Suggested Listening

Ketak eyed the shore as she approached the temple. Its colorful spires against the night sky was perhaps the most beautiful merger of nature and engineering she had ever witnessed outside of Liselm. That beauty loomed overhead, made threatening by the knowledge that this monument might become their tomb and indeed murderer.

Beside her, Xyka did her best to not upset the ebon squirrel that now sat upon her head. The silmid woman had seen stranger things than necromancy-seeking rodents in her life, but not often.

It sniffed the air in front of the temple, and required all of a heartbeat to decide it didn't like this strange new location, and without Elruin it jumped away and went straight into a nearby bush.

"What does that mean?" Xyka asked in the silmid language.

"She doesn't like the temple. I presume this is where you keep most of your healers?" As was true of Arila and Sonhome, the talented healing mages were locked away in the center of the city, close to the wealthy and far from the threat of violence.

"Yes." Xyka refused to look away from the glowing red eyes that stared at her in the darkness. As bizarre as thaumic breeding was, she never before encountered herbivores that looked at her the way predators looked at their prey. Weeks ago, she would have considered them the most unnerving creatures she had ever witnessed. Now she knew there were worse things in the night. "We lost several of our finest during the confusion of the first few days, and now the rest are cloistered away."

"May they be remembered." Ketak resisted the urge to call the survivors cowards. She didn't know their stories or the burdens they bore. "But please, I need to speak to them. This place appears to be in less danger than we originally feared, but we must convince them that there is no choice but to begin purging the necromancer's influence."

"If the necromancer's left this region alone, I'm afraid it might be difficult to convince them to act, but I believe I can convince them to hear your words." Any excuse to get away from the squirrels which would remain forever in her nightmares was a welcome one. "I pray you're prepared.

Ketak took a slow breath, and considered her approach. Were she too forceful, the clergy might take offense and reject her, but if she didn't make clear how dangerous the situation was, she might be condemning what remained of the city's holy orders to the most gruesome of possible deaths. If only Calenda could be here. She was the one who knew how priests, or for that matter humans, thought.

She had to hope things were going better with the others.

Suggested Listening

Calenda hesitated at the edge of the cemetery designed much the same as their own in Arila with a series of rune magic structures that were intended to block taint while doing more complex work. Such practices were a necessity of survival, not cultural preference.

It was also clear from the onset that the system was nonfunctional. The visible runes were cracked and split, no doubt victims of the same attack which had been used on Arila, followed by an inability to control the border and prevent other corpses from being turned into weapons. As such, the area was busy with mages working to cleanse the area with the wards down.

Two armed soldiers, both men, stepped forward with their spears pointed at Calenda. "State your purpose."

Cali bristled at the commands these men issued. Did they have no respect for social propriety? "I am a priestess of Ecros, here on the authority of Engewal to track the necromancer responsible for the attacks on this city and others across the empire."

The guards didn't relax or glance at one another. "You have no authority here, foreigner."

Cali once again found herself at odds with her unliving nature serving to keep her less emotional than she knew she should be. "I wasn't aware Seyid declared independence in the last two weeks."

"We should be so lucky," the one who hadn't been talking muttered.

"We may be part of the empire, but that does not mean we answer to you. Unless Enge Himself has ordained you the new queen, you and your lieges can both go back where you came from and stay there."

"At the expense of allowing innocent people, even perhaps your entire city, to die?" Not for the first time in her life, Cali considered taking their spears and planting them firmly in their sphincters. Like always, she restrained herself and soaked in disappointment.

"You may not have heard, but it's too late to save the ones in here."

"You may not have heard, but that's not an obstacle to a skilled abomination necromancer." Perhaps she could crack their skulls against the ground for a few minutes, nothing important would be damaged. Then she saw a black blur move past her vision and rush into the confines of the cemetery. "Mort! Return!"

The hellsquirrel ignored commands and shot right past the guards, leaving behind an aura of confusion and uncertainty which could manifest itself in any number of ways, but almost guaranteed they'd forget they saw him in the first place.

Shouts of surprise soon began within the cemetery as the various mages tried to deal with the bizarre, agile animal that fed upon their necromancy.

"Merat ne!" One guard ran into the cemetery to figure out what was going on, while the other remained facing her, more agitated than ever.

Cali crossed her arms as she watched the man who wasn't a threat to her even when he had backup. "So, instead of accepting my help, you'd rather wait out here while horrible monsters might be murdering the people you're supposed to be here to protect?"

He hesitated, listening to the screams of panic and fear. One particularly shrill shriek made his mind up for him. "If you cause any trouble at all, I will make certain you hang to death!" He turned and ran into the cemetery as well.

Calenda gave him a respectable head start before she ran past him like he was standing still, acting the part of a warrior expecting to find a fight. To her surprise, she did find a fight. Two dessicated corpses had started to move, and as they did Cali felt the tug of their energies. They were consuming absurd amounts of necromantic energy from the air, more than a human body should be able to withstand.

Cali struck hard and fast, landing a bone-shattering flying kick into the closer of the two zombies. An act which the zombie didn't seem to so much as notice. She stepped back, uncertain of herself. "How?" She could have accepted that it wasn't destroyed, even that it remained standing, but to take a blow such as that without so much as budging an inch, was unbelievable.

It seemed she wasn't the only one unable to understand, as the local exorcists unleashed spell after spell, any one of which would have left Calenda crippled if not destroyed, upon the undead to no effect. While in the midst of the necromantic firestorm, a fuzzy rodent basked in the energies and shielded Cali like the good boy that it was trained to be.

The zombies began to move, going straight for the necromancers while passing her by. Useful, knowing that they didn't seem to realize she was there, but dangerous if anyone began to wonder why she was ignored. She hoped the others were having a better night than she was.

Suggested Listening

Lemia kept close to the younger girl, doing her best to appear to be her mother or older sister. "Don't try so hard to hide, you don't want to attract attention as an easy victim any more than you do as an outsider."

Elruin wanted to ask how she could both look like she wasn't dangerous and look like she wasn't weak at the same time, but she lifted her head a little in the hopes that would be enough. It seemed like everyone had a different way of doing things, and not a single person ever showed her what they were.

"This is where the necromancer is taking his victims," Elruin said. The air all but screamed the song of undeath, a song muted, distorted, and echoed by the coral buildings. Magic warped much as canyon walls warped sound.

"I know." Lemia didn't need Elruin's absurd sensory abilities to draw the same conclusion; she only had to look at this part of the city.

The poor district in Klent was, in many ways, the opposite of the one in Arila. Instead of small shacks strewn about like debris after a storm, these impoverished people lived in massive and well-organized coral boxes, stacked atop one another like colorful bricks. In a city like Arila, people might have thought these large, sturdy buildings were a sign of wealth and power, but one look at the residents' faces would disabuse them of the notion.

People here were alert, watching one another and the strangers in their midst, asking the universal question of the slums: who are my allies, who are the threats, and who are the victims? Outsiders, by definition, could not be allies; anonymity made them both the quintessential victim and threat. Yet not a single local thug approached to cause them trouble or drive them out of 'their' territory, not a single member of the well-meaning community warned them away. These were a people who had given up, they were all victims of a far more dangerous power.

Elruin looked around, as alert to the mystical elements at play as she was oblivious to the human. "That way." She looked in the direction she was certain contained some fragment of undeath, but heeded Lemia's reminders not to point or show any obvious body language.

Lemia's heart jumped in her chest, wondering what to do. They were as protected as anyone could hope to be, but the idea of confronting a necromancer with the skill and brutality this one had shown brought her back to the frightened little girl she thought she'd outgrown long ago. "Perhaps we should go get the others, first?"

"No." Elruin's eyes somehow shined darker than the night's sky. "It's here. I can hear it, it's making another weapon."

"Three above." Lemia forced herself to breathe. "Lead the way."

Elruin set Decima down. "Hunt!" Then ran after, following her own path rather than relying upon the squirrel to lead her. As strong as the animals' instincts were, they were not as sharpened as Elruin's ability to trace magic. Decima was helping, however, by absorbing some of the ambient necromancy which allowed the abominations to hide in the city.

The streets became more narrow, as they pursued the source of growing necromantic power in the dark, changing from rigid right angles to a series of labyrinthine curves and dead ends that grew ever closer to resembling the oceanic environs which coral formed in nature. Even in the day, these streets would remain dark. Even without a monster, these streets would reek of blood and offal.

Then they saw it. Standing over six feet tall, it was a mass of bodies twisted together as if made of wet clay rather than living tissue. Sinew and tendons draped from countless that moved in spite of not being connected to anything.

At its feet, a man, a woman, and two young children sat smiling, naked save for the blood which coated them. All had serene smiles on their faces, while watching the man hold open his own thigh muscles as four rotting arms shoved a rune-marked femur into the bloody mess of his leg. Then, somehow, it cast a healing spell on the flesh, forcing it to stitch back together without sign of the original wound.

Lemia gagged, but didn't lose her stomach this time. "It's like..." she didn't complete the sentence. It was like Calenda, taint hidden even as they looked straight upon it, able to cast magic in spite of the fact that undead should not ever be able to cast magic.

The thing's six heads looked straight at them, each an echo of love. A concerned mother, a childhood confidante, a trusting younger sister, a doting father, a loving husband, a young son. "You are lonely." "Empty." "Pain. Suffering. Loss." "Come to me." "I will make you happy." "We can be together." "Forever." "Always." "Be part of me." "Let me be part of you."

The girls received fantasies tailored to their own psychology, but in the end they weren't that dissimilar from one another. Their mothers were affectionate, they knew their fathers, they beheld innocence unlike any in their real childhoods. They were offered a life of happiness, even if it was short and full of comforting lies.