Chapter 25 : Skeleton Knights
Windsor had been watching Evan look at the inscription. "We believe this is the key to the passage," he said. "We've tried every approach we could think of. At most, we managed to produce a brief luminescence."
Evan read the words again. The literal meaning wasn't obscure — it was a philosophical statement, the kind that decorated important places to make them feel significant. What it actually meant in terms of mechanism, he couldn't determine from the text alone.
He decided to try something direct. He extended his hand and let a thin stream of pale grey magical energy flow from his palm toward the inscription — carefully, controlled, more a probe than an attack.
What happened next, no one in the room had anticipated.
The moment the energy touched the carved letters, they began to move. Faster and faster, the characters circling until they were a blur, and then a vortex opened in the stone. A sound came from it — something between a roar and a groan — and smoke poured out in masses. The hall went translucent around them, edges dissolving.
Before anyone could respond, the vortex expanded and swallowed the room.
Outside, Raphael and Shur had descended to low altitude, Shur still breathing fire across the mountainside, working through its reserves carefully. The dragon understood economy; it had been burning since they arrived and knew its limits. It was preparing one final exhalation before landing.
The castle rippled as though it were a reflection on disturbed water. Smoke erupted from every opening. A spatial vortex materialized without warning, its pull immediately enormous, and it dragged both dragon and rider inward before either could react. Then the castle vanished, as completely as it had done centuries earlier. The mountainside sat empty and quiet, as though nothing had ever stood there.
Neither side had been prepared. Evan least of all — he had no explanation for what his magic had done. Duke Windsor was a vampire of the Duke rank, which placed him at Legend-tier at minimum. The idea that a lich of Evan's current level could outperform him through raw magical power was not credible.
In the moment the vortex opened, something had happened inside Evan — the circulation in his organs had surged, accelerating sharply, and then settled back to its usual rhythm almost immediately. The unnamed technique. The one that had been running on its own since the first night, entirely beyond his control.
He didn't have time to think about it.
His surroundings had already changed.
A floating island spread before him, with peaks and valleys, barren and windswept. Light pervaded the space without any visible source — not shadows, not gradients, just a sourceless brightness that existed everywhere at once. Evan stood in a depression in the terrain. He was alone. Looking up, he caught brief flashes of movement across the sky — a red streak that could only have been a dragon, and smaller shapes scattering in various directions. Sophia and the others, landing somewhere else.
He steadied himself and cast Wraith Eye. The invisible orb rose above him and he saw through it: he was at the low center of a crater, roughly a li in radius, steep walls all around. No plant life except patches of lichen. Scattered white bones, half-buried. The temperature was comfortable, the air dry. Nothing immediately threatening.
He dismissed the spell, took the sword-cane in hand, and began to climb.
He had gone about a hundred steps when the ground moved. A skeletal hand pushed up through the soil. Then another, nearby. Then a dozen at once, soil breaking apart all around him as skeletons pulled themselves free of the earth, rusted blade-fragments in their grip, or arm bones stripped from other skeletons when nothing else was available. Soul-fire burned in their eye sockets, pale and dim.
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Evan began chanting: "Return." He was attempting to dismiss them back to wherever they had come from — a standard death magic command. The skeletons paused. The soul-fires flickered. Then they kept coming. The spell had registered but produced no result.
He tried summoning instead — calling his own skeletal constructs to his side to fight. They appeared and joined the battle, but they weren't responding to his commands any differently than the others. Something about this place was disrupting the normal channels of undead magic.
He dissolved his own summoned skeletons. No point expending energy on constructs he couldn't direct. The local skeletons lurched toward him with their rusted weapons, and Evan drew the sword-cane.
The first thrust found a skeleton's soul-fire dead center. The fire went out. The skeleton collapsed and scattered. Something else happened too — a faint coolness traveled from the blade back along his arm, and his mind went briefly clearer and sharper. He noted it without stopping to examine it.
He moved forward. His footwork and his thrust were beginning to work together for the first time as a unified thing rather than two separate habits — Andrea's lessons had given him the framework, and his drilling had given him the reflex, and now in actual combat they were merging into something that felt like it had always been there. He wasn't counting the skeletons he left behind him. By the time he reached the crater's rim there were many.
He stopped and looked out.
The landscape was stark. Little vegetation — lichen across the rocks, patches of bare stone. In the middle distance, a mountain with rivers of lava running down its flanks. And at its peak, rising from the lava flows themselves, a mage's tower. Thirteen stories. Dark stone, intact.
Evan had read enough in Nicholas Andrew's memory to know what a mage's tower meant. They were almost never built in the living world — the materials required were beyond what current civilization could supply. Legendary mages built them in demi-planes, which was where they spent most of their time. A demi-plane controlled by someone who had built a tower would have its controls centered there.
He knew where he needed to go.
He also knew what was between him and the tower. At the base of the mountain, a formation of skeleton cavalry had assembled — skeleton horses carrying skeleton knights, lined up in patient ranks, apparently waiting for exactly this moment.
He had been dealing with skeleton infantry. Cavalry was a different problem. A mounted knight, even a dead one, hit with the full momentum of the horse behind it, and his sword work was still calibrated for opponents on foot. He started down toward them anyway.
The lead rider accelerated. At full gallop a mounted knight carried enormous force — horse and rider unified, the impact arriving before the reach of the weapon. Evan had barely registered the closing distance when he cast: the fire bracer's array produced a fireball the size of a large ball, blue-white and compact, and he sent it straight at the incoming rider.
High up in the sky, Raphael watched this from Shur's back.
The skeleton knight dropped flat against the horse's neck at the last possible moment. The horse seemed to lower its profile somehow. The fireball passed over them by a finger's width and detonated in the ranks behind, blowing several skeletons apart.
The rider came up as the horse arrived, blade already extended in a rising arc — rusted but moving with the precision of deep training, directed at Evan's neck.
Evan moved. He didn't decide to move; his body read the incoming angle and responded before his mind had finished processing it. Left foot crossing wide, body rotating from the waist, the incoming blade dragged out of its line by his deflection, and then his point found the eye socket and his wrist turned upward. Something cold moved through the sword and out the other side — not absorbed, but discharged, expelled in the motion itself. The skull went up and the soul-fire died before it landed.
The horse and skeleton collapsed behind him.
He stood there for a moment. That last sequence had not been anything he had trained. The footwork, the rotation, the timing of the deflection — he had no memory of drilling that particular combination. It had come from somewhere else, some integration of everything he'd been doing since the first night in Nicholas Andrew's castle, and the cool energy from the unnamed technique had moved through him in that instant and done something he couldn't quite name.
He shook his head and looked up at the sky. Far above, Raphael had been watching — his attention caught by the fireball, which from that distance looked like fire-school magic from a mage with reasonable melee skill. Nothing that suggested a lich. Before he could look closer, a pulse of darkness erupted from somewhere across the demi-plane — something at Legend power, concentrated and unmistakable. Raphael's attention shifted immediately toward the larger threat.
The skeleton cavalry was still coming.
Evan exhaled, lifted his blade, and went to meet them.