Good Tidings [Chapter Three - On the Rh'thorean Necromancers]

[Lhindir_ 3691]

 

Another work from the collected manuscripts circulates among those who know where to look.

 

ON THE RH’THOREAN NECROMANCERS

Being a Chapter of Good Tidings

 

“...The planes shift, and reality with it. Fathomless are its depths, for even the most ancient have not witnessed its inception. So cast away thy inhibitions, the flesh and the mind, for only the Mad may know how deep the roots go.”

Gravelord Ludwig Wick

The exiles of Rh’thor. Followers of the forlorn prophet Geitheros. Some had known him. Some had not. He was banished, wandered, and vanished into the spaces between known lands. His followers scattered, and some landed in a tomb cut into a hillside south of the farmlands of Kaedrin, and they stayed, and they grew old, and the world forgot them.

Forgot them and the art with them. Necromancy. A myth by then. No living man had witnessed its use in over a century. The witch hunters believed it stamped out. The word remained. The knowledge did not.

Well. It does not matter now.

Seven of them when I arrived. Old men. Red tattoos branching across their skin like the roots of the Widukind, the Oak, whose tendrils span the known world beneath the soil. The ink started at the wrist and grew outward over years, up the arms, across the shoulders, down the chest, up the neck, until the oldest wore more ink than skin and their faces looked like something the earth had claimed from below.

Their numbers had been harrowed by time and pride in equal measure. Seven old men in a dusty tomb. They had not taught many. They were waiting for a prophet who was not coming back.

•     •     •

Hera I have written of. Their leader. A student of Geitheros himself. My adoptive father. Sufficient.

Ludwig I liked. Human. Old, not ancient. A steadiness behind the eyes. He watched things the way I watch things, but where mine is cold his was patient. Ludwig had been waiting a long time and did not seem bothered by the duration. He became my right hand. By the time I led the coven to ascension, he named me Prophet. The last.

Vinzakra. Elf. Strange in a way that carries weight coming from me. Where Hera was deliberate in everything, Vinzakra was innate. He moved through the tomb like something not entirely present. He would be sitting in the circle and then he would not be, and you would not have seen him leave. I did not trust him. I respected him. The two are not the same.

The Butcher. I never learned his given name. He was fond of meat, a trait I came to share after the initiation and which I think he recognised in me before I did. Large man. Heavy hands. He dealt in the practical applications. The cutting. The handling of flesh. He became subservient to me in time. He understood hierarchy the way an animal understands it, and when he determined what I was, he submitted completely. Useful. Reliable.

The others I will not name. Names have power in my art. A named man can be found and raised, and I do not intend for anyone to raise them. I killed them when the time came. They would have tried to steer the work according to their understanding, which was deep but narrow. I did not intend to answer to men whose contribution had been to sit in a circle and grow old.

•     •     •

What they taught me.

The Creator is dead.

Not absent. Not sleeping. Dead. The act of creation was the act of destruction. He made the world by breaking himself apart. The world is his corpse. Every stone, every tree, every breath of wind, every living thing that draws air and pushes it back out. All of it fashioned from the body of a being who tore himself apart so that something could exist.

Every soul is a shard of him.

Every creature that breathes life force carries a fragment of the Creator. A splinter of the original consciousness, scattered at the moment of creation, lodged in flesh and bone. When a man is born, a shard is drawn from the dispersal and set within him. It animates him. It is what makes him more than meat and mineral. When he dies, the shard is released and passes into the afterlives, which are many, which are fractured, which all feed into the great river of souls that flows through the planes.

The exiles called it the soul stream. The afterlives are its tributaries. The stream flows nowhere. It has no mouth. It empties into nothing, because the vessel meant to receive it shattered at the moment of creation, and the shards of that vessel are the very souls flowing through it. Nothing gathers. Nothing restores. The wound stays open. The Creator stays dead.

•     •     •

I described it to my children like a vase.

A vase filled with water. The vase shatters. Water splashes across the floor, into the cracks, under the furniture, into the gaps between stones. Every drop is a soul. Every shard of the vase is a piece of the Creator’s form. The water and the vessel scatter together across a surface too vast to comprehend. Every drop drying. Every shard grinding to dust. Unless someone gathers them all and mends the vase and pours the water back, the Creator is gone.

Gather every drop. Mend the vase. Scarred. Cracked. Sealed with the memory of having been broken. But whole. Holding water. And the water remembers. Every crack it seeped through. Every dark space it occupied. Every century it spent scattered. The Creator, restored, armed with the memory of every suffering and every joy of every soul that ever lived, will do what he did before.

He will destroy himself again. Shatter the vase again. Create again. But this time he will create better, because this time he remembers what it cost.

The reborn God is the Red Lord. The provident one. God himself, restored, scarred, carrying the weight of every life that was ever lived. He will gather the shards. He will mend the vessel. He will pour the water back. And then he will break himself apart once more and make a new world from his body, and the new world will not carry the curse, because the curse was the flaw of a God who created blind, and the restored God sees.

Not a place. Not a reward. A second creation, born from a God who remembers the first.

•     •     •

The exiles taught me the mechanics. How life force moves through living things and can be turned. How the boundary between living and dead is a threshold, not a wall. How dead flesh can be made to serve. How pain can be used as a lever at the place where body meets soul.

They taught slowly. Grudgingly. Testing at each step. I learned everything they had.

•     •     •

Then I departed from them. In understanding.

The exiles believed in patience. The Red Lord would come in his own time. The heralds need only keep the flame alive.

I saw it differently.

Souls do not gather themselves. They scatter into the broken afterlives, settle into the tributaries, dry into the cracks. The gathering requires death, because death is the only thing that releases a shard and returns it to the stream. And it requires death at a scale no coven could produce through direct action.

The answer was already there.

Humanity.

Short-sighted. Fractious. Their history tells it. War after war, empire after empire, each one falling harder than the last, and the men who do the killing believe they fight for land or God or honor when they are doing the only thing their kind has ever excelled at, which is generating death at scale without any help from the likes of me.

And humanity would drag the rest with them.

The orcs needed no push. They were already grinding themselves into extinction in the desert. Even now their numbers dwindle, spent on the endless need to klomp. They are doing the work on their own. I merely had to let them.

The elves were the easiest to direct mankind toward. Arrogant. Isolated. Sitting in their forests and their spires, convinced of a superiority they have never been shy about expressing. Mankind needs only a push to try and subjugate them. The subjugation opens the door for rebellion. The rebellion produces war. The war produces death. Point and step back.

The dwarves are perhaps the hardest. Their holds are old and deep. But their holds are also full of loot. Gold and gemstones and arms, centuries of wealth piled behind stone doors. Loot enough to make men lust. That is enough. You do not need to convince a man to invade a dwarven hold. You need only let him hear what is inside one. And the dwarven grudges will make sure mankind is repaid tenfold for the trouble. That is the thing about dwarves. They remember. They write it down. And they always collect.

I did not need plagues. Men notice poisoned wells and look for the poisoner. I did not need undead armies. Shambling corpses announce the return of the art. These are the methods of men who confuse spectacle with result.

The weapon was already built. Every kingdom. Every army. Every grudge, every succession crisis, every border dispute. All of it running constantly, needing only maintenance to keep it going.

I made sure it could not be turned off.

I used the Empire’s own armies to find the dragon bones I needed for my ascension. Thirty years of military expeditions, research commissions, intelligence operations, all pointed quietly toward locating the remains of a creature that the men carrying out the search did not know they were searching for. They thought they were surveying territory. Mapping caves. Cataloguing minerals. They were finding me the components of a ritual that would make me immortal, and they filed their reports and collected their pay and went home to their families none the wiser.

I used the same apparatus to suppress every rival practitioner who might have drawn attention to forces the Empire believed extinct. Ghost summoners. Frost witches. Inferi cultists. Rogue mages. Any mystic operating openly was a threat to my concealment. I did not hunt them myself. I pointed the ISA at them. Whispered to the right officers. Kept the Empire’s own witch hunters busy with lesser quarry so they would not come looking for the real thing.

•     •     •

The old men watched me arrive at this with growing horror. I did not conceal it. They were old. They were dying. I needed to see which could be carried forward and which could not.

Most were horrified. They wanted a student. A keeper of the flame. They got a man who looked at their sacred flame and saw a forge.

Hera was quiet. He looked at me the way he had always looked at me. Steady. Whatever he concluded, he kept.

Ludwig nodded. That was his whole response. It was sufficient.

The Butcher grasped that I was in charge and that the work would require a great deal of meat. He was content.

Vinzakra left the tomb one evening and did not return. I did not look for him.

•     •     •

I killed the ones who would have stood in the way. Proud men. Narrow men. They would have tried to constrain me. I did not have their patience and I did not want it.

Ludwig followed me into the Empire. The Butcher followed me into the Empire. Hera stayed behind, or took a road of his own, regretfully.

•     •     •

When the coven was mine I laid down three rules. No necromancy used openly. No wielding of undead. No witnesses. At-least until we took total hold.

The old practitioners had been careless. They raised corpses when it suited them. They drained men in sight of others. They left survivors who spoke, and the speaking drew witch hunters, and the witch hunters drew the Empire, and the whole enterprise collapsed into fire and flight and another generation scattered into holes in the ground. This cycle had been repeating since before Geitheros was born. Practice in the open. Get hunted. Flee. Hide. Wait. Each cycle thinner than the last, until seven old men in a tomb was all that remained.

I broke the cycle. The art stays hidden. Always. If you must kill, kill with tools that cannot be traced. I always preferred a satchel full of dead bees. Mundane. Ordinary. A man stung to death by bees is a man who had poor luck. No one investigates bees. No one sends a witch hunter after bees.

Necromancy is a last resort. Every raised corpse is a signpost. Every drained man is a witness even in death. The art stays beneath the sleeve. The bees do the rest.

•     •     •

A word to those who come after me.

If you wish to do something grand, step away from your own art. The art can raise the dead and drain the living and hold a man at the threshold between worlds. But a tool used in the open announces itself, and an announced necromancer is a hunted necromancer, and a hunted man cannot do the work.

Your words will do more damage than your spells ever will. A whisper in the right ear starts a war. A forged letter topples a dynasty. A trade route sabotaged at the right moment starves a province. A law written with one ambiguity guts a court for a generation. These are the tools that move the world. Not corpses. Not plagues.

I sat in their Cabinet. I healed their sick. I hosted their Diet. Every day, in plain sight, wearing the wig, saying good tidings, doing more to hollow their civilization than any army of the dead could have managed. No one was looking for a man in a powdered wig. They were looking for something else.

Guard the art. Master it. But when the time comes to do the work, put it down. Pick up a pen. A handshake. A smile.

•     •     •

The vase is mending. Drop by drop. Shard by shard. The wars I set in motion still produce death, and the death releases souls, and the souls flow into the stream, and the stream fills, slowly, across centuries, with the fragments of a God who broke himself so that we could exist. And when the last shard is gathered and the last drop returned, he will be whole. Scarred. Remembering. And he will break himself apart again, willingly, knowing what it costs, and the world that grows from his body will be paradise, because it will be the work of a God who has suffered and who will not make the same wound twice.
 

 

O.C.
Dated 1874

 

[King_Kunuk 3022]

An aged weaver reads the manuscript and ponders. He would need to seek out this elder in person, sometime, perhaps.

[Mordringfan 166]

The Frost Dwarf, dwelling within the walls of the Black Church, reads through the interesting manuscripts, curious as to the one who wrote this was.

[Security_ 2287]

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◎──────────────── ۝ ────────────────◎

 

In the depths of the world forgotten by Man trudged an ancient, forlorn thing. Twisted beyond its years, whatever sanity remained fell and threatened to snap away into the histories where its memory lies. Time to time, century to century, it clawed and it clambered its way out of sealed tombs and once more sought a fragment of modernity. To remember what was once dust has been built again, and to know that to dust it will return. Fleshless hands perused the spines that held yellowed scrolls, leaving faint trails of swept dust - stopping, then, at something familiar. A name, and with a burning gaze, a memory. 

 

"Ostromir Carrion," creaked the shambling bones, with a voice that might have been the tattletale crack of a ship in storm. "What became of him, but a writer." 

 

The excerpt was placed back where it was found, left with the last notion that elden Wick might ever have of the Tuvyic.

 

"I was right." A cackle pierced the air, stilling to silence just as quick. "He was the last Prophet of Rh'thor."

[tantuni445 289]

A woman, now old, sat with her legs crossed. She no longer led armies of the dead, nor did she command the threads of life. She had decided, by her own will, to refrain from touching the art that followed Rh'thorean. She picked up a pen, solved a puzzle, drank her tea, and spent her day as usual.

Rh'thorean was gone. For Lady Yathre, this didn't matter. Dying and being resurrected dozens of times, holding her soul captive in the lifebanks for a century, and so much more—the experiences had become too much for her. She had finally understood the essence of things. Death has no master. For souls like herself who try to control death, there is only sacrifice to it, because for the living, the concept of annihilation is inexplicable. The essence of it all was that it was a tale of those trapped in a tedious, repetitive cycle created by stitching together decaying corpses.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie And with strange aeons, even death may die... I guess?"   commanded a weaver of Rh'thorean, now retired.

Edited April 15 by tantuni445