Book of The Dead

“That son of a bitch,” Mage Captain Elinon spat, almost unable to believe what he was seeing.

Anger, outrage and grief rippled through the Golden Legion as if they were physical things. Men and women cried out, unable to contain their emotions, even through their ingrained discipline. The pain was raw, overwhelming, but the rage and disgust was even stronger. If the Necromancer had thought that what he had done would weaken the resolve of the Soldiers he faced, he had been sorely mistaken.

Aaron Parrol. That was his name. Elinon had seen him about the camp a few times. Serious young man, in his early thirties, in the Legion for a few years at least. He couldn’t remember what squad Aaron had been in, not precisely. The man hadn’t been a mage, but he’d been a comrade.

Still wearing his own armour, golden trim running along the shining steel, shield and gleaming sword in hand, Aaron Parrol had returned to the battlefield at which he had died. Only now, rather than brown eyes and dark hair poking out from the rim of his helmet, there were hollow sockets filled with ethereal purple light, and a fleshless, toothy grin.

Even from the rear of the formation, Elinon could see the Soldiers closest to their former comrade were pulling back from him, trying to fight something else. They didn’t want to be responsible for killing their own friend.

“Bring him down, dammit! Set him free!”

A Sergeant, sensing their hesitance, demanded they correct it. Rather than shy away from what Aaron had become, they needed to destroy it, immediately. It was the only way to set him free.

Elinon grit his teeth so hard he thought he heard them crack. Unable to contain himself any longer, he strode through the formation, pushing Soldiers aside, until he found one of his Mage Attendants, Melissa Bertram.

“Mage Captain,” she said, saluting him as she saw him approach.

After hours of battle, she was dirty, tired, exhausted, but the spark of fury in her eye told him everything he needed to know. She was more than up for the fight.“Pass my order to the mages. Bring Aaron down. And any others who show back up to the battlefield. Bring them down no matter what it takes.”

Meeting his furious stare, she nodded, understanding what he was saying.

“I’ll pass along the word immediately, Captain,” she assured him.

Elinon turned away, before he got sucked back into the battle. He’d been ordered to work on relieving the curse, and he wasn’t about to disobey, even if every cell in his body urged him to throw magick at the horrific puppet that had once been their brother-in-arms.

When he returned to the rear of the line, he could already feel the change behind him. When he turned, he saw the concentration of spells being thrown at the abomination. The undead raised its shield and ducked low, but there wasn’t anywhere it could hide from the barrage. If the Golden Legion’s armour and equipment weren’t so well made, perhaps that one salvo would have been enough, but the skeleton endured.

Forcing himself to look away and return to his assigned task, Elinon went to move back to the tents where the healers were operating. Except, he’d barely taken three steps before he felt it once more, that same ripple of powerful emotion sweeping through the ranks. He didn’t want to look, but felt almost compelled, unable to resist as his neck swivelled and he turned back to the frontline.

Another of their former comrades had strode out of the miasma, dented armour splashed red with what was likely to be their own blood.

Then another. And another.

Elinon felt bile rise in his throat.

~~~

Vitality flooded into Tyron. Soldiers were dying, more and more of them. Not a lot, not all at once, but the speed at which they were dying was much higher than it had been at the start of the battle. So long as Tyron had enough skeletons to feed into the grinder, he would win.

Only problem, he was running out. At the beginning of the battle, he’d had over fifteen thousand skeletons, the result of harvesting every cemetary and gravesite he could find for twenty kilometres in every direction. All of that exhausting work, creating noctic bone, forming weapons and armour for each and every one of them.

After hours of brutal combat, he was down to less than a third of his starting number. If he had to guess, the Golden Legion were still three-thousand strong.

But those Soldiers were growing weaker by the second. In another twenty minutes, fifteen hundred of those could become too afflicted to fight. Even now, he could see how sluggish the Soldiers had become, as if they fought through molasses.

Magick moved, Words of Power thundered and Tyron brought the Shivering Curse to bear once more.

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The Golden Dome protected the massed ranks arrayed against him, but not nearly as well as it had before. Frigid cold descended, lashing at the defensive magick and weakening it yet further. Any Soldier standing right on the edge would feel it affecting their extremeties, slowing them down even further.

With a mental command, Tyron called for his final minion.

From above, the wyvern crashed down on the centre of the line, bursting from the miasma and smashing into the front ranks of Soldiers. With its dense bones converted to the noctic form, wearing thick new armour plating around its head and shoulders, what was already a powerful minion before would be even more formidable now.

Gnashing teeth and thrashing wings, the wyvern bashed into the closest Soldiers, using its size and mass to disrupt the lines. With its thickened sinews, the creature drank in Tyron’s magick at a ferocious rate, but with so much of his horde destroyed, he had energy to spare.

After hours of constant casting, Tyron was beginning to approach his limits. Even now he was enacting another Raise Dead ritual through a demi-lich within the Ossuary while constantly throwing spells into the face of his opponents. Splitting his focus in so many directions at this late point may not have been wise, but he had faith that he wouldn’t make a mistake.

There would be no errors.

Without pause and without mercy, Tyron continued to batter the front line with spell after spell. Buffing his horde, stacking curses and unleashing a steady flow of offensive spells, never letting the pressure up for even a second.

He didn’t relent, unaware of the rictus grin on his face and triumphant light starting to blossom in his eyes.

Victory was at hand.

~~~

“You have to do something!” Merigold pleaded, tears spilling down her cheeks as she clutched at the arm of Honoured Stennis.

“I am only here to protect you. That is the limit of my remit.”

“You offered to go and fight before!” she demanded. “You offered to defeat the Necromancer single-handedly.”

For once, Stennis actually appeared troubled.

“I… should not have done that. You would not have been safe if I wasn’t by your side, even amongst the Golden Legion.”

She knew exactly what he was referring to. There had been numerous attempts on her life since she had left the Central Province. When he said she wouldn’t have been safe, he spoke the truth.

“Am I safe now?” she demanded, gesturing wildly around herself. “We’re in the middle of a battle, for Lofis’ sake!”

Gaze so hard it could cut through stone, Stennis spoke, his voice flat, but she could tell he was struggling with some deep emotion.

“As long as you are by my side, you are perfectly safe,” he told her. “Even here.”

He looked at her, something stirring behind his eyes, something she couldn’t read.

“But they are dying!” she screamed, pointing toward the miasma.

“Only the Emperor can direct my steps and he has placed me here,” he told her, his expression unreadable. “I cannot move without orders. You know what it is you carry.”

The seal of the Emperor hidden within the lining of her clothing. With it, she carried Imperial authority. Anyone who saw it was bound to obey whatever she asked them to do, in his name, in the name of the Gods themselves.

“If I take it out here, can I order you to fight?” she demanded. “Will you save them then?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he refuted her.

Of course it didn’t, that would be too convenient. She’d known he would say no before she even asked the question. Honoured Stennis wasn’t just anyone. He answered directly to the Emperor himself. A piece of paper, no matter how official, did not override the words of the highest authority in the realm.

Hopes crushed, Merigold felt hot tears begin to spill over and run down her cheeks. She tried to suppress her sobs, but they came anyway, torn out of her throat against her will.

She couldn’t bear it. She wasn’t made for this, wasn’t able to separate herself from the cold reality of events as she had so easily done before. Real lives, real men and women. No longer lines on a piece of paper.

Did she really have to stand here and watch them die, these people who had come here because she had made them?

In the depths of her despair, a thought came to her, and she seized it like a drowning woman to a jagged piece of flotsam.

“You will protect me if I’m in danger?” she said, forcing the words through clenched teeth.

Stennis nodded.

“No matter the cost,” he told her.

“Fine. Do your job, then.”

She pushed away from him, unable to budge him an inch, and turned toward the rising cloud of miasma in front of her. Not giving herself time to think, or to fear, she began to push forward, moving closer to the front.

“What are you doing?” Stennis demanded from behind her.

“Putting myself in danger. Don’t you dare lay a hand on me!” She cried as he stretched out a gloved hand to seize her arm. He retracted it as if he’d been scalded, an unreadable emotion in his eyes.

Not wanting to lose this chance, she pushed further forward before he could reconsider, shoving, pushing, asking, shouting, pleading, doing whatever she could to move soldiers out of the way and move closer to the Undead.

She didn’t belong here. It was unbearably hot, the press of bodies, every one of them so powerful they could crush her without even trying. Every time she was jostled, she feared her bones may be broken, but she didn’t stop. There was shouting, there was flashing steel, screaming, flashes of unbearable cold and the grinning skulls of the dead looming ever closer.

Over it all, the voice of the Necromancer rolled like thunder and crashed like lightning. Booming, warping, twisting, remaking reality, turning it from the light and into darkness.

It wasn’t possible for her to see the lance coming, she didn’t realise it was coming her way at all until Stennis was there by her side.

How he got there, she could never say, yet here he was, slicing through the spell with unspeakable ease, shattering the magick and saving her life.

“Stay behind me!” he snapped.

“I will, as long as you keep walking forward,” she retorted.

With a grim look on his face, he did exactly that.