Adamant Blood 449

“So why get rid of him?” Mark asked.

Walaria said, “This is a large thing happening now, and while your initial decision to include him was acceptable on the surface, he is too young to be allowed to view these mysteries.”

Mark had no real loyalty to the guy, but… Yeah sure. Whatever.

The vast gathering room was empty, save for the lingering ghouls and ghosts the necromancers had left in their wake, and for Mark, Walaria, Sunder, Stitches, and Addavein.

Walaria’s vector touched every single lingering set of lingering ghostly eyes and most of them scramd, though so of the more obvious ones stayed behind. One ghost woman held halfway in one of the walls, watching. That thin, white, soft-cloth wearing bat-winged guy with the golden manacles who was guarding the door also remained. Walaria ignored those and a few other eyes hiding in the stones and the shadows.

Walaria told Mark, “With Buckler and Lancer dead, we have been searching out Contracts for a new battle archmage. Thrashtalon ca to us with an offer—”

“Holy fuck,” Mark said, suddenly worried, angry, and exasperated.

He wished he could have followed Tombsigh out the door.

Walaria continued, “If you can make a Transcendent Body, Mind, and Soul, Thrashtalon will grant the person a Simple Contract requiring the new archmage to kill the gestalt entity of Godking Dominant. There’s a bit more beyond that, with technical terms and assurances that Aluatha needs to ensure the archmage cannot turn against us, to allow us to pull so of the plug if the archmage goes wrong like what happened to Buckler and Lancer, but it’s a good Contract. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”

Addavein quietly and surprisingly asked, “Truly?”

“Truly,” Walaria said. And then she looked at Mark. “And we’re not taking it.”

“Oh thank the gods,” Mark said.

Addavein was conflicted, while Sunder and Stitches were trying to be flies on the wall.

Walaria continued, “I’m sure there’s a trick, but it would have been a trick down the line, beyond the destruction of Okuana and the Godking. That’s a trick we’re not willing to risk. But certain things beca apparent in the conversation between Thrashtalon and our lawyers that hint at a deep possibility that the Transcendent Skills you picked up from Bittercap Mausoleum could truly create a soulhouse… of a sort. We’re not sure. Thrashtalon is furious that we’re not accepting his Contract and his help, which might be a ruse and his whole purpose in coming to us with this information, but thatis a risk we’re willing to take.”

Mark asked, “What’s the worst thing that Thrashtalon could do, if I completely succeed, and Aluatha took this offer? If I manage to make a soulhouse in whoever you want to make Transcendent and that guy becos an archmage with a… a ‘Simple Contract’? Transcendent makes sothing very, very hard to kill, first of all.” There was the other, big question of WHO Mark was going to Skill, but that seed secondary right now— Mark added, “And who is the demon? It’s not Leash, right? Because Leash is currently inside Grax, wherever the hell he is— Probably in D’Australia?”

Walaria said, “The demon is one of Leash’s offshoots. Calls himself Rivet. The worst possible outco is unknown to us, so we’re not stepping down that path. You need to know this, though, because it does directly concern you. Other people, like Tombsigh, did not.”

Mark took a breath, then asked, “Who is the person you want to Transcend? If I even can?”

“I am rather certain you’ll be able to do it with a bit of practice. You’ve already crossed the hardest parts of Skilling. As for the person, they’re a young soldier of Aluatha on his deathbead. 32 years old. Na of Cade Waterson. You wouldn’t know him. He’s from a noble family and he wants to serve Aluatha, but he’s dying from Breaking the Binding to try and save his fellow soldiers when they went to deal with the Goblinho infestation that remained from our anti-goblin ritual. He hadWater Shaper and Water Manipulation and he was almost a Grand Mage. Now he has nothing, 2 dead brothers, and about 24 hours left to live. Probably a lot less.” Walaria finished with, “If you can Transcendent him, he’ll be defending our waters from dryad encroachnt and whatever else we throw him at.”

The guy was going to die anyway, huh?

Mark solidly said, “Give an hour and I’ll be ready to try.”

Walaria nodded, then stepped away without another word, opening a door mid-air and vanishing as the door closed behind her.

Addavein instantly started with, “I need to see the Bindings for Transcendent.”

Mark dove into himself and pulled out the files for Transcendent Body, Transcendent Mind, and Transcendent Soul. They were full of a whole bunch of Sigaldry that Mark didn’t understand, but Quark was able to copy it anyway… sort of. It took a while. Maybe minutes. The Bindings were on paper, on a scroll; that’s how they were stored. Mark didn’t want to change that right now, or maybe ever. So the images were 2-D, and quite distorted from reality.

Quark got what he could.

Mark ca back to reality and Quark used the projector they had used for the symposium to cast the images for the three Transcendent Powers into the air, stitching many images together into sothing that might have been a real depiction of the actual Powers. Mark made sure they all knew that; the scrolls for the Binding were not the Binding itself.

Addavein, Sunder, and Stitches started talking all at once and Mark got them into a Union of Understanding, and soon they were all working together, all from very different beginnings but all toward the sa goal of figuring out how to best put these things into a person with a currently-broken-and-killing-them Binding.

Stitches said, “I think we can all agree that you’ll want to start with Transcendent Body?”

Sunder instantly said, “No no no! Transcendent Soul. Fix the unstable mana. That’s what kills in a Broken Binding. All of his Skills are going out of control right now.”

Addavein said, “Fix the Mind, first, and that will allow him to control his mana better. Everything else flows from the mind, from the mories of the Dream, but honestly any choice is a good choice. If he is currently-dying then Body might be best. It is likely his highest remaining Power Level, due to his previous Powers of Shaper and Arch abutting Body, and shifting that PL into a real Body Power seems like the biggest kaiju to kill.”

Mark said, “Body, then Mind, then Soul. Can soone summon an undead to test this on? I’m going to try and give it… Healthy Body, I guess? I have a few of those— I have one of those. Uhh… Hmm.”

Sunder began to speak—

“You have Animate Undead and Animate Ghost,” Addavein said, “Animate Ghost is the safest one, so switch out for Ghost and then figure out how it works to make a life. Should take a few minutes and you need to learn. The Power will do most of the lifting.”

Sunder did not say a word. Stitcher kept quiet. Both of them were interested in seeing what it ant for Mark to ‘switch Powers’. Sunder, in particular, was probably watching through dreamsight… Oh. They all had fragnts of a divine mirror, didn’t they. They could see into the dream, into souls.

Mark went into himself and grabbed Animate Ghost, switching on the Ability by shuttering his house—

He opened his eyes to a different slice of reality that he had never seen before. As his skin hardened into that of an adamantium elental, and then softened as Death Mana in the air flowed into him, Mark gazed upon ghosts in the miasma that had been left by so many necromancers in the sa place, at the sa ti.

That one ghost that hung in the wall, looking out, was still there, and a lot brighter. She was a beacon of undeath, actually, and she illuminated hundreds of nascent ghosts in the purple dark/light that curled in the corners, that rested in the shadows, that seeped out from doorways, and that surrounded Stitcher, Sunder especially, and even Addavein.

Sunder breathed out Death Mana that curled on his words as he said, “Remarkable. It really is a complete and total Binding shift— Well. No.”

“There’s a hidden Binding below the current one,” Addavein said like he had seen this before, because he had.

“I can barely see it,” Stitcher said, squinting his mismatched eyes. Those eyes glinted with a mirror shard’s inner reflection. “But I can see it. Yes. Hmm. And Quark is still active? Ah! I see him now.”

Quark seeped out of Mark’s shoulder like rcury pooling out of darkness, saying, “I am still here, sirs.”

Mark turned his gaze to the shapes in the miasma all around… and he just went for it. He knew, basically, how this worked, due to the talks of the night, so he reached out with a sense he didn’t know he had, which was not like Kinesis at all but instead like… like shining a light into the darkness.

Death Mana flowed into Mark, through the environs, and he funneled that Death into a light that picked out a ghost floating right there. It was the ghost of a person. A psychic impression on the world caused by Death mana curling into the dream and giving it back to reality, but only a little. Mark drew the ghost fully back to reality as he pumped Death into that ghost, solidifying it and evaporating all others nearby. The ghost grew fangs and eyes full of hate for Mark—

“It needs a mory of stillness,” Sunder said, quietly.

Mark considered the stillness of solid adamantium, just standing there, doing nothing.

The ethereal purple ghost turned a little darker, a little brighter around the edges, and then it floated there, feet on the ground, arms to the sides. The harsher parts faded. It was a male ghost, and its forr dangerous parts turned into old wounds taken in the stomach and chest and on the head. Those wounds were little more than wisps of Death. They didn’t show up on the ghost himself.

The ghost locked eyes with Mark, and then it stayed there, still. Motionless.

The Death miasma in the air was slightly less, but not much less. There had been a lot of necromancers and Necromancers here just 20 minutes ago, and they had stuck around for hours.

Mark made two more ghosts, to stand near the first one in a line.

The other ghosts were female, and they had taken wounds in life upon their chest and legs, so in death those pieces of them were little more than ethereal wisps. The three ghosts each locked eyes with Mark once, and then they did nothing. The third one looked around a bit more, and that was it.

Stitcher was impressed. “Not attacking, huh? Usually they attack.”

Sunder said, “A real knack for Powers.”

Addavein rely grinned a little; proud by association.

Mark closed his eyes and put Animate Ghost away. As his house brightened, coming back ‘online’, Mark went back to reality. The ghostly purple miasma in the air was gone, hidden from sight, but the ghosts he had made remained. They looked darker to his normal sight. Almost hidden, actually. That had to be Adamantium mana spillover. Or maybe they were darker because Mark couldn’t ‘death sight’ see them anymore?

He didn’t need the death sight to see them, though.

With Unionsense, Mark would never mistake these almost-shadows for anything less than a real thing. All three of them, but mostly the third one, had vectors to them. All three of them were focused on Mark, but the third one was also looking at everything else… Hmm.

Mark said, “I know Tombsigh said that ghosts weren’t real people, and that they have souls and Bindings and they’re monsters, but these ones look rather… Alive? And they’re not attacking ; that’s the real rub. I figured out the ‘stillness’ thing, but… Shouldn’t they be attacking?”

“They don’t have Bindings yet,” Sunder corrected.

“Oh?” Mark asked.

“They’ll attack when you manipulate the spaces where their Bindings should be,” Addavein said. “They can’t grow a Binding without having a mana baptism, and they don’t have one of those yet. The second you touch them they should grow a Binding, though. Probably just a Knack.”

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“But they are monsters,” Stitcher said, almost hopeful. “So they couldgrow a real Binding. Maybe sothing adamantiumflavored? aning adamantium blooded?”

Mark had a whole wash of emotions.

Sunder shook his head, not believing that was possible.

Addavein shook his head, too, saying, “Adamantium and Death are their starter manas, so they’ll end up as mostly Death mana, no matter what happens. Unless you fully replace everything, from the dream to the reality the mana will always beco Death… Unless you start with a truly Blank Slate. There is no Blank Slate here.” He told Mark, “Just go for it. Put sothing into one of them and take it out without killing them.”

Mark hadn’t heard the term Blank Slate in a long ti. Not since Addashield had used it on Mark before he ‘planted the seed’ that turned Mark adamantium blooded—

“Mark?” Addavein asked.

“Just do it,” Mark said, rapidly agreeing with the sentint.

Sunder and Stitcher eyed Mark, but they said nothing, for Mark was already working.

Mark Unioned with the first ghost, the male one—

The ghost’s mouth suddenly opened wide and a scream echoed as he raised his arms and legs, becoming a host of ghostly knives and teeth. A monster. And then he gnawed on Mark, and wasn’t able to break his clothes. Quark estimated the ghost’s Power Level at 8 or 10. Mark’s standard clothes were PL 50, these days, and his flesh was 99, and also adamantium.

For Mark’s first attempt at ‘proper Skilling’, he half-lidded his eyes, falling half into the dream.

Standing in his Skiller room with Union arms and hands all around him, and standing in reality and being gnawed on, Mark plucked out his remaining Healthy Body blueprint and he opened his house to the ghost.

The ghost suddenly appeared in both his dreamsight, and in his real sight. If the ghost understood what was happening to it at all, then it gave no indication as such.

Mark Unioned with the monster, breathing in Fragnts and breathing out Healthy Body in return, or at least that had been the plan. The Binding only half-moved. Whatever was inside the ghost jolted out of position.

The monster’s teeth fell apart into dark miasma, the claws and eyes fell away into unstructured Death, and Mark hadn’t even gotten to the point where he had used the Healthy Body blueprint at all.

Mark centered himself, coming back to the mont, and saying, “Too slow.”

Addavein nodded, silently agreeing.

Mark touched the second ghost with Union and she went berserk as well, becoming knives and blades that bounced off of Mark’s skin as Mark’s Union bored into her with the speed of a heartbeat.

Suddenly, the dark ghost’s chest throbbed with black veins moving in and out, connecting to Mark’s astral body, and while the ghost startled and stopped attacking, trying to run, Mark ripped out the Fragnts of its Binding and gave it Healthy Body in turn.

For a mont, perhaps a full 10 seconds, the ghost turned back into an ethereal person, but the person was hollow inside and already dead. She collapsed onto the ground and broke into at that rapidly beca dark, ghostly flesh, that then vanished into the miasma altogether.

Mark and the guys watched it happen.

And then Mark went into his soulhouse to check what kinda fragnts he had gotten from the ghost.

The ghost’s blueprint was a tattered ss of broken paper, and when Mark asked the System for help in identifying the new ‘ability’ the System returned a simple ssage of ‘No new abilities discovered’.

Mark pulled back into reality and said, “So a Union of Fragnts and the chosen Binding was the correct way to go, like I thought it was, and I ended up with nothing but fragnts for a blueprint, as expected, but what happened with the ghostly gore?”

Stitcher offered, “A mana type conflict?”

Sunder shook his head. “More basic than that. Healthy Body won’t go into a ghost at all, for there is no sort of ‘body’ to make healthy.”

Stitcher humd, not sure about that answer.

Addavein said, “Try putting Animate Ghost into the third ghost.”

Mark instantly asked, “Won’t that cause a self-replication issue?”

All three experienced mages were unconcerned with that.

Addavein explained, “Maybe if the entire world were made of Death mana, which is what ghosts use to live and exist, then that would be an issue, but the world is not made of Death mana, so it is not an issue, and you probably got Animate Ghost from ghosts to begin with, because that’s how so of them are.”

“Ohh… But if they get a real Binding they’ll make Death mana, right?” Mark asked.

“Not enough to matter,” Addavein said.

… Mark realized a problem.

Mark had no more Animate Ghosts except for the one he was using. Mark said, “I have Animate Undead? Lotsof those. I only have the one Animate Ghost.”

All three mages had an ‘ahh’ mont.

Mark offered, “I have ‘Dancing Dead’? That seems harmless enough?”

Addavein shrugged, and the others had no real opinions.

Mark began Unioning with the third ghost, which turned into a real puncher. Her punches and kicks did nothing to Mark, as Mark pulled out her Fragnts and placed within her the Power Dancing Dead—

The ghostly woman pulled back, like she had been slapped, or punched herself, and she began walking around on the ground like a drunken person, stumbling into a chair, and then holding onto the chair for a mont, before she stood upright and then fell on the ground—

She fell into a roll, and then she sprang up onto her feet and spun in the air, twirling, her ethereal wounds becoming gossar trails, becoming a tight dress as she landed on her toes, ‘en pointe’, Mark thought it was called. She did a twirl, spinning with one leg up, and then snapping her leg down to spin again.

And then she was dancing with an invisible partner, moving around like there was soone else holding her waist, or her hands, and gradually the miasma in the air spun into that person she had been dancing with. The new ghost was male and wearing tight pants and a frilly shirt.

The dancing pair split, and then the female dancer was dancing with another invisible partner and the male ghost was off to the side, picking up chairs and moving them further to the sides, making room.

Mark stepped away from the male ghost, off of the new ‘dance floor’, and Addavein, Sunder, and Stitcher stepped to the sides as well, out of the way. The four of them looked on; Addavein proud, Sunder srized, and Stitcher grinning.

Mark was very quiet, whispering, “There was a horde of dancing ghosts in one of the ballrooms of the mausoleum. They looked very peaceful until they were disturbed.”

Addavein said, “They’ll dance while there’s free Death mana in the air, but when it gets used they’ll start going on rampages to kill anything nearby, unless the room they’re in is a full ballroom, and then they’ll just dance and dance and never stop, spilling out Death mana into the world beyond their little party.” He added, “So dragons used to keep Dancing Dead ghosts inside little houses to watch them dance whenever they wanted, using them like music boxes for little princesses.”

… Oh. Mark could hear it now. The music. It was barely there and ethereal, but it was there. Soft and pleasant.

The music of the dead played on, and the ghosts danced.

The ghost in the wall watched the dancers, too, her head swaying back and forth a little to the invisible music.

Stitcher said, “My grandmother used to tend to Dancing Dead rooms all the ti.”

Sunder said, “They really are quite nice to watch.”

Addavein said, “That’s part of the magic, of course. It’s a srize effect. Very easy to get lost in, if you want to get lost in it. That’s why the dragons loved it. They’re also a great source of Death mana, if you let them live and farm them properly.” He stared at the woman dancer, who was now flowing around with another woman dancer, his tail swaying a little bit as he took a breath, his vector going inward. And then he huffed and said, “So that works.”

Stitcher asked, “Do you mind if I keep this one, Mister Careed?”

“Go for it?” Mark said, not sure what he was agreeing to.

Sunder went, “Ahhh… Too fast. I was just about to ask.”

“The slow Necromancer gets the dregs!” Stitcher said, and then he did sothing truly strange, lifting a hand and then ripping out a piece of reality where the dancing ghost was. That shard of reality condensed into his hands, into a shimring soul crystal, all bright and full of purple, black, and fiery darklight. He put the trinket in his pocket and said, “You have lots of Animate Undead, yes? Let’s go to a corpse pit and see about lessons in fleshwork?”

Addavein said, “A good idea.”

Mark… agreed with it, sure. Why not!

10 minutes later, Mark overlooked a slaughterhouse dump for the industrial kitchens that were supplying the food for the big Ball tomorrow, and Mark was thrilled. These were not human remains! He had been expecting sothing very different.

“Not human! Woo!” Mark said, half-triumphantly.

“Oh darklight no,” Sunder said, but not for the reason Mark was feeling.

Stitcher added, “We’d have to travel for 2 hours for that, and the Second Princess was very clear about an hour deadline. I think we have at least 15 more minutes, yes?”

“10,” Addavein said, “So let’s get to it, Mark!”

Mark got through four pig carcasses, making them into little more than undead-creating undead, before Walaria stepped out of a door to the side, and into the stench of the room. The scene did not bother her, but she did have to stop for a mont, to look at the pigs.

One of the skeletal pigs was little more than part of a skull, so hanging offal, a spine that might have been a horse’s, and random bones from sothing else. Probably many other things, actually. The spell Animate Undead did all of the heavy lifting, but that lifting was quite heavy when the carcass was not complete, and nothing here was complete. The big ‘pig’ was ‘eating’ so ‘at’ that sloughed right through where its throat should have been, to fall out where its chest should have been, to land into the pile on the ground, where that ‘at’ beca so slithering intestines and so rolling eyeballs. It was animating the dead that it ate.

Still looking at the show, Walaria asked Mark, “Do you believe you can pull out remnant Bindings and install a new one? Have you cycled a few tis?”

Mark said, “I pulled out Animate Dead from the big pig and it stayed… ‘alive’, long enough for to put in Drain Existence, too. It was falling apart without Drain Existence, but that helped it bridge the gap between remaining ‘intact’ or decaying like all of the other ones. So… Yeah. And then I put Animate Dead into it. They’re holding, I guess? That’s a Two-Talent undead monstrosity, so I think I got this. As long as the guy is at least kinda healthy— And there’s no mana-type conflict?”

Walaria said, “The man has about 3 hours left to live, so he will either die in the transformation, or not. There is no more waiting.”