A Sorcerer’s Journal

  Undeath Ascendant

  Jeron Warder

  Entry 1

  The year 1220 After the Breaking

  “Well, there’s no turning back now,” the larger sailor said.

  The sailor striding next to him along the boardwalk nodded solemnly.

  Like his fellow, the sailor was wearing a simple, white, short-sleeved shirt open to the center of his tanned chest. He had a pair of light gray pants that were cut off just below the knees and wore no shoes. Both young men had a jug of spirits of some kind in their right hand and a travel bag in their left, and their shoulder-length, brown hair flowed with the wind. It was an illusion, of course, and it was one I designed with purpose. It was a very realistic one that took a lot of magic to maintain, so it would be extremely noticeable to anything that was sensitive to the use of magic.

  To a casual observer, the two seamen weren’t notable in any way, and they blended in very well with the other sailors and dockworkers going about their business in Talm’s dock quarter. Talm was one of the great cities on Blue Bay, and its port bustled with activity during daylight hours. Just ahead, seagulls and pelicans squabbled over the fish entrails thrown into the water by the fishmongers who cleaned and filleted the catch of the day on their wooden tables at the edge of the pier. Their knives flashed in the partial shade of their booths as they worked with the agility granted by years of practice. One of the fishmongers fileted a fish while making eye contact with me.

  “Is that one of them?” I asked in low tones, nodding towards the knife wielding fishmonger.

  “No, that would be too easy,” Bran said softly. “It’s slowly coming up behind us. I can’t see it through the visor of my helm, but I know it’s there. In fact, I can sense another one coming towards us from dead ahead.”

  Despite knowing of their presence, there was absolutely nothing we could see that gave them away while stalking us. The pedestrian traffic was exactly what would be expected on this sunny day. The people were energetic but not rushed. No one was recoiling in alarm. There was no panic anywhere.

  “I just got a glimpse of it walking behind those stevedores with the small barrels on their shoulders. It looks like another porter,” Bran said in a low voice. Louder, he said, “Let’s duck into this alley for a minute, mate. Me eyes ‘re turnin’ yellow.”

  The two of us walked casually into an alley between a couple of large, two-story warehouses. The alley itself was about four feet wide and strewn here and there with garbage. Two rats stopped chittering at each other as the sailors got closer and fled down the shaded alleyway, disappearing into a crack in the stonework. Bran, as always, went first and picked up his pace when he saw how long the two buildings were. They were nearing the midpoint of the alley when two constables entered the alley from the other side, their stout wooden clubs held loosely in hand. I tried to look behind me as I walked, but because of the armor under the illusion, I had to turn my shoulders a long way to do so. A metallic rasp sounded as the unseen bevor protecting my chin and neck scraped against my cuirass. I winced at the sound. There were two porters coming into the alley behind us, and the one in the lead cocked his head to the side a bit at the sound of metal striking metal. I cursed softly.

  The pair ahead were less than thirty feet away from us now. “Good day,” one of the constables said cordially.

  “Good day,” Bran said. Under his breath, he added, “Everyone’s hostile. Beware above.”

  We stopped walking as the bigger one turned to the wall and seemed to fumble for the laces to his pants, which he did while still holding the jug and the travel bag. The constables and the porters quickly closed the distance.

  “Lord God, please protect us in this dangerous hour,” Bran prayed softly.

  A golden glow appeared around us as I looked up suddenly at the sound of a talon breaking a roof tile. I appeared to raise my travel bag above my head as the two things hurtling down on us from above. They looked like two ruffians wearing brown shirts and pants, but their feet looked like raptor’s talons and their arms ended with curved, bony blades where their hands should be. Those blades were coming down on us with great speed, too. If anyone was outside the alley watching, I would have appeared to wave my jug at the descending assassins, and an invisible force threw one into the advancing constables and one into the trailing merchants. Both Bran and I raised their travel bags between themselves and their adversaries, and advanced quickly towards the flailing pile closest to each of them. This part, at least, would have looked pretty funny if someone didn’t know what was really going on. Being there, it was anything but funny.

  The three shapeshifting assassins in the pile Bran approached extricated themselves from the pile with amazing swiftness as one of them transformed into a human torso with eight spidery legs, which it used to climb the wall straight up. Bran swung his jug at the spider-like thing and sheared off the four legs on its right side. Black ichor sprayed out from the wounds as the thing shrieked in pain, but it maintained its hold on the wall. One of the constables transformed into a large turtle-like thing and shot its head forward suddenly to snap its jaws on Bran’s lower leg with a metallic clang and scraping sound. The sailor hacked repeatedly into the mass of bodies as things attempted to grapple him.

  Under the illusion, I had channeled fire into my mace and brought down some heavy blows into the pile of assassins before me. They tried to block the attacks with suddenly grown carapaces or shells, and they tried spearing me with tentacles that had bony spikes on the ends of them, but each time their attacks seemed to be foiled by my travel bag, which gave off sounds like metallic clangs when struck. In short order, I simply beat them to a smoking pulp with his flaming liquor jug. Oh, to be a bystander.

  The larger sailor, meanwhile, had swung his jug in a sideways arc which severed the head of the turtle-like thing that was trying to bite through his lower leg. It didn’t even scream out as the stump formed into a blade at the end of a thick appendage. The sailor thrust his jug straight down through the center of the turtle shell, killing it instantly, then held his travel bag up to shield himself just as the assassin with the spider legs lashed out at him with a tentacle that had a bony spiked ball at the end of it. The bag crashed loudly, and the sailor was knocked back a step as he fumbled for good footing with the turtle head still attached to his lower leg. He set himself securely, then brought his liquor jug down in a great chop that clove the shapeshifter in two.

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  When the larger sailor turned around to see how his comrade was doing, he found the other man concentrating with his eyes closed with a pile of blackened flesh smoking at his feet. A shimmering was seen in the air all around the area where the battle took place.

  “There,” I said. “You all right?”

  “Of course,” the larger man said as he bent down to pry the turtle head off of his greave. “I can see myself now, by the way.”

  “Yeah, I set an illusion of an empty alleyway around us so we can properly deal with this mess,” I said.

  The dissolution of the personal illusion revealed me to be a young man around twenty years old who was arrayed in plate armor made of adamantium, a very rare, and almost indestructible metal. I always thought the blue tinge of the metal went very well with the thick, blue, silken cape I wore. There was a very large diamond in the shape of a half icosahedron set into my cuirass that glowed with magical energy. The helm I wore was even more distinctive, being made of adamantium, gilded with gold, and having twenty-one rectangular gems of various colors hovering where a crown would go, slowly spinning and revolving around the helm. The shield I used, by contrast, was made of steel plated wood, and though well made, it was badly dented and cloven in the fight. Concentrating briefly on a spell, the black gore I was covered with seemed to disappear starting at the helm and going down to the sabatons.

  “Do you sense any more of ‘em?”

  Bran concentrated briefly and turned in a slow circle. “Nah, that’s all of ‘em.”

  Bran was armored in adamantine plate also, though the style was much plainer and to his tastes. It didn’t have the stylish gilding and such that my armor had, but that was done by choice, not by lack of materials. Bran was a very grounded young man and didn’t want to call undue attention to himself. That said, he was carrying a sword that was made of divinium, a white metal, with a gilded hilt inset with pearls that glowed when he drew it. Along its straight blade was inscribed the name of the weapon, Vengeance. It was a holy relic, and it was ideally suited to defeating the demonic, shapeshifting assassins we just faced. I used another spell to clean Bran’s armor next, and he nodded in thanks. He ignored the damaged steel shield he carried. It was still functional. Maybe.

  “The walls are made of stone all the way to the top of the buildings. I think I can get rid of the bodies right here and no one will be the wiser,” I said.

  “Whatever you think, brother. We have time,” Bran said. He moved back down the alleyway a bit and watched for danger just inside the shimmering aura of the illusion spell.

  Putting my mace back on my belt, I concentrated on telekinetic magic. The corpses floated up a foot above the ground and arranged themselves neatly next to each other on the cobbles of the alleyway. I then stepped closer to my larger brother and raised a gauntleted hand to point at the corpses. Fire swirled around my gauntlet, then rushed out in a cone of flame to engulf all the bodies. I held the flame on them for several seconds, after which they were reduced to ash. Heat shimmered from the cobbles and the lower part of the warehouse walls when the flames disappeared, but there were no fires started. The alley smelled like burned peat and trash, but that would clear away shortly.

  “That takes care of Talm. After we cleansed Indigo this morning, Aerie yesterday, and Mithram before that, we’re free of the Xerith in all the closest cities to Stonekeep,” Bran said.

  “Yeah, it gives me some breathing room, but I won’t rest well until I’m sure there are no more magic sensing, shapeshifting assassins out there just waiting for me to close my eyes before stabbing me with something,” I said.

  “I’m with you all the way, but let’s get some rest for now. We’ve been hitting it pretty hard the last couple of days, and Mira still isn’t herself,” Bran said as he sheathed Vengeance.

  I took a closer look at Bran’s shield. Though it was plated with a sheet of steel, it was dented, battered almost out of shape, and was cloven three inches deep in two places on the edge. My own shield looked much the same, and that was only from one day of fighting. As capable as we were, combatting enemies as powerful as the Xerith took an equally powerful toll on a man. I activated a mending spell and focused on Bran’s shield. The dents straightened and the rents came back together until the shield looked pristine. Then I did the same for my own shield, knowing that our mother would be very worried if she saw the kind of damage the Xerith could inflict. These weren’t even the ones that could use magic, but they were bad enough.

  “All right, then,” I said. I held out my hand, and Bran grasped my vambrace.

  We disappeared from the alley as if they were never there. The illusion of the empty alley faded moments later, leaving only gently floating black ashes to show anything unusual had happened there. The salty wind blew in from the ocean, and soon even the ash was gone.

  *****

  Later that evening, I was alone in Stonekeep Castle, setting Mordon’s helm back in their study. There were two desks in there, one of which belonged to Mordon, and it was here that I found his helm. As was my custom, I used a bit of magic to clean the helm thoroughly and put it back where I found it. Mordon had been missing for more than twenty years, before I was even born, and it was unlikely that I’d ever even know what happened to him, much less that he’d come strolling in and wonder why his helm was missing. That didn’t matter to me, though. This was still his and Ismaera’s place, and I still felt like an intruder here, even if they were dead.

  What would they think of how I was handling things? What would they have done differently? Would they even like me as a person? For that matter, I didn’t even know if the Icosahedron would keep granting me magic to channel if I did something unacceptable in its eyes. I didn’t even know if there was a standard of conduct for sorcerers and High Magi.

  Also, I often felt like an imposter. Like I wasn’t good enough to make decisions that would affect everyone in the city. My hands started shaking when I thought back to the battles I’d fought. Goblins and ogres. The undead. The Xerith. Magic being hurled at me with the intent to kill. The shouts, the roars, claws, fangs, weapons… It was too much for me right then, and it took me a while to steady my breathing with deep breaths and refocus my mind on happier times.

  I’d already looked through his desk drawers once to see if there was anything that would lead me to where he’d gone, so I knew there was nothing that would glow with blinding light and show me where he’d gone. On the other hand, focusing on some of the strange things in his desk might help me put aside the less pleasant things I was thinking at that moment. I opened the center desk drawer and looked over the contents. There wasn’t much in there besides dried up ink jars and a few nice styluses. There were a few things that looked like they might have been souvenirs or lucky charms or something, and there was also a palm-sized piece of paper. On it were written these words:

  “In the days to come, serpents will replace the shepherds and will devour the flocks. The heart of darkness will snuff out the living. Out of lamentation, death will consume all. “

  Well, that was cheerful, I thought. But that was the only written thing either in or on the desk. It sounded like some kind of prophecy, and the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like the dreams Elle and Bran had. Their dreams had compared the Xerith to snakes. They had also recently tried to replace the King of Mithram with one of their own. They’d taken over the Church of the Overgod if they didn’t start it themselves, and they’d replaced the royal family of Aerie.

  It made me wonder if these were the events described so cryptically on the paper. The “heart of darkness snuffing out the living” mentioned on the paper sounded a lot like the necromantic focus we found outside the Pirate King’s lair, but it didn’t actually cause death itself. The focus had only locked people into an endless loop of undeath and killing. There was no great “lamentation,” either. Not that I knew of at least. Unless the prophecy was talking about Fellton. That place was a nightmare of human suffering. Death hadn’t consumed everything, either.

  In the end, I thought about the snippet of prophecy for a while, and there was nothing I could discern from it. It worked well for drawing me out of my shaking fit, though, so there was that. I put the paper back into Mordon’s desk and went about my day, forgetting all about it.