Other POV
Somewhere far across the black seas on the northern borders. A sky-scraping tower mounted against a stone hill, unrivalled by the host of many monstrous hills seen across the vast empty seas.
Dark, thick waters crashed violently against the soiled shores. From one of the highest window-shaped holes cut into the stone obelisk, a set of blinding lights flickered against the dimmed shadows.
Inside was a spacious chamber filled with all manners of clusters and miscellaneous things. Standing rather out of place amid the mess was a tall, thin-faced figure with deathly sallow pale skin. Long silk raven black hair tumbled gracefully down his shoulders, and his narrowed eyes gleamed a sinisterly beautiful blood crimson-red.
He combed the long fold of silk hair over his ears. The sharpened tips of his ears foretold of his rich ancestry. A mother of unknown origins, though he suspected she was possibly a dark Elf, with either a fiendish lineage or some kind of inbred mutation. As for his father, a man he knew only in name, he was a highborn mortal. Although he had him to thank for his striking, pleasant, strong features.
He was devilishly handsome in appearance and stature, but most importantly, his enemies rightfully feared him for his talent.
Nekro Cadavar stood over a workbench inspecting the decaying corpse of a little girl; she died from a sickness that rendered her poor life cut short. Her gaunt figure had already turned grey, and the bones were hard pressed beneath the thin skin. Nekro had her two arms parted away from her body. He paid close attention to the intricately drawn symbols against her forearms.
Considering he designed the spell himself, it was hard to miss even the poor examples of his work.
There would always be scrutiny of these poor imitations of his work. But he resigned himself to witness such nonsense the moment he accepted the help of assistants. If Nekro hadn't already deemed his standards impossible to maintain. He might've granted the designers of this work a horrible judgment. But alas, Nekro was listening to his outer voice these days. And behaving in a manner fit for a mage at the Master Rank. In theory, he was a level beneath the infamous Archmagus Rank, 100 years away. But in reality, he knew things were never that rigid, especially regarding the things surrounding magic.
"The goal is to draw the fading energies into the makeshift core and trick it into believing there is an assured reliance on using the fake core as the heart source."
Those blood-red eyes almost hardly moved in their gaunt sockets. The wizard eyed the gaping wound in the middle of the tiny frame. The flesh had already rotted and blackened. The cage of bones protruded like teeth and formed a ring around the hole. Nekro wondered why they hadn't put the core inside yet.
"If only these idiots had a better grasp on the fine art. Perhaps, in turn, they wouldn't constantly disappoint me with a mundane showing of themselves."
Nekro pinched something caressed in his deep robes and took out a slender wand. 13.5 inches long, 0.8 inches wide. This was his third active and least favourite wand. Made from a dark mahogany infused with the core of a dragon heartstring. Nekro admired its sleek look before he hovered the wand over the corpse and twisted an incantation against the frigid air. He mumbled the chant quietly, and a dark voice seemed to overlap. The black markings against the corpse's arm shuddered before contorting into more thin, refined shapes with sharp strokes.
Two full sleeves of slickly drawn tattoos covered the two arms.
Nekro removed his wand and placed it back into his robes. He flinched ever so slightly, sensing someone's urgently fast approaching.
There was a timid but constant knock on his door. Nekro combed his narrow-shaped gaze over the ground and towards the end of the stone-walled room.
"Come in." His gentle voice beckoned the visitor inside.
The door creaked open, and a woman in tight grey silks and dark violet robes wrapped over her head and slender body appeared. Her skin looked sickly grey, with dark rings circling her almond-shaped eyes. Nekro narrowed his gaze the moment he realised who was disturbing his peace.
The slave girl walked inside; she locked eyes with Nekro and swiftly lowered her head.
"Pardon my intrusion, Lord Wizard. B-but, there is…there is a problem."
"Go on."
The slave noticeably shivered before quickly pulling one side of her blouse down from her neck, her snow-white collar bone revealed.
A glaring, deep scar of an eye drawn inside a set of triangles was carved painfully into her unblemished skin. The scar was bleeding profusely as though freshly gotten. For the first time in a long while, Nekro looked troubled to see what had become of his blood-tie seal.
"That shouldn't be possible…unless." Nekro understood there was only one viable option for the seal to be broken. Similarly, there is only one way to escape from a blood oath covenant.
"My disciple has been killed?" He said in his usual flat tone. But only Nekro could attest to the cold wind sweeping through his mind right now.
Using his wand, he gestured towards the servant to approach. The girl looked horrified but obediently walked towards him with her head hung low. Once she arrived by his side, the wizard held out his pale hand and beckoned her dainty hands into his grasp.
Holding her by her hand, Nekro twirled her around slowly. His impassive face remained set in place whilst he admired her lithe figure in silence for a moment.
"For a blood slave sworn to my every word, you're well put together. Tis a shame really, now that the seal is broken. There's perhaps nothing else to do…is there."
"H-huh?" the servant girl uttered; her eyes widened with despair, but before a word could be said, Nekro's hand shot forward and grabbed hold of her neck. A simple breath was uttered, followed by a quick and ferocious squeeze.
*snap*
The life filtered away from her eyes. Nekro released his grip and watched the lifeless body collapse to the ground. Nekros' wand appeared again; he held out his left hand. And with a cruel smile, he spoke.
"Book."
A gold light flashed across his palm, and a firm black-skinned book adorned with golden patterns floated above it. The floating book opened, and Nekro swiped his wand across one of the pages. A dark light traced the movement of his wand and clung to the tip of it.
[Book of Necromancy: Song of Chambers Vol.1 Digora Burial]
A thick black gas spewed out from the wand's tip and swarmed the corpse.
Nekro raised his right hand and performed three somatic hand seals.
(Absolute, Intuition, Energy)
The gas suddenly turned erratic, and hundreds of tiny screams screeched into the air whilst the gas ate every piece of flesh.
It took only a few seconds for the body to completely erode, leaving a pile of black ash in its place. Nekro turned towards the small space cut against the stone wall. He gazed dreamily into the stormy night air, with a host of complications running through his thoughts.
His thin lips moved suddenly.
"Deja, Sol, Cross…come out."
Three shadows suddenly flashed across the air and landed in the space behind the wizard. Three figures clothed in grey hooded cloaks appeared. Dark runes bizarrely moved against the hem of the robes. They removed their hoods one by one.
A young man with dark brown skin and pale-cropped white hair.
A middle-aged woman with deep purple hair tied into pigtails. Against the right side of her face was a glaring pink scar scabbed over many times.
The last hood came down, revealing a youthful girl with a round face, pale skin, and half-closed eyelids. Compared to the other two, who refused to look up, she proudly held her face upright. There was a dark emptiness in her gaze, a coldness that almost made her look otherworldly.
Nekro smiled slightly when he beheld the youngest of the temporary disciples he had sired recently.
In the order in which they removed their hoods away, their names were Cross, Sol & Deja.
Nekro creased his lips into a cruel smile and beckoned them to rise to their feet.
"Is there something wrong, Lord Wizard? " asked the round-faced girl with empty dark eyes. Deja.
Nekro beheld her thoughtfully in silence for a few moments. A slight chuckle escaped his mouth before he responded kindly.
"It seems as though the mortal realms are a lot more dangerous than I first thought, ku-ku-hu."
The three apprentices exchanged uncomfortable looks.
Nekro strolled measuredly towards one end of the room and traced his long fingers against the line of books shelved against the dark wooden cupboard almost as tall as he was.
He pulled one of the slimmer books free and blew away the coat of dust resting on top before prying open the hardened pages. His scarlet eyes shifted across the lines of text like a snake in close watch.
"I learned that to hold one's own secrets requires a great measure of self-thought and conviction. But to expect the same from others… it's a fool's errand."
Nekro pressed three fingers firmly against the opened book and pulled his fingers against it slowly. As he did so, a sticky black tar appeared beneath his fingertips and stretched away from the pages.
"In the shadows where secrets linger, in silence bones creak,
Oaths tie us as one, in dreadfulness, we speak,
In the bloom beneath the red moon, where souls unite,
Your fears, your blood, in grief entwined,
Let this vow hold true in both life and death, for only promised silence can sever me…from you."
Nekro's hand suddenly flashed towards the trio. Three black spikes darted forward and impaled each one between their eyebrows. The air was snatched free from their mouths, and their bodies suddenly turned limp.
"With this, now you are sworn to keep my secrets. To disobey a blood oath will grant you death. Now then."
Nekro exhaled a deep breath and waved his arm for a second time. The spikes instantly dispersed into ash. And the wizard wiped his hands against his robes.
He straightened an old wooden chair before him and took a seat. With one leg folded over the other, Nekro observed the trio, who couldn't stop touching the space between their brows.
"Ask away then. What do you wish to know about my business?" Nekro spoke with a bright smile pulled beneath cold red eyes. Two of the disciples froze where they stood. The young woman with the hideous scar looked away shyly. The young man with dark skin slightly bowed with his eyes closed. But the third one was different. Nekro observed the brazen girl , staring boldly towards him without so much as batting an eyelid.
With her round head slightly turned, she asked with a voice devoid of all emotion.
"Early on, that slave with the bleeding scar. That was an astral soul bond, wasn't it?"
The question surprised even a seasoned wizard-like Nekro.
"Yes," his face pulled into a cruel smile; for the first time, he stared with intrigue at the girl standing before him. She was attractive just as she looked dangerous.
A rare arousal flowed through Nekro's blood.
"I sired a disciple from this realm. A youth with a surprising aptitude for my magic. She was older when I got my hands on her, so perhaps the initiate stage might've been as far as she could go. But it was her blood that I'll miss the most." Nekro mulled in brooding silence.
Deja observed him carefully for a few moments.
"Her blood you say? What does that mean." She asked with narrowed eyes.
Nekro followed her empty gaze trailing towards his hand. He wore three black gem stones encased in a silver cage of dragon bone.
For the second time, he was surprised by her.
'She's observing my magic rings? How daring.'
"The cloud kingdom has been ruled by aged warriors for centuries. They are a family with a history as dense as the earth beneath us. And for the sake of my research, I needed a member of that lineage alive." Nekro's gaze slightly darkened. He wondered where Deja could've come from. Compared to the other two, her eyes had seen death and not blinked. He, too, was born with such a face.
'Before the wizard saved him.'
Nekro sneered at that memory.
The young girl seemed to have understood something, but then a question flowed delicately out of her mouth.
"What's happened to the rest of that bloodline ?" There was a knowing smirk against her childish face.
Nekro obliged, knowing with the incantation placed, there was no fear of his plans being revealed.
"I killed them by mistake, of course. The cloud King and all his family. Right now, the figure in place wearing the king's face is a man I met in a drinking hole. Magic altered how he looked. But that girl… was my Trump card to hold control of this country. Legitimately."
"I see. Why would you go to such trouble? Might I ask?"
Nekro gave a stiff smile.
"This realm, this land and soil we stand on, is one of the oldest places across this entire world. To most wizards, it's merely a dry place. Without a mana vein, it holds no value to those like us who live breathing mana. Hu-hu-ku. But, with the amount of corpses crying out from the ground. This is the perfect place for necromancy." Nekro smoothed his hair back and sighed out loud.
" And having my talons in the cloud country makes it easier for me to move freely, that's all."'
Deja creased a cruel smile with admiration.
"And what do you need from us then? Lord Wizard."
"Ah, let's see." Nekro smoothed his unblemished chin before snapping his finger in the air.
"Someone killed my disciple. And that person needs to die. There's an old castle far east from here. She had business there, and that's where she likely died. Find out what happened, and if nothing breeds truth. Kill the patriarch."
Deja merely blinked a few times as she thought of something.
"How strong is he?"
"Gold-ranked body." Nekro sang with a cruel smile, sizing up the girl's reaction.
Deja never said anything more in the matter. She bowed solemnly before making her way towards the door. The other two began to move, but Deja's sudden voice halted their movements.
"I go alone. No point sparing us all for something so trivial, right. Goodbye. now"
Nekro sat in deep admiration, watching her small back move further and further away. With all his plans surrounding the dead, perhaps he needed something to help waste the tedious time between the plethora of his goals.
Perhaps it was high time he indulged in the fruits of the flesh.
"Interesting… ku-ku-hu."