Chapter 478: A Dead World

The first door that tore through reality made my eyes ache. It was the size of a barn, and it hung in the air fifty feet above the floor, and through it I could see a vast land.

It was grey and flat, going out to a distance that did not end, and in the sky was a green sun that was spilling its flame down to the ground, as if the sun was bleeding, or maybe crying.

My perception left the sun and went to the land, and the only thing I could see were the dead, in numbers that stopped being a number and became a texture.

Men and Beastkin and Stoneborn and shapes with the wrong count of limbs, standing shoulder to shoulder from the lip of the door to the edge of sight, and every one of them was lit from inside with the same cold green fire, and every one of them turned to look when the door opened.

Behind them, further out, there were shapes on that plain the size of hills.

Ribs. A rib cage standing up out of the grey ground with the curve of a cathedral frame, and past it a skull lying on its side that I could have walked into without lowering my head, and beyond that more of them, out to the horizon, a whole country of bones that no mortal thing had ever worn.

These… these were the bones of gods.

A second door opened. A third. A seventh. They tore open all around the inside of my pyramid, above me and behind me and in the walls and once directly under my feet, and through every one of them that plain, filled with the living dead, was looking back at me.

The voice of the Necromancer became more shrill, and the dead began to come through.

∞

The first ones fell forty feet and got up with their legs broken. They did not even acknowledge the injury. Their burning eyes found me and they began to crawl towards me.

Then a dozen. Then a hundred. They poured out of the doors in a steady stream and the fire in them made them bright as they fell, so the inside of my tomb filled with falling lights. From a distance, a mortal would think it was fireflies in their thousands pouring out of those doorways… oh, how naive. This world was filled with monsters.

And through all of it, the stranger was still trying to tear me apart, and the Necromancer kept up her chanting, making the doorway slowly widen.

A brawler and a summoner, sharing the same body. There was nothing fair about it.

The first of the dead reached me while I was still writing and fighting for my life. It must have been a powerful warrior when it was alive, but this was not a battle in which one corpse was going to make any difference. I put the pen through its face and it came apart into green fire and ash, and I kept writing.

The second one took me round the waist. The third got an arm across my throat. By the time I had burned both of them off me there were forty, and by the time I had cleared the forty there were four hundred, and the claws of the stranger came through all of them without slowing, using them as a diversion while he tried to kill me.

These dead may not have been powerful, but they dulled my perception and stopped me seeing the full scale of the assault that mattered.

I was cut from shoulder to hip. A claw took three of my ribs out through my back. I lost most of my left hand for the second time that night.

And I kept writing.

∞

Maybe another mage would have been terrified at that moment, as I was being systematically butchered, but I had died too many times to fear death, and the thought of dying could no longer stop me from doing what I wanted.

I made small marks with my pen, because it was impossible to draw anything more complex while I was being attacked like this.

Nothing that looked like a Script. I was sure the stranger would not allow me any obvious display of power. They believed I was controlling the blood of Terra, and they did not want me using it again.

So if a Script was a page filled with words, I wrote no sentences. Just single letters, scattered across twelve miles, in places nothing would think to look, in an order that made no sense from any direction except one.

My plan was to make eighty-one marks, and at that moment I had made forty-four of them, and if I did not finish these markings, then I was dying here. Well, I still thought I was going to die, but I did not want to die alone.

I dodged a particularly vicious swipe that would have taken my head off, and that was when I noticed the chanting from the Necromancer had changed.

∞

For a moment there was a drop in her chanting, leaving the whole place in silence, but it was an odd silence, because there was so much happening in there. I could hear all of it underneath that moment: the dead falling, the fire, my own breathing, which was wet, since I had lost nearly half my lungs. Then she started up again in a lower register, and this one had a rhythm to it.

The largest door stretched wider, and all the other doors began to feed into it, making the expansion accelerate.

It opened almost three hundred yards across, and it felt almost as if that strange realm was merging with this one, and then a massive hand came slowly out of it.

It came up and took hold of the rim, and it was made of bone. The hand was the size of a town square, and the green fire ran between its joints like mortar in a wall. Then a second hand. Then the top of a skull, rising, with two pits in it that held the fire of a furnace, and sockets I could have put a house in.

The bones of a god were about to enter this place. The corpses that had been falling were painful distractions. This would be anything but.

It came out of that hole one slow movement at a time, and the pyramid groaned as the weight of it came onto my floor, and the Scripts I had laid in the stone sang and strained and some of them went dark.

The stranger kept trying to kill me as we fought under the bones of the god while it stood up. Its skull went past a hundred feet, and past two hundred, and it had to stoop under a ceiling two miles above us, because the shoulders would not clear.

The whole of that thing was bone and green fire and nothing else, and when it turned its head to look for me, I felt its attention land on me like a dropped roof.

“Ah,” said the one voice that was neither of theirs. “How far can you run?”

∞

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∞

sorry for slow updates, the chapters are longer and a bit technical… so I usually take time to make it come out well, and give the magic a sort of logic that ties everything together and would directly link to elric’s future power sets.