Josh Reynolds - Master of Death

W’soran hissed and thumped his head with balled-up fists. He glared about him at the throne room, at the flagstones of black marble and the wide columns, covered in elaborate and grotesque carvings, which loomed upwards to meet the arched ceiling. It had seemed so magnificent, the first time he’d seen it. Now, it seemed facile and empty, as if Nagash’s death had drained away the malevolence that had once been imbued in the stones and columns.

‘How,’ he muttered. ‘How could this have happened?’ How could Nagash have been felled? How could a god… die?

No answer came to him, in the vastness of the now-abandoned throne room, but he knew, regardless. Nagash hadn’t been a god. His claims to the contrary, and all hubris aside, it had become increasingly clear to W’soran that Nagash was many things, but a god was not one of them.

Would a god have had to bargain with the ratkin? Would a god have taken such pleasures in the torture of a mere mortal, as Nagash had Alcadizzar? That Nagash had not allowed him to extract the price of his stolen eye from Alcadizzar had been a disappointment; he had gorged on the fallen king’s pain like a flea, keeping it all for himself. W’soran closed his eyes. And would a god have denied his truest servant, in a fit of pique?

He went to the throne and traced the gouges. A tingle of magic — ugly and acidic in nature — coursed through his fingertips. He pulled his hand back quickly, flexing his fingers. He could see it in his mind’s eye. Nagash’s final moments had likely been swift ones. That was the only way he could have been overcome, with speed and ferocity. W’soran had considered it himself, in those private moments in recent months, when he was far from Nagashizzar.

The attacker had probably taken him as he sat slumped, exhausted after his Great Ritual. That would have been the perfect moment, and Nagash had known that. Why else would he have sent them all — W’soran, Arkhan and the others — from Nagashizzar while he did it?

He saw his master now for the paranoid creature he truly was. Nagash had been afraid of them all. He had been afraid of their power, afraid that they might usurp his much-vaunted dominion of the dead. He feared that once more the usurper would be usurped and tossed down by his followers.

W’soran had returned first. He had felt Nagash’s death reverberate through the winds of magic and the pain had nearly driven him mad. The tattoos of obedience that Nagash had scratched into his flesh had burned like acid and he had nearly toppled from his palanquin into the Mortis River. Carried on a cloud of scarabs, he had returned to Nagashizzar to find the dead there toppled at their posts, and ratkin swarming the corridors, armed for war.

He glanced around, at the pathetic, smoking heaps that marked the final moments of a number of the latter. They had attacked the moment he arrived, and he had been sore pressed for several confusing moments. The pain of Nagash’s death had disorientated him, and Nagashizzar, once a place of safety and strength, now seemed menacing, like a beast that had slipped its leash. Without Nagash, Nagashizzar crouched ready to serve a new master.

‘Master,’ Zoar said, stepping into the throne room. ‘The ratkin have retreated for the moment. We have revivified a number of the citadel’s guards, but we require your might to bring them all back from the dark vale.’ The Yaghur looked tired. W’soran had left his acolytes behind when he’d made his sudden journey, and they’d pushed themselves hard to catch up. Undead as they were, the magics they’d used still drew on their strength and will, something none of them had in abundance. W’soran chose for certain qualities, and initiative and endurance were not among them.

‘I am coming,’ W’soran said, examining his hands. Slowly, his fingers curled into fists. ‘We have much to do, and the night slips by.’

‘What are we going to do, master? What will we do now, with the Undying King… taken from us?’ Zoar asked. Nagash had been a certainty for the Yaghur for centuries. Zoar and his brethren had been shaken to their core, no less than W’soran, by the destruction of Nagash. If they could know fear, they did so at this moment.

W’soran looked at Zoar. ‘What will we do?’ he asked. ‘Anything we want, Zoar, for Nagashizzar is ours, as of this moment, and Nagash’s empire with it!’

The Worlds Edge Mountains

(Year -290 Imperial Calendar)

‘We welcome you, oh speaker of the dead,’ Shull, High King of the Draesca, wheezed, his white-haired head bowed beneath the weight of the tall, bat-winged helm he wore. He sat slumped in a throne constructed from wood and the bones of a great cave beast, killed by some ancient tribal champion in the mists of history. Bronze braziers stood to either side of the throne, their flames both warmed and lit the lodge-house that served as Shull’s palace. It was mostly empty. A great fur rug covered the floor before the dais that held the throne, and rough benches lined the path to it.

In normal times, the sub-chieftains of the Draesca would sit on those benches, as their high king welcomed official guests. But these were not normal times, and W’soran was not a normal guest. He stood before the throne, cloaked and hooded, with his face hidden by the bronze mask he’d worn as high priest of Mourkain’s Mortuary Cult, and inclined his head.

‘And I give thanks for that welcome.’ W’soran examined the old man carefully and could see the weight of unnatural years that clung to him. There was a cruel power in the helm the old man wore; W’soran knew this, because he’d put it there. The metal helm was as much a vampire as the man who’d created it, and no high king had yet lasted longer than seven years wearing it. ‘Many have forgotten me, in my exile,’ he continued. ‘Many have turned from the ways of the charnel fields, and the teachings of the Mortuary Cult, in these dark times.’

‘Not the Draesca! Never the Draesca, my lord,’ the high king coughed, bending forward to hack up a spatter of blood onto the rough-hewn planks that made up the floor of the lodge-house. ‘The Draesca hold tight to the old ways,’ he continued thinly, gesturing to the great berths that marked the walls of the structure. In the berths sat the dusty, shroud-wrapped bodies of the previous chieftains. W’soran could practically taste the flicker of dark magic nesting in each of those corpses, like maggots in a wound. ‘We hold tight to our ways and our mountains both,’ Shull croaked, and a darkling power flared deep in his sunken eyes. He was on the sixth year of his reign, and his body was weighed down by decay and nearing death. ‘Thanks to you, my lord,’ he continued, essaying a gap-toothed smile.

The Draesca inhabited the mountains of the northern fringes of Strigos, and the south of the Draka and the Fennones. They were a large tribe, made of dozens of feuding clans, and ruled by the high king, who was chosen by tribal coronation. Neferata had gotten her hooks into the other tribes early, but the Draesca had been W’soran’s the moment he had forged their helm of kingship for them.

There was a part of him in the helm, even as there was a part of Nagash in the crown that now occupied Ushoran’s head. It had taken him centuries of research and failed experiments to create the process that had gone into the forging of the helm. It had not been an idle whim.

He had known from the first what black presence squatted brooding beneath the crude pyramid that Kadon had built and Ushoran usurped. Ushoran had as well, though he had not truly understood. But W’soran had. What he had not known was how it had gotten where it was, many hundreds of miles from where it should have been. Those last few days in Nagashizzar, in the wake of Nagash’s destruction, he had scoured the citadel for any sign of the crown. It had been the symbol of Nagash’s authority, and somehow, Nagash had sealed a portion of himself — of his essence — into the black iron. It was that shard of the Undying King that had drawn first Ushoran and then the others, one by one, to Mourkain.