Book Of The Dead

A haunted expression plastered across his face, Tyron stumbled from the small stone building. Dove tried to read the look in his eye, but the young mage was already collecting himself as he handed out silent orders to the gathered skeleton army.

In neat ranks, they gathered their weapons and gear that remained in the camp and began to file into the building, disappearing into the darkness within.

“So you succeeded then?” he asked. “You’ve secured passage through the Abyss?”

Tyron nodded sharply.

“It’s done,” he replied, his voice hoarse from the ritual casting, or perhaps from something else?

“What about the pri-?”

“You don’t need to worry about the price,” the Necromancer snapped, “are you coming or not?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for a feel of Selene’s backside.”

The young man could handle himself. Dove pushed his concerns aside and slid into line with the silently marching skeletal minions. It was disconcerting looking at them, knowing that he looked essentially the same as they did. It was hard to think of oneself as a skeleton. In his mind, he was still… still Dove. A scrawny, bearded human mage who summoned creatures of the Astral plane to fight against the kin.

Yet that wasn’t who he’d been for a long time now.

He jumped and clicked his heels together. He’d never been so light on his feet as a human. Even his substitute bones weighed an awful lot less than a full human body, which allowed him to move with surprising alacrity. It just felt so good to have a body again. His time as a head, at first semi-voluntary, then very much against his wishes, had been a nightmare he was unable to wake from. Unable to move, to touch, to affect the world in any way. He was quite confident it had driven him mad, in the end.

Thankfully, Tyron had eventually gotten around to fixing the problem. The problem of not having a body, that is. Dove was fairly sure his mind would never recover. At least, it wouldn’t return to what it had been before.

As he passed within the small stone building, he swirled his bony fingers, letting the feeling of power, of magick, flow over them ever so briefly. Such a precious, limited supply he had, but there was so much he could do with it, given the chance. All he needed was an opportunity to slip the leash.

A puncture in reality, the opening to the Abyss yawned before him. On one side, a dimly lit remote building, exquisitely drawn ritual circle sealed into the stone floor, and on the other, nothing.

A nothing so complete and total, so all encompassing, it had gone all the way around and become something. Even so, it was still nothing.

To his ghostly sight, it was just black, a void, and as he stepped through, that was all he saw. In his current form, he couldn’t feel, he had no skin or flesh to assess temperature or pressure, but he felt confident that he wouldn’t feel anything regardless. Not here.

Along with the skeletons, Dove shuffled forward, finding a place amongst the narrow and dense formation. If he stepped too far to the side, he’d probably fall off… whatever it was they were standing on. No matter how he tried to study the area around him, he couldn’t get a read on anything at all, not even the abyssals who doubtlessly swarmed around them at a distance.

“Stay close to me.”

Tyron appeared at his elbow and began to stride toward the head of the group as Dove leapt to follow in his wake.

“What’s going on? We have a limited travel area?”

Whatever deal Tyron had negotiated with the denizens of this place, Dove had no doubt it was restrictive in the extreme. Anything that lived in the Abyss wasn’t happy to be here, but he imagined that led them to guard what they had even more zealously.

“More limited than you imagine,” Tyron replied tersely.

The young man’s eyes glowed as he maintained the ocular magick Dove himself had taught him.

“Is that even useful in here?” he wondered.

It allowed one to see traces and flows of magick. As far as Dove knew, there was no magick within the Abyss, not as he understood it anyway.

“It is,” Tyron confirmed as he watched their surroundings warily. “I had to modify it first.”

“Of course you did.”

“There’s no magick here, except for what we bring with us.”

“I knew that.”

“But, if you know what to look for, you can detect changes in the… stuff.”

“S… stuff? Is that the technical term you came up with? Fucking stuff? Try a little harder, holy shit.”

“Shut up, Dove. What do you call the soup of un-reality that surrounds us? Huh?”

“Unsoup.”

“Fuck you.”

“You’re welcome.”

The two walked in silence, Tyron forging ahead, nervously glancing over his shoulder as if to assure himself that his minions were still there. Possibly whatever allowed him to sense them was being interfered with in here. Or perhaps the magick was degrading over time? This wasn’t exactly a healthy place for anything not born here to be, after all. Abyssals melted apart if they came through the veil, perhaps it was similar for the people of his own realm when they trespassed here?

“The opening is just ahead. At least, it should be,” Tyron muttered.

“Just like that? Cragwhistle, here we come.”

“Not quite,” came the grim reply. “Opening rifts in between our realm and the Abyss is dangerous, for everyone. I don’t want to give it–,” he grimaced, as if remembering something unpleasant, “any greater hold on us than we can manage.”

“So where are we going?” Dove was confused.

“Taking a slight detour,” Tyron stated. “We’re going to appear on the other side of a rift, then travel to Cragwhistle.”

“On the other side of a rift?!” Dove squawked. “Are you serious? By yourself? Are you trying to get killed?”

“Obviously not,” Tyron frowned.

“Could’ve fooled me. What sort of fuckhead jumps through a rift by himself the second he becomes silver? You’re out of your mind.”

The Necromancer glanced behind him at the hundreds of skeletal minions.

“You think I’m going by myself?”

“Those don’t count!” Dove raged. “I’ve been through the rifts plenty of times, but only with a high level team by my side.”

“Dove, we both know you’re full of shit. Some of the rifts are safer than others, even on the other side. A small, brand new rift like the one at Cragwhistle has an extremely low chance of attracting anything too dangerous. The biggest and baddest monsters can’t fit through, so they don’t bother with it.”

“A low chance isn’t no chance,” Dove insisted. “We could pop out and find ourselves squashed by a giant frost monster in seconds.”

“What do you care? If you die beyond the rift, the chance Yor will bother trying to track your soul down is similarly low. I half thought that was the real reason you wanted to come out. Sneak off through a rift and get yourself flattened.”

“That… shit, that might actually work.”

“You didn’t even think of it?” Tyron boggled at him.

Dove waved his bony arms in the air.

“I’ve been too absorbed in being able to touch myself again!”

“You can touch other things too….”

“But why would I bother?!”

“I hate you, Dove.”

“I hate you too.”

Tyron stiffened, eyes widening as he tracked something move around them.

“This is it,” he said, voice suddenly tense. “Get ready.”

The former summoner looked at him oddly until Tyron glanced back at him, uncomfortable.

“What?” he asked, finally.

“We could be walking into a combat situation,” Dove reminded him.

“I know that.”

“So why are you at the front?”

Tyron blinked, then took several slow steps back amongst the ranks of his minions. Dove cackled.

“Not exactly feeling like a brave adventurer now, are you?” he hooted.

“You were a Summoner. I bet you couldn’t throw a rock and hit the frontline your entire career,” Tyron grumbled.

Before either of them could continue to bicker, a rent opened in front of them, showing a desolate, frozen wasteland. Harsh wind blew, snow and ice slashing through the air, yet Dove could hear none of it, nothing came through into the Abyss, not a single snowflake.

“Here we goooooo! Bony boys, follow hard up my rear!”

So shouting, he leapt through the opening and into the freezing cold. For a moment, he almost braced himself for the cold, long practised survival instincts told him he would freeze to death in weather like this, naked as he was. Yet the ice and snow chilled him not at all. It was liberating, in a way.

A depressing reminder of his shallow existence in another.

Behind him, rows of skeletons, followed by Tyron, began to emerge from the inky void. Dove scanned the area keenly, wondering if they’d stepped out of the Abyss and into their own doom, but as far as he could tell, there were no kin nearby.

Not that he could see very far.

Whatever realm this was, miserable would be a gentle descriptor of the conditions. Storm clouds boiled overhead, thrashing and rolling as lightning flickered like a snake’s tongue, cutting through the darkness in momentary bursts of blinding light. A constant barrage of ice, borne aloft by the wind, punched into him, forcing the skeleton to raise a hand to protect his skull from the onslaught.

If the enchantments within were damaged, he’d be back to an immovable head and he would not have it.

Suddenly, he was overcome with frustration at how helpless he was. No magick sight to see the threats coming, no powerful summons, no enhanced physical body or mind, nothing that had become so integral to who he was and what he did. The anger bubbled up within him so quickly he was almost shocked by its intensity. Here he was, beyond the rift, where he was supposed to be at his strongest, supposed to fight, and win, yet he was almost helpless.

“There’s so much magick,” Tyron called in disbelief.

The young mage had put on his bone armour, and he looked severely intimidating, wrapped in black bone, rounded plates of the stuff covering his shoulders and even a helmet of sorts on his head.

“How far do we need to travel?” Dove yelled above the din, not wanting to talk about the power he couldn’t touch.

“Not far… I think,” came the reply, as Tyron tried to get his bearings.

After spinning on the spot for a moment, he grunted and pointed a finger.

“That way, about three kilometres.”

“Three kilometres? In this?!”

“What, are you cold?”

Tyron himself was clearly shivering, despite pulling his thick cloak over his shoulders.

“Weak as piss,” the Necromancer chattered at his skeletal companion.

“Do you see any rift-kin?” Dove ignored the insult.

Tyron nodded.

“They’re over there. We’ll be putting my legions to the test shortly.”

Despite himself, a smile crept over his face.

“I can’t wait to see what happens.”