Book of The Dead

The countryside slowly rattled past as the cart followed a winding dirt track through the foothills. Tyron sat in his customary position toward the back, a femur held in his hands as he passed it back and forth, trying to focus his mind on it.

He’d been this way for hours, and Dove was starting to get sick of it.

“What crawled up your arse and died?” he demanded.

“W-what?” the young mage looked up, surprised.

The skull that contained the Summoner’s spirit sat wedged between two bags of bones so it didn’t bounce around in the back of the cart, and Tyron found his glowing eyes, frowning.

“You’ve been sitting there squirming with a sour look on your face, not saying anything for hours. We both know what’s bothering you, let’s talk about it, let’s flop it out and examine it in the true male tradition.”

“Dove, you don’t need to insert your dick into every situation.”

“That’s what my wife said.”

“Wait… you were married?”

“No, not in the legal sense. Or the romantic sense. It doesn’t matter. Stop trying to change the subject! Murder. We were going to talk about all the murder you’re planning on doing.”

Tyron’s features twisted and he leaned forward to bury his face in his palms.

“This is why I didn’t want to talk about it,” he groaned. “I was hoping to avoid thinking about it at least for a while.”

“Except you didn’t avoid thinking about it, did you? Every time you tried to focus on that chunk of bone you got a look on your face like you were about to throw up.”

“That obvious, was it?” Tyron sighed.

“It was even more obvious than that if I’m being honest. I’ve seen slayers with dysentery that had a more placid expression than you had on. If the concept of murder is so disturbing to you, then why are we out here trundling about on the plains?”

“You know why,” the Necromancer grumbled.

“Explain it to me again. Just for funsies.”

“So I can get experience and resources to keep advancing my Class.”

“So, your plan is to murder a bunch of people in order to empower yourself?”

The mage lifted his head and set his jaw.

“Yes,” he said.

As much as he might try to dress it up, that was what he was going to do. He could make an argument that the men he was planning to kill were terrible, evil even. Rapists and murderers, they would be killed by the marshals eventually, once Annette and the others reported their experiences to the authorities. Did that make it right for Tyron to take the law into his own hands?

No. Not even close.

Little by little, he could feel himself being chipped away. Only the day before, he had taken the spirit of a person, a human being, and offered it to an otherworldly creature in exchange for knowledge.

Was it really a soul? Was it a psychic imprint on the ambient magick from the moment of death? Did it matter, in the end? He refused to handwave his responsibilities away with weak justifications. The only way to face his actions and choices was head on.

Ultimately, all of the morality boiled down to a single question that he continued to ask himself every day. He’d asked it as he stood in the dark, stone in hand, preparing to conjure a spirit. He’d asked it as he looked into the Abyss for the first time, and felt the madness imprisoned there creeping into him. He’d asked it as he stood, shovel in hand, over the open grave of a recently departed member of his own community.

Will you do this thing, or will you abandon your goals?

Was he willing to turn his back on all that he hoped to achieve, to reach the heights his parents had achieved, to be a force for good in the world and help turn back the tide of rift-kin that was slowly burying the realm in darkness? Or would he forge ahead, against his own instinct, against what he thought was the right thing?

It was wrong to hunt and kill human beings to empower himself. It was an unarguable fact. Yet he was going to do it anyway, because he would rather do that than abandon his hopes and dreams.

“Am I a selfish person, Dove?” he asked.

“Yes,” the response was immediate.

A flicker of pain crossed through the Necromancer’s eyes. He’d known it, but it still hurt to hear it said. He liked to think he wanted power for the right reasons, but ultimately he still wanted it for himself.

“Kid, everyone who pursues the heights is a selfish piece of shit in this place. You have to be, really. Altruism is nice, don’t get me wrong, it’s great even. But any person who was able to scale the precipice and achieve those kinds of levels of personal strength is automatically selfish. The resources they had to expend to get there, the effort, the time, the energy, all of it could have been directed to another cause, but instead, it was devoted to the self. Your parents are a perfect example, Magnin and Beory do whatever the hell they want and always have.”

“They’ve helped a lot of people.”

“That’s a byproduct of their search for freedom. You know that as well as I do.”

“They’ve never murdered anyone.”

“First, you don’t know that. Slayers are asked to do all sorts of shit when they reach the top end. Rogil had us hunt down criminals a few times. They didn’t get a trial, let me tell you now. Second, do you think they would have committed murder if it was the only way for them to grow strong?”

They would have. They wouldn’t even hesitate.

He didn’t like to admit it, his parents were heroes in the eyes of the public, but he knew them better than anyone. The drive for adventure, and freedom, was all consuming inside those two. They would have pushed for it at any price.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is, fuck Monty and those pricks. Heck, resurrect those arseholes and murder them twice. Don’t get all in your feelings over a gang of literal pieces of walking shit.”

“I get what you’re saying, but that doesn’t make it right.”

“Kid. Tyron. Who fucking cares if it’s right? Not this entrapped spirit, that’s for sure. These guys need killing, you need levels and skeletons, it’s winning all around.”

They didn’t speak for a long moment as the cart continued to rumble forward. Eventually, Tyron broke the silence.

“Thanks, Dove.”

Without the support of the skull, he likely would have driven himself mad by now. He knew he was in the wrong, but at least he felt a little better about it.

“No problem. Now, rather than moping, hopefully, you can start doing a better job making sure the marshals aren’t about to leap over the ridge and punch us in the face.”

“I’ve been checking….”

“Sure you have.”

Tyron sighed and worked his magick for a moment. When it was complete, his eyes flickered before being overtaken by vision from another source. Looking through the eyes of his skeletons, he scanned their surroundings before he dismissed the spell.

“Still nothing,” he said.

“Those bony boys have shocking eyesight. You really think using them for your lookouts is appropriate?”

“Unlike you, I don’t have a spirit bird I can whip out to spy on things. Skeletons are what I have, so that’s what I have to use.”

He had four out there now, moving carefully through the brush while the rest of his minions pulled the cart. Every now and again, he would look through their eyes and see if anyone was drawing close. Out here on the plains, he was at constant risk of discovery by slayers and marshals. Hopefully they wouldn’t care enough about these relatively empty places to search thoroughly for any stray kin.

“Which is why - “

“Summoners are superior,” Tyron sounded out along with him, rolling his eyes.

“Nice to see you agree. Now if you’re finally in a good headspace, let’s see if we can work on your new stuff.”

“You mean my Minion Modification Skill?”

“Exactly. How does that even work?”

It was an… interesting ability, albeit a powerful one. Tyron had never really considered the possibility he’d be able to make changes to minions that had already been created. Adjusting a ritual that had been enacted was very different from reforging a blade. A ritual was a complex magickal construct with many moving, interlocking pieces. Sticking his hand in the middle and tinkering with it was, generally speaking, bad for the ritual and not great for his hand either.

Except in this metaphor, the hand would be his mind.

Yet this new Skill enabled him to do just that. It was remarkable.

“It’s… weird. It’s like I can peel back layers of a minion and work on them before patching it all back together. I’ve only attempted it a few times, it’s such a strange sensation. I can even start to unravel their bone weaving and change sections.”

The skull absorbed this information.

“I don’t think you understand how powerful that Skill is going to be in the long run. Having undead lagging way behind your current standard can get you killed. Not to mention the insane efficiency gain. You’ll go through less remains to maintain a full contingent of your best minions, and you don’t even need to find remains to practise your Skills.”

Tyron frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you want to work on your Raise Dead, for example, you can bring over one of the bone-crew and start poking at the ritual. It might even give you insights you wouldn’t otherwise get, being able to modify it after it was cast.”

That was… true. Tyron hadn’t really considered it that way. He quickly ordered one of his skeletons to approach and watched as it awkwardly climbed into the back of the cart amidst the bags filled with bones.

“Workaholic,” Dove sniffed.

The young mage grinned as he got to work, beginning to extend his magick and examine the conduit that lay between the skeleton and himself. Being able to make modifications as it functioned was an incredible opportunity and he wasted no time in starting as he commented back and forth with his friend.

Despite how engrossing the magick was, in the back of his mind, the locations of the remaining bandits burned like candles. No matter what he did, it was impossible for him to truly dismiss them from his thoughts.

They weren’t that far away. He’d likely run into a few of them tomorrow. A group of six, or perhaps seven, had broken off from the main group and appeared to have settled somewhere close to the foothills.

Spectacularly unwise.