Before I started my climb into the tree, I took a look at the little gray sapling nearby—Cranton’s tree. He didn’t seem to have gained any new skills, but that was fine. As long as he kept preaching in my name and establishing Death shrines and temples all over Prand, I didn’t care if he didn’t ever acquire more necromantic abilities. He was doing excellent work for me in his own limited way.
I clambered into the tree and swung agilely from branch to branch before I scurried up the trunk. I paused in my ascent to chuckle at the memory of when I’d first come to this place, when I’d first seen this tree. All its branches had been shrouded in a dense fog, hiding all of my potential skills from me. Now, only the upper branches were obscured by the fog. Only a few skills left to pluck, like ripe, juicy fruit. Then what? What would happen when I’d gained every skill this tree could offer? Would another tree sprout from the shiny black ground? Or would I become something else, something beyond a god?
Only time would tell.
When I was halfway up, I began to see what this new skill was. Weirdly enough, it looked as if it involved the power of Wind too. I guess this was some sort of bonus that came from wielding my kusarigama, a weapon enchanted with the dual powers of Wind and Death. As I neared it, I saw that the glowing image hanging from the branch was that of a raging storm, complete with flashes of lightning and torrents of rain. The black storm clouds were rimmed with a pestilent yellowish glow.
The rain was also sickly yellow, but the lightning strikes were a luminous green. On the ground, the bloated bodies of the victims of this storm of sickness lay scattered, their skin turned green, covered in oozing boils, their eyes yellow, and their tongues black.
“Plague Storm,” the name entered my mind unbidden. It seemed a fitting name for this spell.
I took in the awesome but horrific sight of the skill in front of me. “This one’s going to be pretty damn useful.”
Grinning, I snatched the skill off the branch and felt the familiar jolt of energy and swelling of power within me that indicated that this new skill was now part of me.
“Fuck yeah,” I growled as I relisheed the new power as it coursed through my veins. “I can’t wait to unleash a Plague Storm or two on some deserving motherfuckers.”
I swan-dived off the branch, laughing as the glossy black ground hurtled toward my face... and then, a millisecond before impact, I blinked and found myself back in my physical body, in my chamber in Aith. Here too I could feel my powers growing. The people were celebrating and getting drunk in my name, which in itself was a form of worship. It didn’t give me nearly as much power as taking a soul with Grave Oath would, but it was a useful—and for them, pleasant—way of building up energy.
The next morning, everyone was up and ready to depart before the sun rose. We marched out of Aith in a procession watched over by the entire city, but with different looks than when we’d first arrived outside its huge walls. Hostility had given way to admiration. I led the procession myself, dressed in my gleaming black plate armor and mounted on Fang, a lone figure ahead of the rest.
Even though I’d always been a lone wolf, I now had multiple women and friends I could count on. I knew that, at the end of the day, I wasn’t alone. They trailed behind me, also dressed in their armor and battle garb, refreshed after our stop in Aith. Following behind them, marching in perfect order and divided up into their own sections, came my army. My mind was linked, like the strands of spider silk that connected every building in Aith, to each one of my undead troops. I could see the world through their eyes, taking in everything at once, and control them all as one unified force, or separate this control into individual actions if necessary. Sometimes, it felt almost overwhelming, having this degree of control over thousands of beings who were essentially extensions of myself. They weren’t mere resurrected hunks of bone and flesh; they were a part of me, a part of living death.
I rode Fang out of the enormous city gates of Aith, the same location where I’d dueled the huge war-spider controlled by Layna. With a gentle mental command, I ordered my zombie lizard to turn around so I could watch my army stream out of the city. Pride surged through my chest. These rotting things of decaying flesh and sun-bleached bones were seen as unholy abominations by most regular people, but to me, they were the perfect soldiers. They never questioned an order, never disobeyed me, could feel neither pain nor fear, and would go on fighting until they literally could no longer do so. They didn’t need sleep, didn’t need food, and didn’t need water or grog. What was more, they did not pillage, they did not rape, they did not go off and sack villages for fun. They dispensed only the justice that I ordered them to, and they fought only the enemies who stood in my way.
This was an army I could be truly proud of. In a twisted way, this was the perfect army of justice. And a sense of justice, however fucked up it might have seemed to others, had always been what had driven me. Always.
There were the skeletons, my first division, led by Sarge, who still wielded his golden paladin’s greatsword. Then there were the zombie Crusaders with their tower shields, led by Captain Jandor, whose face had long since rotted off his skull but who still managed to cut an imposing figure in his Crusader armor.
There were my skeletal cavalrymen,
