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His New Hoard Chapter 4: The Necromancer's Secrets Sponsored by Fox_Sinz By Draconicon

Once they were a few dozen paces from the hole, the cold faded enough for the mole and dragon to pick up the pace. Not much, but at least they were no longer shuffling and catching their feet in the bones and guts and bodies beneath them.

Even so, Draconicon could hear the click-clack-click of claws on ice and the rending sounds of talons on flesh. Their protective tunnel had been breached, and it would only be a matter of time before something broke through and caught them.

He looked out of the corner of his eye, tracking his necromancer. Jaceb was keeping up a good pace, though he was puffing for breath. The mole still kept that skull tucked under his arm, cradling it as if it was the most precious thing in the world.

Ahead, there was nothing but darkness, the angel long gone. He'd disappeared sometime after the creature had breached the passageway, and hadn't been seen since.

I could have kept Jaceb alive without wasting that favor, he thought. Right now, we need another body. How is he immune to this?

Armor, he imagined. It had to be that strange armor the angel was wearing. It had healed its wearer, and it had many other buttons besides the one that he pushed.

There was no point in thinking of that now, though. He hadn't taken any from the battlefield, and the angel himself was nowhere to be seen. All they could do was keep moving and hope nothing else big punched its way through.

"Keep moving," he muttered for the fifth time in as many minutes. "Keep moving."

"I w-w-will."

They kept reminding each other of what they had to do. It was the only way to fight the cold, and the only way to have a reason to do anything in this ring of Hell.

"How much further?" he asked. "Do you remember?"

"At least...at least another...hour..."

That wasn't promising. Draconicon looked up as the ripping, rending sound that he'd been hearing for the last few minutes rushed directly overhead. It was close enough that if the creature making it decided to break through, they probably could attack him and Jaceb with ease. With the sounds it was making, he imagined that there were deadly claws, likely tipped with an icy poison for the blood and the brain. It would be like this realm to have ways of leeching through as well as emotion.

At this point, I'm almost thankful that I can't be afraid, he thought.

He had never felt quite so helpless as he did right that moment. The dragon had been through a great deal in his home universe, on the Dragon Plane. Fighting to survive among wyverns, a month of daily mage duels and assassination attempts, making enemies of the dragon-gods themselves: he had gone through all that and more, and still survived.

Back then, however, he had been able to fight for himself. Here...Here, he could only fight for others.

"Keep moving, my necromancer," he said, both for Jaceb's sake and his own.

"K-keep following," Jaceb responded.

And they did.

With nearly twenty minutes between them and the hole and no sudden break-ins, Draconicon wondered if perhaps they might be safe. The creatures had many opportunities to follow them through the tunnel, but after those first few minutes, the only sound that had chased after them were the thump-slash echoes of whatever was running above them.

Maybe, maybe, they were safe.

"S-sir?" Jaceb whispered.

"Yes?"

"W-why are y-you in Hell?"

"Someone decided I didn't belong where I lived."

"W-what did y-y-you do?"

"Not enough to warrant this." He would have smiled if they were anywhere else. "That much I can promise you."

"Are...are y-you g-going to...tell me? One day?"

"When we're out of Hell...If we get out...Yes."

"...Okay."

Draconicon shook his head, hoping that they still would. Now that they had passed from one realm of Hell to another, he knew the approximate 'feel' of a border. There was one another half hour or so ahead, and when they got there, he would have to make a choice.

We aren't in the center of Hell anymore, he thought. That means that leaving this universe should be just about possible. The question is whether we can break through whatever the dragon-gods have put around us...

He couldn't imagine that they would just banish him and expect Hell itself to sort him out. They had felt threatened by his experiments, his inquisitions, his challenges. They had to know him well enough to have set a series of bars around Hell, making sure that escape would be difficult.

The closer he could get to the edge of Hell, the better his chances of breaking through. However, if he was having this much trouble with this ring of Hell...

How bad is Darkness, really? Is there anything there to worry about?

The answer was obviously yes. Jaceb probably knew, but...

Well, was there much point in talking about it before they got there? They still had to survive -

"FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE!"

The shrieking shout came as a hole was ripped through the bodies that formed the roof. The chill that followed immediately froze him in place, leaving him unable to do anything but stare at the thing that was crawling through.

It was a smaller monster, one that stood barely three feet high. Moving with the crackle and hiss and horrible grinding sound of ice on ice, its frigid limbs sprouted spikes and spines of frost to stick it to whatever it touched, only breaking off when it moved again.

As it turned its frosted, wispy head towards Jaceb, however, Draconicon was able to move again. His black fire leaped from his fingers, taking what he understood of the spike creation of the other creature, and turned it in on itself. The monster's eyes widened a split second before its body burst apart into a hundred pieces.

The gamble worked, and so had the adaptation. He doubted it would work every time, however.

"Can you fill the hole?" he asked. Despite the situation, his voice still sounded dead.

"Not quickly."

"Then keep moving."

It was an effort, but the dragon was able to pull some small bit of magic together. Black fire leaped from his fingers, forming a spiral of heat between the cracks in the bodies. Any teacher back home would have ripped him apart for something so weak, but considering the effort it took to summon it, he would be grateful that it had even come into being.

They walked and walked, pursued by the thumping of other monsters and demons above them. The tunnel was cracking all around them, and bit by bit, the cold of the outside ring of Hell was creeping in. He didn't know how long they had before the whole thing shattered, and he didn't want to make it worse by asking the mole.

Just keep walking, he thought. Just keep walking, and eventually...

Well, he hoped that they would reach the border. If the angel was still there, then perhaps they might have an ally. If he wasn't...

Well, he would figure it out when they got there.

Four holes and six demons later, they were at the edge of the tunnel. Jaceb must have been stretching it, rebuilding it as they went along, because it took them right up to the barrier between the Hell of Ice and the Hell of Darkness.

The angel turned to look at them, his golden armor shimmering despite the lack of light. Draconicon shook his head.

"Where were you?" he muttered.

"Ahead of you. I wasn't going to bother saving him."

As the angel gestured at the necromancer, Draconicon was already looking past him, staring at the border between the frozen wasteland that held them and the darkness that waited ahead.

It was like a wall of moving shadow, like darkness that had taken on solidity and lifted itself from the ground. Rolling and twisting like a sleeping snake, it reminded the dragon of nothing so much as a nightmare given flesh.

Considering what it is, probably a good description.

Draconicon stepped forward, hovering his hand a few inches away from the rolling, rippling darkness. He hesitated, then pushed his hand through to the other side.

Just as with the last boundary, there was no response. He felt nothing different, saw nothing different, thought nothing different. He sighed.

"Jaceb."

"I remember..."

As the mole grabbed him around the hips, Draconicon leaned forward, took a deep breath, then allowed his head to pass through the darkness.

Immediately, all thought, all memory, all understanding of the world around him disappeared. Not only was he blind, but all he had was...was anger. Almost like the burning rage that had left him with a migraine in the realm of fire, but worse, in its way.

He was aware that he was burning through thought, his brain on fire with rage and growling, bestial anger. He was aware that he was cutting off his ability to think, to reason, to plan, but it didn't matter. Everything else was secondary. Nobody else was right. Nobody else could help. He was angry, and he deserved to be angry.

Why was he here? Why did he need to go through? What were the hands on his waist?

It didn't matter. He just needed to -

One quick yank pulled him out of the darkness, and he fell back on the broken bones of old bodies beneath him. The sudden chill of the Hell of Ice brought him back to the moment, the emotions suppressed once more. He stared up at the ceiling of the tunnel, slowly shaking his head as he realized just how far gone he had been.

"...Thank you, Jaceb."

"Are y-you...okay?"

"Will be. Just...give me a minute."

Not that they were likely to have one, but Draconicon knew better than to rush. He barely had his head on straight, and he didn't dare push things quickly right at that point.

There's no way that we're going to be able to get through that, he thought, and he knew that it was true rather than an effect of the motivational-depression that was part and parcel to this particular Hell. If we go in there, we will forget everything. I can't afford to forget...I can't be angry without a reason...

Rage was the enemy. Rage was the fire that would consume him before it could consume his enemies. He had to keep that under control. Reason was its leash, and without reason, it would consume everything.

As the dragon sat himself up again, taking Jaceb's arm and getting back to his feet, the angel shook his head.

"I don't know how you plan to get out of here, but you better figure it out soon." He gestured with the spear again. "More are coming."

He'd already guessed that. The cracks above hadn't stopped, and he knew better than to think that the demons would hold back when they knew that there was prey in the tunnel. Draconicon shook his head, stepping back to the border.

If he threw him and Jaceb out of Hell from here, then it was a good bet that they would be able to make it through. They were approximately at the mid-point between the center of the plane and the edge of it, and if he was lucky, the safeguards wouldn't be too strong. They'd be expecting him to try from the center, not from here.

If I'm right, that is...

And that was not counting what was waiting for them on the other side. He didn't know where they would end up. All he knew was that it wouldn't be Hell, that it would be closer to the center of the universe rather than the outskirts. But that had to be better. It had to be.

Draconicon closed his eyes, looking inside with the magical eye that all mages were trained to use. Introspection was among their greatest tools, and he needed to see what he had to work with.

In terms of power, a great deal. He'd been concentrating his spell choices on a selection that had a low-impact on the pool of energy inside, and that had been bearing out well. He still had more than 90% of his power, and while it was still weak in this place of ice, he was pretty sure that he could use it to get them free.

Pretty sure.

Looking elsewhere, he could see that the hooks of Hell had been digging in. He groaned, forcing himself to reach inside, using tiny bits of his power to scorch away the imprint that Hell was trying to leave on him. There wasn't much he could do about that, but he did what he could, dragging the little tendrils of the realm out of him.

It was always the problem of the outer universes of existence. The longer you stayed there, the more that the realm sunk itself into you. The realm wanted stability, and in order to get it, the realm sunk pieces of itself into your body, pulling you to it, keeping you rooted.

It was how the universe kept itself stable, according to most scholars. The hooks couldn't be released until death, and even then, it was only so that the great void in the middle of existence could flush away the worst of the trash. Even here in Hell, he imagined, if you died the right way, you could be erased forever.

But if you wanted to leave...

Draconicon was midway through removing the hooks of Hell in his metaphysical existence when he heard something. Another crack, another crunch above. He turned his head, looking outside rather than in -

CRACK!

Whatever it was, their attacker was much bigger than an ice imp. It punched right through the bone ceiling above them, slammed down a fist with claws bigger than the dragon's arm -

"No..."

And stabbed right through the edge of Jaceb's treasured skull.

Even as the black dragon acted, swishing his finger and summoning a disk of flame thinned down to the slightest edge, the mole fell to his knees. The monster screamed, pulling its arm back, and Draconicon reached down, trying to pull Jaceb to his feet.

The mole didn't respond.

"Jaceb?"

The necromancer only shook his head, cradling the skull in his hands.

"Jaceb, we have to move. Come on."

"No...no, they...the s-skull..."

All he could do was watch as the mole lifted it up, holding the white, rune-etched thing as if it was the most precious thing in the world. He turned it, revealing the side that he had been cradling. More than two inches worth of runes had been punched through, the side of the bone left broken with the claw of that creature.

The mole shook like a leaf in a storm, battered on all sides. He shook his head, looking down at the skull again, running his fingers over the scratches.

"No, no, no, no...the names...not the names...can't...can't forget..."

"Jaceb -"

"Can't leave them here...not safe...not for them...Can't...can't...CAN'T!"

With the last can't filling the air like a shriek, the burned fingers returned. They grabbed the roof of the tunnel and pulled, hard, ripping it right off. Bones cracked and bodies were rent in twain, and the cold of the ice ring poured into the tunnel, leaving the dragon as dead to the world as a corpse.

No fewer than four giants and innumerable floating imps looked own at them. Creatures that were as invisible as the wind but with eyes of crystalline ice peered over their shoulders, and there were other things soaring up into the sky. The dragon's mind was already figuring out the why of their appearance.

We were breaking the rules...we weren't being affected...

And so, Hell had to punish them. The rules were broken. They needed to be -

"Y-YOU!"

Jaceb's scream was almost enough to break the stillness that had settled on him. The frigid air had settled down into his core, and he was barely able to shift his eyes, let alone his head.

The mole was on his feet, the skull shaking in his hand, the various etchings on the side of the bone starting to glow with a deep blue light. His fingers were thrust through the eye-holes of the skull, and...

And the shaking was slowing down.

"You...y-you think...you think y-you can take everyone...everyone away from...me? K-keep them...here? I...I w-won't..."

The mole's eyes burned, going as blue as the runes on the skull.

"I W-WON'T LET Y-YOU!"

The ground shook, and Draconicon was almost bowled over as the hundreds of thousands of bones beneath their feet suddenly shattered, becoming nothing more than pin-pricks and dust. The bones flooded out from under them like a powder, flying into the air.

The giants suffered first, the bone dust flung into their eyes, shredding their vision in the first blink. Jaceb's shrieks only grew louder as he threw his hands this way and that, the bone splinters flying into the air, shaving themselves down further and further until the dragon couldn't even see them.

Oh, but the demons could feel them. The flying ice imps screamed with the shriek of the winter wind as their wings were broken, pierced, pulled back and sewn together with the raw power of the necromancer gone mad. The bones threaded themselves like infernal sewing needles through the wings, leaving the imps to fall and shatter as they hit the ground.

Draconicon sat up slowly, looking at the angel at his side. The armored warrior slowly shook his head, whispering something under his breath, something too quiet to hear.

The wind rushed down, and the demons within grabbed Jaceb by the shoulders, lifting him off the ground. The needles and pins of bone swished about, stabbing through their insubstantial bodies, until the grip of the wind solidified.

Jaceb split in two, ripped right down the middle, and the skull fell. Before it could hit the ground, though, the mole's shadow ripped out of the dead body, falling down and catching it.

Rather than a simple piece of darkness, Jaceb's shadow held the skull with a rage that Draconicon had never seen before. He held the skull over his head like a student holding an orb of power aloft, and for a moment, the dragon wondered if he was going to summon some great undead.

Instead...

The mole's body stretched, breaking, snapping, the dead pieces of it breaking apart further and further. From within the flesh and bone came the blood, and particles of it rose through the air. Red turned to black, and black turned to a pulsing, horrible gas that carried the stench of death with it. The wind carried it, but only for a moment before it started to falter, the storm of ice around the broken tunnel coming to a stop.

One by one, wind demons fell dead, poisoned by the miasma of the mole's own blood that had been summoned. Jaceb's shadow continued to glow with a line of blue light around the edges, and the skull seemed to be burning brighter and brighter.

As the mole summoned more power, ripping his own body apart until there was nothing but the skeleton left and the giants were strangling on nooses created from the mole's own flesh, Draconicon saw something else. Surrounding the mole, gathering around the skull, almost bursting from his own soul, there were other silhouettes, other people.

Other, very small people.

They rested their hands on the mole, almost like they were trying to pull him back, but Jaceb was still screaming, somehow reaching a pitch that was impossible for a living throat to hit. Draconicon grimaced, fighting to pull himself upright.

Two giants fell, dead from asphyxiation before he could. He stumbled forward, resting one hand on Jaceb's shadow shoulder as the third one fell. The glowing shade turned to him, seeming to pant.

"Stop."

The dragon's words barely seemed to penetrate the mole's understanding. He gestured wordlessly at the world around them, at the dead monsters and then at the skull.

"They're...they're g-gone...g-gone..."

He didn't have time to ask who the mole meant, nor did he have the confidence to think this through clearly. What he knew was that the more power that Jaceb expended, the more that Hell would notice them. While they'd done this, he didn't want to think about fighting more. And the fact that the mole's body was nearly completely gone left him concerned about putting his necromancer back together.

He squeezed the mole's shoulder again, shaking his head.

"They're gone. You're almost gone. What happens if you go? What happens to the rest of them?"

It seemed to be the magic question. The mole looked down at the skull, then at the ghosts around him. Finally, it clicked.

The darkness in the air faded away, and a rain of bone dust and shards fell around them. Jaceb's shadow slumped, handing the skull to the dragon before it could completely flop onto the ground.

As the shadow started pulling its skeleton over, keeping its bones separate from the rest of the bodies around, the angel stepped forward.

"You have to let me kill him," the angel said. "You can't let him stay alive after that."

"Try me."

"Did you see what he did? You're mad if you think you can let anyone that can do that live. Or worse, leave."

"I gave him my word," Draconicon muttered.

He looked down at the skull. The damage was still there, but the light had faded from the runes. The damage hadn't spread, either, something that he was more than a little concerned about when he had seen just how much power the necromancer was pumping through the skull. Whatever power the mole had been channeling, it hadn't damaged his little treasure.

But those smaller ghosts...

Children?

He wasn't sure what had happened with Jaceb, or what had gotten him sent down here, but if it involved kids, he needed an answer sooner than later.

Soon, the shadow had finished sealing its bones into a bag made of giant flesh. The shadow nudged it at the dragon's legs, then jumped into the inside, seemingly working on putting itself back together. Shaking his head, Draconicon pulled the bag off the ground, threw it over his shoulder, and looked back towards the angel.

The otherworldly warrior shook his head.

"This is wrong."

"And leaving him here is right?"

"Did you see what he did?"

"I thought angels were supposed to be okay with killing demons."

"Not like...that."

"Dead is dead. And I promised to look after him."

"...You are lucky that we are not in another realm of Hell right now."

Draconicon already guessed that. The angel had been very clear in his hatred of necromancers before, and he knew that Jaceb would be a dead mole - well, a dead-er mole - if they weren't in a place where reason was king. If emotion was running through the angel at anything approaching normalcy, then that hate would probably bubble over and force a fight.

And while the dragon had stopped it before, he wasn't entirely sure what he could do here, even with the loophole that he and Jaceb had discovered.

He looked past the angel, taking a few deep breaths as the cold of the world started sapping away the heat of that battle and everything else that had come with it.

Options. Forward? Not really. There's no getting through the darkness without some way to counter the power that it has. No time to discover the loophole, either, not after a fight that loud.

He looked down at Jaceb. The mole was more powerful than he had expected, but that didn't mean anything when the universe they were in could keep calling out more and more demons. Even the greatest power could be exhausted after long enough, and they didn't have the numbers to try and pull a war of attrition.

The angel probably had some sort of countermeasure, considering that his armor had resisted the emotional burn of the ring of Fire, and he seemed more himself than either the mole or the dragon did here in the ring of Ice. However, there was no point in taking the armor, particularly when it was unlikely to fit and he didn't actually know how it worked. The same for the power of Adaptation. Without knowing how something worked, he couldn't use the fire to make a version of it for himself.

Going back wasn't an option, either. They had crossed the entirety of the ring of Ice in Jaceb's protective tunnel, and in the process, they'd woken up every demon along the way. There was no protection going back the way they came, and the necromancer was going to be too busy putting himself back together to make another tunnel.

Which left one option.

"Are you coming with me?" he asked the angel.

"Do I have a choice?"

"Even those I claim get a choice..."

He tugged the bag a bit higher over his shoulder, shaking his head at the lack of weight. Even though it was a full skeleton back there, it was so much lighter than he expected. He tried not to think about that, or about the movement he could feel inside.

"It's time to leave."

"Do you really think you can break free?"

"Let's just say that there's a reason that I was banished here."

"..."

"And not one related to sins."

"I have yet to judge that...but fine. If you can take us out of here, do it."

Nodding, Draconicon closed his eyes. He reached for the magic within, and he pulled.

The black fire spread out under his feet, writing itself in the ice with the delicateness of a scribe's quill. The ice didn't melt beneath the flames, but he didn't want it to. This was a spell to be written.

Bit by bit, he expanded the fire out under his feet, creating an array of circles that were of varying distances from one another, adjusting each when he realized that there was a millimeter of space that he didn't need between several of them. He let the fire run out in lines after that, connecting them in straight lines that then curled, tightening, pulling the different rings of fire together like springs that had been wound far too tightly.

As the angel pulled closer to him, the dragon continued to weave his magic, writing out the spell of trans-universal-shifting. Their launching pad was almost constructed, and as it filled out, he extended his power towards the outer world.

This was the first time that he had extended his power to such an extent, and he could feel the energy of the world around him trying to pull him back, trying to sink its metaphysical fingers into his power and rip the spell apart. He reinforced it with adapted runes from the ring of Fire, hoping that it would be enough to keep the launch tunnel of a spell from collapsing under the external assault.

He built it up further and further until he felt the emptiness of the space between universes, and he shivered at the sensation. Up til that moment, he had been building the spell for Jaceb more than himself, but there...

There, in the emptiness, in the space between one universe and another, he could feel himself again. No influence from Hell, no influence from others. It was just him.

It was such a relief that he almost wanted to cry, and such a terror that he almost pulled away from it.

Forcing himself further, he found the barrier that the dragons that had banished him had set up. It was a powerful one, but it was straight and firm rather than a curved one. Enough to stand up to something that was launched at it from afar, but from this distance...

And with three people...

"Hold on," the dragon muttered.

"To what?"

"Anything."

Hoping that he was right, Draconicon released the spell.

The black fire roared around them, throwing them forward. They passed through darkness, then through chaos, barely feeling the effects of either as they moved faster than sound, faster than light. The angel's hand squeezed tight on his tail, but Draconicon barely noticed, forcing himself to keep his eyes opened as they moved faster than any living being had a right to, breaking through all the layers of Hell in the space of the shortest moment.

Then they were free of the realm, floating in the nothingness, carried forward with their own momentum. The glowing barrier that the dragon had sensed was just ahead, spread out in a square around the realm of Hell itself. They were flying at it with a speed that prevented any turning, any slowing down.

And then, they hit.

Draconicon screamed as he hit the barrier, the power of his enemies trying to force him back, trying to slow him down. A hundred hands, a thousand hooked blades, a million screaming voices shouted at him to turn back, shredding his metaphysical self in an attempt to break him down and make him turn around, to kill his momentum, to shove him back the way that he'd come.

But he didn't.

You will not...keep...me...here!

The spell shook around him, his sheer momentum pushing him forward against the barrier, grinding him through it, until -

Silence.

The voices screaming at him were gone. The pain of the blades shredding him disappeared. The hands no longer gripped him.

They were slower, yes, but they were still flying, still soaring through the empty space, heading to a different universe.

They were free.

The End