Tyron slumped forward, his chin slipping from the hand which had been propping him up as he was trying to study through bleary eyes. One moment, he was trying to read the scroll propped open on the table before him through blurred, red, raw eyes, the next, he was awoken by a loud bang.
He was so fatigued, it took him a while to realise the sound had been made by his head slamming into the table. As tough as he was, he barely felt the impact, yet it was enough to startle him back to some sort of wakefulness.
“I think I’m too tired to keep reading,” he mumbled to himself.
“Yeah, no shit,” a voice said from behind him.
Tyron turned to see Dove leaning against the wall behind him, swinging his snake in slow, lazy circles. Borderline delirious, Tyron thought for a moment he was wearing a feathered hat, of all things.
He blinked several times, trying to clear his eyes.
“Dove… where the heck… did you find that hat?”
“Oh, this old thing?” the undead said, sweeping it off his skull and fluttering the feathers against his ribs. “I made it myself with cured kin leather. The feathers, I sourced from a Dust Folk caravan. Quite dashing, wouldn’t you say?”
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Dealing with his former teacher was always an enormous headache, but in this instance, the pain was almost clarifying, helping the Necromancer to dispel a little of the fog that plagued him.
“Just how desperate for a reaction are you, Dove?” he asked tiredly. “You put so much effort into such ridiculous pursuits.”
Far from being offended, the former Summoner merely snorted with amusement.
“In my eyes, you’re the absurd one. Imagine dedicating your life to such dreary subjects like vengeance, and not shitting your pants in public. Boring! Dull! Lacking stimulus for the washing staff!”
“Of course, you didn’t have to wash them yourself,” Tyron mused, thinking aloud.
“That’s not the important bit!” Dove cut him off. “The important bit is the detailed examination of how dreary and uninteresting your life is. Let’s focus on that.”
Tired as he was, Tyron actually started turning his thoughts towards defending his life choices, before he shook his head. As if he was going to start justifying himself to Dove, of all people.
“Presumably, you’re here for a reason,” he said to his former mentor, turning around properly in his chair to face the skeletal construct. “You didn’t come to annoy me.”
He considered for a moment, then sighed.
“You didn’t come just to annoy me.”
Dove cackled to himself, sweeping the hat back onto his head before gathering the snake skeleton and swinging it up onto his shoulder and around his neck like a scarf. One of these days, Tyron would have to check to see how it was stitched together. Whoever had done the work did a good job of it.
“I wouldn’t put it past me,” he said. “There is little that gives me more joy in this unlife than annoying you. Although, it’s getting harder and harder to achieve. I almost feel like you no longer care about the feelings of your old teacher.”
It was impossible for a skeleton carved of onyx to form a hangdog expression, and yet, somehow, Dove managed to adopt a long-suffering and pitiful air, even without having the capacity to form a facial expression.
“You missed your true talent in life. You should have been a mime.”
“That’s what I told my mother!”
“Then you wouldn’t talk as much.”
“Sacrifices must be made, in the pursuit of true art.”
“Why are you here, Dove?” Tyron sighed. “Out with it or I’m going to bed. By myself.”
The last was a necessary classification, since the skull started leering at him. How did he even manage to leer?
“Fine. I thought now might be a good time to discuss my mastery over the Realm of the Dead and all that pertains to it. The cosmic secrets I have unlocked. The nature of life, of death, and the cycle of rebirth. The deep knowledge, the very deep knowledge! So deep, it was moist when I found it! Locked with the crevices of the realms, the damp, sopping crevices!”
“Stop thrusting your hips at me.”
“Sorry, I was getting carried away. Anyway, I know you wanted to speak about it, and now’s your chance.”
He went back to leaning against the wall, looking for all the world as if he had someplace he’d rather be. Tyron frowned.
“You turned up now, when I’m on the brink of exhaustion, collapsing on my desk, and offer to speak to me? This timing isn’t just suspicious, Dove, it reeks more than your hat.”
“How dare you,” Dove gasped. “Do you really believe I would be so conniving, so deceitful, so… so underhanded?!”
“Stop talking for a minute or I’ll stuff your soul in a chopping board,” Tyron groaned, rubbing at his face.
Blood and bone, how long had it been since he’d slept? He hadn’t felt this exhausted in… a long time. Years. Perhaps not since he reinvented the status ritual for Dove, if even then. His eyes were dry as bone, his skin felt stretched over his skin, his mouth felt like he’d eaten a handful of sand. To top it all off, he had a pounding headache, and his guts were twisting around themselves like a sackful of snakes. He desperately needed something to eat and drink. He also needed sleep. Badly.
If his students saw him like this, they’d start trying to mother him again. He’d had enough of that treatment the last time.
What had he been doing? He trailed his eyes across the pages scattered over the table, along with those he’d stuck to the wall. Yes… the sigil combination related to the containment of the soul. It had to be the soul, what else could these particular runes relate to? He’d been cross-referencing to see if they were used anywhere else… perhaps in the…
His hands were already reaching for the scroll when he realised what he was doing and let them collapse in his lap. Getting drawn back in now would be a terrible idea. He sighed and pushed them all away before turning back to Dove.
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“Remain shut up for a minute,” he stated.
A few mental commands sent the undead he kept nearby running, and it wasn’t long before Filetta arrived in the room, a plate of bread and steamed vegetables in one hand, a mug of water in the other.
“You didn’t need to use me as your waitstaff,” she said. “I’m an undead killing machine. Even a skeleton could bring you food.”
“Their artificial minds don’t know how to carry plates and can’t tell what food is decent. I’d have to look through their eyes and micro-manage every movement,” Tyron grunted, taking the plate and mug and putting them on the table. He took a tiny sip from the mug, letting the cool water run over the desert that was the inside of his mouth.
What an amazing feeling. That alone was enough to help him feel a little better. He knew better than to start guzzling at the water, so he took another small sip, then another.
“Why is Dove being so quiet?” Filetta wondered, spotting him in the corner acting uncharacteristically obedient.
“Because I made a threat he knew I’d follow through on,” Tyron replied, trying a sliver of carrot. It hurt his throat going down, so he switched back to sips of water.
“Which was?”
“Chopping board.”
“Ah.”
Dove raised a hand and waved it a little. Tyron rolled his eyes and nodded.
“Hey there, sweet cheek-less,” he said, leaning toward Filetta while stroking the snake bones as if they were a cat. “Haven’t seen you around much lately.”
“That’s because I actively avoid you. Prick,” came the reply. She turned back to Tyron. “If that’s all, I’ll leave.”
He nodded. “Thanks. Sorry to ask you to do this,” he waved his hand toward the food.
“Just don’t make a habit out of it,” she scowled.
“Why can’t I have spirit flesh?” Dove complained as Filetta spun and left. “I could make expressions again. Sort of.”
“If you want upgrades, you need to be less of a pain in the backside.”
“Well, that’s never happening.”
“Exactly.”
It would take time for the food and water to actually make it through his system, but for now, just having something in his stomach was enough to make Tyron feel revived. It wouldn’t last, his mental fatigue was immense, but it would have to do.
“Alright,” he said, continuing to take tiny bites from the food on his desk. “Start talking.”
“About what?”
“Realm of the Dead.”
“Oh, that place. It sucks.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
Tyron kept grazing as Dove stared at him blankly.
“Are you actually going to give me details and answer my questions, or are you just here to piss me off?” Tyron said, outwardly calm.
Dove held up his hands as if to ward him off.
“I’ll talk, I’ll talk. To an extent. There are things I can and things I can’t say.”
Well… that was interesting in and of itself. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees.
“If we were to compare your new role to that of a traditional Summoner, how close would they be?”
The two had often discussed Summoning magick. To give him his due, Dove had been an excellent Summoner, with a firm grasp of the fundamentals and broader applications of that branch of spells. Had he reached gold rank, he would have become powerful indeed.
“Fundamentally the same, but the methods are completely different,” Dove replied.
Another clue. Tyron tried reasoning out loud.
“So… as a Summoner, to put it simply, you would use Astral Projection to send your consciousness to the Astral Sea and attempt to form a contract with a being native to that Realm. Upon successfully forming a contract, you became able to summon them here in our realm for a time.
“If the fundamentals are the same, then I assume you follow a similar process. You would use… Realm of the Dead Projection? Undeath Projection? You couldn’t really call it ‘Astral’ Projection anymore….”
“The Skill is called ‘Death Projection’. Boring, I know.”
“Interesting… so you use this ability to send your consciousness to the Realm of the Dead, and once there, you have to convince an… entity? A being? A denizen of that place… to make a contract with you.”
“Basically, yes,” Dove said, waving a hand. “There are differences, but in essence, that’s what I have to do.”
“So you’ve seen the Realm of the Dead?”
The skeleton hesitated.
“Not sure I would say ‘seen’,” he hedged. “You don’t really see as a disembodied spirit. I’ve been there, sure.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“Not… not really. My contracts…”
He trailed off, leaving Tyron to join the dots. He had formed contracts which forbade him from speaking. The problem was, with Dove, that could be a complete falsehood. It was entirely possible there were no such restrictions on him at all and he was just being difficult for the fun of it.
Tyron leaned back in his chair and took another sip of water. Was Dove lying to him? It was difficult to say.
“Are you able to summon the spirits of the dead?” he asked.
“No,” Dove replied definitively.
That seemed to track. So far, he’d seen two of Dove’s new summons. One was a hound the size of a donkey formed of bones and shadows. A terrifying-looking summon, it had disturbed every living thing that had laid eyes on it.
The other was a smaller, wraith-like bird that didn’t have a beak but more of a needle, like a mosquito. What it fed on, and how, Tyron was very keen to know.
“Do you think you will eventually be able to summon the spirits of the dead?” he pressed. Perhaps if he advanced further?
“No,” Dove said, again, with great certainty. “That’s not how it works.”
“So… so you can only summon creatures who are ‘native’ to that place. Am I correct?”
“You are.”
Tyron thought some more.
“You have contracts with two creatures so far that I’ve seen. Are you able to summon any more than these two?”
“No.”
“Do you have more than two contracts?”
“I do.”
“Do the contracts with the two summoned creatures place any restrictions on your speech?”
“They do not.”
Tyron stared at the skeletal construct that housed his former mentor. Dove stared back. He was being unusually cooperative. Was that a mask to hide his deception, or was he being as open as he could be, and deciding to be helpful on a whim?
Dealing with Dove was an increasingly painful experience. Thankfully, the time he’d spent locked in a gardening implement seemed to have reigned him in a little.
If he was being honest… then there were many potential implications. He was forced into a restrictive contract by some sort of entity living within the Realm of the Dead? A powerful being that ruled over the realm? Or perhaps just a slice of it?
“Is there a way to break a contract you’ve formed?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Are you able to list the contracts you’ve made?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me how many there are?”
“No.”
“Do any of them place you in danger?”
“Can’t answer that.”
“Do any of them place me in danger?”
“Can’t answer that either.”
“Fuck’s sake, Dove. What the heck did you agree to?”
He tickled the feathers of his hat with his long, bony fingers.
“Do you really think I can answer that?”
Tyron groaned and rubbed at his temples. The headache, which had been slowly receding, was now back with a vengeance. What was he supposed to do with this information?
“Dove…” he began before trailing off. He was definitely going to regret this. “... Do you need help?”
The skeleton sprang upright and planted his absurd hat back on his head.
“Funny you should ask,” he cackled. “Turns out I do.”