4 - JUSTINIA

I left my father behind. I did not look back, though I was tempted.

I waded through the fog, approaching the waiting silhouette.

“There you are.” Justinia’s voice was lower than I’d expected, and gravely. Her accent immediately struck me as peculiar, both familiar and alien all at once.

I came closer. The sun began to rise, golden light spilling across the dark sea.

And I got my first at Justinia.

Short than me by an inch or two, but it was immediately obvious that she was strong. She wore tough, leather armor that’d clearly seen better days. Her shoulders were broad, her arms thick and muscular. Her eyes were so brown as to be nearly black. No helmet in sight—instead, she had short, dark hair, her messy curls decorating her brow. A silver stud through one ear. She had a scar that ran horizontally across her face, ear to ear, crossing her nose. A serious scar, but even despite it, she was not an unattractive woman. I found, in fact, that I actually liked the scar, and not just the scar, but the roughness of her; her aura was that of someone who had seen the world and all it had to offer.

And then there were her axes.

Two of them, one strapped to each hip. Leather wrapped around the dull steel hilts. Single-headed, neither particularly large, but there was something sharp and vicious about the blades that immediately told me that these were real, practical weapons that’d seen a lot of violence and dealt out their fair share. They’d cracked skulls, spilled blood, and tasted brains.

I came to a stop. Justinia’s dark eyes swept up and down my body, weighing me up.

“My name is Aurion Asan I,” I said, “the Deathlord Prime.”

I don’t know how I expected her to react. With laughter? Reverence? Did I think she was going to get down on her knees, an obedient slave awed to be in my presence?

“Justinia,” she said, and offered me her hand, so casual, so confident, so defiant in the face of the usual formality and stiffness of the Order. I blinked. Then I reached out and shook her hand. “We can complete our little introduction in a moment,” she said, “but first, we ought to get going if we want to make it across anytime soon.”

I climbed into the boat with my meager travel bag, feeling woefully underprepared for any of this. Justinia untied the boat, kicked it away from the wharf, and leaped in. She sat at the rear and took up an oar. I grabbed the other and together we began to row away from the Withered Isles—away from my home and everything I knew.

Silence save for the gentle dive of the oars into the calm sea. I watched the sun rise. The clouds, mercifully, seemed to be steadily dispersing, promising easy weather.

None of it felt real. I glance over my shoulder, toward the island. Shadow Castle was a massive, black shape rising out of the fog, an ominous colossus—but it did not take long for it to fade away as though it had never existed in the first place. For a while, we were surrounded by the fog, lost in the midst of it. It was an eerie feeling. Anything could’ve been ahead of us. Infinite possibilities awaited—and infinite terrors.

“So,” Justinia said into the chill, quiet air. “First time off of the island, eh?”

“First time,” I confirmed, sounding calmer than I felt.

“Nervous?”

“Practically about to shit myself,”

Justinia grinned. It brought life to her face in a way that only made her even more beautiful. “You just wait, boy. You just fuckin’ wait.”

“What’s it like? Telemir?”

“May as well just call it the Autarchy,” the woman grunted. “Because there isn’t much left on that continent that isn’t the Autarchy. And as for what’s it like? Well. That depends on how much you like being told what to do.”

“I don’t like it much at all, if I’m being honest. I’ve had too much of it in my life.”

“Then you’re going to hate the Autarchy.”

“A good thing, then, that I intend on destroying it.”

Justinia went quiet.

“What?” I said, self-conscious.

“Don’t talk so confidently about such a thing,” she said quietly. “Not until you’ve at least seen it. A person shouldn’t seek to destroy what they don’t know.”

“My conviction is total.”

“It isn’t your conviction that I doubt, but rather, your capability.”

My turn to be quiet, until I said, “Well, then why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I’ll tell you a little,” she said, “since we have much time until we arrive at the coast. But there are many particulars that you must see and experience yourself. And there is even more that I haven’t yet seen myself.”

“You’ve had ten years.”

I felt her glaring at me. “I don’t think you quite understand just how large the Tiran Autarchy is. Do you realize, boy, that you’re talking about destroying the largest and greatest empire that has ever existed?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I chafed at the use of boy. “The larger the structure,” I said, “the more weaknesses it has.”

We rowed in silence for the rest of the day.

The fog cleared. The sun reached its zenith. It was mid-Spring, and the temperature would’ve been pleasant, if it weren’t for my heavy, dark robes. I sweated beneath them and made a mental note to buy more appropriate clothing as soon as possible.

My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten yet. We didn’t eat much on the Withered Isles; that was simply part of our lifestyle. I was thus aware of how scrawny I was, and particularly aware of it then, sharing limited boat space with a woman who had at least twice as much muscle as I did, and who probably could’ve snapped me in half with her bare hands.

Hours passed. The sun descended. The sea stretched out infinitely in all directions. My shoulders ached from all the rowing, and I had to rest periodically and let Justinia takeover. The woman seemed tireless, and her efforts only served to make me feel even weaker. Still, she didn’t complain, or even comment on it. She just rowed.

The moon glared down at us, half-full and radiant. The sea resembled polished onyx, its perfection occasionally shattered with the surfacing of a fish and once, a dolphin, which glistened slickly in the moonlight, a single, gleaming eye momentarily revealed before it plunged back into the unknowable depths.

“Perhaps,” I suggested into the silence, “we should try to get some rest and continue when the sun rises—”

“No,” said Justinia, and kept rowing.

An hour or two later, Telemir came into view.

Telemir. An ancient and mysterious continent. A continent that, over the past few centuries, had undergone so much change that no history book could keep up with it. Three hundred and sixteen years ago, the Tiran Autarchy had been founded by a man who had come out of nowhere—the boy-tyrant Marak, who was said to have come from the dirt, from a family of farmers, and yet who had, through sheer ruthlessness, cut his way into kinghood.

And somehow, he was still alive.

Alive, and possessing the self-styled title of Autarch. Over the course of three centuries, he’d conquered every nation on Telemir. He’d united a continent and had recently begun his expansions overseas. It was said that he wouldn’t stop until the entire world was his—until all of creation was his.

And it had all begun here.

I frowned at the approaching coastline. Dark, jagged rocks. A beach with white sand that seemed to glow in the moonlight. Mountains in the distance. To the north, not far off of the coast, I could just make out the skeletal remnants of a warship jutting out of the sleek water, its main mast reaching beseechingly for the starry sky.

Really, it hadn’t taken us long to get here.

Funny, I thought, how close the Withered Isles were, and had always been. Somehow, the Isles had avoided the Autarch’s attention. Few outsiders even knew we existed. My father had once told me that the greatest accomplishment of our Order was having survived for so long. He told me that it had been founded many thousands of years ago.

We necromancers can be very patient.

That’s one of our greatest strengths.

“Row,” Justinia grunted to me, “row hard, boy, and tonight, for the first time, you will sleep on Autarchy soil.”

I rowed. Soon enough, the two of us jumped out and pushed the boat the rest of the way up onto the beach. Holding my robes out of the water, I trudged across the sand and then came to a stop. It was a small, tranquil cove that we’d found. Rocky cliffs towered above us, jagged and foreboding.

Further up the beach, a skeleton lay half-hidden in white sand.

I approached. Its bones had been badly weathered by the salty air. Old cloth hung from its ribs and spine in tatters. I ran my fingers idly across the curve of its skull. The moment my flesh made contact with bone, a tingle went through me. The possibility of power. I swallowed thickly. I could see a faint aura around the skeleton, a pale, almost translucent shimmer.

This, I knew, was its aura of undeath.

A soul is raw power. And even when a soul leaves a body, some of that power remains infused in whatever organic material is left behind. This is what creates the aura.

I had an aura of my own now. I couldn’t see it—one can never see their own aura. But I knew it was there. This was, in part, the purpose of The Dying—the ritual was necessary to activate one’s necromantic abilities.

And all I had to do now was link my aura to that of the skeleton’s.

The skeleton’s was so weak, so feeble, that it took no effort at all.

The skeleton trembled. Its bones twitched.

I will explain something to you very quickly.

People wonder how a skeleton can move once reanimated—after all, it is just bones, lacking in the muscle, tendons, and ligaments that allow a living creature to propel itself. And to this I will briefly point to necromantic power, which is difficult to describe if you have not studied it. Understand this: uncontrolled, necromantic power is a wild thing capable of much. But, in the hands of a skilled necromancer, it can be easily directed. I can, for instance, infuse a skeleton with power, and weave into that power certain commands; I can shape the energy, almost unconsciously, in a way that allowed this flow of power to mimic the working of muscles and other organic tissue. I can even allow a skeleton to see, in a manner of speaking, though of course it has no eyes.

I knew the theory behind all of this. I had spent my life studying it.

Now was the first time I had ever put it into practice.

The skeleton dragged itself languidly out of the sand, which fell from its stained bones in a fine rain.

Its skull twisted about, resulting in the grinding of bone on bone. I frowned in concentration. I could feel the very dim consciousness of the skeleton at the edge of my awareness. We shared a link now, and it was weighing on my aura—but only very slightly. Different necromancers are capable of different things. An average member of the Order might be able to command twelve basic constructs at once—anymore, and the toll on their concentration and aura would be too much. A necromancer can suffer greatly—and even die—if they push themselves too hard.

This, however, to me, felt like practically nothing.

It felt easy. Natural.

It felt good.

I weaved the necromantic formula for vision into the flow of power between us. It took only a second.

The skull looked toward me. The cavernous pits where its eyes had once been stared right at me.

That was a disconcerting feeling. I was very comfortable with reanimated skeletons—they’d been a fixture of my life on the Withered Isles, and such constructs performed all manual labor required by our Order. But there was something different, and particularly surreal, about one’s own construct observing you. I knew, logically, that it was incapable of emotion or thought—at least unless I specifically granted it those things. Yet even still, I felt judged.

Justinia appeared next to me. She was grimacing. “Fuck me,” she said. “I forgot how creepy these things are to be around.”

I frowned at her. “There is nothing…creepy about it. You realize, I hope, that you have a skeleton inside you?”

Justinia’s eyes went wide. She jolted back. “Inside me? How’d it get in there?”

I scowled. With little more than a thought, I withdrew the link; the skeleton disassembled and collapsed in a pile upon the sand.

“Best get used to them,” I said. “You’re going to be seeing a lot of skeletons.”