It was not often that undead despaired. When the long view was measured in centuries it was always possible to steer things in a more favourable direction, and if all else failed one could always just play dead. Very few could tell a living and unliving corpse apart by eye alone and enough patience could let the board reset itself as a person’s misdeeds passed out of history.
Head Gardener Ackeron was coming to the conclusion that he could no longer afford to take the long view. Hells above and below, tomorrow might even be looking too far.
The lich was sat in his office, which to the shock of everyone to enter it did in fact exist. In fact most of his subordinates were shocked every single time, forced to leave most of their memories of the room at the door.
Opposite him were five chessboards. The metaphor was crude. The positions approximate for how he felt the battle against whichever pair of unseen hands was going.
The first board showed an even position. The two sides pawn structures locked, the position cramped with limited room for manoeuvring or advantage by either side. This was the paladin board, and sometimes Ackeron wondered if it should even be there, the peace being as enduring as it had proven.
It was certainly the only board where he’d shared a drink with the other pair of hands. High Paladin Gregor was, by most measures, a good man and a level head. Which was why it was almost with resentment that he plucked a couple of pawns from the paladin’s side.
The war against Von Mori really was taxing the Holy Paladin Order hard at a time they could ill afford to be taxed.
The second board showed a position where Ackeron’s pieces were in full control, with the enemy king protected by just a couple of pawns (one close to promotion on the eight rank) and a rook against nearly a full set of pieces. This was the Sidhe board, the residents of Avalon, and though the threat from those veritable nightmares were as good as solved it was the one board that Ackeron would likely never remove.
The fae folk were just too tricksome, too conniving, which was why even when they were bound to borderline passivity on Reath the ancient lich kept the board there. To make sure he never forgot.
Board three, for theatrical reasons, had red pieces opposite. A month ago it had been a defensive position in his favour, but now the centre was wide open. There was no stopping a demonic invasion at this point, and they were woefully unprepared. Worse their allies were unprepared. And as the final nail in the proverbial vampire’s bachelor pad, so were their enemies.
There was no real pair of hands behind the red pieces, the hells were too fractured in their leadership – where there even was leadership.
By all logic it should have been board three that scared him. It wasn’t even close. Board five beckoned.
Still he spared poor board four a glance. There was only one set of pieces. He was playing black, the reactor, the defensive player. This was the board of the unknown threat. It represented monsters beyond even immortal ken. Rogue gods. Rot-herylds. A plague of Warped. Things like Tza’rahlitzek that could hit the board without warning, wiping away the work of centuries.
Board four hadn’t looked this bereft of pieces since the first day he’d walked into this office as Head Gardener and set it up.
And then, because he’d put it off as long as he could, he turned his attention to board five. The other unknown board. More than anything in his life or unlife he hated board five.
It had taken him a hundred years in the job, as well as some rambling notes from his predecessor, to notice there was a set of hands on the board that simply should not have been there. If they even were there.
They didn’t move often. And they struck at the Necropolis more oft than not. Or perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps there were other people just like him, quietly despairing as those unseen hands struck again and again and they couldn’t prove a thing.
The fort at Eredich. The decay of the Ossific Champions 3rd Company. Merida’s second apprentice. His own predecessor, the late Silent Zara. All just too unlikely to be chance. Perfect confluences of bad luck.
Just two pieces on the board. King vs king.
Zara’s final journal had been manic, almost fevered. That she’d worked it all out. That she was ready to face ‘the nameless man who covets the world’. That had been the journal at its most coherent.
He’d dismissed it completely at the time. That Zara had finally cracked under the pressure. There wasn’t any other explanation for her teleporting herself alone into an elder dragon’s lair and challenging them to a duel.
To Zara’s credit she’d done well. Five whole seconds against one of the original dragons was very close to breaking the record.
His first clue that she hadn’t been mad should have been when some of her journals, the ones with the ravings in, had been misfiled and consequently burnt. Alas his paranoia hadn’t been properly developed in his youth. Such a strange thing youth, at least for a necromancer, at forty he’d thought the apprentices young, at a hundred the journeymages, then the masters.
He wondered how the real ancient monsters of Reath saw him. An uppity child? A promising youth? A fly to be swatted?
Unlike Zara he’d eschewed journals. The only nod to the existence of what he’d taken to thinking of as ‘the unknown player’ was the fifth chess board and often he feared even that was too much.
Ackeron knew he’d grown in his time as Head Gardener, but in his head Silent Zara remained a towering existence. An archmage in all but name, for the sake of Merida’s volatile ego. One of the few necromancers to make the transition into lichdom and keep their life in the process.
Compared to that, even after all this time, he felt paltry. He felt wea-
“My lord…?” Ackeron nearly incinerated the source of that quiet voice, and the hand gently shaking his shoulder.
Slowly the leathery lich turned his empty sockets upon the young woman before recognition dawned upon him. Gabriella Erezel, his adjutant,’s eyes were wide with fear. She knew just how close he’d come to killing her out of reflex.
“How long was I out of it?” He asked slowly, voice a tired rasp.
“Three hours I think. At least that’s the last time someone checked on you.” She told him, placing a sheath of reports on his desk. “That’s this evening’s reports and there’s four I have to give you verbally and one through hand sign… or I can just save you the reading and tell you the written ones.”
“I’ll read them later.” Ackeron sighed, rubbing at eyes that had been missing for centuries. “...I think it’s time I retired.”
“Don’t say it like that sir. You’ll outlive all of us I’m sure… well you know what I mean.”
“I feel old.” The lich said simply, “I don’t know how Merida keeps going. Well let’s hear it.”
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Good news please.” Ackeron requested, and waited, and waited. The problem with necromancers, at least the problem that noone ever talked about, at least in the lich’s opinion, was that each and every one thought they were are a comedian. Worse, they all seemed to be the same comedian. “And the bad news?”
“Okay, starting with the small stuff. Recruitment is down across the board and rejection of fresh bodies is up to almost fifteen percent and expected to rise to twenty percent over the next decade.”
If Ackeron had been alive he’d probably have gulped. This was going to be a rough report if the eventual existential failure of the Necropolis was the small stuff.
The problem was that they had, in some ways, done too good of a job. With life expectancy up all over Council of Mages territory, far too many people were surviving deep into old age, bones weakening. With no dire, and persistent, threats to peace not enough people were even becoming necromancers.
By all the dead gods but he couldn’t be expected to fight a war with nothing but bonemeal class undead! If things continued on their current trajectory they’d be forced to fold bonemeal class into labour and bump labour up to war. Possibly even put a hold on Ossific Champions entirely.
Despite Alec and Holly’s disdain for the pinnacle of non-sapient necromancy, they filled a vital role in emergencies. And it wasn’t fighting demon lords and similar. It was fighting the demons that came with them.
Three Ossific Champions could hold a hellrift until the end of time so long as no demon lords turned up. Besides the Necropolis had weapons for killing demon lords. They were called Ackeron and Merida, amongst a dozen or so other names.
“Okay. What’s the next piece of news?”
“It’s looking like a full blown civil war between the pyromancy cults. Vulcanus is currently besieged and hard pressed, some of the cults have even brought their elementals.”
“That’s madness.” The ancient lich hissed, “What on Reath are they thinking?”
“I imagine it’s the elementals’ ideas. When your object of worship says jump, you jump. Maybe some of them are looking to follow in Charigris’ footsteps, maybe some are outraged at Vulcanus’ failure to protect them. Some likely both.” Gabriella shrugged, “Either way Vulcanus is in trouble.”
The lich rubbed at his empty eye sockets, going through the motions of the exhaustion he could no longer physically feel.
Dead pyromancers was never a good thing. The fire mages were the most martial of the major magical arts, for all that fire had uses beyond killing it was the most obvious one and huge swathes of the Council of Mages response teams, town guardians and so on were composed of them.
Not to mention the elemental cults themselves, as a general rule, tended to keep their area of the world fairly safe.
Officially Vulcanus lacked an elemental, its neutrality the reason it had been chosen as the ancestral home of pyromancy. A polite fiction. The truth was that Vulcanus simply had the most powerful elemental of them all.
Qrilotesh, a volcano elemental dating all the way back to the time of the gods, had a fondness for humanity. Or rather she had a fondness for new experiences, sharing her power with a rare few in exchange for getting to share some of their perspective.
Some elementals never took a Chosen, the idea too alien, too strange. Some only ever took one in their entire lives. Most settled for a single person to speak for them and be their agent in the world.
Qrilotesh fell into the rarest category. Taking multiple chosen at a time and demanding little in return beyond that they try to enjoy life to the fullest.
Something about the situation nagged at Ackeron, though he couldn’t place his finger upon it.
“As much of an ally as Vulcanus has been, we cannot afford to be seen siding with them by their successor if they fall. What’s the next problem?” The Head Gardener asked as he scratched a couple notes down.
“The Umbral Temple has reached out to us to see if we want to help with the foundation of a new anti-memetics division to combat, and I quote, ‘a long overlooked and unforeseen hole in our security’. They plan to put the proposal before the Council next week.”
This time Ackeron actually swore. “How?! They were doing well! I was getting weekly reports from… from… Crap.” The lich breaking off as he sought a name and came up blank.
On any other topic he’d already be summoning weapons to himself, calling upon oaths and favours to do battle with whatever entity had managed to worm its way into the veritable fortress that was his mind because anyone who could manipulate a lich’s memory was the sort of foe the survivors told stories about afterwards.
Stories were not told about anti-memes. There wasn’t really much point. The creatures, in what Ackeron was mostly sure were many shapes and guises, could eat information itself. Noone had tampered with his mind, the reason he could not recall the name of whichever poor soul had been his liason to the old anti-memetics division?… contingent?.. department? was that it simply didn’t exist any more.
They’d be able to figure some of it out from gaps in the records, equipment that was missing, farms and mines that had underproduced for no apparent reason. Sometimes it was just thievery, sometimes it was poor record keeping. But sometimes it meant those materials had fallen into the waiting maw of an anti-meme.
To Ackeron’s knowledge he’d only ever faced three, and only one of the encounters could he even remember, the other two reconstructed off of gaps in memory and notes he didn’t remember writing. Notes too could fail. The Whispering Archive was proof of that, if one knew where to look. It was called the Empty Shelf, for all it was stacked with books. Each one holding nary a word anymore.
A monument to failure, or, going by what fragmented records survived, an insane attempt to restore the books knowledge with necromancy. The logic, as much as it could be called logic, went thus: A book with its words removed was a dead book. So surely if placed in a location with sufficiently large concentration of ambient necromancy they would become an undead book – thus restoring the lost knowledge.
Success had been… about as high as expected really. Beyond an incident two hundred and fifty years ago where the blank copy of What I Did On My Holidays by Harry the Vicious had managed to tear out a librarian’s throat, nothing had happened.
The point was that anti-memes were bad news. Especially to organisations that depended on skills and knowledge that had been built up over century. The mere thought of an anti-meme actually getting into the Whispering Archive was a terror every bit as bone-chilling as something like Tza’rahlitzek.
Even something as weak as a tentacular dreadmaw, a hideous cross between a hyena, an octopus and a threshing machine, and one of the few that wasn’t able to eat information about itself by virtue of being too dumb to know it was an information, could erase centuries of advancement in an evening’s binge.
And one had wiped out the organisation best prepared to fight them, and done it so fast they’d apparently been unable to escape or call for aid. Unless of course they had called for aid and that too had ended up erased from history. Maybe the Slayers of Death had had a leader once? Even without being redacted from reality, would anyone notice if ten of the notoriously granular and lone wolf Sable Shields vanished?
But down that line of thought lay madness. What Ackeron had to do was decide how to deal with this latest catastrophe.
“How do you want to handle it?” Gabriella asked, fingers curling and uncurling nervously around the reports.
“Simple. We’re going to do nothing.” The lich told her calmly. “We are already overstretched and I would not have assigned anyone less than veteran to its predecessor. Whatever this is, we are not the people to fight it. Instead send an amendment to Gardener Natalya’s orders, read her in on anti-memes and give her negotiation rights with the old monsters of Seruatis. Perhaps one of them will answer the call.”
If Ackeron had still had a stomach it would have been threatening rebellion at the thought of begging their most ancient enemies for help. And it was begging, Ackeron had nothing to offer them beyond not seeking reprisals.
“Okay, final bit of bad news.” He ordered as he wrote a couple more notes to himself.
“We’ve managed to determined one of the dragons slain fighting Tza’rahlitzek. Golgoth the Radiant. His body however is missing and his hoard had already been removed. There was also no trace of his soul.”
The last snippet was almost enough for Ackeron to try and break his desk using nought but his skull.
“One of us then.” The lich concluded, “The other orders won’t like it, but I will demand every senior necromancer and intelligent undead’s actions over the last month are accounted for.”
“He might have fled as a ghost…?” Gabriella suggested, trying to throw her boss a lifeline.
“No. The ghost would have stayed to protect its hoard, and put up such a fight that little of it would have survived.”
“Then a rescue mission?”
“Again no. There would be no reason to keep it secret, hells I’d have sponsored such a project personally. We have to assume malintent.”
“How do you want to handle it?” His aide asked, unlike Ackeron she hadn’t written anything down. A skill the lich was grateful for. Written records were useful, but sometimes they could be a death sentence.
“Go to the library and inventory all the books on dracoliches, dragonbone, dragonblood, soul binding and wraith wrangling. Do it personally and do not consult with the librarians. If we’re lucky our rogue will need to consult the books at some point.” Ackeron ordered.
“Very well.” Gabriella bowed low to him, “If that is all then I shall take my leave, lord.”
“That is all.” Ackeron confirmed.
It was only when she’d left that he looked down at the message she’d been signing to him as they spoke.
The Elder Wraith wants to come home.