“Oh, fuck!” he shrieked, his squint eyes almost popping out of their sockets. “You just fucking killed me, man!”
I didn’t waste any time. I dropped his beating heart straight into the acid. The corrosive liquid hissed and frothed around the organ for a second or two. When it stopped, his heart had turned black—just as mine had when Isu did this to me.
I snatched Cranton’s blackened heart out of the acid and shoved it back into his chest. As soon as I pulled my hand out, the wound closed up, leaving no sign that it had been there. There wasn’t even a hint of a scar, and the cold of the death magic vanished from my hands.
Cranton slowly looked down at his chest, gingerly touching the spot where I’d ripped his heart out. “What. . . what am I?”
“Fated, my friend,” I answered. “You are now Cranton, First Priest of the Temple of Necrosis.”
“Did I… did I die there?”
“A kind of death,” Isu answered for me.
“The first thing you did for me,” I said to her, “was give me the ability to raise skeletons. I think that would work for Cranton.”
I didn’t recall exactly how Isu had given me the ability, but I assumed Cranton had a similar tree to mine in the ethereal plane.
“I can have my very own army of skellies?” He grinned.
“An army in service to me,” I pointed out.
“Of course! I’m your priest, man.”
I turned to Isu. “Does Cranton have a tree like I do?”
She nodded, as though she was still a little reticent to answer my questions.
As I’d done before, I gripped Grave Oath with both hands, closed my eyes, and concentrated all of my thoughts and focus on my skills. My soul was catapulted out of my body and tore through reality at an unimaginable speed
I was in the endless black world with the huge gray tree standing at its center. I walked across the perfectly smooth, glass-like ground, but as I approached the tree, I saw that something was different: a sapling had sprouted a couple of yards away. It poked only a foot or two out of the ground and only had one branch. From this single branch hung a miniature skeleton, an inch-long figurine.
This was Cranton’s ability tree; it had to be. Now that I’d made him Fated, a part of him had been transported here.
My tree already had all the skills I could potentially learn, even if they were hidden by fog. Cranton’s tree, on the other hand, had no branches.
How was I going to give him any abilities?
A small sliver of light on the glass-like ground snaked from Cranton’s sapling to my own tree. I crouched beside it and realized they were roots. My own tree was somehow connected to the sapling. My tree was the father of any others that sprouted here.
I wasn’t exactly a botanist, but I had a few ideas I could try. The first one was attempting to use Grave Oath to graft new branches onto the sapling. Each branch on my tree represented an ability, and those without fog surrounding them were those I’d already mastered.
But which ability would be most useful to Cranton? Skeletons? Zombies? Zombie beasts?
Isu had made coins for me previously, ones I’d provided to Elyse and Rami so that the souls of anyone they killed would be mine to harvest. I didn’t have any more of those coins, and the ability to create them would be perfect not only for me but also for Cranton. With them, he could travel the lands, gifting my enchanted coins to warriors of great power. Then, I would have an almost constant supply of souls. Cranton needed to learn the ability himself because I didn’t have a treasure chest filled with gold coins handy. If he possessed the power to make enchanted coins himself, then I’d never need to replenish his supply when it ran low.
First, however, I needed to learn the ability myself before I could try to graft that particular branch onto his sapling.
Grave Oath still had a reserve of souls from my previous exploits, so I stared up at the lowest of the branches that were obscured by fog and pictured a handful of enchanted coins. I was almost certain I could see them half-glowing through the thick mist.
I stuck Grave Oath into the tree trunk, and the souls imprisoned in the dagger were sucked out. The fog around the lowest obscured limb cleared, and I saw a couple of enchanted coins glowing there.
I climbed up the tree and plucked off the glowing enchanted coins, but I also cut a shoot off that branch with Grave Oath. The instant I did, a sharp pain ripped through my side, and a feeling of weakness washed over me. That was when I understood that this was not something to be done lightly.
This enormous tree was me, and it was strong and tall, but cutting branches off would weaken it, would weaken myself. I needed to be careful about who I gave powers to, and needed to become stronger myself if I intended to make more people Fated in the future and give them abilities.
Still, Cranton would need more than just the coin-changing ability. I forced myself to climb further up the tree until I reached the branch for raising undead skeletons. Carving a shoot from the branch was simple, but the action produced a pain that made my vision blur. I pushed aside the agony and climbed back down to the ground.
I knelt beside the sapling and shaved off a section of its bark. I grafted the two shoots onto it, and as they bonded to the sapling, I felt as if a sledgehammer had just been slammed into my stomach. My breathing was ragged, and my limbs ached, as though I’d fought a dozen battles without any rest.
I closed my eyes and returned my soul back to my body.
“Whoa,
