Fifty. Fifty in only two weeks. On average more than three of Nith’s servants had vanished everyday since he lost the vampire.
The necromancer had given in and set up a permanent camp a few days ago. Now the neighboring forest had been stripped to construct a partially earthen barricade and the tower Nith now inhabited.
The encampment had changed nothing. And Nith did not really expect it to. The goal was to more easily observe.
Nith carefully moved his hands above the pebbles strewn across the tarp covering the floor. Each anchored a scrying spell linked to one of his servants.
Powerful warding magics in the walls would hopefully prevent anyone from knowing what he was doing. Nith randomly switched to overseeing a new undead each minute.
The necromancer had been at it for hours. He would visually examine the targeted undead and its surroundings. Then he moved on once it was clear everything was normal in the visual spectrum.
Nith nearly missed it. He was targeting a speed focused undead he crafted from a girl in the six to eight age range a few years ago.
The small skeleton appeared normal. But the soul-mage noticed a dark mass around the lower spine of another skeleton a couple yards away.
Nith twisted his wrist and sent the appropriate pebble flying to his hand. He was watching the suspicious undead a moment later.
It was one of his older and more heavily enhanced creations. A quick check confirmed it was a mage-breaker.
An innate ability to dismantle spellwork and enhanced agility let the servant strike down mages and others defended by magic. It had been stripped of all soft tissue to improve its maneuverability.
That made the mass of flesh around its pelvis and lower abdomen concerning. If it was flesh.
Nith recognized the texture of biologically living muscles and ligaments. They were attached to the neighboring bone as if a natural part of it.
But all the tissue was the oily black of old grease from an automatic carriage in desperate need of an artificer. Even the bone around the area had turned a glossy black.
The glass-like vertebrae and upper femurs were suspiciously similar to the obsidian fragments in the dead horse. That felt like so long ago now.
Closer inspection revealed a patch of entirely restored skin covering the base of the spine and top of the buttox. The skin was a gray color far lighter than the flesh below.
But the more noteworthy thing was the sinuous tail growing from the sacrum. It was roughly three feet in length and covered in the same skin tone as the section on the undead’s back.
Nith had no idea what to make of it. There were many forms of undead and stranger creatures out there. He had seen more than most in his century of life.
The ability of powerful mages to make new ones complicated that. Even if the more novel creations were often flawed and unable to perpetuate.
There was very little to go off of from visuals alone. All he could be confident of was that his creation had been tampered with.
Nith guided the mage-breaker back to the center of the encampment. It responded normally and moved with ease.
The flesh visibly grew even in the short time between spotting it and the servant’s arrival. New muscles were forming as shallow filaments expanded to be full structures.
The entire process resembled a form of regeneration restoring the missing flesh. Except it was doing so with the black imitation of alma tissue.
Nith did not risk leaving his tower. Instead he scrutinized the undead standing at the base from the safety of his wards.
The necromancer’s eyes widened. It made no sense. But his senses and spellwork agreed. The creature’s soul was unraveling.
No. That was wrong. It was not unraveling. It was disappearing.
Sections of the soul were completely gone. And more were vanishing at a continuous rate. But the remaining pieces were operating normally.
The soul should have been coming apart from the massive trauma. It was functionally torn to shreds. Yet those shreds stayed in place and continued to behave as if they were part of an intact soul.
Nith felt a dread seep to his core. It was completely impossible. The most basic principles of the soul dictated his senses were mistaken.
Either he had been so completely overtaken by another mage that everything he saw was a trick or the underlying rules of the magic he had spent his unlife mastering were a lie. Nith was equally opposed to both options.
The servant's soul was the equivalent of a person walking around with random holes and chunks of their body missing. Except Nith could explain such a relatively mundane thing with forces he entirely understood.
No. He had to deal with this rationally. If this was an illusion he was completely incapable of detecting it. Acting under the assumption his environment was not reality was far more risky than assuming it was real.
If it was real there had to be an explanation. Everything had a process and cause. Once you understood those you could begin the steps to control it.
Was the soul vanishing? Or was it being hidden? The second seemed more likely.
Scouring the remaining structure revealed no external spellwork. The only thing Nith found was an oddly low level of animus.
That should have made the channels start fraying and leaking. But the channels in the remaining soul looked as strong as ever.
The other signs of weakness a limited animus supply should cause were absent. Was it somehow operating more efficiently to compensate? Or was it using animus he could not perceive?
Nith considered the possibility. It was actually plausible. Life and unlife were by far the most common forms of animus. But others did exist.
The uncommon types were usually just less effective or more specialized forms of the two major kinds. Yet some had noteworthy effects that could be hard to replicate even with unlife.
There could be a type of animus undetectable with the standard methods. If it was obscure or the recent innovation of a mage, he would know nothing about it.
Nith had no better ideas. He began trying every alteration to his soul perception technique or work around he could think of.
The gaps in the soul kept growing. The flesh grew alongside them. The mage-breaker was no longer a skeleton.
Its upper body and legs from the knees down appeared to have been flayed. Skin had grown over the stomach, hips and thighs.
Nith would have sworn this specific servant was an elderly priest before the necromancer killed and deboned him. It was memorable because the man’s attempt to utilize the magics taught by his god to kill the soul-mage had motivated Nith to make the priest into a tool for killing other priests.
Was he mixing up his creations? Or was the flesh not regenerating back to the undead’s living form? It did seem like the skeleton’s build had shifted as the glassy black overtook it.
The soul was nearly gone when it happened. Nith was trying to visualize the pattern the missing animus would take. The hope was to spot appropriate disruptions in the bleed off animus saturating the soul. He just had to know what he should be looking for.
He suddenly felt it. Threads of something throughout the entire soul.
It was blurry and barely there. Like an image left behind on the back of his eyelids. But he could see it. And the more he focused, the clearer it became.
Nith was not sure what changed. He was not directly doing anything new. And it was unlike perceiving animus.
The experience felt as if he was slowly becoming aware of a sense he never had before. The closest corollary was his ascension from journey-mage to master-mage.
The last of the unlife animus was gone by the time Nith could feel the soul clearly. He thought it looked like the soul had before. But the correlation between his existing senses and this new one was not direct.
Nith tried to manipulate the invisible animus like he would any other soul. He could almost feel it resist him. But there was no reaction.
The necromancer watched in fascination as the invisible animus concentrated in an organelle. He was trying to determine what part of the soul it was when the power lashed out.
Nith’s material senses became a tumble of force, flame and the unbiased physical data that acted as his sense of pain. The smoldering necromancer flew through the air beyond the place his wooden tower room had been.
All around undead crumpled as their animating force was drained by their airborne master. The scorched flesh and exposed bone was replaced by blemishless skin as Nith regenerated.
The necromancer halted in mid-air. He could see his attacker dashing through his army. None of whom were attacking. Because they could not sense a soul.
Nith wanted to rip out a soul and squeeze until it popped. The undead had physical senses. But the control matrix identified enemies by detecting the opponent’s soul.
Everything had a soul. It was the most universal way to identify conscious creatures. Except the rogue servant had a soul that did not register to magic.
Nith could fix that with the correct instructions or modifications to the control matrix. But doing either would take too long.
More servants fell as the necromancer gathered power and formed a spear of soul-flame. He sent it flying as the distant figure jumped and landed outside the barricade.
The guiding spell brought the burning animus to the target in an instant. The gray skinned sprinter ignited.
And a moment later it went out with the same abruptness. Nith gaped. Soul-flame burned everything.
It was materialized animus that consumed any animus it encountered to keep burning. That included magic and souls themselves. Could it not burn whatever the invisible animus was?
The corrupted servant disappeared from sight. Nith considered sending his entire forces in pursuit. But that would be futile without fixing the soul-identification problem on scale.
Instead he began sending orders to his three remaining va’id combatants and two speed specialized creations. The faster undead dashed after the rogue and the va’id followed.
Hopefully the imprinted image of their target and rough parameters for recognizing it visually would fix the problem. Only the specificity of the task made it quick to define for them.
Nith floated to his throne. The paralyzed corpses below slowly regained unnatural animation as he stopped tapping them.
The scrying stones for the party he sent out were either destroyed alongside his wards or scattered in the ruins of his tower. The master-soul-mage lacked the skill with sensory magic to create new ones quickly. He would have to trust in his creations.
Nith finally knew what was attacking him. Sort of. He did not know what it was exactly. But something was being done to his servants to make them go rogue.
That could be extremely bad. He had lost powerful creations. They were presumably under the control of the individual who was sabotaging him.
He set about reconfiguring the encampment for a more physical assault. The hardest part was altering the control matrix to identify as hostile anything with autonomous motion that did not register as under his control.
It would make an exasperating number of false positives. But destroying every tumbleweed and loose fabric scrap carried by the wind was better than ignoring the enemy.
Nith walked his throne around the edge of his troops. He found three more servants contaminated with the invisible animus.
All three were fleshy undead created from the villagers of Willowcrook. The physical changes were much harder to spot. But he found the tail on each.
It was as large as the rogue’s tail on two of them. But the third had one less than half the length of the others.
The smaller tail was on a tall woman whose red skin had faded in death. Her soul was also the least overtaken by invisible animus. Did the tail grow as the unlife animus was supplanted?
Nith took fewer chances this time. Stronger more developed undead surrounded the compromised servants and corpse-handled them to a cleared area for holding.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The necromancer finished scanning his troops and returned to the three. They simply stood still as ordered.
The mostly remaining clothes made the gray flesh spreading from the lower back hard to see. It was also less obtrusive than on the skeletal servant.
Only the color of the flesh was changing. As opposed to all the soft tissue regenerating completely.
Nith tried to pull the furthest along soul out of its body. It proved more complicated than he hoped.
Most of the junction points were gone. If they were somewhere on the converted section, he could not find them. And separating the ones he could still affect did little.
The squat man only twitched a bit. He would likely have some efficiency issues if his soul did not reestablish the connections.
The soul-mage turned his attention to the woman least affected. The process had progressed. He was now sure her tail was growing.
Nith moved quickly. She soon crumpled as most of the connections between her soul and cadaver were switched to the soul trap Nith held.
The soul ended up attached to his spell and its body. Nith could not figure out how to remove the junction points no longer formed by unlife animus.
He almost severed the spell when he noticed specks of the invisible animus in the spellwork. Tiny fragments were bleeding in through the soul-body connections held by the spell.
Nith began scrutinizing his person for any sign of the unknown energy. He managed to remain relatively calm when he found a film of the stuff in his own channels.
Where was it coming from? He started scouring his soul for any sign of tampering. The animus prism around his source was still converting the raw energy into unlife. The only signs of tampering were those from his own hand.
Animus did not just appear. It had to be fueled by the spark of consciousness and refined by the animus prism.
The only alternative was converting one type to another manually. But that boiled down to creating a spell that replicated a natural prism.
It might have been feeding from outside. The invisible animus did not appear to be coming from the source in any of the sabotaged servants. Which implied it came from somewhere else.
Nith searched for a link connecting the undead to an outside power. It was getting easier to perceive the alien energy. Yet there was no origin point. It simply grew at a continuous rate.
The necromancer became engrossed in the analysis. But he remembered to call back the hunting party after half a day.
The chance of losing them outweighed the odds of success at this point. The links he specifically tied to the va’id were still registering their presence.
The mage-breaker had only disconnected when its soul lost all unlife animus. That indicated the va’id were still under his control.
At least until they vanished a few hours later. Nith ignored the loss. It told him that sending his servants outside of his perception was not viable. Not even if they were some of his strongest. Being angry did no good.
The process continued at a significantly different rate for each of the subjects. The teenager had less than half his soul converted when Nith discovered him.
But he finished before the originally more advanced older man. The woman remained far behind the other two.
The once turquoise skinned teen was now entirely gray. His eyes had gone from a vibrant red to solid black orbs.
Otherwise he looked unchanged. The altered build Nith noticed in the skeletal mage-breaker was not recognizable here.
The village boy stumbled a few seconds after his soul disappeared to magical senses. Two strength focused enhanced servants immediately seized him.
The kid started struggling. “Let go ya’ cow fuckers.” The request was completely ignored by his captors.
Angry comments masking whatever emotions the villager was feeling continued as Nith stepped from his throne and dropped to the packed earth. The fourteen to sixteen year old appeared to be acting freely.
Nith guessed the controlling force was either insidious or would not take active command until an appropriate time. He had known necromancers who used compulsion, artificial desires and pleasure responses instead of direct control of the body. He never felt comfortable with such nebulous methods himself.
The boy spotted Nith. The disgust and hatred in those black eyes twisted the still soft face into something no child should have been capable of.
“What do you want?” The tone was either bravado or the product of blinding disdain. Nith doubted it was shock. That likely faded weeks ago.
“What do you want from me?” The question was spoken to the villager. But it was for whoever might be watching through the boy.
“Let us go. Then crawl in a hole and die.” Nith ignored the response.
The teen lacked an obviously fatal wound. He had likely been killed by some form of internal trauma. But his body was covered in small cuts, bruises and abrasions.
Unlife would alter and greatly slow the process of decomposition even without the ability to maintain the flesh actively. That meant the body was little different than when first revived.
Those signs of damage had not fully healed. But black ichor already scabbed over the open wounds. The process on an intact body was clearly different than on one missing most of its flesh.
A series of warnings from his troops drew Nith’s attention. The outer edge of his forces had entered combat.
The necromancer pivoted and dashed away. He leapt and scampered up the skeleton containing his throne. He did not stop until he stood atop the bleached skull.
A section of the barricade was flattened. The culprit waded through his undead defenders. They were attacking the gray twenty foot figure.
But it did little good. The va’id swept aside and threw off the assailants with ease. None of the undead appeared to have damaged the attacker.
Nith narrowed his eyes. The martial technique felt familiar. The va’id looked like a scaled up version of the mage-breaker’s final appearance. But Nith did not need a close inspection to infer her identity.
None of the fodder could even break her skin. But the more powerful and specialized servants moving towards the breach could.
She was completely dominating for the moment. Yet the undead her swinging arms and tail batted aside were not smashed to pieces. She was holding back.
Nith was distracted by half a dozen new warnings. New spearheads of gray combatants were piercing his defenses all around the encampment.
It was a multi-pronged attack. But what was the point? They would be surrounded and exterminated before long. And he would simply repair any servants they destroyed.
The feeling of his body snapping out of proprioception and head falling through the air took Nith entirely off guard. He reached for the animus in his surroundings.
But the trauma of decapitation slowed his soul’s reactions just enough. Gray fingers dug into his skull and crushed. The bone caved in.
Nith desperately tried to re-enforce the attachments to his brutalized body. The foot stomping his skull into broken fragments was not helping.
The last thing his fracturing sight registered before his soul unraveled was the grim focus on a face faintly familiar.
It was sharper and bleached gray. But something around the eyes remained of the archer that attempted to kill him before any of this.
The tiny smile of grim satisfaction faded with his perception. And the scourge of the wastes, pale mage of the black tower and last survivor of Yi’an’s Chosen finally passed from the living world.
My awareness retreated from his consciousness. The uneasy mind returned to the constellation of sparks within myself.
I would likely call it forth again soon. But for now I simply considered.
Nith had appeared in my void a few days ago. His spark was dim and flickered at first. It felt disoriented in a way beyond the trauma of the restless dead.
That had drawn my attention to it. And I was glad it did.
The mage was not a gam. Yet he came to me upon death. The only other case of a non-gam doing that was whenever I replaced an animal’s animus with essence.
I now suspected that was exactly what happened. Or at least it was far enough in the process.
My spare time the last few days had been spent combing through the months leading to his death. He definitely started cycling essence through his soul before being killed at the hands of his former slave.
I suspected that was what allowed him to see essence when other alma mages could not. He appeared to have inadvertently formed a rudimentary version of essence sight.
The way Nith came in contact with essence was almost as intriguing as the mage himself. My confusion had been cleared up when I found his memories of finding the decaying horse.
I needed to fill up the empty space inside the horse when I stopped hiding in it. My eggs were the most available filler.
That solution did leave me needing to get rid of the horse before they hatched. But that problem was still a week away when Ane rode off on the horse I was soon to dispose of.
I had not expected the ve hatching inside the corpse to have any consequences. I was still in the habit of assuming ve were harmless.
The handful of minds that appeared around the same time as Nith contained the fatalities from the diversion that led to his death. Their memories filled in many of the gaps.
A growing band of the mage’s escaped victims had been shadowing his slave army. The first members were part of a scouting party that stumbled across the horse’s body.
I did not have anyone from that original group. But I pieced together that the ve had escaped the body and attached themselves to Nith’s puppets.
The conversion process apparently removed whatever control Nith had over those he resurrected. Those first freed slaves put enough of what happened together to catch as many of the ve as they could and flee the area.
Some decided to leave. But most resolved to use their newfound freedom to fuck-over their former master as much as possible.
The main strategy was sneaking up and releasing ve near the stragglers of Nith’s slave army. They then swooped in to retrieve any convertees once they regained control of their bodies.
It struck me as dumb luck the mage never caught them. But he was very reliant on his ability to sense animus.
He also had far more slaves than he could manage effectively. Only the complete control of his troops and lack of a sophisticated enemy had made it viable. At least until his own escaped victims had started an impromptu guerrilla war against him.
It had been challenging to ease the minds of those killed in the final strike into a calm state. Months to decades trapped in their own deteriorating bodies as a sociopath wielded them as bloody tools left psychological damage that would take decades to resolve.
But it was still easier than the mass-murderous mage himself. The victims had relatively positive formative years.
The childhood Nith experienced in the group known as Yi’an’s Chosen had left him without a concept of happiness or any similar untainted emotion I could work from. Their children were essentially trained like beasts with the single goal of creating potent mages.
They were deprived all positive social contact. Only accomplishments believed to progress their training were rewarded by food, sleep and an absence of physical abuse.
His psyche was dominated by a sense of powerlessness that he would do anything to overcome. And no amount of control over his environment could ever truly fix it.
For now I would leave him in a mixture of his greatest accomplishments. The experiences had not truly fulfilled the man. But they were the best I could provide.
The field data of ve merging with modified alma souls was interesting enough. The glimpse of the species alma called va’id even more so. But the treasure trove of knowledge within Nith completely eclipsed both.
He was an alma mage. And he could resurrect the dead. It was precisely the information I had left the Moors to acquire.
I suspected he was not that good at it. He needed to make heavy alterations to the souls of those he returned to life.
That made sense with how fragile alma were. Altering them to run on unlife animus would remove the need to repair their body perfectly.
Yet those he revived were so dysfunctional that they could not maintain or restore their flesh. They could only move and sense their environment.
But he had proficiency with the most important aspect. He could retrieve the vanished source of a dead soul.
I scrutinized every example I could find of resurrection. It was not easy, even for something so abundant.
Searching through the memories of those who returned to me was like looking through a box filled with drawings. Each one was a different experience from their life. But there was no universal order or method to how the person sorted those experiences.
Restoring the source required the soul to be held together. It also needed a kind of resonance with the source.
The analogy of a vibration was the closest physical phenomenon I could compare it to. Nith extrapolated the frequency from the structure of the soul in a complex formula he mostly did by instinct.
When he vibrated the soul at that frequency, the source would reappear. I really wanted to try it. There was no reason it would not work on insects and other small creatures the same way it did on alma.
The problem was I had no idea how it could be used to restore those within me. Gam did not have souls. We had essence patterns. There was not even a source to return.
I opened my eyes as the cart came to a halt. The orange light indicated we were stopping for the night. And glancing to where the sun touched the horizon confirmed it.
My muscles did not get stiff the way alma often complained of. But I made a good show out of stretching them. It still felt good to move.
I was actually experiencing a sort of discomfort. Although it was more aesthetic distress than a negative sensation.
The threads in my spiral were swollen with essence. I normally kept them as thin as possible to maximize complexity and therefore essence generation.
But the amount of essence I could control had increased since I last restructured it. I was starting to rebuild it every few days. Otherwise the rising quantity made me frustratingly inefficient.
It was a good problem to have. I noticed an increase around a month ago. And the rate of improvement had escalated since.
My capacity was half again what it was a month before. And it showed no sign of stopping.
The question of why I was suddenly growing in strength had been preoccupying me. This was faster than even my first few years. And it was nothing like the minimal increases over the recent centuries.
I hopped off my seat at the back of the cart. The grass was naturally short in this patch. And wheel ruts accompanied fire rings and bare patches of earth. This was evidently a common stopping point out on the trail to Rillan.
My initial theory was that something in my new environment was letting me overcome the wall in my progress. It might have been as simple as being outside the Moors.
Many gam found new experiences or changes in lifestyle could cause or correlate with improvements in essence capacity. I did not know precisely why. But it was common enough to have some mechanism behind it.
It could be the contact with a new sapient species and their society. Or maybe it was learning a formalized version of animus spellweaving.
A new theory had developed in the last few days. The timing of my spikes in power were very close to the estimated times Nith’s slaves became gam.
Could the ve be the difference? This was probably the first time ve had merged with other creatures. And it was happening on scale.
The causation was a mystery. But the correlation certainly lined up.
I noticed the abnormal change around when Nith lost his first handful of slaves. Then the improvement slowed when the vampire he set to defend kept the rebels from sneaking close.
The gains redoubled after the va’id incapacitated the vampire and attached a ve to him. That lined up with the greater effectiveness of the vampire in sneaking ve into the mage’s troops.
My understanding was that the eggs lain by the freed slaves had also started hatching around then. That gave them a larger supply and let them be less careful about ensuring every ve found someone to attach to.
I did not know what had happened after Nith was assassinated. But the difficulty I was having keeping up with my escalating volume of essence the last few days gave me a suspicion.
The details on the early escapees were second hand. But most of the group had produced a lot of eggs shortly after they were freed and joined the roaming rebels.
That was pretty expected with the kind of trauma and turbulence they would be dealing with. Gam often lay unfertilized clutches when they are working through hard to process emotions.
A lot of those eggs were left behind. But they started sending groups back to retrieve ve once they confirmed where new ve came from.
Freeing all Nith’s victims would take a while even with a lot of those early eggs hatching. Assuming killing the mage did not remove his control. I was not sure if it would. But the fact no rebels were killed after Nith died made me suspect it at least compromised the slave army’s ability to keep attacking.
Why ve merging with alma would have such an affect on me was still unclear. But the circumstantial evidence was sufficient to make it my working theory.
There was not a lot I could do about it now. But I was certainly going to take advantage at the next opportunity.