Chapter 15: Chapter 14 – A Thoughtless Provocation

"Woe betide those who infuriate the great master. While most had forgotten by now, three centuries ago there had been four necromancer powers in this area, with Cainte to the south. At least, until one day the Undead Monarch who ruled over Cainte had mistaken the master's kindness for senility and weakness, sent his hordes in, where they killed and raised many of master's subjects to swell their ranks of living corpses.

 

Master's fury was awful to behold, and his vengeance swift and decisive. By the turn of the year, the undead kingdom of Cainte was no more, its slaves and common people liberated and welcomed as the master's own, while its leaders and necromancers subjected to torment worse than death, sequestered away in deep dungeons where they can neither live nor die, in suffering and torment until the day their lifespan ended and death mercifully came to relieve them." - Drietven Edrunviel, head butler of the Palace of Bones.

Tohrmutgent suburbs, Ptolodecca, second day of the first week of the seventh month, year 37 VA.

 

It happened while they were out and enjoying themselves, for once.

 

Nec Aarin had assumed his mortal guise once again, and led Aoife, Aideen, and Diarmuid on a little jaunt outside the palace, where they happily interacted with the populace and frequented the many food stalls people made.

 

Despite the Akra mountain range and the Shade Woods between Ptolodecca and the Elmaiya empire, it was a rather short journey by sea - two days from the nearest point -, and as such, when famine or civil war beset the empire, it wasn't uncommon for there to be therians from the empire who came and sought refuge.

 

Because of that, nobody blinked an eye at Nec Aarin's mortal guise, and some younger children seemed to find him as adorable as Aideen does and liked to spontaneously hug him or play with his tail before their mothers scolded them for such impolite behavior and apologized profusely, while the Bone Lord smiled and waved the apology away as there was nothing to apologize for.

 

For his part, Aideen thought that her grandpa enjoyed the way the children came and petted his ears and tail without fear.

 

They were in the middle of enjoying a strange dessert - one that made Diarmuid look askance at the food on his hand - of thin reddish-brown pancakes wrapped around some large candied insects. The pancake was made with blood in the mixture and had a savory flavor that supported the pancake's buttery sweetness well, while the candied insect inside tasted a bit like a crunchy shrimp, in a sweet shell of hardened syrup.

 

She was just about to take another bite of her half-eaten snack while Diarmuid closed his eyes and took a bite from his, when she noticed it.

 

A cloaked, hooded figure - a common sight in Ptolodecca, to be fair - had finagled their way out of the crowd and walked down the small alley they had just been through, straight towards them. Aideen kept an eye on the figure from the edges of her sight, a trick she learned from Drietven to observe people without actually looking their way.

 

That was why she was the first to notice it when the figure suddenly leapt for her mother and an all too familiar, wickedly barbed blade appeared from within their cloak.

 

"Mother, watch out!" Yelled Aideen as she pushed her mother to the side in a hurry. The assassin - and there was little doubt to that now - had boldly jumped and she doubted she would be able to shove them away. Her mother was in a conversation with grandpa Aarin and had her back towards the threat, while grandpa couldn't see it because mother blocked his sight, and Diarmuid hadn't noticed the assassin until Aideen yelled out.

 

By the time their eyes turned towards the assassin, the wicked blade had reached Aideen. The assassin didn't seem to mind and probably thought to dispatch of her first before they continued. The blade, clearly an enchanted piece of work, punched clean through her chest bone, bisected her heart, and came out through her back in a jet of blood, just barely missing her spinal cord.

 

What the assassin had definitely not expected, however, was that Aideen grabbed their right arm - which was directly connected to the blade - with both of her hands and simply didn't let go.

 

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Unable to extract his blade from within her body, the assassin panicked for a moment, long enough for a raging Diarmuid - scenes from when Aideen was killed under his watch the first time replaying in his mind - to deliver a brutal chop that bisected the assassin from the right shoulder to the left hip.

 

The black blood that flowed out from the cut, and the way the assassin's eyes seemed to glimmer with soul fire, confirmed to them that the assassin was a soul puppet. One that Aideen remembered all too well.

 

Diarmuid knelt down and unmasked the assassin to find a dead woman's face that was twisted in hatred, which then turned into a sadistic grin as they all felt a sudden build up of magic in the surroundings.

 

"Get back! She's about to self-destruct!" Warned Aoife to her children. She was quite taken aback by the assassination attempt, within Tohrmutgent no less, and it had taken her a moment before her mind regained its clarity. Inwardly she scolded herself that she had turned soft from her decades of life in Vitalica.

 

"No." Echoed a single word that sounded like it came from the depths of hell itself.

 

The buildup of magic energy ceased, then dispersed, or rather, was made to cease and disperse. Nec Aarin, the Bone Lord walked towards the assassin with small steps as every eye turned towards his direction, a shimmer of black magic was around his outstretched left hand, and a similar glow encased the fallen assassin.

 

Dismay, then utter horror replaced the sadistic grin on the assassin's face as the soul that controlled the puppet realized that it was cut off from magic, and the horror just amplified when it tried to withdraw into its real body, but found itself trapped within the puppet.

 

"You dare to tread upon my domain, try to kill my disciple, and hurt my grandchild, and still think you could get away with it?" Said the Bone Lord as the heavy use of death magic eroded his mortal guise and he returned to his skeletal guise. His voice seethed with fury, unlike anything Aideen had ever heard before, and somehow it made her have goosebumps on her skin, while cold sweat drenched her back.

 

"It seems I have been too nice for too long, that those fools in Junora forgot to fear me," muttered the Bone Lord as he raised the assassin's half body from the ground with pure magic, while the assassin's eyes widened and their look of horror further amplified upon viewing Nec Aarin's skeletal visage. "Aoife, we're heading home. This is nothing short of a direct provocation, and that demands a response in the only way those fools would be made to understand."

 

"Yes, master," said Aoife with a bow. She discreetly turned the other half of the assassin to dust, then whispered to the stupefied stall owner for him to keep his silence on the matter. Judging from the way the man nodded rapidly like a woodpecker, she felt he got her point. "Come, children, we're going home. Aideen, you might want to… remove that thing first, but keep it for inspection later. Would attract too much attention if you leave it be."

 

"Oh right, will do, mother," Aideen said. She tried to pull the blade out, but found that the barbs had snagged on her flesh and made that difficult - and painful - so she called to her brother for some help. "Brother, can you chop that arm off around the base of the blade? This thing is easier to push out than to pull out."

 

"Sure," replied Diarmuid as he chopped the assassin's arm off right by the base of the blade. Aideen then pushed the blade out her back and gathered it and the assassin's arm into her storage before she put on a second robe over her torn, bloodstained one. He was no longer surprised by now at how his sister could be so nonchalant about a blade through her heart, as he had seen her take even worse injuries and shrugged it off during their training. "Mother's already on her way, we should hurry to catch up with her."

 

"Certainly."

 

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