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Calendar sketch 5/12
Dread Necromancer Sephtis and his adopted son, wyrmling Iron Dragon Galchobar, up to their usual nasty business. Galchobar just loves lighting candles for vile and forbidden blood rituals.
(Technically, Galchobar is a Dragon Cohort, as described in the Draconomicon)
Original size: A4. Materials: fine liner, pencils. Finished: 1st of April 2021.
“How long do I have being the Dread Necromancer, if I do not find a way back home?”
“Your pardon?”
“My predecessor was murdered.”
“That is not –.” Xiala let out a breath. “When the Dread Necromancer Lython Drunvane died, he had been dead for over two hundred years already. A small thing like death does not stop a proper necromancer. The second death often does.”
“Second death.”
“A necromancer does not die of old age. To bring the dead to life is difficult, but not a great magic. Your own body is simply another one, at least for the Dread Necromancer.”
Ahhhhh, darkness breathed and shadows enveloped and became part of the cloak. Power upon power, layered with power. The cloak was an exercise for others, barely protection at all. The real cloak formed about him not unlike wings, invisible even to others with magic.
“I – what?”
A new one, so soon. How amusing, the cloak whispered, a voice felt in his bones more than heard.
“You’re the real cloak.”
I come when called and needed.
Jef rubbed his face. “Do you come with a user manual?”
I do not understand your meaning?
“How do I use you?”
I am the Cloak of the Living Dark.
That wasn’t an answer. Jef hadn’t had a headache yet since arriving on this world; he had no idea why.
The Blade of Yklt: The sword of the dread necromancer, so old that it was made before vowels were handed out for use in language. As most dread necromancers never use or take up the blade, it’s been gathering dust. Or would, if the dust wasn’t afraid of it.
The blade can cut through many things, though a piece of a god tree as armour takes a few swings. The real use of it is the armour it grants that was made from the hide of the first dragon. The armour is invisible but bulky and limiting so almost no Dread Necromancer has used it. While worn, nothing can harm the Dread Necromancer. The downside is that when removed, you are vulnerable for that same amount of time as when it was worn.
The last Dread Necromancer to wield it dropped dead of a flu.
The dead scrubbed down each building from the rooftop to the streets of the city and the sewer streets below. The perfumed smell of the city came from the newly dead, bathed in springs underground by each other. The skeletal dead, by contrast, cleaned each other as efficiently as the walls. Jef shivered inside his cloak. It may be seen as an honour to have purpose in death, but to him it seemed little more than indentured servitude.
This is not your world. The dead are roombas here. The reminder didn’t help. He was the Dread Necromancer, and so knew the lie that hid under those words. He could feel the awareness in the dead, for all it seemed to diminish the longer they remained active.
The dead didn’t have emotions like the living and their personalities faded over time as well. Jef had no idea if this was a true thing from being dead or something caused by the spells that made the dead walk and serve the living.
The living worked less. The dead worked more. There was a balance to this, even if it was not one that Jef could say he understood in practice even if he did in spirit. The wealth of every nation was built on broken backs. Was it better to break when dead than when alive? Again, Jef reminded himself that this was not his world. His morality could not apply here. Perhaps must not, given how little he knew.
The truth of that was bitter but no less true for all that. And despite it, in the back of his mind, a voice whispered: you could improve them; you could make things better.
Xiala Silverbane scowled her way down the hallways of the Gloaming as she walked to the private quarters of the Dread Necromancer. She had given him two days to brood over what his failed spell had been, and in her experience that was over a day too long to leave any dread necromancer unattended. The door to Jef’s rooms opened to her touch. He still had the bone from the ancient dragon burning gently in the heart, the heat of the room almost oppressive compared to the cold in the rest of the ancient palace.
Jef was reading through more texts left by previous Dread Necromancers. For all that Jef had the build of a knight in the Armies of Light, he was scribbling notes and focused on an ancient scroll when she coughed.
He looked up. Blinked. Set his odd quill aside. “What are you wearing?”
“This is the traditional outfit of the chief -assistant to the dread necromancer,” she said coldly.
“You’re serious.”
“Often.”
“There are bandanas that contain more clothing than what you’re wearing. You must be freezing. Go change into something sensible. Please.”
Xiala has expected many things from the Dread Necromancer. This worrying concern for her well being kept rattling her.
His phone wasn’t a bridge to back to Earth. He didn’t know what could be; nothing in the private library spoke properly of travelling to other worlds. To pull someone through was easy; it was like fishing with a lure. But to travel was more akin to becoming a fish and leaping into a void.
It required power, but he wasn’t worried about that. The Staff of Seven Torments hovered beside his bed, waiting. He had been able to find nothing about the staff even in the personal library he didn’t want to think of as his; the secrets it held could only be learned by the Dread Necromancer, but he was rather certain one its torments was the way it always waited to be used like a storm pressed up against a dam or a die about to strike a table.
He reached out with his right hand, fingers brushing it. There was power inside him, cold and dark like a pool of still shadow. The staff was an empty sun, an ache running through the heart every time it was touched. Energy flooded into him even as he pulled his fingers back, the staff aching to be used as it thrummed with force.
There were 11,342 people in the palace called the Gloaming and for a moment he felt every single one. And he knew how easy it would be to drain them all to husks and tear a hole between universes back to Earth. This wasn’t what necromancy was for, but with enough power he could bludgeon it into any shape it wanted. The first torment was the staff itself. Hovering helpfully, waiting to be used.
A promise that seemed to come without a single price attached.
What if there was magic back home, and people hid it from everyone because of situations like this? If everything was alive and that was the core of magic, and hidden from his world? He had no idea, and no way to know. The phone seemed aware only in a primitive way. He wasn’t sure if that was true at all, or only what he wanted to believe. Jef set that thought aside as well.
“Hello. I’m Jef, your user. I bought you on August 16th a year ago. And I need to make a phone call home, so you are going to aid me in that.”
There was no reaction from the phone.
Jef hesitated, but only for a moment. He owed some people more than silence. “I will make a phone call back home,” he said, holding his phone tightly in his right hand, “and you will not resist this or you won’t be a phone. I’ll put what makes you you into an ant, if I am kind. An apple, if this world has those, if I am cruel. I need to call people, to let them know that I am safe even if am far away. And you are going to help me do this or learn what dread means when people call me the Dread Necromancer.
“We can discover it together.”
