A sudden slight bump in his mana usage interrupted Reud’s train of thought, his sentence trailing off into nothing.
“Lord Reud?” Hamo asked. “You were saying about mana types?”
Reud waved him down, frowning. The spell he’d cast on the smuggler had activated, as smoothly as he’d hoped it would. The man had been converted to a skeleton in an instant, all the mana required in raising such an undead having been slowly gathered into the spellworking over the time it had sat dormant within his soul.
But it shouldn’t have activated this soon.
The man should still have been alive, assigned to aid with the Farhaven district’s production of wooden trade goods. The spell was designed to take over the moment the bonds between the man’s body and his soul fractured, transitioning him from life to unlife seamlessly. So, what exactly had gone wrong?
“Work on your spells for a little while, there is something that requires my attention.” Reud said, standing.
“But what could-” Hamo started, only to be shushed by Aleida.
“Do as you’re told, Hamo. I’m sure Lord Reud has a good reason.”
Reud smiled at Hamo. “It’s necromancer stuff, so technically I’m working on my spells, just like you. I’ll be back soon.”
With a mental command, he ordered Bo to look over the young mages and walked quickly off in the direction of the new skeleton that had joined his horde. He had to see what had happened to the man to cause him to resurrect far before his time.
The last thing he wanted was an out-of-control spell raging throughout his new city.
He’d implanted the man with a modified version of the spell he’d used on the Seeker enclave in Avonford, the portion that burnt a portion of a soul to immediately cast a reanimation spell, though modified to create the more complex skeleton instead of zombie. He’d also modified it to burn the soul slowly, hopefully slow enough that the soul had time to heal from the damage. Ideally, if the spell worked as he’d intended, he’d be able to cast it on everyone in the city and have them all join his minions on death, no matter where in the world he happened to be at the time. But what if he’d made the spell burn the soul too fast, and it had killed the man. Or if he’d accidentally kept some of the self-multiplying nature.
The consequences of that were too dire to even think about.
Reud hastened his footsteps. Entering the Farhaven district, his stomach dropped as he saw the crowd of weeping people standing around a building entrance, its door hanging loose from broken hinges.
Oh, Vistol, he really hoped that wasn’t the result of one of his spells going awry.
“What’s going on here?” He said, slipping into the calm and authoritative persona that the people of his city seemed to like.
A multitude of voices responded to him.
“Lord Reud, it’s terrible!”
“An attack… these men…”
“They broke in, they…”
“There was shouting, and they all had weapons, and…”
Well, that didn’t sound like a spell going wrong.
“Enough! I just need one person to speak.” Reud said, pointing at the first man to respond. “You, tell me what happened”
“Through there.” The man said, pointing at the broken door. “A group of men attacked the guards, then ran through there. No one has come out since.”
“Thank you, good man.” Reud said. “Leave it to me.”
Now that he was closer, he could feel the death that infested the building and beyond. Five corpses in the rooms lining the corridor, one just beyond that, a further three in a cluster beyond that, and someone on the verge of dying. The raised smuggler, however, was even further yet. Out by the wall, maybe? It was accompanied by four guard-skeletons, with yet more converging on their position from all over the city.
If they were still moving, Reud would have assumed they were chasing the culprits, but they were stationary. That meant they’d probably lost their targets. Annoying, but understandable. They were still a long way off being developed enough to not be outwitted by a savvy criminal.
That would come, in time.
But for now he had to focus on the living. The person he could feel dying in the building beyond didn’t have long left, the fraying soul fetters blazing out pulsing waves that glowed to Reud’s soul sight. They may yet be able to shed some light on what had occurred here.
Reud pushed through the crowd and into the corridor beyond. None of the bystanders seemed to have gathered the nerve to enter yet, so it was deathly silent. Broken doors and still bodies lined the corridor, the signs of a systematic slaughter of the residents. Reud gritted his teeth in anger at the sight. Whoever had visited this wanton, senseless violence upon his people would pay.
He’d see to that.
The corridor opened onto a small square, the door to one of the buildings leading off it also broken in. It was in there that the dying person lay, slowly fading. Reud hurried over and into the room.
And stopped dead.
It wasn’t the sight of the dying person that froze him in his tracks, or the signs of a serious struggle. Nor was it the echo of where the animation spell had activated and raised the smuggler as one of his minions.
It was the body of Rachel, lying lifeless in a pool of congealing blood.
Instantly, his body went cold, the ice-flames of a terrible anger igniting within him. A jagged rent had been torn in her chest, out of which had evidently poured the lifeblood that had formed the crimson pool ringing her. Her skull had been partially caved in, her dishevelled blonde hair serving to veil where her eye socket and cheekbones had collapsed under an onslaught of blunt trauma. Her arm was stretched out to where her blade had fallen against the wall, her fingers twisted and broken. That meant she’d fought, but lost. That she’d stood up against some kind of injustice, and paid the ultimate price for it.
With Vistol as his witness, he was going to kill those responsible. Then, he was going to tear their souls from the ether and bind them in agony for all eternity.
They were going to pay.
Turning to the other occupant of the room, a tattooed man bleeding profusely from a wound in his leg, Reud narrowed his eyes. The man was instantly recognizable as one of the monster slaying band, those petty thugs that had been working with the smuggler to steal from the city. Two more like him lay dead in the room, one from a sword wound to the gut, another from a shredded face. The handiwork of his new minion, if he had to guess. They were the very same men that Rachel had gone to such lengths to try to track down and stamp out, and that had eluded and confounded her to no end.
And with Rachel dead, in the presence of these men, it didn’t take a genius to guess who her killers were.
Grabbing the man’s hair, Reud yanked his head back, squatting in front of him. The man’s eyes rolled dizzily, but eventually focused on Reud.
“Who are you! Why are you here!” Reud shouted from inches away from his face.
The man didn’t respond, his eyes unfocusing a moment. Gritting his teeth in anger, Reud jammed a finger into the wound on the man’s leg, digging it deep into the flesh within.
That got his attention.
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Letting out a scream, the man jerked away from Reud’s hand, struggling futilely to stop the pain.
“Please, please, please, please…” He begged, weak hands slapping at Reud’s arm.
“Tell me why you’re here.” Reud snarled, releasing the pressure a moment.
“Orders, Erhart’s orders.” He gasped, slumping back.
“Who the hell is Erhart?”
The man didn't respond, so Reud twisted the wound in his leg wider.
“Aldsville! The mayor!” The man screamed. “Please, no more…”
“What were the orders!?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I don’t want to die.” The man sobbed, his hand clutching at Reud’s clothing. “Save me, please, I’ll do anything…”
“The orders!”
“Please, I don’t want to die… It hurts… please…” The man murmured, his eyes unfocusing again and foam forming at the corners of his mouth. His mind was fraying as his soul pushed its way free of his mortal form, the magical backlash of that event scrambling what remained of his brains. It was too late to get anything coherent out of the man.
Reud slapped his hand away and stood, letting the man fall back against the broken table he was lying against. He’d be fully dead in less than a minute, by his reckoning. Maybe, with the help of Aleida and some focus from him, they could stop that occurring, keep him alive.
But Reud had more important things to focus on.
Turning back to Rachel’s corpse, Reud settled himself down beside her, breathing deeply as he pulled mana into himself. Time was of the essence if he wanted to bring her back. Not in the same way he’d done for Lilia, however. That particular spell would take at least a century of charging manastones to be able to accomplish. But still, Rachel deserved something more than just a resurrection as a simple skeleton. She’d been the first one to truly accept them both when they’d arrived in Littlestream, and ever since she’d been nothing but helpful and supportive.
So, her fate wasn’t that of a basic skeletal minion. Instead, he’d pour every scrap of power he’d stored, every iota of spellcraft he’d curated, every last bit of his vast affinity into making her the greatest of the greater undead. He’d make her into a true work of necromantic art, the pinnacle of everything he’d learnt from his experiments and his failures and his triumphs.
She deserved that, at least.
Mana saturated the air at his call, the contents of the room warping and shimmering with iridescent light as reality twisted under the pressure of so much power. Following the link from Rachel’s body back to her soul, Reud teased it gently from the ether, carefully avoiding doing any damage to the fragile thing. He wanted to keep her mind and memories as intact as he possibly could. At his call, a shell of pure mana wrapped the soul, and Reud pushed it back into the core of her body, faint threads of mana tying it in place. Raising her properly would take time, preparation of the bones and even more mana yet, so he just needed to make sure her soul didn’t deteriorate before then.
The ether shuddered as the man finally died, his soul lifting away from his corpse and pushing through to the beyond.
Only to be stopped by Reud’s iron grip.
Ripping the soul away from its attempts to nestle into a comforting afterlife, Reud slammed it into a cage of mana and tied it off inside Rachel’s body as well. For his crimes, his soul would serve as part of the very particular spell he had in mind for her reanimation. The souls of his two companions joined him a moment after, each one writhing in agony at Reud’s merciless grasp.
“Reud! What’s going on!” Lilia's voice sounded from behind him, bursting into the room, the heavy clanking of Bo following behind. “Bo pulled me over to here and-”
She stopped just behind him, looking down at the body shimmering with light.
“Oh gods… Oh Rachel…” She gasped. “Who did this?”
Reud pointed at the man’s body lying to one side of the room. “Aldsville, again.”
“Those damned stupid, cowardly, backstabbing scum!” Lilia growled. “How dare they!”
Lilia let out a scream and kicked one of the fallen stools that littered the ground, sending it flying to shatter against the far wall, before collapsing to her knees beside him.
“Oh, Reud… She trusted me, she trusted us.” Lilia said, her voice dropping to a sob. “We let her down…”
“We can’t change the past.” Reud grunted back, mana still pouring out of him into Rachel’s body. “Only focus on the future.”
Lilia’s head snapped up, staring at him. “Reud, you’re… Are you casting a spell?”
“We owe her that, at least.”
“Can you bring her back?”
Reud shook his head. “Not like you, only like Bo. But better, stronger.”
Lilia sighed and hung her head. “I guess… I guess that will have to do.”
Reud reached over and squeezed her thigh.
It took maybe a quarter-hour for the spell to build to the level that her soul stabilized. Now, it would just be a matter of carving the sigils required into the bones, and then completing the spell. A grisly task, one that he certainly wasn’t going to perform here. No, she would have to be taken to his workshop in the tunnels.
There, he would bring her back to unlife.
Standing, he ordered Bo to lift her body, a task the skeleton did with ease. She looked small, and oh so very fragile nestled in the huge armoured arms of the undead. Like a broken and discarded doll.
“They have to pay for this.” Reud said to Lilia, his voice quiet but filled with a razor edge. “We were too lenient before, punishing just the perpetrators we caught and not going after their master. We paid the price for that. Rachel paid the price for that. Now it is their turn to suffer.”
“When do we move?” Lilia said, her eyes hard.
“I can’t, I have to focus on her.” Reud gestured to Rachel’s corpse. “Every moment I delay the reanimation is another memory she loses, another facet of her personality that will fade away. You take Bo and as many skeletons as you need, and crush Aldsville for their actions.”
Lilia nodded, her jaw clenching.
“And bring back every corpse you make. They will all serve Srinaber forever.”
—
Cleaning the flesh from the bones was a time-consuming, disgusting job, but one that he’d performed all too often. If Tel had been here, he’d have used the pyromancer’s flames to speed up the process, but he was stationed all the way down in the depths of the Metalflow Caverns.
Which meant Reud had to do it by hand.
Bit by vile bit, Reud formed two piles, bones on his left, and flesh, organs, and other viscera on his right. Not a single part of her body would be wasted in the spell he was preparing himself to cast, he was going to wring every ounce of soul aspect from it to enhance her undead form.
Hours later, he could finally begin to carve the bones. Sigils, just like those covering Bo, slowly covered each and every surface. Siphons to enhance and control the mana that flowed from him, and through the world. Funnels, to let her control the flow of power that emanated from the animation spell, and focus it where it was needed most. Anchors to bond a great spellworking to her soul, the necromantic spell that formed the core of what would make her Reud’s greatest triumph. A spell that would allow her to improve herself without limit, growing ever stronger for eternity.
Self-improvement, after all, was the most effective power he could give her.
So much of Reud’s magical research had revolved around using souls as fuel for spells, burning their ethereal essence to release a power far more potent than could be accessed by drawing on the mana of the world. Its efficacy had been proven time and again, in Lilia’s resurrection, in his self-replicating spells, in the spell embedded in the smuggler. And now, in this new form of greater undead he envisioned for Rachel.
He was going to make her into a soul eater.
Around the two gory piles, Reud placed a ring of amethyst manastones, the results of the last few months of mana storing he'd devoted every bit of idle time to. This spell was going to require far more mana than he could draw himself, even here at the core of his power. He’d already thinned the mana in the city above, mana that would not be replenished until the moon once again rose in the sky.
Yet, still, he needed more for this.
Seizing the souls of the men he’d trapped in Rachel’s core, he pulled them free and shoved them into the building spell. They struggled and fought against the total violation he was forcing upon them, but Reud’s control was simply too strong. They could do nothing but accept their fate.
Crossing his legs as he sat, Reud raised his hands above the two piles of remains that were once Rachel and began to cast. The spell he was intending to use was complex, exceedingly so. Mere months ago, he would have used an inscribed spell-circle to perform the intricate spell-work, but no longer. The recent events had refined his control at a ferocious rate, enough that Reud felt confident to do this with his mana manipulation alone. It wasn’t like he had a choice anyway.
Time, after all, was of the essence.
The room lit up with iridescent light, tempered by the amethyst light blazing from his pupils, as the spell sparked to life. Instantly, the soul of the men trapped at its core began to fragment, the chunks torn from them flaring away and surging the spell to even greater heights. The viscera to Reud’s right shivered, then began to sink in on itself, the spell rending it to dust as it pulled the soul aspecting from its very nature and pushing it into the bones instead, strengthening their bond to the soul that had once inhabited them.
Gently, delicately, Reud dissolved the shell holding Rachel’s soul in place, and guided it into the spell. New bonds shimmered into life around it, binding themselves deep into her being and pushing it back into the bones that had once contained it.
With a rattle, the skeleton began to reform itself, slowly standing up to form a person once more. A bead of sweat ran down into Reud’s eyes as he pushed the spell to the crescendo that would be required for it to truly become a masterpiece.
And then, it was over.
The iridescence flickered out, once again plunging the room into the semi-gloom that it had once held, lit only by a lantern on the blood-soaked workbench behind Reud.
All was silent for a long few moments.
Then the bones creaked and moved. A skeletal hand raised up and pressed itself to the skull floating above the collarbones, tracing themselves over the fracture lines that marked where heavy boots had caved in her face. They moved down, clattering over ribs and eventually fell still to the side, the whole skeleton shuddering slightly.
“Welcome back.” Reud said.