Sphera was exhausted, in every way she believed a woman could be. Her magic was drained, from hours of emptying her mana out into one newly-retrieved carcass after another and directing them all back to the front lines. Her body was drained, from the mild physical element that came with the rituals needed to make her Necromancy reach the heights of its power. More than anything else, her mind was drained. She’d not slept in almost forty-eight hours, and had only been even kept conscious by her new Master taking an incredibly irritated moment to touch her forehead and work some unknowable Fleshcrafting upon her brain to purge it of its fatigue.
Some of its fatigue, not all. Apparently leaving her entirely sleepless was an alteration more than he had time for. Most things, other than his damned research, were more than he had time for.
Her work, in the siege, had been a purely support role. That was not a surprise, it was by far the best way for any Necromancer to serve in any capacity. She had conjured undead, imbued them with all the power she could, and sent them on to fight the enemy. Rested when necessary, paused when forced, and did precious little else.
Of course, Sphera knew there must have been at least one Ranger using that preternatural perception of theirs to watch her servitors. Had even a single one turned against her new allies, she doubted it would have perished fighting in the front lines before she herself had been put down behind them. Amusingly that fact would have made a rather promising strategy for Venka in having one of his own undead disguised as hers, if only for the slim chance of actually fooling a Ranger, but she supposed even the greatest generals could only work with the information they had.
And Venka was a damned imbecile, too.
For the first day that had been all Sphera had worried about, nothing more than the most unpleasant twenty four hour stretch she had ever found herself subjected to. By the second, it was worse by far. By the second, she’d understood what the Ranger was there for.
Her undead died, and Sphera felt each one. They’d always been dying, of course, but suddenly their expirations came rapidly and easily. On no less than a dozen occasions she felt her creations destroyed within moments of reaching combat, and the carefully built-up surplus she’d been flooding the keep with for the past day rapidly withered as enemies found, seized or made new paths into the building to bring the full force of their numbers to bear. It was scarcely even a massacre, more akin to the sight of her creations being crushed beneath some natural disaster. A flood of bodies, a hurricane of blades, a storm of ruin.
Sphera’s fears worsened as the siege did, enemy approach keenly felt with the growing proximity of her slain undead. Soon enough, Sphera realised, she was sending her creations out to be destroyed without even leaving the corridor adjoined to her Master’s laboratory where she raised them.
After that, Sphera stopped sending them out entirely. She simply focused on the pile of bodies still left beside her- which had long since halted its replenishment as defenders were killed in the fighting- and began concentrating undead directly by her side. It did nothing to smoothe over the turbulent waves of her strengthening horror, and the enemy were scraping at their doors shortly.
It was the second thing Master Silenos had taken the time to focus on, if only briefly, that door. Its wooden frame had been removed, its bands of reinforcing iron replaced, with the same inexplicable materials he worked into his other creations. Sphera had no reference for how strong they might be, she’d not seen much of the grotesqueries in battle. She had only hope, and that was a fool’s comfort.
A thud shook the door, sending dust to drift from the stone into which it was built. She jumped, stepped back, swallowed and turned to her Master.
“They’re coming, Master.”
Silenos Shaiagrazni did not even look up. Sphera might have whispered the words to him, or giggled them, and elicited no less perturbment or shock. He simply continued his work on the latest of numerous orcs, replying without so much as a glance her way.
“Hold them.” He instructed. “Falls ought to be returning soon, once he does we will galvanise and prepare to flee from this city. Assuming my work is not done beforehand.”
It was comical. What work could possibly turn the tides now, of all times? He might have obliterated the entire city in a single, great blast akin to the one he’d used to destroy so many of her own undead, and Sphera doubted Venka would even have been left with an army too small to besiege another. No, they had failed, they had lost. And her Master, it seemed, was falling towards outright delusion in his refusal to accept as much.
More impacts struck the door, then yet more. The noise was almost beyond belief, like hearing trebuchet stones break against the surface mere feet from her. Each time Sphera expected to see the curious construct break and fall away, but instead it held. She almost found a scrap of hope welling up, then saw the cracks appearing.
They were in the stone, not the material of House Shaiagrazni. A wall made carefully thick and defensible- and chosen as the Necromancers’ base of operations for just such a feature- was being broken apart long before the door it held. Sphera had gauged the thickness at two, even three or four feet. A sturdy structure, but far from invincible. It would not have withstood a Hero, and she had no doubts its span would be short as the assault continued.
Of course she had no doubts, she could see it shortening with her own two eyes each time another blow came upon it.
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“Master!” Sphera cried, in a tone which might have left her feeling embarrassed to portray such weakness, were it not for the significant fact of her standing mere yards away from a visceral end.
“Silence.” Silenos snapped, as if she were some petulant, whinging infant at his feet. “My work is nearly done, and Falls is not yet here. I need but minutes, less than an hour, then we will be ready to meet them.”
It was laughable, insane, and- worst of all- something Sphera was utterly without the means to contradict. Venka would know that she had sent her own undead against him, now, such traces would be provable in their bodies, and there would be no mercy for her in the Dark Lord’s army.
She had gotten herself killed in a momentary impulse of ambition, and there was nothing more to be done about the fact.
The wall screamed in agony as cracks lengthened, thickened, widened. Chunks of stone the size of a man’s fist fell from the space between them, then those architectural discardations grew until they were almost head-wide and landed with an audible crash. A minute passed, five, ten. Then Sphera saw images through slits in the wall, shadows and forms shifting behind, barely perceptible through the wafting cloud of dust-clotted air. Her body felt suddenly disconnected from the rest of her, as if the terror unfolding was happening to someone else. Someone distant, someone whose death would have no bearing on her.
And then the largest piece yet was smashed from place, and Sphera’s frightful dissociation was halted by the sight of an undead scrambling through the newly made gap.
Her first instinct was barely resisted, and very nearly killed her. Sphera had prepared a globule of shadestuff, somewhere, and had she loosed it then it might well have spattered the walls and widened the gap already made. Instead she curtailed herself, sent undead on with a thought and watched as a reanimated orcish Elite split the invader’s skull like firewood beneath an axe. Its corpse remained in the hole for all of a second before being violently shoved free, exposing another reanimate which perished in much the same way. This time Sphera had another orc shove back at the carcass, aiming to keep it lodged in the gap.
It was a functional tactic, for the next four or so holes that emerged. Soon enough, though, the wall was being eroded from so many points at once as to begin collapsing. She felt her heart lurch at the sight of so many rotting faces coming on, even as her own surged forth to meet them. Within the close confines, the violence felt somehow enhanced. As if it were forcibly compressed, intensified, by being denied the room to expand. She felt putrid flesh and the reek of sweat and combat-stench, pressed herself back against a far wall and watched as her forces were slowly taken apart.
The quality of her undead was greater, there could be no doubt. But they were finite, and the enemy, functionally, was not. One by one they fell, even as Sphera started hurling shadestuff into the enemy masses and melting off limbs and heads. Soon she was virtually alone, and then the horde was upon her.
It was a streak of fire which stopped them, and a tendril of meat. The latter came down first, forming a new wall, impeding them long enough for the broiling chemicals to wash over them and ignite with an intensity she recalled perfectly well. Recalled, and recognised the improvements to. Steel had not melted from flesh, when last she’d seen Silenos Shaiagrazni unleash his fire magic, but it did now.
“I have finished.” Her Master proclaimed, striding forth with nothing more than that word alone. He looked around at the room, curled lip illuminated by the flickering blaze he’d set among the enemy ranks. “So many corpses, and most untouched by magic. Your mana capacity is not so impressive as Falls’.”
Sphera didn’t have the chance to reply, nor was she even certain she would have, before her Master raised a hand, and gestured. The world moved around him.
It was a large chamber, they were in. Large enough that a full company of one hundred soldiers might have occupied its centre and still found room enough to manouver and march with space to spare. Despite this expansivity, it had been filled almost to its totality with corpses. Orc corpses, human corpses, even the occasional other species who had somehow found themselves conscripted into Venka’s army or trapped in the slaughter of Kaltan. Some were undead themselves, beyond reanimation for a second time, but those were pooled near the entrance, and elsewhere the place was practically choked with dead meat.
Thousands, at a glance. Too many for Sphera to have possibly animated in her weakened state, perhaps too many for her to bring back at all. Her Master did not even change his expression as he shattered both her sense of scale, possibility and pride all in a single flourish of magic.
Everywhere Sphera saw, corpses rose. Not the lumbering behemoths made by hours of Shaiagraznian genius, nor the half-possessed vessels stuffed with some ancient Hero or abyssal force, but reanimates nonetheless. Imbued with all the power their bodies could hold without bursting apart, each lurching forth with the physicality of a Knight and the savagery of a rabid dog. All crashing into the incursive enemy like a tidal wave.
It took less time to force the undead out of the room than it had for them to force themselves in, and Sphera stood on trembling legs as she watched. Turning to her Master.
“...So that was your weapon.” She croaked. He slapped her, hard. Hard enough that she hit her knees again, head rocked by the blow, eyes staring up confusedly at him.
“Idiot.” He replied, good mood apparently dissipating. “As if such a pathetic reanimation as that would take me even a minute of work. No, that was the contents of roughly one quarter of my mana capacity. Ugly work, crude, but it had to be done. It wouldn’t do to be savaged just as I finished sealing our victory.”
At a gesture, his arm was that strange, cylindrical weapon he called a cannon. The wall burst apart, revealing the cityscape out beyond. Sphera’s heart lurched as she saw just how thickly the orcs crawled across it, light spilling in, hope spilling out. But only for a moment.
Because then she realised that the orcs swarming outside the keep- swarming in their tens of thousands- were not standing, nor climbing, nor holding formation. They were lying around, rolling in the dirt, convulsing. Their noises were not hungry war cries, but agonised squeals. Their bodies were not moving with victory, but with death.
All of them, without exception. As if the general Venka himself had ordered his men to die. Sphera turned to her master, stared, and saw him smile.
“I will admit their biology was strange enough to delay even me.” He mused, good mood apparently restored as some great beast lurched around beneath them. It was no more or less terrible than any of his other abominations, disparate only for the fog difused out from its body. Sphera saw, now, that it was this mist that set the orcs to dying. For those who lay in the most thickly congealed clouds were already still and stiff.
“Now tell me, apprentice.” Her Master continued. “Where is the fighting exactly?”