Never Die Twice - Chapter 34

Tye gave Annie the cold shoulder after they left Loki to his eternal confinement.

She had vexed him.

“Tye…” his apprentice said, keeping the black gem containing Gwenhyfar’s soul in her pouch of spell components. “Are you sulking?”

“No,” the necromancer replied.

“He is,” Hagen chuckled.

“You will take responsibility for this,” the necromancer told Annie, annoyed, as he walked downward into the depths of Hel’s dominion. The tall corridors seemed to spiral into funeral chambers deep beneath the plateau, reminding the undead titan of his own dungeon. Could Nastrond and this place have been built by the same people, eons ago? “An apprentice should be able to explore new paths that their master didn’t consider, but as far as I am concerned, this is a terrible mistake.”

Lady Yseult had remained silent after the encounter with Loki, shaken to her very core. Yet in spite of what Tye had expected, the former priestess remained rather steadfast and dignified, even after learning the abominable truth. Unlike Medraut, who had fallen into madness after having his worldview destroyed, she had kept her wits and tried to assess the situation rationally. Perhaps that iron core was why Tye had always felt some kinship towards that woman, in spite of their radically different ideals.

The necromancer had considered offering her power again, especially now that she had thrown her lot in with his ideals, but he knew better. He simply had to wait for her to gather her thoughts and realize that he was the best option; she would come to the necromancer out of her own free will. He only had to wait.

Finally, after walking for what had seemed to be hours, Tye sensed a raw source of magic further ahead. And not just any form of magic.

Necromancy.

“We are close to our goal,” he told his allies. “Stay behind and let me clear the path ahead. Hagen, shield Lady Yseult.”

“I need no protection,” the priestess insisted, even if her former deity’s lack of support prevented her from using most of her arsenal. “While I will not pray, I can still sing.”

“I am sure Hel will fall down in adoration before your perfect voice, m’ lady,” Hagen mocked, although he kept a hand on his mace. “Listen to the chief, and I will take care of the rest.”

“I’m coming, Walter,” Annie insisted, utterly stubborn.

“Unlike Hel, I cannot summon nor teleport inside this dungeon,” Tye warned his apprentice. This was Hel’s territory, and her rule was absolute within these walls. “I cannot bring additional forces to shield you. If you intend to participate anyway, you should remain at the back and support me with spells.”

The witch listened and nodded, while Tye walked straight out of the underground corridor.

His steps echoed into some kind of buried temple, facing a circular marble wall surrounded by tall, crystallized pillars; pictures of Hel’s deeds, from her birth alongside her siblings Jormungandr and Fenrir to the death of Balder, were carved in the stone. The source of the necromantic energy came from behind these murals, but Tye’s eyes wandered to the pillars.

Hel had chained undead members of the Pale Serpents to them.

The necromancer recognized many familiar faces; from the vampire Striga, her body burnt halfway to a crisp, to the Winterwight he raised on the tragic day the Black Citadel fell. From Initiates to Masters, all of them were present in this grisly gathering; each of their festering corpses bound by silver chains, their hands nailed to crystals like slaves on a cross.

Tye eventually noticed Duke, his chest nailed by an arrow of solid darkness to a pillar, and even a man wearing Spook’s cloths, covered in sword wounds; it appeared Hel had raised the mummy from the dead as a flesh and blood human, only to brutally murder him again.

Target practice. Hel had used Tye’s allies and servants as target practice.

“Shit,” Hagen said, slightly distraught, as he and his phantasmal horse walked into the room. Even Annie put her hands on her mouth at the display, while Yseult oversaw the scene with distant eyes. Finally, she understood the injustice that was Helheim. “I expected something like this, but…”

The Calamity approached his dead lieutenants, barely managing to keep his wrath subdued. While an undead could not be raised twice, he had a perfect workaround; he could bring them back. “[Naglfar].”

The [Necromancer’s Stone] shone with purple light, calling upon a power capable of defying death itself, contacting Duke’s lost soul to pull it back into his mortal remains. The body would be rejuvenated, the dead noble reborn.

The spell failed.

Soul not found.

This message sent a shiver down Tye’s rotting spine, as his spell failed to locate Duke’s soul. A soul should be impossible to destroy; something always remained behind, even a fragment.

Did the arrow interfere with the spell? Tye tried to pull it out, but the projectile burned his dead skin on contact like a dangerous hydra’s venom. He had to use telekinesis to remove it safely, and even then, [Naglfar] still failed to activate.

Hel had found a way to destroy their souls or to put them out of his reach.

Sensing the necromantic magic flaring up again behind the murals, his heart full of fury, Tye walked through the circular walls. His enormous body caused the marble to collapse through his sheer weight alone, like a man walking through a paper door.

The Calamity walked to the heart of Hel’s dungeon, a wide circular room covered with ancient runes, shining crystals, and symbols from forgotten civilizations. An oppressive chill filled the room, the power of death ruling absolutely over this patch of the dungeon; Hel’s divine energies focused on keeping a powerful presence sealed.

At the center stood a green crystal obelisk, five meters high, pulsating with energy. The ghost of a skeletal face flashed in and out of existence within its confines, a powerful soul unable to manifest a new body due to Hel’s dark magic.

Asclepius’ phylactery.

Wise among the wise, the lich had ensured the vessel of his soul would be completely impregnable. Instead of putting it in a painting or a gold coin, he instead sealed his immortal spirit into a massive shard of crystallized Starmetal, an alien material coming from the stars beyond the Nine Realms. This legendary metal, even before being empowered by the lich’s magic, had been used to create the most powerful artifacts like Excalibur and was near impossible to destroy.

And yet, a group of four humans were trying their best to try, swords hacking into the phylactery; each blow unleashing a wave of purple necromantic energy into the air.

Scratch that, ‘human’ wasn’t the right word to describe them. With one exception, Takeru, most were more monsters than men.

Tye immediately recognized Prince Arthur among them, hacking the phylactery with a corrupted Excalibur. Much like his sister, Hel had transformed him into some kind of undead, removing his eyes and leaving only smoke seeping through the empty holes. His white armor had turned black, and his fingers skeletal. Instead of calm or arrogance, he radiated a single-minded kind of absolute fury, ignoring the necromancer to keep attacking the phylactery.

In this task, he was assisted by another swordsman; albeit one wielding a bloodied katana rather than a normal Midgardian blade. Wearing a strange crimson armor and a ghoulish demon mask seemingly grafted to the lower half of his face, his black eyes still kept a spark of humanity. He turned away from the phylactery to look at the necromancer, clearly in control of his mental faculties.

The third member of the group was the only woman among them, a magnificent and twisted redhead. She would have been a vision of sensual beauty, if not for one particular flaw: while her upper body was voluptuous, her flesh started rotting at the waist, leaving only blood-soaked bones for legs. She wore an expansive cloak and a magical crown, clearly a magician of some sort.

“You!” the redheaded woman among them snarled upon recognizing Tye, her fingers crackling with magic. “You bastard…”

Tye scanned her with magic, although he had already identified her.

Morgane Sieglinde

Type: Death Hero (Divine/Fairy).

Level: 70

It was the real Morgane Sieglinde. Not the husk inhabited by a foul fiend, but the original, cast down to Helheim by her death by vampirism.

“It was all your fault!” she snarled at Tye. “[Superflare]!”

She unleashed a mighty explosion at Tye, who had to admit it packed quite a lot of firepower; clearly she had leveled up since the last time they crossed paths. Still, the Calamity lazily counterspelled it into nothingness, allowing Tye’s allies to rush into the room, both groups facing one another.

“Morgane?” Annie’s eyes widened upon recognizing the Death Heroes. “Takeru? Takeru, are you alright?”

The archer’s eyes looked up, having turned bloodshot crimson. He alone among the group looked somewhat ‘alive,’ although he now wore light adamantine armor instead of his usual adventurer clothes. However, the mists of Helheim seeped through his skin as if possessing the boy, forming a cloud around him.

“Annie…” the archer let out, his voice nothing more than a guttural whisper. “Annie…”

“An automaton.” Lady Yseult frowned in horror, her face paling when she recognized Arthur.

Takeru’s soul was still there, but even Tye’s mind-reading couldn’t reach it. It appeared the spirit had been buried below a dense fog, malevolent forces having taken hold in the emptied flesh. Perhaps Hel had found no way to make the proud Earthlander behave, or he had been too loyal to the living to bend the knee. So she had possessed him, corrupting his sacred bow into a ghoulish weapon firing arrows of shadows.

The same weapon which slew Duke.

“Where are the other Pale Serpents’ souls?” Tye asked, his eyes shining with a dangerous crimson hue.

“We had Takeru and Ryoma destroy them in bulk, to test their Defiled Weapons,” Morgane replied with a cruel smirk. Unlike Takeru, she didn’t seem brainwashed; she must have thrown her lot in with Hel out of her own free-will. “Not so immortal anymore, aren’t you?”

The necromancer saw red. “Can you even fathom the knowledge and brilliant minds you cost mankind for your foolish revenge, stupid brat?”

“Foolish revenge? You murdered me, you selfish maniac! You think you are the victim here?” Morgane’s glare intensified, her eyes settling on Tye’s companions; her old classmate, in particular. “Annie, he killed me, killed Gwen! Why are you with him?”

“I…” Annie was at a loss of words but saw reason. “We can revive you from the dead, Morgane! We can make it right!”

“I know how to make it right, Annie,” Morgane replied, preparing to cast a spell at Tye. “If we kill him, we will be granted entrance to Valhalla!”

Valhalla?

She fought to get into Valhalla?

She didn’t fight for the right to live again, which Tye might have sympathized with… but a better afterlife? For better slave treatment?

One second later, a furious hit from the necromancer’s staff sent Morgane flying through a marble mural with a loud noise. It appeared that no matter how powerful her magic, she remained a frail mortal at close range.

And Tye was an undead god.

Immediately afterward, the room descended into chaos. Hagen charged at the Earthlander swordsman, Arthur halted his maniacal assault on the phylactery to look at his surroundings, and the possessed Takeru immediately fired an arrow at Tye without a word. His projectile cut through the Calamity’s chest and went through the other side, ignoring all magical defenses and leaving a hole in its path.

It hurt.

Supereffective damage! Takeru’s [Defiled Bow of Final Death] bypassed your damage reduction!

Cursed Earthlanders and their overpowered gear!

Worse, it appeared their transformations had granted these fools new abilities; Morgane had already recovered from the blow, standing among the rubble, while Takeru moved around the battlefield to prepare another attack.

“Vile knight!” The Earthlander swordsman raised a curved katana at Hagen. Tye finally recognized the weapon, the Dullahan having taken it as a trophy before it mysteriously vanished during the first cultist raid. “I challenge you to a duel, to avenge the slight against me!”

Hagen almost answered the challenge, before marking a short pause. “I’m sorry?”

“You don’t recognize me?” the swordsman asked, his eyes widening in disappointment; the shock was enough to interrupt his assault.

“Should I?”

“You murdered me in the dungeon, stabbing me from behind!”

“Oh,” the Dullahan said, but it clearly didn’t help to narrow it down. “Don’t take it personally, but after a point, you adventurers all started blurring together.”

“It’s Ryoma,” Tye recognized him, violently blasting Takeru against a wall with telekinesis before the archer could launch another arrow. Morgane moved to support her ally with a volley of fireballs, but she failed to bypass the necromancer’s buffs. “I slipped him a diarrhea potion because he was rude.”

“Ah yes, the guy who took a shit in the dungeon!” Hagen finally remembered, chuckling to himself. “Dumpboy!”

The insult made the Earthlander swordsman rage, his blade clashing against Hagen’s mace to no avail. His sword was powerful, causing shockwaves upon impact, but the Dullahan had the benefit of a mount to leverage his weight.

Meanwhile, Annie tried to reason with her former classmate, even when she started incantating. “Morgane, we can raise you!” she shouted. “Like Gwen! I have her soul too!”

“Gwen?” Morgane’s eyes turned harsh and bitter. “I don’t care about Gwen! She could have had the kingdom in her grasp, and she threw it all away to claim that stupid dungeon! Now, get out of my way before you end up dead like her!”

“Oh gods, Morgane!” Annie cursed, answering the threat by spellcasting herself. “You were always such an unlikable ass!”

The two warlocks exchanged volleys of projectiles; Morgane was clearly superior in firepower, her furious fireballs overwhelming her rival’s spells, but Annie had the foresight to [Hasten] herself before the fight. Tye’s apprentice moved fast enough to dodge attacks while Lady Yseult, after a moment of consideration, began singing. Her songs empowered Tye’s side, buffing Annie in particular.

“Betrayal…” Arthur’s insane husk whispered, his empty eyes alight with hellish flames upon seeing Hagen. His mind was gone, replaced by berserk fury, as he charged towards the Dullahan with Excalibur raised. “Betrayal!”

Realizing this was getting out of hand, and eager to exterminate the opposition without the possibility of retaliation, Tye decided to freeze the battlefield. “[Clock Stop].”

Time slowed down and then stopped for almost everyone. Hagen, the Death Heroes, Annie, Yseult, all remained trapped in the middle of their current action, unable to act.

All except Arthur, who kept moving inside the stopped time and rushed towards the paralyzed Hagen.

This astonished Tye, who panicked by creating shadowy chains below the maddened specter. They sprung from the darkness and restrained him from all sides, preventing Arthur from moving.

As the necromancer suspected, the prince’s scabbard only protected him from direct magical damage. Materialized objects could still restrain him.

“Revenge…” Arthur hissed like a rabid animal. “Lancelot! Lancelot!”

Tye exploited the time stop effect to mentally invade Arthur’s mind, trying to figure out what went wrong. Unlike Takeru, the prince’s mind wasn’t shrouded or buried.

It was just broken.

Unlike his more competent sister, Arthur’s mind had collapsed. Perhaps from the shock of repeated betrayals or weakness of character, he hadn’t endured through Hel’s torments as Gwenhyfar did. His resolve had broken like his sanity, leaving only a berserk dog bound to the goddess’ will.

The proud prince had become a feral beast, a shell of his former majesty.

Tye felt some sympathy for this foolish prince, albeit only a little. Even if Arthur was an enemy and held a grudge against his friend Hagen, Hel had stripped him of his dignity, of his very being. She had granted the prince eternity but removed his ability to enjoy it; a personal insult directed at the necromancer himself, which would not go unanswered.

Tye telepathically assaulted what remained of Arthur’s mind, intending to obliterate it into docility and free him from this miserable state. The knight let out a terrible wail as the Calamity entered his memories, a snake flooding his brain with venom.

A powerful force erected a mental barrier to shield Arthur’s mind, pushing back Tye before he could finish him off.

“Enough, my pet. The time has yet to come.”

Arthur stopped moving, a dog cowed by his mistress.

The [Clock Stop] effect didn’t collapse, instead lengthened by another force. A familiar woman appeared out of Arthur’s shadow, breaking the chains with a wave of her hand, but keeping the mad prince cowed.

“My thrall,” Hel told Tye with false fondness. “If you wanted to return home, you simply had to ask, instead of destroying my castle.”

The necromancer ignored her, instead scanning her with magic to confirm a theory. The goddess, amused, didn’t try to hide her personal information; in fact, she seemed to revel in it.

Calamity Hel.

Type: Death Incarnate (Divine/Eldritch)

Level: 100.

“You like them?” Hel asked, glancing at her servants, “I thought it amusing to have you fight your own victims. It’s… oddly poetic.”

“You are no goddess,” Tye accused her, his theory confirmed. “You are a Calamity.”

“I am both and neither,” the madwoman replied, scratching Arthur’s head like a dog. His sister would have probably been repulsed over the sight, and it made even Tye uneasy. “I prefer to be called Fate’s handmaiden. I take no sides in this grand play; I simply make sure it takes place.”

“You can start Ragnarok whenever you wish, simply by releasing your father and joining him,” Tye realized. “So Odin pays you a generous bribe of souls to stay your hand.”

“A foolish hope, born of an old man’s misplaced fear,” Hel replied. “All souls are bound to end up in my realm. Some later than others, but the destination is always the same. Such is the nature of death.”

“Like it has always been?”

“So you remember the past cycles then, Nidhogg?” Hel smiled at his lack of an answer. “No. Your spirit remains pure, untainted, beautiful.”

“Unlike yours?” Tye mocked her. “You remember.”

“All of them,” she admitted, sounding almost nostalgic over it. “Every reincarnation, I am reborn carrying the burden of the old universe. It is I, after all, who ensures that it comes to pass and that the wheel keeps turning. Such is the will of Yggdrasil.”

Pieces of the puzzle assembled in Tye’s mind, as the full picture became clear to him. Why Hel’s allegiances remained ambiguous, why she stomped out the undead, why she played Aesir and Calamities against each other.

She was an agent of fate itself, a servant of Yggdrasil making sure the Cycle continued.

“You collect the souls of the dead, and reincarnate them into the next world after Ragnarok cleans up the Nine Realms,” Tye figured it out.

“Not quite. Have you never considered where the springs of life came from? Or why one of them existed in Nastrond, a city ruled by death and despair?” Hel’s smile widened. “Like a corpse fertilizes the ground, the souls of the dead renew the waters of life. They feed the world tree, and through its power, they are reborn in the next iteration. It is my role in this eternal recurrence, to foster the World Tree’s cycle of life and death… and remove the rot before it spreads to the whole garden.”

A symbiosis. The Yggdrasil System granted power to mortals, who in turn became its sustenance. Souls were the furnace of magic, the source of all spells, levels, and peculiar phenomenons taking place in the Nine Realms.

It might have been a fair trade once, but with immortality in sight, mankind had no more need of it.

“The ‘rot’ of immortality will be this world’s salvation,” Tye replied with pride in the Great Work. “We will master nature, not bow down to it.”

“Your selfish dream is madness incarnate, you fool,” Hel replied. “Without the cycle, the World Tree will rot but never regenerate. Your future is an era of endless decay without rejuvenation, as the very souls you try to save fall into madness and hollowness. Then one day, the Nine Realms will crumble to dust, and nothing will remain.”

“Even if you are saying the truth, which I doubt, we will figure something out,” the necromancer said with unshakable confidence. “We have all the time in the world.”

“You would selfishly trade the guaranteed survival of this world for an uncertain future?” She shook her head, amused. “This cycle is true immortality, Walter. Perhaps not the one you sought, but immortality all the same. The Calamities play an essential role in this cycle, but you, serpent, you forgot yourself. You selfishly turned your back on your duty to become a parasite, putting your existence above the greater whole.”

“If so, then why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?” Tye replied. “My former incarnation might have been too strong to die at the hands of Earthlanders, starving in his own cathedral, but me… when you saw my soul, you must have understood.”

“I did,” she agreed, her smile widening.

Why? Why let him run free, in spite of her duties demanding that he be removed? Did she believe Tye would fulfill his destiny again, that fate was truly absolute? But then, why let him ‘pollute’ this iteration with undeath and [Naglfar]? It made no sense.

Unless her motives were no more rational than Loki’s.

And then Tye understood. “This is not about the Cycle anymore.”

“No, Walter. This is about us.”

“Us?” He didn’t like her possessive tone, as if he were her property.

Hel chuckled. “Do you know how old I am, Walter? How unfathomably ancient? I have watched this theater play repeat itself endlessly. My father makes the same cruel jokes, Odin tries and fails to change his fate, men fight for the love of women, peasants toil while nobles mock them. I have done everything worth doing, read every book, played every game, until I lost taste for all things. Immortality is a hollow experience.”

“Because you keep events in their tracks, and lack imagination.” Tye couldn’t imagine running out of things to do, especially when the alternative was nothingness.

“Even so, nature never changes. Gods, mortals, giants… they are all bound by the same foolish passions, their greed, their fears. The torments I inflict on them is a mere punishment for the meaninglessness of their existence. This Cycle is the first where I involved myself to such a degree, and yet everything seemed poised to repeat itself. My existence was dreary and devoid of joy.”

She looked at him with fondness.

“Until you came along.”

As Hel said these words, an ugly, deranged glint appeared in the mad goddess’ eyes.

“You are different from the rest. You struggle against the river and make change; albeit tiny and pointless. When I try to stamp your hopes and make you behave, you insist on defying me and choose the unexpected. When I torment these mortals, I feel nothing, but your pain brings me joy. You make things new and interesting.”

A dark obsession as absolute as the love Medraut felt for his wife. Something raw and primal, whose intensity made the necromancer silent.

“When you entered my realm as a man,” Hel whispered. “When I saw your pale face, the cold flame in them, the spark of keen intellect… when I saw you in all your flawed perfection… I felt something… something I never felt before. My heart beating in my chest. I had never understood why the Aesir whined to me about reviving that swine Balder, but now… now I understand.”

When Hel visits me, Loki’s words echoed in Tye’s mind, it is your face she sees.

“I love you, Walter.”

Tye remained silent for a short while.

“I don’t,” he replied coldly.

“You will learn to,” the goddess replied with the same tone. “We have eternity ahead of us, my thrall.”

“That is true only for one of us.”

Tye activated the [Necromancer’s Stone], the artifact flaring with divine power, as he tried to murder the goddess on the spot.

Hel’s skin peeled away from her flesh, forcing her to take a step back; as Tye expected, it affected the Death Heroes too, although not to the same degree. Arthur writhed in pain but raised Excalibur to attack anyway.

His mistress put a rotting hand on the prince’s neck, restraining him like a hound.

“Shy, aren’t we?” Hel mocked Tye, but she sounded somewhat disappointed. “Why won’t you worship me, Walter? Your defiance fills me with cruel anger when I offer you warmth. Truly, your selfishness knows no bounds.”

“I am only interested in seeing you out of my way,” Tye replied angrily.

“It doesn’t matter.” Hel shook her head. “Clearly, you will only submit once I have crushed all your dreams into a fine dust. Medraut will put history back on track, and when your kingdom of undead crumbles, when your last hope is extinguished, my Death Heroes will finally clean up this world of the vermin that infests it. How ironic that your former victims end up destroying what you built for my amusement. But you, Walter?”

She looked at him dead in the eyes.

“You will never escape death.”

Time resumed, but when it did, Hel and her slaves were gone.

Tye glanced at the battlefield, Annie and the others confused by what just happened. From their perspective, their foes had vanished in the blink of an eye.

“Apprentice?” Asclepius’ mental voice came out of the crystal, a faint yet familiar whisper.

“Grandmaster,”Tye answered, touching the phylactery with his hand. “I have come to help.”

The answer didn’t come in words but in a vague wave of feelings. Relief… and triumph, at a long plan finally fulfilling itself.

“Where is Cywyllog?” Tye asked, having missed her among Hel’s victims.

“Medraut’s wife?” Asclepius replied mentally, his mind in shambles. Decades spent trapped there to Hel’s mercy and the damage to his phylactery had affected his essence, and it might take the lich time to pull himself back together. “She is long gone.”

Hel had slain the last hope of talking down Medraut.

As she had warned, the goddess had let him hope, only to crush his spirit again.