Suggested Listening

Elruin sang to the fermenting pool of torture and death. Scratch's taint pulsed through flesh that refused to let itself cease, so Elruin sped the process with her Requiem and Rot of Ages. With time and effort, her power squashed their regenerative power and allowed death to claim them. One after another, their struggles ceased and they joined Elruin's control, even if that control was limited to four of the dozens of dead.

When she had taken as many as she dared, she began to break down the remaining energies. Nothing good could come of leaving the taint to spread and grow, unless she wanted to replace the goblin threat with an undead one.

The remaining members of the team considered the situation in their own way. Until now, Elruin's collection of the dead had consisted of incidental undead, born of circumstance rather than deliberate cultivation. This was different, and nobody other than Scratch was quite certain how they felt.

Ketak had never seen anything like this in any form, but she told herself the victims were worse, so it did not count. Calenda accepted it as a necessity of war, she'd made her peace with worse crimes. Lemia reminded herself that they were desperate and in need of any advantage they could get, especially in such hostile terrain.

Scratch relaxed as the girl walked the desired path without knowing there was a path to walk. "And now you have what passes for your army back, what do we do with it?" In time, her control would grow to such that she could take the entire slaughter pit and a hundred times more, but it would be a long time before they reached that stage.

"We can clear some more goblins for now," Elruin said. Perhaps motivated by her recent synchronization with Ketak. "They should be close." She began to sing again, this time she spoke to the remnants of the dead, forced them to reveal their last thoughts. It took some effort, but she could follow their trails, track their path through the woods. "They have a nest nearby."

"You 'ound it 'at easy?" Ketak asked. "How?"

"It's a necromancer thing," Lemia said. "A little like the synchronizing magic you did with Ell, but only a little. I suppose you can think of it like they're already synchronized, since they're dead and she's a necromancer."

Ketak was many things, but her mastery of magic was almost exclusively offensive in nature. "I suppose i' it works."

"Cursory exploration only," Calenda insisted. "We cannot fight a whole goblin nest with however many hundreds of the things swarming us."

Led by Elruin's stolen memories, the quartet and corpse slaves made their way in the general direction of the goblin nest. They were aware that danger could come from any direction, and that.

Calenda ran her hand along a tree. "I never could figure out how goblin acid will go through metal, clothes, and flesh, but never seems to harm the trees." She whispered; goblins weren't known for having good hearing, but goblins were not the only threat in these woods.

"Maybe we can study that, some day," Lemia said.

Soon, they found their target, a hunting band of a dozen jumping from branch to branch in the trees. "There!" Elruin hissed, and pointed in the direction of the creatures. A quick, soft song awoke her goblin dollies, which took to the trees to intercept.

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They moved in, with Katek using her forelimbs to aid her in running, not unlike a gorilla might. Cali took to the trees, while Scratch stayed back with the vulnerable mages.

A pity, it wasn't enough.

The first batch of goblins died in a whirl of confusion, pain, and death, but they were not alone. The team could not know this, but goblins do have hearing well into the ultrasonic range which left them close to deaf to common sounds, but allowed them to communicate with one another over great distances. It was a communication method that almost reached the level of rudimentary hive mind.

When that dozen died, another six dozen heard everything they needed about the numbers, shape, and behaviors of the killers. By the time the party realized what was happening, it was too late. They were surrounded on all sides.

Calenda and Katek fought valiently against their foes. Katek, possessing true immunity to the most deadly of goblin abilities, tried to make her way into a position that would let her protect the less resilient mages, while Calenda was immune only to the poison, not the acid that began to eat its way through her skin. She was forced to rely upon her vampire shard to keep moving.

Elruin blanketed the area in darkness, which did little to impair either side, and killed a few. Others burst into flames, the victim of Lemia's alchemical weapons.

"Fall back! More are coming!" Ketak shouted. As much as she wanted to kill every goblin, she knew the need for choke points and tactics.

In the end, they weren't overwhelmed, they got unlucky and Elruin was struck by a ball of the sticky, caustic ball of toxicity that was goblinoid waste. For a moment, she was confused. A moment later, she began to scream.

"Elruin!" Calenda abandoned her fight, leaving Scratch to deal with her foes on his own as she made her way to her wounded sibling.

Lemia was hit moments later, and then the goblins realized that there were at least two foes that could die easily. Eager to claim at least one life in recompense for all their dead, they converged on the vulnerable.

Suggested Listening

Panicked and in indescribable agony, Elruin screamed her song, a necromantic bomb that flowed outward, killing everything in its wake. Lemia and Ketak were spared, virtue of their attunement to the little necromancer. The grass, the trees, and the goblins were consumed by necromantic power and rendered either dead or dying.

Then, only after witnessing such horrific loss of life, did the goblins choose to retreat.

Lemia, blinded in one eye by acid, gripped one of her shards as she stripped it of power to counter the chemicals melting her flesh. Another shard was enough to mitigate the worst of the poison.

Elruin lay gasping on the ground. Her natural resilience fought the worst of the acid, but she had no special defense against poison and nobody on the team had a method to counter it. Gasping for breath, she turned her sight inward to watch her own heartbeat stop.

I made Cali cry. Then nothing but oblivion.

EPILOGUE:

Lord Claron lost the special powers of the Chosen of Enge, but remained devoted to his god and controlled his territory by inertia, reputation, and violence. In two years he was crowned king of all Engeval's kingdoms. Four years later, he would be assassinated. His disastrous economic policies left the kingdoms in ruin, and ultimately accelerated their collapse to the wilderness. A civil war would wrack the land for the next two decades, costing cities and farmsteads to the wilderness. When the dust cleared, the population and territorial control of Engeval had been cut to a tenth of what it had been before Claron's rise to power. It never recovered.

No longer anchored by Elruin, Calenda's sanity deteriorated in a matter of hours. Retaining just enough of her humanity to take Lemia to safety, she returned to the wilderness and fought her way back to Engeval territory and began a one-woman guerrilla war campaign. Slowly, she lost sight of her reasons, remembering only the goal to kill every last member of Claron's army. Six months after she started her campaign, she was destroyed by a force led by Juna and Garit. They never realized who she was or the significance of the tattered toy horse she carried with her.

Lemia would survive the conflict, if barely. Scarred for life, she was carried back to Sonhome by Calenda, where she would spend the rest of her life researching necromancy and resurrection magic hoping to replicate what Elruin accomplished with Calenda. A little over three years would go by before she was discovered and executed as a rogue necromancer.

Driven by her obsession and hate, Ketak continued her campaign against the goblins. She lived longest of the three, nearly a decade of war before she died of drowning when a particularly clever hobgoblin commander flooded their tunnels with a nearby lake. This would not be the end of Ketak's story. She retained her identity, perhaps in part thanks to her connection with Elruin, and became a sapient undead. She then spread her taint to the rest of the dead goblins and eventually the entire lake. Fifty years after the events of Requiem, her tainted lake remains unassailable by any force in the broken empire.

Scratch moved on. He would find six other necromancers, but none ever quite had the potential of a little girl who died long ago in a fallen empire none of them ever heard of. Then he gave up, as there were no more empires, no cities, no people hiding within those cities, no trueborn necromancers to sing for him. His last flicker of hope died long before Elruin was born, but only a millennium after her death did he relinquish the iron grip on his sanity. She was amongst his last recognizable thoughts.