Gus Seldik had always hated his name. Gus? Really? And that was leaving aside his family’s name, the ridiculous once-noble blood that his former family had clung to so steadfastly.

  Gus Seldik. That wasn’t a fitting name for a genius, for one of the most talented mages of his generation! Now Xythen–that was a worthy name! Menacing. Memorable. Cool. Of course, it fit a necromancer better than a mere sorcerer, but by the time he had taken the name, he had long since left behind the pitiful reliance on spirit magic his family had forced on him.

  No one understood that, of course. When he had reached Apprentice level and begun toying with more creative uses for spirits, rather than clinging to the sad role of a support caster, he had been spurned by his family and the sentinels alike. He had been cast out–but he had risen beyond his simple means. Once he made it to Emeston, the money stolen from his family had been more than enough to buy himself a comfortable home, and from there it had been a short jump for him to find Hellesa.

  Of course, even the hag, so arrogant and full of herself, seemed to think she had found him, but that definitely wasn’t the case. Once he made a name for himself in Emeston as a spirit spy, it was inevitable that he would find a patron of worth. Hellesa had just made a better offer than any of the others would have.

  Besides. Necromancy was such a beautiful compliment to sorcery. There was a reason that, when the corpse hag had left Emeston to one of her sisters, she had beseeched Xythen to join her. And how good it was that he had! Out here, far from the watchful eyes all too common in the cities, it had almost been too easy to set himself up in comfort and begin expanding his art, plumbing Hellesa’s knowledge of the Ruined World’s magic and combining it with his own complete mastery of sorcery.

  Once he had crushed Culles (with minor assistance from Hellesa), Xythen had thought the world was his. Once he reached Initiate and could properly control his ghouls, it had been simple to start picking off people from surrounding villages, without the poor common sheep even knowing. The fools. He had built up an army of undead, completely bound to his will. Once they marched on that scab of a town called Jellis, he would’ve had a force that could threaten even Correntry, surely enough to earn a gift from the Tyrant–but then things had begun to go wrong.

  First, that useless Kellen got himself killed and ruined the simple ritual he was responsible for. Then Alamar was stupid enough to raid a caravan protected by wardens. Now Egin had gone quiet–and then the damned wardens had somehow found him too! Xythen would never understand how the brutes had managed to see through his web of subtle machination to find their way to his bastion of peace and solitude.

  Not that it had gone well for them, but still. They had wrecked dozens of Xythen’s carefully created zombies, as well as the pair of ghouls he kept on hand, before they had fallen to Xythen’s magic. Most of the population of Culles had been destroyed, rent back into chunks of inert flesh.

  “What do we do now?” he asked Hellesa. From another mouth, the words may have sounded like a whine, but Xythen turned them into a stoic complaint.

  The corpse hag looked up from the body she was studying. Her ugly, reversed eyes, black with white dots at the center, met his, and Xythen barely suppressed a flinch.

  “...Mistress?” he added belatedly. He had never been good at remembering the title Hellesa demanded he use for her, especially as he grew ever closer to her own power, but it was an unfortunate necessity. For now. Before too long, though… Well, there was only so much the hag could teach him before she wasn’t useful anymore.

  Her voice was a whisper of wind through a graveyard, the creak of a coffin’s hinges, the groan of a tomb’s ornate doors after decades of disuse. It was almost as impressive as his own. “First, you must stand these wretches back up,” the cloaked hag told him, waving a hand over the field of ruined zombies.

  That was the most imposing thing about necromancy, part of what drew Xythen to the deathly art. Done properly, it was unbeatable. Even once destroyed, remains could be reanimated again, and again. Of course, they did get a little weaker each time, as the corpses had less lingering magic in them the longer they were left to rot. There would be no recovering his ghouls, especially–they relied on the remnant energies of the gifts that had animated them in life.

  “I suppose some of them are still whole… ” Xythen pondered the hag’s words, ignoring her attempt to order him about like a common servant. “Those more scattered about, though, will be more challenging. I can’t just reanimate them…”

  “Use them for shamblers, then.” She was cross. What a pain. The wardens must’ve upset her even more than him. “I showed you how to make them months ago. I’m sure the peons still have some of those effigies of theirs hanging around you can use.”

  “Scarecrows?” Xythen frowned. Shamblers would do–but they’d require days, even weeks, of effort to be put together, knitting broken flesh to ruined scarecrows. “That will be a lot of work, though…”

  “Then you should get started!” the hooded shape of Hellesa snapped at him. “Once these three don’t come back, we can be sure that more will come to investigate. We must be ready!” The corpse hag punctuated her words by grinding her heel into the corpse of the older warden, that withered bastard with the fire gift.

  Xythen hated fire–it was the only thing that could truly destroy his creations. Hellesa had hinted that it was possible to reanimate even the ashes of a corpse, but Xythen had yet to see any evidence of that.

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  “And where will you be while I work on this,” Xythen asked, reluctantly adding, “mistress?”

  “We’ll need more fodder if Emeston comes to investigate. I’m going to get it.”

  “You’re going to raze a village?” Xythen asked. “By yourself?”

  “Of course not!” Hellesa snapped at him, quite unnecessarily. “That charnel pit Kellen left behind–those bodies should be nicely seasoned by now. They’ll do well to bolster our numbers.”

  Nicely seasoned? What nonsense. Everyone knew bodies got less potent as they aged. The hag must’ve been desperate indeed to turn to such old corpses as that doomed cult. She was just too self-deluded to admit the truth to herself.

  It was pitiful, really.

  “And the wardens?” Xythen asked. There were three of them, all prime bodies just begging to be put to use. The brawny one with the clubs, the tall one with the spear, and the old cuss who hadn’t even bothered with a weapon, relying solely on his fire–not that mere flames had been enough, not when Hellesa twisted his bones around inside of him. That had taken the fight right out of him!

  The hag spat to one side, the black fluid staining the ground to her side. “What? You want to make more ghouls of them?”

  Xythen smiled down at the corpses. Ghouls… no, his abilities had progressed far beyond ghouls! “I was thinking wights, mistress. With their gifts…”

  The hag narrowed her backwards eyes until the whites were mere pinpricks surrounded by black and gray. “Ah. Yes. These ‘Primal gifts’ of yours. I suppose that would give them the necessary magic… are you sure you can handle an elemental reanimation?”

  Sure? How dare she!? He was Xythen! “Of course I can, mistress! And you must admit, wights would make for a far more potent vanguard than mere ghouls!”

  The hag turned back to the corpses, and Xythen admitted a bit of relief to himself. Not out of fear, of course, but she was simply so… ugly. Yes, that was it. To someone as perfectly formed as he was, Hellesa’s hideous features were difficult to behold. That was why her stare was so unsettling, even after years spent working with her.

  Of course.

  “Very well, keep them. But get to work quickly–I’ll be back in a couple weeks, and I expect this mess to be cleaned up and a new horde ready to go by the time I return!”

  “Of course, mistress.” Xythen gritted his teeth. Withered old crone.

  Well. Maybe if he completed these wights, he could move his own timetable forward a little bit. Once she led back the horde she was creating, he could have his wights take care of her, claim her undead for his own, and…

  Yes. Perhaps things were looking up after all.

  #

  Xythen couldn’t help but grumble with discontent as he went about preparing his wights-to-be. The tall one, with the gift of water, was easy enough, at least. Xythen just tied a rope around his waist and threw him into the brackish cistern. The rotund one though, he was a pain. Xythen had to spend a few hours reanimating a pair of zombies–simple work, but they’d do the job–to hold the corpse up to a dead and twisted oak while Xythen tied his limbs to the tree.

  That only left the third, and he’d required working with fire, to make coals to bury the corpse in.

  Fire. Xythen shuddered, since Hellesa wasn’t there to see him. Spirits and undead alike feared the touch of fire, and so Xythen hated it too. But to make a wight imbued with fire magic… that would be worth it.

  But perhaps he’d just take a break first. Not to brood, of course, but merely… to think.

  It was all supposed to be so simple. That was how Hellesa had made it seem when she approached him.

  Their plan was simple enough to understand, if complex in execution. The Realm wasn’t going to last much longer–any idiot with eyes to see and ears to hear knew that. Hellesa and her sisters, her coven, were just trying to set themselves up to rule part of the corpse left behind once the Realm finally stumbled to its long overdue death.

  Of course, that didn’t mean they couldn’t push it along, to help it go a little faster. Xythen, despite being Hellesa’s primary proxy, didn’t know all of the coven’s plans. He knew other hags were sabotaging Emeston and Correntry, weakening them and hastening their deaths. Hellesa’s role, once she had left the cesspit of Emeston to her sister, was simple. She and Xythen, working through a few weaker proxies the other hags had made, would send the area between Correntry and Emeston into chaos, even as Stelbaka sowed discord along the Lumber Road.

  Its trade routes weakened, Correntry would be helpless when Xythen’s horde came knocking, and he could show that glittering pile of shit the true worth of his mind.

  But it hadn’t gone that way, had it? Kellen had failed to use the knowledge the Eldest provided him properly, and now they didn’t have a Void portal to call upon. Sloan, Algus, Alamar–Hellesa had felt it as each of her other proxies had turned up dead, leaving only Xythen and that worthless craven Cest. And now Egin, even with the authority that fur-bedecked witch had granted him, was gone too, either dead or fled.

  Now it was just him and Hellesa left in the deadlands, their allies scattered and their horde destroyed. If Xythen didn’t know any better, he would think the Realm was stronger than the hag had told him… But no. He knew the Realm’s weakness all too well. A nation that ignored minds as great as his own was doomed to fall. Only bad luck had undone him so far, but once his wights were done, he–

  What!? Xythen’s sorcery allowed him far greater control over his ghouls than any normal necromancer could’ve possessed. Given their own lead, the bestial corpses would as soon eat their prey as bring them to him, but Xythen kept a tight rein on them. And that meant he felt the wrenching pain as they were destroyed. First one, then two more not long after.

  Were there more wardens in the area already? That couldn’t be! He needed to summon Hellesa, to let her know, to bring her back…

  He was halfway through summoning a messenger spirit when he paused. Did he really need her? No… No, of course he didn't. His ghouls were scattered in other villages nearby, but it would be days before these threats reached him. More than enough time to finish his wights… and if he took these wardens down too, and reanimated them as well…

  When Xythen first came to the deadlands with Hellesa, he had met Fangrula, the rage hag, and her primary, Brisann, that witch swaddled in the hides of their prey. Despite being Fangrula’s proxy, Xythen had seen the way the rage hag had flinched at Brisann’s words. He had seen who was in charge between them.

  And if Brisann could do it… why couldn’t Xythen? Forget killing Hellesa! With enough wights, anything was possible, even supplanting the useless crone in this little coven of hers!

  Yes. This wasn’t bad luck at all. This was excellent luck! He needed only to be ready for them…