Convergence of Souls

“You’re even more full of shit than I thought you were,” John growled. “I’m no necromancer, and for all my desperation, I have no idea how to make an offering like whatever insanity you’ve attempted.”

“I know not what you did, or how… but I know I am not mistaken, John Newman. I felt some part of your soul there as surely as I can feel it now, standing here with you. The same as I felt it a year ago when I was watching over you.”

A chill ran down John’s spine at the thought of yet another person keeping an eye on him. He was uncomfortably used to the idea, but that didn’t make it any less unsettling. “Not gonna scare me by claiming to have been watching over me a year ago, you know. Not like you’re the first person to spy on me.”

“Nor the last, given your abilities. But I didn’t come here to scare you, just as I didn’t come to attack you, John Newman. I came here to offer you the chance to join us. Come with me and I will promise your safety – if your abilities cannot be used to complete our ritual, then we have no reason to pursue you, or hold you any longer than necessary. Even if it’s a small chance, think of the pain that could be avoided if you help us succeed! Thousands of lives that won’t have to be lost, suffering and toiling in the afterlife until we succeed in our mission to resurrect them!”

“Even if I thought that you stood a chance of accomplishing your goals, why would I help someone like you? You’re willing to kill thousands of people for the chance to maybe bring them back. What happens if you burn your way across America – hell, across the entire Abyss – and still don’t find this last bit of magic? What about when your forces get wiped out by one of the factions you attack, your task unfulfilled, all those people dead for nothing?”

“Our task will be fulfilled, whether we are the ones to complete it or not. That is the pact of all necromancers who follow Assidia’s path,” Bella said, voice low and determined. “For over a thousand years, we have followed the path she pioneered, thinning and weakening the barrier to the afterlife. Whether we achieve our goal now or the success belongs to those who follow in our footsteps matters little. One day all in the Abyss who have ever lived, shall live again!”

“Really? Even the murderers? The enslavers? The worst of the worst, the people who have inflicted as much pain as you?” John couldn’t help but let that last slight slip in, despite knowing it accomplished nothing. Fortunately Bella remained seemingly unaffected by his barbs. “What happens when instead of ****, everyone just ends up enslaved or repressed, under the heels of the Deities or whoever else rises from the undead hellscape you create?”

“There will be a reckoning in society, that is to be sure. But you need not worry about some ancient warrior rising and asserting supremacy over our world. Lady-”

Whatever Bella had said was drowned out by the screeching of tires and blaring of red-lined engines. Phasing into the streets a few blocks away, the full might of the Brighton forces seemed to be barreling down on them.

”I guess Moira didn’t make the mistake of coming alone again,” John noted, snapping his vision back toward Bella as he saw movement. Bella cast John a quick glance, but she was already moving away from him – leaving behind a series of dark mana circles on the ground as she fled, disappearing from the Barrier shortly after turning away. John debated trying to chase after her, but given what he had seen of her level in his Observe window, he decided to be grateful things hadn’t come down to a direct fight.

Well, not with her anyway. The undead crawling their way out of the mana circles she had left behind before disappearing out of the Barrier seemed to have different ideas about things. Unfriendly ideas. There were a great number of them – already around thirty, with more still rising. There were skeletons and fleshier corpses aplenty, some completely intact, the only sign of their undeath the pallor of their skin and the dead gaze they used to stare blankly ahead.

The Owner of this Barrier has exited!
This Barrier was reinforced by its owner. This Barrier will remain in place for thirty minutes, unless dismissed by a new owner.

“That will give her enough time for her to get away cleanly, especially with those stats. Sophia, we’re going to have to either defeat those things or hold out until they fade away to get out of this Barrier.”

“At your word, Father.”

Sophia stepped forward eagerly, claws flashing as her wings extended behind her, a small piece of their full size. Flickers of red lightning surrounded her claws as her eyes glowed a deep crimson, a burning light that trailed in the air behind her irises as she moved beside him. By that point the Order’s trucks had screeched to a halt a few yards away, led by one particular armored van with a bright golden rose emblazoned on its side. Out of it stepped Moira, Etriyya, and Lord Brighton himself – something John was rather surprised to see.

“What have you gotten yourself into now, John Newman?” Moira said, though she hardly sounded annoyed, and her gaze was focused on the undead now finished manifesting and shambling toward them.

“One of the Northern Ashes came all the way down just to see me, aren’t I special?” John saw the anger, concern, and shock all flash in Moira’s eyes, but she kept her shield steady. “We’ll talk about it in a bit, once these things are dealt with. Might have some new intel.”

“One of the Northern Ashes made her way down here? There should still be miles of territory between us and their front lines,” Lord Brighton noted, surprise in his voice. “She either managed to cross through a nation at war or took a very long path to meet you, John. And either way, she did so without giving us any warning. It’s one thing for a Deity to accomplish such a feat, but…”

"Seems you aren't the only one who can go across the country undetected," Moira commented, already raising her hammer. "But enough talk! Knights of the Order, pass judgment on these unholy nightmares!"

Moira's hammer glistened with light, and as she pointed it forward, it was unleashed in a blinding arc. Two of the skeletons were broken apart immediately as the light struck them, their bones and scraps of armor scattering over the pavement.

The rest of the Order followed suit shortly after, with less impressive results individually, but in such overwhelming numbers that the advance of the undead was fully halted for a few moments as holy fury rained down on their numbers. Lord Brighton was the notable exception, a solar burst emanating from the shield he wore across his left arm that seemed to almost evaporate the flesh from a half-dozen of the shambling zombies.

Still, the undead were a bit sturdier than John had expected. As the barrage ended, nearly two dozen of the creatures were still standing, and John was annoyed to see that at least a handful of the destroyed creatures seemed to be forming together into some rotting amalgamation.

"Weak creatures, but reinforced with powerful magic," Moira noted, shifting to a more defensive stance. "Who was that, John?"

"Bella Oferta."

"Bella- John, that's one of Xanthia Allaquetz's personal apprentices! No wonder she's so eager to escape us. Capturing her would be-"

"Like I said, later!” John growled, as the first of the Undead came close enough to reach with a quick throw. John activated the Rune of Disruption on his sword and tossed it at one of the reanimated corpses. It cleaved into the flesh of the zombie with a wet "thunk", then a blinding flash of blue light swept out from the point of contact.

-387 Mana!
Reanimation disrupted

"Damn, that is powerful magic," John growled, feeling the mana seeping out of him as the reanimation spell was forcibly ended. The zombie fell over, a lifeless corpse once more. John willed the blade back to his hand as the undead continued forward, nearly in reach now, breaking into a full sprint. Instead of their slow approach, they were now moving quickly - as quickly as any of the Barrier creatures he usually trained against.

With disrupting the spells animating them not being an option due to mana costs, John charged ahead with the Order. The two sides of the battle met in a clash of steel, bone, and tangled sinews. Fortunately they seemed enchanted more for durability than for strength. John parried a downward strike from a glistening sword held by an almost equally shiny, skeletal hand as if it were little more than a mudane human, but when he responded with a counter strike, his blade caught in the skeleton’s sternum between two ribs and only managed to carve halfway through. The skeleton shuddered and began its own retaliatory strike – John had to grab the handle of the blade with both hands and twist as hard as he could to crack the bony assailant’s chest wide open, throwing its balance off and eventually managing to split it entirely in half.

All around him, similar exchanges were playing out across the line of conflict between living and dead. Various tattered and rotting limbs crashed against shields and wings, repelled almost too easily. The counter-offensives sank home without issue, but often failed to deliver finishing blows as easily as might have been expected for such deteriorated foes.

”Tanks, nothing but literal meatshields,” John noted mentally as he struck forward with a more focused strike, cleaving into the flesh and bone of a partially rotted corpse and this time successfully cleaving its head from its torso. ”By the time we can clear out these summons, Bella will be long gone.”

Beside him, golden feathers filled the eye sockets and jawline of a zombie, penetrating deeply enough to **** the attacker back – then disable it entirely when they detonated a few moments later. Meanwhile to his right, a glowing hammer shattered skull after skull, caring little for flesh or bone, driving through the reanimated bodies with purpose and fervor. The victor of this battle had been decided the moment that the Order arrived on scene, if not sooner… but it seemed victory had never been Bella’s goal.

The battle continued in full **** for a few more moments, Order steel meeting reanimated corpses in a vicious but prolonged exchange. Sophia fought to John’s left, Moira to his right, only enough space between them to be able to freely swing their weapons without fear. Any of the resurrected minions that tried to push into those gaps were met by steel or claw, quickly shredded and falling into the pile of slowly coalescing bone and flesh shards.

The climax of the battle came as the amorphous pile began to take a form beyond its simple mound – and just as quickly, it was dealt with. Lord Brighton leaped over their lines of battle, shield held beside and slightly behind his body, leading instead with his mace. The Lord of the Brighton Manor reminded all, if there was ever any doubt, about why he bore that title, smashing the entire wretched pile with his mace in one almighty blow. Golden light showered out from the mace as it struck, eviscerating the pulsating creature before it could finish forming, causing his mace to strike more with the **** of a bomb than a simple physical strike.

As the last creature fell, so too did the Barrier, a pop-up in John’s peripheral alerting him to what he could already see before his eyes. What did surprise him was the fact that none of the undead they had been fighting vanished. John was so used to inhuman targets vanishing shortly after their **** or after the Barrier dissipated that all he could do for a few moments was stare at the remaining piles of viscera.

“Those… those weren’t Barrier creatures?” John noted, voiced with the tone of a question, though he already knew the answer.

“No. These are necromancers, not summoners. These are likely victims of the war against the Great Plains Alliance.”

Lord Brighton’s words were blunt, though not uncaring. John didn’t bother looking over to see what expressions Moira or her father were giving him. It shouldn’t have bothered him – John had been personally covered in the blood of multiple Albidians, leaving some of them in nearly as many pieces as the corpses before them now. Somehow, staring down on the bodies of what had once been Abyssal mages, reduced first to the mindless puppets of another, then to the bloodied mess before him… John was reminded of the first time he’d taken a life, so long ago. At the time he’d been so distraught over slaughtering the helpless Cabal prisoners that he had ended up retching in a bush.

Now, even with the realization that he’d been actively dismembering what had once been living, mostly innocent mages, all he could muster was a dry mouth.

“This is why we find necromancy so abhorrent. It twists the bodies and memories of the dead into tools and forces of will for conquest. It is a blighted magic.” Lord Brighton’s words were heavy as he strode across the battlefield to rejoin Moira and John. “We will ensure that these bodies are properly purified and given as proper a burial as we can give them. None shall remain defiled by this unholy magic.”

“As is our duty,” Moira added. “Now, John… as the resident magnet for danger, can you tell us why on earth you’ve been ambushed by a faction we aren’t even technically at war with?!”

Moira’s voice was strained but she seemed more exhausted than annoyed, despite the tension in her brows as she glared at him. John ignored the intense gaze as best as he could, trying to sort through the adrenaline and emotions to figure out what to say.

“Something troubles you?” Lord Brighton said with almost no hesitation, reading John more quickly than the young mage had anticipated. John frowned slightly before he met Lord Brighton’s gaze and responded.

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know how much we already knew about the Northern Ashes’ actual motivations, but… from what she just told me, they’re waging this war – the whole thing, from start to finish – because they think it will let them truly bring the dead back to life. From what Bella said, Xanthia believes they’re so close to breaking the barrier between life and **** that the knowledge to finish that the key they’re missing must exist out there somewhere. They plan on continuing this war until they find it, or until they can fight no longer.”

There was a beat, a silence that hung a little too long.

“And what of that mission brought her here?” Moira asked, her voice unnerved and unsatisfied.

“She thought that my ability to Purify Barrier creatures and create new life might be useful for their ritual, capable of restoring life as well as creating it,” John murmured.

“Do you think that’s something that could be possible?” Lord Brighton asked, voice skeptical but still serious.

Locks of blonde hair, scattered on the ground. Dead eyes met his from every direction, all-seeing eyes, forgiving eyes, accusing eyes, they-

“It’s not possible,” John said, voice angrier than he’d intended. “If it was, I would know by now. I would have… I would have figured it out. My Purify can’t bring people back.”

John couldn’t be any more direct, but it didn’t seem as if he needed to. Despite his sorrows, he couldn’t miss the flicker of sympathy passing between Lord Brighton and Moira. The young Warden wrapped her arms around John without hesitation, pulling their bodies together and gently tucking his head against her armored shoulder.

“I know. I’m sorry, John,” she whispered, saying nothing else. Silence fell across the battlefield, an uncomfortable one, made all the more unbearable by the voice that still whispered in John’s ears. Whispered words that he did not believe… but that he still dared not share with anyone, especially the Brightons.