Book of The Dead

Tyron and his ‘honour guard’ were the first to go through the rift. He wasn’t willing to send his skeletons into a fight he couldn’t see and risk losing many of them. Who knew what monstrosity could be awaiting him on the other side?

After holding his area of the defensive perimeter around the rift, he pushed forward and allowed the other slayer teams to cover the space behind him as he prepared himself to advance. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d crossed over a rift, but it was always a disorienting experience.

The rifts themselves were… difficult to describe. Rents in space, tears in the dimensional weave connecting two places which should never have touched. They weren’t neat circles through which a person could peer and inspect the other side before they crossed. Instead, a rift was like a hazy, shimmering area without a defined edge. Peering into the centre of the rift before him, Tyron didn’t see a warped view of the landscape on the other side, as if he were staring through a heat haze; instead, he caught fleeting glimpses of things he didn’t truly understand. Light and time and space and magick, all overlaid in strange, twisted patterns that his mind struggled to grasp. People weren’t supposed to see such things, the fundamental nature of the weave, of magick itself, as they interacted in the wrong space before him.

Almost, he felt as if he could grasp something, but he knew better than to stare too long into a rift. His mother had warned him of the madness that gripped mages who fell into that trap.

Some things our minds aren’t made to understand, she’d told him. Even if you gained something from the experience, you would be in no state to act upon it, your grasp of reality shattered forever.

So, filled with resolution, he stepped forward, and once again set his feet upon an alien realm. Physically moving through a rift was wrenching. His guts clenched and his head pounded at the sudden shift, but then he was through, on the other side. He ordered his skeletons forward, and for the rest to pile through behind him, the connection between them still stable through the rift.

There was too much to take in at once. Crossing was always dangerous, as the kin would gather most thickly around the rifts on this side. While only a few dozen might push through every minute, there could be hundreds here, waiting, circling, trying to push through.

Despite knowing that several teams were on this side already, the possibility existed he could be jumped by a ravenous horde of monsters the moment he crossed over.

Fortunately, that wasn’t quite the case. There were dozens of kin still hovering around the rifts on this side. Clearly, one of the teams had swept through not long ago, for there to be so few. At his appearance, the insectile creatures chittered and hissed in rage before they charged toward him. In moments, his troops were under attack, and his hands were moving, weaving magick to ensure he could secure his foothold.

The shivering curse slammed down, plunging the surroundings into freezing cold. His skeletons were unaffected, their bones untouched by the penetrating chill, but the kin were not so lucky. Many recoiled at its touch, but then plunged forward regardless, too maddened by the magick to resist the urge to fight and kill.

The tables were flipped in an instant. The cursed kin were heavily affected, severely slowed by the curse, allowing his vanguard of revenants and skeletons to hold them back. All the while, the rest of his troops poured through the rift, setting upon the monsters and shifting the numbers advantage to his side. Soon enough, the kin in the area had been neutralised, and the full force of his undead horde had gathered around him.

An easier crossing than he’d expected, but he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Despite having killed the kin in the area, the danger had not passed. A rift this size would pull kin towards it like iron to a lodestone for hundreds of kilometres around. If he remained here, it was only a matter of time before he was overwhelmed, or something too large for him to handle arrived.

Just like the other teams who’d come across, he wouldn’t remain here, but move some distance away and intercept the kin as they travelled towards the rift. In this way, he could cut down on the numbers reaching the other side in a safe manner, while gaining experience against the strongest that Nagrythyn could throw at them.

With his immediate safety secured, Tyron hurried away from the cluster of rifts, his skeletons pulled into a tight formation around him. Only then did he finally allow himself to take in his surroundings, and immediately froze in his tracks.

Whatever name would be given to the realm connected to Cragwhistle, it was an uninteresting place to look at. In fact, it was almost impossible to see any of it at all, as the entire place seemed gripped in a perpetual winter storm. Snow and sleet fell continuously, with fierce winds whipping up the ice that had fallen to the ground.

Here, though… he could see very clearly that he was in a different world.

The sky burned an angry purple overhead. Boiling clouds wreathed with lightning only allowed glimpses of the dark light that struggled to break through. The landscape was… a disaster. Spires of stone punched upwards, as if they were the tips of blades driven through the crust, and they were covered with hexagonal holes that formed a lattice pattern in the rock. Wisps of what appeared to be steam could be seen rising from them, and he struggled to imagine what was going on within, until he saw a pack of crawlers emerge, scuttling out of the holes and making a beeline toward the rift.

Was it from those strange pillars that the kin emerged? How were they made down there? The exact nature of how kin were created was either not fully known, or a well kept secret, for he himself had never been told, nor found it written anywhere. Perhaps there were monstrous creatures spewing out the corrupted kin like termite queens deep below, or perhaps they were formed purely from magick. He had no idea, and though he would like to know such a secret, he had no intention of learning it now.

No, what he needed to do was make sure he avoided those pillars at all costs as he headed away from the rift.

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Altering his course, he led his skeletal army between the pillars, keeping as far from each as he could, but it wasn’t easy. They were everywhere. The vegetation wasn’t very thick close to the warping effect of the rift, but the further he travelled, the more he found blue and purple grasses popping up in thick clumps, along with other tangled bushes.

It was nerve-wracking, and Tyron had never wished so much to have eyes in the back of his head. From any place around him, kin could spring up at any moment. They could be beneath his feet, separated by only a few metres of soil and stone, and he’d never know. He tried to stay vigilant, to keep his focus as razor sharp as he could, but there was something else pulling at his mind. An insistent voice that prodded and poked him, an itch that he was desperate to scratch.

The magick. The magick was so dense.

Only within the Ossuary had he experienced anything like it, but even that could not compare to this. His magickal sense was drenched in power. Every rock, every pebble, every blade of grass vibrated in his senses, rich with energy to the point he felt they themselves would jump up and attack him. If he focused his eyes in just the right way, he was sure he’d be able to see the power moving in great currents in the air, rolling over the land in wide rivers.

He clenched his teeth.

Once he allowed himself to look, to truly look, he wouldn’t be able to stop, he could already tell. Until he got somewhere safe, it would be madness to indulge in such a thing.

As if to prove his point, there was a rumbling to his right, followed by a pack of kin emerging from a pillar, squeezing themselves through the holes to emerge chittering into the open air. When they saw him, Tyron was already issuing orders to his skeletons. Arrows of bone flew through the air as his undead arranged themselves in ranks, his guard drawing tight around him.

The moment they laid eyes on him, the kin were possessed by the urge to kill that typified their kind. Uttering their eerie, high-pitched screeches, they charged forward, their lithe, many-legged bodies carrying them across the ground at high speed.

These weren’t the little ankle biters, these creatures were the size of horses. With their bodies held low to the ground, they scuttled at absurd speeds and could slash out with their blade-like arms at jarring angles. He ordered his shield-bearing skeletons to ensure they stayed between the foe and his more vulnerable minions. These creatures could cut through half a dozen legs with one sweep of their arms, putting huge numbers of skeletons out of commission.

With a sharp impact, one of his minions lowered his shield and caught the first strike well. Digging in its heels, the skeleton drew deep on Tyron’s power to hold itself in place and absorb the blow as the surrounding undead leapt forward to strike with their longswords. Before they could reach, the kin had already scuttled away, chittering madly as it circled, looking for another opening.

It was frustrating, but he needed to posture defensively against opponents such as these. Not for the first time, he wished he’d had the time to create mounted skeletons. He could use Raise Dead on horse remains now, giving him access to faster, more mobile minions, but learning how to stitch an entirely new type of musculature was a daunting task. He hadn’t even perfected his system for human remains yet! It was clearly too early for horses!

With his current abilities, there were still things he could do.

Once again, his hands flickered as he spoke the words of power. This time, he was aware enough to sense what was happening as he cast. His words caused the dense magick around him to almost visibly ripple, the arcane energy bending reality to his will in a way that manifested to the naked eye.

He could almost feel the sigils take shape around his hands, his fingers trailing through the power in the air.

When he unleashed the shivering curse, it burst out over a wider area than even he had expected. He’d juiced the spell, needing it to cover his entire force and a little beyond to slow the monsters as they approached, but working with such dense magick had pushed the spell even further.

Slightly intoxicated by the feeling, he began to weave another spell, shaping the magick, pushing the power he contained within himself out into the rich air of Nagrythyn.

Shortly after, the blades of his skeletons became wreathed in dark energy as the Death Blades spell took effect. With both spells in play, his skeletons would be much more effective against their much faster and better armoured opponents.

Empowered by his magick, the undead fought back against the kin. The moment the creatures entered the freezing field, they struggled to deal with the cold, recoiling, or rapidly slowing down. His minions pounced, plunging their blades deep into the monsters when they got the chance.

Before Tyron could get too lost in the feeling of casting in this environment, another disturbance shook him from his reverie. Behind him this time, another spire began to resonate with the scritching-scratching sound. Soon enough, another pack emerged, hissing and chittering.

The Necromancer cursed beneath his breath and made the mental adjustments necessary to shift his formation to accommodate this new threat. With more kin joining the fight, he suddenly felt his position was much more precarious. All the spires around him loomed much taller as he began to fear more kin emerging on all sides, surrounding him and his undead. There was no way to know how many there were, waiting to emerge, he could be a dead man already and simply not know it.

“Damn,” he muttered to himself, waking up to how dangerous of a position he’d suddenly found himself in.

With a mental command, he ordered his reserve skeletons to step forward and place down their burdens. Another thought, and the cauldrons were activated. Dense black smoke billowed upward and rolled over the field, blanketing his entire force in moments. His minions began to pull in the Death Magick contained in the cloud, replenishing their reserves and charging the arrays contained within each of them. Concealed in the darkness, his minions fought harder than before, empowered by the cauldrons.

Tyron himself wove magick again, this time around his eyes. In the moment, he was most concerned about the unseen kin still lurking in the spires around him, or just below the ground. Kin contained potent concentrations of magick because of the cores within them. If he used the spell which allowed him to see that energy more clearly, perhaps he could catch a glimpse of just how many monsters were in the vicinity.

Except, he’d miscalculated. Although the spell filtered out the Death Magick, it still made him more sensitive to the rest of the ambient arcane energy around him, and there was a lot.

The torrential flow of power around Tyron seized his awareness, sweeping him up and blinding him to all else. There were no skeletons, no kin; he couldn’t see a thing except the vast, sweeping currents of magick all around him, in the sky, across the ground, beneath his feet.

It was everywhere.

As he stared, he felt something tickle at the edge of his mind. Something about the movement, the pattern, the way it interacted with itself. The way it flowed, winding around itself, spoke to him on some level, and the more he looked, the more he felt there was something he was missing, something he felt he should know.

Meanwhile, more kin began to creep out of the spires, drawn to the surface by the disturbance.

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