Days later, Tyron staggered out of bed, his head a confused jumble of formulae, sigils and conduits. The food he’d brought with him to the other side had quickly become corrupted by the abundant Death Magick in the realm, causing it to lose almost all of its nutritional value. An oversight he now regretted. Even so, he munched on some blackened carrots and slimy, spotted potatoes, trusting his constitution would be enough to prevent him from falling ill. The little water they had was exclusively reserved for drinking, but even that had turned brackish and foul. He forced down a few mouthfuls, grimaced, then risked damping a cloth to run over his face and neck.

Sleep in the Realm of the Dead was not as restful as he may have liked; the deathly silence, the constant threat of discovery and the many projects he was working on had spun through his head even through the sleep spell. If it hadn’t been so long since he’d properly rested, he wouldn’t have bothered sleeping here at all, but his strength seemed to fade quickly in this place. Despite the presence of the ‘reservoir’ the Old Gods had given him, this place was still sapping him of strength.

Perhaps someone without the endurance he enjoyed would have already succumbed to a dreamless sleep. One they likely wouldn’t wake from. No matter, he had sufficient energy for now, but a prolonged stay could prove… unhealthy.

With his head finally starting to clear, Tyron made it over to his desk, on which a tangled mess of paper, flesh, bones, enchanted circles and books lay scattered. He’d been at it for days, a frenzied flurry of testing, experimentation and spellwork that had left him exhilarated but mentally drained. It was all worth it, though.

As expected, the Realm of the Dead had a great deal to teach him.

“Ah, you’re awake,” Dove said, poking his skull through the tent opening.

“I told you to keep out of there while he was sleeping,” Filetta growled, yanking him back out again.

“He’s not sleeping!” Dove protested. “Hey! Let me go!”

“It’s fine, Filetta,” Tyron called wearily, “let him in. He’ll only be more annoying if you don’t.”

He sat back down at the desk, starting to pick through the remnants of the test he’d been conducting when he’d finally given up and gone to bed. Something to do with the hound flesh? Yes, he was testing the energy composition, comparing the results to the fiend that his skeletons had killed. Nasty creature. The way the death-aligned energy was integrated was fascinating….

“Oh, hey! Hey! None of that!” Dove ran inside and saw him reading through his notes, snapping his skeletal fingers to try and distract him away. Or trying to, anyway. That was one of the many things that didn’t work without flesh. “I’ve been dying of boredom out here. You can’t dive back into mindless testing and start ignoring me again.”

“Why not?” Tyron muttered, reluctant to be drawn away just as he was starting to get back into it.

“Ignore this idiot,” Filetta said, striding into the tent, her hands on the twin hilts of her bone daggers. “Say the word and I’ll cut him into little pieces and drag him outside.”

“Uh, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you Tyron? Deprive a man of his full skeleton? Again, I mean.”

If Tyron had once felt guilty about what he’d done to his former mentor, that feeling had faded long ago. Not least because Dove was so consistently annoying about it.

“I would if you distract me from my work,” the Necromancer said, glaring. “We’re on the clock here, if you recall. I’m not sure what will happen to me if we get caught, but I’m fairly confident you’ll be in a Soul Eater’s belly again.”

“Why not talk me through what you’ve learned so far?” Dove countered. “I’m not a once in a millennium genius, but I have been useful from time to time. Humour me, kid, I’m doing the best I can, but there’s nothing to fucking do out here except try and tickle the feet of the demi-liches as they float by.”

“They don’t have nerves. They won’t feel anything.”

“It’s the principle of the thing!”

“Fine,” Tyron sighed. “Filetta, you stay too. If he gets too annoying, you have my permission to separate him bone from bone and scatter him across the concealment array. Bury the head.”

“My pleasure,” she grinned.

Dove, somehow, managed to leer.

“Oh, you’d love to bury my head, wouldn’t you, darling? Sadly, I think I quenched my appetite for sexy thieves when I was alive.”

Filetta turned her gaze to Tyron, who sighed again.

“No, not yet. Now shut up and come over here.”

Not needing to be told twice, Dove sprung to his side, keen to stay out of the reach of the wight’s knives.

“Tell me what you’ve learned. Let Dove the Great unleash his wisdom upon you.”

Ignoring his antics, Tyron organised his thoughts and began to explain his findings.

“I’ve dissected and started conducting experiments on the creatures that were killed during the horde’s search for souls.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Of course you have, you freaky bastard.”

“Dove…” Tyron warned.

“I’ll stop.”

“The bones are extremely interesting, but perhaps even more so is the flesh. The beasts seem to be neither living nor unliving, but some sort of hybrid of the two. Steeped in such potent and pure death-aligned energy, they are… both living and dead. I don’t even have a term to describe such a state.”

He reached down to pick up a hunk of muscle he had carved from the arm of the fiend. Drained of all fluids, it had already stiffened, growing as hard as stone, but there was no sign of rot, nor any smell. The flesh was preserved somehow.

“The flesh doesn’t rot, nor does it have any smell. Even using magick, I can find no sign of decay, yet surely the creature it came from was alive. An examination of their innards showed they had all the basic components a living creature would expect to have.”

Heart, lungs, blood vessels, digestive tract. Fiends apparently fed on the other creatures native to the realm, hounds and soul eaters and whatever else was out there that Tyron hadn’t seen. All the beasts of this place were bizarre and strange, completely different from both kin and anything native to this own home.

“Their entire bodies are suffused with death, to such an extent they seem to have found some sort of… equilibrium. Undying flesh, I suppose I could call it.”

“Well, isn’t this a great find? Get some flesh, soak in Death Magick. Bam, super undead meat, or whatever. Are you thinking of using it for zombies? You’ve had a long-standing policy against zombies, is that about to change?”

Tyron shook his head.

“It’s not that simple. A body doesn’t—well, not usually—they simply don’t accept that much death-aligned energy. Look at my food.”

Tyron turned to rummage through the bags at the food of bed, emerging with a blighted potato that he tossed towards Dove. The skeleton caught it out of the air, then peered at it suspiciously.

“This thing is riddled with death.”

“And it’s rotting. A few more days and it’ll be in the same condition as your own remains.”

“Very kind of you, Tyron. Thanks very much for using that exact comparison.”

“You’re welcome. Creating this undying flesh isn’t as simple as just soaking a body in power. A corpse would simply rot away to nothing in a matter of hours. A corpse would either have to be… strong enough already, or preserved in some way to… maybe if I slowed the process, allowed it to take place over an extended period of time and… perhaps there would be a way to sustain the remains if I–”

“Hey, hey! No! Bad Tyron!” Dove scolded, clapping his hands together. Well, clacking them together. “You haven’t finished explaining everything.”

Pulled once again from his thoughts, Tyron scowled at his former teacher.

“Fine. At any rate, I wouldn’t bother to use this technique for creating zombies. Although, I suppose someone could. No, this is a hint of how to create the true undead. A resurrection, or perhaps the closest thing to it. Raising a person from the dead to a new life within their own body, no longer living, but not truly dead. There could be other benefits as well. If my body were entirely like this, I may no longer need to sleep or eat at all.”

“And you’d be instantly melted by life magick.”

“Well, that too.”

“Since you’re progressing on resurrection, is there any chance you can go back and figure out how to do this before you stick me inside my own head? I’d still have my precious jewels.”

“No. The other main avenue of investigation has been the souls. There are significant differences between what I found in the Soul Eater–the bezoar–and the free spirits, but I don’t know exactly what. I’ve put the half-digested souls to one side in order to study for the time being and focused on the others the wyvern was able to catch.

“So far my tests have gone to show just how different they are from the souls we find in our realm. Those souls are entirely intangible, wisps of magick that hover around waiting to be sucked away to the Realm of the Dead. Somehow, they eventually get transformed into… these.”

He gestured towards the stones glowing with that ethereal, ghostly green light.

“They contain a strange type of magick that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before, not death, but something else entirely.”

“Uh, excuse me?” Dove said, shocked out of his usual antics. “Magick you’ve never seen before? Never read about?”

“That’s right. I didn’t notice at first because it’s only there in trace amounts, but it’s there.”

“What is it?”

“I have no idea. Working with unfamiliar magick is dangerous at the best of times. Conditions here aren’t exactly ideal.”

“Oh come on,” Dove drawled. “Are you trying to act humble? It doesn’t suit you at all. This shouldn’t be a challenge for Mister Gifted. Just do your thing and…” the skeleton waved his hands vaguely in the air, “... make it work.”

Tyron rolled his eyes.

He knew he was good with magick, better than good, and his mysteries had only enhanced his natural gifts, giving him a level of insight most mages couldn’t even imagine, but he also knew his limits. He had a feel for magick that was only rivaled by his knowledge of magick, and he knew acting incautiously with this energy could lead to disastrous results.

“I’ll ‘make it work’ by performing meticulous tests and experiments,” he said, his tone flat. “It’s possible I’ll need to try and uncover new sigils to try and work with this energy, which is exceptionally dangerous.”

Words of power and sigils were how mages manipulated energy, but not all types of magick shared the same properties. Some could be manipulated in ways that others couldn’t, leading to specific sigils and words that only applied to that particular type of energy. If his guess was correct, this new magick had properties he had never seen before, like nothing in his home realm possessed. That meant he would need to find Words of Power and sigils that interacted with it and allowed him to control and shape those properties.

It was the most fundamental form of magickal research, and also the most dangerous. Finding the right way to shape new energy to do things he didn’t even know it could do… there were a thousand ways it could blow up in his face. Literally.

“Putting that aside, the souls themselves are fascinating. If I’m not wrong, they’re malleable in some way. I think it might be possible to forge them, turning them into…” he shrugged, “pretty much anything. I have no idea what they are best used for, but I have a few experiments in mind to try and find out.”

The playfulness leaked out of Dove at this.

“Oh, you can make whatever you want with them,” he growled. “Imagine, a palace built out of the souls of the dead, screaming and twisting for all eternity, denied their final rest and rebirth.”

Tyron’s brows rose.

“You speak as if you’ve seen it,” he said cautiously.

Dove barked a harsh laugh.

“Oh, I’ve seen much worse than that.”