“It took longer than expected to collect these. I hope you weren’t too inconvenienced?” Yor asked with an arched smile.

Tyron sat grimly in his workshop, the darkness only kept at bay by the small globe of light he had conjured.

“As grateful as I am for the service you’ve done for me, don’t you think it would be more appropriate to send word of your arrival? Rather than wake me in the middle of the night?”

Yor pouted and the Necromancer averted his eyes. Evil things shouldn’t look so appealing. It was wrong on a fundamental level.

“You can hardly blame me for waking you. I happened to come on the rare occasion you were actually sleeping. A very rare occurrence, wouldn’t you agree?”

Tyron still preferred to work at night, even when he was enchanting. The lack of distractions was welcome, and he didn’t struggle to fall asleep during the bustle of the day. The noise from the market was irrelevant when you could drift off to sleep with a spell at a moment's notice. More people should learn that spell, it was unbelievably convenient.

“No, I suppose I see your point. Are you going to deliver what you promised, or will I have to jump through hoops and a prolonged conversation I’d rather have no part in?”

If he’d noticed one thing about Yor and her coven, it was their propensity for talk. They could chat in circles around a topic all night without batting so much as an eye. He found it infuriating. What was the point of a conversation that didn’t convey something? Yor insisted he simply wasn’t seeing the nuance or reading the subtle signals, Tyron simply pronounced they were wasting time.

The vampire frowned before she extracted a familiar wooden case from the shadows around her and passed it to him. As he reached out to take it, he realised she wasn’t letting go, the box held firm in her grip.

“Of course,” he sighed. “Shall we discuss the colour red for five hours while constantly hinting that we are talking about blood but never specifically saying so?”

Despite his sarcastic tone, he didn’t actually expect Yor to be angered by his words, but to his surprise, a bit of heat flashed through her eyes as she gazed down at him.

“The games we play serve a very specific purpose. The Scarlet Court is a place where an imprecise word, a poorly turned phrase, or a slip from the correct mode of speech will earn an eternity of suffering. My coven practises so that they may be in complete control of their tongues at all times, as it is the only way for a vampire to survive. Do you understand?”

She glared down at him as he remained seated in his chair. Tyron pinched his brow.

“I apologise. I know too little of your customs and ways to be passing judgement on your activities. Suffice to say, they do not suit me, but that is no excuse for my tone.”

She released the case and he brought it close to his chest, nodding in thanks before he opened it to inspect the contents. Each of the glass spheres was now dyed black, the scent of Death Magick rising thickly from them. If he looked closely, he swore he could almost see the shifting souls wailing in despair locked within. Or perhaps that was just his guilty conscience. He snapped the case shut.

“Of course, this one isn’t going to be free, or paid in a nebulous favour we demand later,” Yor announced. “We have a task, though it will wait until after you return from your… sojourn.”

In the dim light, she was a disturbing sight, her pale features standing out against her raven black hair. What stood out the most was her eyes, blood red, and glowing with purpose. Was there a hint of fang in her smile?

“What do you need me to do?” he asked.

Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be something he liked. This was a heavy favour he had asked for, they were sure to demand a price equal in weight.

“I warned you some time ago that other… groups… from within the court may soon seek to establish a presence here in this realm. Relatively stable and filled with blood, it’s a tempting slice of reality for my kind, after all. Such an event has now come to pass, my Mistress has confirmed it. We expect they may come to you, but we no longer wish to take that chance.”

“You want me to go to them?”

“Indeed.”

He really didn’t like her smile.

“But we want you to survive. So we will call on you to perform this task for us after you have returned. I hope you are a little stronger at that point than you are now.”

“Me too,” Tyron muttered.

~~~

“I’m coming with you,” Dove declared, hands resting on his bony hips.

“What? Why?” Tyron stared at the skeleton, unsure quite what to make of this request. “Is this a joke of some kind? I don’t really have the brainpower for it right now, Dove.”

The skeleton slapped a hand to his skull. A hollow ‘tak’ sound reverberated through the study.

“Not enough brainpower? You?! What happened? You tripped over and lost half of your Intelligence?”

“I’ve got a lot on my plate,” he snapped as he massaged his temples. “I’m organising the shop, preparing for the trip, managing my undead.”

There was also the many avenues of research he’d been feverishly scribbling out notes for, but he didn’t see any reason to mention those. The more time he spent chasing his thoughts down each and every little avenue, the more Tyron became convinced that Necromancy was an unmasterable pursuit. There were simply so many ways one could specialise. If he spent a hundred years, he still didn’t think he’d have time to ferret out every little secret, optimise each component of his craft.

The moment he thought he had a solid grasp of one concept, he realised that his new understanding had applications in a dozen other places, and those changes fed back into what he’d been studying in the first place! It was endless, but his mind simply wouldn’t allow him to put any of it to the side. He had to know.

“It’s interesting the way you say ‘trip’ like you’re planning a jaunt into the central province for a spa day. I think a better phrasing would be ‘horrifying journey through nightmarish un-reality’, or ‘sanity-annihilating trek through a non-dimension filled with soul-devouring worms’. It’s more honest.”

Tyron frowned.

“Abyssals are worms?”

He’d never been able to ascribe a defined shape to them. To him, they appeared as an amorphous mass of tentacles and… whatever they were made of.

“Of course that’s what you latch onto. No, Abyssals aren’t worms. Nobody knows what shape they are, the damn things start to disintegrate the second they arrive on this side of the veil, so it’s not like you have time to take a good look.”

The Necromancer knew that Abyssal creatures couldn’t exist in this reality, or anywhere outside of the abyss, but he didn’t realise they perished that quickly.

“Why do they want to come through, then? They seem desperate to get to this side.”

“I don’t fucking know!” the skeleton threw his bony arms in the air, exasperated. “I’m not an expert on the Abyss! The only reason I know as much as I do is because I’m Dimension Mage adjacent. Abyssals can’t exist on this side of the veil, but they love to come over, melt themselves and kill everything nearby while they do. You don’t seem to understand how terrifying they are.”

“And yet, here’s you, offering to accompany me on this journey through the Abyss… for what purpose? To go to Cragwhistle? If I remember correctly, you described it as a frozen shithole on the arse of the world.”

“Some of us like a good shithole.”

Tyron stared at him.

“You’ve changed, Dove.”

“Not like that! Wait, you’re the one making dirty jokes now? The fuck is going on here? The world has gone mad.”

The skeleton paced up and down, and once again, Tyron was disturbed at the sight of a skeleton moving with such human mannerisms. It was… unnatural. Like a sheep discussing the weather, or a bird weaving fabric. Undead famously didn’t have personalities, barring a rare few kinds. Watching Dove idly reach behind himself and scratch at the back of his pelvis like he still had a backside was simply jarring.

“Look,” Dove fronted Tyron again. “The reason I want to go is so I can throw some spells and kill some kin, alright?”

Far from clearing matters up, this only confused Tyron more.

“What? You want to… kill kin? What for?”

He highly doubted that the reason was so Dove could relive his glory days as a slayer. Although… maybe it was?

“We need to try and figure out how to connect me to the Unseen,” Dove declared, wiggling his skeletal fingers in Tyron’s face. “Neither of us know how to do it, but we both know it’s possible. Yor and her fellow suckers are proof that undead can still level and have classes.”

Of course. Why hadn’t Tyron considered that as a possible motivation?

“You think if you kill enough rift-kin, eventually the Unseen will recognise your existence? Grant you a Class and Race?”

What would his race even be? Revenant?

Dove crossed his arms across his ribcage, the purple light flaring in his sockets.

“Obviously, the odds of this working are low, I know that, you know that, but I have to try. You don’t know what it’s like being cut off from the Unseen, from power and independence. I’ve lived with it my entire life. In fact, I was silver, like you’ve become. Now that I can finally move again… thanks for that, by the way… I want to have a purpose. Apart from fighting the kin alongside my fellow bone boys, what else is there for me?”

If he was honest with himself, and Tyron almost always was, there wasn’t much reason for Dove to continue to exist. As a mentor, he’d been invaluable, but that time had passed. Tyron now equaled the former Summoner in terms of rank, if not quite in level. Were it not for the benefits of his formal mage education, Dove would have nothing to teach him anymore. Even then, at this point, there wasn’t much he knew that Tyron couldn’t figure out on his own.

“So we take you along and you can fight, kill a few kin, hope that you get a Class… somehow.”

Tyron sighed and shrugged.

“Fine, I’ll take you along.”

“YES!” the skeleton pumped his fists.

“But make sure you don’t cause any issues,” Tyron warned him. “We both know you aren’t at your most stable right now,” he held up a hand to forestall any protest, “and I don’t blame you for that. I just can’t afford any fuckups from you. There will be no skeleton running through Cragwhistle being a dickhead. You stick with the skeletons. Am I understood?”

“Completely,” came back a solemn vow.

Tyron didn’t believe it for a second.