Elara Voss's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The crypt district held what she needed. Elara walked through narrow streets where stone vaults lined both sides like teeth. Most necromancers in the nameless city kept quiet workshops, hiding their craft from ordinary people. But here, death was business. Families paid good money to store their dead in proper tombs. Fresh bodies arrived every day. She stopped at an iron gate marked with a crescent moon. Inside, stone shelves held dozens of wrapped corpses. Her green eyes swept across them, counting. Fifty, maybe sixty. Enough to triple her army in a single night. The gatekeeper was gone—probably drinking somewhere. She gripped her bone staff and whispered a command. The lock clicked open. This place would give her everything she needed. The other necromancers would hear about her army soon enough, and they would know to fear it. She worked through the night, unwrapping bodies and raising them one by one. Green light pulsed from her staff with each binding spell. By dawn, sixty skeletons stood in the crypt's central chamber, each wrapped in dark green energy that crackled and hissed. Their hollow eyes glowed with the same light. She commanded them to march, and they moved as one—a wall of bone and necromantic power. Elara led them out into the street as the sun rose. People screamed and ran. She ignored them. This display wasn't for ordinary citizens. She positioned her skeleton army in the open square outside the crypt, arranging them in perfect rows. Let every necromancer in this district see what she had built. Let them understand that her power had grown beyond their petty experiments. Her army stood waiting, a clear message written in bone and green fire: fear her, or challenge her and fail.