Josh Reynolds: Master of Death

The Worlds Edge Mountains,

(Year -223 Imperial Calendar)

W’soran awoke slowly, reluctantly. Eyelids as thin as parchment peeled back from dull orbs — one a grisly yellow, the other milky white and blind — even as thin, desiccated lips retreated from the thicket of needle fangs that occupied his mouth. The twin leathery slashes that were his nostrils flared, taking in the air instinctively. He smelled the effluvium of age, the cold, harsh stink of rock and the faintest odour of long-ago spilled blood.

The latter brought memories scrambling to the surface of his mind. This place had, once upon a time, belonged to a particularly tenacious mountain tribe: hairy savages who had, nonetheless, managed to wrest some form of civilised dwelling from the mountains. They had built a fastness on a fang-like crag, piling stones upon ancient foundations that W’soran suspected had once belonged to one of the elder races. It had been an impressive feat, given their relative brutishness.

W’soran had butchered the lot in a single night, glutting himself on their blood in an uncharacteristic display of excess. The memory of it, of their screams and cries, of the taste of their rough throats, warmed him. His narrow chest expanded like a pig’s bladder filled with water as he sucked in the phantom scent, luxuriating in the thought.

With it came more memories, shaken loose from a stagnant brain. Names, faces, events flowed thinly at first and then came in a flood, a deluge, crashing and smashing through the cobwebs that clung to W’soran’s mind. He remembered his name, his purpose, his fate and more besides.

He remembered Mahrak, the City of Hope, and how he had been driven from the city of his birth by jealous rivals. He remembered Lahmia, the City of the Dawn, and how it had burned. He remembered Neferata, prideful, spiteful, savage Neferata and the gift she had grudgingly given him. Had given all of them — the gift of vampirism.

That gift had been tainted, he now knew. It had taken him centuries to puzzle it out, to understand the dark joke that had been played on all of them — Abhorash, Ushoran, himself and yes, even Neferata. A joke played by Nagash; Nagash the Usurper, Nagash the Great Necromancer.

Nagash, the Master of Death.

Thirst prickled at the back of his throat, not for water or wine, but for the copper tang of blood. Not even moments after awakening, the blood-lust returned in full. No matter how much he drank, how many screaming, squirming bags of flesh and bone he wrung dry, it never dimmed or dulled. That was Neferata’s gift, eternal thirst to go with eternal life, forever in thrall to base need.

But then, he was no stranger to need. Even now, even after everything that had happened he still felt it, burning in his gut like a slow poison. The need, not for blood or to feel the life of squirming prey ebb from twitching meat, but for — what? — respect, perhaps? Acknowledgement, certainly; the admission of his superiority by those who dared call themselves his peers. For was he not their superior in every way that mattered? Did he not control the charnel winds that gave life to the lifeless and made the black blood of all of those gifted with vampirism quicken in their crooked veins? Was he not as much master as Nagash, as much a king as Neferata was a queen, as much a warrior as Abhorash? But it was not in the nature of their kind to recognise superiority, even when it was proven. He had wasted many years trying to do just that, before recognising the futility of such endeavours.

He gave a disgusted grunt and pushed the thought aside. There was a strange smell on the air. Something had awakened him before his time. His unfinished calculations quivered in his head like beheaded serpents. Irritation washed through him, billowing into anger. He had felt the feather-light touch of another mind, through the link of shared blood; an avenue of contact only open to those upon whom he had bestowed his blood-kiss, those whom he called his apprentices.

‘I was not to be disturbed,’ W’soran croaked, long-dormant vocal cords quivering to life as he forced musty air through them. ‘There are calculations yet to be made.’

No reply was forthcoming. That was not unexpected given the proclivities of his apprentices. They were not social creatures, too much given to introspection and meditation, even as he was. Then, he had earned that right. They had not.

The braziers that encircled him had long since gone cold, and the torches on their wall-brackets were doused. The surge of anger, as cold as a deep mountain stream, overflowed its banks. They should have been in attendance, and braziers and torches lit. That was their duty after all: to watch over him as he meditated and to record his calculations and utterances.

He scanned the room, seeing the piles of parchment and the ratty tomes, bound in human hair and tanned skin, piled haphazardly about him like offerings to some primitive god. Even these had been left unattended. That was perhaps the least of their sins. For W’soran, the grimoires and scrolls were merely tools to be used, absorbed and discarded. It was a lesson he despaired of teaching his followers, many of whom treated the decaying tomes as a mother might a child. It was the nature of the savage to graft import to the inanimate, and, regrettably, most of his followers were little better than the rock-dwelling primitives he had butchered to make this lair.

‘Urdek,’ he rasped, naming the most senior of his current crop of apprentices. That could have changed, he knew. He encouraged a certain bloody-minded initiative amongst his disciples, though he’d thought Urdek was made of sterner stuff than that.

Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong about that sort of thing. In the spirit of practicality, he called out the name of the next most senior apprentice, ‘Kung?’

His pointed, conch-whorl ears twitched as he caught the faintest whisper of sound. A pallid tongue, as dry as the desert lands that had once been his home, flickered out through the nest of fangs, tasting the air. W’soran’s yellow eye narrowed and the dim lantern light in its depths suddenly flared into brilliance as he recognised both scent and sound. ‘Ah. Hello, boy. Come to say hello to your master?’ His fanged mouth quirked in a sly smile and he added, ‘Perhaps to… beg forgiveness for old sins?’

‘Do I require it, old monster?’ the visitor snarled in reply as his hunched, beast-like shape circled W’soran in the darkness, padding about him like a wolf hugging the edge of the firelight. Then, the newcomer had always fancied himself as something of a predator. ‘Maybe it is you who should ask myforgiveness.’

‘Rank impertinence,’ W’soran said, almost gently. ‘I will forgive it, just this once.’ His withered frame twitched in the circle of long-cold braziers. He was still sitting cross-legged, his taloned fingers clutching his bony knees. With some degree of academic interest and not a little bit of sweet pain, he began flexing each muscle cluster in turn, forcing his body to remember how it felt to move. His dust-stiffened robes crackled as he shifted position. ‘Why are you here, my son?’

‘Not your son, old monster,’ the visitor snapped.

‘Tch, such anger, Melkhior,’ W’soran said. ‘And to think, you were once my favourite, and beloved above all others.’ He lifted his hand and curled his fingers, watching the play of the black veins beneath the parchment skin. He was reminded for a moment of the mummies of the Great Land, whose internment into eternity he had overseen in once-beauteous Mahrak.

That had been before Lahmia. His fingers tightened into a fist and his talons gouged his palm. ‘Such anger,’ he repeated. His one good eye narrowed and he unfolded his limbs like an awkward spider as he rose to his feet. ‘Such disrespect for one who has given you nothing less than eternity,’ he said, stretching slowly, in increments. Muscles pulled and bones popped in a symphony of fleshly shackles that seemed to grow ever weightier even as his frame dwindled, shedding its unnecessary bulk across the centuries. He gestured and the torches sprang to life as one, driving back the shadows all in a rush.