The Necromancer King

Two Broken People and A Very Bad Idea

Nobody spoke for a long time after the Hunter left.

The seventeen thousand undead soldiers stood in the clearing like a silent sea of old grey bones, their purple fire burning steady in the dark, waiting. The shadow wall Seraphine had built was dissolving slowly at the edges, bleeding back into the trees like smoke clearing after a fire.

Kane stood in the middle of all of it and stared at the space where Drav Solus had disappeared.

Aldric Voss wants you alive.

He remembers the name Ashveil.

He said you would understand what that means.

The problem was that Kane did not understand. He understood nothing. He was a nineteen year old grave digger standing in a forest at dawn surrounded by thousands of dead soldiers and a girl he had known for approximately seven minutes and a voice in his head that kept handing him information like stones and watching him try not to drown under the weight of them.

Seraphine turned to look at him.

"Kane Ashveil," she said slowly, like she was testing the weight of each word. "Who are you?"

Kane looked at her. Then he looked at his seventeen thousand soldiers standing in the grey morning light.

"Dismissed," he said quietly.

They went back into the earth the way they had come. Quietly. Completely. The ground closed over them and the clearing was just a clearing again, dark and wet and silent, like nothing had happened at all.

Seraphine watched this with her arms crossed and her sharp black eyes moving between Kane and the ground and back to Kane again.

"That," she said, "is not a normal thing that people do."

"I know," Kane said.

"Are you going to explain it."

"Are you going to stop pointing that out like I do not already know it is not normal."

She opened her mouth. Then she looked at the ruins behind him and walked past him through the doorway without another word.

Kane followed her inside.

They sat on opposite sides of the dry corner. Close enough to talk quietly. Far enough that neither of them had to pretend they were comfortable.

Seraphine pulled her knees up and looked at him with those sharp eyes that did not seem to know how to be anything other than completely direct.

"Start talking," she said.

"You are very bossy for someone I met seven minutes ago," Kane said.

"Eight minutes," she said. "And you raised seventeen thousand soldiers out of the ground in front of a Senior Hunter and somehow we are both still breathing. The least you can do is explain what I just helped you survive."

Kane looked at his hands for a moment.

Then he told her.

Not everything. But enough. The cemetery. The grave. The blood on the bone and the dead soldier climbing out of the earth and the Church patrol seeing it happen. Running. The system appearing in his vision. Malachar's voice coming from inside his skull, telling him who he was and what he carried in his blood and what he was chosen for.

He told her about his mother. About Duke Harrow's name attached to a death order signed twenty years ago. He told her the way you tell someone something you have been carrying alone so long that saying it out loud feels like setting down something very heavy and not being entirely sure your hands know what to do without the weight.

Seraphine listened through all of it without interrupting once.

When he finished the ruins were very quiet.

She looked at the wall across from her for a long moment. Something was moving behind her eyes that he could not read yet. Then she said something he was not prepared for at all.

"Duke Harrow burned my village when I was fourteen years old."

Kane went still.

"He called it a cleansing," she continued. Her voice was flat the way voices get flat when something has been carried so long it stops feeling sharp. "Three families with dark bloodlines. That was what his men said when they came through. Routine cleansing. Like we were something dirty that needed removing." She paused. "My grandmother. My two cousins. My little brother who was six years old and whose only crime was being related to me."

She stopped. I looked at her hands. Then I looked back up.

"I survived because I was hiding in the well. I heard everything from down there in the dark and I could not do anything and when it was over I climbed out and there was nobody left." She said all of this like she was reading from a list. Steady and quiet. "I have been alone since that night."

Kane looked at her across the small space between them.

He did not say he was sorry. He had always hated when people said that to him about his mother because sorry was a word that did not do anything useful. He did not offer comfort because she did not look like someone who wanted comfort. She looked like someone who had long ago decided that comfort was a luxury she did not have space for.

He just looked at her and let the silence be what it was.

She nodded once. Almost to herself. Like his not filling the silence with useless words was the right answer even though he had not known he was being tested.

"So we have the same enemy," Kane said.

"It appears that way," she said.

"That is either very convenient or very dangerous."

"With Duke Harrow involved," she said, "it is definitely both."

The morning light was coming in through the broken roof now, thin and grey, falling across the stone floor between them. Outside the forest was beginning to wake up, birds somewhere in the trees, the rain finally completely gone.

Kane looked at her carefully. "Where have you been going. Before tonight."

"Away," she said. "That is the only direction I have had for two years."

"Away from what."

"Everything." She tilted her head slightly. "Away from the Silver Order. Away from the Church. Away from any city big enough to have a garrison." She paused. "Away from people mostly. People report what they see and shadow magic is hard to hide when you are hungry and exhausted and not being careful enough."

Kane understood that completely. The exhaustion of constant hiding. The way it got into everything like damp gets into old walls.

"You have no one," he said.

"Neither do you," she said.

They looked at each other.

"I have Malachar," Kane said.

"You have a dead king living inside your skull," she said. "That is not the same thing as having someone."

Malachar's voice came immediately from the back of Kane's mind. Dry and unbothered.

"She is not wrong," he said.

Kane said nothing.

"We should travel together." He said it quickly before he could think about it too long and talk himself out of it.

Seraphine stared at him.

"No," she said.

"The Silver Order knows both our faces now. Drav Solus saw us standing together in that clearing. To him we are already a pair. Running separately gives him two slower targets. Running together makes us harder to corner."

"Or it makes us easier to find because two people leave twice the trail."

"Two people also cover twice the ground when it comes to watching for danger. And your shadows and my soldiers together just made a Senior Hunter walk away from a fight he had already won." He met her eyes. "You know I am right."

"I know your logic is right," she said. "That is not the same as knowing that you are trustworthy."

"You tried to rob me twenty minutes ago."

"That is actually a point in my favour," she said. "It means I am practical."

"It means we are even," Kane said. "I do not trust you either. But we do not need to trust each other to survive together."

She was quiet for a moment, thinking hard. He could see it in the way she went still, the way her eyes stopped moving and focused on something he could not see while she worked through it in her head.

"Conditions," she said finally.

"Fine," Kane said.

"I choose the route. Every time. No arguments."

"Agreed."

"If your soldiers do something that I find genuinely disturbing I reserve the right to leave without discussion or notice."

"What counts as genuinely disturbing."

"I will know it when I see it."

"That is not a measurable condition," Kane said.

"Those are my terms," she said.

Kane sighed. "Fine. My conditions. You stop trying to take things from me. I have nothing worth taking but the principle matters."

"Agreed," she said. Almost too quickly.

"And you do not call me a grave rat." He said it quietly. No anger in it. Just a line drawn clearly in the dirt. "Not as a joke. Not lightly. Not at all."

She looked at him for a moment. Something shifted in her expression. The sharpness did not go away but something underneath it changed.

"Agreed," she said. And this time it was not quick. It was careful. Like a promise she intended to keep.

They looked at each other across the small space.

"This is a terrible idea," she said.

"Almost certainly," Kane agreed.

"We are going to argue constantly."

"Without question."

"And yet," she said.

"And yet," he agreed.

Seraphine fell asleep against the wall about an hour later, her arms crossed and her chin down and her hands still half curled like she was ready to fight even while unconscious. The scar along her jaw caught the morning light. She looked younger when she was sleeping. Not softer exactly. Just younger.

Kane sat with his back against the opposite wall and watched the light move slowly across the stone floor.

Malachar's voice came quiet and thoughtful from the back of his mind.

"She has had no training," he said. "Two years alone with no one to teach her. And she has survived the Silver Order, built a shadow wall strong enough to give a Senior Hunter pause, and made a sound tactical assessment of your situation within minutes of meeting you."

"I noticed," Kane said.

"Whatever Duke Harrow was trying to destroy when he went through that village," Malachar said, "he did not finish the job."

Kane looked at her sleeping across the ruins.

"No," he said quietly. "He did not."

He closed his eyes.

The system activated without any warning at all.

NEW MISSION UNLOCKED:

Locate the Tomb of the First Necromancer King.

Location: The Forbidden Wastes. Eastern border of Valdris.

Reward: Level 5 unlocked. Army Expansion unlocked.

Note: The Church has stationed soldiers at this border for twenty years.

They are not keeping people out.

They are keeping something in.

Kane read it once.

He read it again.

He stared at the ceiling of the ruined building for a long moment and thought about the words keeping something in and what exactly that something might be and whether Level 2 was anywhere near enough power to deal with it.

"You have that look." Seraphine's voice came from across the ruins.

Kane looked over. Her eyes were open. She had not been sleeping at all.

"What look," he said.

"The look," she said, sitting up slowly, "of someone who just received information that is about to make both our lives significantly more difficult."

Kane looked at her.

"Go to sleep Seraphine."

"I knew it," she said. "I knew it the moment I landed on you in that clearing. I thought to myself, Seraphine, this boy is going to be a problem." She pulled her knees up and rested her arms on them and looked at him with those sharp black eyes. "What did it say."

"Go to sleep."

"Kane."

He held her gaze for a moment.

Then he told her about the mission.

She listened to every word without blinking. When he finished she was quiet for a long time.

Then she said four words that told him everything he needed to know about who Seraphine Voss was going to be in his life.

"When do we leave?”