The journey was a slow descent into a land of perpetual twilight. As Mehandi traveled east, the forests became thinner, the trees more twisted, their skeletal branches reaching toward a sky that was always bruised with gray. The air, once so clean and vibrant, grew heavy with the scent of decay and something else—a stale, stagnant magical energy that made his skin crawl. This was not the natural decay of the earth; it was the mark of the necromancer.
He was no longer just following a magical trail left by his brothers. He was following a scar on the land itself. The earth beneath his feet felt hollow, drained of its life, and the aether-veins he could see in his mind's eye were thin and brittle, their light choked out by a cold, parasitic darkness.
His first major test came in the valley of the Silent Stones. A dozen towering, ancient stones, carved with long-forgotten runes, stood in a circle, their magic once a beacon of healing and life. Now, they were corrupted, their auras twisted into a foul, malevolent energy. From behind the stones, a chorus of guttural groans reached him. A dozen figures, their forms once human, now mere puppets of shadow and bone, shuffled out. These were not the glorious reanimated dead of legend, but the necromancer's ghouls—empty shells with glowing, red eyes.
They shambled toward him, their movements jerky and unnatural. Mehandi felt a wave of disgust. His brothers were not just learning to command magic; they were defiling life itself. The star spirit's voice, a calm anchor in the rising storm, echoed in his mind. They wish for you to become like them. A destroyer. Do not grant them that wish.
He didn't raise his hand to destroy them. Instead, he knelt, placing his palms on the corrupted soil. He reached for the faint, desperate whispers of the spirits trapped within the husks, feeling their anguish. With a powerful act of will, he didn't just fight the ghouls. He reached into the magical energy that animated them, pulling at the thread of borrowed power that held them together.
The ghouls' glowing eyes flickered, their shambling movements slowing. A low, painful moan escaped their stitched lips, not of aggression, but of release. Mehandi was a healer, not a fighter. He was unmaking the spell, freeing the spirits from their shadow prisons. One by one, the red lights in their eyes faded, and the bodies crumbled to dust, the liberated spirits rising into the sky as wisps of silver light. He could feel their silent gratitude.
As the last ghoul turned to dust, a cold, mocking voice echoed on the wind, a voice he knew belonged to Ivan. "Impressive, little brother. So pure. So gentle. Let's see how well your mercy holds up when you're fighting what you once loved."
A moment later, a figure appeared on a hill overlooking the valley—a man in dark robes, his face hidden by a deep hood. This was the necromancer, and next to him, his form cloaked in shadow, was Leo. They did not attack. They simply watched, their cold magic a palpable weight on the air.
Mehandi stood, his hands streaked with the dust of the freed dead. He looked at the Lord of the Wailing Barrows, and then at the two figures he had once called family. They were no longer the boys who had betrayed him. They were something far worse, something soulless. He felt the cold, hard certainty of a war to come, a war not just for his family's name, but for his very soul. He was not just fighting for vengeance anymore; he was fighting for the light. He turned and continued his journey, the towering, skeletal spires of the Wailing Barrows now visible in the bleak distance, a monument to the darkness he had to face.