“This is a bad idea.” Vincent said, as their coach trundled out of town and down the road.
“We need guards, YOU need to be intimidating wherever we go. Your people value strength, and this will show your people you have strength.”
“But... Mother... and the nobles.”
“The only nobles who will have a problem with it are the ones already looking to challenge you. From everything I've read your people value strength, this will show them you have strength in spades won't it?”
“I mean... You are not wrong... No no you're right.” Vincent relented.
Elaina stuck her head out the window. “Hans! Take us to a cemetary.”
Hans, her driver, looked back at her with her head stuck out the window and asked “Which one your highness? I imagine there are several near the city.”
“There's a mass grave from nearly fifty years ago about a mile north of the city. A bunch of plague victims came to beg the queen to heal them but... Magic does not work very well on illness. We saved some but many died, most without names. So they were all buried in a set of nameless graves far from the city to minimize contagion. Them, their animals, their horses...” Vincent had stuck his head out the opposite window to answer the coachman
“Perfect!” Elaina retorted.
“Your Highness what is going on?”
“We're going to get our escort Hans!”
“Is this going to be safe milady?”
“Of course Hans!”
“Well mostly.” Vincent interjected.
“Vincent!”
“We are going into potentially hostile territory, if what I fear has come to pass.”
“Tell you what Hans, if after we're done at the graveyard you are too scared to come along you can go back to the castle, and we'll drive ourselves.”
“Nonsense lady, your father would kill me if I left you unchaperoned.”
“You can decide after you've seen what we are about to do Hans.” Elaina replied.
“Always you and your schemes princess Elaina.” Hans flicked the reins and turned the carriage to the north. Both Vincent and Elaina pulled themselves back into the carriage.
“Do you need anything for this?”
“Theoretically no, practically... there are a lot of things I could have that would help me focus.”
“Like?”
“Some foci to channel the magic through. Like your crystal ball for divination, but different. This will involved two different schools of magic mingling so... It should be different.”
“I wish we could have brought Ezra, he loves figuring out how to make new magical bits and bobs.”
“He's an enchanter then? I remember hearing something about it but not much about how much he has accomplished.”
“Oh! Ezra is Brilliant! He's come up with so many inventions that I'm sure would revolutionize our country, it's just...”
“Just?”
“Father says he can't release all of them all at once. Says it would cause 'chaos' and 'panic' and 'disrupt the very fabric of our lives.' I don't think I have ever seen Ezra more broken hearted than the day he showed father his inventions and father just shut him down.”
“I'm sorry to hear that.” Vincent replied, leaning forward to put a hand on hers.
She looked down at his hand, before looking up at him, blushing.
Seeing her blush, Vincent began to blush, and quickly retracted his hand, the both of them spent the next several minutes trying to get their countenances under control, before Hans called down.”We're here your hignesses!”
Elaina and Vincent got out of the carriage, beholding a small, overgrown cemetery. No individual headstones were present, only a low wall and a small monument, stating 'In memory of those who lost their lives in the outbreak of 1072.'
“So everyone who died in that outbreak was buried here?” Elaina asked
“Men, women, children, dogs, livestock. Those doing the burying used magic to cover them with soil, as we couldn't risk the contagion spreading from their corpses.” Vincent replied.
Elaina frowned in the direction of the mass grave.
Vincent knelt and touched the ground. “Let's see if this works...”
A dark pulse spread out from where Vincent touched the earth, the grass around his head shrivelling into dry dead hay before being revitalized by vivid green pulse released a moment later. The pulses continued, one after the other, the grass dying and being reborn again and again as the pulses got close and closer together.
Finally, a single powerful wave surged out, seemed to hover over the mass grave in front of him, and then sank into the earth.
Elaina waited, shifting from one foot to the other.
“So...” Elaina began. “Did it work?”
“Give it a minute” Vincent replied.
More minutes passed.
“Are you sure you did it ri...” Elaina's sentence was interrupted by the sound of earth shifting, then being flung aside as bodies began to pull themselves out of the mass grave that Vincent's magic had sunk into.
“I told you it would take a minute.” Vincent said as he stood, the two of them watching as their new 'escort' tore themselves from the ground.
Men and women, buried in whatever they had on them now stood on the torn ground, alongside several horses, oxen, and a handful of dogs that had stayed and died with their masters.
“Gods!” Hans exclaimed from the carriage. At first Elaina thought that it was in response to the dead rising, but as she turned back she saw the horses linked to the carriage trying to bolt.
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“Um. Vincent? We may have a problem.” Elaina said as she rushed over to the carriage.
“Hans! Can you calm them down?” Elaina called up to him as she hovered a few feet back from the creatures. An errant hoof lashed out and almost caught her across the chin, making her back up another step.
“I don't know your highness! I'm trying but This has them spooked real bad.”
Vincent had caught up to Elaina by this point and stood beside her. He looked over at her.
“So... I know with divination you can feel emotions and thoughts... Can you... I don't know... push some feelings of calmness into the horses?”
“I don't know... I've never tried that before...” Elaina closed her eyes, and reached out to the horses in front of her.
Images snapped into place as she began seeing through the eyes of one, then two, then all four horses. She saw herself in the vision of one of them, Vincent had moved inbetween her and the horses.
“Oh that's sweet.” She saw herself say, though she was so divorced from her own senses that she didn't even feel herself say it.
She saw Vincent look back at her body as she said that, then focused on the Horses. She ordered her mind, thinking calming thoughts, of walking through fields, a gentle breeze drifting across her skin. Slowly, the horses calmed, their eyes blinking and calming, as the images she put in their minds eye overrode the panic they were feeling at the unnaturally animated bodies beginning to mill about them.
Elaina opened her eyes to see the horses in front of her calm and docile.
“Well done your highness!” Hans called from the back of the carriage.
Vincent turned and beamed a smile at her, then turned to the gathering horde of undead around him. He raised his left hand and a pulse of energy emanated from it, an the zombies which had been milling about started forming up in ranks around them. Another pulse shot out, and a few of the zombies moved to mount the horses and oxen that had been raised with them.
“We'll have to be on the lookout for weapons for them... it looks like the tools they were buried with were on their last legs BEFORE they died.” Vincent mentioned, and Elaina took a look at the gathered undead, and saw that Vincent was very correct. Most of them only had the handles of tools, with a few of them still having rake or hoe heads still attached.
“We'll make do. Hopefully they will scare off any potential raiders or assassins.” Elaina covered her nose. “With the smell at very least.”
“Yeah... we'll need to find a way to keep the smell off of us, it cannot be healthy to breathe that all night when we camp.”
“Hmmm...” Elaina murmured to herself.
“Your Highnesses? We should probably get going. You know. Unless you'd like Princess Mira to catch up with us, and while I can confidently say I was just following orders, I feel like she would not let the two of you off as lightly.”
Elaina nodded at this, and made her way into the carriage, Vincent following her.
“Onwards Hans! Let us be off!” Elaina shouted out of the window, then she turned thoughtful and looked at Vincent.
“How... How do you control them?”
“It... kindof feels like a leash? Connecting me to all of them? I think I can draw them closer or give them a bit more leash.”
“Maybe give them a bit more play? I'll try to keep the horses calm but I've never really done this before, and I don't want to go blind on our first date” Elaina smiled wryly at Vincent.
“Is that the backlash of using divination too much? I didn't study it in class other than it's tactical applications in warfare.”
Elaina nodded back. “Yes, severe headaches, followed by migraines, followed by blindness, and then eventually audio and visual hallucinations.”
“Ah... I honestly have no idea what the backlash from raising the dead might be.”
“You said it was a mixture of healing magic and dark magic? Maybe it will be a combination of those two.” Elaina pondered out loud.
“Hmm... With healing magic you go numb and weak, too much and your heart and lungs can stop. With dark magic your senses get overwhelmed by disgusting tastes and smells. If you over use THAT you poison yourself. It can be a bad couple days if you over use it... my instructor insisted I experience it at least once. She was a bit of a sadist, if I may be honest.” Vincent said, as his eyes darted out the windows, watching several of the now mounted undead loping along to keep pace.
The two of them lapsed into silence for some time after that, Elaina staring out the opposite window to Vincent and watching their dirt caked escort as it loped along. She cast her view to the rear.
“Are the unmounted ones going to be able to catch up?”
“Probably when we stop to rest. They won't so...”
“What if they get too far away.”
“I.... I don't know...” Vincent finally replied after some time thinking
“... You know those undead hordes they talk about in antiquity, undead just killing, and the dead rising around them, and it going on and on...” Elaina answered.
“Maybe... maybe we should slow down.” Vincent replied.
Elaina stuck her head out the window to tell Hans to slow down.