Prophet of the Dead

I know that. But look in my head and you’ll see what I have in mind.

Aoth’s sense of connection pulsed stronger as Jet examined his thoughts. Then the griffon spun around Lod and over the heads of the nearest combatants, warriors and creatures that had likely come rushing to aid either Aoth or his foe but ended up fighting one another.

Jet plunged down behind the bone naga. Aoth scrambled off the familiar’s back and roused the magic of tattoos that augmented his strength, agility, and hardiness. At once, aquiline talons and leonine hind paws throwing up snow, Jet ran three strides with the uneven gait of his species, beat his wings, and sprang back into the air.

By then, Lod was twisting atop his serpentine coils to orient on Aoth. His fleshless jaw worked, surely whispering an incantation, and then streamers of snow leaped up from the ground. As they stretched and twisted, they darkened into something so infused with malevolence that their mere proximity made Aoth’s head throb.

He charged his spear with destructive force and whirled. The preternaturally sharp edges of the head slashed three of the shadowy snakelike things to nothingness. The fourth had time to strike at him, but he simultaneously blocked the attack with his shield and annihilated the attacker with a thrust.

He pivoted back toward Lod and, with a short incantation and a jab, hurled glowing blue darts of force from his spear. Apparently they stung, for when they struck just below the point where bare bone gave way to scaly flesh, the undead naga flinched and hissed. In that instant, Aoth dashed a couple of steps closer.

Then Lod swayed from side to side, and something about that sinuous motion wormed its way into Aoth’s head and snarled his thoughts into confusion. No longer sure why he was running, he stumbled to a halt.

His bewilderment lasted only a heartbeat. Then, by trained reflex, he pictured a sigil of psychic defense, and his thoughts snapped back into focus. By that time, though, a wave of smoking liquid was sweeping toward him like a breaker rushing toward the shore.

He threw himself flat in the snow, burrowing in it, and covered his head with his shield. Even so, as it washed over him, Lod’s conjured acid seared him at various points along his back and legs. But evidently not badly, for he was able to leap back onto his feet, and the magic of another tattoo sufficed to mask the lingering pain.

He charged onward. Until Lod vanished, leaving nothing behind but the long, twisting rut where his enormous tail had dragged through the snow.

Lod hadn’t simply turned invisible. Aoth’s fire-touched eyes would still see him if he had. The bone naga must have translated himself through space, and Aoth spun to locate him.

Just as he did, maggots, or something like them, rained down on him from the empty air. He scrambled aside, but some landed on him anyway, clung, and gnawed. One wriggled onto his bare neck, and its bite burned like vitriol.

He slapped the conjured grub away, then, trusting his armor to protect against the rest, charged Lod once again. Come on, he thought, you’re bigger than I am! Just fight me hand to hand!

Lod, however, wouldn’t oblige. Slithering to maintain his distance, he whirled his hands through an intricate pattern as he cast another spell.

The vista before Aoth shattered into senselessness as if he were viewing it through a wall built of warped and cloudy lenses. At the same instant, something pulled at every part of him at once. Though he’d never encountered a spell exactly like it before, he surmised that this time, Lod was attempting to shift him through space, and that different bits of him would end up in different places.

He bellowed a word of dispelling and found the strength to sprint even faster. The painful tugging lost its grip on him when he plunged free of the spot where the unseen framework of existence itself was churning.

Then, finally, instead of retreating and evading, Lod crawled to meet him. Maybe the creature had grown tired of throwing spell after spell to minimal effect. Aoth certainly had.

The bone naga reared over him, raised his fleshless hands, and boiling shadow flowed over them, sheathing them in ghostly clawed gauntlets. Halting, Aoth came on guard, his spear and shield poised to meet the attack when Lod’s upper body whipped down at him.

For the next instant, though, it didn’t, and Aoth abruptly remembered his experiences fighting dragons in Chessenta, and how an attack might come from any direction. He risked a glance backward and discovered the end of Lod’s tail sweeping down at him like a falling tree.

He dodged, and the tail smashed down in the snow. Lod’s skeletal upper body hurtled down at him.

Aoth shifted his targe to block. Raking shadow claws screeched on enchanted steel, snagged in it, and yanked, jerking Aoth off balance before they popped free.

The loss of equilibrium kept him from thrusting with the spear as he’d intended. And before he could recover, the end of Lod’s tail flicked sideways, slammed his legs out from underneath him, and dumped him in the snow.

The undead naga struck down at him, and he just managed to interpose the shield. Lod grabbed it by the edges and tried to rip it away.

Aoth could feel it was useless to resist. Even with tattoo magic enhancing it, his strength was inferior to Lod’s.

So he didn’t resist. He let Lod’s pulling hoist him back onto his feet, then yanked his arm out of the straps on the inner face of the targe.

And finally, a move seemed to catch Lod by surprise. Swaying atop his coils, the bone naga hesitated, holding the shield as if uncertain what to do with it.

Gripping his spear with both hands, Aoth spoke a word that brought all the power still stored in the weapon surging into the point to set it aglow. He fed the blue light with much of his own remaining innate magic, and it blazed brighter still.

Lod cast the targe aside and struck. Aoth met him with a spear thrust that drove cleanly between two ribs. With a dazzling flash, force exploded from the weapon to tear apart the naga’s rib cage from the inside, where the graven symbols didn’t protect it.

Unfortunately, that didn’t finish the bone naga. Lod hissed a word of chastisement, and Aoth cried out with sudden pain, weakness, and dizziness that dropped him to his knees.

Lod tore the spear out of his grasp and opened the fanged jaws of a skull that was abruptly far less human and more reptilian than before. The pieces of rib Aoth had blasted away floated through the air toward their former positions.

But then wind screamed, flung snow across the battlefield, and tossed Aoth onto his side. It caught the rib fragments too and swept them away despite the force animating them.

Lod twisted to look into the wind and no doubt find its source. He raised his hands to start a spell.

But meanwhile, the wind screamed louder still. The naga’s left arm snapped loose and blew away, and the right followed a heartbeat later.

But even that didn’t stop the bone naga’s conjuring. He roared words of malediction that made Aoth’s body feel as heavy as lead-his heart pounded as if it were trying to tear itself apart, and his ears ached as if he were deep underwater. Aoth strained to croak out a spell but couldn’t control his breathing.

Fortunately, Jhesrhi’s voice was chanting as vehemently as Lod’s. At her behest, the wind howled even louder until it drowned out both of them. Then Lod’s entire upper body burst apart into tumbling bones, and the snake part flopped down on the ground.

Although it didn’t die entirely, the wind ebbed. Feeling stronger than he had a moment before, Aoth floundered to his feet, recovered his spear, and found Lod’s fallen skull. The naga’s bones no longer showed any signs of wanting to reassemble themselves, but he smashed them anyway.

As he finished, Jet and Jhesrhi swooped down to light near him, the latter borne aloft by a friendly wind of lesser violence. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I will be,” Aoth panted. “Thanks to the two of you.” He turned to survey the greater battle and was just in time to view the final moments.

The air brightened yet again, burning off the last trace of unnatural murk and letting the sun shine down without hindrance. Phantoms shredded away to nothing. Vampires fell down smoking and thrashing, and zombies balked. And all those foes who were still capable of it turned and bolted, with automatons, berserkers, bright fey, and flares of hathran magic in pursuit.

Aoth grunted in satisfaction. “I believe we’ve fulfilled our contract with Yhelbruna.”

“Yes,” Jhesrhi said, “and done a service for the unknown lands the Eminence of Araunt hailed from,