The obsidian door slid sideways without a sound, revealing the tall, skeletal figure of a necromancer. Its clothes were ceremonial rags, and in its empty eye sockets burned a faint violet fire. It was a low-ranking servant, but one sensitive enough to perceive the alteration in the chamber's energy flows.
"My Lord Kaelen," whispered the necromancer, its voice like the crunching of dry bones. Its head bowed in a reverence that failed to hide a thread of insidious curiosity. "The castle's heartbeat… changed. We felt your awakening. It was not in the foreseen cycles."
Kirson, inside Kaelen's shell, did not flinch. The two crimson points serving as eyes remained fixed, impassive, on the servant. The strategist's mind analyzed the situation in microseconds: To show surprise or justification is weakness. Absolute authority is not explained. It is imposed.
When he spoke, his voice was not a sound, but a vibration that resonated directly in the necromancer's consciousness, cold and sharp as the edge of an ice dagger.
"Does my schedule answer to a bone-pit watchman?"
The question, laden with a disdain so glacial it could almost be felt in the air, had an instant effect. The necromancer retreated a step, as if struck physically. The violet fire in its sockets flickered, gripped by fear.
"No… no, my lord. Forgive me, I only…"
Kaelen's mental voice interrupted it, amplifying to fill the entire space of the chamber, an unbearable pressure on the fragile mind of the undead.
"My awakening serves designs your intellect cannot comprehend. Your function is not to question. It is to obey."
He paused, deliberately, letting the terror take root in the servant. Then, he continued, now with the tone of one giving a routine yet irrevocable order.
"Inform the Shadow Watchers. The crypts in the west wing are to be sealed. I have perceived… an inconsistency in their defenses. No one is to approach. This is a direct order."
The necromancer, trembling from head to toe, prostrated itself completely, its bony forehead hitting the stone floor with a dry crack.
"Yes, my Lord Kaelen! Immediately! It shall be done as you command!"
"Now," the voice in its head added, with a hint of infinite weariness, "vanish your presence. Your breathing (or the illusion of it) contaminates the silence."
The servant did not need to be told twice. It scrambled to its feet and fled down the corridor, its rags flapping behind it like the wings of a terrified bat.
The door slid shut.
The moment he was alone, Kirson's facade cracked. Kaelen's silhouette lost some of its hieratic rigidity. The points of crimson light extinguished, plunging the facial void into an even deeper darkness. A mental fatigue, dense and heavy, took hold of him. Maintaining that mask of absolute power was an exhausting effort.
But it had worked. He had bought a respite.
And, at the same time, he had potentially dug his own grave.
He turned slowly towards the obsidian mirror, facing the nothingness it reflected. "The crypts in the west wing," he thought, consulting Kaelen's memories. They were a storage place, of little importance, but guarded by minor runes. A perfect location for a believable excuse. But now that excuse was an order. If the Shadow Watchers found the defenses to be perfect, or if sealing that area interfered with some castle process he was unaware of, the questions would return. And next time, they wouldn't come from a frightened necromancer.
The chess match had begun, and he, Kirson, had made his first move. An audacious move, based on a lie. Now he had to hurry to turn that lie into truth, or at least into a convincing enough distraction.
From the void of his face, the crimson eyes ignited again, but this time with a different gleam. It wasn't Kaelen's coldness. It was the fire of a cornered man's determination.
He had to explore. He had to learn. And, above all, he had to find a way to be more than just a ghost in the enemy's armor.
(End of Chapter 2)