CHAPTER B5: CONSTRUCTION

It wasn’t easy to create a ritual that would pierce the Dimensional Veil to another realm. A great deal of power was required, the spellwork had to be incredibly precise and messing it up could create fluctuations that had very serious consequences. At worst, one could tear an opening to the Abyss and let through something that would promptly dissolve the body of the caster into a fine mist.

Tyron wasn’t keen on fighting an Abyssal just because his work was poor, so he worked exhaustively to ensure that his ritual was flawless.

That would be enough if he was trying to reach a normal place. Though, who could say what ‘normal’ was when it came to dimensional magick? The Realm of the Dead was deep and dark. Getting to it, physically no less, would require incredibly powerful, incredibly precise magick. A single error would rip a hole in the weave and have disastrous consequences.

For something as complex as this, with so many components, each needing to be perfect, it was much better to create a permanent structure and affix the sigils and arrays necessary to it directly.

Such a thing would naturally require a huge amount of magickally attuned materials and skilled craftspeople to create, but Tyron was fortunate enough that both of those were near to hand.

The wasteland was quite literally covered in crystallised magick, enough to make the entire doorway out of it if they wanted to, and in Master Willhem and Master Halfshard, he had the two finest Arcanists in the Western Province.

“How long is it going to take?” he asked.

The Demi-lich who had once been Master Willhem hovered by his side, his skeletal feet hanging down until his toes just barely cleared the stone floor, a staff in his grip and the rest of his form concealed by a robe he had started wearing. The Necromancer strongly suspected Annita had been responsible for the dresscode. It can’t have been pleasant looking at her former master floating around, his ribs and glowing red marrow crystals on display.

“Days. A week, perhaps. It’s hard to say,” Willhem rasped.

There was no shortage of labour, since Tyron had put several hundred skeletons on the job of assembling the physical arch, all under the direction of a surviving Stoneworker. The actual dimensions of the structure weren’t overly important, as long as they permitted the sigils and arrays to be placed in the correct locations relative to each other.

That was the time-consuming part. The two masters were the only ones working on it, and they needed to engrave thousands of sigils directly onto the stone itself, as well as onto the cores which would be embedded in the structure. It was a huge amount of work.

As an undead, Master Willhem could work effectively around the clock, never needing to eat or sleep, but Annita Halfshard, while a workaholic to rival Tyron himself, was not so resilient.

“It should be fine,” Tyron said after considering for a moment.

The Empire would move more of their army to the West in order to put the rebellion down with an emphatic blow. They might move quickly, but they couldn’t be moved instantaneously. He had a little time to play with. Not much, but a little.

If all went well, then the Golden Legion would never arrive in Granin at all. Tyron would take the fight to them instead.

“I’ll come by to help when I can. I have another project I’m working on right now.”

“The wyvern? That will be difficult, even for you.”

How the heck had Willhem managed to find out about it? Were his minions sharing secrets amongst themselves?

“I think I have it in hand,” Tyron said with casual confidence.

He’d been awake for three days straight working on the final touches to his design for the wings. The structure of the ligaments and muscles was completely different from what he was used to, but he thought it was a vast improvement over what Arhinan’s apprentice had created.

The only way to find out for sure was to create the minion. Tyron had no doubt he would find hundreds of flaws once he actually got to see the thing move, but he was determined to start from as thorough a base as he possibly could. After all, who knew how many of these monsters he would get his hands on?

They’d been scouring the wasteland for months, his undead and the Slayers, and as far as Tyron knew, this was the first one that had been found. It seemed they were far from common.

Excusing himself, Tyron turned and walked away, leaving Master Willhem to return to his first most prized apprentice, who had pointedly ignored Tyron while he was there. On either side, the high walls of the temple rose, with the crumbling granite pillars lining the central hallway. Perhaps it was blasphemous for Tyron to create his gateway here, but the Dark Ones had done little to earn his goodwill lately.

They’d ultimately agreed with his proposal, though he found the spiteful posturing that seemed fundamental to their nature grating. The fact that they needed him at all seemed to grate on them, though he couldn’t blame them for a level of arrogance. They were gods, born divine at the dawn of the world, and powerful enough to squash him like a bug.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Exiting the main floor of the temple, Tyron walked down the steps to the street below, where his latest prize was waiting for him in the street. His eyes gleamed with a hungry light as he took in the wyvern corpse. A small crowd had gathered, as it wasn’t every day that the remains of a large monster were hauled on a cart through the middle of the city by a team of skeletal horses. The curious onlookers began to melt away once Tyron showed himself, their desire to know overshadowed by their nervousness toward the necromancer.

For his part, he paid them no mind. Although his reputation was rising among the survivors, as rumours that he may have ‘solved’ rifts forever continued to spread, they were still afraid of him. If it kept them out of his business, he didn’t mind that one bit.

Eyes gleaming, Tyron walked up to the cart and examined the wyvern more closely. Killed almost a week ago, the beast was well rotten. Interestingly, he didn’t think there were many maggots eating into the sagging flesh, since the lack of vegetation and life in Granin meant the fly population was virtually nil.

Even so, the stink was… powerful.

Nothing that Tyron wasn’t used to.

The wyvern possessed a fine coat of light-brown fur, now sodden and matted, along with powerful, almost leonine hind legs. Its tail was long and sinuous, equal in length to the rest of the creature’s entire body. It wasn’t easy to tell, with the beast folded up in the back of a cart, but it could be as large as ten metres long from snout to tail. Perhaps longer, once the tail was fully uncoiled. With keen interest, he examined the kin’s head and massive fangs, each as long as his fingers.

A dangerous minion indeed. He could imagine it swooping down from above, its hind claws and vicious teeth rending and tearing. Even being able to see through its eyes as it held itself aloft would prove to be incredibly useful if he were able to craft a functional design.

“Alright,” he said aloud, rubbing his hands together, unable to conceal his anticipation. “Let’s get to work.”

Summoned from within the belowground complex under the temple, people began to emerge, tools in hand and ready to work. A skeleton amongst them walked straight to Tyron and gave him his own butcher's knife. Testing the edge on his finger, he nodded approvingly.

The Corpse Handler Class wasn’t a glamorous one. With mediocre attribute gains and almost no combat-related abilities, they had a very narrow focus. At early levels, they had feats and Skills that slowed the decomposition of remains, had access to some similar Skills to Butchers, and gained bonuses to their strength and dexterity when handling the dead.

Not particularly impressive.

As they continued to gain levels, their usefulness as a support Class began to be revealed. They could not only preserve dead flesh, but strengthen it, or, as they were just starting to learn, mould it. There were some amongst them who were already starting to eclipse Tyron at butchery, able to strip the flesh from a dead body at an impressive clip. Beneath the temple, nothing was wasted, that flesh and offal was collected and stored for others to practice their abilities on. It was grisly work, the workshops below stank of blood, meat and rot, but Tyron couldn’t deny their usefulness.

Under his direction, the corpse of the wyvern was carefully cut apart, with Tyron ensuring that every bone was examined, catalogued and sketched before being carefully stored away. He stripped the flesh from the back of the kin himself, studying the alignment of muscle and tendon. The advanced stage of decay didn’t help, but he learned enough to make some slight adjustments to his design, which satisfied him.

Once all of the meat had been carted below ground and every bone accounted for, Tyron headed inside, the cart, filled with crates of carefully packed bones, coming down behind him.

The Bone Smiths were always in demand amongst the Necromancers. They still followed the path that Tyron himself had laid down, the knowledge he had accumulated from his experimentation, but he had hopes that, as they continued to advance, they would find alternate, and better, methods.

It was their responsibility to strengthen all of the bones used to create minions. At the lowest level, this meant using the solutions and techniques Tyron had created, stripping away every ounce of dead flesh, condensing and hardening the bones and priming them with magick.

They were capable of much more than that, of course. Already there were some who were able to create weapons and shape bone as he could. Eventually, they would surpass him in that respect, which Tyron would be very grateful for. He didn’t want to have to keep making swords and armour if he could offload that work, but for now the items he created were still superior.

The entire workshop was turned over to the wyvern remains as they were hauled in by diligent skeletons. The Bone Smiths were professional and competent, which pleased him, seeing to their tasks without fuss or errors.

As they uncovered more abilities, they were starting to realise more and more benefits of having a dedicated Class for preparing the bones. Some had recently unlocked an ability, Bone Tempering, which allowed them to consume a bone in order to harden another. This increased the density, and therefore the weight, but the tradeoff was well worth it.

All of Tyron’s latest skeletons had passed through the Bone Smith workshop.

It took a full day of work for the wyvern’s skeleton to be completed, and Tyron remained with it every second, carefully monitoring the work being done. When they were finally finished, the Smiths breathed a sigh of relief as he gave them a satisfied nod and turned on his heel to leave.

A long row of skeletons trailed behind him, carrying the bones to his personal chambers. Once inside, he had his minions stack the boxes along one wall as he got to work.

It wasn’t time for the weaving, not yet, first he had a heap of enchanting to do. Tyron wasn’t a fool, he knew this wasn’t going to be like any other minion. A creature this size would draw an immense amount of power just to move around, let alone fight. If it were keeping itself aloft, it would need as much magick as his entire mounted force on the charge.

He wasn’t about to sustain that from his own reserves, not a chance.

Tyron worked on five separate arrays for gathering and storing power. If the wyvern had its own reserve of magick, it could fly for a time on that alone, not taking from him at all. Three of the arrays were engraved along the ribs, one at the base of its tail, and the final array within its skull.

He used high-grade cores for each of them, unwilling to be cheap when it came to his latest creation. Although it pained him, he knew it would be worth it if he were successful.

It was a painstaking task, engraving every sigil in perfect alignment to the others, setting the cores in place, testing and adjusting. When it was finally done, it had been another day, perhaps two, since he’d started.

The headache was growing in his head, but there was no way he could stop now, on the cusp of the final stage. Summoning his minions once more, Tyron had all of the bones moved again, this time into the Ossuary itself.

Time to weave.