IMPORTANT NOTE
I will be changing my update schedule to exclude Sundays & Saturdays from now on, during which I will only post chapters to Patreon. While I have made it explicitly clear that I do not and will not guarantee Advanced Chapters, my usual output is 1 - 3 Chapters a day during weekends I'm not working, and I feel as though I owe it to Patrons to give them something. I won't commit to it, because again, I don't want to get burned out... But I am going to do it if I'm able, and simply setting aside two days seems like the logical way to do it. Thanks for your support, and please enjoy the writing, even if you dislike the contents.
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“It originated from the palace, my lord.”
Lunnierre Karelian, Necrolord of the Immortal Host of Absolum, turned his cold grey eyes on the Vasiri reporting to him while the undead legions under his command marched past them. The woman’s skin was pallid, devoid of the vital essence a truly living creature would possess. When combined with her rust-red eyes, it created a visage that was at a glance elegant and beautiful thanks to her cheekbones, but twisted into wrongness when subjected to anything beyond a cursory examination.
“The Nephilim, then.” Lunnierre said with a glance back toward the south where he knew the ancient city of Albion stood.
After all, he’d been there when it fell.
“You truly believe it was a—?”
“Calamity’s Blade has been harnessed.” Lunnierre cut in without paying her any heed. “The last gasp of Elysea has made himself known to our Master, and Lycinius — the worthless wretch — is dead.” He let her process that before promptly dismissing the words. “It doesn't matter.” He declared while he turned back toward the north and the expansive blight of the Desolation. “We will press on to Sanctuary, and when he follows after us to find the ruin of Elysea’s last bastion, we will cast him among the multitudinous corpses and corrupted supplicants of our Master’s army.”
“Some of the supplicants are flagging, my lord.” The Vasiri said carefully. “If we want them to last long enough to fight for us at Sanctuary—”
“They will overcome or they will be added to the undead. The desert beasts are more worthwhile than the mortal supplicants, and the hardiest among those supplicants will have no issue making the journey. Those that die can join the horde, or be used to feed the appetites of the beasts.” He turned his gaze back to the Vasiri. “Why are you wasting my time with these trifles?”
“I am merely trying to—”
“Heed me, you sycophantic maggot.” Lunnierre said icily. “Your only purpose is to maintain your Leash on your section of the horde. You Vasiri are only here to ease the burden of commanding the dead, while I focus on the enemies of our Divine Master. Do not conflate your usefulness with value. You are disposable. You are all disposable.”
He lifted a chitin-armoured gauntlet and waved her off. “Now go, before I decide you look amusing.”
That at last seemed to make some measure of an impact, and the woman dipped into a hasty curtsy and vanished with every ounce of her Expert tier speed.
How predictable.
Lunnierre turned his eyes back toward the army under his authority, and watched while the neatly organised rows of skeletal warriors stomped past, followed by ten thousand — perhaps less, now that time and exhaustion had claimed the weakest among them — dominated and corruption-infused mortals in piecemeal attire.
Their purpose wasn’t grandeur, after all, it was horror.
He would not simply defeat the Elysean remnant, he would break them.
“Children playing at the glories of their forebears.” He murmured darkly while turning toward the distant horizon line where he knew the shielding mountains would be. The dimensional displacement that hid it meant nothing to a chosen dread knight of Absolum, and he would find and pierce their safe harbour with or without the snivelling Solari positioned among the populace of the so-called Sanctuary.
One week. In one week he would have his vengeance, his justice, and the restitution denied to him by five Ages of slumber. He turned back to the horde while he considered that fact. He had already failed Absolum once, and been cast into darkness and solitude for five thousand years as a result. The very idea of that punishment made even his immortal soul shiver with fear. The blackness. The compression.
The silence.
Lunnierre let none of his trepidation-fuelled determination bleed through to the emotionless mask of his face, which would eventually resume its obfuscation beneath the horned insectoid greathelm he carried at his side. The forces under his command marched past him unhurriedly while he watched them, and Lunnierre almost considered accelerating their pace.
In the land that Elysea had become, though, that would prove… problematic.
He needed them to be coordinated and whole when they reached Sanctuary. The defects affecting individual units would show their impediments too well if he pushed past a steady march, and it would serve him no purpose to arrive with a strung out and disorganised force to confront his enemies. Even if they saw him coming, it would matter little.
He would sweep over the would-be inheritors like locusts over wheat.
His eyes shifted to look out at the Desolation once more, and let some small kernel of memory rise to the fore. Time spent in a village now lost to memory and blight, where he’d been raised to believe in the inane promises of the Mantle, and the flawed leadership of Lucius Valoris Tollarius.
Years spent fighting within the Legio Fulminata, only to be castigated and exiled for delivering unto the wicked the punishment they deserved. He did not disagree that what he’d done had been savage or brutally horrific. Flaying an entire village alive had been barbaric. It had also been effective, and Lunnierre of Korinthus had always been effective. The fact his Decurion, Penturion, Centurion, Legatum, and Archon had none of them seen nor understood the necessity justifying his actions was hardly his fault.
It had been war. The village had been godsworn. He had disabused them of their notions of rebellion or insurgency for generations to come. The tales of Lunnierre the Manflayer had echoed up and down the River Varus. From the Veneratii-filled white towers of Antares to the viridian conclaves of the forest-realm of Norathilien, and beyond to the northron protectorates that bordered Elysea proper. His name had become synonymous with the fate that awaited cultists.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
If Archon Iralion had only heeded his warnings and understood his actions instead of blindly following the ideologue rhetoric of Albion and House Tollarius, then the entire godsworn rebellion might have been avoided. Instead they had banished him, lifting the veil of their hypocrisy and lies from his eyes and opening his mind to the truth: Elysea was as twisted and corrupt as any flawed mortal. Only the divine had the right to pass such judgement.
Only a god could be worthy of castigating him in such a manner.
So he had sought out the Necromancers of Saturnine, and been granted membership to their esteemed order, and gifted the knowledge of the Death God’s cult. When the Solari had risen in defiance of House Tollarius and the lie of the Mantle, Lunnierre and the Necromancers of Saturnine had risen with them, and he had been there, fives Ages past, when Justinian Tollarius had been Anointed the Grand Ascendant of the gods’ chosen nation.
His eyes looked out at blighted Elysea with memories playing behind them, and he scowled. The last time he had been in these lands, they had been verdant and lush. Now they were little more than ruined, poisoned, and desiccated husks of their former glory. Gone were the many and great rivers, gone were the towering manawoods reaching up as if to brush the sky. Dead were the multitudinous plethora of fauna and flora that had once marked Elysea as the most beautiful land in the Prime Material.
All of it had been destroyed, corrupted, subsumed.
His Master had thrown his lasting wrath against the land, and it had withered beneath Absolum’s hate. To Lunnierre it was a form of poetic justice, a rightness that he entirely held as just desserts. If they had listened to him, then all rebellion and chance of godsworn resurgence would have been abated. He could have been the change, the fulcrum Elysea had needed to properly move past its decaying and slovenly state.
They had relied far too much on the threat of the Ordo Draconis and Bael’tharax to suppress godsworn insurgencies.
He sneered out at the landscape.
Killing the Drakaii had been one of his great pleasures during the outset of the true war. It had been a gratifying act of vengeance, no matter that each was slain with overwhelming ambush tactics and when they were at their lowest guard. What matter was it that it had taken a one hundred to one ratio to kill them? They had died, and the Empire had lost its greatest strength over the course of nine brutal days.
Perhaps if Bael’tharax had remained hale and whole, things would have gone differently. Even Lunnierre understood and respected, even feared the unbridled might of the Dragon King.
Yet even that creature, the greatest of all that lived, had been laid low by the superior minds of the Nine. Justinian’s own hand had seen Bael’tharax forced into a route, and opened the way for the Anointed to storm Elysea herself. Forsworn they had been called; Lunnierre and all those with him that had once served in Elysea’s Legios, as if he and his peers had chosen to be cast out. Some had defected, certainly, but only after seeing the truth of the rotting carcass the Empire had become.
Old. Decrepit. Unworthy.
Lunnierre breathed deep of the blighted air and felt its poisonous mana taint filling his channels, and reacting to the blessed virulence of his Stygian Core. He had worked hard to cultivate the power over death and to twist his Life magic into the violation of the same element it had become. Like all Necromancers, he worked the power of Death; but unlike many he had naturally been gifted with Life magic as well.
Unlike the Vasiri, who each had to be broken like stubborn beasts to see the glory of Absolum’s enlightened ideas, Lunnierre had embraced them willingly. He had even been raised to the vaunted position of Necrolord during the war’s most violent campaigns, and had been present the same day the Lunar Gate had fallen to the machinations of House Karelian.
His House. His blood. Anointed and revered by the Sworn.
It had not been easy, of course, to convince many of his family to join his enlightened path… but after delivering the majority to Absolum’s clutches, and making good on his Manflayer title, he had shown the others the futility of resistance. The godsworn had been the future, and he had inflicted pain to ensure his kinsmen survived what was to come. If only he hadn’t been forced to serve penance, he would have even had Stormharrow for his own.
Instead it had gone to his mortal and half-witted brother, Vitarius. The fool.
“Perhaps I can have a reunion once we are done with Sanctuary,” he mused to himself. “The Lunar Gate is not so far from the shield mountains.”
That would be a fine use of his time, after all.
And a sweet appeasement for his tenure in exile.
He idly wondered how his descendents — not direct, of course — would react to their ancient progenitor showing up after five thousand years of ignoble imprisonment. Perhaps he’d need to reinforce the necessity of adhering to his wisdom. It had been a while since he’d practised his flaying techniques. He’d need to brush up on them, lest he make a poor showing to his relatives. That would be a true crime.
His eyes drifted again toward his horde, and the conspicuous forms of the twelve Vasiri standing haughtily nearby and overseeing the march.
He picked out the female from earlier, considered her, and then discarded her.
He’d always found the opposite gender repulsive. Too empathetic. Too weak.
Instead Lunnierre let his eyes fall upon a fair-featured elven man among the press of Vasiri, and he smiled. He had always enjoyed the taste of elf. There was a mana-rich succulence to their flesh that few creatures could emulate, and once he’d moved past his initial gorge at the thought of eating what he had incorrectly qualified as people, he’d come to enjoy elf as his favoured meal.
After all, they weren’t really people. They were just more intelligent animals.
No one was as worthy of the mantle of person as the original Anointed. All these others were just pretenders, attempting to hold for themselves a kernel of ancient and inviolable glory. Lunnierre loathed them for that, and the Vasiri especially. Demented fools that had to be forced into accepting their shared Master’s most holy gifts. Lunnierre sneered. The male would do nicely.
He couldn’t kill him, of course, but that shouldn’t matter.
He was quite confident in the Vasiri’s healing to keep it alive.
There were just under ten thousand appropriately corrupted supplicants to feed to the man, after all. That would be more than sufficient to maintain its healing.
“Though marching throughout will make the indulgence far less enjoyable…” He muttered to himself while his mind raced. “The maggot did mention the supplicants were wavering. It would be benevolent of me to let them camp for a single night, if that is the case.”
He nodded to himself. “Yes. A night of recovery sounds well-needed.”
Lunnierre glanced at his army while he made the decision and felt it out before him once more, tied to the Vasiri by necrotic green and deathly black tethers of power. From the twelve Vasiri, he could sense the dense weaves of connection trailing back to the Highest and Absolum himself, though all of them paled when compared to Lunnierre’s own. His core and Soulforce were interwoven with his bond to the god, and his tether — he was quite proud to know — was one of the most potent that still existed.
He was one of the last true Anointed, after all. The last Necromancer of Saturnine, as far as he knew. In that way it was something of a blessing, horrible as it had been, to have been locked away. Now he alone could be responsible for the rebuilding of his order. Perhaps he’d do it in Stormharrow, as a gift to his relatives. He smiled coldly at the thought.
His eyes trailed once more over the Vasiri, and then focused back onto the elf. A thrill of anticipation buzzed through him and down his spine, and Lunnierre felt a small stirring in his loins. He had not cared about carnal desires outside of ensuring his line even before his imprisonment, and even then his stupid, worthless bitch of a cousin had failed to provide him even a single son, no matter how often he’d cajoled her to do her duty.
It had been his divine right to ensure his line! The fact she’d resisted a champion of the Nine had been absurd. Her tune had changed when he’d flayed her brother, but even that had only lasted so long. He couldn’t understand why people were so lacking in common sense. Barbarism was an excellent means of educating others on the folly of their ways. It was hardly his problem that there were some few that refused to learn from the poignant examples of consequence.
Her death was one he did regret, if only because he hadn’t been able to carve out her worthless guts himself. She’d been killed in the last days of the war, supposedly. Or committed suicide. He couldn’t fully remember. It had been around the time he’d been most heavily engaged against his homeland’s futile resistance to Revelation.
Not that it mattered. Not anymore. The ungrateful bitch was five thousand years dead.
He had better things to dwell on, now. His smile split his features again.
At his side, Lunnierre felt his Regalia vibrate with expectation. He patted the runesword placatingly.
It was going to be a truly wonderful night.