B5 Chapter 40 – Construction

It wasn’t easy to create a ritual that would pierce the Dimensional Veil to another realm. A great deal of power was required, the spellwork had to be incredibly precise and messing it up could create fluctuations that had very serious consequences. At worst, one could tear an opening to the Abyss and let through something that would promptly dissolve the body of the caster into a fine mist.

Tyron wasn’t keen on fighting an Abyssal just because his work was poor, so he worked exhaustively to ensure that his ritual was flawless.

That would be enough if he was trying to reach a normal place. Though, who could say what ‘normal’ was when it came to dimensional magick? The Realm of the Dead was deep and dark. Getting to it, physically no less, would require incredibly powerful, incredibly precise magick. A single error would rip a hole in the weave and have disastrous consequences.

For something as complex as this, with so many components, each needing to be perfect, it was much better to create a permanent structure and affix the sigils and arrays necessary to it directly.

Such a thing would naturally require a huge amount of magickally attuned materials and skilled craftspeople to create, but Tyron was fortunate enough that both of those were near to hand.

The wasteland was quite literally covered in crystallised magick, enough to make the entire doorway out of it if they wanted to, and in Master Willhem and Master Halfshard, he had the two finest Arcanists in the Western Province.

“How long is it going to take?” he asked.

The Demi-lich who had once been Master Willhem hovered by his side, his skeletal feet hanging down until his toes just barely cleared the stone floor, a staff in his grip and the rest of his form concealed by a robe he had started wearing. The Necromancer strongly suspected Annita had been responsible for the dresscode. It can’t have been pleasant looking at her former master floating around, his ribs and glowing red marrow crystals on display.

“Days. A week, perhaps. It’s hard to say,” Willhem rasped.

There was no shortage of labour, since Tyron had put several hundred skeletons on the job of assembling the physical arch, all under the direction of a surviving Stoneworker. The actual dimensions of the structure weren’t overly important, as long as they permitted the sigils and arrays to be placed in the correct locations relative to each other.

That was the time-consuming part. The two masters were the only ones working on it, and they needed to engrave thousands of sigils directly onto the stone itself, as well as onto the cores which would be embedded in the structure. It was a huge amount of work.

As an undead, Master Willhem could work effectively around the clock, never needing to eat or sleep, but Annita Halfshard, while a workaholic to rival Tyron himself, was not so resilient.

“It should be fine,” Tyron said after considering for a moment.

The Empire would move more of their army to the West in order to put the rebellion down with an emphatic blow. They might move quickly, but they couldn’t be moved instantaneously. He had a little time to play with. Not much, but a little.

If all went well, then the Golden Legion would never arrive in Granin at all. Tyron would take the fight to them instead.

“I’ll come by to help when I can. I have another project I’m working on right now.”

“The wyvern? That will be difficult, even for you.”

How the heck had Willhem managed to find out about it? Were his minions sharing secrets amongst themselves?

“I think I have it in hand,” Tyron said with casual confidence.

He’d been awake for three days straight working on the final touches to his design for the wings. The structure of the ligaments and muscles was completely different from what he was used to, but he thought it was a vast improvement over what Arhinan’s apprentice had created.

The only way to find out for sure was to create the minion. Tyron had no doubt he would find hundreds of flaws once he actually got to see the thing move, but he was determined to start from as thorough a base as he possibly could. After all, who knew how many of these monsters he would get his hands on?

They’d been scouring the wasteland for months, his undead and the Slayers, and as far as Tyron knew, this was the first one that had been found. It seemed they were far from common.

Excusing himself, Tyron turned and walked away, leaving Master Willhem to return to his first most prized apprentice, who had pointedly ignored Tyron while he was there. On either side, the high walls of the temple rose, with the crumbling granite pillars lining the central hallway. Perhaps it was blasphemous for Tyron to create his gateway here, but the Dark Ones had done little to earn his goodwill lately.

They’d ultimately agreed with his proposal, though he found the spiteful posturing that seemed fundamental to their nature grating. The fact that they needed him at all seemed to grate on them, though he couldn’t blame them for a level of arrogance. They were gods, born divine at the dawn of the world, and powerful enough to squash him like a bug.

Stolen story; please report.

Exiting the main floor of the temple, Tyron walked down the steps to the street below, where his latest prize was waiting for him in the street. His eyes gleamed with a hungry light as he took in the wyvern corpse. A small crowd had gathered, as it wasn’t every day that the remains of a large monster were hauled on a cart through the middle of the city by a team of skeletal horses. The curious onlookers began to melt away once Tyron showed himself, their desire to know overshadowed by their nervousness toward the necromancer.

For his part, he paid them no mind. Although his reputation was rising among the survivors, as rumours that he may have ‘solved’ rifts forever continued to spread, they were still afraid of him. If it kept them out of his business, he didn’t mind that one bit.

Eyes gleaming, Tyron walked up to the cart and examined the wyvern more closely. Killed almost a week ago, the beast was well rotten. Interestingly, he didn’t think there were many maggots eating into the sagging flesh, since the lack of vegetation and life in Granin meant the fly population was virtually nil.