Chapter Thirteen - Colourful Creatures

It was...

It was...

Seventeen moved to the side and looked up. The ocean was lapis blue. That was good. The sky past that was bright and yellow with sunlight, and in that brightness, Seventeen could make out the faintest hints of lilac and teal. It was daytime above, and from the colours... It had to be the fifth month.

It wasn’t time to move out. No, he and his army could rest some more. Become stronger in their underwater tombs and wait until the call returned and it was once more the time for war.

Every year, his troops would march out into the day, and when they returned, he would listen to the tales of the place where the ocean wasn’t. Seventeen yearned for the day, to see the darkened sky with its many stars, but he had a mission, given to him long ago.

He was a necromancer.

A proper necromancer. He had paid his union dues ... Some time ago, and he wore his somewhat ratty official bow-tie with pride around his skeletal neck.

Seventeen tucked himself against the opening to his laboratory and enjoyed the swirl of the moving waters against his torn and ragged clothes. They yanked him to and fro, like seaweed caught in the currents.

But, as with all things, the moment passed, and soon he would need to return to his work.

His scouts had found more bodies. Bones and ligaments and pieces of things that had once lived, and now he had to turn these into more soldiers for the army, more bodies for the war.

On his table, held up by legs bent just-so to give it the right height, were the remains of some of the larger, more predatory fish, and the lower half of a man’s body. He wished he had more arms. That way this fresh creation could have held onto some weaponry. But perhaps it would make do as another guard, or a scout to fetch more material from the wastes.

He was about to start working when a clatter and bang sounded out across his fortress of bones.

Seventeen paused and listened. The beats of femurs on shoulder-blades and drums made of stretched skin was unfamiliar. That wasn’t the call to warn of a shift in the tides, nor the announcement that a school of scavenger sharks had come to pick clean the marrow of his soldiers...

Seventeen, were he able to, would have gasped.

A necromancer was approaching.

He rushed around his laboratory, setting things straight here, and replacing things there. But no! A guest might never see the laboratory. They would definitely see him.

He had never had any guests before. How he wished that one of the fabled Death Butlers of yore were here to keep his fortress clean!

It wasn’t the time for wishful thinking!

Seventeen burst into his room, and found it a mess. Barnacles had grown on the walls, and his bed had rotten away in the currents. Not that he had ever used it. In the corner was a chest, old and well-worn, a treasure found in the wreck of an ancient vessel. He opened it and shifted through the golden coins and precious trinkets within.

“Ahhh!” he sighed as he found his uniform.

During the day-to-day, it was entirely acceptable for a necromancer to wear only the minimum pieces of their uniform. After all, it could interfere with safety protocols and experiments, and necromancers were sometimes reviled and mocked when wearing their full garb, it was therefore logical that they only wear the full regalia when in need of it.

First came the pants. These were checkered in brown and green and stopped near the middle of his shins. A mark that he was a specialist in grafting and creating new undead. Then the shirt, the pale grey of old bones. A sign that he was, himself, an undead.

Next the suspenders that looped over his shoulders and kept his pants on over his bony hips. They were the pitch black of the void, with cute little crossbones stitched into them. Those didn’t denote any ranks, he just liked the bone pattern.

He slipped on his shiny oxfords, still sleek and fresh after all those millenia, and ran out of his room while straightening his tie.

He was excited in a way he hadn’t been in... nearly centuries.

The last time he’d had any contact with the world beyond his fortress was with the fighters of the local sect, the one that has sprouted up recently. They liked to chat with his vanguard whenever he sent them out. They treated the spearhead of his army like players in some strange game.

Seventeen couldn’t find it in himself to kill those humans. They were entertaining, and they would die eventually, then he’d get to play with their bodies.

He had learned patience.

He exited the corpse of a massive turtle that he had made his home some millenia ago, and moved to the open space at the centre of his base. This was the parade ground, where on occasion his little army would form up in neat rows and lines and march about to practice.

The undead required no exercise, but practice never hurt anyone.

At the far end, the main gates of the fortress were opening up, slowly and steadily with the clunking of bone gears and ligament chains.

Seventeen shifted from side to side, then noticed how empty everything was. What kind of greeting was this?

“To arms!” he called. “Parade! Form ranks along the sides!”

His sergeants heard the calls, and soon skeletons and zombies, abominations of flesh and bones and interesting creatures he had fused together in his laboratory came pouring out of the barracks and halls all around his fortress.

He was nervous, of course. The gate was moving still, and perhaps his guests would see the mad scramble for what it was.

Oh, how he wished they had sent a message ahead of time!

Soon, his army had formed up along the sides of the parade grounds. Skeletons in mismatched equipment stood in neat rows. Wisps and Shades and other ephemeral undead swirled through the currents above in neat formations.

To the sides, his bigger creations stood tall and proud, making themselves look large while grunts fastened armour and gear to their flanks.

His squadron of man-sized spider abominations skittered about until they had placed themselves in their own untidy formation.

In the coming weeks, Seventeen decided they would be placing a much larger emphasis on parade ground practice. The current showing wasn’t terrible, but it was far from perfect. If only he’d known he would be receiving guests.

He was also annoyed that the gate was so slow to open, but at the same time, it was giving him time to prepare.

The doorway locked into place, and from the outside of his fortress came a carriage.

It was a simple carriage, not ornate, nor fanciful, but in his vision it glowed purple and blue, enchantments buried into the wood and steel, and turning the carriage into a piece of moving art. Simple, yet perfectly executed.

The horses at the fore were zombies, still fresh and hale, the sort of flesh that he never got to work with, and atop the carriage, in the driver’s seat.

Seventeen straightened as his eyes rested on the swirling magic of a creature he was not expecting to see. The greys of necromantic magic mixed with the lively greens of something tied to nature itself, and the pitch black of a death butler.

The soul within was grafted together from two recipients. He wasn’t aware that such was even possible!

He wanted that creature on his laboratory table right away!

Seventeen stood a little taller as the carriage rolled around the parade ground and came to a stop a few necrometers away, its doors facing him.

They opened, and the first thing to exit was... a dog.

Seventeen looked at the creature, with its fur waving in the waters and its tongue lapping at the air. It was alive, he could tell, but still breathing. The faint hints of magic clinging to it solved one question, but not the other.

Why was there a dog here?

Next came a young woman. She had the same faint glimmer of yellowish transmutation magic linked to her, and her bag glowed with tightly woven enchantments. She... had the faintest of grey glows to her. Was she the necromancer?

Her outfit was all wrong though. No bow-tie--though he knew that some female necromancers disliked the bow-tie and suspenders uniform for a reason he could never comprehend--and her skirt didn’t have any pattern that he could discern.

Another living creature scrambled out of the carriage, and Seventeen’s caution rose. A demi-god, with a soul of gold and green, whose ties to this realm were as solid as any, but whose whole being was blessed through its own birth.

She looked like a mantis, though made larger. He had heard of her ilk from his scouts. They were dangerous.

All that was forgotten as another stepped out of the carriage.

He was magic made manifest.

Seventeen tremble as the being looked about. Divination magic washed out around him in a burst of pink, and the ocean suddenly seemed brighter thanks to his mere presence.

He wore the jacket of an arch-magus, and the bow-tie of a member of the necromancer’s union, but the little skulls were wrought of fine silver thread, and the cloth was the pitch black of death itself.

“My lord,” Seventeen said as he bowed at the waist.

There was no way he wouldn’t recognize the man before him, not even after so long, not even after millenia beneath churning waters and far from anyone else.

“Ah, so that explains it,” the Father of Bones said.

Seventeen wished he could crumple onto the ground as a stack of bones.

The Harold had seen his fortress in such a sorry state, and had seen how little Seventeen had advanced. Decades of laziness came to haunt him all at once. What discoveries had he made? Did he have any notes to present to his Father of Bones? Any new treaties and scientific discoveries?

A thesis, at least? Even a little one?

No! Seventeen caught himself. He was a proud necromancer, at the very least. He had done his duty, and grew a strong army that awaited for this very moment.

A flick of magic, one he didn’t doubt the Bone Father saw, dipped into the fortress itself and made the entire facility awaken. It was one creature, made of a million bones and corpses, and within its deep bowels were two thousand years worth of shipwrecked men and the bodies of creatures lost to the waves.

Seventeen’s troops awoke, ready to serve at long last.

“Lieutenant of the Seventeenth Garrison Battalion at your Service, My Lord,” Seventeen said. That wasn’t truly his name. He was merely a lieutenant, made to serve, but he needed a way to sign his documents, and it seemed to be popular among lieutenants just like him, once.

“How very interesting,” Harold said. He looked across the few troops on the parade ground, and Seventeen could just make out the faint grey tendrils of magic brushing over his creations and evaluating them. “Have you been collecting resources this entire time?”

“Yes, my lord!” Seventeen said.

“Impressive.”

Seventeen felt as if his soul could sing, but he reigned in his excitement and stood back up. He held onto his suspenders in the proper posture for a subordinate member of the necromancer’s union. “Thank you, my lord,” he said.

“Well, this certainly gives me all sorts of ideas.”

***