The Necromancer King

The Girl From Nowhere

Kane had three seconds before the Hunter reached the ruins.

He could feel them counting down in his chest. He did not wait for them to finish.

He stepped outside.

Kane positioned his two skeletal soldiers in front of him and watched the treeline.

Nothing moved.

Then everything moved at once.

Something dropped out of the trees to his right and crashed directly into him. It was not the Hunter. It was not anything he was prepared for. One moment he was standing and the next he was on the ground with something heavy on top of him and his face pressed sideways into cold wet grass and all the air knocked completely out of his body.

He shoved the weight off him and scrambled upright fast.

A girl was crouching in the grass two feet away, catching her own breath, one hand pressed flat against the ground. She looked up at him through wet dark hair and her eyes were sharp and black and absolutely furious in the way of someone who had just been startled and was not handling it gracefully at all.

She was about his age. Dark brown skin. A small old scar running along her jaw. She wore dark layered clothes built entirely for moving fast and a worn canvas bag strapped across her back.

She looked at Kane.

She looked at his two skeletal soldiers standing behind him with purple fire burning in their hollow eyes.

She looked back at Kane.

"You have dead bodyguards?," she said.

"Yes, but who are you?" Kane said.

She stood up slowly, brushing grass from her hands, and her eyes moved to the canvas bag hanging at his side.

Except Kane did not have a canvas bag.

He looked down at himself just to be sure. He was wearing a torn shirt, dirty trousers, and no coin purse. Nothing that anyone with working eyes would look at twice.

Her hand was already reaching towards his pockets.

"I do not have anything," he said.

Her hand stopped.

"Everyone has something," she said.

"I have two copper coins I dropped at the cemetery, a power I cannot fully control, and a dead king living inside my head." He spread his empty hands wide. "Choose carefully."

She stared at him for a long moment.

"You are the most useless person I have tried to rob in three months," she said.

"I am very sorry to disappoint you."

Something shifted in her expression. Not quite a smile. It lasted half a second and then her eyes cut past him to the trees and every trace of it disappeared.

"The Hunter," she said. Her voice dropped low and urgent. "He followed you here!"

"He followed both of us here by the sound of it."

"How many soldiers do you have."

"Two."

"That is not enough."she said, panicking.

"His name is Drav Solus." She was thinking fast now, her eyes moving quickly across the trees, calculating things Kane could not yet calculate. "Twelve years in the Silver Order. He does not lose. Never."

Kane looked at her carefully. "How do you know that?" he asked.

"Because he has been hunting me for two weeks." Her jaw was tight. "I know everything about him. His patterns, his speed, his weaknesses." She paused. "He has no weaknesses."

"That is not helpful information," Kane said.

"No," she agreed. "It is not."

A branch snapped.

One clean deliberate snap from the trees directly ahead.

Then Drav Solus walked out of the darkness and the night seemed to pull back from him slightly the way it pulls back from people who have spent a long time making it their professional home.

He was not big enough. That was the first thing that surprised Kane. He had expected someone enormous and armored and loud. Instead the Hunter was lean and middle aged with a plain face and quiet eyes that moved across the scene in front of him slowly and carefully.

He looked at Kane. He looked at Seraphine. He looked at the two skeletal soldiers.

"A necromancer and a shadow mage," he said quietly. "The Church is going to be very pleased tonight."

He drew his sword and moved.

Kane had never seen anyone move like that in his life.

Drav Solus crossed the distance to the first skeletal soldier in four steps and took it apart with two strikes that were so precise and so fast they barely looked like effort. Bones scattered across the grass.

The second soldier grabbed for him and the Hunter ducked under its arm without breaking his stride and drove his blade through its ribcage and the purple fire in its eyes went out immediately.

Just like that Kane had nothing.

His back hit a tree.

The Hunter raised his sword.

"The ground." Malachar's voice came sharp and urgent from the back of Kane's mind. "Stop looking at the sword. Look at the ground beneath his feet."

"What about the ground," Kane said out loud.

Seraphine threw him a sideways look. "Who are you talking to."

"Myself!, he replied

Tell me, what is beneath this forest?."he asked.

"This entire area is built over the old plague burial grounds. Three hundred years ago they buried thousands of victims here and built over it. The Church never told anyone." Malachar answered.

Kane dropped to one knee and slammed his palm flat into the earth.

He felt it immediately.

It was like pressing his hand against something vast and sleeping and feeling it breathe. There were thousands of them lying quietly in the dark for three centuries just waiting for someone to reach down and ask.

Kane started chanting, “FROM DUST AND DARKNESS, YOU SHALL RISE AND SERVE.” He said it the third time and immediately the ground tore open in seven places at once.

The force of it threw Drav Solus backward and his sword arm came up to cover his face as mud and stones and old bones burst upward from the earth.

Skeletal hands broke through the surface first, then arms, then skulls–old, decayed, and almost falling apart, yet still moving, climbing out of the dark earth with a slow, terrible purpose.

Seventeen thousand soldiers rose from the plague burial ground and turned their empty faces toward the Hunter.

The system blazed bright across Kane's vision.

POWER SURGE DETECTED

Ancient burial ground accessed

Undead raised: 17,000

MISSION COMPLETE: Survive 24 hours

REWARD: Level 2 unlocked

NEW ABILITY: Soul Steal (now active).

First memory fragment unlocking (brace yourself host).

Kane barely had time to read the last line.

The memory hit him like a wall.

It was not his memory. He knew that immediately because nothing in it belonged to his life.

A throne room with high stone walls, an army stretching across an open plain so wide he could not see where it ended, a woman with kind eyes and a crown made of shadow standing beside a man Kane did not recognise.

Then the image shifted.

The memory vanished.

Kane's was weak and then he fell.

He did not hit the ground.

He looked up and Seraphine was holding him upright, her sharp black eyes searching his face with an expression that was trying very hard to look like irritation and not quite managing it.

"What just happened?" she asked.

Kane straightened slowly and found his footing. His whole body felt like it had been turned inside out and put back together slightly wrong.

"I saw something," he said.

"Saw what?" She asked.

"You will not understand." He looked at her

Her hands dropped from his arm slowly. She stared at him for a long moment with something moving behind her eyes that he could not read yet.

Across the clearing Drav Solus had found his footing again.

He stood at the edge of the ring of seven ancient soldiers and looked at Kane across the space between them.

His sword was raised and his breathing was completely steady.

But something had changed in his quiet eyes.

Caution.

For the first time in his life someone was being careful around Kane Ashveil.

It felt like the first real breath he had ever taken.

"Shadow wall, now!!" Kane said without looking away from the Hunter.

He did not know if she would listen. They had met approximately five minutes ago and spent most of that time falling on each other in the grass and arguing about a bag he did not own.

She listened and quickly stretched her both hands facing the direction of the hunter.

The darkness between the trees thickened and moved, gathering in Seraphine's outstretched hands and spreading outward in a deep black wall that swallowed the entire eastern side of the clearing.

It moved like smoke but stopped like stone. Drav Solus took one step toward it and stopped.

Seeing this the Hunter lowered his sword slowly. He looked at Kane across the ring of ancient soldiers and the shadow wall and the space between them filled with silence that felt heavy and deliberate.

Then he said something Kane did not expect.

"The High Inquisitor wants you alive." His voice was completely calm. "He asked me to tell you personally that he remembers the name Ashveil." A pause. Those quiet eyes did not move from Kane's face. "He said you would understand what that means."

He stepped backward into the trees.

The darkness took him.

The air was silent except for the sound of Kane’s own breathing,, and there are seventeen thousand undead m soldiers in front of him, silently watching him with glowing eyes–waiting for something

Seraphine turned and looked at him slowly.

"Aldric Voss wants you alive?" she said. Her voice was completely flat. "Aldric Voss has never wanted anyone alive."

She searched his face. "Kane Ashveil, who are you?"

The system pulsed quietly in his chest.

Malachar's voice came from the back of his mind, low and certain.

"Tell her," he said, "that the answer to that question is going to change everything!”