When Holly had first imagined entering the Necropolis, ancestral home of necromancy, it hadn’t been like this.

The young dryad had imagined it would feel a lot like finding a new home. That they’d be welcomed as guests as they walked through streets that who’s youngest cobble was a full hundred times her age… That Erebus would have been there to guide them through the city he had, at times, spoken so fondly of.

Instead she and Alec had been smuggled in under invisibility spells, teleported directly into the Necropolis’ academy under heavy guard. If it weren’t for the looming threat of Erebus, still out there somewhere, she was all but certain they’d have been simply killed for the eternal crime of knowing too much.

If Natalya, Erebus’ former commander and one of the survivors of the desperate battles against the rogue elemental Charigris and Tsa’rahlitzek herself, hadn’t been there to advocate for them every step of the way Holly was fairly certain they’d have still been killed, just very quietly.

Just about the only part of the whole thing that had matched the image in her head had been that they’d arrived in the dead of night. There was no logical reason this should be the case, undead didn’t require sleep, but necromancers, in her experience, seemed to simply delight in that aesthetic.

They were noble, as people went. In many ways because they had to be. Necromancy’s name had been blackened time and time again through the history of Reath and the Necropolis fought every day to turn the pages of history away from the darker times, and by and large they’d succeeded.

These days more people would deplore the Holy Paladin Order than their ancient foe. They were also a pragmatic people from Holly’s experience, and not the kind of pragmatism that treated other people like pieces on a board but the perhaps more terrible kind that treated everyone like those same pieces.

It was a terribly cold person who could look a friend in the eye and tell them where they going to die. Colder still that could do it to a mirror.

And it was cold. Holly had seen it with her own eyes. There had been nothing of honour in it, no thoughts of glory when they had faced down Charigris, just simple calculation. If I do this then fewer people will die than if I don’t.

Alice, the only living warshifter on Reath had died from that choice, died gladly, but died all the same. And tens of thousands of lives had been saved. The Academy Vulcanus had not fallen. The great volcano elemental Qrilotesh had not been forced to battle a foe that even if she could best it would have left hundreds of miles of Contenmere a lifeless wasteland of ash and slag.

She’d seen it again. Hours later. When Erebus had challenged the demon queen that had trained him to a duel. Witnessed personally Reath’s youngest archmage employ magics that would have signed his death warrant a dozen times over just for knowing. Seen a lightning bolt fuelled by a gods lifeforce and will expend itself upon Tsa’rahlitzek just to lay a wound upon her. Seen a meteor pulled from the sky. Seen gods bleed in battle.

Seen an imperator die.

By Von Mori’s grace, she was pretty sure the only reason she wouldn’t be executed over some of the things she now knew was that the Necropolis didn’t know of them to ban them.

They’d been let through only a few black stone corridors into some kind of waiting room, the bricks aglow to her burgeoning magical senses. They rather had to be, the inner sanctums of the Necropolis were old to the point mere stone would have crumbled to dust just by oxidation alone.

Not a word had been said to any of them by the necromancers escorting them before the damn slammed shut behind them and the click of the key in the lock had rung like a death knell.

The waiting room certainly hadn’t been designed to put people at ease. It was a drab, dismal affair, the walls painted a carefully neutral grey. The chairs creaked when they were sat in, and after she’d felt hers starting to give way Holly had elected to stand instead, her bare feet caked in dust.

She was nervous, too nervous really, but that was because some of it wasn’t hers. Hells, she was increasingly sure most of it wasn’t hers. That was the problem with sharing a soul with Alec, he tended to worry.

When she’d been bonded to the teenage mage, back before she’d even known he had magic – or he had for that matter – she’d been singularly unimpressed with the boy she was doomed to spend the rest of her life no more than a hundred metres from. Such was a dryad’s lot in life. Even one consumed by wanderlust such as she had to share their soul with something.

Alec at least was far more mobile than the holly tree she’d sprung from. And, now she’d had some times to come to terms with things, far better company as well.

It helped that the short leash she’d spent her life on had been extended significantly. Back when she’d been bound to her tree it had been painful to move more than a dozen metres away from it. Agony at more than fifty.

Now, with Alec, she honestly didn’t know how far she could go; there hadn’t really been a chance to check but she’d put good money on being able to wander the entire Necropolis and its attendant towns with barely a twinge. And it had only taken literal torture, a coma and being separated by a mad mage’s temporal loop to achieve it.

Each incident had been a kind of strain on the thin strands of their shared soul, and like with muscle, that which did not break it made it stronger. There were dryads centuries her senior who’s bond wasn’t so developed.

To give her host some credit, not all of it was because of bouts of extreme trauma, Alec, for all his faults – which she would happily list given the opportunity – was a lot more complex than a tree. Which wasn’t to say her tree had been boring, it had had needs, wants and desires, even if just for more sunlight. But they had been very static things, predictable even.

The most exciting thing she’d ever had to do for it had been to remove a colony of burrowing beetles from its trunk, not even magical beetles, just plain old insects. And if she’d carefully nurtured her tree for another couple hundred years then she’d have had a real chance at establishing herself as a power in her part of the forest.

That was what it was like being a dryad. A constant thirst for power, undercut by the near constant boredom.

The fleshbags thought it was all peaceful bliss and dancing through the flowers but the truth was that plants were fiercely, brutally competitive. Sure there was a level of cooperation, in times of drought everyone shared water through the thin strands of fungus that permeated the soil, and some of the trees had deep roots indeed to find enough for all, but when that ran out then it really was every plant for themselves.

Then there was sunlight. The older trees were absolute gluttons for sunlight, and sharing? No way in all the hells. When Holly had finally become old enough to be leave her tree, she’d spent a couple very productive days chopping down the nearby beech trees with a large rock just to clear some canopy.

By the standards of Von Mori dryads that was about a two out of ten for ruthlessness.

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The point was that faced with a life of high stakes boredom ahead of her, she’d jumped on the first opportunity to leave that had come along on the simple basis that it was very likely to be the only opportunity.

She’d had regrets since then, a lot of regrets if she was honest. Her holly tree had been dull, silent and just vaguely content. Alec on the other hand seemed to delight in throwing himself into danger, and reluctantly she’d had to admit so did she.

The other big surprise had been the sheer variety of emotion the human had, just checking their bond at this very moment gave her a terrifying bandwidth of emotions. Waves of anxiety, a subtle creeping dread and a cold fear that ran all the way down his spine only so it could then run up hers.

Damn it, she wished Erebus was still here. For all she understood why he’d had to leave, the Necropolis wouldn’t have dared to put them on trial with a literal god-killer glowering behind them.

*

Natalya tried not to openly watch the two terrified teenagers that had by the vagaries of fate become her wards. It certainly wouldn’t have been her first choice but in the fallout of Erebus’ death there had been no one else in a position to protect them.

Amara, for all that she was the premiere pyromancer of the era, and likely would be for centuries to come, was still a vampire. Vampires and the Necropolis did not get along, too much bad blood between them after the Purge of Night.

That a sufficiently powerful necromancer could just suborn a vampire was almost a secondary concern compared to that kind of history. It said a lot about Amara that two of her best friends were necromancers… well one of them now.

But alas her positive qualities also included tact and an above average measure of tactical acumen. A vampire protecting the two youngsters in necromancer central might do more harm than good.

Weaver of New Tales had been an even poorer choice of guardian. Normally an arachni in the Necropolis would have been an honoured guest. The giant sapient spiders, much like gorgons, had a right to protection within its buttressed walls that dated back to before the first stone had even been mined. And an ambassador from the Great Web Beneath, thought lost millenia ago, would have been doubly welcome, possibly even triply.

Unfortunately politics was at play. The Necropolis had secrets, and that wasn’t a secret, but one of those secrets an arachni was uniquely suited to ferret out, and one adept at shadow magic, as Weaver was, was even more likely to discover things that senior necromancers very dearly wanted to go unknown, at least for a few more years.

As one of those senior necromancers Natalya had, as politely as she could, directed Weaver elsewhere, feeling like an absolute heel in doing so. The arachni had been sincerely looking forwards to seeing the place her husband had grown up in.

And wasn’t that an absolute mind-breaker. Erebus had been married. Admittedly a sexless, loveless and childless marriage for entirely political reasons, but still she’d thought she’d known her erstwhile subordinate better than that. It was hard not to feel hurt sometimes.

Which brought her to her current spot, leant against a wall as she watched Holly steal glances at Alec every time his anxiety spiked, which was every few seconds, while the dryad carefully didn’t looking at the door they hadn’t come through.

Alec was the more concerning of the two to watch. Natalya had been in this game a very long time, too long really, but there wasn’t a necromancer worth a wisp who couldn’t slow the aging process to a crawl, ditto a healer, and she was both. In her considered opinion Alec had the look of someone who was seriously considering doing something foolish.

It might have had something to do with the way one hand kept creeping down to the sword at his belt, just to check it was still there, or maybe it was the way the other hand was maintaining a white-knuckled grip on Erebus’ warstaff. Natalya would have put good money that if the stave had been made from a wood mundane than an elder dryad’s heartwood, freely given (and that mattered magically), the yew stave would have been creaking from the pressure.

Or it was the way his own gaze had only left the door they’d entered by to flicker for just a moment to her face, seeking reassurance or perhaps just a measure of how screwed they really were, then back to the door.

She could all but see the gears turning through his head.

First he’d get out his water flask, not out of any thirst but because the fools who’d given it to him had overenchanted the damn thing. Frankly it was more of an unexploded bomb than a drinking vessel.

She knew he had some kind of enchanted body armour on, and was pretty sure he’d taken to sleeping in it, either way it and a carefully positioned chair would likely absorb most of the blast when he stabbed the flask.

After that it would be a matter of fighting his way to the teleport room, holding the mage manning it at swordpoint, getting teleported as close to safety as possible (Forest Von Mori would be her best guess) then hoping for the best.

The fighting wouldn’t be too hard. The guards at the door were living ones, and they wouldn’t be expecting a pair of apparent teenagers and a necromancer in good standing to make a break for it.

Alec might be unable to cast a spell to save his life at the moment but his swordplay belonged in hands many years his senior and he had access to some truly terrifying alchemicals that Natalya had carefully forgotten to take from him.

It would be a good plan, and it would fail disastrously at every single step.

The door was enchanted, just about every part of every building this deep in the Necropolis was. Necromancers built things to outlast not just living memory but unliving as well. So that was failure point one.

The guards Alec could probably put down, but not without killing them, and she doubted he had it in him to kill in cold blood, and if he did then he’d be dodging scrying spells for the rest of his life.

The third problem was the truly insurmountable one. The teleport room, ironically, would not be able to teleport them. Teleports were about the most mana intensive spells most mages would see in their lifetime. They took an absolute age to charge, to the point it was more common to have mana stones and spell spheres doing the work than mages.

As for the kind of combat teleporting that was so popular in stories… well Natalya wouldn’t quite say it was a myth. But she’d only ever seen one person do it, and Erebus was dead.

Only a few people on Reath knew it, and none were inclined to share the information. But the thought was one Natalya worked damned hard not to even let cross her mind for fear something or someone might pluck it out.

Despite Alec and Holly’s nervousness, she was fairly sure they were safe. For all necromancers were pragmatic, they did value life, and very few of them were cold enough to kill children.

The problem was that nearly all of them would be in the small chamber ahead of them. And most of those without the stomach for bloodshed, which was a surprising number of necromancers, would not be there.

If it were an open vote in the Unhallowed Auditorium, a room intended to seat every citizen, necromancer or sapient undead in the Necropolis’ aegis, then Alec and Holly’s safety wouldn’t even be a passing question.

But the smaller chamber didn’t have a name, because it didn’t officially exist. Or rather officially it was a backup classroom for remedial necromancy that seldom saw use.

This wouldn’t be an open vote, couldn’t be an open vote, because that was the problem with the crime of knowing too much, it tended to spread very fast. So they’d keep it to those already contaminated. Those who in their wisdom and benevolence had concluded the knowledge was safe with them.

It would depend on which voting blocs were in attendance. Erebus’ order, the Sable Shields, would almost certainly side in favour of the two. The Grand Apology the same. Her own order, the Eternal Gardeners, would probably be against. Which left only the majority of unaffiliated senior necromancers and liches who could go either way.

By the Martyr’s forgotten name but she wasn’t ready for this fight. Wars of words had never been Natalya’s forte. She’d been a soldier, an elite warmage, even that rarest of things, a soul healer, but not once in her life had she been accused of being a diplomat.

She wished Erebus was here. Not because he was more diplomatic. He most certainly hadn’t been. Erebus would have simply declared the pair of them off limits and if any of the learned liches awaiting them had brooked disagreement he’d have simply told whoever said it that they’d be the one that died first.

There’d have been laughter, because it was laughable. One necromancer, no matter how great their deeds, their knowledge or power, against the entire Necropolis… there could only ever be one result.

And some of the laughter would be uneasy, because some would remember the many who’d been stood opposite Erebus and made that same calculation. And he was still standing there, and they weren’t.

Miraculously, graciously, they’d conclude that Alec and Holly were just children in over their heads, good, kind souls to be gently guided and educated until they were worthy of the secrets in their heads.

Very gently guided.

But Erebus was dead, and she was not. And if the Necropolis, in its wisdom, decided to kill two children, she’d have little choice but to stand back and watch.

Slowly the door to the chamber swung open and Natalya stood to her full height, rolling her shoulders back as if getting ready for a fight. Because she was. And she was absolutely determined not to lose.