The Necromancer Prince's Journey Across The Stars

In all the endless days of his infinite unlife, Janus Coinblack had never once dreamed.

Today was different.

And so would every day afterward ever be.

In the hallowed Halls of Memento Mori, the bone-white palace sitting between Reality and Unreality, Life and Oblivion, the Thirteenth Necromancer Prince lay in bed as he did every nocturne. Outside the frosted panes of his mullioned windows, the mournful howl of a lone hellhound serenaded him to sleep. Beneath a canopy of black silk and gold brocade, enveloped by dove gray sheets and charcoal duvets, the young lord tossed and turned, settling at last with the final howl.

No matter the nature of his soul, Prince Janus' vessel was one of flesh. His flesh needed the repair and renewal that immortality alone could not provide. And so his body rested.

His mind was another story altogether.

On the shores of the realm of Morpheus, where the consciousnesses of all beings came together in the maddening mental mélange of electric ecstasy, Prince Janus watched the turbulent tides of an eternal ocean dash upon bleak black rocks. He stood still as stone beneath the starless sky, dressed in the thin gray tunic and pale blue undershorts he wore as nightclothes in the waking world. It was as if he'd journeyed from bedroom to beach in a single step.

Gleaming against the smooth dark brown skin of his flesh vessel, two metallic sigils marked upon his hands shone. On the right, a golden alpha. On the left, a silver omega.

Janus raised both hands to the empty slate sky and cried out, "Why do you seek me out here, my Creator and Destroyer? Why give me the gift of dreams when I know you'll only take them back again? What is it that you want of me? What more could there be?"

Silence.

"What more do you want?" he asked again, making sure his voice was pleading rather than demanding. Subordinate yet smooth. "Sovereign Death of the Twelve Worlds, you already have all that I am."

Dark pools of emptiness formed in Janus' dreamform hands. Twin sparks of pure starfire flared where once the princely sigils had burned.

The Eyes of Sovereign Death.

"My thirteenth creation. Last and least of my progeny." A pause. "My son."

Janus gulped. He could not last recall when Sovereign Death, both Father and Mother and yet Neither, had called him by that title. Had claimed him as heir instead of servant.

"Sire?" Janus whispered.

"You have yet to truly give all of yourself to me." The Sovereign Death's voice rumbled like an impossibly infinite series of brazen horns. "Come to The Silent Court. Bring your Scythebearer and your Gateway. We have much to discuss."

The Eyes of Sovereign Death vanished. And so, too, did the thought-flesh of Janus' dreamform.

The slate-gray sky receded into nothingness. The oceans evaporated into roiling mist. The beach scattered away into glittering motes of crackling thought.

Stormclouds swallowed the moon. In the distance, the braying of beasts that sounded almost downright funereal.

Janus sat up in the tangled sheets of his massive canopy bed in Memento Mori's master bedroom, eyes widened.

Until that day, nearly all his days had been the same. Overseeing the souls of drifting humanity as they departed one reality for another. Resurrecting those deemed worthy or useful. Expelling eternally those deemed beyond use or redemption by any measure. A dutiful servant he was, left almost completely alone among the departing dead of humanity's starbound empire.