Never Die Twice - Chapter 8

Below the mines of Level Two, were the ruins that made up Level Three.

Back when Lyonesse was a mining town, the villagers dug too deep and excavated the entrance, releasing the demon Beli and the cannibalistic, degenerate morlocks who worshipped him. They promptly slaughtered the miners and turned the area into a vicious dungeon it was today.

When Tye arrived in the city, his forces overran Beli, slaughtered the demon’s worshippers, raised them as workers, and claimed the upper levels for their own use. With the Alkahest in the mines so easy to access, the necromancer had never bothered to explore the ruins beyond the parts closest to his operations.

Until today.

“So, you’re the new one?” Hagen asked Laufey, as he guided Tye and his elites through a flagstone hall. Two rows of Alkahest pillars supported the ceiling of the massive chamber, while primitive, half-erased mosaics adorned the walls. Ghostly will’o wisps in Tye’s employ provided light. “Pretty little thing.”

“Enough to make your head fall over?” the dark elf replied.

“Poisonous with words too, I like you already,” the dullahan replied. “I am Hagen. The silent, stoic type there is Spook, and the rotting one is Duke.”

“It is Jarl Duke to the living,” the zombie taunted Laufey. “You better respect your elders.”

“Certainly, your Oldness,” Laufey replied, unimpressed. Duke hissed in response, but Tye shut the two up with a glance. Spook rattled in the rearguard, the sight of the hall agitating him. Having been one of the catacombs’ mummified corpses before his revival, returning to his place of ‘birth’ must have bothered him.

“Here it is, chief,” Hagen said, once the group reached the T-shaped end of the hall; a massive wall of stone stood in front of them, with two smaller hallways on each side. The Dullahan touched six of the stones making up the structure in a sequence.

Instantly, the wall vanished, revealing a circular room roughly twenty feet in diameter, its floor covered with runes, ancient glyphs, and spell circles forming a large diagram around a heavy stelestone. A group of sixteen noseless, skinny humanoids with porcine features glanced at the newcomers, surrounded by man-eating ghouls and skeleton warriors.

Tye had long suspected the underground ruins to have been a place of worship of some sort, due to the sheer number of hidden rooms, tombs, and walls within it. The sight of the stelestone only confirmed his thoughts. “How did you learn about its existence?” he asked Hagen.

“Remember the adventurers who accidentally teleported in a few days earlier?”

Tye nodded.

“I wondered how they ended up finding the teleporter, and I figured they must have been chasing something in the forest before finding the hidden entrance. So I had the ghouls in our midst track the smell of the living, and they smelled these,” Hagen pointed a finger at the goblins, who cowered in response, “little guys behind the wall. A little trial and error, and we opened the path.”

The necromancer, clad in his robes and mask, approached the goblins, who looked up fearfully at him. They must have remained hidden in that area for a while, looking clearly malnourished and starving; a glance at bones nearby told Tye that they had even resorted to eating their dead.

“I could keep them,” Laufey asked. “My hounds are in need of chew toys.”

“I say we press-gang them, either alive or dead,” Hagen replied, more pragmatic.

Tye recognized some of the tribal markings on the goblins’ skin, guessing they were the survivors of the shaman’s raider party which the Academy had exterminated. “‘Who is your leader?’” the necromancer asked them in their native tongue.

The group looked at a female among them, slightly bigger than the rest. According to her more elaborate tattoos, cloak, and bone wand, she must have been, if not a shaman, at least a spellcaster. “‘I am Boneater Who-Hears-The-Gods.’ Second to shaman.”

There were no gods here. Not even the foul ancestors that the goblins worshipped. “‘I am Malice Striker,’” Tye translated his sorcerer name in old goblin, lacing his words with magic to establish dominance. “‘Do you seek power? Do you seek to live forever?’”

The goblin seemed to struggle to understand the question, before replying. “‘Yes. You powerful spirit. You strong.’”

“‘I can make you stronger, stronger than the humans who hunted you here,’” Tye said. “‘There will be pain, but there will be power and revenge. I can also make sure you never go hungry again.’”

“‘What price?’”

“‘You serve.’”

The goblin, having little choice, barked words to the rest of her tribe. All of them knelt before their new master. “Feed them,” Tye told his undead servants. “Then bring them to my laboratory for surgery.”

He then turned his attention to the stele. An oppressive chill leaked from the stone, which Tye confirmed to be a seal after casting [Super Magic Scan]. The magical bindings went back thousands of years in the past and had slowly weakened over time.

“Hidden city,” Laufey said, reading the runes. “Hall of the unworthy.”

“You can comprehend the runes?” Tye asked, slightly on edge. Knowledge of the runes was a very guarded secret, exclusive to specific classes, and even the necromancer himself had only partially unlocked it.

Laufey answered by speaking ancient words of power, the binding circles casting light on the room. A paranoid Duke immediately drew his rapier to murder the elf, but Tye stopped him with a hand gesture.

The stele trembled, yet refused to move out of the way.

The dark elf shook her head in disappointment. “I cannot break the seal by myself,” she admitted. “My father could, though.”

Besides the fact he couldn’t leave the realm he was bound to, Tye would never deal with a creature he couldn’t put down.

A careful examination of the seal confirmed the elf’s words though. Only the mightiest of mages could unlock the seal by speaking ancient words of power, and Tye would need at least thirty more levels to do so.

“And you never wondered who built these ruins?” Laufey asked, curious. “Or why?”

“No,” Tye replied bluntly. “I have no interest in reliving the past unless it serves me to shape the future.”

But in spite of the seal’s power, the lack of maintenance had left a slight breach within its magical defenses. One he could exploit at this current stage. “Protect my body,” Tye ordered as he sat in front of the stele. “I will be gone for some time.”

“Praying?” Laufey mused.

Tye didn’t dignify her with an answer. “[Astral Projection].”

Answering the call of his spell, his blackened soul emerged from its immortal coil, a pitch-black, serpentine cloud of darkness visible only to the undead present. Hagen immediately moved to shield his master’s body, while Tye’s soul slipped through a slight breach in the stele.

The necromancer knew this was risky. Reduced to its most primal essence, his soul could not cast spells while in astral form, nor even use the abilities of ghosts. He was helpless, but this helplessness made the magical defenses ignore him.

Once his floating soul crossed the stele, Tye found himself in a dark staircase leading down a dark abyss.

The descent seemed to last for hours, and maybe it did. Eventually, though, the narrow walls opened to reveal something incredulous.

Something awe-inspiring.

The stairway gave into a giant cavern, so vast that one could fit all of Lyonesse and its surrounding countryside within. Veins of alkahest covered its walls, providing a faint crimson light.

A natural plateau emerged at the center of the cavern, linked to the world above by the stairway. On it, enormous, giant-sized walls of black stones stood, a breach revealing a city within.

Meanwhile, deep below them, a sea of purple fog flowed around the plateau, an unnatural veil separating the living and the dead. Immense, blackened roots surged from the mists and dug into the plateau.

The roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil itself.

Somehow, glancing at the mists put him ill at ease, for a reason he couldn’t grasp. As Tye floated down the stairway, towards the city’s entrance, the necromancer eventually received a message from the system itself.

You have entered: [Nastrond].

He’d never heard of it.

From the size though, the necromancer guessed that it was a giant city, more ancient than the human catacombs above. However, the architectural style fit neither the frost children of Jotunheim nor their industrious, fiery Muspelheim cousins. Perhaps it was built by the primordial titans or a sect from either realm.

The specter crossed the breach into the city’s immense, rubble-covered streets, the architecture, unlike anything Tye had seen. Rectangular blocks of black stone integrated to the walls seemed to make up the houses, but the group only found a few of them. In fact, after crossing a second row of protective walls, the only building that stood out from the rest was an immense cathedral at the center: an immense, giant-sized temple of black stone and dark metal which put even Odin’s temple above to shame.

In whatever case, the inhabitants clearly worshiped serpents. From statues of snakes coiling around pillars to the fang-like spikes on the defensive walls, many details in the city reminded the necromancer of reptiles. The calcified fossils of giants often remained nearby, the remnants of whoever inhabited Nastrond before—

THOMB!

A powerful rumbling sound echoed through the street, as the necromancer’s soul reached a large plaza right in front of the cathedral’s mighty gates. A forty feet tall titan of black metal walked towards him, having stood watch over the building for centuries. The machine looked like an armored knight chiseled from darkened steel and wielding a great sword. Its closed helmet released noxious fumes.

An adamantine golem. Level sixty.

A soulless automaton, resistant to all magic below Tier IV, with the strength of a giant and a blade so sharp it could cut through steel. They felt neither fear nor remorse, only duty. A very formidable guardian against robbers, adventurers, and even noble knights.

One was terrible, but Tye noticed two others standing watch both sides of the cathedral, vigilant sentries unbound by time. Together, they made for a fearsome defense against all but the most powerful adventurers.

Thankfully, the giant walked through him, continuing an ancient, never interrupted patrol.

The soul approached the cathedral, and was instantly repelled by an invisible barrier; a second, perfect seal surrounded the building, preventing anything from crossing through. Unlike the one above, this particular magical defense had stood the test of time. Its design was more complex, more layered.

What could possibly justify so many magical defenses? What kind of ancient evil slumbered within these walls?

“I sense you, my wayward thrall.”

A familiar woman’s voice whispered to his very soul, haughty, cold, and regal.

An old, primal dread, buried decades ago, awakened in Tye’s mind, as he could feel the overwhelming pressure of a goddess’ gaze upon him.

“I smell your fear… and the stench of Midgard above… I sense…”

Tye immediately canceled his [Astral Projection], his soul instantly catapulted back into his body above. The chill of Helheim vanished, its goddess no longer able to track his soul’s location.

“Chief?” While Laufey looked at him with a bemused glance, Hagen sounded deeply concerned. “Chief, what happened?”

The necromancer glanced at his own fingers, shaking in dread.

“Chief?”

“Hel,” Tye replied, the undead present all freezing in place. “She almost found me.”

For the next hours, Tye buried himself in research, never leaving his alchemist laboratory.

Trapped in a glass canister and suspended in alchemical liquids, Boneater had started changing colors, her skin slowly turning silvery with black spots. The experiment was progressing well; the necromancer believed that he could reinforce the goblins’ physiology and adapt them to his needs within days. His eyes then wandered to white rats kept in cages, looking at their master with crimson eyes. His future familiars.

The sound of Hagen’s steps interrupted him. “We’ve secured all of Level Three,” his loyal Dullahan said, offering him a scroll. “I drew a full map, and put crosses where we could lay traps and ambushes.”

The Ankou grabbed the document but found himself unable to focus on the details, his mind bothered by other matters.

“Chief? If you wanted to confide in someone, I’m here…”

“I should have known dropping all my magical protections and exposing my naked soul would bring Hel’s gaze on me,” Tye replied. “It will not happen again.”

“She hasn’t forgotten,” Hagen shrugged. “How long has it been? Thirty years?”

“Twenty-nine.” Twenty-nine years since Tye managed to get their souls out of Helheim, where they had been trapped. Twenty-nine years since they escaped the iron grasp of that brute of a goddess. Now that she knew he was in Midgard, he would have to become more careful around her church above.

“We escaped her once, we can do so again,” the headless horseman tried to cheer up his liege. “In any case, if she comes for your head, my weapon is yours.”

“Thank you, my friend,” the necromancer replied. “But the goddess matters less to me than getting rid of that seal for now.”

The sheer amount of alkahest there alone justified breaking the seal, but the presence of Yggdrasil’s roots also presented opportunities. They were the support of the universe itself, and extracting their lifeblood could help his research.

Since he lacked the levels necessary to undo the seal the standard way, he would have to research a more… unorthodox method.

The necromancer would avoid undoing the wards around the cathedral though. Tye had the feeling whatever was inside was more trouble than it was worth.

Ghostring phased through a wall. “Chief, you have an emergency!”

“The princess found a way to clear up the toxic cloud?” Tye asked. “Hel?”

“Worse, chief,” Ghostring said, chuckling to himself.

“There’s a new alchemist in town.”