Book of The Dead

From the freezing cold atop a mountain to the dry desert sands, the change in temperature was jarring.

Dustwatch Keep wasn’t as far south as Endless Sand, but the heat was already oppressive, the lack of moisture in the air almost punishing.

Not that the skeletons cared. Every day, Tyron was more and more convinced that he had made the correct decision with his choice of preferred minion. Undead that were affected by the weather? What was the point?

“Another rift dealt with,” Filetta sighed. “More charity for The Three.”

“Don’t forget they’re the only thing keeping us safe from the direct interference of four rather irked gods,” Tyron reminded her dryly. “They need us, but we also need them.”

“Bah,” she snorted. “Feels like you’ve been doing an awful lot for them lately.”

Looking at the dead kin strewn over the terrain before them, he couldn’t say his motives were entirely altruistic. Taming the rifts and leaving behind a garrison to prevent monsters from destroying his ritual circles was costing him quite a bit, but fighting the large monsters that congregated around the untended rifts wasn’t without benefits. Although Tyron didn’t bother to butcher the monsters himself, his minions were already hacking into the beasts, hunting for the cores which would soon be added to his stores.

After making so many relays in such a short span, his stockpile was greatly diminished, and without these regular injections of large- and medium-sized cores, building more constructs would be almost impossible. Perhaps even more important were the vast quantities of smaller cores he needed to fuel his basic skeleton production. Tens of thousands of skeletons meant even more tens of thousands of cores, which meant slaying an equal number of weaker kin.

His garrisons weren’t only a regular source of experience and levels, but a way for him to farm the materials he desperately needed. Not that he would ever admit as much to The Three directly.

“With this rift dealt with, the horde can march on to Endless Sand next. Once that is taken care of, I’ll send several groups across the desert. With a little help from the Dust Folk, we might be able to get into the Southern Province.”“You aren’t going to send the entire horde?”

“There’s no need to risk them. If one relay gets through, I can use it to bring the rest.”

It would take a while, since he’d have to move his entire army one Ossuary-load at a time, but it’d be well worth the effort. Crossing from the Western Province directly to the Southern was considered impossible. The Endless Sand Desert was exactly that as far as people of the Empire were concerned. If the Dust Folk didn’t kill you for tresspassing, then the total lack of water and food were likely to do the job.

And if they didn’t, then the monsters were an ever-present threat, far too dangerous for exhausted, overheated and dehydrated warriors to fight.

Undead, however, would survive just fine. The heat didn’t bother them, they didn’t eat or drink and he could support them via the relay the entire way through.

“I didn’t expect there would be so many new undead joining from Cluffton,” Filetta observed. “There’s plenty of minions to spare if you want to send more into the desert.”

“You never left Kenmor during your life, did you?”

“I was a dockside thief from the age of four. You think I had time for a vacation to the countryside?”

“Good point. Cluffton was a decent-sized city. With two Slayer Keeps that no one really wanted to live near, a lot of the usual industry surrounding rifts was there instead. Northwatch is similar in that regard. When you add in the trade moving from Skyice to the west, Cluffton was a major hub and the third biggest city in the province.”

His minions had worked around the clock for weeks after arriving in the ruins of the city. A single mass grave hadn’t been sufficient to hold so many dead, so they’d been forced to dig one near every major gate through the walls. Sadly, they had been more thorough in destroying the remains, perhaps due to the sheer volume they were dealing with, but a smaller percentage of hundreds of thousands was still a large number of viable corpses.

Sorting the bones had been by far the most difficult and time-consuming part.

“Can you ask Master Willhem to come here? I’d like to speak with him.”

Filetta looked at him oddly.

“You could summon him with a thought,” she said, confused.

Tyron nodded.

“I could, but I choose not to.”

“You summon ME through the conduit all the time!”

Now it was his turn to look at her with a quizzical expression on his face. Was she jealous? Of what?

“I talk to you more than anyone else, living or dead. If I had to have all of those conversations out loud, I’d never get anything done. Now can you go and ask Master Willhem if he can join me?”

“Fine,” she huffed, marching off towards where Tyron knew the demi-lich was working. She seemed somewhat mollified at least. Of all his undead, she was by far the most fascinating. He was keen to see how far she could go, holding on to some remnant of her humanity with grim determination. He admired that.

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Looking towards the rifts, Tyron could see the broken remains of dust devils and thorn lizards, well-known behemoths that broke through Dustwatch occasionally. There had been a swarm of the beasts when the horde had arrived, on both sides. As he watched, his minions were returning, carrying chests filled with cores harvested from the monsters they had killed after passing through.

Even though the Golden Legion had cleared the rifts when they’d come through, they had immediately abandoned them again, meaning the damage that had been done was significant. Even after being tamed, it would take time, perhaps years, before the rifts shrank to the size they had been when Tyron had Awakened. At least the volume of magick coming through was diminished, giving the realm he called home a new lease on life.

Although… he had tamed less than half a dozen rifts so far, but how many were there across the world. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

Glad to be distracted from that disturbing thought, he turned his attention to his former mentor drifting over the ground towards him.

Even Tyron didn’t know why the demi-liches refused to walk; it wasn’t like they couldn’t. Somehow, the moment they were reborn as undead, they instinctively knew that their feet no longer needed to touch the ground.

With nothing to lose, he thought he may as well ask.

“Is there any particular reason you don’t walk anymore, Master Willhem?” he asked respectfully.

Drifting to a halt in front of him, his old master hesitated for a moment before looking down at his feet, the ground several inches below them, and then back to Tyron.

“I don’t want to,” he said with finality.

I tried, Tyron thought to himself.

Maybe it was simply a function of how light they were. A demi-lich, counterintuitively, didn’t want thick, reinforced bones, hardened and more dense, but rather they wanted bones like a bird, as hollow as possible. This allowed room for more Arcane Marrow, the crystalline structure that held their vastly improved stores of magick.

As a result, they were light, far lighter than his other minions. They didn’t wear armour, carry swords, spears, axes or shields either. Most were content with robes, maybe a helmet and some padding for their shoulders and chest. A human skeleton only weighed ten to twelve kilograms, on average. Tyron had made a study of this. Despite the work he performed on their remains, a demi-lich’s skeleton would weigh no more than twenty. Keeping them aloft wouldn’t take much energy.

After all the work the Unseen had done to his body, Tyron had no idea how much he weighed, but it was possibly in the range of two hundred kilos or more. There would be no graceful floating for him.

“You wanted to see me?” Master Willhem asked him.

Tyron shook his thoughts out, focusing on the Arcanist.

It was difficult to see his old master in the undead creature before him. Master Willhem had never been a large man. Wiry and thin, hunched with age, he had always looked more like a greedy weasel than a proud lion, but he had possessed a presence that others had been forced to respect. His fierce intelligence, ruthless dedication and once-in-a-generation talent had burned in his eyes, even after greed and selfishness had embedded themselves in his life.

That intelligence remained, burning in the hollow sockets of his skull, but the ambition and hunger were gone. Willhem was a creature without purpose in the world. If Tyron offered to set him loose as a spirit, to eventually be dragged to the Realm of the Dead and meet his fate there, he would probably accept.

“How… have you been?” Tyron asked, somewhat lamely.

The demi-lich hovered in silence for a long moment.

“Fine?”

Tyron nodded.

“Good. That’s… that’s good.”

An awkward silence threatened to form, only prevented by his old master snapping out as he so often had in life.

“Don’t be wasting my time, boy. Did you call me for a reason or not?”

It was so unexpected to hear that tone from the old man that Tyron couldn’t help but smile, surprised and heartened that an ember of Wilhelm’s personality still smouldered within the undead.

“Is that any way to speak to the Necromancer who raised you?” Tyron joked.

“I’m dead, boy. What are you going to do, kill me?”

“No, I’m not going to do that.”

Tyron looked at the demi-lich, weighing the words he might use.

“How are your skills?” he asked, seemingly as a tangent.

Mater Willhem raised his skeletal fingers, flexing them with clear irritation.

“They’re… not what they used to be,” he said.

It hurt his pride to admit it, too. Despite his death, Willhem was proud, unbearably proud, of the heights he had achieved in his craft. He had ascended to the highest peak a non-Noble had been allowed, stepping over so many others from more privileged backgrounds than himself in the process.

“Are your fingers not dextrous enough?” Tyron asked.

“They’re fine,” Willhem admitted begrudgingly. “It’s my skills. I’ve done everything I can to train myself and try to regain them, but I just… can’t. I can do what you need me to just fine, but not what I used to be capable of.”

This was the true source of the old master’s listlessness. The reduction of his abilities had been a far greater blow to him than Tyron had appreciated at the time. Without his life, or his fortune, or his status, his craft was the only thing that remained for Master Willhem, and that had been diminished.

Even so, Tyron hesitated. Was it right to offer this? Should he?

To achieve his vengeance, he definitely should, but Willhem was, perhaps, the one undead he would compromise for.

Ultimately, he decided to leave it to the master. Willhem would make his own choice.

“I may… have a way… for you to recover what you lost,” he said.

Immediately, the demi-lich’s focus was on him, burning into his eyes with tangible intensity.

“I can’t be certain, but I think the process will be… difficult. Painful,” he clarified. “Very painful. I need to work with your soul, directly, and make changes to the structure of the Arcane Marrow in your bones.”

Should he?

Tyron hesitated, then forged ahead.

“Also, if you desire, I could… bind a reliquary… or a phylactery, as a receptacle for your soul. I haven’t worked out the process completely, but it would effectively make you… well… immortal, I suppose. So long as the device remained whole.”

Master Willhem floated in silence for a long, silent minute.

“I don’t care for immortality,” he said finally.

Tyron looked him in the eye.

“I believe the process might remove the limitations placed upon you by the Unseen. You could get back to gold. Probably even platinum.”

The demi-lich’s skull tilted a fraction to the side.

“... but I do like the sound of that,” he said.

There it was. The hunger. Ambition that roared like a bonfire, burning in those hollow eyes.

Death had taken everything away from Master Willhem, but finally, Tyron had found a way to give something back.

“I’ll get started immediately,” he said, smiling.