Master Ben Ten selected seven of his students to come along with us, rounding out our Fellowship to the nominal limit of nine people and maximizing the sharing of magic and Karma that would result.

  Unlike most of the Isparian undead, Master Ben Ten and his students took meticulous care of their Armor and Weapons, and so didn’t look like a clacking mess. Indeed, with their helms closed and down, the only thing that might give them away as undead was the disconcerting lightness of their movements, and the clacking of their bones against their Armor if it wasn’t secured.

  Night was the most comfortable time for the undead, and I had no problems working in it with my Mask of Clarity down. The skeletal warriors were quite gratified when I proposed we leave after Aethra’s Salute, and take the long watch out into the waters in the north.

  “We can see your face more clearly when you drop your Mask down,” Master Ben Ten informed me after we shimmered into place well over a hundred miles to the north. My lived-line had passed along this beach when I ran the island’s shoreline with the Mick, so arriving on target was simplicity itself. “It does not look so… rotting and degrading as it might, mists of magic falling off the bone,” he told me.

  “There are spells that allow the living to see the world as the dead do, but such things are not for the faint of heart, nor the wise. I imagine you can see one another as if you were almost alive, just able to glimpse the bones inside of one another, too?”

  The skeletal warriors affirmed that was how it seemed: they looked real to one another, mostly, and the living looked like constantly decaying corpses that somehow never really broke down, and moved unnaturally. Even the brightest magic was muted, although the Lost Light of my Staff was searingly bright and almost painful to them, they couldn’t gaze at it for too long.

  “Were the world itself not looking so different to us, we would almost believe we were still alive, and it is all else that is dead and corrupt,” Master Ben Ten said softly. “When the first living people we fought for told us we were merely bones, when they looked so horrid to us, we knew something was wrong…”

  “You are caught on the precipice between life and death, held there by unnatural forces, whose energies intertwine with you on physical, mental, and spiritual levels. The fact that you are bound by Curses instead of necromancy means your actual souls are still within you, still alive, and it is your body that is bound and Animated to hold it. True undead are actually long dead, slain by the process that makes them rise up, and only a negative mirror image of their soul remains behind. It thinks it is them, but it is not. It is a thing wrought of anti-life in the mirror, whatever its stolen memories and life tells it. What true undead have is not a soul, and you likely have noticed that as well?” I asked them, spreading my hands and bringing up some Disks for them to ride on.

  All of them had their own Disks by now. The flow of pyreal goldweight bars hadn’t stopped and wasn’t going to, with the result that not only was some powerful magic being Invested into stuff, a lot of versatile and useful items were coming back into being.

  Disks were just too bloody useful not to have one of your own to haul your stuff around on. Nobody liked to wear heavy packs and purses if they didn’t want to. All they had to do was throw a dark cloak over mine and disguise the muted translucent silver of the Force magic that made them up, and they were good to go.

  “The Empyrean undead, they look like black ink wrapped around their overlong bones,” spoke up Konrad ‘the Destroyer’, the tallest and brawniest of the lot, a dead Aluvian axe-man with a long and cheerfully violent past. He was, like the Mick, someone who’d led a morally ambiguous life until the Fall, and there in the midst of disaster he’d found a truth he’d been ignoring all his life. His valiant death didn’t stop him from pursuing that truth, and he had been bringing that truth to things that threatened living Isparians for years ever since.

  He also eagerly came over to help out Briggs whenever the big Ancient was in town, especially with any smithwork. Being fairly tireless as an undead, he’d taken up the trade to wile away the hours, and actually kicked out a constant stream of decent ironwork for tools and the like.

  “That’s because they took their immortality in Blood Magic, very similar to what Nuhmudira manipulates. The proper method for Dericostan ‘immortality’ is for them to sacrifice someone for the benefit, perhaps paying them to volunteer or compensating their heirs. However, the means and method are corrupt, and so they degrade as negative energy rots their souls from within over the centuries and millennia, and they do not care.” I started walking out across the incoming waves, just high enough that I barely went up and down as they rolled gently in the swell, pacing out towards the Shoreward.

  “It took me a month to realize I wasn’t actually breathing anymore, and what I thought was flesh was actually passing through what I touched until it hit my bones,” Sumzan, a proud tulwar-bearing fellow in the immaculate jannisar garb of a turbaned desert warrior related. “I thought I was trying to eat things, and they would just fall to the ground beneath me, lost in the ruin and clutter I didn’t want to notice.” He sighed eerily through his ornate turquoise naryid armor helm.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “We can touch one another as if we have flesh, and that was the most disconcerting,” Shouzan the Stormsword told me, their hollow eyes watching as magic shimmered around Crown and opened a way through the Shoreward easily.

  “It is no different from the likes of the dreads, phantoms, and even the wraiths and ghosts of the lands of Ispar from the tales. Incorporeals can touch one another, even as they pass through mortal flesh and sear it with the necroic energies of their existences as they do so. In the same way, your spirit is bound to your bones, and you can beat on them as they can beat on you, two spirits meeting.”

  The waves were rolling a good two feet higher further out, but that was fine. I popped my Wings out, celeste feathers filled with more stars than the night sky above, and simply propelled myself ahead steadily and firmly, keeping close enough to the surface of the water to maintain my lived-line.

  There were creaks as all of them bent to get a better view. “Lady Magos, your Wings… they look like the night sky as I remember, not this ghostly tableau of weeping orbs in the sky and spectral clouds chasing shadows across them!” Master Ben Ten uttered for all of them.

  I looked back at them all, who were staring at my raised and frozen pseudo-limbs in wonder. My Wings were more ectoplasm than anything real, and certainly not invested in enough to be considered extra limbs, which could then be weaponized. No, they just channeled aeromancy and enabled me to fly at a decent clip, namely twice my ground speed, three times if I had my Cloudstepping Sandals engaged and helping them out.

  I couldn’t outrun the master lightfooters, but I could outfly them!

  “Can you see this, gentlemen?” I asked, and swept a Spectral Force back above me. It was more Hologram than Phantasm, magical light sharper and harder than was normal, where the suggestive effects of a Phantasm would fill in desired details from the viewer’s own mind, making it seem more real.

  Such things naturally didn’t work on most undead, whose brains and minds operated very differently from humans. Undead could be tricked with illusions, sure, but those illusions did look very different to them than what we thought. Basically, the ‘science’ of them had to make up for the loss of the ‘art’ of them, which generally meant keeping your damn Illusions pretty simple.

  Simple, like just reflecting and showing the night sky visible above us.

  A shout of joy and wonder escaped all of the skeletal men as they craned their heads back to look up at the soaring wheel and arch of the star-filled heavens above. Two of the younger ones outright fell flat on their backs and stared up at the sky in rapture, while the others could not take their empty eyes from the stars that were no longer staring back at them.

  “It is good that we are doing this during the night,” Master Ben Ten breathed, his head tilted back and slowly sweeping the sky, as if trying to devour the sight of it to be remembered forever. “I fear my eyes would burn out from staying open too long if this were during the day, and I could behold the blue sky and white clouds again!”

  “My apologies for not considering such a simple matter earlier. I will raise a place outside the walls of Mayoi and Hebian-to that will replicate the sky above with illusions, it will be a simple thing to put up.” A Permanent Illusion that required basically no thought whatsoever, actually. No different from putting the illusion of something over itself. “You will be able to see the sky whenever you stand beneath it.”

  Rattling sighs from bones emulating breathing escaped behind me as semi-corporeal spirits wrapped around old bones channeled the wind blowing through the gaps in their Armor. “That would be wonderful, Lady Magos, although you may have to make it somewhat large. I imagine it will be getting quite the use out of our compatriots still waiting their turns.”

  That was probably a given. “I apologize for my lack of magical reserves that could accelerate the process of the Resurrections. Even the simplest improvement, a Rapid Ritual to bring the time of the Resurrections down to a minute to Cast, still requires the Casting of a thousand of the spells out of a IX Valence to either bring the cost of the Metamagic down, or raise the synergy within the spell. Doing so would require me to be a Seventeen, and I haven’t even reached Fifteen so that I may Cast VIII’s in the Matrix system.”

  “Do not bother yourself, Lady Magos,” Master Ben Ten said softly, all his students nodding with him. “We are patient, and our souls are filled with hope. Were this my homeland back in Ispar, there would be no noble lords nor households who could possibly afford to return us to the living. The amount of time and magic the Resurrections clearly demand of you is visible to all of us.

  “When you can do more, we know you will do it. Already you do more than any other being in these lands has for us. You have clearly set it in your heart to right a great wrong, and not a student of mine will dare to whine and complain that you cannot deliver us all from this horrible mockery of a fate right now.

  “We endured for years without the hope you have given us. Now, you display it before us, and it only shines brighter by the day! We will endure with the patience of stone, for deliverance is here! Let the most anxious and weakest go before us. We will wait,” he stated proudly, solemnly, and his men all nodded agreement with him.

  I inclined my head at him. “Well spoken, Master Ben Ten. Yet, I do not think I have to tell you what it is like to know what needs to be done, to have the road and path you must take right in front of you, and progress still be so frustratingly slow!”

  Bony jaws clattered in amusement. “You have seen us working at trying to learn the Ways of the Golden Hag!” a bluff, rather squat Sho by name of Ugisko, hailing from a hill clan there, spoke up merrily.

  “I have. The Ways are a pain to learn at the best of times, you are all under a massive handicap, and yet still you make progress! You are all geniuses!” I assured them, and if bones could glow, these fellows certainly would have.

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