B5 Chapter 53 – Dead Progress

Visions swam through Tyron’s mind, a dizzying kaleidoscope of images and impressions that seemed to stab deep into his brain, leaving behind tiny shards of knowledge he couldn’t interpret. He saw magick, folding and twisting, meshing and weaving with creatures who lived and died. He saw the transition from life to death, and the reverse. He saw rebirth, he saw annihilation, and he saw the immutable material that connected them.

Again and again the visions flashed, a disorienting and violent storm that wracked his mind and lashed his spirit. When it was finally over, Tyron awoke feeling drained, his head throbbing with pain.

What had just happened?

It took him a moment to realise he was lying on his back on the floor of his tent, the rough carpet scratching at his back through the robe he wore. When had he taken off his armour? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember a lot of things. When he tried to rise, pain wracked him and weakness clung to his limbs, causing him to fall back, wheezing. What was happening to him? He hadn’t felt this weak since his Awakening.

His mind raced, fear sparking a burst of energy that cleared away the worst of the fog.

He knew this feeling—it was familiar territory. If he was calm and thought about it rationally, he could discern what had happened. His throat was parched, his eyes as dry as sand, his head a mess of twisting thoughts and theories. His stomach was a hollow shell, chewing on itself, and there was precious little energy left in him.

How long since he’d eaten anything? Days at least, possibly as much as a week. Maybe two.

After a few deep breaths, he pulled himself up to a seated position, rolled over, then started crawling towards his pack. It looked as if he’d collapsed out of his chair when the vision had taken him, so at least he didn’t have to go far to reach his bag at the end of the table.

On his hands and knees, he reached inside and rummaged for the waterskin.The mighty gold ranked Necromancer who brought down the Western Province and spilled the Divine Blood of the Five, crawling on all fours like a dog. He would have laughed if he had the energy. At least Dove wasn’t there to see it.

Seized by panic, he froze and turned to look around the tent. No, he was sure of it, Dove wasn’t here. Blood and bone, he would never have lived it down.

Waterskin in hand, he collapsed to his backside and brought it up to his lips, drinking deeply. An instant later he nearly spat it out again. The water was truly foul. Thicker than it should be, almost as if it were turning to some sort of sludge, it tasted like rainwater running off an open grave. He forced himself to swallow and nearly retched. After several deep breaths, he drank more, forcing the disgusting liquid down his throat. When the waterskin was empty, he threw it to the side and groaned as his stomach roiled. Acid burned the back of his throat, and he feared for a moment it wouldn’t stay down. As the seconds ticked past, he became more confident, and reached for his pack once more.

The stored rations, mostly dried meat and hard bread, weren’t looking much better than the water. Crumbling and blackened, it was clear the suffocating atmosphere of death had done its work, yet he didn’t have a choice.

Another deep breath, then he forced himself to eat, shoving the food into his mouth and choking it down with the bare minimum of chewing. He was forced to immediately clench his neck and try to hold on as his stomach protested even more vigorously. If he were ever to try and eat a week-old corpse, he imagined this was what it would taste like.

It took a few minutes for things to settle, and he finally felt ready to pull himself up to his feet. The world swayed for a few moments before it finally stabilised and he was comfortable walking the two steps it took for him to reach his seat.

Even just that was enough to make his head spin.

Honestly, he could never remember feeling this weak, not after any of his work binges. The Realm of the Dead was having a stronger effect on him than he’d thought possible. Even the protection of the Three wasn’t enough to stop the overwhelming Death Magick from infecting his flesh. The food had gone foul, the water was undrinkable, it would be worse than useless from this point forward.

Without eating or drinking, with his own strength being sapped away, how much longer could he possibly stay here? Not long. If he waited too much, he wouldn’t even have the strength to get back to his home realm.

What had he even been doing that was enough for the Unseen to force a vision onto him? Which of his mysteries had he triggered, or was it a new one?

Blearily, he looked down at his desk, trying to piece together his jumbled thoughts.

What he saw was a sphere. It looked as if it were made of glass, with two coloured energies swirling within like smoke. They intermingled and coiled around each other before separating, swirling around the edges of the sphere and then repeating the cycle, coming back together in the centre. Tyron stared at it for a moment, genuinely unsure just what he was looking at.

His eyes flicked to the pages on the table, hoping they might provide some insight, but if anything, they made things worse. Rather than neat, legible notes and theories, what he found were borderline insane ramblings and statements. The more he read, the more confused he became. Every page he looked at seemed to contradict the last. The few things he could read that actually made sense were utterly disconnected from each other.

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Had he actually gone mad?

It took almost thirty minutes of carefully piecing together the trail of his own thoughts before he began to grasp just what it was he had been trying to do. Studying souls had been his purpose. If he dug into the older notes and scribblings in his books, he’d been running every kind of test and experiment he could remember, and then inventing new ones, pushing as fast and as far as he could as he desperately sought to understand the Realm of the Dead and the souls within it.

He’d sent out his minions to collect more several times, a desperate hunt for materials to fuel his experimentation.

After that, things started to get… strange. Looking at his own writing, Tyron struggled to understand what had possessed him. He’d been investigating the mixture of energies, the process by which a soul was transformed into this new state.

He shuffled through a few pages, eyes widening at what he saw.

At some point, he’d even gone so far as to start ripping souls out of revenants so he could study them. He hastily rummaged through the pages and was relieved to see the damage had stopped at ten.

Ten revenants wasn’t something he was happy to lose, but he supposed he should have been grateful it wasn’t more. No one knew better than Tyron how obsessive he could get when he was focused.

Still… ten souls, and just what had he done with them?

Scanning through the scribbled notes and ravings, he was able to piece together what had happened. Five of them had been… destroyed in the course of his experiments, the other five had been successfully transformed to the state of the souls he’d found in this realm.