Without even being aware of it, Lokus took a step toward the opening, then another, and another. Before he realized what he was doing and stopped himself, he was several feet inside the ruin. And when he cast his Domain back, the opening was gone.
‘…Shit.’
He was trapped.
‘Ibmund? Ibmund, can you see the opening on your end?’
The demon had neglected to follow its master inside, sensing something wrong with the dilapidated stone building and having no orders to do so.
Lokus waited for one of the demon’s telltale growls as an answer, but nothing came. Either the demon couldn’t hear him, or he couldn’t hear the demon. Since Lokus could still sense the demon through their connection, he could only assume that it was the former.
‘Guess I’m on my own. Nothing new.’
Turning back to the darkness in front of him, he steeled himself and started to walk further into the ruins.
He remained alert with every step, studiously checking every nook and cranny within his Domain. It took only a thought to reopen his goosebump-y pores, a skill Opening of the Celestial Gateways had taught him. He found nothing hostile, or even alive, but what he did find were piles upon piles of skeletons.
In contrast to the ones outside, these ones still wore the tattered clothes they had on when they died, and thus Lokus was able to identify two separate factions among them.
The first had lengthy black, hooded robes that obscured the majority of their forms, or would have, if they weren’t riddled with dozens of holes. Scorch marks and chipped stone surrounded many of them, a record of a magical battle ages past.
Their bony remains had been carved up by unknown implements, creating a pattern that throbbed with energy within Lokus’ Domain. The purpose of these were unclear to him, but clearly they were significant to their bearers.
The second faction had armor on, and their weapons were strewn about on the stone floor, both rusted to uselessness.
Nearly all of them were near or entangled with skeletons of the first faction, and wounds from their weapons marked many of the robed skeletons, further cementing Lokus’ theory of a battle having happened at some point.
Lokus walked for hours, something he was keenly aware of since he had personally walked around the building. The interior shouldn’t have been nearly as big as it was, but somehow it went on for miles.
Lokus passed bookshelves lined with tattered and withered books; gardens of nothing but dirt, their contents long since decomposed; and tables filled with plates upon which sat stinking, rotting food. How long had it been since someone had been here?
Every third or fourth step carried with it the risk of stepping on a bone or rusty weapon, because there were literally thousands of dead inside the ruin’s walls. Lokus found himself repeatedly stepping over or around these objects, only to turn around and do it again seconds later.
‘I don’t get it,’ he thought. ‘Why did it lock me in here? There’s nothing here. Unless I’m looking in the wrong place.’
Until now, he had been searching for something out of the ordinary. A grand door, a glowing object on a pedestal, a beating heart on an altar, things that would immediately stand out to him. But maybe he had been going about this all wrong.
Maybe he needed to look to…
‘Him. Or her, hard to tell.’
Lokus bent down, his fingers brushing against a metallic amulet, wound around the neck of a robed skeleton amid three armored ones. It was the first of its kind that he had found since entering, and thus stood out to him once he adjusted his search.
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While the skeleton’s robes were worn and full of holes, and its jaw bone was smashed to bits by the mace of one of the nearby armored skeletons, this amulet was in pristine condition. There was no hint of rust, tarnish, or scratches on its surface.
The pendant hung from a chain of the same material, and was fashioned in the shape of a human hand. While Lokus couldn’t see the colors, he could feel a pocket of Majesty tucked within the index finger of the hand.
He tried to break the chain with a tug, but the skeleton’s neck gave way first, the spine crumbling to dust as the amulet emerged untouched.
Lokus brought it close to his face, running a finger along the contours of the hand-shaped amulet with a curious light in his eye. A sudden urge overcoming him, he snapped the amulet’s index finger off, only to drop the object in surprise and stagger back as a massive surge of energy exploded outward.
A tiny fraction of a fraction of that energy rushed toward Lokus, seeping into his nose and agape mouth and flooding him with knowledge.
[New Edict learned! Please see “Mandates and Edicts.”]
A technique anchored itself within Lokus’ mind, branding itself onto his psyche like a hot iron, with all of the pain that entailed. He grimaced and fell to a knee, dropping the bag of meat and struggling to breathe as he felt like someone had lit a fire within his mind.
Lokus was so distracted by the pain that he didn’t even notice as the remaining ocean of energy spread throughout the ruins, sinking into the brittle bones of the dead.
The sound of rattling bones reached his ears, originating from deep, deep into the ruin. Then it sounded again, closer this time, then again, closer still. Then, as two sounded at once, followed by four more, he realized that there wasn’t one source.
There were thousands.
The dead began to rise.
Their empty eye sockets were lit by a pale flame as they stood, their bony hands clenching and releasing as they worked their jaws.
Lokus let out a groan of pain as the pain spiked, and at once, all of the skeletons in the vicinity snapped their heads in his direction, the flames in their eyes narrowing to pinpricks.
One of them raised a hand, pointing its fleshless finger at Lokus, before its mouth opened and screamed silently. Its flaming eyes warbled, growing and shrinking over and over again, many times a second, something soon mirrored by the others.
In unison, they stepped forward, their mouths affixed in permanent grins as they stalked toward Lokus.
Lokus got shakily to his feet, pulling his axe out and raising his shield just as the first skeleton attacked.
Lokus let out a grunt as his shield deflected a punch. Tremors ran down his shield arm, but he held strong. Even though the skeleton lacked muscles, its strikes packed a fair amount of power behind them.
The flaming eyes of the skeleton that had attacked him constricted to pinpricks as it retracted its hand, as if it was narrowing its eyes in displeasure. If it weren’t for the past years eroding the weapons in the ruins, it wouldn’t have to use such methods.
Before it could notice the hairline fracture on its hand where it had struck the shield, Lokus retaliated by swinging his axe. The skeleton was too slow to react, its arms frozen halfway up in a tardy block as the axe’s head embedded itself into its neck.
This time it was Lokus’ turn to narrow his eyes as the skeleton looked back at him with that flickering gaze. His axe had chopped through half of the skeleton’s spine, something that would’ve paralyzed if not outright killed a living thing, but the skeleton hardly seemed fazed.
‘They’re dead,’ Lokus reminded himself. He bashed the skeleton’s face with his shield while simultaneously yanking his axe out of its neck, freeing the weapon in time for him to haphazardly block a strike from another encroaching skeleton. ‘I can’t expect the same things to work on them.’
So if weapons didn’t work, then it was time to use his Majesty.
Breathing in through his nose, Lokus shoved away a third skeleton only for a fourth to leap onto his back and wrap its bony arms around his neck. His airways cut off, he let out a choked breath as he tapped into the power of his Sovereign Gateway.
He dropped his axe, wrapping his hand around one of the skeleton’s arm bones while hundreds of undead slowly shuffled toward him.
‘Finger of the Reaper,’ Lokus spat mentally, naming the Mandate he had received from that explosion of energy.
But while the Mandate activated, infusing his index finger with the power of death, it did nothing to stop the ever-tightening grip of the skeleton.
‘Fuck,’ he cursed. Of course that wouldn’t work. They were dead. He had already established that, but in his panic, he had neglected the fact. ‘Then I have nothing else. Frost Aura.’
A surge of cold erupted with him as the epicenter, expanding out in all directions and turning what little breath Lokus could exhale foggy. Mustering his willpower, Lokus commanded the aura to condense, turning it from a thin cloud of cold to a dense ball around the skeleton’s arms.
The effect was almost immediate.
While the skeleton’s grip didn’t loosen, neither did it tighten. A thin layer of ice quickly formed on top of its bones, seeping into cracks unseen and turning the bone almost as brittle as before it was raised.
With a strangled cry, Lokus tightened his grip on the skeleton’s arm and pulled, hard. After less than a second, the bone shattered into countless pieces to the tune of breaking glass, small shards flying in every direction.