V2Ch65-Dark Rites
“So, you clearly know more ancient runes than I imagined,” Dero said, looking down at the large ritual circle Tybalt’s undead had created.
Kind of impressive, if I’m being honest, she thought grudgingly. It had been decades since she’d seen a magic circle used that was this complex. Knowledge of magic thrived among the dragons and elves, of course, and even within some scattered groups among the humans, but it was growing less comprehensive over time. It was more and more common with each passing generation for people to simply rely on their systems and class skills to perform tasks that their seniors had known how to achieve by the use of runes. To most humans, in particular, the runes were simply a lost language.
“I don’t know them, really,” Tybalt admitted. “I saw what was in my book, and I copied it. Things that other necromancers used. Sometimes it feels like there’s a whole world of things to learn.”
“There is,” Dero replied simply. “And you are still young.”
Sometimes he seemed older than he was, but Tybalt was only twenty-one, a small fraction of the dark elf’s years.
“Considering that I intend to live forever, I’m very young,” he said with a smirk.
And then he seemed exactly his age again.
Don’t you know that every necromancer has that intention? Dero thought. Have you run into a lot of them? No? Then maybe don’t assume you’ll be the exception… Just a reminder to me not to get attached.
Three zombies walked over, one carrying a man in military gear with a sword at his side, the other two dragging a miner who feebly kicked and cried out for help as he moved.
Tybalt walked up to the miner and backhanded him across the face, and his body instantly went slack in the creatures’ arms. Dero caught a flicker of pity in the necromancer’s expression as he stepped backward, out of the ritual circle.
The zombies set down their burdens and vacated the space as well.
“What exactly does this thing do?” Dero asked. “You said ritual magic. I recognize the rune of sacrifice.” It looked like an infinity symbol, except instead of circles, the shapes were two diamonds with an opening at one end and a line running through the middle. “But some of these others…”
The fact that this human was making use of at least a couple of runes that Dero herself didn’t recognize was a reminder that her own training as a mage was incomplete. Would forever be incomplete, with what had befallen her mentor.
“Yes, I think that’s sacrifice, one of these is soul, another is transference, and there are a couple of symbols that correspond to the specific type of undead we’re looking to make.”
That explanation is just vague enough to be entirely unhelpful.
“What exactly are you sacrificing? Is it the soul itself?”
“Yes,” Tybalt said. “You got it in one. The Undeath Ritual removes them from the cycle of reincarnation. It burns their souls as a sacrifice in exchange for borrowing more of Lord Mudo’s power than usual.”
From the way I’ve been hearing about what happened in the village, these guys you have up here aren’t even the perpetrators of any crime. Not directly. They’re not exactly innocent, no, but… Hmm. Well, I can’t pretend I’m always completely just. If anyone wanted to hurt someone I cared about, it wouldn’t matter if they sent someone else to do the job and left what they wanted a little vague. I’d kill them. I wouldn’t feel bad about it. And I wouldn’t be fussed about making it quick.
The necromancer opened his textbook and, very carefully, he began reading aloud in a tone that didn’t seem entirely human, words that corresponded to a dead language. Dero had heard syllables before that sounded similar to these, but not since she was a child.
Was the sky overcast earlier?
It was dark and cloudy now, gray in the area overhead. As Tybalt spoke the words in the book, the circle began to gently glow in the deep green color that Dero had noticed corresponded to Tybalt’s mana.
The living human who lay in the middle of the circle suddenly blinked awake, eyes wild with fear. He jumped up and tried to throw himself at Tybalt - only to bounce off of a barrier that appeared when he got close to the edge of the circle.
The necromancer looked on calmly but kept quietly uttering his incantation, while the miner looked around for any way out. Finding none, he tried to claw at the runes engraved into the soil. But they seemed to be impervious to his touch. The shapes didn’t even smudge as the sacrifice tried to rip them out of the ground.
After thirty seconds of struggle, the miner’s eyes widened, his body suddenly seemed to seize up, and he collapsed onto his back.
Dero saw the man’s irises glow in the same dark green as Tybalt’s mana, and then the miner’s mouth opened to let out the most horrendous, blood-curdling scream she had ever heard.
I never messed with magic to do with the soul, and neither did Pelayo. It’s… breathtaking? Horrifying?
She wasn’t certain how to feel, but she tried to commit everything she saw to memory for later examination. Even with just a few hundred years of life under her belt - a relatively short time for an elf - it was already rare enough for her to see something truly new.
Thunder rolled overhead, drowning out the miner’s long scream for a moment. Dero again felt the strange impression that the weather was actually responding to Tybalt’s magic.
Perhaps it is. This is the power of the Death God, after all… How much can it be said is truly beyond Lord Mudo?
She turned her eyes to the necromancer, and saw he was shuddering as mana rolled off his body in waves, pulled into the circle. In the moment when she looked at him, Tybalt seemed almost as helpless in the grip of his own magic as the intended victim.
Finally, the glowing of the mystic runes intensified, turning so bright that Dero shielded her face with one hand for a moment. As a dark elf, she wasn’t quite nocturnal, but her eyes were made more for night vision than for staring into blinding lights.
At some point during the glowing, the scream stopped. A few seconds later, the radiance died down completely.
When the light disappeared, the body of the dead man was gone from the circle, while the other - the sacrifice - was plainly dead. She blinked and looked from side to side to see where Tybalt’s new undead was.
But all she saw was the undead that had been lurking around the area beforehand, along with the necromancer, panting, sweaty, and flushed - but triumphant.
Well, there were two undead she hadn’t noticed before, standing in the periphery, not in the actual circle itself. They carried handfuls of small animals. Insects and rodents? But neither of them was the corpse Dero had seen in the circle before.
Huh. Her eyes focused on Tybalt. Did he get a level? He looks happy and a bit more energetic than I’d expect after all that. But… did the ritual succeed?
Then a gentle glow illuminated the air in front of them, just inside the ritual circle. This light, colorless and much dimmer compared with the blinding quality of the mystic runes, slowly took the shape of an actual person.
Dero recognized the look of the man whose dead body Tybalt had placed in the circle before, but now he glowed, and she could see through him.
A spirit. I’ve only seen such a thing from a distance, and I’ve never known a mage who could just call on them so easily. If I questioned whether he was truly connected with the Death God, this would eliminate all doubt.
The dark elf had heard many legends of the before times, when Death God Mudo had been one of the most prominent members of the divine pantheon, perhaps the most powerful. She knew that the ancient tradition of necromancy, in the period of Lord Mudo’s greatest strength, had begun as contact with the spirit world. Communing with spirits, calling on them for counsel and strength, using their connection to the other side for divination, those had been the roots of Tybalt’s class.
It was only after the world had fallen out of balance that it became a power that distorted life and death, twisted into an offensive application that reflected the Death God’s desperation rather than what she guessed were his preferences - or indeed, the course of nature.
As Dero recalled her foggy knowledge of the Age of Heroes, the spirit moved, jerking her attention back to the present.
The former human’s lips parted in a snarl, and he sprang at Tybalt as if to strangle him. As the ethereal body struck the edge of the ritual circle, it collided with the same barrier that had kept the sacrificial victim in, bounced off, and just hung there in the air for a moment, stunned.
The necromancer spoke.
“Cease.”
The spirit’s expression altered, veins bulging on translucent skin, eyes practically bulging out of their sockets with rage - but he didn’t move.
“Basta- ”
“I said cease. I didn’t give you permission to speak.”
The spirit clamped its mouth shut, looking as if it wanted very much to do otherwise.
“Welcome back, Commander. Your work in this world isn’t done yet.”
The spirit of the former Army officer stared back at the necromancer with seething eyes.
They look like they hate each other - like they’ve hated each other for years.
“Oh, you can speak now,” Tybalt said lightly. “Use an inside voice, and show me the respect appropriate to your master.”
“You - urgh - what have you done to me, bast-master?”
Dero noticed now that the Commander’s voice rang with a strange, piercing quality, echoing more than it should have.
“I have brought you back. I sacrificed a human being, destroying his soul to restore you to some shadow of your former self. You’re a guardian spirit now, waiting for me to affix you to the one you’ll protect.”
“Oh, is that so?” the Commander said in a tone full of bile.
“You will serve willingly and ably… or I will destroy your soul as I did the man who died to summon you.” He waved a hand, and ethereal chains appeared around the Commander’s limbs. “I can force you to serve, Volusia. But you will be more effective if you accept your new circumstances willingly.”
“Destroy me, then, master,” Volusia spat. “Move onto your second choice of slave!”
“Are you sure, Commander? If I end your existence, you will not go to any afterlife. Your soul will not reincarnate. You’ll suffer terribly, and then you will cease to exist forever. Are you really willing to experience that, just to defy me? Wouldn’t you rather be on the winning side?”
“I seem to recall I almost killed you myself. You’ve become arrogant since then. You think you’ll beat the Kingdom? The same military that trained you?”
“‘Almost’ is a world of difference from actually doing it. You didn’t kill me. You failed and died yourself. And I’ve become much more powerful since that day. You don’t even know how long you’ve been dead… although, in truth, it hasn’t been that long. But you’re missing a lot of information. For one thing, the beastfolk had thousands of bodies for me to reanimate. Preserved corpses that could give even the Royal Family a run for their money in a fight.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. So, would you prefer to serve, or be destroyed?”
“I… will… serve…” The words seemed to come out painfully, the Commander’s face twitching with barely concealed rage as he spoke.
“Good. Good. I’ll give you one other choice, and then I’ll dispatch you to meet your charge. A simple question: do you want to be responsible for protecting Mariella or one of my beastfolk companions?”
“Not you?”
“As I said, I’ve grown more powerful since the day you almost killed me. And I’ll be surrounded by a guard of my most powerful undead. Everyone around me is weaker than I am now, and I worry for their safety.”
“Then I’ll protect one of your beastfolk,” Volusia replied. “Much as I always considered them the enemy, your fire bitch is a traitor, and that’s worse.”
“I’ll let that slide this once,” Tybalt said. “You will speak respectfully of everyone who follows me from now on. I’m assigning you to protect this woman.”
Dero waited for Tybalt to describe the person, but the necromancer stood silently. Something must have passed between human and spirit, because the undead nodded.
“Fine.”
“You can go, then. Don’t make yourself visible unless something threatens her or I call on you.”
Volusia disappeared without saying anything more, and Dero finally saw the full weight of the ritual hit Tybalt. His shoulders slumped, and he sank to the ground as if all the strength was gone out of him.
A zombie dragged another corpse into the middle of the ritual circle, and Dero saw another pair walking toward a tree, preparing to get a second miner to sacrifice.
“You clearly need a rest,” the dark elf said.
“Every minute I waste, the enemy is closer to attacking us,” the necromancer said in an irritable tone.
“If you collapse and pass out, how many minutes do you think that will waste?” Dero replied, smirking.
He paused. “Yeah. I guess you have a point. And I can still do a little bit of work while I wait for my strength to recover.”
The zombies that had been going to untie the miner paused. The undead who carried the handfuls of vermin moved toward Tybalt, and his hands illuminated with the glow of his deep green mana as he prepared to resume his necromancy, on a smaller scale.