Ch 1

~~~

The pair stood before the ruins of Unkah.

The walls had long been torn down, and the foundations worn down by aeons of sand and wind. The tombs were now hollow, treasures long stripped, as no guardians remained to protect their offerings. The Sphinxes, charged with duty by old gods, had fled with their charges, when the valley of queens was stripped of their aforementioned, and the people followed the rains. Nor the golems formed from earth and desert clay and imbued with the breath of life by the desert rabbi, which had fallen still and mute, their joints locked with the ever-biting sand until their bodies were worn to dust and carried away by the ever-tearing wind.

It would have been a testament to a great city reclaimed by nature after millennia of uninhabitance, if not for the stench of blood and cloud of flies. They had followed the assassins’ trail here across the sea of sand, and the new lanterns still sitting on vintage plinths like tiny lighthouses confirmed they had made the right guess. The cobalt-blue flames contained therein, bright like the lava of Karuulm and visible even in daylight, confirmed the identity of their quarry. The darts, venom-coated from the fang of a great zul-serpent of the poison waste, littered the ground like playground mulch.

Already dark from the grave, Ophius’s skin was growing even darker after a week in the harsh sun. It was taking a faint purplish cast, like the vintage of deep red wine – evidently some relic of blood blighted by the rite of anastasis that had summoned their spirit back into materium.

“I didn’t have a very long rest.”

Theophania stopped scanning the ruins and looked down at her companion. “Fifteen years. Longer than mortals get.”

Once upon a time, Ophius towered over the girl, and could have picked her up and carried her like a sack over their back. If Ophius was bothered by the fact that she seemed to have sprung up in the blink of an eye, it didn’t show. “When you’ve lived as long as long I have, you’ll wish you had more than fifteen years to sleep. Where did you even get this body?” If Ophius resented the new form they were inhabiting, it showed a little.

“My great-grandfather’s court shaman. Bellerophon the Majestic, holder of the Sacred Mirror of Devirt’Noc, Heir to the Holy Rings of, uh, I don’t remember. I was with you when you had to harvest new flesh after your old burnt out. You were always saying only strong bones could carry your power, not just any meat vessel would do. Thought I’d keep it in the family when I needed you again.” Thia shrugged.

“And why me?”

“Don’t you ever get tired of asking that?”

“Don’t repeat my own words back to me.” Ophius glared.

Thia grinned, impishly. “I took your words to heart. Went home after you died. Reclaimed the throne, like you said I should. Sealed the Dragon-God away, like the fortune-tellers said I must. And no, I wouldn’t really have trusted anyone else to do it, just like you said.”

“And why me? Didn’t trust anyone else? Your cultmates who helped raise me? Your underlings who are back home running the kingdom now?”

Thia exhaled shortly. “Trust? Maybe only when I’m watching them, and in view of the palace. Rely on? A little. He wasn’t working alone. Someone let him to steal what he was looking for, without raising alarm before someone noticed it was missing, and I didn’t have time to try to figure out who. I could trust a stranger, or someone I know for sure wasn’t involved.”

“Because I was dead.”

“Because you were dead.”

~~~

Latter Days of the House of Theophania

Prologue

It was a common misconception that the spookiest part of Kingstown was deep in the old catacombs. Surrounded by bones of long dead lords and saints, far from the light of the sun and the open sky, dripping with the blood and dread power of forgotten sorcerers and the arcane artifacts with which they were interred, the dark and closing walls of bone beneath the earth could give a layperson the idea that some grotesque animatronic of bone and dead flesh wielding a rusty iron battle axe could turn around any corner and rip their head off.

They were mistaken.

It was up, at the edge of the woods: a copse beside the Royal Healer-Herbalists’ magic garden, at the bend of the river Mardu. Under the burning light of the sun and the silver light of the full moon. Where the hawk moths fluttered so thick in the air it seemed like you were drowning in a sea of eyes, and the phosphorescence of the blood beetles that carpeted the broad-leaf elephant ears so thick on the ground that it looked like a parade of Fae at the midsummer lantern festival. It was not the loose undead raised by errant necromantic power that threatened, but the wild and untamed Bigfoot, Manticore, and dread beasts of the woods that had lingered since the dawn of time that threatened to step out from behind a tree at any moment. It was the scarecrows and totems, the curse-markers planted every few hundred feet, the silently spoke that it was not just rumors, scary stories for children, imagined unlikely horrors; but real threats, so real that the Shamanic wing of the Palace Guard had sought talismans and fetishes to ward off their predation.

It was here, in the autumn twilight, that the small procession stood. Many masked and hooded figures stood in a circle around a damaged tombstone. The tombstone bore a badly weathered epitath, and all that could be read now was “Carry on my w…”. One figure carried an intricately carved stick, festooned in runes and pentacles, channels of energy, and planted it onto what might have once been a burial cairn. Despite the hard-packed earth and stone, the wood sank in easily without resistance. One carried an ancient, basilisk-jaw-visor helmet, which gleamed beyond what the sinking sun should allow, and placed it atop the post. One carried a deck of prophecy-cards, a set far more ornate than the sort you would expect from a common itinerant fortune-teller separating superstitious villagers from their coin. A gold-inlaid card was drawn, 0 The Fool, and it was wedged behind the plume-holder of the helmet.

Offerings were placed before the helmet: a cooked anglerfish and Karamjan deep-sea octopus, fetched directly from the distant sea and conveyed by fast horses in an ice-chilled chest; two glass flasks, one of a hearty yellow potion, brewed from ingredients taken from the Healer-Herbalists’ garden, and the other a blighted purple ichor, stopped and sealed with lead, drawn from dark pools in the northern wilderness; a twisted bracelet of hemp and brightly-dyed linen, worn and crudely woven as if by an anxious teenager.

The leader of the group, having been muttering continuously while her compatriots prepared the ritual, pushed her hood back. The gold and gems of her crown glimmered in twilight. Queen Theophania, first of her name, chanted to a final crescendo and pointed a ring-studded finger. The stone of the cairn buckled upward in a shower of dust. A hand, then another hand, rose from the dirt, and with a loud crack the very earth split open where the helmet had been placed. The prepared wooden totem had morphed, somehow both slowly and suddenly, and beneath the notice of mortal perception, into a living head, perched atop bony shoulders and emaciated chest of a dark figure that pushed its way out of its tomb.

The naked, androgynous, creature stepped out of the pit, dripping with dirt and worms and all sorts of unwholesome things. It stretched and twisted, as if working actual rust off of abandoned iron machinery, and then spread its arms. One of the cultists stepped forward with a crimson velvet cloak to drape upon it.

The raised being worked its jaws, and rasped out in a grating, wheezing whisper, “….ssss Thiiiaaa…”

Theophania stepped forward and embraced her old companion. “Welcome back Ophius. We have work to do.”