Once again, Anastacia sat across a table from a guild official, who very clearly didn’t want to be there but had been chosen by their collective as the one responsible for keeping an eye on the necromancer’s actions. The official, whom Anastacia had mockingly nicknamed ‘Strawberry’ based on the reddish hue of his crystalline horn, slowly flipped through the hefty stack of papers containing the One of Amora’s report on the recent events, now completed with his own notes based on what Anastacia and the others had told him. He and the four guards accompanying him had commandeered the use of the Inn’s kitchen for a couple of hours to interview everyone involved with the events, one by one, eventually finishing up with the necromancer herself.
He exhaustedly lifted his jaded gaze up form the notes to look at the overcaffeinated necromancer fiddling with an onion. “Were it anyone else, the guild would assume we were being made fun of with a report like this, but your story has been corroborated by every other account of the events – and personally this is the least I expect of you, nor do I at all doubt someone wanting to write you out of existence.” He said after a thorough review of the matter.
“So, what is it this time, do I have to run errands for you guys or something? Because I have no intention to clean up the mess out there.” Anastacia groaned, well past ready to end the meeting.
“No, the guild does not hold you responsible, the aftermath will be dealt with in due time. Though I would suggest you keep yourself available in the coming days – and that is strictly a suggestion, not even a request. Since you were not on a guild approved quest during the incident, you are not entitled to any compensation for any physical or psychological treatment you may choose to undertake… My personal suggestion would be to at least consider the latter. Due to your newly appointed position among necromancers, the tribe located near our border is now officially considered to be an enclave. You are entitled to the throne of Mournvalley, which still exists as a nation but no longer recognizes you as the leader of the land area, but since your reign over necromancers as people is through an ancient pact that is still observed by powers that be…” Strawberry stopped to sigh deeply. “Your previous classification as a noble in exile has been changed into a sovereign nation state…”
“Excuse me?” Anastacia’s interest in the conversation was reignited. “I am now a nation?”
“Regrettably, yes.” The official nodded and glared at one of the guards that couldn’t quite hold back a chuckle. “Officially you posses no land, as your enclave is not within our borders nor have you laid claim to it, but your position as a ruler of necromancers – though not Mournvalley, can’t be denied. This forced us to find a new interpretation of our foreign policies, and it was decided that you are now a nation state and the tribe is an unrecognized enclave of… you.”
The necromancer chuckled. “Does that change anything?”
“Immediately, no. You, as a person, are still a citizen of Valor and contracted by the guild and this has no effect on any quests you may partake in. However, you, as a nation, are entitled to diplomatic negotiations regarding matters of defense, economy, culture and so on. To which I’d like to add: please don’t. This entire matter is already a farce.” The official reluctantly explained and skipped over several pages off his notes, trying to find something he could latch on to and move on with the interrogation. Eventually he found a page that caused him to stop and pause for a while. “During the incident, did you happen to see anyone with crystalline growths on their body? Possibly encased in cloth or bandages?”
Though they hadn’t played much of a part in the end, Anastacia remembered the wrapped up being with a violet crystal growing out of their head. Killing them had caused Tekhelet to remain just as stuck as she had been but that was all she really knew about them. Thinking about it, she managed to connect them to Trauma, the similar being Emilia had run into inside the machine fortress. “Yeah… about that… There’s a chance that I… killed them. Tekhelet said something about using that person to travel between planes or whatever it is they do, so I prevented that.”
“I see.” Strawberry muttered quietly with a different kind of seriousness in his voice. The usual bored undertone had changed into a somber one, as the death of the being clearly bothered him. The red horn flashed a few times as he no doubt relayed the news to the rest off his kind while writing down everything the necromancer had said.
“Should I not have done that?” Anastacia worried.
The official waited for a while to give his answer. “Some would call it mercy, but refrain from it if you at all can in the future. Use what means you have to bring them to us instead.”
The necromancer nodded. The very rare crack in the official’s cold masks left her little other choice. “So, what happens now?” She asked after giving Strawberry a while to get his message across and take notes.
“The guild is taking measures to keep Valor and its people safe. While our alliance with Mournvalley is being realized, word of the sect’s goals is being spread across the world to hopefully discourage beings of importance from accepting their offers. We will begin warning adventurers as they accept quests and summoning some of the more guild-aligned adventurers to accompany guild magi on quests we deem risky.” The official explained and regained his composure. “I believe we have everything we need for the time being. The guild thanks you for being as cooperative as we believe you can be.” He slid the thick stack of papers into a satchel and almost fell over hanging it form his shoulder.
Gesturing for his entourage of guards to follow, Strawberry started making his way out of the kitchen, only to stop at the door. “And I did mean what I said about psychological treatment. You have died and ceased to exist within the last year, mortal minds were not made to survive either. See to it that there are no loose threads to pull on and make you unravel.” He warned the necromancer and left to file away his growing collection of notes.
Anastacia leaned back in her chair and sighed deeply while staring into the void with unfocused eyes. She had only had a chance to eat a bit before the guild came looking for her and everyone else involved. Being the last person to be interviewed, much of the day had already passed waiting for her turn and not much else than just thinking. Having briefly grappled with the possibility of never being able to see her friends, drink coffee or do much of anything ever again, she had quite a list of things she wanted to do, partly just to make sure she still could. Though she was unhappy with the all too quick parting of Iris, she wasn’t about to chase her into Mournvalley. Emilia was being looked after by Rosie, and it was probably better for her to not interrupt them. With Gilbert she had already spoken all there was to say, and seeing him relievedly light his pipe was more than enough to know that a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. She had also exchanged some words with Yulia, but the poor lamb was far too busy keeping the inn running on her own. Holly was still asleep and had been moved into a vacant room to rest, so a chat with her about the entire affair would have to wait as well. This more or less left King, Xamiliere and Leggy at the top of the list, with the one of Amora as a close runner up – the rest of her bucket list could wait a bit longer.
There was no way she could actually choose between the three, so she simply decided to leave it up to the same fate that kept trying to ruin her life every chance it got, and would take her time with whoever she happened to run into first. As she probably should have expected, both King and Leggy were already waiting immediately on the other side of the doorway out of the kitchen.
“Oh!” The necromancer yelped in surprise upon almost running into them. “Both of you, upstairs.” She said and nodded towards the stairs while tapping the shoulder with the socket for a simulacrum core embedded into it to signal her intentions. Both of the simulacra did as they were asked and led the way to Anastacia’s room.
Messy as ever, but not in the way she had left it. Anastacia kicked some of the clothes laying on the floor out of the way and made a token effort to pile back up a stack of books that had fallen over. She didn’t say anything about it, but she could tell that someone had definitely gone through her stuff, even if most of it had been just thrown on the floor to begin with. As far as she could tell, it was all still there, so it might well just have been Iris while she had been figuring things out.
“I hope you two were fine while I was gone.” She said and sat down on her bed, patting the spots beside her to invite the machines to join her – which they of course did. “Who wants to go first?”
Leggy raised her hand before the question was even over, while King resigned to patiently waiting for his turn, as was usually the case. Ever since they had returned from the machine fortress, Anastacia had put a lot of effort into figuring out the workings of the socket in her shoulder and the scarred pattern spreading out of it. Usually late at night, she had used its power once on King and once on Leggy, which allowed her to peer into the prisons holding the souls entrapped within the simulacra, to give them the will to move. At first, these visits had been extremely short, but as she had learned more and the pattern had spread, their duration was increased greatly. Worthy of note was also the fact that despite the time she spent within the prisons feeling much longer, on the outside she was only unresponsive for about ten seconds. She had kept all of this a secret from everyone else, since the fairly gruesome look of the growing scar on her arm already worried her friends, and telling them that it was both intentional and she wasn’t about to stop would have likely turned into a whole ordeal. Anastacia figured that she could always just take a few weeks off from the daily visits to allow the scars to heal, if they ever became an issue that is. This had briefly crossed her mind when the pattern had begun to spread down towards her chest instead of only the arm, but the spread was much slower there and seemed like it could come to a halt soon enough. The pain it had caused at first was almost entirely gone too, only the newest parts of the pattern burned for a couple of minutes afterwards, and a burn ointment Emilia had made for her soothed them quickly.
She took out a spare simulacrum core she had in one of the pouches on her belt and slid it into the socket without hesitation. The pattern on her arm quickly lit up in bright blue and she bit her lip to get through the initial pulse of energy that burned into her skin at the edges of the pattern.
“Ready?” She asked from Leggy and lifted her arm over the simulacrum’s knee. As soon as Leggy nodded, she placed her palm on the smooth stone surface and felt the energy from their cores mingle – and with that, a bright blue flash extinguished the world around her and placed her into a void of nothingness.
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At first, her actions within the prison had been hard to control and it almost felt like she was merely an onlooker, watching herself. However, as days passed and she understood the situation better, she regained control of herself in the vision. Ever since the first time she had accidentally activated the core, the soul of the aureun who was made into Leggy, Val-Varjo, had been the only thing within the void. Chained and staked into a stone pillar as a punishment for her actions against the Aureun empire, unconscious. Every day, even before she regained control of herself, the necromancer had torn and pulled on the chains and metal spikes, slowly working them loose – until now, as there was only one spike left.
Anastacia grabbed onto the spike she could only barely reach as it pierced the aureun’s chest, which was already well above her head and the slight upward tilt of the spike didn’t help. With her feet barely touching the ground, if there was such a thing as ground in the void, she swung back and forth while picking up speed to work the spike loose. Finally, after quite a bit of effort, the meager weight of the necromancer and the momentum of her swing were just enough to dislodge the stake and release Val-Varjo. Anastacia immediately tossed it to the side and prepared to catch the unconscious aureun, as if that wouldn’t just result in both of them slamming into the ground. Luckily, it never came to that, as the lights on the aureun’s stone mask flickered on the moment she was free. A pair of glowing eyes, not unlike those of a simulacrum, homed in on the necromancer immediately. Instead of limply falling down, Val-Varjo braced herself for the small drop and came to a halt with her mask only an inch away from Anastacia’s face.
The eye-like lights on the mask focused into small points as if her gaze narrowed to inspect the small being before her. “Pien?” She said quizzically and stood up to her full height, posing unmistakably like Leggy did, though a lot more imposing and a bit taller. “Prata.” She continued and pointed at the necromancer’s mouth.
“Hello?” Anastacia greeted the aureun. “Are you alright?”
“Hello? Hello… Alright… You… Hello!” Val-Varjo repeated, as if eventually coming to a realization of some kind. “So, this is the langue that survived, huh? Are these words familiar to you, human?”
The necromancer nodded. “I can understand you now, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Splendid!” The aureun exclaimed before suddenly kneeling to almost match Anastacia’s height and put her hand on the necromancer’s shoulder. “What do you know of the Aureun empire? Were you somehow forced here against your will by them? If that is the case, I am truly sorry for-“
“The aureun were wiped out thousands of years before I was even born.” Anastacia interrupted the unneeded apology.
Val-Varjo tore off her stone mask and revealed her amazed face. The fully black eyes glistened on the verge of tears as they looked for lies or trickery in Anastacia’s face but didn’t find any. Her face, pale enough to be translucent so that the dark veins under it were slightly visible, was beautiful by most standards – so much so that it almost shocked the necromancer. “Do you speak the truth? Is the empire truly gone? No soul spared to taint this world with their ideals?!” She almost pleaded for a confirmation.
Quickly recalling the exact way the Aureun empire had fallen, Anastacia recounted what she knew. “The third artificial children turned against them and handed necromancers the knowledge to empower themselves to challenge the aureun in combat. Then the gods and necromancers had a brief alliance to wipe them out, the first artificial children mostly stood idly by instead of defending their creators and the aureun were rooted from their fortresses. I don’t think anyone has seen a living one in a long, long time.”
The aureun picked up Anastacia by the shoulders like it was nothing and spun around in excitement while laughing in a mildly deranged manner. They spun until Val-Varjo became too dizzy to stand up anymore, and less than gently lowered herself on her back onto the ground, still holding Anastacia aloft above her – which was somewhat lucky as the necromancer was no less dizzy and would have just fallen over otherwise.
“Arrogant fools! Self-important losers! I hope their deaths were as pitiful and pathetic as their lives! Oh, how I would have loved to see it unfold before me, the spreading of death among those who thought themselves untouchable, destruction at the foot of beings they deemed lesser than themselves – but not I. I knew. I knew and saw the potential of the surface children! Only lesser because of our foot holding them down, only weaker because we did not allow them to grow!” The aureun laughed, and kept laughing until she no longer could, only letting out giggles and gasps over the pain in her chest in the end.
Even with the tears of joy flowing down her cheeks and the surprisingly sharp teeth exposed by the widest grin she had ever seen; Anastacia still found the Aureun’s looks rather captivating. Her eyes shiny and full of life, not at all like darkness because of their color, but like orbs of obsidian. Somewhat pointy ears that poked through a mess of shoulder-length hair that had the color and shine of silver. Thin lips, naturally almost black in color, hiding a row of teeth somewhere between human and shark’s. All of this, carefully placed on the canvas milky white skin, a proof of the mostly underground lives the aureun led, and framed by visible black veins – and with that came a realization: necromancy did not work within the prison. Not only was Leggy, or Val-Varjo just as untouchable by her powers as the simulacrum in the real world, Anastacia couldn’t even feel her own body. Just like in the mother grove or in the depths of the machine fortress – but even more so. She felt what she thought a normal person must have felt like. No ever-present reminders of the fact that each and every person was a bunch of liquids sloshing about among membranes and tissues, strapped onto a few bones and held in a sack called skin, no constant barrage of unneeded and unwanted information about every living body near her. For once, her mind was quiet, more silent than it had ever been before.
Suddenly the grin on Val-Varjo’s face faded in an instant. The gentle taps of tears hitting the stone plate covering her chest snapped her away from the unbridled joy and she looked up at the comparably small human she was holding up like a small animal. “Voi fitt! Have I hurt you, human?! Even with equal souls, your bodies are frail at times.”
“No…” Anastacia uttered and stared at her own hands, which she could no longer feel with her mind for the first time ever. She could still feel her fingers touching each other, the aureun’s strong grip on her shoulders, the tears rolling down her cheeks – but that was it. She couldn’t feel the blood coursing in her veins, the muscles pulling on tendons or any number of the nearly limitless functions the human body kept tirelessly working on no matter how many times she hoped it would at least take a small break. She smiled at the aureun but couldn’t stop the tears. “It’s just so… quiet.”
She didn’t know if this was a new development in whatever mechanism allowed for the visits or if she had been too preoccupied to notice it before, but it had caught her thoroughly off guard. Perhaps it was because Fah-Raja, the aureun within King, never took off his stone armor, making it easy to not think of him as a living being, but seeing Val-Varjo take off her mask and prove otherwise had made the difference.
The aureun slowly and gently placed Anastacia down and sat in front of her. “It now strikes me that this meeting is more absurd than I first realized. I know my situation well, but how you found me has me baffled.” She pondered out loud. “Have the people of the surface surpassed our technologies and unraveled our spells to the point where this is commonplace?”
Anastacia paused caressing her own hands in amazement. “Not exactly.” She said and pulled on her collar to reveal the core in her shoulder.
The aureun reached over instinctively to touch the core but pulled her hand away on the last second. “Why would you…?” She wondered and traced the burn patterns with her gaze.
“I didn’t. Technically you did it.” The necromancer smirked and pointed at Val-Varjot.
This obviously shocked the aureun to the core. “…I? Why would I do that?” She worriedly muttered and reached over a couple more times, always backing off. “I’m so, so, so sorry!”
Anastacia took her hand and felt the warmth of another person without the unwanted baggage of necromantic knowledge for the first time. The translucent skin was softer than Xamiliere’s bark, something the necromancer hadn’t been too fond of before, always more comfortable with the rigidness of wood and stone. However, it now felt very different. “Don’t be. You had good intentions and it has done nothing but helped me.”
Clearly puzzled why her hand was of such interest to the human, Val-Varjot offered her other hand too and the necromancer immediately pressed her own palm against it. “Aside from the absolutely exhilarating news of the empire being history, many things must have changed during however long has passed since. Yet, in my mind, the questions pale over history and events pale against the simple ones: who are you, human? Why do you approach me with such familiarity? What is my remaining form to you outside of this prison? A servant? Property?”
Wiping her face into her sleeve, Anastacia stood up to introduce herself. “My name is Anastacia. I am an adventurer, a queen of a small tribe of the second artificial children and perhaps one of the leading experts regarding the first artificial children.” She declared and bowed for the aureun, leaving out a fairly obvious piece of her being. In the outside world she may have been the freshly crowned ruler of the necromancers, wielding uncontested might among her kind – but here, within the void, she was not. There were no white ones, no cursed crowns, no necromancy, no inquisitors, no sect – and no brume, only Anastacia the perfectly normal human. She didn’t want to start off with a lie, but for once she had been granted the opportunity to not be what she was. Even if it was only to an ancient remnant of a long dead person trapped within some kind of an accursed soul prison, there was nothing more she wanted than to just be Anastacia.
“And you, Val-Varjot, are a companion of mine. A friend, a housecarl of my court, a follower through nothing but your own will to do so and a target of some very complicated feelings.” She continued. “I know you are here as punishment for standing against your own kind, and it is an honor to meet you.”
“How you know that is beyond me, but it is indeed the case.” The aureun nodded and crossed her legs into a more restful pose. “I am indeed Val-Varjot, of no empire or creed. Traitor, kinslayer and more – but above all else, proud of it. Stuck here for my ‘crimes’ of having a conscience, the inability to think others of sentient mind as less than myself – and of teaching the surface folk the subtle art of making firebombs that get around the problem of the nigh impenetrable armor the aureun wear.”
Just as she was about to inquire more into the last part of the aureun’s confession, Anastacia felt twitch on her arm as the pattern of lights on it flickered and began fading, a sign of the visit coming to an end. “Ah, what a shame, looks like my time here is up.” She sighed.
“Are we to see once more? There is much I would like to know, of the world, of life… of you.” Val-Varjot asked hesitantly and took Anastacia’s hand.
Properly taking in the feeling of the aureun’s hand against hers, the soft and hard parts of her fingers, the warmth that felt so different against her skin now. “Don’t worry, we will be meeting again, often…” She smiled as a flash of light blue erased the prison from her eyes and returned her consciousness to the messy room it had left from, after being gone for mere seconds.
Anastacia immediately grabbed the nearest thing that looked like it wouldn’t leak, which turned out to be one of her old backpacks. Leathery, well made and still mostly waterproof despite being worn down, it carried out its final quest of not spilling vomit everywhere as Anastacia’s mind was bombarded with an entire city block’s worth of unwanted information regarding every fiber of every person in the vicinity off the inn. Each beat of a heart that sloshed blood onwards through the veins. Each breath of air or tobacco smoke inhaled or exhaled, the porous tissue of the lungs expanding and contracting. Each churning of a stomach, each crack of a join, each sore back, each yawn, each cough, each blink of an eye, all assaulting her mind at once instead of being mostly tuned out like usual.
“Nooo…” The necromancer wailed miserably and briefly leaned against Leggy before having to throw up some more. “I hate being meee…”