Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

Tybalt and Vidalia lay together in bed, both naked and covered in sweat, spooning.

“So, you’re a seer, little vixen,” Tybalt said, stroking Vidalia’s ears.

“I am, darling,” the foxgirl agreed, leaning into his touch.

“I’ve never asked, but when you use your visions, do you have to look at the future?” he said. “Only the future, and dreams? Or can you look at things going on in the present, in the real world, too?”

She shifted a little uncomfortably in his arms, her tail pressing itself flat against her body.

“Why do you ask?” Vidalia said quietly.

“It’s not because I want to know if you spied on me naked or something before we met.”

She instantly seemed to relax.

“I mean, you wouldn’t have a problem with that anyway, right…?”

“So, I wanted to know if we could avoid looking at the future for a little while,” Tybalt said, fully ignoring her question. “Instead, I thought it might be good for us to look at what the biggest current threats are, to both us and the Kingdom. We’ll completely ignore the General for the moment. Leave him and people around him, like Samara, out. You and I are going to make a plan to deal with him without using your visions.”

“All right. I think I can do that. I’ll try to find your and the Kingdom’s biggest threats. It’s more likely to work if you or I have a connection to them, but if they’re really a threat to the Kingdom or you, then it’s likely that your thread of fate is interwoven with theirs to some degree.”

“Good,” Tybalt said. “Good.” He pulled lightly on her hair and drew the back of her head up toward his nose so that he could nuzzle her.

“Do you want to do it now?” she asked. One of her hands snuck back behind her ass and lightly caressed his manhood.

“We can have round three after,” he offered.

If they started again now, he was fairly certain they wouldn’t get anything done. Vidalia would just pass out afterward.

“Fine, fine,” she said, pulling her hand back in front of herself. “Sleep.”

Tybalt instantly found himself in darkness. A hand touched his, and suddenly, the foxgirl was beside him.

“I sensed several candidate figures we could observe, my future king,” Vidalia whispered into his ear. “First, there is the High Elf King to the north. Then the Hero in the far east. The Bloodlady and her ogre horde in the nearer east, the High Priestess of Astara… and a leader from the Walian Empire to the south. There is a fifth relevant party, but I’m not sure if you’d actually consider them as a threat or not. Which one do you want to see first?”

“You can go in order,” he replied indifferently. He squeezed her hand. “Or you can follow your own interests. Whatever you like.”

The darkness dissolved in an instant, and they appeared high in the sky.

Tybalt had to stare at what he was seeing for a solid minute before his brain made sense of it.

There was an island floating in the sky. No, a whole archipelago!

A dozen or more islands.

So this is where the High Elf King lives.

Tybalt looked down and saw the sea, about a mile below. There were more islands there. The necromancer guessed that maybe the wood elves lived there. The floating islands ahead of Tybalt and Vidalia had trees growing on them, but Tybalt guessed it was too cold up here for very many species of vegetation to survive. From the legends he’d heard about the elves, the wood elves specifically wouldn’t much care for that sort of biome.

But it was the high elves, the High Elf King specifically, who Vidalia had recognized as a challenge for himself - or perhaps for the Kingdom. He hadn’t asked her specifically which.

Probably both.

He saw a great ivory palace at the center of a small city on the largest island. It wasn’t a building that looked like it could withstand attack - or like the creators had ever anticipated that it might be attacked or subject to any danger at all.

It was a building of opulence and luxury.

With a thought, the necromancer willed them across the threshold of the island, aiming for those ivory walls.

Their consciousnesses crossed the island border - and then were flung forcefully backward.

“Ow!” Tybalt exclaimed, clutching his head. “What just happened?”

“I guess we couldn’t enter,” said Vidalia, wincing and massaging her temples. “Elves are good at magic stuff. Maybe this is like their version of having an anti-teleportation rune.”

“All right,” Tybalt said evenly. “We can’t spy on the High Elf King in his palace. It’s fine. He was probably more likely to be an enemy of the Kingdom than of me, all things considered. And we’ll negotiate with him in a matter of weeks. So forget him for now. We go to the next place.”

“Yes, darling,” Vidalia replied.

The scene dissolved, and a new one immediately replaced it.

A tall, athletic man was in the midst of combat, ankle deep in a swamp.

He slew zombies, skeletons, and ghouls. There was already a pile of dismembered bodies all around him. It felt disturbingly more like a vision of the future than of the present. A future in which this man decided to engage Tybalt.

A group of women fought beside him. A woman wielding ice magic, a swordswoman, a nature mage attacking with swords and vines, and a woman with dragon wings who breathed fire, incinerating the monsters.

“I’ve seen those women before,” Vidalia said quietly. “In Samara’s dreams. This is the Party of Heroes, minus a few people. And plus… a dragon?”

Tybalt nodded. “Seems that way. The Hero picked up a powerful new asset, then.”

He studied the man’s face.

The Hero seems so ordinary… Is he really meant to be my death?

His muscles were no joke - they practically bulged through his armor. But his fighting looked like pretty standard hacking and slashing. He wasn’t showing off any special skills that Tybalt had never seen before.

Tybalt and Vidalia watched for what felt like about an hour. The group fought a force that seemed endless in number but few in practice - just small groups continuously walking out of the fog - and the necromancer saw how the small party slowly began to grow fatigued.

The undead force was never enough to seriously threaten them. But it was a constant menace. Every burst of ice, every sword stroke, every flame burst, every vine that explosively tore through a monster’s chest cost energy. As the fighting continued, the Party of Heroes grew less coordinated, less efficient. They got sloppy.

That caused them to consume more resources that didn’t replenish quickly, wasting bigger attacks than necessary when they had slipped up and let monsters get too close. There were moments when an undead grasped the hem of a caster’s robe from under the water, and only the timely physical intervention of the Hero, the swordswoman, or the dragon-winged lady saved them from being pulled under.

Even if he looks like a bit of a muscle head, he put together a strong party, but they’re inexperienced and lack strategy. They’re less than the sum of their parts. Only the swordswoman seems fully trained.

The Hero also seemed to have had good luck aesthetically. Like Samara, the women around him were all attractive.

“We need to retreat,” the dragon woman barked.

A split-second later, a giant skeletal hand reached out from under the swamp water. The woman’s wings launched her into the air just as the massive fingers closed where she had been.

“Uh, yeah, retreat!” the Hero exclaimed.

He and the others were drenched in sweat now. They should have tried to fall back sooner, when they realized that their strategy was failing. But better late than never.

The Hero at least stood in place for a little while to let the others retreat first. As they disappeared beyond the mist behind him, he struck a blow with his holy sword and chopped through one of the great skeletal fingers before it could fully retreat underwater.

“You were doing so well, Hero,” crowed a cold voice from deep within the fog. “Are you sure you are afraid to continue? Surely the next hundred undead you kill will bring you close enough to land a killing blow on me.”

“I am not afraid,” the Hero roared. “We will come back for you, foul creature!”

The dragon woman transformed fully into a dragon, then, and hoisted him onto her back.

It was interesting that she hadn’t let the others ride her.

Probably some point of pride about only the Hero being worthy, Tybalt thought. More importantly…

He focused on the direction the sound of the voice had come from. As the dragon retreated with the Hero, Tybalt saw a pair of glowing eyes, a skull - and then he was pulled away from the scene, with the Hero and dragon as they soared through the night sky.

The surroundings began to dissolve.

“One thing’s for certain,” Tybalt said quietly. “I won’t have to worry about the Hero for a while. He and that lich are keeping each other busy.”

Vidalia said nothing in response, only brought the next vision into focus.

Unlike that last vision, which had been at night, this one took place in early morning.

A horde of ogres attacked a sleepy human village.

With stone tools, they smashed through the pitiful wooden fortifications the villagers relied on for their security and began smashing heads and cutting throats. A couple of the warriors started drinking beer and ale from dead villagers’ houses before the fighting was even done.

Tybalt was about to make a remark about how unimpressed he was with their discipline when the first village defenders burst out of a few huts, eight men armed with axes, pitchforks, bows, and scythes.

Arrows took them all within ten seconds.

The necromancer turned and saw a half dozen centaurs who had arrived with the ogres but remained at range with their bows. There was a motley scattering of various demihumans, he saw. Not just ogres and a small group of centaurs, but wolfmen, goblins, lizardkin, and even humans.

“There must be a decent leader to unite all of these disparate people,” he muttered.

A female ogre emerged from a hut, and his jaw dropped slightly.

All of the ogres he’d seen in real life had been male, he had recognized as this scene played out. This female exemplified the massive differences between the male and the female more than any other. She was over ten feet tall - around two feet taller than the average male - with massive breasts, blonde hair she wore in a strange style where it spiked up straight in a line going down the middle of her head, and tusks.

She’s huge…

“Garlac! Zembart!” she roared, looking at the two ogres drinking ale. “What have I told you? We do not drink the humans’ firewater!”

She strode over and smashed one of them over the head with her club. He fell over, dead.

Oh. Ogre leadership is insane.

“Ragga! How dare you kill one of my males?” demanded another female ogre, this one of similar stature to the apparent leader.

“Wasn’t trying to,” Ragga said with a smirk. “Not my fault his head too soft. Could not take love tap from Ragga’s club. Ogre males too weak.”

The other woman hurled herself at Ragga, who smashed the club into her shoulder. The sack of the village turned into a general melee as other ogres took the chance to settle scores with each other while the other demihumans and humans on their side looked on in mild dismay.

“So, I guess we’ve seen the future, and the future is ogre,” Tybalt said, chuckling.

“Are you saying you don’t think they’re a legitimate threat to you or the Kingdom, Tybalt?” Vidalia asked bluntly. “Because we’ve seen how much damage a ‘primitive, backward’ tribe can do to one of your Army squads…”

The necromancer looked at her. The foxgirl had her arms crossed in front of her modest chest.

“Is something wrong?”

“You must take this seriously,” she said. “Seeing only the present day of each of these enemies is making you cocky. I… don’t want you rushing into any fights you’re not certain you’ll win. I think that if you tried to attack this ogre group, it would go worse than you imagine. I’m sure you would come out on top, but still…”

Tybalt nodded, a sober expression coming over his face.

“Well, the leader is a savage, but perhaps we can work with her. We’ve seen no indication of her intentions yet, but we should come and spy on her again. At least she doesn’t seem to be on the side of Astara. Hard to say about Vika. But those two gods favor humanity, so she’s probably an enemy of our enemy. If I want to negotiate with the ogres, I’ll need an emissary who is patient, good at communicating, and doesn’t get offended easily.”

Vidalia nodded with a look of satisfaction. The vision dissolved again, and they reappeared floating over a location Tybalt actually recognized this time.