Tyron slumped against the wall of the ravine, gasping for breath.

Holy fuck. That’d been close!

He raised a hand to brush the sweat from his eyes, only to find it shaking slightly. It wasn’t surprising. For a moment there, he’d truly felt that he would never see his home realm again.

Once again, he checked his minions, looked through the eyes of his watching ghosts, just to ensure that he was secure. When he’d confirmed there were no kin in the nearby vicinity, he finally allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief.

It had been a mistake to test his new eye-magick here in the rift. If he’d been cognizant of how vulnerable it would make him to the ambient energy, he would never have used it and orchestrated the fight through the eyes of his undead, who were unaffected by the darkness. As it was, he’d been lost in his reverie for far too long, leaving his minions to battle with their own primitive instincts as more kin had joined the battlefield.

When the large beast had emerged, breaking up through the ground in an eruption of dirt and stone, the tremors had finally been enough to shock him out of his stupor. If he’d come back to himself even a moment later, all may have been lost.

The large monster had stunned him. It was as large as a merchant's carriage, or perhaps a small house. Covered in thick, chitinous plates and propelled by twelve legs, each as thick as a man, it loomed large over his skeletons. With short, scythe-like forearms, it had reared back and cut down four of his undead in one slice. If left alone, it would likely have decimated his horde in a matter of minutes.

As it was, he’d lost more of his precious minions than he’d wanted to. He groaned and leaned his head back against the rock. This rent in the ground created a good bit of cover. From the outside, it looked like a hill that had been cut in half by some monstrous creature, or mighty slayer, and perhaps that was exactly what it was.

With a set of warding stones sitting at either entrance and all of his physically bodied undead pulled within the ravine, he was as hidden and protected as he could be in this realm.

There were still spires nearby, but not as many, thankfully. They clustered most densely in the area around the rift before thinning out a bit further away.

That massive beast…

It had a name, he remembered that much, but couldn’t quite recall what it was. A monster the local slayers ran into every now and again, it was one of the largest kin that could fit through the rift at Woodsedge, outside of a break.

To bring it down as quickly as he could, Tyron had unleashed his full offensive array against it in a flurry of magick that had strained even his dexterity.

He’d used Blood Shield on it to rip away its ichor. He’d used Sap Life to drain its vitality. Death’s Fists and Greater Death Bolts had rained down on it as fast as he could cast them. Recklessly, he’d rushed to be closer to the creature and began to cast Bone Lance, the hardened spears of bone extending from before his hand to pierce the creature in its side.

He’d been desperate to cast Suppress Mind, to hold the monstrous kin still, but it had resisted the spell somehow, his magick unable to latch onto its mind. Perhaps if he’d been able to meet its eye, the spell would have taken hold, which was another reason he’d rushed to close the distance, but the monster was so alien he couldn’t tell if it even had eyes.

With the aid of his spells and revenants, the kin had been brought down, but not before fifteen of his undead had been unmade.

With more kin emerging from the spires, Tyron had realised it had been a mistake to stand and fight in such a location. What had followed was an extended, running battle over ten kilometres as he tried to shepherd his minions to safety while holding off the swarming kin at the same time.

Now that it was over, he realised just how lucky he was to escape when he had. If another of those massive kin had emerged… killing it would have taken too long, locking him in place perhaps long enough for kin to swarm out and surround him.

Tyron shook his head. Despite all his preparation, he’d still underestimated this place. A Necromancer he might be, a supremely talented mage he might be, but this was a realm that only full teams of silver slayers were allowed to enter. This was where Dove and his team had been pushing to level up and reach gold rank. That kin he’d encountered wasn’t even the largest and most deadly creature that could be found here, not by a long shot.

Hopefully those monstrosities were still thin on the ground after such a large number of them had pushed through the rift during the break.

In spite of all his advancements, he couldn’t run around doing whatever he liked here. He had to be cautious, be smart, tackle challenges that were within his capabilities, mitigate his losses and maximise his gains.

Already, he’d lost more skeletons here than he had in all the time he spent beyond the rift at Cragwhistle. Luckily, he still had materials stashed away within the Ossuary. With some time, he could replace his losses, even grow his forces if he wanted to.

This was the perfect environment for him to grow. The kin here were more powerful and more plentiful than what he could fight in the frozen wasteland at Cragwhistle. His time here would surely be rewarded by the Unseen, but only if he pushed himself to the limit.

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With a sigh, he shook out his hands and arms before he pushed himself to his feet. An early setback, but it wasn’t too bad, considering the worst-case scenario. He hadn’t lost anything he couldn’t replace, and he’d secured a temporary refuge in the meantime.

After adjusting his bone armour, he walked to one end of the ravine to check on the warding stones he’d placed there. When he’d first seen Dove’s stones, he hadn’t really understood how they worked, but these ones he’d created himself. They were, effectively, a tool which enabled slayers to use a simplified ritual to shield themselves from the kin. Given that they drew in ambient magick to power themselves, they could be set and left alone, for weeks at a time if need be. By suppressing the magickal disturbance caused by all living things, it enabled slayers to hide from kin, even if they came quite close.

The first set was reasonably placed, but not quite perfectly. Tyron adjusted them minutely then stood back to examine the warding again. Much better. Then he repeated the process at the other side. Clearly, he’d been flustered when he put them down the first time, to make such blunders.

Any kin approaching the ravine wouldn’t have any sense he was here until they were right on top of him. Speaking of on top…

He glanced upward. The ravine was perhaps a little shy of fifty metres deep, the sides so smooth it was clear this space hadn’t formed naturally. Perhaps his father had cut this hill? It was possible. The thought warmed him slightly, even as he wryly dismissed it as a fancy of his imagination. Slicing a hill in half was certainly within the realm of the possible for the century slayer, the man who’d killed a hundred kin with a single swing of his blade.

If any kin were to approach from above, he had no way of preventing them from detecting him. There wasn’t anything he could do about that for now. Without enough warding stones to line both sides of the entire ravine, there would always be a gap up there. If something happened, he’d have to deal with it at the time. He was totally unwilling to find a cave or hole in the ground to use as his camp, considering that was where all the kin were coming from. Hiding below ground may as well have been a death sentence.

With his security as robust as it was going to get in the short term, Tyron moved on to the next thing he needed to do. A little food and water, drawing on the supplies he’d brought along, courtesy of his pack skeletons, hit the spot nicely. He needed to keep his energy up here; there could be no more slip-ups.

After examining the ravine more closely, he chose a relatively flat spot where he could establish a small camp and ordered his skeletons to clear it. Of course, there were undead posted at both sides of the gash, and a strong guard around him at all times, just in case, but there were still enough spare minions for the menial labour.

The absurdity of watching skeletons carrying rocks and setting up his tent had long worn off for Tyron, and he barely spared the undead a glance as they went about their tasks. Instead, his attention was elsewhere. With muttered words and flickered gestures, he cast the magick which would enhance his vision, enabling him to see the flow of power of this world.

The moment the spell was completed, he found himself in the centre of a howling wind. For a moment he spun on the spot, disoriented, then realised just what he was seeing.

Magick was flowing through the ravine, and incredibly quickly at that. In his own realm, the ambient magick was so weak, this spell wouldn’t allow a mage to see it at all. He’d used it as Dove had, to study the remnants of energy left behind by other mages, or to study areas and objects with concentrated power within, such as the rifts themselves.

Here, in Nagrythyn, it was like… like he’d been beneath the ocean all along, but only now could he see the water.

Perhaps the magick in his own realm was far from being enough to lead to the creation of local kin? Was the fall of his own world much further away than he’d supposed?

If that was so… then why was the situation there so desperate? The Venerable had given him a glimpse of just how much had been lost to the rifts during his lifetime. Empires, kingdoms, all gone, consumed by the kin, to the point the people no longer remembered the name of their own realm.

Only the Empire remained, with its five provinces, and the small satellite peoples along its borders, like the Dust Folk in the southern desert. It was possible other pockets of resistance remained, cut off from the Empire by wide swathes of lost territory, but it seemed unlikely.

The Dark Ones, the three gods, were born of the realm at the time of its creation, so if anyone could see the whole thing, they could, and they seemed focused on the Empire. If he really wanted to, he could ask them if there were any other holdouts, but he doubted he could trust them to answer honestly.

So why? Why was the damage so complete? Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer, or at least part of it.

The slayers were the men and women of the Empire who Awakened combat classes and then trained to fight against the rifts. They were brave, effective, well-trained and dedicated to the mission of saving their homeland… for the most part. But at every turn, they were hobbled and foiled by the Magisters. Branded, in order to control and limit their power. Cursed, to be unable to turn their abilities upon non-kin, and thus incapable of fighting back against their controllers.

Tyron knew that the Magisters weren’t to blame, they were simply the hand of something greater, themselves leashed by the Noble houses. And who controlled the Noble Houses?

There was an intricate web of power and politics that bound the houses together, all leading back to the line of the Emperor in the central province. However, Tyron wasn’t blind to the true authority in the Empire. The Five Divines spoke through their chosen mediums, and the Houses had no choice but to answer. Their power was based on the divine authority to rule granted to them by their gods. All the five would have to do is take away their blessing, preventing the heirs of the noble houses from inheriting their privileged Classes through the awakening stones. The Empire would crumble in a single generation.

So… did it somehow benefit or serve the Five Divines to have the realm fall so quickly into a perilous state? What did they hope to gain from it, with their own worshippers bearing the brunt of the suffering?

He shook his head. That was a question for another time. With the magick still enhancing his eyes, he studied the vast flow of power around him.

To cast a spell, mages drew out the arcane energy contained within themselves and gave it shape via the words of power and sigils formed with the hands. Yet that alone wasn’t enough to power a spell. As Tyron himself had done, it was sometimes necessary to draw in or shape the magick in the area. It was a difficult skill that required a mage to impose their will upon the world around them in order to cast the most powerful spells.

Watching the magick streaming past him, Tyron sat, his back pressed into the rock, and spoke a word of power.

With keen interest, he watched as it blossomed into the dense energy around him, shaping it, moulding it ever so slightly to a new shape.

Again, he spoke, and again, he watched.

Then again.

And again.

So passed his first night in the realm of Nagrythyn.