The necromancer went to the window, watching the distant figures of Vanalath and Orimo.

Just when they were nearing a resolution, he had fled, as expected. He was a creature that longed for the light and feared it all the same. It was his existence, his own division of the mind. It seemed they both had their divisions to contend with.

They couldn’t continue like this. As the ghoul grew in intelligence, his personality grew as well. His Brand, whatever Path he walked, had begun its work on him. Right now, he was on the divide between monster and man. Eventually, he would need to decide his course of action. To do this, he would face her. It was unavoidable.

Impatience. That was something he shared in common with the previous owner of his body. She had thought it an annoying trait of his when he was alive, but seeing it in this creature now gave her mixed feelings. She wished she could feel like this forever, gazing out the window at the man she had known most of her life, the boy she might have married had events taken a different course.

But this was the role of the youngest version of her—the dreamer, the wishful girl who gazed into deep lakes and imagined worlds. The dreamer was her weakest self.

The oldest version of her, the necromancer, had tried to destroy him. And that version of her was the only one that could remember what was most important. She led the others. That version, nameless but for her title, was her strongest self. Even now, she felt her dissatisfaction in the back of her mind. She didn’t like the dreamer much.

In the distance, Orimo and Vanalath began to fight. She frowned. There was only so much dust left, and it wasn’t easy to acquire more, especially here. Healing undead was not cheap.

She shook her head. What was it about that ghoul that reminded her so much of Van? His impatience? His stubbornness? All of his worst traits. Was that all he had been—a mix of base emotions? Is that what remained?

Van had died two years ago. The severing of his filament, his thread of life, was confirmed. His Truesoul had departed this world and left a spirit in its wake. Truesouls were like that—they hated the mortal plane. They always longed to go up there, to join whatever it was that waited for them Beyond. The filament was the only thing keeping them here, a hair-thin tether nailed down by life and severed by the act of death.

Redundancy. That was an important rule for a necromancer. She understood redundancy.

If any of Van remained, it would be only pieces of his spirit: the redundant layer of the soul. How many fragments of that spirit had persisted the entire two years since his demise? Enough for him to retain some of his traits? But fragments were just that—fragments. They were useful as fuel to create new undead, but they weren’t the person. They could never be the person.

Orimo was one example of this. His spirit remained whole, likely due to some interference on the part of the Deathstone in Vanalath. He appeared to any casual observer to be the same Orimo the Hunter he had been in life. He walked like him and spoke like him, though perhaps his personality was a bit freer after the loss of his Brand. But this ghoul wasn’t Orimo—not by a long shot. That much was clear when she found him outside after his resurrection, eating the flesh of former villagers from the pile of ruined bodies, a look of immense satisfaction on his face.

Ah. She hadn’t noticed, but it seemed that the oldest division of herself had returned at some point. Farewell for now, dreamer.

- - -

The day after his rematch with Orimo, Vanalath sat with his back to the giant boulder that marked the necromancer’s abode. He was on the side of the rock that faced west, opposite of the cottage. The large boulder provided an effective barrier against the bustle of the undead camp. Most of the evolved ghouls had been put to the task of gathering the remaining undead that were scattered around the valley, and after one day, over fifty lesser ghouls had gathered there, turning the previously silent plains noisy. It was easier when the undead were in their catatonic, resting state, but something about being near the necromancer had them worked up. She could have demanded that they remained still, but for some reason she didn’t seem to care.

Now he was alone at last. Here at the center, the valley appeared as a great bowl, though he knew from his time in the northern pass that it was more teardrop-shaped. To the west, he could see the waterfall near the village of… Boling, was it? Orimo had spoken of the various villages earlier. Not that their names mattered now that they were destined to become ruins.

Vanalath closed his eyes and allowed his thoughts to drift. Training Conceptualization, or at least reaching a new understanding with it, was the task he had embarked on. In the past, the skill had improved during quiet moments like this, when he was able to delve into his own mind and forget himself. He allowed ten breaths to pass, though he had to count them mentally as he didn’t actually breath. He couldn’t quite get the timing right when he tried forcing it. He lacked the instinctive rhythm of living creatures. So, he focused on the mental count, and it worked, his mind slowly refining to a laser focus, extraneous thoughts evaporating like moths in a flame.

He worked through the events of the past few days in reverse order. He was searching for something to latch onto. The past day he had performed sword drills incessantly. He watched himself doing the exercises from this detached perspective, noting things he hadn’t been aware of before. There were some imperfections in his stance. Perhaps some attacks had a better follow-through that he had missed. Other than that, he saw other things going on in the background, things that he had ignored at the time.

One such thing was Kalaki, who stood a few dozen paces away, practicing with his spear. He drilled, perhaps influenced by Vanalath’s state of mind. Though if anything, his movements appeared more fluid and refined than his master’s.

…was even his Peon more skilled than him? And without a class at that. Vanalath would have watched for longer, but there wasn’t much he could learn from a show of spearmanship. Not as he was now. He went on, further into the past.

At first, he had been surprised at the amount of detail locked away in his head. It was almost like he remembered more than he saw in the moment, though he knew this wasn’t quite true. It was simply that there were certain things he didn’t care about in the present. He had been aware of Kalaki yesterday, but he hadn’t paid the ghoul any mind.

The rematch with Orimo had been exhausted already. It was the only thing he had thought of during the past day. He’d played through every moment of the fight dozens of times, searching for weaknesses in Orimo. There were remarkably few.

He went further back. He saw the grove, trees smashed as a result of his rage. Then, the eye. The false ritual. He went back, back until he was standing by a brook, observing a masked Anamu who dragged behind him a dead hunter.

For some reason, this was the scene he latched on.

It wasn’t a fight, nor anything he would consider a major event. This was simply a memory of Anamu and his prey. The hunter that ran. That was what he lingered on. The man had been savaged by the ghoul, and he was headless, missing an arm.

Why was this the memory he settled on? It was the kill that allowed Anamu to evolve. Was that why it drew him? No. This memory wasn’t about Anamu.

The hunter that ran.

Why had he fled? Fear? Perhaps seeing his comrades fall all around him finally broke him. He ran from the battle because his resolve failed him.

But that was the dichotomy. From what Vanalath saw of the hunters on the front lines, not a single one of them had feared death. They practically threw themselves at the undead. Even Vanalath hadn’t cowed them, though to those unbranded men he had been an incarnation of death. That was what bothered him. If these men cared so little for their own lives, why had one of their number fled into the mountains?

The pieces slowly connected.

Orimo. It had been Orimo who held them together. Those hunters could act fearlessly because they had a leader they trusted unconditionally at their backs. Orimo must have been the only thing holding the band of men together when the undead charged them. Their rallying point. Somehow, his presence inspired in them the resolve to face death, and once he was killed, that resolve shattered.

To lead. It was a concept packed with significance. Vanalath had his own experiences with leading. Back at the prison, he had devised a plan, sending in ghouls to spook the humans. In several other instances, he had used the undead. But had he led them? Could you lead creatures as dense as ghouls, or could you only push them from behind like a slave driver—like the necromancer? What did it mean to lead?

A part of him knew why he was thinking of all these things. It had to do with one of his titles, as well as one of his skills.

(⁎)

You have manifested the Shape of a conqueror through an act of overbearing will.

One of the Three Noble Titles, is the point of the spear: The King of War. You become adept at imposing your will on others.

Stratum 1

Dominate, a skill he had earned later, shared one phrase in common with this title: “become adept at imposing your will on others.” That similarity couldn’t be a coincidence. Orimo had explained titles to him the day previously. Many titles had invisible effects in addition to the effects described. These were things like becoming more likely to learn a certain skill or having access to different class selections when you were ranking up. Plenty of titles had invisible, indefinable effects. They were also apparently given at random. Different Branded performing the actions of their predecessors would not often get a title for their efforts, despite fulfilling the arbitrary requirements that the first person who earned it had.

Orimo explained that this had to do with suitability. He had called it a person’s “destiny,” but Vanalath knew that such words weren’t useful to understanding anything. If Orimo were to be believed, this made it Vanalath’s destiny to rule. It was superstition, essentially the equivalent of claiming that invisible spirits caused all natural phenomena.

But what did it mean to impose his will? Was it simply what he had been doing up until now? Commanding the weak-minded? But what about when subjects could lead themselves? Anamu and Kalaki had intelligence far surpassing their former selves. In time, more would likely follow suit. Perhaps ghouls like Iokina would rise up to positions of command. Current methods would only take him so far. Could he push forward, forcing those even more intelligent than him to follow his direction? What if that led to their destruction?

Everyone had different methods of rule. Orimo had been a leader, not a king. His was a band of brothers. He had proven himself time and time again and for this, he commanded the respect of his hunters. This method had its limits. His men wouldn’t have followed him had he ordered them to kill their families, for instance. Orimo led as long as he fit the image of him that the hunters held in their minds. It wasn’t a true, inherent form of command, but one contingent on many factors. The true leader had been whatever “ideal” each hunter held in their hearts. In other words, there was no leader.

And that meant that some of the hunters had broken when Orimo fell.

That was one thing that all types of leadership had in common with one-another. If the leader fell, everything crumbled down. Perhaps if another strong hunter had stepped forward, it could have been prevented, but none had been Orimo’s equal.

Take the way the necromancer operated. If Orimo’s men followed him because he represented a greater ideal: homeland, family, or whatever was most important to them, then she was the opposite. She ruled because she herself was the center. Before, Vanalath hadn’t been fighting for his own reasons or ideals, but for her alone—for her ambition. If the necromancer had died when he was in that state, what would he have done? He would have lost his way.

A ruler was not a simple leader. A ruler… was the center of everything. A ruler was a king. Someone who held their own goals above the goals of any other. That was a king. It didn’t matter if he had subordinates or not. It didn’t even matter if he failed. All that mattered was that a king was a law unto himself. That he had no greater ruler.

But even if Vanalath thought himself a ruler, he knew so little. He wanted more. He wanted to know what lay behind those mountains. He wanted to know the secrets of necromancy and the limits of his strength. He wanted to kill a god.

He knew what he needed to do.

- - -

Vanalath’s steps up to the cottage were firm. The lesser ghouls, packed before the entrance in a bid to get as close to the necromancer as possible, parted before him like water. During the time he had been training, over a dozen more had joined their ranks. Her forces were building. Vanalath wondered just how many people had lived in this valley, and whether, as lesser ghouls, they would prove much use at all.

Just filling out the ranks was useful enough, he supposed. And every lesser had a chance to evolve.

He entered the building to find the woman sitting on the floor of her cottage, eyes closed as if in meditation. She no longer had needles protruding from her body, though he saw wounds on her flesh where they had been.

A floorboard creaked as he stepped forward, and she opened her eyes.

“Vanalath! Wonderful timing. I just completed the attuning process. Iokina went out to gather more ghouls, so the process should speed up considerably. Have you given thought to my question?”

She wanted to know if he had decided his course of action. He had. He did not know if she was more powerful than him, but it wouldn’t do to antagonize the woman needlessly.

Watching her reaction, he spoke carefully. “I will not serve.”

She maintained a politely inquisitive gaze.

He continued, “I will not serve, but… I will join hands with you. Know that my Peons and I are not yours to command. However, when our interests align, we can aid one-another.”

She was manipulative. He couldn’t trust her, this woman who had tried to command him and when that had failed, had attempted to destroy him. But she couldn’t touch him with the fear of that eye’s owner looming overhead. Perhaps it was foolish to rely on something as treacherous as the will of a being like the Dread Sovereign, especially when Vanalath sought to ultimately remove himself from that being’s influence, but this wasn’t all he was going to rely on.

He would simply become powerful enough that he would have nothing to fear from her.

Another reason he chose not to depart was because this woman already had a plan to foil the Enclave. Vanalath didn’t delude himself into thinking he could face them down right now, or even escape should they sent out a Hunt—which was apparently quite likely. Orimo had spoken some of the Enclave. If he were to be believed, Orimo was ordinary among the hunters there: simply average, neither strong nor weak. There were dozens like him, and dozens more who were even stronger. And at the top stood a few individuals so powerful that even Orimo didn’t know their Tier. And many of these Branded were specialized hunters and trackers. Orimo said that even he couldn’t escape a Hunt organized by the Enclave.

And the most important reason Vanalath didn’t choose to leave was because of her knowledge. The necromancer was the only one who could make more undead. If he left, he had no way to make new troops. So he would accompany her, learning her secrets, training and growing. What he did afterwards… well, it was up to him. He would decide when that time approached.

She hummed. “An alliance, hm?”

“That’s right. An alliance.”

The necromancer rose, sticking out her hand.

“I would be pleased to have you aboard,” she said. “You can call me Rellika. I look forward to our partnership.”

Her fingers, long and slender, were calloused from years of work. Vanalath grasped the hand, noting that their respective body temperatures were now very nearly the same. She no longer had the warmth of a human.

“Rellika,” he said, feeling the word. It rolled off his tongue comfortably, as if he had always known it.