“I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it,” Dove breathed.

Tyron swayed on his feet and blinked owlishly. Now that the goal was close, the frenetic energy that had possessed him for the past week was beginning to fade. Already, he could feel a headache blooming in his temples, and the dryness of his mouth and eyes was gradually becoming a major issue.

“Souls are… weird,” he said slowly, before he turned and began to rummage through his pack. He needed food, water and roughly eighteen hours of sleep.

Dove laughed, an uncomfortable, frenetic edge to the sound.

“You just outdid yourself in terms of genius bullshit, and that’s your offering? Souls are weird?!”

“Well they are,” Tyron muttered before shoving a wedge of cheese into his mouth.

Quickly, he spat it out. It was going rancid. He rinsed out his mouth, then took a long drink from his waterskin. The fluid was brackish, and far from fresh, but to his parched throat it was like the tears of the goddess.

Spirits, souls and ghosts were his weakest subjects, as it were, when it came to Necromancy. He’d spent almost all of his time studying bones, artificial mental constructs, death magick, he’d had almost no reason or interest to investigate the souls of the living. Outside of his revenants, he didn’t even have any ghosts in his entourage currently. Yet, when it came to this particular problem, an intricate and detailed knowledge of the soul had been necessary to succeed.

So the majority of the week had been spent finding and then examining ghosts. Even possessed by the spirit of inspiration as he had been, Tyron had found that the rules governing the souls of the dead were… weird.

Dove was dancing, wiggling his bony hips in obscene motions and giggling like a young maid.

“Of all the stupid bullshit you’ve pulled off, this is by far the stupidest, and most bullshit laden of them all. Where the fuck do you get off figuring this stuff out? It’s nonsense! I was here to watch you do it and I still don’t know how you did it.”

The Necromancer waved a hand carelessly as he continued to drink and eat. The negative effects of such a long stint of ceaseless work continued to build, but he hoped to ward them off before they grew too severe.

“We aren’t even sure if it’s going to work,” he stated, his throat still raw.

Seated in the cave in the dead of night, the wind rustling in the trees was their only companion. A small fire crackled near the entrance, providing some warmth, and several globes of magickal light gave all the illumination they required.

Tyron’s small table was covered in loose sheets of paper, each filled with a dense, almost illegible scrawl. With a groan, he picked himself up and felt every muscle in his body protest at the motion. Damn it all, it wasn’t easy for his muscles to get stiff and sore like this. Even at his level of endurance, an entire week of casting spells and sitting hunched over his notes was enough.

In moments like this, being a Lich didn’t seem like all that bad of an idea. No need to sleep, eat or drink. He could work for months on end without any need for a break. Efficiency-wise, it would be a real time saver. Certainly better than being a vampire, at least. For starters, sleeping half the time was an enormous waste, secondly, every vampire he’d seen was often… diverted, with other concerns, rather than focused on their goals.

If the Dark Ones got their way, he certainly wouldn’t remain a human for long, judging by the feats they’d offered him. Something to worry about another time. There was no way he was going to get any sleep until Dove had attempted the new ritual, so he may as well let him have his fun.

“Let me talk you through it one more time, then we can make an attempt, alright?” he croaked before taking another swig of water.

“It’s not that complicated, kid. I could do this with one hand up my ass.”

For good measure, the skeleton reached around and inserted his hand into his pelvis from the back, wiggling his fingers.

“If something goes wrong and you rip your soul apart, at least you can’t say I didn’t warn you of the risks,” he insisted, ignoring Dove’s antics. “Sit your bony backside down and I’ll walk you through it.”

So saying, he pulled out the chair and indicated for Dove to sit, then began to rifle through the sheets of paper, trying to create some semblance of order so he could present it.

“Starting from the beginning,” he coughed.

“Oh shit, really?”

“Shut up. Starting from the beginning. So the status ritual, we know essentially what it does. It takes the Unseen’s… assessment of you, then codifies it. The information is contained within the blood, so it isn’t even extracted. We use the medium of blood to manifest the information contained inside it. So all the ritual has to do is ask the Unseen to reveal itself, which it willingly does.”

He paused for a minute to take a drink and work up some more moisture in his mouth while Dove bounced in his seat impatiently.

“In many respects, the current ritual we use is performing the task in the simplest possible way. Which is why any idiot can cast it. Your situation… is a little different.”

“Yes. I’m dead. Therefore, no blood. I think I got that part, is it really necessary to explain it?”

“If you talk less and listen more, this goes faster. Do you want it to go faster?”

If Dove could roll his eyes, he certainly would at this moment.

“Yes, professor Steelarm.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Now, at this point, you’re going to say that?”

“You’ve always been insufferable. Now shut up. Without blood to work as a universal medium for the Unseen to encode information into, we were pretty stuck. We determined there was magick inside your soul, which was a breakthrough, but that didn’t mean there was information contained inside. So we had to find a way to examine the magickal… contents of the soul, so to speak.”

This process had been a great deal more difficult than Tyron made it seem. He had limited ways to examine souls. Eventually, he’d been able to cobble something together using cannibalised parts of the Commune with Spirits spell and the Repository ritual. Effectively, he’d substantiated a soul and then selected a medium to deposit the magickal information from the soul into. Most of the time, he’d used his own blood.

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“Luckily, the Unseen is thorough in its work,” Dove remarked, somewhat sarcastically. “It infects everything equally.”

Tyron hesitated, but didn’t say anything. Was the Unseen a saviour or a curse? That question would haunt the people of this realm long after he was dead, just as it had for millennia before he was born. Wherever there was magick, the Unseen was present, and after thousands of years of the realm being saturated with arcane power from the rifts, magick was in everything.

Including, apparently, souls.

“So this section of the ritual is there to… provide a shell through which the ritual can access your soul, I guess.”

“That’s kind of clumsy phrasing.”

“I agree, but I don’t have better terminology I’m afraid.”

“It opens a Soul Hole.”

“I hate you. Never say that in my presence again. This construct acts as a receptacle through which we can access the magick within the soul, then this section mimics that magick, effectively creating a copy, then we encode that information into our medium of choice.”

“You’ve lost a lot of blood this week. Have you even got any juice left?”

“I’ll be fine. At that point, my own information should be overwritten and the final part of the ritual will work much the same as the traditional one.”

“Great.”

“The risk is, your soul actually ruptures when we try to open it, or the magick contained within won’t resonate with the copy we’ve made, so any choices you make during the status ritual won’t take effect.”

“Nobody’s ever worked out how that shit works, the Unseen pretty much does all of that itself.”

“Which is why I have no idea if this ritual will actually work or not.”

“Whatever! I’m still willing to give it a try. It’s not like I have a lot to live for, so is this even really a risk?”

“Well, if your soul explodes, you won’t get to go to… wherever souls go when a person dies.”

“I reserved a spot on Selene’s left tit.”

“Sure you did. There, you have the method, you know the risks.”

Tyron pulled a knife from his belt and pricked the tip of finger. The blood was slow to come, so he pushed and squeezed until a healthy number of drops had fallen and stained the clean sheet of paper on the table.

“When you’re ready,” he said, withdrawing his hand.

Dove, as a spirit inhabiting what was effectively a cunningly carved statue, did not need to breathe in any way, yet, in this moment, he made the sound of a long slow inhalation as he readied himself. Perhaps it was simply a habit he wasn’t rid of. Taking a steadying breath was something people did all the time. Or perhaps Dove was simply trying to settle himself as a rare flutter of emotion perturbed his cold spirit.

Regardless, a beat later, he began to speak, his hands flicking out the familiar gestures with practised ease. Throughout the process, Tyron held his breath, gripped by a heady mix of fatigue and anticipation. Had he failed Dove at the final hurdle? Had he made magickal history by inventing brand new magick?

With the added components, this was a much longer and more complex ritual than the standard one, but Dove breezed through it, completing the process in under five minutes. The instant he completed the ritual, several things happened at once.

Dove leaned forward eagerly, his hollow, glowing eyes staring down at the page in front of him.

The blood, ever so slowly, began to move.

Tyron’s eyes rolled up in his head as he became gripped by a sudden vision.

~~~

As soon as he began to awaken, the details of what he saw began to fade. He’d been… somewhere… somewhere else. Intangible presences, like ribbons of mist had twined themselves around him… whispering… begging. What they’d said… was important. Very important. But he just… couldn’t… remember. The harder he tried to reach out and grasp the memories, the faster they slipped away from him, until he was left grasping nothing, and his eyes opened.

“Hrrrr,” he slurred, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth.

His head was pounding. His vision was blurry. How long had he been out? A vision. He’d experienced a vision. That must mean he’d unlocked a new mystery, which meant… he must have been successful… hadn’t he? What had happened when the ritual ended?

“Finally awake? Welcome back, kid.”

Tyron swivelled his head and saw Dove in front of him, his eyes finally deciding to focus. Then, he realised a few other things.

“Dove,” he rasped, “why am I tied to the chair?”

The skeleton stood tall, wearing his armour, hands resting on his bony hips.

“I’m not going back, kid,” he said seriously. “I know you have to leave soon, and there is no fucking way I’m going back to Yor. Not now that I finally have a reason to… continue existing, I guess.”

It took a few moments for what was being said to sink in, but Tyron seized on the key point.

“It worked?” he breathed, a grin blossoming on his face. “I was right?”

Dove leaned forward, his head tilted to one side.

“You just got a fucking mystery didn’t you? Another mystery, I should say, you fucking prick.”

Tyron shrugged defensively, which was difficult with his arms tied behind his back.

“I could have made a breakthrough that was sufficient to be granted a vision, but not enough for the ritual to work as intended. I didn’t see what happened, how was I supposed to know?”

He tested his bonds. Dove had done a suspiciously expert job tying him up.

“I know what you’re thinking. I’ve got rope-tying at level ten.”

And now he had access to those Skills again?

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Dove said, and it appeared as though he attempted to wink. He wasn’t successful.

“Was it really necessary to tie me up?” Tyron grumbled. “You could have just run away when I went to sleep.”

“This is way more fun. That… and I wasn’t sure if you would let me go?”

Tyron raised a brow at him questioningly and Dove flapped his arms in a defensive motion.

“I know you made a deal with Yor to bring me out here. I don’t know what the terms are, but you’ll get kicked in the balls if I don’t come back, I’m sure of that. Generally, you’ve tried to do the right thing by me, but….” he trailed off.

“But you were worried I wouldn’t be willing to pay that price and that I’d drag you back against your will,” the Necromancer finished for him.

Maybe he would have. Maybe he still would.

After wrestling with the idea for a few moments, he slumped in his seat.

“It’s fine,” he muttered. “You can go. This is the last time I’m going to do you a favour like this, alright? As unfortunate as your situation is, I’ve got a few things I need to deal with as a matter of urgency.”

“Oh, I fucking get it. I hate the magisters to death, and they didn’t torture-murder my fucking family. I support the mission, one-hundred percent. I just don’t want to spend another second as some vampire-addicted idiot’s ball-bag. If Yor was pissed at what I said? Fine. I’ve done my time. Now I can level again. Now I have access to everything that I’d lost. I refuse to lose this opportunity.”

There was an intensity to his voice, a manic, possessed energy that perhaps only someone who’d gone through life and death the way that Dove had could truly understand. Tyron didn’t grasp it, but he felt the power of it.

“What’s your plan, then? Are you going to hang around the mountain? Hunting kin here in order to get levels?”

“I think…” Dove mused, as he tapped a finger to his chin, “that I’m better off not saying, just in case Yor demands the truth out of you. I’ll be somewhere, doing something. How about that?”

Tyron rolled his eyes.

“Fine. Leave a message in Cragwhistle if you want to get in touch with me. Just don’t be doing any massacres or zombie uprisings. If you ruin my revenge, don’t think you’ll get away lightly.”

The last was said with complete sincerity and Dove hastened to reassure him.

“Not a problem, I get it.”

“What Class did you get, anyway?”

“It’s on the table if you want to look, you pervert.”

“Says the guy with rope-tying ten. Will you let me out of here now?”

“No. So long, kid, until the next time I see your brooding mug.”

“Take care of yourself, Dove. If you want to stay alive… I suppose.”

“I wonder.”

Finally, the skeleton turned to leave. Then turned back.

“I used to think you were a once in a century genius, you know? Then I thought you were a once in a millennium genius. Now… I’m not certain this realm has ever seen anything like you before. Don’t fuck up, Tyron, you could tip this entire realm over if you play your cards right.”

“That’s the general idea,” Tyron smiled fiercely.

Then Dove turned, and he was gone.