“When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.”

Her hand brushed his cheek, soft fingers warm against his skin. Aloram’s mother thumbed at a tear, wiping it away, smiling. She grasped his face, fingers in the short, curly black hair behind his head.

“Be strong, like your father was.”

His chin quivered, his face twisting unbidden into an anguished grimace. Tears rose hot in his eyes, and he fought a losing battle to hold them back. She stroked his temple, her smile an illustration of untold depths of knowing sadness, and touched her smooth forehead to his. The contact comforted him, if only for a moment.

She drew her head back and looked into his tear-stricken eyes. In hers, Aloram saw the same stark iron grey as his own, and her smile fell away. Her face became serious, hard. That expression. He’d only seen it once before, on a day when the sky had been a harder grey than either of their eyes, and the world had seemed to grow a shade darker, a touch colder.

“If nothing else, be strong, and never kneel. When the time comes, you’ll know what I mean. I love you, son.”

That was the last time he’d ever said those words back to anyone, and the last time he’d seen his mother.

Hands groped at Aloram, pressing in on him from all directions. Long, sharp fingernails jutted like evil claws from rotting fingers of bone. They tore at his skin, gouged out chunks of his flesh, ripped at every part of him, his body falling, falling all the while into the endless abyss below. He felt hair tearing from his scalp, the ravishing of hungry hands squeezing, raking, killing him.

A shriek tore from his lips, was choked by the questing of fingers down his throat, plunging down his open mouth and into the human cavity of his esophagus. Bile tried to rise in his mouth, but was blocked by the decaying, dead limb that scratched at his lungs from the top. He gagged, tried to cough, choked on his own stomach acid.

Starving hands hollowed out his eye sockets, ripped the fleshy orbs from his face, devoured them, plunged him into faux darkness. Sight left him, and he could no longer make out the bony figures that assailed him. But still, red dominated his vision, just as pain overwhelmed his senses, and torment engulfed his soul.

They laughed at him, all those dead hands, unseen mouths opening from rotted palms, teeth gnashing, biting into the succor sweetness of his warm flesh, feeding on his blood, on his marrow, on his life.

“Did I ever tell you about when your mother and I met?”

Aloram looked up at his father, his neck craning to peer into the tall man’s downturned face. His father’s black hair billowed around his shoulders, tossed about by the wind, his face a dark shadow in stark contrast to the pale blue sky above. Aloram could still see the hint of a smile there, though, as he squinted up, the rare expression flitting across his father’s hawkish features.

“She was new to the community. Had only been there a week.” His father paused and tilted his head up high to look into the sky and the grey clouds gathering in the distance.

”She came in with some friends. At least I think they were her friends, I guess I never came to ask about them. I saw her, and I knew God had finally answered my prayers.”

He squeezed Aloram’s small hand in his own. It was almost painful. Aloram could feel his skin's hard, tough calluses and his grip's restrained strength.

“I saw her, and knew she was His messenger, sent to me to deliver you.”

The grip slackened, and his father looked down from the sky and knelt to his level, big arms folded over his knee.

“My son. My Messiah.” His father gripped his shoulder with one firm hand, squeezed. “What are the words?”

And Aloram said them.

The last time Aloram had said those words was over his father’s grave, reading them off the tombstone, a somber elegy etched in stone and engraved in his mind. Aloram couldn’t speak them now; couldn’t move his jaw past the reanimated radius and ulna in his mouth, the icy hand reaching down his throat and into his chest.

So he thought them. And the pain receded. The red vision faded to black; the abrading laughter quieted to tranquil silence. For the first time since he was a boy, Aloram cried. There was no awareness of the water that rose up to fill ruined sockets, but he cried, and his soul shuddered; and a cold-hot wave washed up to the shores of his consciousness, lapped against the sands of his mind; shy; humble.

The waves were black, and he felt them. They touched like broken lovers, or hurt children, shy and abashed, quick to startle, but gentle: deeply caring. It washed up higher, covering more of him. It quested forward a little, asking, and he allowed it to rise a bit further, giving himself over to it, inch by inch. It pushed, and he pulled away until the island of his being was covered by void.

“Gooooood…… gooooooooooooddddddd….”

Aloram frowned at the trifling sound, but it only distracted him a moment, and soon his attention was simultaneously consumed and erased by the terrible, cohabiting shadow.

Whatever occupied him opened Aloram’s eyes, or rather, the sparking embers that took their place. Black pits of cold flame flared to life in the vacant sockets, burning with a terrible, implacable fury. In his mouth, the invading arm dissolved, crisping away to nothingness. The air caught fire around him, the deathly talons catching and spreading the flame, alighting, roasting with the putrid rancor of rot, decay, and burning flesh.

A black inferno surrounded him; gouts of cold fire birthed into existence in a sea of odious flame that scorched and drowned the ravine in his sinister fury. A pyre of flame sprouted from his head in a thick demonic mane that poured upwards, flowing long hair flaring high, tongues of flame licking greedily at undead limbs.

The world seemed to flicker and dance, alternating sheets of black and white blanketing his vision. What was once cackling laughter turned to horrified, tortured shrieks. The dead thought they were past pain, immortal, untouchable servants, invulnerable torturers reanimated to heap suffering upon their enemies in life, and whomever else their master set them upon.

But now, as they burned, the ghouls felt a pain worse than could be found anywhere in life or undeath, and they wailed in helpless lament. Aloram rose through them, floating up the ravine, his visage a constantly flickering, shifting image shrouded in blacks and light greys like streaks of dark charcoal scratched onto the surface of the world.

Undead arms jerked away from him as he approached, aghast at the impossible fire that wreathed him like a satanic shroud. In a flash, he appeared on the surface of the ravine and dropped onto the stone ledge twenty yards in front of the cloaked necromancer, staff raised, violet skull shivering in its wooden cradle.

The floor beneath his bare feet cracked and shattered when he landed, shards of stone expelling outward in rings. Flames licked at the walls, ate the blue light, and replaced it with cold, grinning black. The tunnel seemed to shrink around them, everything fading from being except for Aloram and the old, decrepit man.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Hurren Ainsfadder stared stricken at the hellspawn before him. Black flame lapped at his naked body, covering his pale skin in a rippling, living cloak of hungry fire. It was his aura, but somehow more than aura, more tangible, as if the flames hadn’t covered his body, but his body had become the flame. It was unlike anything he’d ever encountered in his four hundred years of life: some mingling of rei and flesh, of rei and soul, a mystery of cultivation that he, in his many years of devoted study and single-minded meditation, had yet to so much as begin to unravel.

The fire covered the tall man’s hands like gauntlets, the fingers drawn into sharp, cruel claws. It rose from his head in undulating sheets of liquid midnight hair that seemed to sway in an invisible wind, constantly streaming upwards towards the high cave ceiling above. His eyes were glacial fire, onyx pits that burned with an intense, emotionless passion, and Hurren stared into them, unable to look away, as they hollowed out his soul.

The demon— he wasn’t truly demonkin; there was simply no other word to describe him— was a living contradiction. Bloodlust seeped from him in suffocating waves, and the fire that expanded from him to engulf the cave thirsted to consume Hurren, so much so that he could feel it as a physical sensation.

But there was also an equally tangible boredom: a disdain for Hurren, as if his centuries of accumulated Rei amounted to so much drivel. As if he wasn’t worth even the meager expenditure of effort it would take to kill him.

Hurren raised his scepter, pointed the Effigy of The Silent One towards the upstart demon across the tunnel, and intoned his prayer. This brat wouldn’t ruin his expedition; if he had to suffer Orren’s castigation again, he’d quit the sect and kill himself outright. No, this child would die, and his body would join the legion.

“Ed nim sippi, et surrai ak—”

A hand closed around the ancient skull, bone cracking as it tightened into a fist, flame dancing out from between closed fingers. Hurren’s eyes flicked down to the head of his staff, incapable of believing what he saw. In a thousand years of abuse, that bone would not break…

The hand opened, and Hurren could only watch the falling shards of shattered skull for a moment before black fingers flashed through the air, an abyssal palm closing around his face, consuming his vision.

The ugly stick fell, clattering to the stone, flames already feasting on it as Aloram launched forwards, open hand connecting with the necromancer’s withered face. Fingers wrapped around the mage’s head, he lifted him single-handed, the momentum causing the old man’s torso and legs to fly forwards as if a wind vane struck suddenly by a strong breeze.

They flew several yards before Aloram drove his arm savagely downwards, introducing the back of the necromancer’s skull to the cave’s floor. To his amusement, the necromancer’s head didn’t immediately pulp; instead, it plowed through the stone like a ship’s bow through water, sending chips of rock flying in all directions.

Still hurtling forward with the momentum of his launch, Aloram swung the man by his head upwards and into the ceiling, where his body collided with the tunnel's roof in a veritable explosion of shrapnel and dust, shattering ancient stalagmites and sending their broken pieces showering to the floor. Without knowing why or what he was doing, Aloram turned his palm over instinctually. In his gauntletted hand, a single tear of black flame appeared.

In his head, he whispered to it.

Feed.

And it leapt into the air, darting up towards the necromancer. The flame grew as it moved, expanding until it seemed a thousand independent tongues of fire, each several feet wide and higher than a man. They filled the spacious corridor, made it feel small and cramped, seemed to fill the whole world with their insatiable, animalistic hunger.

Several tens of yards away, embedded into the cave roof, Hurren Ainsfadder tried to scream.

Ravenous black flames ate the sound before it could escape his lips, filled his throat, his lungs. They scorched his skin from the outside in, the inside out, consumed his limbs, his heart, his core. They feasted upon him until there was nothing left but his clothing, jewelry, and the book he’d clung to more tightly than his life. His skin, his flesh, his soul, the Rei that flowed around and within him— those they devoured until the memory of smoldering embers and the charcoal-black scorch marks of Aloram’s flames on the grey stone above were all that remained.

As Aloram’s vision returned, turning first from total darkness to a two-dimensional illustration of shadowy outlines, then slowly gaining depth and color, he padded down the corridor. Steam rose from his skin, and he noticed that he was neither hot nor cold, but that he’d somehow lost his boxers and was now totally naked.

His hair bounced around his shoulders as he walked, feeling longer than he’d remembered, but not by much. In addition to the extra inches of hair, he felt heavier. Only a few pounds, maybe five, but he noticed it. That’s odd. He pinched a strand between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing it back and forth. It felt thicker, more lustrous than it should.

Looking down at himself, his body was both leaner and more muscular than it had been before. Years of bodybuilding had trained him to be exactingly aware of every minute detail of his frame, so he knew there were changes, but it was still hard to tell without a mirror. Snatches of memory flashed through his mind: decaying hands, clawing fingers, hair being pulled from his head. His mother. Aloram released the strand and kept walking, his face a rigid knot of tensed muscle.

Before him, descending through the air in what looked like the slow-motion back-and-forth of a falling leaf, was a robe of flowing black fabric. Following it with his eyes, Aloram watched as the robe landed in a pool on the ground, forming a heap of dark cloth.

Beside it, lying proudly face up, spotless despite the floating dust all around, was a tome. It was the sort of volume, perhaps the only one Aloram had ever seen, that could genuinely be described as a tome without the usual air of snobbery and pretense that the use of such a word held as prerequisite. It was leatherbound, or skinbound, Aloram thought with an amused twinge of his mouth, engraved with deep etchings that stood out in hard, straight lines.

The linework was crude, as if made by violently stabbing the cover with a knife and dragging it back and forth in harsh lines, but the runic engravings felt somehow perfect, too, and imbued with a hideous sort of importance.

He stared at the book for several protracted moments, then bent and lifted the robes from the floor. Extending his arms and spreading them wide before him, the robes unfurled. They were torn and clearly incomplete, as if half the intended fabric had been lost, but they were plenty good for him. Their plainness was reminiscent of monks’ robes on Earth, but it was more gothic.

As he held them in his hands, his skin reacted to the fabric, and his eyes could faintly distinguish tightly knit threads of perfectly integrated Rei sewn into the material. The Rei was decidedly grey but nearly colorless, complementing the ashen, drab simplicity of the garment.

Aloram wrapped it around his waist, tying the excess into a knot at his hip. As he was looking down to tie the knot, he noticed a silver chain lying on the floor, a medallion the size of a silver dollar attached at its end. Embossed on the metal was a pile of bones, adorned by a skull with lines emanating from its eye sockets. Complex interweavings of Rei engulfed the medal, so finely interlaced that it hurt his eyes to look at it for long. Clearly, the robes and the medallion were crafted for some purpose greater than just modesty and ornamentation, and he made a mental note to examine their properties in closer detail later.

Must be related to whatever group he was a part of... I wonder if there are more of them around here. He picked it up and tucked it into a fold in his robe. Might find a use for it later. If this guy is anything to go by, then there’s a whole world out there to explore. And more people. The thought brought a flicker of a smile to his lips as he looked around for signs of the man’s body.

Gazing up, he could only just make out the marred, discolored surface of the stone where the necromancer had incinerated.

How many does that make now? I lost my list. His attention was drawn back to the book on the floor; a morbid, nauseating aura was oozing from it and gathering on the floor like a fog. Wrinkling his nose, he tucked the book under his arm.

Underneath the book was a silver ring. It formed of a thin, snaking, beaten metal, drawn out in one long tine that was wrapped once in a coil, each end sharpened to a spiny point. It was a plain ring, unadorned and knurled; the surface was hammered and stamped like beaten copper, but it carried a certain spiteful elegance that enamored Aloram immensely. He immediately slid it over his right ring finger, then grinned. The fit was perfect.

On the wall no more than ten strides away, Aloram made out the faintest of glowing markings, a dim yellow outline. The outline of a door, its stony surface covered in moss that almost outshone its edges. He walked over to it, touched a finger to the luminous yellow, and lifted rei from his core, pushing it easily through his fingertip.

Aloram backed away, and with a loud, familiar grinding, the door swung open towards him.