Hours passed and still, the young Necromancer sat, unbelieving, as he stared at the rapidly cooling corpses of his parents. It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be real.

Magnin and Beory Steelarm were invincible, immovable presences in his life. The thought that they might die had never even entered his head. To his mind, they were functionally immortal, regularly entering the most dangerous places imaginable and leaving with hardly a scratch.

The sight of their still and lifeless bodies refused to register and his brain froze. He was dimly aware of his skeletons coming to life around him as his magick slowly replenished. They may have even fought off some rift-kin as he sat unmoving, he couldn’t be sure.

Hours later, he gathered enough of himself to turn, muscles aching from lack of activity, and he grasped his mother's pack, fumbling it open with shaking hands to find the note she had left him.

He read it through five times.

Despite the evidence before his eyes, he still couldn’t make himself acknowledge what had happened. Despite the note, which he read over and over, it couldn’t force the knowledge that his parents had died to sink into his head.

He was still struggling with it when night fell.

“They knew from the beginning it was going to end like this,” Yor said from behind him.

Tyron turned his hollow stare onto the vampire, and she met his eyes evenly.

“You were working for them,” he rasped, his voice hoarse, as if he’d been screaming in his own throat for hours.

Her dark eyes softened imperceptibly.

“We were working with them. It was Magnin and Beory who arranged for me to accompany you, and they who paid the price for my assistance. My mistress had her own reasons for sending me, of course.”

Tyron nodded.

He still couldn’t feel anything, as if the emotions had been blasted out of him. Almost against his will, his eyes moved to flick back to the corpses on the ground. He stilled them. Looking at those lifeless bodies wouldn’t help. Nothing would help.

Yor gestured to the letter.

“Your mother has written of the arrangements, yes? The archer is already stumbling her way back down the mountain. She will testify to your death at the hands of your parents.”

So Magnin and Beory would go down in history as murdering their own son. Apparently, he was a wanted criminal and a threat to the empire, so they’d continue to be heroes in the eyes of the people.

Which… for some reason… ignited a slow-burning fury in Tyron’s gut.

The silence dragged out, and for a moment, even Yor looked discomfited. Tyron’s eyes were dead, his posture slumped, yet he radiated a cold anger that manifested as his fingers curled and uncurled into fists, the knuckles whitening as he clenched.

The arrangements.

They had planned everything out for him so well… given him as much time as they could manage, letting him gain power, so that he could stand on his own when they were gone. It was all there on the page. If he followed their instructions, he would live a quiet and anonymous life, free of the brand, free of control.

The freedom they had always been denied in their own life, they had bought for him.

He’d have to hide, of course, but they’d arranged that for him as well. Experts who could produce fake status documents, corrupt officials that would look the other way and let him settle.

You choose, they’d written, you get to choose.

When he thought of how much they had wanted that choice, he almost broke. It was the most precious thing in the world to Magnin and Beory, the greatest gift they could bestow.

He didn’t want it. He wanted his family back.

“You took their souls, didn’t you?” he rasped as he stared up at the vampire.

“Your mother forbade us from telling you what happened to their souls, except to say that the Court does not possess them,” she shook her head.

Tyron grunted. He should have known they wouldn’t let him track them down. Once again, they had gone somewhere he couldn’t follow. He stared at his hands, trying to reconcile the emptiness inside him and the glowing embers of his anger.

“What are you planning to do?” Yor asked, a slight smile quirking at the corner of her lips. “Will you do as your parents suggest? Settle down somewhere out of the way? Practise your magick in secret and live a quiet, fulfilling life?”

He looked at her, his thoughts slowly turning over in his head.

“I… have a lot of work… to do,” he said, forcing himself to his feet.

Yor watched him go, stumbling around the impromptu camp site.

Magnin and Beory had left their gear behind, which was worth thousands of gold, that couldn’t be left to rust away on the mountainside. He couldn’t bring himself to touch his parents, however. He gathered their packs, sorted the many, many valuable items they had tucked away, transferring the most immediately useful ones to his own pack.

Two strange jewels were amongst the things he found. His mother’s letter had detailed what they were, and what they were for. He placed each one on either of his parents' bodies, ensuring they wouldn’t roll off. Magnin had ensured they were lying relatively flat, just another courtesy from his father before he’d taken his own life.

With that task done, he sent his skeletons to gather the remains scattered across the mountainside. So many Slayer bodies, many of them still in excellent condition. An abundance of wealth the likes of which he’d never seen in his short necromantic career.

With a little help from his remaining revenant, he pitched his father’s tent on the other side of the rock, slightly sheltered from the breeze and where he couldn’t see them.

After he ate and drank, he gathered his tools and began to organise his work area. As the saying went, many hands made light work, and despite his extensive losses, Tyron was not short on hands.

For once, he also wasn’t short on time.

He rebuffed the occasional rift-kin surge, but his work progressed smoothly, all things considered. Perhaps Yor was helping in that regard, when she wasn’t watching him through her gleaming red eyes, that smile still on her lips.

When he was ready, Tyron began to systematically prepare the remains, extracting the bones, separating the flesh, burying the refuse he didn’t want and couldn’t use.

He paused for a second when he came to Laurel’s body, freshly recovered from her icy coffin, but his eyes hardened and he smashed down with his cleaver. She deserved nothing less.

When the task was done, he had his minions organise the bones, arranging them so that they might saturate with Death magick in peace.

After he washed his hands with some water from his father’s canteen, he gathered a dozen small stones, each just large enough to fit in the palm of his hand. New homes for the lost souls.

By the time he had finished locking them away, he was swaying on his feet from exhaustion. Even Tyron had limits, and he had found them. He crawled into the tent and let sweet oblivion take him, sleeping through the day and letting his minions defend the camp. When the sun fell over the horizon, he emerged.

Whatever medicine his mother had fed him was miraculous, to say the least. The arrow wounds were almost healed, only circles of puckered, new flesh remained of the holes he’d sported the day before. This morning, he felt he could check on his parents, and he found that the crystals had completed their work during the day, doing just what Beory had wrote they would.

The two figures were now coated in a thin layer of glittering, diamond-like substance. It would preserve them perfectly, the letter had said, until he was ready to put the bodies to good use.

He wasn’t sure he would ever be ready to dismember his own parents, but he didn’t want them rotting away here on the mountainside either. He would need to put them somewhere safe, where they wouldn’t be disturbed, but that would have to wait, he simply didn’t have the means right now.

Yor stood over the remains, her perfect face a blank mask.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do yet?”

Tyron ignored her. There was still so much to do.

In fact, he remained on the mountain for a week. He took his time, prepared his spells meticulously, took notes, raised his new minions with care.

On the third day, he went down to the village and spoke to Ortan, informed the man of what had happened and traded for supplies. The villager was shaken as Tyron told him of the Slayers dead on the mountain, and the mammoth rift-kin he had slain.

He begged Tyron to remain and protect them, refugees from the plains had arrived, and they needed help more than ever. The Necromancer refused, told him when he would leave and turned away.

Slayers would come to protect them eventually, he no longer felt compelled to be a shield for these people. He benefited from the experience the rift-kin fed him, but that was all.

For the remainder of the week, he worked, studied and rested.

In many ways, it was the idyllic existence he had always craved. Time to examine his Class, time to think on his spells and experiment. He learned a great deal in that time, putting the opportunity to good use, but he found no satisfaction in it.

The more time that passed, the more the cold anger in his belly burned brighter. The anger burned any pleasure he might have felt to ash, incinerated the joy he might have felt.

Magnin and Beory were dead. It was the divines that had killed them.

Oh, they had acted through their puppets, the nobility, and they through theirs, the Magisters, but it was clear where the fault truly lay. Tyron didn’t know how he could possibly seek revenge against the gods, he didn’t know how to reach them, or how to hurt them if he did. Even the nobles were beyond his reach, protected by layer after layer of law, privilege, soldiers and Slayers. The Magisters too were difficult to reach, able to control every person who fought against the kin using the brand.

But he would reach them. It would take time, a great deal of time, but he would reach them. What had happened on this mountain, what had happened to his family, wouldn’t be allowed to stand.

Tyron didn’t know how, but he was going to throw down everyone who had done this and grind them beneath a skeletal heel.

When the week was done, he met with Yor under the full moon.

“I’ve decided,” he said.

A smile split her face in half, revealing her fangs.

“And I take it you haven’t chosen to live a quiet and reserved life?”

“No,” he said shortly.

Her grin widened, which he hadn’t thought was possible.

“I’d hoped you’d say that. So, you want passage through the rift?”

“I do.”

“Well then.” She reached out a hand for him to take. “Shall we?”

That night, he performed the status ritual once more, confirmed his choices, and stepped into the rift, the vampire by his side.

In his hand, he held his bedraggled book of notes, a tome that would come to be known and feared across the realm as the Book of the Dead.