The man sat on a plinth of obsidian atop a gently sloping hill, surveying the lands around him. Plains of black grass rolled to the far distance. Leafless trees with black trunks and branches stood sentinel, with shadowed silhouettes prowling through the dark forest. Skeletal creatures shambled aimlessly across the fields. Foul creatures dotted the sky, flying without wings. A faint buzzing sound carried on the air, and with it came the stench of burning and rot.

Despite it all, the man seemed content. His form was wispy like he was a creature of smoke, all but his head covered by black. His bone white hair was finger-length, and it swayed in the breeze. Deep red eyes surveyed the lands, and there was a smile on his face.

He spoke with a soft, sibilant voice. The fabric of reality seemed to recoil from the sound, twisting and warping to escape yet unable to break away from his will. Every word he spoke was blasphemy. Every syllable was sin. His speech was near musical, but to hear it was to know the melody of madness.

It was too much for a mortal mind to comprehend. He spoke for a long time, narrating a tale of misery and woe, but trying to retain his words was like grasping water in one’s hands.

The man smiled, but no mirth reached his eyes. They were deep and unfathomable and the fiendish red of hellfire.

And they seemed almost sad.

With a sigh, the man waved a hand in dismissal.

Darkness rose like a wave and swallowed the world.

~~~

Lucas jolted back to consciousness, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Everything hurt. Dry throat, stinging eyes, sore nose, ringing ears, skull throbbing like a stubbed toe, and those were just the problems above his shoulders. His entire body was aching, from his skin to the core of his bones. The makeshift ropes had rubbed his skin raw. Muscles he didn’t know he had were sore. His arms and legs were heavy as lead. His organs had twisted themselves into knots and he didn’t have a clue how he was going to go about untying them. His thoughts were sluggish, his mind struggling to come back online.

But when he blearily opened his eyes and blinked up at the open sky, none of that seemed to matter.

It still hurt, mind. But no amount of pain could pierce the euphoria that filled him when he remembered he was outside. He’d made it.

Groaning, he rolled over onto his back, only to have the shock of a lifetime when a warm presence he hadn’t noticed let out an indignant yowl and scrambled off of him, leaving a score of stringing lines along the base of his spine in its wake. His heart plummeted and he flailed in panic at the sudden attack, but the fear sputtered and died when he beheld his attacker.

Small and a little skinny, the tabby cat stared back at him with narrow-eyed suspicion, sitting on its haunches a metre or so away. It hissed in warning when he reached for it, but made no further moves when his hand came to rest on its head. Warmth radiated from beneath its soft fur, and it leaned into his touch despite the affront in its feline yellow eyes.

“Trying to steal some body heat from me, buddy?” Lucas asked. He shivered. “Afraid I don’t have much to spare, to be honest.”

The sun had come out to burn away the morning dew, but Lucas had evidently spent the night on the damp ground and it hadn’t done him well. If he wasn’t already weary enough, he was as cold as he’d ever been. It was baffling he still hadn’t gotten sick.

The cat watched him as he scratched it behind the ears, then ran his fingers along its body. He’d never been much of a cat person, but seeing another living creature was a fantastic start to the new day, buoying his spirits. He couldn’t help thinking it was a good omen to mark his change in circumstances. Encountering a living being so soon after escaping the overgrown castle complex? That had to be a positive sign.

He needed that boost in his mood, knowing what he had to do before moving on.

His little friend stuck around as he set to the task, only deigning to bother him when it saw he was snacking on apples, demanding a portion for itself. Using a sharpened stick as an implement, he spent much of the morning digging holes in the ground. It would’ve been tiring labour even if he’d started off at peak condition. As he was, it was practically self-torture.

Over fifty graves were needed. By the time the sun was at its apex he hadn’t done three. And even that had exhausted him.

After a bigger lunch and a much longer rest that gave him some time to actually think, he was awake enough to remember he had magic at his fingertips. Calling upon his vitality with a bit of concentration, he threaded the magical energy into the mass of plants nearby, and commanded them to spread forth and help him dig.

A dozen branches sharpened and flattened their ends to crude shovels under his control, then speared out to scratch aside the dirt. It was uncoordinated and messy, but it got the job done.

Manipulating his vitality hurt. Even his channels hadn’t escaped the punishment he’d put himself through yesterday—if it was even yesterday; he felt like he’d slept a lifetime away. The walls of his channels stung like an open wound he was constantly pouring saltwater over, and the smaller sub-channels were even worse.

Watching the flow, he felt it was all moving slower now. Not as slow as he’d forced it to before, but it was substantially more sluggish than the previous default had been. It felt like his vitality was… thicker? It took some effort to speed it up to where he thought it should be, and with his vitality moving faster in his channels he noticed it got easier to manipulate and shape it outside of him.

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Huh.

That wasn’t something he’d noticed before, because generally he hadn’t focused on manipulating his vitality internally and externally at one time. And even when he had been focused on internal matters, opening up his sub-channels had taken priority above all else. Speeding up and slowing down his vitality and the effects those actions had on him had been interesting quirks he’d noticed then swiftly moved on from.

Slowing his vitality down had already proved its worth in boosting his strength and endurance during that torturous escape. Now, he supposed, it was time for the opposite to have its day.

Things went much faster that afternoon.

He quickly set aside his own stick when he concluded that putting himself through bodily labour was inefficient use of his brain power and vitality. He was better off promoting himself to a managerial position, coordinating his plant workers in their digging.

Strolling slowly along with the tabby cat following behind him, he spent the rest of the afternoon focusing almost entirely on his external vitality senses. He sped up his internal vitality to the edge of discomfort, and his range and finesse increased by leaps and bounds. Before long, he was controlling dozens of spade-tipped wooden tentacles, and their sheer quantity made up for how slowly they moved.

He settled into an almost meditative rhythm, and soon enough the shaping required little conscious thought from him. His mind drifted, always going back to the contents of the baskets sitting innocently on the sled.

The sun was beginning to set by the time the graves were ready. Making his way back to the sled to start on the next step, he couldn’t help feeling like he should do more, like he should conduct himself with solemn and grave purpose. There was no way to know if these people would appreciate it, especially coming from someone who wasn’t religious himself, but he resolved to say some prayers for them all the same. He didn’t know what else he could do.

Each basket contained a pile of bones, and he wondered about each of their stories as he spent the rest of the night lowering them into the dark pits. He didn’t linger on their deaths. Instead, he considered who they might have been in life, their hobbies, their favourite foods. It was all fiction, he knew; his freaky ability to imbue their bones with his vitality gave him no clues as to the people they’d been. But he did it anyway.

After each skeleton was laid to rest, he spent a moment with his head bowed, and sincerely hoped that they were comfortable and happy in whatever came next for them. He hoped whatever came before had been comfortable and happy too, regardless of its end.

Filling the graves back in felt like an ending, and he fetched stones to place at the head of each plot. Maybe it gave them some measure of peace, wherever they were. Maybe it didn’t. But it was something he felt he had to do. A timeless reminder that these people had been here, long after the grass had grown long. They’d be remembered, in some form.

When he was done, he found himself at a loss. The end had snuck up on him, and it was almost a jump scare when he realised there were no more baskets on the sled.

It was the dead of night by then, though the moon was bright enough to see clearly by. The ground around him was unmistakably a grave site; rectangles of disturbed dirt with stone markers at their head were surely a universal concept.

Ahead of him, the overgrown castle city he’d escaped from loomed, a jagged silhouette. The mass grave he’d dug was barely a hundred metres beyond its borders.

Behind him, the open expanse of an unknown world. Infinite possibility. And, hopefully, answers to the myriad questions that had previously had to go on the back burner.

He didn’t know which one was more frightening in concept.

He did know there was no fucking way he was going back inside the city without an impossibly compelling reason.

And so his path was set. Travelling in the dark didn’t seem like the smartest move, so he headed back towards the sled, where his bedding was stored. He’d hunker down for the night, and tomorrow he’d set off in search of answers. It wasn’t the most comprehensive plan, but he’d always been adaptable.

As he settled in for the night with the tabby cat curled up on his chest, Lucas gazed up at the moon. He felt a bout of melancholy. The bones had been a constant weight on his mind for days. The issue finally being dealt with felt surreal. There was a void in his psyche now, in a way. A lack of purpose. It didn’t make sense, since he absolutely did have many more goals to work towards, questions to answer. But he couldn’t help how he felt.

On a whim, he reached out with his vitality sense, tuning in to that different channel. The bones tried to passively absorb his vitality like they always did, like weak glue traps.

Lucas frowned.

Something was different.

He’d laid out the bones in the right configuration as best he could with his shoddy understanding of anatomy. The layout of a skeleton was largely logical, and he thought he’d done a decent enough job even working off instinct and half-remembered biology classes. They were as accurate as he felt they could be.

That proved to be true, he supposed.

When he’d connected his vitality to that rib bone, he’d noticed a strange sense of confusion that wasn’t his own. The vitality had automatically reached out a hair beyond the bone’s pre-existing channels as if to form a further connection. It had felt less natural to make the vitality loop back, having to bridge the gaps himself. It wanted to continue on, but couldn’t. He hadn’t thought much more of it.

Now, he understood. Much as he wished it didn’t.

Where a single bone was passive in its attempts to absorb his vitality, a fully assembled skeleton was almost eager. It wasn’t truly will. It wasn’t consciousness. Not on the part of the bones, anyway.

It was his vitality, mingling with the skeletons, that wanted to seep into the bones, and he recognised the shape it was trying to mould itself into without his conscious input.

It was impossible not to. It was exactly the same image as his own channels, after all.

With but a twinge of his will, Lucas knew deep in his own bones, he could have commanded the skeletons to rise.

This was necromancy.

He didn’t end up spending the night in that place. Instead, he packed up his meagre belongings onto his sled and dragged it away through the darkness until he was too tired to go any further, never wanting to see that damned cursed city again.