Runesight

9 - Necromancer

--- Runesight ---

There was a story I remembered from when I was a child, the type my mother would tell when I wouldn't leave her alone. It wasn't the type of story with a happy ending, but if you opened a book with the words bound inside and flipped through to the end, you might think it was happy when you got to the last line.

A boy lived in what is now Aulous, the country named after the everhigh mountains that bordered the dragonlands. At the time of the story though, it wasn't a country yet, it was right after the rise of Yeran power and all the human tribes were too busy squabbling with each other to appoint a king or write a social contract.

The boy loved to look at those mountains that reached beyond the sky, he loved to watch when sometimes a dragon would fly overhead, off to business that the boy would never know. He learned to paint so he could capture their beauty, he learned to hunt so he could traverse their feet.

One day the boy became a man, he decided to map the mountains that he loved, but in order to do that he had to find the top. The young man gathered together supplies, pages of maps, rations for the journey, and his bow for hunting. He bade his family farewell, but they knew better than he did, for they said goodbye tearfully and supposed that the young man would never return.

The young man drew as he went, mapping the crags in the rock, the distance between each peak, and the routes of the animals that called it home. One day he came across a cave hollowed out in the icy peaks. He still couldn't see the top, but he took shelter there for the night, deciding it was a lovely cave for such a place.

When he woke, he crept farther into the cave, exploring the branches and shapes that formed its belly. He mapped these as well. He came into a room near the end and stopped in surprise. Before him, sitting silently on a ledge, three enormous blue eggs shimmered in the torchlight.

His greed spoke before his wisdom.

The eggs were gone by the time their mother returned, she searched high and low for them, scouring the mountains for the culprit. When she found the young man he didn't live long, but neither did her eggs. They shattered upon the rocks below her cave during the scuffle, and the dragoness's scream of fury could be heard for hours afterward. She destroyed several human villages, seeking vengeance. The other dragons joined in soon, vowing to remove the human plague from the land.

The villages weren't idle though, they hiked the mountains and found nests when they couldn't take the attacks anymore, destroying more eggs in retribution, killing dragons when they could. The tribes of Aulous joined together to fight this, rising up against the threat. They were victorious in the end, destroying any dragon that dared to attack them.

Now clearly this is more than a bit fanciful, the dragons never stopped looking for revenge, and the humans never stopped having to rebuild their cities.

But no one remembers how a circle of pain begins, and no one thinks 'hey, we should stop this, I think the revenge we got is enough now.'

That, I believe, is exactly how Niun felt when he stared at the map, trying to figure out how to get Jeref where he needed to go.

--- Niun ---

He scratched the zombie behind the ears absently. It had been three days since Eliax had given him the map, three days of anxiety, confusion, and not a little depression. He'd tried putting Jeref in an abandoned house, Nasei knows there were plenty of those in the city lately. But Jeref didn't like the idea and ended up breaking a Jeref-shaped hole in the wall so he could track down Niun again.