“Get out of here!”

“W-what?” Jessabelle said, eyes widening in shock.

“Run! Run as far from the walls as you can!” Reud shouted. “Get everyone into cover!”

“But what about-”

“Leave Leo and move! That’s an order!” Reud roared. “There’s something coming, something that’s going to make the Seekers look like a simple walk in the park in comparison!”

They both looked at him, eyes wide.

“Move! Now!” Reud shouted.

That finally spurred them into motion.

Deep down in the dungeon, Reud felt the thing begin to move, uncurling itself from around the dungeon core, where it had lain for centuries. Soon, the out-of-control spell that made it up would urge it to seek out new souls to consume. Then, it would rush through the tunnels and passageways that brought it up to the surface, and then it would tear through the people of his city like a scythe through wheat.

It was going to take everything he had to prevent that from happening.

“Rachel! You stay!” Reud shouted as he climbed back up the side of the collapsed gate to peer back out onto the battlefield. Both sides had resumed hostilities, though the undead had the upper hand with one of the giants immobile. A few more shots from the spider-walker, and then the undead would overwhelm the Seekers and slaughter them to a man.

But it wasn’t to be.

With a thought, Reud sent the spider-walker skittering back into the city. It would be useless against what was coming. A second thought sent the undead in the field scattering in all directions, running away from the battle as fast as their legs could carry them. Confusion ran through the army, the men huddling together as the skeletons that had pressed them so fiercely suddenly turned tail and fled. The giants started to give chase, before a man tapped something on the side of the remaining metal machines and they froze in place. A moment later, a cheer ran through the soldiers, voices full of manic relief. They must have felt that they’d finally won, finally prevailed over the mage they’d come here to hunt.

How wrong they were.

Reud cut off everything but the bare minimum of mana he was sending to all of his minions. The skeletons running into the woods, the minions escorting Lilia, those in the mines, Bo and Lec and Tel, the spider-walker. Everything except Rachel. He’d need every last bit he could channel for what was going to come.

Dropping to sit cross-legged on the threshold of the city, Reud drew in a deep breath, and with it every fragment of mana he could touch. Reaching out, he seized a recently departed soul from the field and tore it into fragments, augmenting each until it resembled a real soul. Such hasty spellcraft would last mere minutes, but its purpose would be complete long before it broke down. Reud flung the makeshift soul mass over the field and into the woods beyond, the spell looking like nothing more than a crowd of thousands of souls sailing over the battlefield.

Then he pulled a fragment of it and sent it deep below, to the abomination.

Instantly, it surged into motion. It had taken the bait.

Reud felt it shoot through the dungeon and into the tunnels beyond, shredding everything it touched in its haste to sate its terrible hunger. He would have to be ready when it finally emerged, and found the lure to be nothing more than a fake. He would have to leash it with chains of mana, pin it down and restrain it before it could seek out fresh prey.

But, even for him, controlling tens of thousands of maddened souls was simply too much.

Centuries ago, Reud had stumbled across a discovery. If one applied soul magic in just the right way, a soul would dissolve into pure mana. An unbelievably vast amount of mana. The discovery had been… difficult to replicate, but Reud had pushed on with the research, trying new ways of achieving that exact state he had managed by pure chance. If he could pull it off, after all, he could bring back Lilia immediately.

Decades had gone by without any meaningful results, when he’d had a brilliant idea. No, not brilliant, in hindsight. Terribly, awfully, foolish. Instead of painstakingly trying each combination himself, he’d devised a spell that would run through them by itself, replicating itself without any intervention required on his part. He’d reasoned that he could set it loose amongst a collection of captured wildlife, and let it spread uncontrolled until it arrived at the solution. He’d designed the spell to reanimate the host body when it worked, using nothing but the mana garnered from burning the soul as fuel. Then he could happily just sit back and wait for the movement of a corpse to indicate he’d finally discovered the solution.

But it had gone terribly wrong.

Somewhere along the line, it had warped into something far more deadly than he’d intended. Before he could do anything to stop it, all of the test subjects in the chamber had amalgamated into a single mass and had broken out into the city above. Back then, Srinaber had been filled with dead, a whole city’s population worth, all slaughtered by Lightire at the end of the war. Tens of thousands of bodies, the perfect experimenting ground for a necromancer with nothing but time.

The perfect food to nourish the building calamity.

It had taken the spell less than an hour to scour the city clean of corpses. Each time it consumed a soul, it drove it mad as the spell tore great rents through it. The mana leaking out of those rents gave it a strength that blew through everything Reud had thrown at it.

Then, when the city was empty, it had gone searching for new prey.

By the time Reud had managed to formulate a plan to deal with it, the spell had subsumed every living thing within leagues of Srinaber, from the population of three villages, down to the smallest insects. It had grown from a fist sized blob to a cloud that blotted out the sun. It was only by using his own phylactery as bait that he’d stopped it from continuing to scour the length and breadth of Rudase.

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And now it was awake once more.

Pushing himself even harder than before, Reud gathered more and more mana from even further afield, condensing it within himself. Without any manastones to safely store such intense power, reality began to warp under the influence of the mana. It twisted space, messed with temperature, slowed the flow of time in regions and increased it in others. Distortions that only grew worse as Reud continued to build the power he’d need to withstand the coming struggle.

Pain sparked to life all throughout his body as the power started to tear through him, his skin splitting in a thousand places. A red sheen covered his arms as pinpricks of blood burst from every inch of his skin. His vision blurred as mana twisted one of his retinas. Electric agony surged through his leg before the limb went numb. His body was falling apart.

A shadow fell over the city.

Reud looked up, blinking stinging blood from his eyes. It wasn’t a cloud that had thrown the city into shadow. It was a great writhing wall. A mass that stretched from the ruins at the far reaches of the city up into the sky, blotting out the sun.

And it was all bones.

“Vistol give me strength, here we go.” He murmured.

Then it shot down towards him.

As it flew, it shrieked, the tortured souls that made it up screaming out their madness for all to hear. It passed overhead, the howl of wind left in its wake blowing away the smoke still curling through the streets. The very ground shook as it crashed down in the forest, right on top of the lure Reud had tossed there, snuffing the spell out instantly.

For moment, all was still.

The Seekers looked towards the forest, dumbfounded. The great mound of bones stood just barely visible through the trees, thousands upon thousands of bleached-white skulls and ribcages and femurs and more. All sitting amidst the shattered remains of the tree trunks it had destroyed as it landed.

Then it roared its hunger once more.

The bone mass exploded into a whirlwind of furious motion, bones churning past one another, flashing around faster than the eye could follow. Skulls gnashed at anything within reach, arms scratched and scraped, legs kicked. The rest of the bones constantly shattered and reformed, forming jagged edges that dug into every surface and tore it apart in a frenzy of violence.

It surged towards the nearest source of souls it could find, shredding everything in its path. The trees of the forest turned to nothing more than a spray of splinters, flung out from the churning mass. The earth below it fared no better, a great gouge being dug from beneath it as it bore down on the hundreds of souls standing so defencelessly in the field.

The Seekers stood no chance.

It engulfed the army in a moment, drowning out the terrified screams of the men beneath its own shrieks of ravenous rage. A pair of new walls of mana erupted from its depths as the final two metal machines were destroyed, but it did nothing to stop its attack.

One moment an army stood outside the Srinaber gates.

The next, they were gone.

The mass screamed its insatiable hunger once more, and turned to the next soul it could sense. Reud.

Reud grunted as he unleashed the magic he’d been building against the mass surging towards him. The field flashed with iridescent light as the two forces slammed together. The bone mass crashed into the ground as if stamped by an enormous, invisible boot, its scream redoubling in intensity. But it wasn’t defeated, far from it. The bones at the edge of the mass rolled out from beneath the magic, beating themselves against the edges of the spell as they sought any weakness they could exploit. More bones squeezed their way out of Reud’s grasp, pushing their way higher and higher. Then, one found a flaw, twisting its way in and blasting its own mana back down on him. Reud’s control slipped for a moment.

But a moment was all it took.

The mass exploded out from his grip, wrapping around and tearing through the city walls to either side of him. Wood and stone turned to splinters and dust as it annihilated the fortifications as easily as it had done everything else. Debris showered down on him as he slammed his restraining spell back in place, a moment before the bone mass consumed him.

Another grunt escaped his throat as he saw just how close he’d come to death. The bones had frozen in a towering column mere paces away, churning slowly. Skulls, bloody chunks of armour, broken limbs, twisted metal, all faced him, the souls within screaming their hunger and hate right into his face.

He didn’t have long.

“Rachel.” Reud said, through gritted teeth. “I need you.”

The skeleton stepped up beside him.

“What do you need?” She signed.

“Eat the souls that make this up, every last one. With the souls gone, the spell will finally collapse.” Reud grimaced. “I don’t know if you’ll survive, if your body will even be able to take what this is going to do to it. It was never designed to withstand this much power, this fast. And I hate to ask you to do it, given all that you’ve given for us. But I don’t have a choice. So, please.”

Rachel reached out, and put a hand on his shoulder, the bones of her fingers digging painfully into the wounds lacing it as she gave him a squeeze. Then she nodded.

“My honour.” She signed and turned towards the towering mass. Then she paused, and turned back to Reud, signing something else.

“Thank you.” She gave a little wave. “And goodbye.”

And then threw herself into the bones.

Immediately, the screams of the mass redoubled. A new voice joined them, a woman’s, filled with defiance. The bone mass fell back from Reud, writhing around the intruder in its midst. It smashed against the remaining buildings around him, sending great cascades of stone tumbling down. A rock smashed into Reud’s shoulder, shattering the bones and crushing him to the ground, but he couldn’t spare a moment to care. All he could focus on was pouring the remainder of his power into Rachel to aid her in her fight.

And she was winning.

Where there had been tens of thousands of voices, now there were merely thousands. And it dwindled from there even further, reducing to hundreds. Dozens. Three.

Then it went silent.

The bone wall stopped dead, then collapsed, the writhing bones falling to clatter against the ravaged ground. A cascade that buried what remained of the gatehouse, wall, and buildings in a sea of bones.

And in its centre, stood Rachel.

She blazed with energy, so hot and violent it was like a miniature sun. Her bones were broken in a thousand places, pitted with so many holes that it was impressive she hadn’t collapsed. Yet, before his eyes, the bones repaired themselves, restored to perfection by the energy surging from her. As he watched, thousands of souls surged through the furnace of the spell in her soul, turning to pure mana that rampaged back through her, weaving into the ether and back again, bolstering her soul to heights Reud had only speculated about.

For a moment, he could see a spectral impression of a woman, flickering into life around the skeleton.

And then his body finally succumbed to the mana ripping through it, and dissolved into nothingness.