The Heart of a Necromancer

by Eddie Patin

  After a few minutes of climbing without being bothered, the three of them approached the crest of the mountain; the false summit on the way to the big peak. According to the map overlay from universe 934, the small peak was called Little Ellis.

  "Watch out now," Riley said suddenly, gesturing at a skull sitting on the ground.

  Up here, the trees were sparse and the mist wasn't as thick. Jason found that he could look down into the mountains to the east and west, and he could see the faint torchlight of the village a few miles to the north, its glow magnified by the fog down there. He expected that once they reached the summit of Little Ellis—according to his map—he'd be able to see across what looked like a ridge running to the south and hopefully the taller summit of Mt Ellis itself, connecting the two peaks.

  Hell—from here he could even see the stars somewhat.

  Jason looked down at the skull Riley had pointed out as they ascended the slope. An old, bleached bone head stuck out of the ground, buried up to the empty cavity of its nose. Beyond it, Jason suddenly saw another. Then he found the smooth, round dome of yet another.

  "What the hell?" he muttered.

  "They're all around us," Riley said. "Some sort of fruking ... decoration."

  As the Reality Rifters climbed to the smaller summit, Jason started to see the black, forested mountain range open up around them, everything slightly illuminated by his right eye's image intensifier soaking up the light of the stars on the mist that crawled across the land.

  Finally reaching the highest point, staring at the many skulls surrounding them, half-buried in the summit, Jason jumped up onto a boulder and scanned the bigger mountain to the south. He could see the ridge. He—

  Jason's attention was suddenly diverted when Riley walked up and casually kicked at one of the skulls. When the soldier's boot hit the old, bone cranium, Riley seemed shocked for a moment when the skull didn't dislodge. It was as if he'd kicked something solid.

  In the next instant, the skull shuddered, drawing a gasp from all, then jerkily rose from the ground. For a moment, Jason half-expected the rising skull to burst into a colorful wreath of flames and turn into another one of those mage skull things. Instead, a skeletal neck followed, then clavicles, then the top of a ribcage with two bony arms pulling free from the earth, and Jason was left staring at the upper body of an animated skeleton pulling itself free from the mountaintop!

  "Holy shit!" he cried.

  Before the creature could free its legs, Riley kicked it powerfully in the chest, throwing it backwards to the ground where it struggled to still free its bony lower legs.

  Suddenly, the sounds of earth and gravel moved all around them. Small rocks tumbled and clattered. The sounds of bones clacking against other bones filled the air. With a cold wave of horror crawling over his skin, Jason realized that all of the skulls they'd passed were attached to skeletal bodies that were now pulling themselves free from the mountain!

  "Shet!" Riley cried, slinging his rifle. Both long arms clattered against each other on the soldier's back as he pulled the small sledgehammer off of his belt.

  "Shoot 'em!" Jason shouted. "Are you crazy?"

  "Won't do much good!" Riley shouted back over the rising, rattling noise of skeletal bodies appearing around them in the thinning mist, surrounding and crowding around the Reality Rifters on the summit of Little Ellis. "Don't get pinned down! Try Morgana's ring, Jason! Get the sword!"

  The cyborg suddenly launched himself into a lightning-quick assault on the nearest skeleton that approached on clicking, clawed feet. Riley was powerful with his enhanced strength and reflexes and he smashed the undead creature into several pieces with a single blow!

  Scanning around him from his perch up on a rock, Jason looked out over a macabre tapestry of deathless aggressors. The necromancer was like a dark artist, judging by the mindless monsters that he'd assembled for this peak of skulls. Many skeletons were just as Jason would have expected—old, fleshless human forms with two arms, two legs, and a single skull. Others were more creative, approaching silently with gaping jawbones save for the rattling of their mixed-up segments. Some had extra arms. Some had multiple heads—one even looked like a bouquet of gruesome flowers with a pod of a dozen or more skulls glaring without eyes from its chest cavity. Some of the skeletons had long claws. Some had spindly, bone arms where wings would normally be on other creatures. All of the undead rose and advanced from all around like something from a horror movie, filling Jason with dread as his mind ran away with what they might do to him if they caught him with their bony, clawed fingers...

  "I don't know what to do with the ring!" Jason shouted. "Why the hell would I know what to do with it?!"

  Riley spun with his sledgehammer and cleaved through two advancing bodies of bones, smashing through them like a wrecking ball. One of the skeletons broke in half with a dry hiss escaping from its dusty jaws. Gliath joined the fray with his shotgun slung over his back and his Blessed Warblade gleaming in one vigorous, black fist. The leopardwere tore through an advancing undead creature with four bony arms that reached for him with many sickle-like claws. With his big kukri blade, Gliath sheared it from clavicle to dirt-encrusted pelvis. The abomination clattered to the ground in two dry, swaying pieces.

  Jason raised his AK-47 and aimed at the center mass of the closest skeleton. He fired twice. As the rifle boomed, he saw one rib split off from its sternum, which also split when the second round hit. A few pieces of bones fell to the ground through the other ribs and the skeleton kept coming; claws outstretched and jawbone cracked open in a silent grin.

  "It's dimension stuff, Jason!" Riley exclaimed, smashing his hammer into the breastbone of another risen monster that clumsily swung a rusted short sword at him. The soldier reached out and caught the bony wrist of the skeleton's sword arm, then Riley smashed his sledgehammer down over its skull, collapsing the creature into a pile of bones.

  Jason suddenly felt bony fingers grab his ankle with the strength matching the desperate fear in his heart. He looked down to see the skeleton with the shot-up sternum clawing at him. In another second, another would be on him, then another.

  "Gah!" Jason cried, and smashed down at the creature with the butt of his rifle.

  Two hearty bashes was enough to free his leg and Jason jumped down from the rock and scrambled over to stand between the fiercely fighting forms of Riley and Gliath. He aimed his AK-47 solidly at the skull of an approaching skeleton and fired two tremendously loud shots that echoed through the mountains. The skeleton's skull exploded—which seemed to confuse it for a moment—then it stretched out its claws and continued on, still reaching for him...

  Fresh, cold horror swept through Jason. He felt his guts turn to ice water.

  "Fuck!" he shouted. "They're invincible!"

  "They're not fruking zombies, Jason!" Riley replied, smashing through another one. "They don't have any brains! You have to break 'em to fruking pieces so that they can't keep coming. Use the damned sword!"

  Quickly—before any came any closer—Jason slung his rifle after clumsily pulling the lever on the side of the receiver back to safe. He reached into his focus key pouch with trembling hands—being careful not to drop his focus keys in stupid terror—and fished out Morgana's smuggler's ring.

  A skeleton suddenly appeared a little too close to him.

  "Shit! Help!"

  Gliath deviated from whatever he was doing on Jason's left to cleave through the skeletal attacker's torso with his big, silver-edged kukri, splitting the monster in half before it collapsed into a pile of bones.

  Jason considered the ring for an instant, then ripped off the glove of his right hand. He stashed the glove into his jacket pocket and tried to put the ring on. It looked too small, but the magical ring slid easily onto his ring finger.

  Holy shit! It was just like in DnD! The magical ring changed size to match the wearer's finger! Either Morgana had big fingers—which wasn't likely—or the ring had immediately resized itself to Ja
son's hand.

  As soon as the ring was on, Jason felt as if he could access an entirely new angle—a new dimension. He didn't know how it worked—he definitely didn't understand how it fit into his scheme of the Tenth Dimensional Model of the other Jasons—but he could most definitely feel the presence of the sword somewhere at that strange angle to their reality. Dawnbringer's hilt sat easily within his grasp. All Jason had to do was reach and...

  Feeling his fist wrap around the hilt of the Soloster heirloom weapon, Jason drew Morgana's sword.

  The blade appeared out of thin air as if picked up from sitting on a table at a weird, incomprehensible angle to Jason's hand. The sword immediately lit up the mountaintop with a brilliant golden light that hurt Jason's right eye because of the image intensifier.

  "Shit!" he cried, reaching for his left hand and turning his night vision off.

  Dawnbringer gleamed from the center of a massive horde of bones, claws, empty eye sockets, gleaming bony foreheads, and gaping jawbones. The summit of Little Ellis was crawling with skeletal undead, all surging in toward the three Reality Rifters. Morgana's blade shone like the sliver of the rising sun peaking over the mountains in the morning—gold and radiant with a silvery edge much like the edge of Gliath's Blessed Warblade.

  "Back, cursed undead!" Jason shouted, suddenly grinning from ear to ear. His body pulsed with terror, but he was so excited from holding the shining, magical sword in the air that he might have had a boner. "By the light!"

  Riley laughed, smashing through another malignant, animated sculpture of bones.

  Jason had enough sense in his wildly racing head to make sure that he was clear of his friends, then he swung Dawnbringer through the crowd of advancing undead. The shining blade cut a swathe through them easily—Jason literally felt like it was a scythe cutting through grass—only deflected and slowed down here and there as the sword clanged against an odd short sword or spear held in bony hands. He dashed three of the skeletons to pieces with one swing.

  "Awesome!" Riley exclaimed.

  "Yeah!" Jason shouted, swinging wildly, cutting through any monsters that advanced on him. He saw arms and skulls and shoulder blades sliced into pieces, flying before him. The blade flared as it cut through the bones of his attackers and Jason quickly glanced around the summit at the horde surrounding them on all sides.

  Jason then saw something huge and made of bones moving in the distance on the ridge.

  Then he saw the glint of Dawnbringer's light on a distant building on the steepest part of Mt Ellis's slope across the rising ridge, halfway to the higher summit.

  "There!" Jason exclaimed, pointing with Morgana's shining sword. "I think that's the tower!"

  "Let head that way!" Riley shouted over the noise of rattling and bones, skeletal feet scraping on rocks, and the bashing and thrashing of their weapons on the mindless, eager undead. "Stay close together!"

  The Reality Rifters started down the slope of the summit toward the taller peak. They'd have to follow the ridge for a while, then ... shit—Jason had no idea how they'd reach the tower! He'd have to rift them into it somehow ... maybe.

  As Jason led the way swinging Dawnbringer—cutting blazing swathes through the varied and horrific skeletons—monsters of bones and morbid design pressed in at him. Some had claws and occasionally teeth fused onto their limbs from other predatory creatures. Some were equipped with old weapons taken from villagers and other sentient beings. Once, a half-decayed metal blade sliced down at Jason's arm and hit him so smartly with its rusted edge that he knew he'd bruise. Jason thanked his lucky stars again that he was wearing a minotaur-hide jacket that probably saved him from having his arm lopped off. Grimacing, he was happy to maybe receive a bruise instead. Jason cut the skeleton in twain. Another time, a skeleton with a spear thrust in at him with a semblance of the skill it might have possessed in life. Jason was barely able to move with the blow, and took the barest stab to one leg. He cried out in pain and Riley smashed the offending skeleton into pieces.

  "Look out!" Riley cried, pointing ahead.

  Jason recovered from a wide swing with Dawnbringer and looked past the pressing horde, only to see that large bone shape slithering through the throng again. Before, he'd assumed that it was a surge of undead. Now, it looked more like the back of a huge skeletal serpent—or a massive worm made of bones.

  As he spun Morgana's blade and cleaved through the pressing bones again to keep the horde from mobbing the three of them, Jason gasped when a massive sculpture of thousands of bones in the form of a gigantic, ghoulish snake suddenly reared up from the throngs of undead. It was as thick as a tree and composed of countless bones all fused together in a deathly work of offensive art. Several skeletal arms unfolded around its face like claws, and Jason expected it to roar at them somehow, but the monstrous creature merely clattered with the movement of its measureless parts and pieces. It was like a massive bone golem from DnD in the shape of a huge worm, bristling with ribs and claws and bony spikes, rising up over fifteen feet tall!

  "Holy shitballs!" Jason exclaimed, staring a little too long. A skeleton with four arms and three skulls crunched into him. Three of its bony hands rudely gripped his shoulders and jacket. "Fuck!" he cried, instantly trying to push the skeleton backwards with his shining blade. The abomination in his face staggered at Dawnbringer's touch. Jason cleaved through it with a mighty vertical strike. His arm was getting tired.

  As the three of them paused their violent journey across the ridge, fighting back the pressing horde, the huge bone snake-creation slithered toward them, flattening and bursting any skeletons in its way. The mighty bone-beast closed the distance far too quickly for comfort, and Jason hoped that Morgana's sword would be able to guide them through the bulk and weight of its evil body of—

  Riley suddenly whipped his blaster out of its holster and fired a softly snapping laser beam at the clacking behemoth. The red, superheated light crackled through the air and mist—Jason felt the heat of it on his face—then hit the worm in its body. The struck area of dry, creaking and clattering bones burst into flames. The soldier shot it again, lighting up another part of the skeletal abomination as it slithered bulkily toward them. He shot twice more before the beast nearly loomed over them, then it was a bonfire, lighting up the ridge with blazing red and orange light as the monstrous golem-creature burned like a gigantic, flailing, segmented torch.

  "Follow!" Riley shouted, darting forward through the horde around the blazing monster, just below the ridgeline.

  Gliath obeyed without hesitation. Jason plunged ahead after them, doing his best to clear the way with Dawnbringer. As the towering inferno of bone-serpent reared up over them, the three Reality Rifters hauled ass past it.

  The monstrous, burning creature lunged down with its horrific mouth and skeletal-arm pedipalps, missed, then in a magnificent spectacle of raging fire and crushing bones, it slipped and tumbled down the ridge through any skeletons and other undead creations in its way, rolling down, down, on fire...

  By the light of the massive, burning bone-serpent, Jason could now easily see the tower built into the steepest part of the mountain up ahead. The building was protected from invasion by its design. It was perhaps three stories tall with a crenelated roof.

  A skeletal hand suddenly seized Jason's short hair from behind, but lost its grip. His hair was too short to grab.

  "Gah!" Jason screamed, spinning and cutting down two skeletons that were just about on top of him. There were more coming; lots more. "There's the tower!" Jason exclaimed, slicing through two more skeletons following them.

  "Rift us there!" Riley shouted.

  "Protect me!"

  Jason felt Riley and Gliath draw in close to him. He sunk the tip of Dawnbringer into the earth at his feet—immediately hurting his feelings to do such a thing to such a fine blade. He pulled up his OCS and unlocked the screen, navigating to the coordinates section as quickly as he could. Looking south and up at the tower, he gave his best guess to put t
hem on the roof. He checked his compass by the light of the screen. Throwing together some coordinates and adding another ... forty feet of elevation, he guessed ... Jason focused on opening a rift.

  With a loud flutter and a snap above the sound of bashing bones and the rattling horde, a brilliant orange portal unfurled in front of him and grew into a vertical, spinning rift. Jason watched the center of it as the gateway shuddered and shimmered and gradually darkened to reveal a view through to the destination rift. Jason's heart hammered in his chest.

  The skeletons didn't wait. As Jason watched the whirling, roaring portal, mindless undead approached them from their southern side—the other side of the rift—breaking the portal's surface with their approach. Jason heard a snap in the distance and saw a blazing orange rift open high in the air, close to the tower but still off by thirty feet to one side and too low. Several skeletal abominations began pouring out of the destination rift into the open night air, tumbling to their destruction far below.

  "You missed!" Riley exclaimed, grunting as he powered his hammer through two approaching bony bodies.

  "No shit!" Jason shouted, releasing the rift. It fizzled with a pop, and a dozen skeletons surged in his face again. He yelped and drew Dawnbringer from the ground, swinging the blade and frantically making himself some space. It seemed like one out of every four skeletons were at least partly on fire from the calamity with the huge bone snake. Jason shot a desperate glace down the ridge and saw the writhing, burning form of the big monster struggling to get back up at them. It was still burning. It wasn't totally out of the game.

  With another few seconds to spare, Jason returned the blade to the earth and went back to his coordinates. He adjusted as best he could figure, flexed his mind, and rifted again.

  A roaring, fiery orange rift appeared in front of him once more. Jason focused, praying that he'd estimated correctly. Honestly, it was pretty hopeless to get it on the second try. The tower was maybe what—a hundred feet diameter maybe? Hell—from here he couldn't tell if it was rounded or square, and there was no telling what the roof was like. It could be—