Lhindir_

[Yet another chapter from the collected works finds its way into quiet hands. -- This is an open post, anyone may be free to roleplay possession of it, as are all prior and future in the Good-Tidings Series] ON THE RH’THORIAN FAITH AND THE FIFTH LORD Being a Chapter of Good Tidings “…the roots remember what the soil has forgotten. And when the soil is spent and the branches have fallen and the last leaf has curled into ash, the roots will speak. And the speaking will be fire. And the fire will be the first word of a tongue the world has not yet learned to hear.” Hera, to the boy from Kaedrin Most of what is known about the Rh’thorian faith was taught to me by Hera and the exiles. Their knowledge was incomplete. They were cast out of Rh’thor for the practice of necromancy, and what they carried with them across the frozen wastes was memory, fragments of scripture, and a conviction so absolute it had ceased to resemble belief and had become instead a kind of patience. I have never been to Rh’thor. What I know, I know from old men in a tomb. Old men whose certainty was more unsettling than their art. I will set down what I understand. I will set it down plainly, because the theology is already sufficiently maddening without ornamentation. • • • Rh’thor is a city in Yulthar, the godless land in the far east, where east meets west and meaning dissolves into mist. It sits on the edge of the Abyss, the grave of Aegis, the first land, consumed when Iblees fell. The Abyss poisons the waters around it, bleeding darkness into the gulf the Rh’thoraens call the False Sea, whose black tides wash mist and rain over the land and choke the living with a patience that borders on devotion. It was not founded. It accumulated. Warbands and crusaders, raiders and sorcerers came to claim it and succumbed to the mists. The mists kill. The dead rise. And the risen, confronted with a choice between communion and oblivion, became Rh’thoraen. The city is stagnant. The dead cannot sire children. Fathers ceased to be fathers. Mothers ceased to be mothers. It became a bastion and a prison for dead men unwanted and the remnants of those who could not die. • • • The False Sea. Its waters are black because the Abyss bleeds into them. The chasm where Aegis fell has no bottom that anyone has found, and whatever festers in that wound seeps upward into the sea and stains it with a darkness that is not the absence of light but the presence of something older. If a man, living or dead, drinks from the black, he dies and will not rise again. In a land where death is an impossibility, the False Sea offers the one thing the immortal crave and fear in equal measure: an ending. A Rh’thoraen who walks to the shore and swims into the black disappears. This is considered sacred. They believe these souls become one with whatever lies beneath. I find this significant. Even the deathless want the option of stopping. • • • The faith begins with a tree. A tribe on the outskirts, south of the city, spared the touch of the mists. A man called Aelvarus came across a tree that burned but did not crumble. The tree spoke its name once. Widukind. The Oak. The first of the Old Ones, pulled from the Void by the Demiurge, bound to the cycle of life and death. From Widukind, Aelvarus was granted command over stagnation and knowledge of the Redlord’s Path. A messianic figure would come. These men were spared the curse of degradation though they were made sterile. They fashioned red cloaks. They named themselves the Red Priests. The Redlord’s faith became the dominant faith of the city. Widukind is not a god. He is an Old One. A messenger. The message matters, and the message is about someone else entirely. • • • The Demiurge. The Rh’thoraen theologians call the Creator by this name. The first Lord of Fire and Shadow. Fire as the act of making. Shadow as the cost. He forged a unified mankind and then was lost, consumed by the conflagration of his own labour. The Creator is dead. He made the world by annihilating himself. The world is his corpse. Every soul is a shard of him. But the shards are not equal. This is the thing most practitioners fail to grasp, and the failure is ruinous. When the Creator broke, his soul did not shatter into equal pieces. The fragments vary. Some are vast. Some are barely splinters, motes of divine substance so slight they animate nothing grander than a blade of grass. The size of the shard determines the power of the creature that carries it. Its mana. Its capacity for magic, for will, for influence upon the wretched theatre of mortal affairs. This is not metaphor. It is mechanism. The shard is the source. The Creator is the source. And the Creator distributed himself with a carelessness that has defined every hierarchy the world has ever produced. The gods hold the largest pieces. That is why they are powerful. They are not divine by nature. They are divine by proportion. Strip the shard away and they are nothing. They squat upon the largest fragments of a dead God and call themselves kings, and the world genuflects because it has forgotten what a king actually is. An inferis gorges on souls and grows. It is not gaining strength from nothing. It is gaining more of the Creator. Each soul adds a shard to its mass and the accumulated shards compound with a voracity that should give any thinking man pause. An apparition is powerful because it is an amalgamation of souls, many shards fused in one vessel, its power scaling with how many it has gathered. A wight operates on the same principle. More souls. More shards. More of the Creator pooled in a single vessel. More power. The arithmetic is simple. The implications are staggering. Souls cannot be destroyed. They split. They scatter. They are consumed and reconfigured. But they cannot be unmade. The Creator’s substance persists. It endures. It endures with the stubbornness of a thing that was never meant to stop existing. The shards exist. They cannot be destroyed. They can be gathered. And if gathered, the Creator wakes. Not as he was. Scarred. Cracked. Bearing the memory of every fracture. But aware. And if aware, capable of breaking himself apart again, deliberately this time, knowing what went wrong, knowing what the first attempt cost, carrying the weight of that knowledge into the second try the way a surgeon carries the memory of every patient he has lost. • • • Heith-Hedran. The life-banks. The exiles used this term and no other, and they spoke it the way a cartographer speaks of an ocean he has charted but never crossed. Heith-Hedran is the ethereal current that suffuses creation. It is not visible. It is not locatable in the way a river is locatable. It is substrate. It is the circulation of the Fifth Lord’s residual force through the body of the world he made from himself. When a living thing dies, its life-force does not vanish. It cannot. The shard persists, but the energy that animated it, the vitality that kept the vessel moving and breathing and reaching toward the sun, that disperses. It bleeds outward from the corpse the way heat bleeds from cooling iron, and it enters the Heith-Hedran. The current receives it. The current carries it. And the current redistributes it to wherever the world is thin and hungry and in need of replenishment. This is the mechanism by which creation sustains itself in the absence of a living God. The Heith-Hedran is his circulatory system, still functioning in a dead body. The heart has stopped but the blood still moves, driven by residual pressure, by the architecture of the veins themselves, by a momentum that was set in motion at the moment of the shattering and has not yet exhausted itself. Every living thing draws from it. A man draws deeply. An animal draws less. A blade of grass carries the faintest of sparks, the merest splinter of the Fifth Lord’s substance, and even that splinter requires sustenance from the current to persist. The grass grows because the Heith-Hedran feeds it. The wolf hunts because the Heith-Hedran sustains the shard within it. The child opens its eyes for the first time and breathes because the current found it in the womb and filled it with enough of the Provident Lord’s residual warmth to kindle the fragment it carries into something that can move and think and, eventually, die and release its portion back into the flow. The cycle is elegant. Life draws from the current. Life ends. The energy returns to the current. The current carries it to new life. The shards descend into the deep. The energy recirculates through the Heith-Hedran. Two systems, intertwined. The soul stream collects the fragments of consciousness, the irreducible pieces of the Fifth Lord’s soul. The Heith-Hedran collects the energy, the animating force, and recycles it. One gathers the self. The other sustains the vessel. Both operate without direction, without intention, without a hand at the wheel. They are the machinery of a dead God’s body, still turning, still circulating, still keeping the world alive the way a slain man’s blood continues to pool and seep long after the heart has stopped. The necromancer understands this better than any cleric or mage. The art is, at its foundation, the manipulation of the Heith-Hedran. When I raise the dead, I am not creating life. I am redirecting the current. I am pulling sustenance from the flow and forcing it into a vessel that has already released its portion, filling it again with borrowed warmth, making it move and act and serve. The vessel has no shard. The shard has already descended into the deep. What remains is architecture without awareness, a house with no one home, animated by a current that was meant for the living but which I have rerouted through my will and the art. This is why the Rh’thoraens call necromancy a blight. It disrupts the Heith-Hedran. Every corpse raised is energy redirected from the cycle. Force that should have flowed to a newborn child or a sprouting seed is instead held inside dead flesh, sustaining a vessel that no longer grows. Multiply this across a war, across a plague, across a civilisation that has been hollowed out by thirty years of engineered collapse, and the disruption compounds. The current thins in places. Fields fail. Livestock sicken. Children are born weaker than their parents. The world grows tired in ways that no physician can diagnose because the diagnosis requires a vocabulary that has been dead for a century. The Rh’thoraens of the city see this and call it desecration. The exiles saw it and called it something else. Borrowing. The distinction matters. Everything the faithful draw from the Heith-Hedran belongs to the Provident Lord. It has always belonged to him. The current is his blood. The shards are his bones. The cycle is his breathing, slow and vast and unconscious. When a necromancer pulls from the flow, he is not stealing from creation. He is drawing an advance against the restoration. Borrowing from the inheritance that was promised before the first man drew breath, in service of the very God whose body provides the loan. The Provident Lord does not begrudge the withdrawal, because the withdrawal accelerates his waking, and his waking is the repayment. Every debt incurred in the work is settled the moment the last shard falls into place and the Fifth Lord opens his eyes. But the faithful try to return what they use. This was a principle the exiles held with a rigour that surprised me, given the nature of their other commitments. Life-force drawn from the Heith-Hedran was not to be hoarded. It was not to be squandered on vanity or excess. It was taken for a purpose, applied to that purpose, and when the purpose was served, released back into the current. A corpse raised to guard a passage was laid down again when the passage no longer needed guarding. A ritual that required the redirection of the flow was followed by a period of stillness, during which the necromancer allowed the current to reassert its natural course through the area he had disrupted. Even the old men in the tomb, who had sustained themselves on borrowed warmth for centuries, spoke of their own existence as a temporary commission. They did not expect to last forever. They expected to last long enough. And the dead who are called back must know it. This was Hera’s insistence, and it is the one point of doctrine I have never abandoned. When I raise a servant, when I pull a soul from the deep and bind it to a vessel and set it to work, I do not deceive it. The soul is told. Its service is borrowed time. Its labour is in service of a paradise it will inhabit when the work is done and the shards are gathered and the Provident Lord builds the world again with eyes that remember. The dead serve not because they are enslaved but because they are shown what waits on the other side of the ending, and the showing is enough. A man who has seen the shape of paradise does not resent the errand that brings it closer. Not all of them believe. Some resist. Some rage. These are released. Not out of mercy. Out of doctrine. A soul that serves unwillingly carries the memory of compulsion into the deep, and that memory persists in the shard. But this is not the catastrophe the Rh’thoraens of the city believe it to be. They fear that shards steeped in suffering will produce a flawed creation. They are wrong. They have it precisely backward. A shard that remembers slavery will not permit slavery. A shard that remembers misery will build against misery. A shard that has known death and pain and the full weight of what it means to be a vessel in a broken world will fight, with every fragment of the awareness it carries, to ensure that the next world does not contain these things. The suffering is not a contamination. It is an education. The Provident Lord wakes from shards that have lived inside every kind of anguish, and the God who opens his eyes will know what suffering is, and he will know it the way a man who has touched fire knows what burning means, and he will not build a world that burns. This is why we use the methods we use. The wars. The plagues. The engineered collapse. The thirty years of rot I have threaded through the Empire’s foundations. All of it produces death. All of it produces suffering. And all of that suffering flows into the deep with the shards that carry it, and the Provident Lord receives it, and when he wakes he will hold every scream and every wound and every moment of despair in his hands and he will say: never again. The pain is transient. The memory of pain is permanent. And a God built from the memory of pain will create a world that has no room for it. This is the justification. Not comfort. Not reassurance. Justification. Every method is justified if it produces a world free of Iblees’s taint. Every death is justified if the shard it releases carries the knowledge of what death costs into the deep where the Provident Lord is assembling. The suffering of this world is the price of the next world’s perfection. It is all transient. Every war. Every plague. Every betrayal. Every child who dies before it learns to speak. Transient. And on the other side of the transience, a creation built by a God who knows what every one of those deaths felt like, who carries the full weight of every shard’s memory, and who will not permit a single one of those memories to repeat. We are not cruel. We are surgeons. The surgery is ugly. The patient will live. The exiles understood this. Geitheros understood it before them. The art is a tool. The tool must be used with purpose. A surgeon who hesitates at the wound kills the patient as surely as a surgeon who cuts too deep. I know the disruption compounds. I know the world grows tired. I know the blight spreads in ways I can measure and ways I cannot, and that the fields around Dobrov have been thinner each year, and that the children of the Empire are born into a world that has less warmth to offer them than the world their parents were born into. I do not pretend this is costless. The Heith-Hedran sustains the world as it is. The world as it is must end for the Fifth Lord to wake. If the current weakens, if the cycle stutters, if the machinery of sustenance begins to fail, the Veil thins faster, the shards descend more urgently, and the Provident Lord grows in proportion to the decay. The cost is real. The cost is justified. And when the Provident Lord wakes and creation is remade, the debt will be repaid in full, and the Heith-Hedran will flow again through a world that does not carry the flaw, and the cycle will begin again, clean, whole, and sustained by a God who knows what circulation means because he has felt his own blood thin. • • • The Four Fates. The doctrinal core. Four prophecies. I reproduce them as the exiles carried them. The Advent. He shall dig his roots into the depths of the earth and purge it of its illness, and thus all men shall be purged of their barbarous darkness and ruinous, divisive inflictions, becoming one. The gathering. The roots are the soul stream. The illness is the fracturing. All men becoming one is the restoration of the original consciousness. Not a political event. A metaphysical one. The Rise. He shall invoke the fire of unified man, and cast it upon the followers of gods, and thus banish their masters from the world we walk upon. Once the Fifth Lord is restored and the shards are unified, the gods lose their purchase. Their power derives from holding the largest pieces. When those pieces are reclaimed, folded back into the whole, the gods diminish. They are not banished by war. They are banished by irrelevance. The fire of unified man is awareness. Men who know they carry pieces of the Provident Lord have no reason to worship parasites who stole the bigger pieces. The Struggle. He shall take up the broken sword and forge it anew, and then lead men in a battle against the gods that shall last half a millennium. The broken sword is mortality. The flaw. Reforged into something whole. The battle lasting half a millennium is the time required for the last gods to fall. And they must fall. Even the gods must be slain for their shards to be reclaimed, for their pieces are the largest, and without them the vase cannot be mended. The Fifth Lord cannot be restored while the Aenguls and Daemons sit on the largest fragments of his soul and refuse to relinquish them. They will not give them up willingly. They will have to be taken. The Quietus. He shall be slighted by an unknown final sin, where he will call upon the name of the Demiurge before killing the gods themselves, and thus blanketing all things in primordial darkness. Calor Mors. The warm death. Not death as ending. Death as transformation. The Red Lord calls upon his own name, his original name, and destroys the existing order entirely. And then the final line. And then men will take the light of gods and consume it, and then stand against the Void. The light of gods is the stolen power, the accumulated shards, the pieces of the Fifth Lord the Aenguls and Daemons have been hoarding. When they are slain, that power returns. And mankind, unified, whole, carrying the restored consciousness within them, turns to face the true enemy. Not the gods. The Void. Uncreation. Emptiness. The thing that exists outside the Veil. The Veil is the substrate of creation itself. It is the barrier that separates what exists from what does not. When the Fifth Lord made the world, he made the Veil with it, a skin stretched across the wound between being and unbeing, holding uncreation out the way a dam holds back a flood. But the Veil is not permanent. It is not self-sustaining. It is made from his substance, and when he broke, the Veil weakened with him. It thins. It frays. And the Void presses against it, always, patient, constant, waiting for the moment when the barrier fails and everything that exists ceases to. The gods were never the real threat. They are parasites living on the inside of a wall they did not build and cannot maintain. The Void is the adversary. And the fight against it is not a war in any mortal sense. It is re-creation. The act of making again. The Provident Lord, restored, breaking himself apart a second time, building the world anew from his body, and in building it, reinforcing the Veil from the inside. Thickening it. Healing the cracks. Sealing the wound between creation and uncreation with the weight of a God who knows what he is doing because he has done it before. That is what standing against the Void means. Not armies. Not blades. Creation itself, performed by a God who remembers the first attempt and will not make the same mistake twice. • • • The Old Lords. Four men tried before me. Curseless knights in the age of Horen. They stole necromancy from Iblees through a Dragaar’s device, became the First Wraiths, and turned their hatred against the divine order. The texts summarise their fates. For he who had burned in the oldest dark, the flames of ire would consume him. For he who had melded with the dark, he would see nothing but darkness. For he who had offered an olive branch, he became unable to be rejoiced by men. For he who had conquered life, his name be stricken from legends. Dhurzumkal, the Lord of Embers. Pupil of Widukind. Named the Abyss Xion. Retreated from the battle between Iblees and Aeriel, daemonic fire followed him into a cavern, fused with his being, became an everlasting pyre. Dwarves trapped him behind a runic door and named him Demon of Fire. He burns still. Malkaathe, the Lord of the Abyss. First to suggest spiting the gods. Walked onto the battlefield between Aeriel and Iblees. Fell when Aegis collapsed. Screamed for ten days. Built a throne from the ruins of the towers of Aemon and Daemon. Became one with the Abyss. His followers say he toils in the depths, carving a new world into stone and fighting to keep the first soul from awakening. Legend has it a great Dragaar sought to die and plummeted into the Abyss, crashing and breaking upon the bottom. Malkaathe raised it through sheer will and a bargain struck between them. They say he covets the creature’s phylactery as a prized jewel, set into the arm of his throne. I do not know if this is true. It sounds like him. Brandh, the Lord of Oaks. The pacifist. Source of the Weirhents, the druid-seers who preached that the curses could be broken through self-restraint. He taught that the original men were unified before the curses and could be again. Meanwhile he killed dragons and men who disagreed with him using a greatbow. The Nameless Lord. Departed north. Built the kingdom of Geidleth through mercy and will. Grew so powerful the Aengul of Lordship came to fight him. They were matched. The god sacrificed his own godhood, fusing Wraithsoul and Godsoul to the throne. Eshtael cursed the kingdom with forgetfulness. The scribes screamed their memories into stone. Geidleth became a bastion of undead driven by the remnant of a dream no one can remember clearly. I will be brief in my assessment. They are all failures. Not because they lacked power. Not because the gods were stronger. They failed because they are mortal. All of them. Even as Wraiths, even with Wraithsouls that exceed the capacity of any living man, they are mortal minds trapped in immortal vessels. They think like men. They fight like men. They grieve and rage and build and stagnate like men. They sought to remain in a mortal world and mend it from within, as though one can repair a house by rearranging its furniture while the foundation rots beneath. Dhurzumkal wanted to cast out the gods. Cast them out and then what? The world is still broken. The Fifth Lord is still dead. Removing the wardens does not repair the prison. Malkaathe wanted to destroy the gods. From a throne in a grave. He stopped moving. He sat down. The ambition curdled into stagnation, and stagnation is the one disease the Rh’thoraens were built to recognise. Brandh wanted to prove the gods unnecessary through peace. Noble. And irrelevant, because the gods do not care whether men need them. They care about keeping their pieces. A pacifist arguing with a thief about the morality of theft has already lost. The Nameless Lord built a kingdom. The finest mortal achievement the world has seen. And it took one act of divine spite to erase it from memory. That is the nature of mortal achievement. You build on sand and the tide answers to someone else. They all wanted to stay in the world as it is and make it better. The Provident Lord does not want to make it better. The Provident Lord wants to unmake it entirely and build it again. The difference is everything. • • • The Provident Lord stirs. The Fifth Lord. The one who is yet to come. The exiles called him the Provident Lord because he is the provision that was promised, the inheritance laid down before the first man drew breath, the culmination that the act of creation set in motion by the very nature of the breaking. He was not named by men. He was named by the architecture of creation itself, the way a river is named by the valley that shapes it. The provision was built into the shattering. The guarantee that the pieces, once scattered, would seek reunion. That the shards would flow downward, gather, coalesce, and in time produce something with the weight and awareness to act. This is not hope. This is gravity. This is the thing the exiles understood but did not say plainly, because they were cautious men and the implications terrified them. The Provident Lord is not a prophecy that will be fulfilled in the distant future by a man who does not yet exist. The Provident Lord is assembling now. He is growing. Every soul that enters the deep, every shard that is released through death, feeds something in the depths of the world that is getting larger. Think of how an inferis grows. It consumes a soul and becomes more powerful. It consumes another and grows again. The accumulation compounds. Each shard adds not just power but awareness, fragments of the original consciousness pooling together, gaining coherence, gaining memory. The Provident Lord operates on the same principle but at a scale that makes an inferis look like a candle flame held up to a forest fire. He is down there. In the deep. In the space where the shattered afterlives converge and the fragments drift. He is growing the way a pearl grows inside an oyster, slowly, layer by layer, shard by shard, built from the accumulated substance of every death that has ever occurred since the shattering. And as he grows he gains more and more of the original power, more of the first awareness, more capacity to act upon the world even from the depths. The exiles believed he would come on his own. That the gathering was natural and inevitable. That all they needed to do was wait. I do not wait. Every war I enable accelerates the gathering. Every death releases a shard. Every shard flows into the deep. Every fragment that reaches the deep places makes the Provident Lord larger, more aware, more capable of reaching back up through the roots of the world and assisting those who serve him. He stirs. I have felt it. In the art. In the way life force moves differently now than it did thirty years ago. In the way the dead are harder to keep still. Something is changing in the deep structure of things and it is changing because the Provident Lord is growing and his growth alters the conditions of the world above him the way the roots of a vast tree alter the soil. The gods know. I believe the gods know. They can feel their pieces pulling toward something. They can feel the shards they stole straining at the edges, wanting to return to the whole. The Aenguls grow restless. The Daemons grow hungry. The divine order frays. And the men who worship them sense that something is wrong but cannot name it, because they have never been taught the vocabulary for what is happening, and the men who have the vocabulary are sitting in tombs or standing in cabinets wearing wigs. • • • Geitheros. He was not a heretic from the beginning. He was a Red Priest. Faithful. Sent from Rh’thor to hunt a necromancer who had been preaching that the Redlord could be born from the practice of necromancy. This was blasphemy. The Rh’thoraens view necromancy as a misery, a blight, a curse, and a hex. Geitheros and his war-priests tracked the heretic across frozen wastes. Loss after loss, his men were killed. Only Geitheros survived. He killed the heretic. And whatever the man said to him before dying changed everything. No one knows what was said. Only that Geitheros returned to Rh’thor a different man. He challenged the clergy. He said Widukind’s words were metaphor. That stagnation and peace were not the path. That suffering was. That necromancy was the tool. He founded the Red Vigil. He and his followers baptised themselves in water stolen from the False Sea. They were captured. Many were crucified. Geitheros was exiled for his years of service, spared the drowning. He departed across the lands carrying the teachings of the Red Vigil. From him came Hera. From Hera came me. I believe the heretic told him the truth. The Rh’thoraens on Yulthar are content to let death play out. They believe the gathering will happen on its own, that mortality will grind the world into extinction at its own pace, that the soul stream will fill given enough time, and that their role is to sit in their stagnant city and watch it happen. They are not wrong about the direction. They are wrong about the timeline. Left to its natural course, the gathering will take longer than the Veil can hold. The world will be consumed by the Void before the Fifth Lord is restored, because the Veil thins faster than the shards accumulate. The exiles diverged because they wanted to accelerate the process. That is the whole of it. That is why Geitheros turned to necromancy. Not because he hated Rh’thor. Not because he lost his faith. Because he understood that the comfortable stagnation of a city of the dead, that beautiful, eternal, childless peace, was not fast enough. The gathering requires force. Force requires the art. And the art requires practitioners willing to use it. • • • The Crypt. The exiles’ temple was a barrow south of the farmlands, half-sunk into a hillside that the locals avoided without knowing why. Instinct is a poor theologian but an excellent cartographer of dread. The entrance was a stone lintel set into the earth at an angle, as though the hill had tried to swallow it and failed. Inside, the passage descended for thirty paces before opening into a vaulted chamber that the old men had been inhabiting for longer than any of them could agree upon. The air was cold and tasted of mineral and dust and something else, something that moved against the skin the way static moves before a storm. I felt it the first time I entered. The Heith-Hedran was closer to the surface there. The old men had chosen the site with the unerring instinct of creatures drawn to water in a drought. They had built things in that crypt. Not with the craft of masons or the precision of engineers, but with the patience of men who had centuries and nothing else. The walls were inscribed. Every surface that could hold a mark had been carved or painted or stained with red ink. Passages from the oral tradition. Names of the dead. Genealogies of the circle stretching back to Geitheros. Diagrams of the soul stream as the exiles understood it, drawn in pigment mixed with ash and blood, showing the flow of shards downward into the deep places and the circulation of the Heith-Hedran outward through the roots of the world. Some of the inscriptions were in a script I did not recognise. Hera said it was Old Rh’thoraen, a writing system used before the mists took the last literate generation, preserved only in the memories of men who had memorised it from men who had memorised it from men who could no longer remember why the letters curved the way they did. Against the eastern wall, a reliquary. Clay vessels sealed with wax, each containing ash from the founding fire. Bone fragments from exiles who had died before I was born, kept not as trophies but as anchors. A length of red cloth so old it had turned the colour of dried blood, said to have been cut from Geitheros’s own cloak before his exile. A stone from the shore of the False Sea, black and smooth and cold to the touch in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. Hera told me the stone still carried the memory of the black water, that if you held it long enough you could feel the pull of whatever waited beneath the surface. I held it. I felt nothing. I did not tell him this. A set of iron rings, seven of them, joined by a chain that had been broken and reforged so many times that no original link remained. Each ring bore a name in Old Rh’thoraen, etched into the inner band where it pressed against the skin. Six names I could not read. The seventh was blank. The Provident Lord. The one who is yet to come. The exiles wore them on their fingers during the Litany and removed them afterward, placing them back on the chain with a care that bordered on reverence. The rings were too large for my hands. Hera said they had been forged for dead men’s fingers, which are thicker than the living, and that I would grow into them. He meant this in more ways than one. A map of the Abyss, or what the exiles believed the Abyss to look like, painted on a stretched hide that had been treated with something that kept it supple across centuries. The map showed Malkaathe’s throne at the bottom, surrounded by concentric rings of ruin that the cartographer had labelled in Old Rh’thoraen. Hera translated some of them for me. The Ring of Screaming. The Shelf of Broken Towers. The Wound Where Aegis Fell. The map was speculative. No one living or dead had returned from the Abyss to confirm its geography. But the exiles treated it as scripture, and I have learned that the difference between a map and a scripture is only a matter of how many men have died believing in it. In the alcove opposite the reliquary, a brazier. Iron, low, three-legged, older than anything else in the crypt. The fire that burned in it was black. Not dark. Not shadowed. Black. A flame that consumed light rather than producing it, that made the space around it dimmer than the space farther away, that moved with the slow deliberation of something that was aware it was being observed. The exiles fed it nothing. No oil. No wood. No fuel of any kind. It burned because it had always burned, and the old men said it had been carried from Rh’thor in a vessel of fired clay and had not gone out since. I believed them. The fire did not behave like fire. It behaved like a statement. This is service to the Fifth Lord. This is what the end looks like when it is patient. The brazier sat in its alcove and the black flame turned without heat and the shadows it cast were brighter than the flame itself, which is not possible, which I saw with my own eyes, which I do not expect you to understand because I did not understand it either. I sat in front of it for hours. It taught me nothing I could articulate. It taught me something I could feel, and the feeling has not left. A mortar and pestle carved from a single piece of basite, the bowl stained permanently red from centuries of grinding the ink. The red ink of the Widukind is not a dye. It is a compound. Blood, ash from the founding fire, powdered hematite, and a binding agent the exiles extracted from the sap of the ashwood itself, boiled to a resin and mixed in proportions that Hera adjusted by instinct rather than measurement. The mortar was sacred in the way that a surgeon’s blade is sacred. Not because of what it is but because of what it has touched. A blade. Short, curved, bronze, green with age. The cutting edge still held. Hera said it had been used to perform the first marking, the first line of red ink drawn on the first initiate outside of Rh’thor, and that every marking since had been done with other instruments but this one was kept because the first cut matters. It was wrapped in linen stained with something that was not blood and not rust and not anything I could identify. I asked once. Hera said the stain was from the heretic. The one Geitheros killed. The one whose last words changed everything. Whatever the heretic bled, it was not entirely mortal, and the cloth remembered. A set of clay tablets, seven of them, each no larger than a man’s palm, inscribed on both sides in a script so fine it might have been etched with a needle. The exiles called them the Leaves. They were the only written scripture the circle possessed, carried from Rh’thor by Geitheros himself, and they contained passages from the Red Vigil’s founding texts that predated the oral tradition. Hera could read them. He read them to me once, slowly, translating as he went. I will not reproduce what they said. Some things are better left in the language they were written in, and some truths lose their shape when they are carried into a tongue that was not built to hold them. I will say only that when Hera finished reading, he was silent for a long time, and when I looked at him his eyes were wet, and I did not ask why because I already knew. Set into the floor before the rift, a circle. Not drawn. Carved. The grooves were deep enough to hold liquid and the exiles filled them with the red ink before any major working. When the ink settled into the channels it formed a glyph that Hera called the Seal of Returning, a closed circuit that redirected life-force back into the Heith-Hedran after a ritual had drawn from it. The circle ensured that nothing borrowed was lost to the air. Every working performed within its boundary returned its excess to the current through the carved channels, which fed downward into hairline fractures that connected to the main rift beneath the ashwood. It was, in essence, drainage. A mechanism for ensuring that the debt incurred by the art was repaid immediately and in full. I have reproduced this circle in every place I have practised since. It is the single most useful thing the exiles built. Any necromancer reading this should build one. The dimensions are not important. The closure is. The circuit must be unbroken and the channels must lead to earth, to stone, to anything that connects to the substrate beneath. The Heith-Hedran will find the offering. It always does. Along the northern wall, an ossuary. Not a burial. A construction. The bones of the exiles who had died across the centuries were arranged in patterns that I did not recognise as intentional until Hera explained them. The long bones formed vertical channels. The skulls were set at junctures where channels met. The ribs fanned outward in arcs that followed the curvature of the wall. The arrangement was not decorative. It was architectural. The bones of the dead, stripped of flesh and life-force but still carrying the faintest residual impression of the shards that had once inhabited them, functioned as a lattice. A framework through which the ambient current in the crypt was guided and concentrated toward the rift. The ossuary made the crypt more efficient. It gathered the Heith-Hedran the way a lens gathers light, directing the diffuse energy of the chamber inward toward the place where it could descend. I have seen cathedrals with less sophisticated engineering. The exiles built this with human remains and intuition and the patience of men who could not die and had nothing to do but refine. A basin, shallow, wide, carved from a single block of dark stone that Hera said had been quarried from beneath Rh’thor itself. When filled with water and placed near the rift, the surface did not settle. It moved. Slowly, in patterns that shifted over hours, responding to the flow of the Heith-Hedran beneath the floor the way iron filings respond to a magnet held beneath a table. The exiles used it to read the current. The patterns meant something to them. A spiral indicated strong flow. A fracturing indicated disruption somewhere upstream. Stillness, true stillness, indicated something drawing heavily from the current nearby, pulling the Heith-Hedran toward itself with enough force to flatten the ripples in the basin. I learned to read it. It took months. The vocabulary is not verbal. It is spatial. You watch the water and you feel the current through the stone beneath your feet and eventually the two languages merge and you understand what the basin is saying without translating it into words. Any practitioner with access to stone from a place where the Heith-Hedran surfaces can build one. The stone remembers its proximity to the current and retains a sympathy with the flow. It does not need to be from Rh’thor. It needs to be from the deep places. Quarry near a rift. Near a cave system. Near anywhere the substrate thins and the current presses upward. The stone will know. In the passage between the entrance and the main chamber, a series of notches cut into the walls at intervals. Each notch held a bone, and each bone had been treated with the red ink and wrapped in a strip of cloth from a dead exile’s cloak. Hera called them the Sentinels. They were not wards in the traditional sense. They did not repel or defend. They listened. The bones, still carrying the faintest residual resonance of the men they had belonged to, vibrated when the Heith-Hedran shifted in the area around the crypt. A disruption in the current, caused by the practice of the art nearby or by the passage of something drawing heavily from the flow, would cause the Sentinels to hum. A sound so low it was felt in the teeth rather than heard with the ears. The old men could distinguish between different causes of disruption by the pattern of which Sentinels responded. I never developed this sensitivity. But the principle is sound, and I have adapted it. Bone retains sympathy with the current that once animated it. Treated bone, inked and anchored, retains it longer. A line of such bones, spaced at intervals along a corridor or a perimeter, creates a detection system that requires no active maintenance and no expenditure of the art. It simply listens. It simply hums. And the hum tells you what is moving in the current before it arrives at your door. And at the centre of the chamber, the tree. An ashwood, pale and slender, growing where no tree should grow. It had no sunlight. It had no rain. It had no soil in any meaningful sense, its roots threading down through cracked stone into the darkness beneath. The exiles had planted it, or their predecessors had, over a rift in the floor of the crypt where the Heith-Hedran bled upward through the rock like groundwater through a fracture. The rift was narrow, no wider than a man’s forearm, but the current that rose from it was dense enough that I could feel it without reaching. The air above the rift shimmered the way air shimmers above a fire, though there was no heat. Only movement. Only the slow, vast exhalation of the world’s circulatory system pressing upward through a crack in its own skin. The ashwood’s roots had found the rift and descended into it. They had grown downward through the stone, through the fracture, into whatever lay beneath, and they drew from the Heith-Hedran directly. The tree was sustained by the art. The exiles maintained it the way a physician maintains a patient, feeding it with small, deliberate infusions of life-force to supplement what the roots could draw on their own. It should not have lived. Ashwood requires sunlight and temperate soil and decades of patient growth. This one had none of these things and it thrived regardless, pale and luminous in the torchlight, its bark the colour of old bone, its leaves a silver-green that shifted when you were not looking directly at them. Hera called it a lens. He said the tree’s roots, threaded into the Heith-Hedran, allowed the exiles to feel the current’s movement in a way that unaided perception could not achieve. When they performed the Litany, they performed it facing the tree. When they named the dead, they pressed their inked wrists against its bark. When one of them died, his body was laid at its base and left there until the life-force had fully dispersed and entered the rift, returning to the flow through the roots rather than dissipating into the air the way an unattended death releases its energy. The tree was a conduit. An instrument. A thing the old men had built across generations of careful, patient, obsessive cultivation, tapping the deepest vein of the world’s remaining vitality and using it to anchor their faith to something they could touch. I sat beneath it often. Not for devotion. For observation. I could feel the Heith-Hedran moving through the roots. I could feel the shards descending, faintly, in the deep places beneath the rift, the way you can feel the vibration of a river through the floor of a cave that runs above it. The tree taught me more about the mechanics of the current than Hera’s lectures ever did. It taught me that the Heith-Hedran is not abstract. It is not metaphor. It is as physical as blood, as directional as a tide, as manipulable as any other force in the natural world, provided you have the vocabulary and the will and the willingness to reach into the flow and redirect it. The tree is still there. I assume it is still there. I left the crypt long ago and have not returned. But the rift will not have closed, and the roots will not have died, and the Heith-Hedran will not have ceased to flow, because these things do not stop. They are older than the men who found them and they will persist long after every exile has crumbled and every rite has been forgotten and every name has been spoken for the last time into a silence that no one remains to observe. The machinery does not require us. We are grit. We are friction. We are the acceleration, not the engine. The engine was set in motion by a God who destroyed himself to build it, and it will run until the last tooth breaks. • • • The exiles carried certain rites with them when they departed Rh’thor. I will describe them as they were performed in the tomb, for no other hand will record them, and the old men who kept them are dust, and dust remembers nothing. The Litany of Stagnation. Spoken at the failing of the light, when the sun withdraws its hand and the dark reminds us what awaits. The eldest speaks first. His voice is a rasp, a thing scoured hollow by centuries of repetition, and the words fall from him the way water falls from stone: without decision, without effort, without the pretence of meaning anything new. “The wheel turns. The wheel grinds. The wheel does not stop for the grieving or the proud. We are the grit between the teeth. We are the friction that wears the axle thin. Let the wheel turn. Let it grind. Let it stop when the last tooth breaks.” Each man answers in turn, descending by age, each voice older than a mortal voice should be: “Let it stop.” Then silence. A silence that extends. That thickens. That becomes a presence in the room the way the mist becomes a presence in the streets of Rh’thor. Hera performed this every evening without variation or mercy. The old men joined him. I stood at the edge and spoke the words into the dark because I understood that the words were not for me, and they were not for the wheel, and they were not for whatever listens in the silence afterward. They were for the men who needed to hear their own voices say the same thing they had said the evening before, and the evening before that, stretching backward into a continuity so long that the words had ceased to be language and become something closer to breathing. The Naming of the Dead. Performed on the first night of each new moon, when the sky offers nothing and the dark is absolute. Every member of the circle speaks the name of a person they have killed or caused to die, and for each name they press a finger to the red ink on their wrist, the place where the first mark was given. If a man has killed more people than he has fingers, he begins again at the first hand. The recitation is without cadence, without rhythm, without the inflection that would suggest remorse or pride or anything at all. The names fall into the dark the way stones fall into the False Sea. They are heard. They are not answered. It is not confession. It is not absolution. It is the ledger. The accounting that the deep demands but does not enforce. The dead are named so that their shards may be acknowledged as having entered the current, and the naming is the only ceremony the dead will ever receive from the men who sent them there. It can last hours. There is something clean about a list. The Vigil of the False Sea. This rite I never witnessed in its true form, for it is performed only on the black shore of Rh’thor itself, where the water meets the mist and the mist meets the silence and the silence is the only sound the dead have ever needed. Hera described it to me. The faithful walk to the shore at the hour before dawn, when the sky is the colour of a bruise that will not heal. They remove their cloaks. They stand in the black water up to their ankles and the water does not kill them because they are already dead, and the dead cannot die twice, though the water remembers what it is for and presses against their skin with a hunger that never sleeps. They recite the names of those who have chosen to walk deeper. The voluntarily ended. Those who swam into the black and did not return. The recitation concludes with words that Hera spoke in a voice I had not heard him use before or since: “They are gathered. They are remembered. They are closer to the whole than we are.” The exiles performed a diminished version of this over a basin of water mixed with charcoal and ash in the tomb. Seven old men standing around a clay bowl in a dusty room, speaking the names of people who had walked into a sea on the other side of the world. The ceremony was lesser. The sincerity was not. The Burning of the Grey. When an initiate earns the right to wear red, he burns whatever grey garments he arrived in. Grey is the colour of the uninitiated. The unburned. The man who has not yet passed through the fire that does not consume. The fuel is oil rendered from animal fat, never wood, for wood comes from the roots of the Widukind and burning the Oak’s substance is a small blasphemy that the old men would not tolerate even when greater blasphemies were their daily labour. The initiate watches his old self burn and speaks into the smoke: “I was nothing. I am becoming. When the wheel stops, I will have been.” Hera made me perform this when he judged I had learned enough. I burned a shirt I had been wearing since Kaedrin. The smoke carried the smell of soil and sweat and a life I would not return to. I spoke the words. The shirt smelled terrible. The ceremony was brief, which I appreciated. But I will confess that the moment the fire caught and the grey cloth curled inward on itself, I felt something I could not catalogue. It was not emotion. It was recognition. The grey was the boy from Kaedrin. The red was what remained. The Anointing of the Mark. Each time a new line of red ink is added to the body, the fresh mark is anointed with a compound of the initiate’s own blood drawn from the wrist and ash from a fire that has burned continuously since the founding of the circle, carried from Rh’thor in a clay vessel across oceans and centuries and maintained by hands that have long since crumbled. When the exiles’ fire went out, which it did twice during my time with them, they did not admit it. They relit it from a candle and continued as though the chain had not been broken. I noticed. I said nothing. The one performing the marking speaks over the wound: “The root grows deeper. The wheel turns slower. You carry more of the burden now than you did before.” The initiate responds: “I carry it.” Three words. The weight of them is not in the speaking but in the years that follow, when the mark has healed and the ash has been absorbed and the burden is no longer a phrase recited in a tomb but a thing you feel in the marrow when the art moves through you and the dead stir and the deep pulls at the edges of your awareness like a tide that knows your name. There were lesser observances. Whispered devotions before meals that none of them could eat, since the curse rendered sustenance to ash on the tongue. A murmured thanksgiving over the body of a slain animal before its life force was consumed, acknowledging the creature’s shard as having been released into the deep. A seasonal arrangement of stones at midsummer in a pattern that none of them could agree upon, accompanied by a recitation of Widukind’s words as carried in the oral tradition, words that shifted each performance because the original text had been lost or abandoned in Rh’thor and memory is a poor vessel for carrying scripture across centuries. I performed all of these when asked. I did not resist. I did not mock. The rites are not for the gods or the dead or the wheel. They are the architecture by which a congregation of exiled men, each of whom has outlived every person they ever loved, maintain the structure of a community that would otherwise dissolve into seven separate darknesses. The exiles needed their rites the way a bridge needs its cables. I understood the mechanics without the ceremony. But I performed them because the old men needed me to, and I needed the old men, and the cost of standing in a circle speaking words I did not feel was lower than the cost of explaining to seven proud, dying necromancers that their traditions were the scaffolding around an absence. • • • A few passages the exiles recited from memory. I set them down because I have a better memory than any of them did and some of these may be the last surviving record. From the Red Vigil’s founding charter, as carried by Geitheros and transmitted to Hera: “We are not the flame. We are not the shadow. We are the men who stand between the two and refuse to close their eyes. The flame will burn us and the shadow will swallow us and we will stand regardless, because the standing is the work, and the work is all that remains when faith has been stripped of its comforts.” From the oral tradition of the Red Priests, origin unknown, possibly pre-dating the founding of the clergy: “The dead do not grieve. The dead do not hope. The dead do not pray. This is their advantage over the living. A dead man who serves the wheel serves it without the distractions that make the living weak. Grief clouds the hand. Hope slows the blade. Prayer is a letter written to an address that does not exist. The dead man works.” From a passage attributed to Aelvarus, the first to hear Widukind speak, though I doubt the attribution: “The tree said its name and then it said nothing else, and in the nothing else was everything I needed to know. The name was enough. The name contained the doctrine. A tree that burns and does not crumble is a tree that suffers and does not end, and that is the condition of all living things in this world, and the condition will not change until the wheel stops, and the wheel will not stop until enough grit has been fed between its teeth to wear the axle through.” And from a prayer the exiles spoke over the dead, which I heard seven times, once for each of the old men as they died: “Your shard returns. Your name is spoken. Your mark remains on the skin of those who knew you. The wheel turns and you are in it now, part of the grinding, part of the wearing, closer to the whole than we who still stand above the deep. Go. Be gathered. Be ground. Be made part of the mending.” These passages meant a great deal to the men who carried them. They meant less to me. I understand what they provided. Community. Continuity. The sense that the work extends beyond the individual. I have never needed these things. The mechanics are sufficient. • • • The Memento Legatum. The tattoo tradition. Every Rh’thoraen scribes the legacy of their life across their body. Aspirations. Lineage. Covenants. Sacred scripts. Remember your legacy. A Rh’thoraen’s greatest shame is to be flayed of their skin. I carry the tradition in my own way. The red ink of the Widukind branches across my arms and chest, each line earned. No one has seen them. I wear long sleeves. I say good tidings. The whole of the Rh’thoraen tradition sits beneath the surface of a man the Empire believed was an alchemist. • • • I want to be clear about something. Rh’thoreanism is not a faith. Faith implies belief. Belief implies uncertainty. There is no uncertainty here. The Creator broke. The shards exist. The soul stream flows. The Veil thins. These are not articles of doctrine to be accepted or rejected at the pleasure of the devout. They are mechanics. As observable as gravity. As measurable as the flow of life force through a living body. A man does not need to believe in gravity to fall. He falls regardless. And the shards descend regardless. And the deep receives regardless. And the Provident Lord grows regardless of whether any man alive has ever heard his name. The Rh’thoraens on Yulthar are content to let death play out at its own pace. The exiles saw that the pace was insufficient. I saw it could be accelerated. But none of us invented the process. It has always existed. Every death that has ever occurred has released a shard into the deep. Whether the dying man believed in the Redlord or worshipped the canonist God or cursed all gods with his last breath. The shard releases. The deep receives. The Provident Lord grows. This is not faith. This is eventuality. The goal is to accelerate eventuality. I am not converting men. I am not building a church. The master is death. Death releases the shards. Death fills the deep. Death feeds the Provident Lord. A man who dies in a war he started for greed or honour is serving the Provident Lord as surely as I am. He will never know it. He does not need to. Every soldier who has ever killed another soldier has served. Every plague. Every famine. Every succession crisis. Every border skirmish. All of it. Service. Whether they know it or not. The canonists need believers. The Xionists need adherents. I need nothing. I need men to do what they have always done, which is live and fight and die. The machinery runs itself. I ensure it does not slow down. The exiles wanted to accelerate. I am the acceleration. And the Provident Lord grows. And the Veil holds, for now. And every death tips the balance one shard further toward restoration. • • • The Provident Lord is not a restored god. He is the Creator, awake. The Rh’thoraens use the word Demiurge because their texts are old and the old texts were written by men who understood the Creator as a craftsman, indifferent to his craft. I reject the word. A craftsman does not break himself to make his work. A craftsman stands apart from what he builds. The Fifth Lord did not stand apart. He became the work. He is the work. Every shard is him. Every soul is him. And when the shards are gathered and he wakes, he will not be indifferent. He will be the opposite of indifferent. He will be a God who has lived inside every life that was ever lived, who has suffered inside every death that was ever died, who knows what he creates because he has been what he created. The first creation was blind. The second will be made with open eyes and full knowledge of what it costs. The gathering is what wakes him. Death at scale is what feeds the gathering. The machinery I have spent thirty years building is what produces the death. And the gods, for all their stolen power, will have to be slain for their shards to return to the whole. Every last one. The largest pieces. Without them the Provident Lord cannot wake fully. The Fifth Lord grows. He stirs in the deep places. He reaches through the roots of the world the way the roots of the ashwood reach through the rift, blindly, patiently, with the certainty of a thing that does not need to see where it is going because it already knows. And with every death, every shard, every fragment that flows into the deep and settles into his growing mass, he draws closer to the moment when he will open his eyes and remember what he is. And when he does. When the last shard is gathered and the last god is slain and the last piece falls into place. The Provident Lord will be awake. Not restored to what he was. He will never be what he was. He will be something else. Something that knows. An aware God, a conscious God, a God who has lived inside every soul that ever suffered and who will create again with that suffering held in his hands, and the world that grows from his body will not carry the flaw because the flaw was ignorance and the ignorance is gone. And then men will take the light of gods and consume it. And the Veil will hold. And the Void will not pass. • • • To serve the Fifth Lord is to serve death. This is not euphemism. This is not poetry. This is the operational truth of the faith stripped of its liturgy and its scripture and its red cloaks and its old men weeping over clay tablets in a tomb. Death is the mechanism. Death releases the shards. Death fills the deep. Death feeds the Provident Lord. Every other element of the tradition, the rites, the markings, the Litany, the Naming, the ashwood and the brazier and the founding fire, all of it, every last observance and artefact, exists in service of the single act that matters, which is the ending of life so that the fragments it carried may return to the whole. All else is decoration. Necessary decoration, perhaps, for men who need ceremony to justify what they know to be true. But decoration nonetheless. He is represented by fire because he is the flame that will burn all things. Not the fire of destruction, which is petty and purposeless and the province of lesser minds. Not the fire of malice, which is Iblees’s domain and beneath contempt. The fire of Calor Mors. The warm death. The flame that does not consume to ruin but consumes to transform, the way a forge consumes ore to produce iron, the way a kiln consumes clay to produce stone. The Fifth Lord is the forge. Creation is the ore. And when the flame has done its work, when every impurity has been burned away and every shard has been reclaimed and every stolen piece has been wrested from the grasping hands of gods who never deserved to hold them, what remains will be new. Clean. Whole. A creation purged of the taint of Iblees, free of the curse that fractured mankind into races and scattered them across a world that was never meant to hold so many broken pieces. The fire is not punishment. The fire is the promise. Calor Mors. The warm death that precedes the warm birth. And the world that grows from the ashes will not carry the flaw, because the flaw was burned out of it, and we will be perfect. Free. This is the doctrine in its entirety, reduced to its simplest terms, as I would have Hera speak it if Hera were still here to speak: That which kills, serves the Fifth Lord. Every death is a shard released. Every shard released is a step toward the gathering. The soldier who falls in battle serves. The plague that sweeps a city serves. The mother who dies in childbed serves. None of them know it. None of them need to. The deep receives regardless of intent. That which steals souls and hoards them, hinders him. The gods who sit on the largest shards and refuse to relinquish them. The Aenguls and Daemons who have built their thrones on stolen fragments of a dead God and who will not let go. Every soul they trap, every shard they hold beyond the reach of the deep, is a piece of the Provident Lord that cannot return to him. They are the obstruction. They are the reason the gathering is not yet complete. They are the reason the fire has not yet come. That which borrows must know it must return. The necromancer who draws from the Heith-Hedran. The servant raised from the deep and set to work. The life-force redirected, the current disrupted, the warmth taken from the cycle and held in dead hands. All of it borrowed. All of it owed. And the debt is not abstract. It is not a metaphor for spiritual obligation. It is a mechanic. The borrowed force must flow back into the current. The raised servant must be released when the work is done. The disruption must be temporary, purposeful, and conducted with the understanding that every mina drawn against the Provident Lord’s inheritance will be repaid when the inheritance is claimed. A man who borrows and does not return is no different from a god who steals and will not let go. He is an obstruction. And obstructions are removed. Gravelord Adunakhor, Faithful Servant of the Fifth Lord 1875

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

Another chapter, surfaces from the underworld. . . Circulating to any who care to read the work of the lich. ON THE BOY FROM KAEDRIN Being a Chapter of Good Tidings “...And when the world shall listen, and when the world shall see, and when the world remembers, that world will cease to be.” Chronicle of Rh’thoraen Necromancy I was not always what I am. Kaedrin was a farming commonwealth, vassal to the Empire, sprawled across the western reaches beyond Haense. Wheat and barley and cattle and mud. A stagnant country where a man’s worth was weighed in bushels and sons, and I possessed neither in quantity. My soil was clay. My harvest was adequate. My name was Carrion, which the farmers acknowledged with a nod the way one acknowledges a headstone in a field one passes daily. They knew the word. They had long forgotten what it commemorated. The Commonwealth smelled of ploughed earth and woodsmoke and the damp that colonises stone when the masons have cut costs. Farmers gathered at market on Wednesdays to trade grain and grievances in equal measure. I stood among them, seventeen years old, and observed the mechanics of their fellowship. The laughter that passed between them like a signal fire. The hand upon the shoulder that communicated belonging. I could identify each gesture with precision. I could reproduce none of them. I had been studying this particular insufficiency for as long as memory permitted. I did not have companions. I had tenants who paid and left. Neighbours who were polite in the way farming folk are polite, which is serviceably, and without warmth. I had a house built for a family I did not have and I walked its corridors counting things, because counting was something I could do and doing it was better than standing still in the silence that gathers around a man the world has decided it has no use for. Hera came to my door in autumn. The fields had been cut and the stubble was grey and the crows were thick upon the eastern pasture. I remember the crows. Forty-seven. He was an elf. Old. Far older than anyone I had met in Kaedrin, where old meant sixty and he was something past that, something the face did not show but the eyes did. He wore black. Not the black of mourning or fashion but the black of a man who has worn the same colour so long it has stopped being a choice. His face was painted white. The paint was thick and careful and it sat on his skin like a second face laid over the first, and I understood at once that the paint was not decoration. It was practice. It was something he put on every morning the way I would later put on the wig. He offered to tutor me. Those were his words. No preamble. No account of who he was or what road had brought him to a farmer’s door in Kaedrin. He said: I would like to tutor you. As though it were the most mundane proposition in the world. I said yes. I did not ask in what. I did not ask why. I said yes because no one had offered me anything before, and because his eyes were steady, and because when he looked at me he did not look away after one or two or three seconds the way the farmers did. He held. I counted to nine before I stopped counting. He did not begin with the old knowledge. He began with mathematics. I had expected otherwise from a man who bore himself as Hera bore himself, with the gravity of someone who had outlived the relevance of most things he had witnessed. He gave me arithmetic. We sat at my kitchen table and he taught me to count with purpose. Not the compulsive enumeration I had practised since boyhood, fence posts and crows and seconds of eye contact catalogued to no end. He taught me to measure. To discern the ratios that govern the relations between things, and to read in those ratios a language more fundamental than any tongue spoken by men. Mathematics, he said, was the script in which the world was authored. The speech of men was merely commentary laid atop it. A man fluent in both could perceive what a man fluent in only one could not. Then philosophy. We read together by candlelight in the kitchen that had been built for a family and now held two. He brought texts in languages I could not read, and translated as we went, his dry voice turning foreign words into ideas that rearranged the inside of my head. The nature of knowledge. The nature of perception. Whether the world as men experience it bears any true resemblance to the world as it is. Hera did not explain things the way a teacher explains things. He dropped a sentence into the room and left it there. One night, late, the candle burned low, rain on the windows, the kitchen smelling of damp stone and tallow, he said, “The blind man and the seeing man stand in the same field. The blind man says it is empty. The seeing man says nothing, because who would he say it to.” Then he drank his tea and did not speak again for the rest of the evening. I sat with that for three days. On the third day I understood what he meant, or part of it, and when I told him he looked at me for a long time and said, “You are closer than most.” The highest praise he ever gave me. Closer than most. I did not sleep well during those months. I sat at the table long after he had gone to bed and I turned his fragments over in my head, trying to fit them together, trying to see the shape he saw. Whether my solitude was, as I had always believed, a deficiency. Or whether it was something else entirely. He never answered that question directly. He answered it by continuing to show up at my table every morning with another text and another silence and another fragment that fit into the growing shape of something I was not yet ready to name. Then alchemy. The properties of reagents. The interactions between substances. The precise measurements that yield specific effects. This was the first discipline that produced a result I could verify with my own senses. A compound either reacted or it did not. The outcome was consistent, repeatable, obedient to laws that did not warp according to who was present. No ambiguity. No secondary meaning. Only the substance and the method and the result. I loved alchemy the way other young men loved women or horses or the blade. It was the first thing in my life that did not lie to me. We talked long into the night. Every night. For months. Mathematics at the table with the candle guttering. Philosophy in the dark after the flame died, his voice arriving from across the room, the white paint on his face catching the last glow of the embers. Alchemy at dawn, in the lean-to behind the house that I had fitted as a workspace, the smell of reagents mixing with the smell of wet clay from the fields. He was patient. He was exacting. He never told me I was wrong without showing me why, and he never told me I was right without showing what I had missed. It was months before he touched the old knowledge. Months of laying foundation, stone by stone. I did not understand what he was building at the time. I understand now. He was teaching me how to think before he showed me what to think about. He was putting tools in my hands before he showed me the material. He was making certain, with the patience of a being who has centuries and knows it, that when I finally saw what he meant to show me, I could hold it without breaking. He told me, in time, where he came from. Not at once. Hera parcelled his past out across weeks and months, a sentence here, a detail there, and you assembled the shape of it yourself or you did not. He had loved a woman. He did not speak her name. She had lived on the distant shores of Yulthar, that godless land in the far east, a land of the dead where no child could be born and no ordinary seed could take root. She grew roses there. Gardens of them, climbing the stone walls, the salt air curling the petals inward so they looked like fists that would not open. Hera’s voice cracked when he spoke of them. A fracture in the cadence. A pause where no pause belonged. Then he continued as though nothing had occurred. She was lost. He did not say killed. He said lost, and in a place where death does not work as it should, that word carries a weight I will not attempt to describe. Hera did not describe it either. When I was initiated, Hera drew the first line of red ink on my wrist himself. The exiles watched from their circle. When it was done he placed a rose petal in my hand. Dried, ancient, faded to something between rust and dust, fragile enough that closing my fingers too hard would have destroyed it. He closed my hand around it gently and said nothing. I still have the petal. I sustain it each day. It sits in a glass case on my desk. The sole object in my possession maintained for sentiment rather than use. Everything I have built since has been an attempt to deserve it. Hera did not speak the way other men spoke. He spoke in fragments. The edges of larger statements, the rest of which he had decided you were not ready to hear. He would say something and then go silent and then say something else hours later that connected to the first in a way you had to work out on your own, and if you could not work it out he would not explain. He simply waited until you did. “His roots will bury deep into the earth,” he said to me once, early on, while we sat in my kitchen and I did not yet know what we were speaking of. He said it gazing out the window at the fields. I did not know who he referred to. He did not clarify. Weeks later he said, “The soil must be made ready,” and I understood he was still speaking of the same thing, and that the thing had a shape I could not yet discern but which he had been contemplating for a very long time. He taught me the way you teach a boy who takes everything apart. He did not lecture. He presented systems and let me pull them to pieces. The Aenguls and Daemons, the supposed shepherds and tormentors of the mortal world. He laid them out the way you lay out the parts of a clock and asked me what I saw. I saw self-interest. I saw beings who claimed impartiality while chasing their own designs. I saw a cosmos governed by creatures who demanded worship from mortals the way a landlord demands rent, and who gave nothing in return that they could not take back whenever they pleased. “The Way of the Primeval Man,” he called it. Xionism. The old belief, older than the Empire, older than the faith, older than the recorded memory of mankind. The conviction that the gods were not gods at all but parasites, and that the mortal powers, the arts the Church called abominations, were the true inheritance of man, stolen from the very daemon who had cursed them, turned against the divine order by men brave enough or desperate enough to try. He told me of the Old Lords. The first men to defy the gods. They had stolen necromancy from Iblees himself and used it to transcend their mortal forms, becoming the First Wraiths, unshackled from the curse, immune to the covenant that bound every descendant race to suffering. There were four. They had names. The names are not important here. What is important is that they failed. They stole the fire and they burned for it and they scattered across the planes and the work they began was left unfinished. Four lords. Four paths. Four failures. The Rh’thoraen faith waits on the fifth. The provident lord. The Red Lord. The son of God. “His roots will bury deep into the earth,” Hera said again. “And when they have reached the bottom of things, the earth will split, and through the split the light will come, and the light will be terrible, and the light will be the last thing this world sees before it becomes something else.” I asked him who the Red Lord was. He looked at me with the white-painted face and the old eyes and he said nothing for a very long time. Then he said, “The soil must be made ready.” He took me to meet them on a night without moon. We walked for hours through country I did not recognise, south and east of Kaedrin, past the last of the farmland and into terrain that bore no name on any map, through woods that smelled of copper and old stone. Hera did not speak during the walk. I did not speak either. I was counting my footsteps. Four thousand, two hundred and seventeen. The tomb was cut into a hillside. The entrance was narrow. The stone was old in the way that bedrock is old, without apology, without announcement. Inside, the air was dry and thick and tasted of dust and something beneath the dust that I did not have a word for then and have a word for now. It tasted of death. Not rotting death. Still death. Death that has been dead so long it has become a condition rather than an event. Seven of them. All old men. I had expected something else. Something grand. Something formidable. What I found was seven old men in a dusty chamber lit by four candles, sitting in a circle on the stone floor with their legs crossed and their hands upon their knees. Their robes were grey. Their skin was weathered and folded like parchment that has been creased and recreased until the creases have become the dominant feature. And on their arms and necks and faces, lines of red ink, red tattoos worked into that ancient skin in a script I could not read, and the tattoos shifted in the candlelight, and I knew it was the candlelight doing it and not the ink, and I noted it regardless. The exiles of Rh’thor. Followers of the missing prophet Geitheros, banished from their homeland for practising the very art their faith was built upon. Their numbers had been harrowed. Seven old men in a dusty tomb. They had not taught many. A shame. That was going to be their undoing. An entire tradition, centuries of accumulated wisdom, carried in the bodies of seven men who were all closer to death than they were to the day they received their first marks. If Hera had not found me, if I had not walked through that narrow entrance on a moonless night, the whole of it might have died in that chamber and no one in the world would have noticed. And among them, at the edge of the circle, not quite part of it but not outside it either, a boy. Younger than the rest by decades. His name was Thales. He was quiet the way stone is quiet. He sat and he listened and his face gave nothing away. I took to him at once, which was rare for me. With most people, trust is something I assemble from observed parts over time. With Thales it simply appeared, whole, without assembly. I offered to house him afterward. I told him he could stay with me in Kaedrin, in the house that was too large for one person. He accepted. He stayed. He stayed true, which is a thing I can say about very few souls in my life and which I say about Thales without qualification. None of them stood when we entered. None of them spoke. Eight pairs of eyes turned to me and held. I counted the seconds. They kept accumulating. No one looked away. The silence in that tomb was nothing like the silence of Kaedrin. The silence in Kaedrin was the silence of people who had nothing to say to me. This was the silence of men who had been saying the same things for centuries and were deciding whether I was worth saying them to. The oldest of them spoke. His face was more tattoo than skin, red lines nesting around his eyes like the roots of something that had been growing there for a very long time. He addressed Hera first, in a tongue I did not know. Hera answered. Then the old man turned to me. “What do you see,” he said, in Common, “when you look at the world.” Not what I thought. Not what I felt. What I saw. The distinction mattered. I had been making it my entire life without anyone acknowledging it existed. I told him. I told him I saw connections. Systems. The way a man’s fear connected to his debts connected to his wife’s illness connected to the physician who could cure her connected to the lord who employed the physician connected to the trade route that funded the lord’s estate. I told him I perceived these things without effort. Without cessation. Without the ability to stop. The old men listened. None interrupted. None shifted. They listened the way Frederick would later listen, the way Hera listened. As a discipline rather than a courtesy. When I finished, the oldest looked at Hera and said something in the old tongue, and Hera nodded, and something passed between them that I filed for later examination. Then the old man said, “The world is a machine. You have seen this. Most men live inside the machine and do not know it is a machine. You stand outside it and watch the gears. This is what you are. This is what we are. And we have been standing outside for a very long time, watching it grind, working to bring it to a stop.” He spoke of the Red Lord. The provident one. The son of God. The one the four failed lords had been clearing the way for since before the recorded memory of the descendant races. He would gather what had been scattered. He would end what had been broken. He would remake what could not be repaired. The exiles of Rh’thor were his heralds. They viewed necromancy as a misery, a blight, a hex, and they practised it anyway, because the blight was the tool, and the tool was necessary, and the work was larger than comfort or cleanliness or the approval of men who did not understand what was at stake. I sat in that tomb for three days. They taught me the fundaments. The fracturing of the soul-planes. The curse of Iblees running through every descendant race like rot through timber. The absent Creator. The scattered afterlives. The promise that all of it, every broken shard, could be gathered and restored and made whole, if someone possessed the patience and the will and the stomach for what the gathering required. On the third day Hera laid us on the slabs. Thales had been sitting across from me in the candlelight for three days and we had not spoken. I did not know him before the tomb. I do not know what road brought him there. We lay side by side on the stone, which was cold, and the old men stood around us in their circle, and Hera stood over us, and he did not explain what was about to happen. He cut us open. I will not describe the full procedure because the details serve no purpose and because there are things the body remembers that the mind will not put into words. What I will say is this. He brought us to the edge. Death. Not the idea of death. Not a symbolic death, not a ritual approximation. The actual edge. He opened our bodies with a blade that had been used for this purpose for longer than the Empire has existed, and he held us at the border between living and not, and he kept us there, balanced on that line, while he spoke words in a tongue that was old when Yulthar was young, and the candles flickered, and the red tattoos on the old men’s faces moved in the light, and I could no longer tell whether it was the candlelight or whether the ink itself was alive. The pain was absolute. I have endured many things since. Broken ribs. The transformation. The long, grinding process of undeath. None of it compared to what Hera did to me on a stone slab in a tomb south of the farmlands of Kaedrin. He took me apart. He showed me what I looked like on the inside. And then he put me back together and the mending was worse than the opening because you feel every seam closing and you know that the seams will never be invisible again. Then he pulled us back. Thales and I, gasping on the slabs, covered in our own blood, shaking, weeping, alive. Barely. He pulled us from the edge and set us down on the living side of the line and he drew a mark on each of our wrists with a needle dipped in red ink. One line. The ink was warm. Warmer than it should have been. It settled into the skin the way something settles when it has found the place it was always meant to occupy. The scars from the cutting never fully healed. They marred my mortal body for the rest of my natural life, white lines across my chest and stomach where Hera had opened me and looked inside and decided I was worth closing back up. I wore long shirts. High collars. The wig covered the face. The clothing covered the rest. No one saw. My body became a vessel for processing life force that day. Whatever Hera had done on that slab, whatever he had opened and closed and rearranged inside me, it had changed the way my flesh took sustenance. Anything but the most dense was consumed before it reached me. Bread, fruit, grain, wine, the staples of Kaedrin, the things the farmers lived on, all of it turned to ash on my tongue. The body burned through it and took nothing. It needed something heavier. Something closer to the source. I developed a craving for meat. Human was always best. Raw. But others would suffice. Elf, lamb, calf. Wine was vinegar unless it was made from a living thing, pressed from something that had bled. The farmers sat at their tables and ate their bread and drank their wine and tasted what they tasted, and I sat among them and chewed and swallowed and tasted dust, and smiled, and nobody wondered why the young lord never finished his plate. It is amusing, when I consider it. I received my tattoos, the red ink of the Rh’thoraen tradition worked into my arms over the years that followed, line by line, mark by mark, as I earned each one. And not a soul ever thought to look beneath my sleeve. “This is the beginning,” Hera said to us both. “The rest you will earn.” I earned it. Every line. Every mark. Every secret those old men carried in that dry tomb south of the farmlands. It took years. The testing did not stop. I did not break. And in time the exiles died, one by one, the way old men die when they have been carrying a tradition too heavy for their numbers, and the things they knew passed to me and to Thales, and the tomb emptied, and we carried it all forward into a world that those seven men had been watching from the outside for so long that the watching had become the whole of their existence. I owe Hera my life. He came to a boy drowning in a kingdom of wheat and mud and showed him that the drowning was sight, that the alienation was a gift, that the cold and relentless attention that rendered him strange among the farmers of Kaedrin was the very quality the work demanded. “His roots will bury deep into the earth,” Hera said once more, the last time I saw him, standing at the edge of my property where the crows gathered on the stubble. He was looking at me when he said it. Not at the field. At me. I did not understand then. I understand now. And for that, Hera. I thank you. And I will bring us to providence. O.C Dated 1874

Another manuscript, spreads through the underworld. . . ON DEBTS AND FAVOURS Being a Chapter of Good Tidings “The man who provides for another man’s needs without being asked holds a handle that the other does not even know exists.” Frederick Armas, over a glass of water I was twenty-three the first time I understood how debt works. Not the kind recorded in ledgers. The other kind. The kind that dissolves the moment you speak its name. Frederick was drinking tea. I was not drinking anything. We had been in his study for an hour. He was explaining the Cabinet, which he had built with his own hands and fifteen years of labor no one acknowledged. He explained it the way a craftsman explains a joint. Where the weight falls. Where the wood is thin. Where a determined man could pry it open. I was disassembling it in my mind while he spoke. I have always done this. Every structure I encounter, I take apart. Every person, every institution, every conversation. I find the seams. I note which pieces bear weight and which are decorative. Frederick recognized this quality in me before I had language for it. He said once that most men look at a clock and see the time. I look at a clock and see the gears. I remember the angle of his head when he said it. I catalogued his expression as approval, because I had taught myself which arrangements of the face correspond to which sentiments, even if I do not experience those sentiments in quite the way others seem to. At the end of the hour he stopped. He rose, crossed to the sideboard, poured a glass of water, and placed it before me. I looked at it. I did not touch it. “You have been here an hour,” he said. “No one offered you a drink. You noticed. You did not ask.” He waited. Frederick could do that. Most men treat silence as a wound that requires dressing. Frederick treated it as an instrument. “Because asking reveals need,” I said. “And need transfers power.” I thought this was clever. I was twenty-three. “Correct,” he said. “And entirely wrong.” He pushed the glass toward me. “Every man has needs. Water, coin, status, someone who remembers his name at the end of a long day. These are not weaknesses. They are handles. And the man who meets another man’s need, quietly, without ceremony, without the other man feeling that something has been placed on a ledger, that man holds a handle the other does not know is there.” He pointed at the glass. “I just gave you water. You did not ask. You would have sat here three more hours with a dry throat before admitting you needed something from me. And now you have the water, and you feel. What.” I considered this longer than he expected. I could tell because his brow shifted, which is what mild surprise looks like on Frederick’s face. A quarter of an inch. I had catalogued it. “Noticed,” I said. “Noticed.” He set down his tea. “Not grateful. You do not use words like that. But noticed. Someone saw what you needed before you said it. That feeling is worth more than any figure in any ledger, because a debt has terms, and when the terms are met the relationship ends. But the feeling of being noticed has no terms. The man who feels it does not believe he owes you anything. He believes you are kind. And kindness is the only thing in this world that collects interest without the borrower knowing he is paying.” I drank the water. I think about that glass most days. Forty years now. • • • Here is what I did with it. There was a captain in the ISA named Vetter. Transferred to the Palace from the Third Brigade in the dead of winter. Cold quarters. A rotation no one bothered to explain. Staff who received him with the particular courtesy reserved for men who have not yet earned the right to be spoken to directly. I learned his name on the first day. I learn every name on the first day. I collect. Who owes what to whom. Who is ailing. Whose marriage is sound and whose is not. What a man’s children are called and where they are schooled. I have done this since boyhood. I cannot stop. Frederick identified this compulsion early and judged it useful rather than unsettling, which is why he is the subject of this chapter and the others who noticed the same trait are not. I learned Vetter’s mother was ill. He mentioned it to another officer over mess. That officer mentioned it to a clerk. The clerk was one of mine. Most of the clerks were mine. I sent a physician. A real one. The medicine was sound. The fee was drawn from funds that exist nowhere in writing. Vetter’s mother recovered. He attributed it to Providence. No one traced it to the Governor. No one was meant to. Three months later I required the eastern approach to the Palace unobserved for forty minutes on a Tuesday evening. I did not ask Vetter. In a routine meeting on household security I observed, as one observes weather, that the eastern side felt thinly patrolled after dark. Vetter corrected the deficiency. He was performing his duties. He was pleased to be performing them, because the Governor knew his name, enquired after his family, and had once provided a tincture that eased the burden of the night watch. The tincture was genuine medicine. I do not poison my instruments. That is waste, and I have never had tolerance for waste. Three minutes of preparation purchased twenty years of a man who adjusted patrol routes whenever I mentioned an inefficiency. Fourteen times he did this. Fourteen times something passed through the Palace that should not have been there. He never enquired what. He never thought to. He was a conscientious man solving problems his Governor had identified, and his Governor had been kind to him, and that was sufficient. I wished his mother well. The medicine was good. The kindness was genuine. Men will read this and conclude the kindness was a pretense. It was not. Every kindness I have extended in my life has been real. That is the mechanism. A false kindness is eventually detected, and the detection destroys everything built upon it. A genuine kindness is never questioned, because there is nothing beneath it to discover. The kindness was real. The purpose was also real. Frederick taught me that these are not in conflict. Most men believe they are. Most men are mistaken about most things. • • • Now the part Frederick would not have sanctioned. Frederick employed this method in service of the Empire. He built its Cabinet, its Diet, its networks of intelligence, and maintained them through a thousand small kindnesses, each one genuine, each one holding a handle the recipient never knew was there. He was masterful at this. The finest practitioner I have encountered. And he did it because he believed the Empire merited his devotion. I held no such belief. The Empire was a mechanism for the production of suffering. It performed this function by design. The curse is in the grain. But the method is the method. I used the same one. Precisely the same. Only the application differed. When you attend to a man’s needs long enough, quietly, without presenting a bill, you cease to be his benefactor. You become part of the architecture of his life. He stops perceiving you the way he stops perceiving the walls of his house. You are simply there. You are the reason things hold together. And when someone moves to take you away, the man does not pause to weigh the merits of your removal. He resists. Not from calculation. From something deeper and older than calculation. The Solicitor General investigated me three times. Three times. Acquitted. Twice the evidence was adequate. More than adequate. But the men who sat in judgement. Their mothers had received physicians. Their children had received commissions. Their wives had been made welcome at gatherings where welcome is earned, and I had ensured they earned it without effort. Small attentions. A name recalled at the proper moment. A tincture for a headache. A door held. A word placed in the correct ear at the correct hour. A patrol route adjusted so that it passed a man’s home more frequently after I learned his daughter walked alone at night. None of them reasoned: I cannot condemn the Governor because the Governor attended to my mother. They reasoned: the evidence must be insufficient. They reasoned: this must be a misunderstanding. They arrived at whatever conclusion permitted the world to remain as it was. The world as it was suited them. I had made certain of that. The third acquittal. The Solicitor General issued a public statement. Ostromir Carrion does not, and did not, have direct ties to the accused. I read it at my desk. In the margin, small enough to require a lens, I wrote: Once more acquitted. Then I drank my tea. I have not tasted tea in eleven years. The body no longer processes it. But the cup is warm and the ritual persists, and I have found that the rituals outlast the substances they were built around. The wig operates on the same principle. A great many things about me operate on this principle. I keep a file for observations of this nature. It is labelled patterns I have noticed in myself but do not understand. It grows most years. They reopened the investigation only after my departure. After the kindnesses ceased. After the glasses went unrefilled and the tinctures undelivered and the names unremembered. The Inspector-General published the evidence. All of it. I observed this from beyond the veil. I was not surprised. Frederick had explained the mechanism precisely. When the lender departs, the interest ceases, and the borrower perceives for the first time the weight of what he has been carrying. But by then the account is settled. The patrol routes were adjusted. The things that required moving were moved. The work was accomplished. Vetter remains at the Palace. He still takes the tincture. He has not connected any of the fourteen adjustments to anything that occurred on those evenings. He will not. Vetter performs his duties well. He does not ask why. • • • Frederick gave me the glass of water. I took what he taught me and I used it to dismantle the thing he spent his life constructing. He would not have approved. I consider this sometimes, in the late hours, when there is no one left to perform for and the only company is the skull on the shelf that used to be Gino. I believe Frederick would have been angry. And then I believe he would have understood, because Frederick understood the nature of tools, and tools do not concern themselves with the purposes they serve. The glass and the wig. Both from the same man. I have carried both longer than he drew breath. I bid you Good tidings, Frederick. Truly. May I see you again in providence. O.C. 1866

A Series of manuscripts spreads, through the underworld. . . PROLOGUE Being a Preface to the Collected Works of Ostromir Carrion I am dead, but hardly gone. That much should be established at the outset. I am a lich. They killed me more than once. Each time I returned. Eventually I dispensed with the theatre of mortality altogether. The body does not age. The mind does not dull. The will does not bend. I have outlasted every man who tried to put me down, and their bloodlines thin while mine thickens, and I am still here, eternal. They gave me a funeral. It was a fine affair. My daughter brought chrysanthemums. The Countess collapsed. That wretched Edward Napier came to the infirmary where my body lay and cut into it in front of my family, my wife, my children, my grandchildren, all of them watching this man take a blade to their patriarch on the slab, convinced he would find what he had always suspected. He found nothing. I had seen to that years before the thought ever crossed his miserable mind. I ruined him in the end. It is funny, when I think about it. Napier gave me my world the moment he signed my ensign commission. The Emperor came as well. He stood over the casket. He mourned, or performed mourning. I was near enough to read his face, and his face was careful. I spoke to him afterward, from beyond my grave. Briefly. I believe we both knew what I was. I believe he had known for some time. And I believe he understood that knowing and acting are different things entirely, and that acting against me would have cost him a great deal more than it would have cost me. So he did not act. He grieved. He returned to his throne, and I had assumed mine. No Count rules forever, they said. Perhaps not. But I am no longer a Count. • • • I was Ostromir Carrion. Count of Dobrov. Baron of Woldzmir. Governor of the Imperial Palace. Court Physician. Alchemist. Lieutenant of the Third Brigade. I sat in their Commons. I served on their Cabinet. I hosted their Diet, introduced their Emperor to the assembled lords at the opening, and closed it out at the end. The High Pontiff performed my wedding. The Solicitor General investigated me three times. Three acquittals. Twice the evidence was sufficient. The verdicts came regardless. I held other titles. Older. Heavier. I will not name them here. Those who know have no need of the reminder. Those who do not will learn in time, or they will not, and either way it is no concern of mine. I rotted the Eighth Empire from the inside. I sat in its Cabinet, healed its sick, governed its Palace, hosted its Diet, smiled at its Emperor. They thanked me. They promoted me. They invited me to their weddings and their children’s baptisms. And while they did all of this I was hollowing every institution I touched until nothing remained but the shape of the thing, intact from the outside, gangrenous within. They gave me a county for my trouble. • • • What follows is not the story of my life. There are chapters of that story that do not belong in a manual, and others I will not lay before strangers. Nor is it an apology. I have studied apologies. I have administered them when the cost was low and the return was high. They are a tool. I do not feel the need to use one here. Nor is it a confession. The Church had its chance. The High Pontiff married me. The clergy sat at my table, ate my food, praised my healing, and never once, in thirty years, suspected what was sitting across from them in a powdered wig with a warm handshake. If they could not see it then, I will not spell it out for them now. What follows is a collection of manuscripts, letters, and private writings. The Empire I describe no longer functions. The men who opposed me are in the ground. I am at my desk. Draw your own conclusions. • • • Since my departure I have been compiling my papers. There is a great deal of material. Thirty years of correspondence, marginalia, ledgers kept in locked drawers in handwriting so small you will need a lens. Who owed what. Who feared what. Who could be moved. I wrote it all down, every name, every debt, every secret, on a chain around my neck against skin that grew colder year by year for reasons the court never thought to investigate. Someone taught me, once. He saw what I was before I did and chose to arm me rather than shun me. I will write of him at length in these texts. Most do not have what I had. Most sit alone in small rooms and make do, or they do not make do, and they are forgotten. These writings are for them. The skull on my desk belonged to Gino. My Deputy Mayor. Dead now, properly, in the way that lasts. His eyes still catch the light when I speak to him. I speak to him most evenings. The dead do not fill silence with noise. If you are reading this you are ambitious. Good. Ambition is the sole quality I cannot furnish. Everything else is contained in what follows. And with that, I bid you reader, Good tidings. O.C. 1865

Probably you Laeo. Raziel did have a certain affinity for his wayward uncle that Anordal never fully understood but appreciated.

Lol ofc, you have my whatsapp.

Ostromir Carrion, my Orenian Nobleman turned Necromancer and extremely corrupt politician.

o7 I enjoyed a couple groups tbh. My favorite I think was the entire Josephite Mafia @Nectorist. It was the last time I could really get immersed in human roleplay and I think was a sort of unique, wig wearing, golden era. Otherwise, I'll always remember being a noob in Geoboy/Swgrclan's @Swgrclan @Swgrclaŋ's necromancer coven. I also enjoyed leading my own necromancer coven, though a lot of the players were the same as the aformentioned Josephite Mafia. I was an azdrazi oddly enough before there was much of a "community", My character independently had a very long relationship with Azdromoth played by Matt. I liked how mission focused they were priorly, with the grand azdrazi plan of using humanity as a weapon to achieve azdromoth's ascension. Overall? Solid and fun experience. I enjoyed playing with Bagley, @KBR @julius @Jentos @Cepheidand @Deer__. Geoboy66 was a very large force in me enjoying necromancy, he was a very strong roleplayer and I always enjoyed the WC3 like necromancy. I have a personal philosophy of creating large groups and trying to get lots of people involved, and necromancy always allowed you to make zombie armies in service of some esoteric aims, which catered to my playstyle and let me build some villains that I thought were memorable. Imo, the best antagonists are created when they actually have agendas, and want to win in their own unique ways. Also shoutout to @KBRfor actually helping me get necro and being a GOON back in those days.

I think back in the day we played very con-current characters and all of the noobery made it so much better and more nostalgic to me tbh. I liked the Dobrov story arch the most tbh, and how Ostromir's legacy impacted Moliana and that entire generation of Carrions. Otherwise, just all of the goofy stuff we'd get up to with Nemir and a bunch of my mage dudes. Irl? I express creativity in microsoft excel and working on my startup. Hopefully there will be more soon.

Big W to you dude, been a blast to game! I think I enjoyed Ostromir Carrion's story-arch the most @squakhawk.It was an arc I was very involved with and allowed myself to get immersed in one last time. It had a satisfying conclusion and I think I left a positive impact on necromancy in the long run. It also went into very good hands with @femurlord.

When I first joined LOTC, I couldn't have imagined that I'd be here in some capacity, close to 10 years later. And what a ride it has been. I've seen the server evolve through countless cycles, met many friends and had some of the most fun experiences in any game on this platform. Unfortunately, I've not really been able to get into the game again and think that my time on here has run its course. So, like many others before me, I'd like to leave off on an AMA and express my thanks to the many, many friends I've had the pleasure of gaming with over the years. You all know my discord, and I'm reachable there.

Screaming into the forums at 1am. It probably won’t happen. But it would be nice for the staff to acknowledge the addiction element of lotc and or make any effort to fix it.

Other than making a tiny dent in the epidemic of addiction based games sweeping Gen z, and a. But. Then again. This wouldn’t exactly be massive.

I wonder if you could sue lotc. There are many documented cases of: grooming Addiction uncapped gaming hours catering to minors I know that there are plenty of other games that we’re getting hit quite hard with this.

Hard to do. Lotcs appeal is the lore, history, and setting. The reason it works is there is actively an addicted network of children who end up developing friendships with eachother and then keeping eachother trapped. If you leave lotc you lose your friends. It’s always available too with discord. There are also plenty of stories of people who ruin their lives on this game because they play 40+ hours a week. Reach that kind of critical mass would be very hard now. And I’d argue unethical, due to the aforementioned addiction based element.

Not all businesses are run well, and this one was created kind of by accident. Creator, forget if it was tythus, wanted a server and made a roleplay game, it built up, and changed with the times and was turned into what it is today. It’s a game built on addiction. They make a lot of money on the winter sale etc, and try to cut as many costs as possible to sustain themselves. This is partially why lotc’s main design detective is conflict adverse. It’s easier to run with a volunteer labor force. If it was not profitable, it would not run.

Lotc is a business. It’s not meant to generate narrative, it’s meant to keep you online and engaged as long as possible to create critical mass and in turn, draw in more profits. war server? Thats expensive. Conflict? Makes players leave. the discords are apart of this because they keep you constantly engaged and therefor, generating activity.

Mmm. Petra Turis

An ancient lich stirs in the shadows, reading memoirs with blazing eyes. Even in these times past, there was a twitch, a passing memory, a fleeting hint of interest in times long past.