Blood Shaper

Martha felt the thing puppeting her body twist her neck a bit too far as it suddenly started listening to something she couldn’t hear. It was a novel event to Martha. The thing had often reacted to stimuli she couldn’t perceive even had she been in control of her body, but it had never been like this. Some other thing was communicating with the creature she detested so much and that had never happened before it had dragged her body across the sea and met these vampyr creatures that were similar to it.

That was why it had come here it turned out. It hadn’t just been seeking new necromancers to question in an attempt to permanently rid itself of Martha, although it still made a few “inquiries” when it had the chance. It had been seeking out the vampyr, drawn by some scent or sense that they existed across the sea, because they were like it but different. The thing that controlled Martha’s body was a parasite that hid within its host until it could devour them and take their body, transforming itself into something new in the process. The vampyr were like an infection that destroyed the original owner of the infected body and becoming a new thing in the process. Both were twisted, unnatural things from a universe outside of this one and Martha’ thing wanted to learn from the vampyr, for the same reason it had sought out necromancers. Unlike so many past victims, Martha was still there.

She was pretty sure she was some kind of lich at this point, although she was a strange, broken one. Permanently binding one’s being into an undead form with your mind and magic intact was seen as the work of someone who had mastered the art of necromancy, no other could accomplish it. In Martha’s opinion it was also the move of the desperate or stupid. To even try it without a Master Necromancer Class or one of comparable power was a n elongated and ritualistic form of suicide, and if you already had a tier five Class, what was the point? You were practically immortal at that point anyway and becoming a lich meant giving up so many good things that came with being alive. She only knew of two people that had gone through with it that she didn’t find foolish had been afflicted with a virulent poison and a particularly deadly curse that neither had been able to escape otherwise.

Martha obviously counted as one of the desperate. She’d been able to sense her own death coming, the being that had been lurking in some other dimension or fold of reality while it ate her body gave up on stealth when it started to consume her, and she’d done everything she’d could to beat it back. Then, when it all seemed lost, she’s tried to turn herself into a lich freehand, an impossible task. Surprisingly, it had worked better than she’d expected, which had been not at all. She was still there after all, although twisted, broken, and mad, hanging magically as clusters of cells and bits of flesh woven throughout her own body. The madness was undeniable, any lich that didn’t have a full body went mad and she had so much less than that, but there was also the corruption and perversity that was the being that had killed her in all ways but the last. It did not belong in this realm any more than it belonged in her body.

But even as the thing had traded its service to the vampyr so that it could study them and try to learn how to become more like them, so too had Martha been studying. The puppeteer was different sideways from the world than the vampyr were, so it could not look at them there. It was limited to the mean’s of Martha’s body, and if her body was there so was she. In every narrowing of her eye, in every twitch of her ears, and in every flare of her nostrils she was there, learning too. Learning how best to destroy the vampyr.

There was an information war going on, one the thing inside of her body didn’t know was happening, and Martha was winning. She could tell by the bouts of frustration and the increasing number of times it was sweeping her body each day, searching for her in her holdouts and hideaways, that it wasn’t learning what it wanted to. It was from a universe that was different than this one and the one where the vampyr spawned from, which meant it had so much farther to go that Martha did. Martha just wanted to kill the vampyr quickly so that the thing never had the chance.

Which is why she cursed as the thing turned her body and started moving. The undead horde it had started fashioning after it allied itself to the vampyr, a horrendous cavalcade of random zombies and abominations without a single shred of grace or artistry, shambled after it. It was heading away from the ritual circle that the vampyr had been fashioning, away from the chaotic roil of destruction that the vampyr had created when they’d destroyed the nation that had once sat in these lands. Martha had been taking control of some of the horde and making a few changes to the massive circle using the crumbling undead as her limbs. It was much harder for the thing to detect her interference with so many shamblers around dividing its attention. With just a few more tweaks she could rig the entire thing to explode, damning the vampyr to fiery deaths and maybe even freeing Martha from her torment if the thing kept her body close enough to the circle. But now it was leaving, headed somewhere else with all of the undead and preventing her from making those final changes.

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She cursed the thing manipulating her flesh, whatever it was that had communicated with it and sent it away, and herself for ever touching the forbidden artifact the thing had been so deviously tucked away in. It had been her own curiosity and unwillingness to accept the warnings of others that had doomed her, and all the more tragically the undoing she had brought down on herself hadn’t come to be until she’d long since realized her foolishness and changed her ways.

With her plan foiled by unfortunate timing, Martha went back to her normal status, watching and waiting. She had picked up tinges of truth in the maddened cacophony of the vampyr, bits of reality among the torrent of illusions and hallucinations. There was a threat not too far away, one that could unmake the vampyr with a surety that only the most maddened and feral among the vampyr didn’t worry about it. She’d never heard of a “Kinkay” before, but she also couldn’t think of anything else that her thing and the army it was leading could be sent to deal with besides a threat the vampyr feared facing. Perhaps, if it was strong enough, she could foil the thing inside her body at the most inopportune moment and this “Kinkay” creature could kill them both. That had been her aim in so many battles before this one, and if it failed, well… If Martha had control over a pair of shoulders she would have shrugged them. She had suffered all this time fueled by spite and defiance, having vowed so many centuries ago to foil everything that the thing wanted as best she could. She would accept her freedom and the embrace of whatever came after death, but only when she knew she was taking the being from beyond the stars with her!

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“I’ve got it!” Kay crowed, holding the orb that was the passive state of his new artifact in the air between his thumb and forefinger.

Eleniah looked up from her breakfast. “Did you drop it?”

“No,” Kay replied with a chuckle, “The name for it.”

“Oh, is it good?”

“No, it’s stupid and ridiculous, but it’s true and it reminds me of Earth, so I like it. Plus, I plan to keep this baby a secret so not that many people will know the name.”

Eleniah stared at him for a moment before shrugging and going back to her food. “Looks like there’s no point in trying to convince you to pick a cooler name, so go ahead and tell me.”

“I name this artifact ‘The Sanguine Positioning System!”

A screen appeared acknowledging the name before it vanished.

“… Why?”

“Back on Earth there was this web of devices that floated above the sky that could tell you where you were on the planet as long as you had a device that could connect to the ones above the sky. People used them for navigation all the time, and as the technology improved you could even use it to tell you where you were in a building or on the street.” Kay looked down at the orb. Sadness and regret tinged his next words. “You know, that technology eventually led to the creation of the self-driving vehicles that killed my family.” He lifted the artifact to his eye level and spun it slowly, looking at every piece of the uniform orb. “I’ll have to make sure this and anything like it aren’t abused here.” He tossed it into the air at the same time he sent it into his Inventory Skill, making it vanish like a magic trick.

Setting down her fork and rising to her feet, Eleniah made her way to Kay. “I think-“

She didn’t have a chance to finish her thought as someone hurriedly opened the door and a messenger flanked by two of the Blood Guard stumbled into Kay’s private dining room.

“My apologies, your majesties, but there’s an emergency!” The young dwarven woman, one of several youngsters that were new to messenger or courier Classes that had been recruited to the palace panted and trembled as she held out a missive. “The details are there, but there’s an army of the undead moving on Avalon . The scouts say there’s some kind of half-undead monstrosity leading them out of Nelam.”

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