Josh Reynolds - Neferata

She shook her head and Ushoran cocked his, looking at her curiously. ‘You disagree?’

‘I… no, no, it is a good plan,’ she said, forcing the words out. ‘I look forward to it.’

‘Do you? I wonder,’ Ushoran said, turning back to the ceremony. ‘Now shush. History’s epilogue begins now.’

Stung, Neferata stepped back and joined her handmaidens. Naaima laid a hand on her arm and Neferata shook her off. Naaima looked afraid; it was the first time that Neferata had seen fear in her handmaiden’s face since before Lahmia fell. Layla was trembling like a child or a frightened animal, her eyes red and wide. Rasha was less obviously affected, but there were signs of strain on her face and in the rigidity of her muscles. It was no longer just her. Something was stirring in the dark, and even lesser creatures could sense it. Her senses were screaming in terror. The throne room seemed to contract. Someone was sitting on the throne. For a moment, the shape was lean and immense, a rickety giant clad in armour such as she had never seen, with a crown on its skeletal brow and eyes of green balefire that burned her clear through.

She shook her head and the vision passed. She looked at Anmar. ‘What is your fool brother playing at? I told him that Ushoran was to know nothing of the dwarfs until I decided to tell him!’

‘My lady, I—’

‘Don’t try and protect him, girl,’ Neferata said, grabbing Anmar’s arm. ‘What is he up to?’

Before Anmar could answer, W’soran and his followers began to speak, one after the other, their voices blending in dark harmony. The light of the braziers scattered about flickered and then blazed all the brighter, turning from a clean pale glow to something sickly and weird as the words echoed from the oddly vaulted reaches of the chamber.

Neferata stiffened as something reached out of the darkness of the tomb-corridor and caressed her. The chamber seemed to tremble with titan footsteps and the rock groaned and shifted. Smoke issued from the cracks in the walls and the floor and she could feel a heat pressing down on her from every direction, just as before.

Alcadizzar was coming.

W’soran spat something, and he flung out one gnarled limb. A weft of crackling onyx lightning stretched from his hand, splashing across the aperture. His disciples threw back their heads as W’soran pulled more power from them. Neferata blinked as she caught sight of what might have been obsidian webs spreading between the necromancer’s acolytes and binding them all together. Her blood began to race as she sensed something coming. She looked around, seeing the same intent expression on the face of every vampire in the chamber — a feral lust that stripped from them even the most basic shred of human dignity and instead replaced it with the bald greed of a starving animal.

When the light came, it was painful. A curling wing of flame lashed out of the aperture, spattering across the line of necromancers, and one screamed, high and piteous, as his ragged robes caught fire. He tumbled from the line, thrashing and beating at himself with stick arms and wispy fingers. The flames simply consumed him all the faster for his attempts to put them out. He crawled across the floor, leaving a greasy trail in his wake, his flesh blistering from his bones.

‘He comes!’ Morath screamed suddenly. Neferata saw the Strigoi stagger, their hands clapping to their ears. A moment later she understood why. The voice screamed, rattling her brains inside her head. It was not the voice of the crown, not the thin whisper of Nagash’s shadow, but the full-throated howl of the Prince of Rasetra and the last true King of Khemri as he was dragged from his tomb by W’soran’s magics. There was nothing of her gentle prince in the mad, billowing shape which lurched from the aperture, its limbs ballooning and thinning like the smoke of a raging fire. It roared and its face became an elephantine skull as it squeezed itself into the chamber.

‘Bind him, damn you!’ Ushoran roared, fighting to be heard over the tumult. ‘Bind his damned soul, W’soran! Do it now!’

W’soran did not reply. His dark parchment-like flesh had gone utterly pale from the strain of the great wreaking which he was attempting. The spirit swept one of Ushoran’s warriors up and the vampire flailed like a leaf caught in an updraft. It was crushed against the ceiling of the chamber, reduced to a wreck of bloody meat and crushed armour. Alcadizzar turned, empty eyes seeking more prey. Neferata froze as his eyes lit on her. Her handmaidens dived aside as the spirit swept towards them, but she could not move. She heard them crying out, but she could not answer.

Alcadizzar stopped, his ethereal features inches from hers, his blank eyes staring into her dark ones. She felt the heat of him, and knew that he could burn her form to a cinder, should he so choose. In life, Alcadizzar had been magnificent. In death, he had become something so monstrous that she felt fear for the first time in centuries.

But he did not burn her, or dash her to the stones. Instead he hesitated, his face becoming malformed as it rippled with long-forgotten expression. Again she saw times past, spreading out around them like the wings of some great bird, a kaleidoscope of thought and emotion and lost moments. Of a child whom she had weaned on immortality, of a boy whom she had trained, of a man whom she had come to — what? Had it been love? Or simply desire writ large?

‘I wanted…’ she croaked, reaching up as if to stroke his cheek. ‘I wanted things to be different.’

She saw his end. She felt the tremor of the hissing, smoking blade in his hands as it sheared through Nagash’s upraised hand, and felt the foul heat of that same sword as it ate into him, burning his hands raw and black. She saw him stumble through the mountains, naked and broken, his shard-thoughts so sharp that they cut his soul to ribbons even as his body at last began to fail. She saw him clutch Nagash’s crown tight to his chest as he sank to his knees in the freezing waters of the river, a living, screaming mummy, his flesh burned tight to bones made strong by the elixirs she had fed him as an infant.

She heard the crown scream as he carried it into the darkness, and how it ripped his soul free of his body, trying to force him to let go. She felt Kadon bind that monstrous soul-thing back into its shell, nearly killing himself in the process. And she saw him release those bindings even as red-eyed death closed in on him. And she knew, then, just what it was W’soran was trying to do and something she thought was sadness flooded her. ‘Oh, if you had just given in to fate,’ she murmured.

And what of you, Neferata, Alcadizzar whispered, would you give in?

Struck, she gaped at the spirit as it suddenly convulsed. Beyond it, visible through its cloudy shape, something horrible swayed in the aperture. It had clawed its way out of the deep places, invigorated by W’soran’s magics. Alcadizzar’s body, hungry for the return of its soul, was still a mighty thing, even shrunken by death. Withered muscles pulsed beneath cracked and dried flesh as it took a faltering step.

‘No,’ she hissed. ‘No!’

‘Yes!’ Ushoran howled.

Alcadizzar howled as well, as his spirit was dragged into his corpse. Many of W’soran’s acolytes were on their hands and knees, vomiting black blood as their master strained against the dead king’s strength. With a shriek, W’soran thrust his arms out, and Alcadizzar’s essence splashed against his corpse, seeping into it like an implosion. The thing rocked on its heels and its arms slowly spread, dropping the thing it held.

The strike of the crown against the floor sounded like thunder. ‘Now,’ Ushoran snarled. ‘Now, I will have my vengeance.’ He leapt for the wight, his claws sinking into its dried meat. ‘Now, I will tear you apart, usurper. I am the master here! Me! ’