V3Ch27-Vampire
Tybalt pushed mana into the runes he’d left on the ground for a third time.
The third bandit cried out through his bandana, at first begging for mercy. Then he began screaming as the power reached him.
The worst sound that Tybalt had ever heard echoed through the sky for a third time in the shadow of the Charnel Fortress. The last sacrifice disintegrated, his body and soul expended.
| Skill Recognized: Undeath Ritual acquired!
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| New type of creation generated, bonus experience granted!
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Tybalt had only been trying to make death knights of whatever kind. Sir Damek and Lord Franco were wight knights like Harald… but this last one was apparently different. He needed to check her status.
But she was moving without being ordered, and it wasn’t the strange, stiff motion of the dead. It was far too fluid.
“Where am I? What’s happened?
She sounds far more human than the others.
The figure hopped to her feet and began moving toward Tybalt.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, her voice shaking.
She stopped as her foot touched where the runes were etched into the sand, then pulled her foot back with a little hiss as if repelled.
Her eyes are glowing red. Does she have Kistana’s class?
“I am your master,” Tybalt said. “I have raised you from the dead. Be still now.”
She stopped moving, but she looked at him with obvious dislike. Her lips curled back in a snarl, revealing sharp canines. Too long and sharp for a human.
What is she?
He pulled her status up.
| Esmerelda Morngart
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| Vampire Knight Lv. 0 (0/10 EXP) (formerly Mana Cavalry Lv. 20)
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| Health: 340/340
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| Mana: 360/360
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| Stamina: 100/700
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| Strength: 300
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| Agility: 395
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| Constitution: 240
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| Fortitude: 200
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| Will: 260
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| Skills: Chivalric Vow, Mana Armor, Mana Reinforcement, Mounted Supremacy, Spiraling Stab
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It also explained why she could look at him with such disdain. Like the first undead Tybalt had ever created, Baldwin.
Vampires were among the most free willed undead.
I’ll have to try and talk to her differently. He glanced at her and noticed the glowing red eyes again. Oh, no wonder she’s upset. She’s hungry.
Tybalt walked over to the fourth bandit and tossed him into the runic circle.
“Go ahead and eat your fill, Esmerelda,” he said, licking his lips. “Enjoy yourself.”
“What? Why…?”
He saw the look on her face flicker through multiple emotions. Anger, hunger, confusion about why she was looking at her former subordinate with hunger, and then some trace of acceptance.
“You were a shitty bandit anyway,” she muttered.
Then she fell upon him.
The man’s screams echoed through the air as Esmerelda tore into him.
Tybalt smiled. It was nice to understand what was going on. Raising the dead always gave him back more of that sense of control that trying to predict the future seemed to take away.
“You’re enjoying this, right?” Tybalt asked, looking at the Charnel Fortress.
“Yes, master.” Even though the voice emanating from the building in front of him still felt ominous, it seemed more docile in daylight. Or perhaps it was the fact that the entity knew it needed Tybalt’s protection for the moment.
He had already informed the Charnel Fortress about what was coming - the Army, plus the Divine Trust - and given the intelligence there some basic marching orders on how to handle them.
Then Tybalt had performed every one of his rituals in the shadow of the fortress, both so that he could take advantage of the powerful undeath-enhancing aura it exuded and so that the evil place could feed on the suffering of his victims.
A win-win.
“You’re both enjoying this far too much,” Dero said from around twenty feet behind Tybalt. She had made no secret of the fact that the fortress gave her the creeps. The necromancer actually appreciated the fact that she refused to get any closer to the walls. It indicated that she properly understood the danger of being in proximity with the Charnel Fortress.
Dero was the only one of Tybalt’s women who he didn’t have to worry about potentially being consumed by the intelligence that possessed this place. Maybe Victoria too.
“What happened to me?” Tybalt’s attention was pulled to the vampire death knight in front of him, who now rose to her feet. Her eye color, he noted, had returned to its apparent usual violet. Like Dero’s eyes. Perhaps she had a splash of dark elf blood, though she looked human otherwise.
“What happened to me?” the woman repeated. “I never had these unnatural appetites before. What have you done with me?”
“I think you can guess,” Tybalt replied after a moment. “You seem like an intelligent woman.”
“I’m an undead.”
“Correct.”
“A powerful undead. I can feel this energy coursing through me.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“To serve me, of course.”
She bared her teeth.
“Of course,” Esmerelda said, eyes narrowing.
“Would you have preferred to remain dead?”
She let out a sigh and relaxed her jaw.
“No. But I already spent one life trying to live for myself. That was cut short, and now I return as a servant. You can imagine that I would be discontented.”
“Everyone serves someone,” Tybalt said. “I serve the Death God who has empowered me. If you serve me willingly and to the best of your ability, I can at least pledge I’ll never try to strip you of your dignity.”
“You controlled the one who killed me.” Like everything else she had said, it wasn’t a question. She at least didn’t take long grasping her situation.
“I conquered the town of Humun. I needed to show them that there would still be law and order. So I made an example of your bandits.”
“My horse.”
“What?”
“I can feel that you have some power over me. If I press against it, there’s a force there. Since you raised me from the dead, that only makes sense. So I will obey your commands, within reason, for now, if you raise my horse, in a similar condition to me. I will wait to see what sort of a leader you are before I promise anything more.”
At least one of her skills is specialized for fighting on horseback anyway.
He looked back.
“Dero, could you go back and look for the nice vampire’s horse?”
***
While Tybalt waited for the dark elf to return, he and his three new knights transacted the remainder of their business with the Charnel Fortress.
It had hungry spirits - wendigos - that wanted to feed.
The necromancer had bodies for those spirits to occupy and additional corpses for them to eat.
The Charnel Fortress opened its gates, and dozens of wendigos emerged.
“Go and occupy the bodies in front of you,” Tybalt said. “All except this man.” He touched the only living human he was keeping back, ready to serve as a sacrifice to raise Esmerelda’s horse. “Then feed on the other corpses as you please, leaving only myself and those who follow me alone. In exchange for the flesh you will occupy and the food you consume, you must serve me and my successors forever, with flawless obedience.”
“Yes, master.” The voices were a chill whisper on the wind, but they were clear enough for the necromancer.
“It shall be done,” agreed the Charnel Fortress.
The disembodied spirits swept past him and into the bodies.
“What is the meaning of all this dark sorcery?” Esmerelda asked, looking at Tybalt with a mix of suspicion and curiosity.
As they spoke, the spirits howled with joyous hunger at entering the living flesh of the prisoners Tybalt had brought for them. Or perhaps it was the prisoners howling in pain at losing their bodies to the wendigos.
Either way, it spoke of success.
“Building a stronger army,” the necromancer said as the wendigos began devouring the other bodies. He had to raise his voice over the sound of flesh being torn apart. “Fighting the oppressive order of the Kingdom.”
“To replace it with what?”
“My own order,” Tybalt replied. “Naturally.”
“Hmm.”
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“Why?” she shot back instantly, scowling. He could tell she had interpreted his words as an order, and she was fighting her instinct to just obey him. If he had actually intended to compel her, he was fairly certain she would just answer. She was only a newborn vampire, after all.
Her will was weak compared with the necromancer’s… for now.
“Do you always have such a problem with authority figures?” he asked.
“You see yourself as an authority.” The words were almost, but not quite, a question. The question was almost, but not quite, insubordinate.
You’re going to be a handful.
But it would be worth it to have a powerful vampire knight at his side, serving willingly. As willing as he could make it.
“I am the only one capable of asserting authority over this entire desert,” Tybalt replied. “I am the Beastking, the High Priest of the Death God, leader of a successful conquering army… Why wouldn’t I see myself as an authority?”
“I see.” She paused and looked like she wanted to be somewhere else, her expression distinctly unhappy.
Tybalt had the self-restraint and the patience to let her be the one to speak next, though.
“I had an unhappy childhood,” Esmerelda said finally. “When the authority you see closest to you is wielded arbitrarily, and you have no control, you learn to distrust it instinctively.”
Tybalt was taken instantly back to his own childhood.
His mother’s drunken beatings. Angrily ranting at Tybalt for looking too much like his father. On the other side, his father’s capricious moments of involvement interspersed with much longer and more consistent periods of total neglect.
The familiar outrage rose in him at the memories before he tamped it down.
“Tell me more about it,” he said.
“Why?” she asked again. But she wore a little smile this time. She was joking. Or near enough.
“Well, we’re going to be stuck together for a while, I suspect,” Tybalt said. “We might be kindred spirits. How the fuck did you end up as a bandit? You have a last name. That means you’re noble born…”
“Yeah, I am. You’re clearly not, so maybe you think that was an advantage for me. Maybe it was. Sometimes. I mean, I had the advantages of a class and a horse and learning how to ride and fight on horseback. That was pretty great. Other times, it… wasn’t. My family was strict. They had high standards, they were a little mercenary in how they thought about us kids, and I was not only one of five, but I was a girl, so of course, I wasn’t set to inherit anything.”
Tybalt nodded along. It was typical noble stuff so far.
“With my coming of age, they wanted to get some use out of me,” Esmerelda continued. “My family wanted to marry me off to a creep for political advantage.”
“I guess that’s pretty common,” he said. “I understand not wanting to comply.”
“I wasn’t finished. He was about three times my age, and there were… whispers about what had happened to his previous wives.” She looked disgusted, and Tybalt thought he saw a trace of fear in her eyes. She shook her head. “I shouldn’t defame someone I’m happy to say I don’t really know.”
“So you ran away. How did you end up here? I would think you’d run somewhere more hospitable.”
“I’m from the Morngart family.”
“Oh…”
Morngart was Commander Volusia’s hometown. The southernmost port in Niet.
“Yeah. My family controls the port of the same name. I’d been on ships almost since I could walk. It was easy enough to sneak aboard one.”
“Then the question bears repeating. Why the fuck come to the Salt Waste? You could have sailed to any other port. You were right by the Gulf of Gold.”
“Because my family would look for me. All along the Gulf, there are mercantile city-states, run by people like my family, often people who know my family. And my looks don’t exactly vanish in a crowd.” She ran a finger through her conspicuous silver hair, and Tybalt’s gaze was also drawn to her purple eyes. “If I was in one of those places, I’d always be looking over my shoulder. So I went in the opposite direction, as far northwest as I could get.”
Running away, you wound up here. We’re really not so different at all.
Tybalt was about to say something to that effect, when he heard the crunch of footsteps.
Dero was back.