Book Of The Dead

Tyron stepped through the rift, back onto the mountain, still shivering as he shook the rime from his cloak. No matter how many layers he put on, the realm these kin belonged to was beyond freezing.

Around him, his skeletons emerged, as well as Dove, who jauntily swaggered onto the trail.

“What’s the problem? Flesh getting you down?” he asked, mockingly.

“Yes, yes. You don’t feel the cold. Very funny.”

Despite being halfway up a mountain, surrounded by frost-covered trees and plants, with a chilling wind trying to creep inside his cloak, he relaxed. Compared to the never ending storm of ice and snow on the other side, the climate around Cragwhistle was luxurious. If he didn’t have the skeletons to wade through the snow drifts and make a path for him, getting anywhere over there would be a gigantic pain in the backside.

“Well, at least it was a successful trip. You got what you needed, didn’t you?”

Tyron clutched at the bag tied to his belt, feeling the large cores scrape against each other within.

“Hopefully, yes. If it isn’t enough, we’ll just have to go back again in a few days.”

“Maybe by then the blood flow will have returned to your extremities,” the skeleton said, chattering his onyx jaw in a somehow suggestive manner.

Ignoring the genital related idiocy, the Necromancer began to trudge his way down the slope, arranging his undead in a wide protective ring around him. They moved so lightly, the skeletons, due to their low weight. With all the improvements he’d made, they were well balanced, and seemed able to traverse the rocky terrain with ease. He himself was not nearly so graceful.

“With everything we gathered, I should have enough cores to make some armour for you as well. There’s only so much I can do with chips, no matter how well I can arrange them. To give you a more significant pool of magick to work with, something larger is required.”

Dove seemed pleased with the news.

“There’s not much I can do with it at this point, but I’ll never say no to a bit more magick. A shame those damn mammoths don’t have fourth grade cores. From the size of them, you’d think they would.”

“If they were strong enough to hold cores of that quality, we’d be getting flattened by them,” Tyron remarked dryly. “I didn’t get a good look, but I think we collected at least one third-grade, which I’ll use for your armour. If I combine the rest, that should be enough to power my construct.”

So far, they hadn’t encountered any monsters stronger than the mammoths, even on the other side of the rift. That wasn’t to say they didn’t exist, but perhaps the rift was still too small to attract more dangerous creatures, unable to fit themselves through. Or perhaps the frozen wasteland was a recently fallen realm, without enough time to be fully corrupted by wild magick.

Either way, he was grateful. Even with his army of skeletons, he wouldn’t be willing to fight on the other side of nearly any other rift in the province, certainly not alone.

When they arrived down the mountain, Tyron found a crowd of villagers waiting beneath his cave and sighed. At least in the rift, he hadn’t needed to cater to these visitors. Then he spied a familiar-looking old woman at the fore of the group. It had been a week since he’d tasked a group with finding him more skeletons, and she was certainly the person he’d spoken to at that time.

If they had bones, this was a different matter entirely. With a spring in his step, Tyron made his way down the trail, eyes alight with anticipation.

“Welcome back,” he greeted them. “I’m hoping you have something for me?”

He tried to keep the eagerness from his voice, but struggled.

A woman of few words, the apparent leader of the group nodded and indicated for some of the others to step forward, which they did. Bulging sacks on their shoulders, six young men approached, straining against the apparent weight before they gently eased their burdens onto the ground. At his direction, the undead stepped forward and inspected each, reaching inside and withdrawing what were clearly bones that had been dug up recently.

“There’s thirty full skeletons there,” the old woman finally spoke, her voice thin, but with a hint of iron in it. “At least, as near as we can tell.”

“Where did you get them?” Tyron asked.

“Mass graves,” she replied, simply. “Some places had too many dead, so they dropped ‘em all in a hole. They were barely covered in dirt. These came from near Underhill, if you’ve heard of it.”

He hadn’t. There were hundreds, if not thousands of villages and farming communities who’d been overrun by the kin following the break. Tyron could name maybe five of those.

“If so many dead were piled in a heap, some of them should have risen on their own. Did you see any wild undead there?”

“We didn’t,” came the reply, “though we was sure to check.”

That was… odd. He doubted the people who’d buried the bodies had been sensitive enough to find areas with low ambient magick, or devoid of death magick. In fact, given so many had been buried so carelessly, there should be roving packs of zombies and skeletons popping up all over the place. Something didn’t make sense.

“You’ve done extremely well,” he said. “Wait a moment.”

He ducked into the cave and rummaged for a bit before emerging with a small pouch of coin.

“Here’s some payment for your efforts, I know you went to great lengths to get these for me. There’s a gold worth of silver in there.”

He tossed the pouch to the old lady, who snatched it out of the air with a hand like a starved python. At the mention of how much he was paying them, wide eyed looks and muttering broke out amongst the small crowd.

“If you make another trip, I’ll pay the same again. As many times as you’re willing to do it. Although I might have to start paying you in cores,” he finished, realising he hadn’t brought that much coin with him.

No matter, he had agents in Foxbridge who purchased cores for his shop. He could fill the villagers’ pockets with chips and low-grade cores, then they could sell them to his supplier, who would then on-sell back to him.

His skeletons brought the bags full of remains toward him and he gleefully reached inside, examining what they’d brought him. Immediately, he began to tut.

“If you are going to make another trip, come and see me before you leave,” he said to the group who were beginning to leave. “I’ll show you how to treat these a little better.”

Most of the remains were in poor condition, and there were several children’s skeletons mixed in, which he separated and buried as best he could. When all was said and done, there were twenty-two sets of remains he could work with, with miscellaneous bones left to the side.

“You look way too happy for a man playing with human remains,” Dove observed from the side. “This Class is not healthy for your social life. Anyone who sees you grinning like a fool over a dead person's ribs is not going to be your friend.”

Such useless chatter wasn’t worth dignifying with a response. Instead, Tyron held up one of said ribs.

“These are exactly what I need for crafting my bone construct. Of course I’m excited.”

He’d hoped that the villagers might come through with some bones, but he really hadn’t expected it to actually happen. Now that he had materials to work with, there were so many things he could test and try he was almost dizzy with the possibilities. Runes and spellforms swam through his head as he instructed his undead to gather all the bones and separate them into piles.

Of course, the first thing he wanted to do was summon the door to the Ossuary and see what would happen if he installed some of these skeletons into the sconces along the walls, but he hesitated to do so. He simply didn’t know enough about that space and would rather investigate it a little more on his own before using it with his undead. Despite knowing it was sure to be useful, he kept putting off exploring it in more detail. For some reason, it unnerved him, and he had several suspicions that not all was as it seemed within that space.

Perhaps a few more levels in his new Class would help elaborate on what was possible within the Ossuary, and surely this latest trip would be enough to tip him over to level forty-four. If not, he would just have to keep grinding.

In the meantime, he had something else he wanted to work on.

Despite having just returned from a difficult expedition beyond the rift, Tyron barely took the time to eat, drink and change his clothes before he threw himself back into his work.

He’d carefully designed the arrays he would need, now it was simply time to take out his tools and put them to work, as well as create a vessel in which to hold them.

Despite his confidence, he took his time working with his tools, hunched over the table inside the cave, a makeshift glass held in front of his face by a skeleton. These weren’t ideal working conditions, but they were good enough. After two hours, the first of the mammoth cores was ready, and he smiled to himself as he carefully examined it.

The theory was simple, the issue was doing it as efficiently as possible. He already knew how to use a core to absorb ambient magick, that was simple, the basics of the basics. He also knew how to convert that non-attributed energy into Death magick. This was a lot more complicated, but nothing too difficult. He also knew how to take that energy and feed it into the communal pool that linked his minion squads.

In effect, he wasn’t producing anything new, his ‘feeder’ skeletons already did this. The difference was the scale. Just because something worked on a small or even medium scale didn’t mean it would function the same when the volume of energy was much larger. In fact, it wouldn’t. If his calculations were correct, this construct would be pulling in almost twenty times the amount of energy a single feeder skeleton drew in.

If it proved successful, then he could use the design as the basis for creating even larger constructs. The single largest limiting factor of the Necromancer Class remained the magick requirements. He intended to leverage all of his enchanting expertise to overcome that burden.

If he soon learned how to create ever more powerful undead, then his need for more magick would only grow more acute.

When the four mammoth cores were done, he turned his attention to creating a housing for them. He did this by taking two complete rib cages, fusing them together and moulding them until they were roughly spherical with a flattened base. Taking the skulls from both of the skeletons he’d already leveraged, he fused these together back to back, then mounted them atop the sphere.

Flipping it over, he opened a hole in the bottom and got to work mounting his cores, then inscribing sigils and runes around them, binding them together. When this was done, he reached into his growing supply of chips and began to form them into arrays, which he mounted around the major cores, taking care to perfectly form and space every part of his work.

When he was finally satisfied, he was surprised to realise he’d been hunched over his table for over a day. Blinking the dryness from his eyes, he sat back with an exhausted sigh, letting his tools fall to the table.

“Finally done, huh?” Dove asked from the cave entrance.

Tyron turned to regard the onyx skeleton before he nodded.

“I think so. Hopefully it works as intended. The more magick I can provide to my minions through external means, the more undead I can support.”

Of course, there was more to it than just that. More magick available to his skeletons also made them stronger. They could move faster and hit harder with more energy being supplied to them.

With some difficulty, the Necromancer gathered up his ghoulish creation and took it outside, where he performed the final tuning. To feed energy into the pool his minions made use of, he bound it to four different feeder skeletons, by placing a new enchantment array within each that would form the conduit from their end.

If it all worked as intended, these skeletons would be pulling vastly more energy than they did before, then supplying it to the twenty undead they were linked with.

“Let’s see how it goes,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

With a touch, he activated the runes, and watched carefully as his construct came to life. Almost immediately, it began to draw on the ambient magick, the cores dragging it in. With his spell-enhanced eyes, he could see the flow of power, and was delighted to see Death magick being produced in the heart of the construct, energy that then began to feed out to the skeletons through newly formed conduits.

Tyron clapped his hands together. Now he had to test it in combat! He scurried back into the cave to fetch his notes and a pen. Exhaustive trials would be necessary to see how effective his latest innovation could be!