simple mind, possibly a remnant spirit, would be infused with the skeleton and bam, wild skeleton.

Due to their testing, they also knew you couldn’t start the process unless you had a full skeleton. Tyron couldn’t put a bag full of femurs in a room and then come back to find them bouncing about on the floor.

Which was a good thing, otherwise how could he store them safely?

But then Dove had a thought. What if they started the process, but then removed part of the skeleton? Would it continue until the bones were saturated and create a half-skeleton? Or would they only half fill with energy?

Could they take ten skeletons, lay them together to start the process, then take all the leg bones and stick them in a room, all the arms in a different room, the skulls in another, and would the saturation continue afterwards?

Turns out, yes it would.

Twenty tibia together in one room were happily bouncing death magick between each other. Twenty shins in another were doing the same. It would take another day for them to fully saturate, even with Tyron helping to speed things along, but he couldn't wait to see what happened.

Would the skeletons try to pull themselves together from different rooms to form a wild undead? Or would they just stay in place? If he brought them back together, would the bone threading begin to form naturally?

He hoped not.

The best outcome would be if the bones didn’t knit together on their own, at least for long enough for him to complete the process himself and then raise the minion as his own.

He’d be creating a fresh undead with fully empowered remains, soaked in death energy, and with all the benefits of his abilities. Better threading meant better movement and greater efficiency. His mastery over Raise Dead meant less wasteful conduits with his minions.

Perhaps even more importantly, if he didn’t have to empower the bones with his own magick, he could shorten the ritual and cast it using less of his own energy.

It would shorten the time needed significantly. Or, better yet, he could use that time to make improvements on other parts of the spell. The magick conduit was always a focus, but the mind construct placed in the skull was another place he could make dramatic gains.

Unfortunately, he had no idea how to get started on that, mind magick wasn’t something he’d ever looked at. But get started he would. He was confident he could puzzle it out, given enough time and a few clues.

If these methods proved effective in creating better undead, he was confident that refining them was all he would need to push his skills to ten.

To say he was excited about it was an understatement.

“Just don’t perform the ritual until you’re confident you’ve reached the point you need to reach,” Dove advised. “Once you hit twenty, that’s it, you’re cooked. Time to upgrade the class if you’re ready or not.”

“I know that,” Tyron scowled, “who in the entire empire doesn’t know that?”

“Just a little friendly reminder, kid. No need to get your balls in a twist. I’ve seen a lot of slayers muck up and go too early. After you offed all those guys the other day, you just can’t take the chance. They might have only put you up one level, they might have given you all three. Better not to chance it.”

“I won’t.”

The light in the sockets of the skull gleamed.

“Good. All you have to worry about then is if those idiots come back and try to kill you.”

Tyron sighed heavily as he pinched the bridge of his nose. He really was tired.

“I thought they’d have come back already, to tell the truth.”

“Might be taking them a while to work up the guts. Or perhaps they got scattered and haven’t been able to get all their people back together.”

The two sat and thought for a while before the Necromancer looked around suddenly.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“How the fuck would I know?”

“You know what I mean, Dove. How long until Yor is back?”

“Couple of hours, I think. Why? What’s gotten up your arse? Not Yor? I didn’t think she’d be into that… then again she has a very dominant personality.”

“Shut. Up. Dove,” Tyron grated. “It’s not that so much as I’m worried she’ll eat the survivors over there. I don’t want to rescue these people only to have them sucked dry by someone ostensibly on my side.”

“I wish she’d suck me dry.”

“Of what?!”

“... ectoplasm?”

“That’s not a thing!”

“Look. Obviously you’re stressed. If you’re that worried about getting attacked, why don’t you put your fucking skills to use and learn a little more about who these guys were, and what they were planning to do?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Are you a Necromancer, or what? Go Necromance! You can speak to the dead can’t you? Aren’t you doing it right this second?”

“Oh. Right.”

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