Throne of Time - Chapter 66: The Necromancer (Patreon)

Suria wasn't tired anymore.

She tried to sit up and was foiled by the softness of the pillows around her, which just drove home the absurdity of the situation. Xuhriha made a lot of strange jokes, but she didn't seem to be joking now, which meant that Suria was sitting opposite the feared necromancer... who was fidgeting in pink ruffles.

"Come on, Suria, don't look at me that way..." Xuhriha usually made too much eye contact, but now she lowered her gaze and squirmed. "It's not like I'm planning to steal your bones. Not even a little bit."

First Suria tried to think about how this might be an elaborate set-up, but she couldn't think of a way that Xuhriha could gain an advantage from deceiving her this long that she wouldn't already have. They had been rooming together for two cycles and Suria had dropped her guard many times... could there be some sort of process that required time to work? Anything physical would be reset by the time loop, and Suria thought she would be alert to a spiritual change due to all her work on her soul talisman.

And so, despite the ominous reputation of necromancy, Suria found herself deciding that this didn't necessarily change anything. She was engaged in forbidden time magic herself, after all, and it wasn't like she was being completely honest with all the other loopers.

"Then I guess I should tell you that I'm the one who caused the time loop," Suria said.

Xuhriha's eyes widened in shock for an instant, then she giggled. "Oh, you got me for a second there! So we're still friends?"

"I just want to understand." Suria sighed and settled back into the pillows. Now that the initial tension had faded, she was reminded of her injuries again. "So you're a necromancer? What does that actually mean?"

"Yes, I am, but I'm also really a first year student, or at least I was. So don't go imagining me raising corpses or anything." Xuhriha paused and tapped her cheek. "Not that I won't be able to do that, hopefully, one day. But it takes a lot of work, and my runic capacity isn't high enough yet. The time loop is very frustrating on that account, let me tell you."

"I know a thing or two about that. But how does a necromancer end up at Darkmoon University?"

"Well... you remember I'm from the Court of Vedraz, right? The Alhras family has always specialized in necromancy as a sort of open secret, because it's only a little forbidden over there. You know, like how infidelity in marriage is very serious in some places, and just a little faux pas in others. But in recent years - I mean our lifetimes - more nations are frowning on the practice. The necromancy, not the infidelity."

"So you grew up... being forced to practice necromancy?" Suria frowned as she considered. "Or is it one of those magical bloodlines?"

"It's more like a family business. You grow up with access to a lot of secret inscriptions and other tricks, but plenty of my relatives don't have the knack for it at all." Xuhriha sat back and began swinging her legs. "If you ask me, magical bloodlines are overrated. I knew a lot of people who claimed to have legendary magic blood and they weren't that strong. And their blood wasn't that interesting."

"You didn't really answer my previous question. Was it something you had to practice?"

"Well, I'm an only child, so my parents put a lot of pressure on me, but I think you're imagining me being stuck in a bone cage until I sacrificed a baby or something. Not at all - I think necromancy is just great fun! Even after trying out a bunch of different disciplines here, I still like it best."

"Does Darkmoon know?" Suria asked.

"Nope! Had to bribe them to dodge the testing, since that would have revealed a few things about me, but plenty of nobles do that anyway. Now, I should tell you that in some early loops I made mistakes and I'm pretty sure a few professors figured it out, but they didn't seem to care much. I don't think necromancy is all that forbidden, it's just the crimes you might commit in the process."

As the conversation shifted to a more relaxed mode, Suria got out her runebook and began inscribing a balming spell that would properly heal her alchemical burns. She was shifting from fear to curiosity and wondered if she would have done that at the start of the loops. There were plenty of notorious necromancers across history, but she didn't find the idea as upsetting as she expected.

"So what have you been doing all this time?" Suria asked as she worked. "Please tell me you haven't just been trying to drive Wynchard mad."

"No, he's actually been very frustrating." Xuhriha sighed and began toying with a lock of golden hair. "One of the very first abilities a necromancer learns is to speak to the dead... as soon as I realized that we were in a time loop, and that we were being eliminated, I started using it defensively. If I can get to the body, I can see their final memories, figure out what they did wrong, that sort of thing."

"So that's what you were doing with the Endelythans just now?"

"Exactly! They weren't soul-killed, by the way, just regular-killed." Xuhriha abruptly clapped her hands together. "Ooh, do you want to see? I could show you, if you want. It's a little disorienting, but I think it's interesting, and it would prove a lot of what I'm saying."

"What does it involve?" Suria asked skeptically. Relaxing around the other woman was one thing, but letting a necromancer cast an unknown spell on her...

"It's not so complex, really. They call it Perception here, but it's basically just sharing a vision. May I?"

When Suria cautiously gave her consent, Xuhriha hopped over to her bed and then gently touched her forehead. At first Suria felt nothing except the tingle of mana, too weak to have an effect - she needed to lower her defenses in order to feel any change.

Suddenly she felt an intense disorientation: she was standing in the streets of Darmkael with leaning alleyways on both sides. Stranger than that, she felt that she wasn't herself, with a masculine walk and strange thoughts. She wanted to look down at her hands, but couldn't control her body.

"Did you hear that?" someone said. Whatever body Suria was riding looked to the side and she saw two of the Endelythan loopers.

"Shields," a voice from her own throat said. "Get ready to-"

A shadow moved toward her and a cold hand seized her arm before she could get her runebook. She had only a glimpse of jaws rushing toward her face and then the experience shattered.

And she was lying in her bed again, Xuhriha pulling her hand back.

"Was that okay?" the other woman asked. "I chose a short memory just in case you reacted poorly. And I tried to cut it off at the end before the nasty, chompy parts. He died pretty quickly but not instantly, if you understand me. I know you've died before, but face-biting is still icky."

"You managed fine," Suria said. Her heart was racing and she still felt a bit disoriented, but the experience hadn't been traumatic. "How much can you relive like that? Surely you can't just... root through a person's entire life."

"When somebody dies, it produces a shadow of death energy, like an echo," Xuhriha explained. "I can absorb that and relive it so long as there's at least some trace left. But for anything earlier, you have to create a spectral construct and then ask it questions, which is much more frustrating. I haven't been able to do that so much with Wynchard always running after me. Sometimes he's nowhere close and sometimes he's much closer than I'd like."

"You said that was a short memory. Does that mean the other Endelythans saw more?"

"Not a whole lot more. Phisvene lasted longest." Xuhriha reached out again and this time Suria settled into the memory more easily.

She was back in the alleyway, retreating while hurling spells behind her. There was something lurching toward her at shocking speed, like a child's misshapen drawing of a man. One shoulder was a hideously bloated mass that glowed with each spell, somehow absorbing their effects. Phisvene desperately tried to cast at a nearby wall, to drop something onto the creature, but it was too late.

The worst part of it was the head, which still retained eyes and scalp, stuck on top of enormous metal jaws. Those jaws lunged forward, opening wider than any creature should be able to, and Phisvene screamed as they closed on her.

Back in their room, Suria took a moment to reorient herself. Once the experience might have been disturbing, but she had been ripped between experiences by the time loop on multiple occasions and even experienced different kinds of deaths, so it wasn't so troubling. Strange, what sorts of things a person could become accustomed to.

"I don't suppose you know what that thing was?" Suria asked faintly.

"Not necromancy, I can tell you that." Xuhriha bounced back over to her bed. "Definitely something created, probably to fight mages. I think Wynchard is convinced that it's the Glyphbreakers, but there's no actual evidence of that as far as I can tell. Oh, and there definitely weren't any of those running around Darmkael earlier in the cycle."

"I suppose we should be grateful for that."

"Anything else you wanted to know? I've learned a little from all this, but whatever is going on with the Blank Hand and the rest is a mystery to me too."

"No, I want to ask about something else." Suria had been focused on the now, but the back of her mind must have been reconsidering past experiences, because now other things were occurring to her. "You told me about how Dsjaho-an died and said you happened to see it... did you actually get the information from his death energy?"

"Yeah." Xuhriha squirmed a little. "I know it's technically a lie, but it would have been really awkward to bring up..."

"I don't care about that - can you show me when it happened?"

"Oh!" Xuhriha's eyes widened, then she shook her head sadly. "The death echo gets wiped out when the loop resets, and I haven't figured out any way to carry it with me. I'm afraid it won't be very satisfying, but I can tell you what else I know, if that would help?"

"Please do."

"He had been asked to come early to class for a special assignment. I didn't understand the details, but it was something plausible, an opportunity he was proud to receive. Along the way, he was thinking about his suicide necklace, because apparently there had been some sort of analysis spell cast on it recently. He had been proud of himself that it passed without notice, then suddenly...

"Gone. Not even a shadow in the corner of his eyes. If it's any comfort, I'm pretty sure he would have died instantly and painlessly. From the death energy, I was able to determine that he had been struck by a spell from behind and that it was a soul killer, but you can't get much more from that."

"So from there you determined it was probably the professors," Suria surmised.

"It makes sense, right?" Xuhriha shrugged awkwardly. "They were so suspicious of us in that loop, and if I knew someone had a suicide method, that's how I'd try to eliminate them."

"I don't suppose the concentrated silphium is running the same risk?"

"No, it seems like a good idea to me!" Xuhriha beamed at her. "That's really quite clever of you. I'd do it myself, but... well, I'm working on a very efficient way of killing myself, if you understand me."

"I can imagine." Now that many of her questions had been answered, Suria's mind was beginning to put the shape of the whole thing together. "So all the pink is misdirection, right? To keep people from realizing that y-"

"No! Pink is just my favorite color." Xuhriha stuck out her tongue. "My family's necromancer aesthetic is so dreary, and skulls in clothing are just uncomfortable. I suppose a pink skull would be cute, but I don't exactly want to draw attention to myself, you know?"

"I'm not sure you're doing a good job of that."

"I don't want to draw attention to the being a necromancer part."

They lapsed into silence, which had somehow become companionable again despite all the revelations. Suria realized that, even after using it as a test, Xuhriha still carried her pink handbag around. It probably contained the glyphs she used for her necromantic spells, since it wouldn't be wise to carry those in visible talismans. Presumably it had not carried those glyphs when Xuhriha used it as bait.

As she put together more of the coincidences and clues, Suria gradually realized that the conversation had been entirely one-sided up to that point. On one hand, she appreciated that Xuhriha had been so forthright with her, after hiding such important information. But on the other hand, Suria realized that she had revealed nothing about herself, despite carrying some secrets of her own.

"I haven't been telling the whole truth about Convocation Hall," Suria said abruptly, before she could think better of it and sink into paranoia.

"Ooh, I knew there was a secret!" Xuhriha leaned forward eagerly. "Is it something exciting?"

"Only for bad definitions of exciting..." So Suria explained, for the first time, everything she'd experienced during the ordeal of the first hour. She mentioned Lirngelf for the first time and Xuhriha immediately understood why he needed to remain a secret. Most of their time, however, was spent on the encounter with the professors in the basement.

From there Suria ended up shifting on to her efforts to learn more about the thrones and their conspiracy. Xuhriha asked thoughtful questions and threw in a few details of her own, but it was clear that no one had a full picture of what had been going on. Once she'd finished telling everything, Suria felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

"That's all I've been able to determine," she concluded. "Do you think we could learn anything more from Lirngelf's body?"

"I'm afraid not. Bodies that have been soul killed are basically wiped clean after the cycle restarts." Xuhriha pouted a little. "And I start out a bit far away, so I'd struggle to get there in time to do much. That's really a shame."

"We could still try it at some point, once the risk is lower." Suria thought for a while longer, considering the problem from a new angle. "Assuming that Professor Drazen actually died, could you learn anything from his death energy?"

"That was my first thought too, and unfortunately not. Well, I can confirm that it definitely felt like someone died. It does seem like a murder, and you'd think a necromancer would be good at solving murders, but unfortunately someone else thought of that. Somebody scoured Convocation Hall of magical traces, most likely for the express purpose of stopping someone like me, or divination, or anything else along those lines."

"So they did a good job covering everything up."

"Probably a much better job than we could, considering that they're archmages. I want to talk more, but..." Xuhriha looked over at her in concern. "You doing okay?"

"I'm just..." Suria realized that she was struggling to keep her eyes open. "Just tired. It was a long day before all this started."

"Get some rest, then! We can always talk more in the morning."

That seemed like a good idea. Suria wanted to move aside all of the pillows, but drifted away before she could find the will.

~

"Suria! I saw your eyes flicker, I know you're awake!"

She wasn't awake as far as she was concerned, just groggy and confused. When she somehow managed to force her eyes open, Suria saw that she had a bright pink necromancer propped up over her, grinning cheerfully.

"I have an idea!" Xuhriha announced. "It doesn't involve using your skull as a cup or anything!"

x

Are we having fun? More necromancy next week!