Book of The Dead

“So you had a chat with the bandit leader and told him to fuck off?”

“Pretty much,” Tyron confirmed.

“You really intend to die for a group of women and children? I mean, noble as hell, admirable even, but I didn’t think this was your goal. Didn’t you have some shit you wanted to do?”

Dove sounded exasperated, and he was. He sympathised with Tyron’s position, he wasn’t a monster. The poor widows they’d found had been abused, raped and forced to watch their families die, alongside their children. It was inhumane and cruel on an almost comedic level. Why the hell were a bunch of idiot farmhands putting people through this ridiculous level of suffering?

So the kid wanted to protect them, obviously, that was the natural impulse. But Dove couldn’t shake the opinion that if he stayed and tried to fight, he would most likely die.

“Tyron, as much as you might feel like a badass, you have to keep in mind how weak you are,” the skull tried to explain, “you’re still not level twenty, still with your base class. Your stat gain is basement level horse dung and you’ve no access to advanced skills and spells. You’re as weak as the piss they passed for beer back at the Knight’s Corner.”

Holy hell that pub had sucked.

“Anyway. If you try and fight thirty men by yourself, even labourers, you are going to get your clock cleaned. That’s not a good thing, by the way.”

The Necromancer frowned, irritated.

“And so what if you’re right? Just because I’m likely to lose, I’m supposed to walk away? Leave those people to suffer and then be murdered at the hands of scum?”

“You’d be alive, which would give you a hell of a lot more agency than if you were dead, you hear me? Once you die, it’s over… for most people. My situation seems to be a little unique. You wouldn’t be around to raise yourself.”

Tyron placed both his hands flat on the table.

“I know you’re only looking out for me, and more than that, I know that you’re right. I probably can’t win. I will most likely get myself killed and that’ll be the end of it. But I promised myself, Dove, I promised that when I started this, I would use my Class to help people. It would be almost impossible to find a more clearcut moral decision than this one. I have to stay and prove that Necromancers don’t have to be evil, that I can save lives and contribute, even with this Class.”

The young man’s eyes burned with determination, and Dove could only sigh as he realised he wasn’t going to convince him.

“I hate to break it to you kid, but I seriously doubt they will ever change their opinion on the legality of Necromancers.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t try,” Tyron stated. “Now, enough of this rubbish, we’re just wasting time. We need to think about how we win. What’s the first move?”

“Pray?”

“Dove…”

“Alright, fine. Let’s wait for night time, hopefully they won’t attack before then, and have a chat with Yor. If you’re lucky, she’ll let you lose your virginity to her before biting your throat out. That’s the only way I can see you getting lucky before death, kid.”

The young man groaned and leaned forward until his forehead rested on the table’s wooden surface.

“Look, my ability to appreciate the stakes here and take it seriously is a little lacking and I don’t think I’m entirely to blame for that,” Dove defended himself. “If you want some real advice, even though it won’t get you laid, you should talk to the widows and ask them to help. If any of them can shoot a bow that’ll be a huge help.”

“I talked to them before I came back here,” Tyron spoke without lifting his head from the table. “Their lives are at risk, I had to tell them first.”

“That’s a surprisingly mature move of you. How’d they take the news?”

“How do you think?”

“I think they were traumatised all over again.”

“Exactly.”

“But, and this is crucial, can any of them shoot a bow?”

“Annette said they would do what they can. They know they can’t run and aren’t exactly happy about the idea of going back under the thumb of Monty. They’re acting as lookouts for us right now. There’s someone in each of the four buildings on the second floor.”

“Right. That’s awesome.”

Tyron lifted his head, the skin having gone red from being pressed into the hard surface.

“Any other bright ideas?” he asked the skull.

Dove thought for a moment.

“Not much, to be honest. You need more minions, you know that much. Either you hold off for a few more hours and use the ones upstairs, or you get to work on some fresh bones now. Other than that, there isn’t much you can do. Unless you have… other magick you can draw on in a pinch.”

“Uh…” the Necromancer hesitated.

He could use a ritual and contact one of the patrons. The only issue being, he had no idea if their intervention would be a help or a hindrance. What would happen if he contacted the court again? Another vampire dropping in on him? Perhaps one less willing to wait before turning him into an undead, blood drinking nightmare. No thanks. The Abyss? He may be able to learn something useful, but he may lose his sanity in exchange. He wasn’t so foolish to assume he had experienced the worst of what that strange realm had to offer. As for the Dark Ones… who knew?

Despite his dire circumstances, he didn’t feel he could justify taking the risk of enacting one of the rituals he had learned from Anathema.

And he was surprisingly comfortable with that. The decision had been made to avoid leaning on the sub-class as much as possible and he wanted to stick to that.

“No,” he shook his head. “I haven’t gotten anything I can use.”

“Then we are back to bony boys,” Dove said. “If someone is looking out for you, then get upstairs and work on them bones. You aren’t much good for anything else.”

As much as Tyron wanted to argue that point, he couldn’t. At his level, with the collection of skills and spells that he had, he wasn’t useful outside of creating minions.

“Alright, you might as well come up to.”

He grabbed the skull with one hand and made his way to the second floor. Checking in on his tests, he could tell the bones were nearing full saturation. In a few hours he’d be able to use them to raise new skeletons, but did he dare wait that long?

Did he have to?

“Can you think of a reason I couldn’t gather some of the bones together and start threading them?” he asked.

Dove thought for a moment.

“Not off the top of my bald shiny head. As far as we know, the bones won’t start to form a wild undead unless there’s enough skeleton to create a functional one. If you put the leg bones together, they shouldn’t start to knit themselves and walk around.”

Tyron pinched his brow as he considered the problem.

“We can play it safe enough that even that shouldn’t be an issue. I can gather feet and shins together, hands and forearms in another room, then the ribs spine and hips in another. I’ll keep the skulls separate and only bring them in at the last minute. That way I can do almost all the threading in advance, and the bones should gather death magick faster considering there will be more of them in proximity.”

“Makes sense to me. Crack in.”

Which is exactly what he did. With the widows and their children on the lookout, he absorbed himself in his work. The Necromancer almost ran from room to room, gathering the bones as quickly as he could and placing them in their new configurations. The moment things were in place, he began to work on the threading, starting with the ankle joints.

Gathering the many small bones of the feet together and connecting them to the shin was a pain, complex and time consuming. It was also massively important. Without a properly functioning foot, the resulting minion couldn’t even walk, not especially useful, and Tyron has spent a great deal of time fretting over ways to create a better woven joint. He wouldn’t say that he’d mastered it, but he’d certainly come a long way from the early days, his more recent minions were better balanced and possessed a much smoother gait, which meant they could walk a lot faster.

One those were done, he jumped to another room and worked on the hands and wrists. Another finely detailed piece of work. Holding and striking with weapons involved a huge variety of muscles and joints in a humans, and although he didn’t need to replicate that level of complexity, he still had to do a lot of threading before his skeletons could articulate all of their fingers and properly rotate their wrists.

He completed ten hands in a row before he ran to another room and started working on ten spines. All the while he kept checking on the amount of death magick contained in his specimens, waiting for the moment they reached full saturation. They were close now, the flickering energy that moved between them continued it’s mysterious jumping, leaving behind traces of magick in its wake.

Any moment, Tyron expected someone to rush into the room he was working in and tell him the bandits were coming, or to cry out in fear and pain as Monty and his crew sprung out of the long grass and attacked. But it didn’t happen. As he continued to weave one segment after another, sweat dripping from his nose and he concentrated fiercely, working as quickly but flawlessly as he could, there was no attack.

Perhaps his threats had scared the bandits? Perhaps they were waiting for nightfall in order to sneak up on them? Or maybe they’d abandoned the farms, unwilling to fight a strange mage they didn’t know or understand.

Whatever the case, they gave him enough time to complete his work.

Tyron and Dove watched anxiously as the bones continue to accrue death attributed magick, the energy in each climbing until they were full, at last. The two nervously observed the bones, Tyron carrying his friend and advisor from room to room as they watched to see if anything would happen.

If the arms suddenly came to life and tried to strangle the life out of him, he’d like to see them coming, after all.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Piece by piece, he began to assemble the first skeleton, working on the joints as he brought the legs together, connecting them to the hips, then attached the arms. When everything was in place, he collected the skull and put it down in its place.

The moment he did so, he could feel a strange energy come over the remains. The air around the bones was different, and he felt a faint stirring of magick within them. Before anything could happen, he hastily finished his work, stitching the neck together and enacting the ritual.

As he spoke the words and felt the power flow out of him, Tyron was shocked to realise that something was pushing back against him, but as he exerted his will, it quickly faded and the spell took hold.

Without the need to laboriously fill the skeleton with his own magick, the spell was relatively easy to cast, not requiring him to invest nearly as much arcane energy. He constructed each of the components required for a complete minion and brought the ritual to an end, watching cautiously as his new servant pushed itself to its feet.

It sat in his mind just the same as any other minion, and responded the same when he gave it instructions. Despite that, he still felt something was… different about it, he just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

But since it didn’t try to bite his face off, he decided that was good enough and got to work on the others. For several hours he worked without rest, bringing the bones together and completing the final elements required at a furious pace before completing the process with the ritual. Each time, something pushed back on him, but he quashed it successfully and proceeded with the cast.

By the time the sun fell, he had ten, brand new minions, perhaps his finest to date, lined up before him on the second floor.

“Anything different about them now that they’re all up and together?” Dove asked.

Tyron stared hard at the skeletons, then extended his senses towards them.

“There’s something…. I just can’t tell what,” he muttered.

He stepped toward them.

“Perhaps if I examine them a little closer…”

A shout went up outside.

“... or not,” he said and swiftly ordered all of his skeletons to gather on the ground floor.