Chapter 17 #3
"I don't care what they say I am!" Voss screams, and the undead around the chamber shudder in response, the death magic spiking. "I care about surviving. I care about being free. And if that means becoming a monster, then at least I'll be an immortal monster—"
"You're not getting through this vault," August says, and the calm in his voice is absolute. "Not as long as I'm standing here."
Voss laughs. It's a terrible sound. Cracked, desperate, the sound of a man who has nothing left to lose.
"You? A psychopomp? You talk to ghosts and guide spirits and think that makes you powerful?
I have a legion. I have constructs. I have four years of preparation and a hundred and seventy-three years of Templar training, and you think you can—"
"I've had fourteen years to learn to speak to the dead," August says quietly. "You've had four."
Voss's eyes narrow.
"You opened every rift in this city," August continues.
"And I closed them. Every one. From the inside.
I walked into the underworld and broke your anchoring magic and sealed your breaches, and I'm still standing.
" He pauses. "You may have torn these rifts open, Voss.
But I closed them. And now, standing here, free of corruption, at full strength, with three Templars at my back, I'm telling you something you don't want to hear. "
August's chin lifts. His grey eyes are steady and certain and utterly without fear.
"You're not the most powerful necromancer in this room."
August raises his hands.
The death magic that rolls from him is unlike anything Vale has ever seen.
Not the focused pulses of combat, not the gentle guidance he uses for spirits, but something vast and encompassing.
It fills the chamber, washing over the undead legion, touching every bound warrior and construct and wraith-form with a will so absolute that the air itself seems to vibrate with it.
Stop, August commands.
Not out loud. The command travels through the death magic itself. A frequency that bypasses the physical and speaks directly to the dead. Vale can feel it resonating in his holy magic, a harmonic vibration that makes his sword sing in his grip.
The undead stop.
Every single one. Mid-stride, mid-swing, mid-attack. The warrior constructs freeze. The guardian constructs go rigid. The skeletal knights halt with weapons raised. The wraith-forms solidify and hold. A legion of death, brought to absolute stillness by a single will.
The silence in the vault is total.
August hasn't bound them. Vale can feel the distinction.
The undead aren't enslaved, aren't chained, aren't forced into compliance by the violent binding magic that Voss uses.
August has spoken to them. Has reached into whatever remains of the consciousness that animates them and asked, with an authority born of fourteen years of compassion, of guiding spirits home, of treating the dead as people rather than tools, and they've answered.
Voss stares. The color, what little remains in his ashen, corruption-ravaged face, drains entirely.
"No," he breathes. "They're mine. They're bound to me—"
He reaches for his magic. Vale can feel it.
The violent, crude surge of death energy that Voss throws at his legion, trying to reassert control, trying to override August's will with raw power.
The undead shudder. Some of them twitch, caught between two commands, the binding magic fighting against August's gentler hold.
Voss's face contorts with effort. The corruption on his skin pulses, darkens, the black veins thickening as he pours everything he has left into the attempt.
The cost is visible. Years burning away in seconds, his body consuming itself to fuel the magic, his legs shaking, his breath coming in rattling, wet gasps.
He claws back a handful. A dozen warrior constructs jerk into motion, turning toward August with weapons raised, and Vale starts to move.
August takes them back.
Not forcefully. Not violently. He simply speaks, and his voice, his will, his authority, his fourteen years of earned power, overwhelms Voss's desperate, burning grasp. The warrior constructs stop. Turn back. Go still.
And August begins to banish them.
One by one, then in clusters, then in waves.
The undead dissolve. Not violently, not with the screaming destruction of combat magic, but gently.
Peacefully. August releases them from the binding magic that holds them to the mortal world, and they go willingly, their forms losing cohesion, their bones turning to dust, their spirits sliding through the veil with the ease of the long-overdue finally being permitted to rest.
The warrior constructs crumble. The skeletal knights collapse. The wraith-forms dissipate. The guardian constructs, last and largest, resist for a moment. Shuddering, their skull-faces flickering. And then they too yield, toppling inward on themselves with a sound that could be relief.
The dust settles.
The vault is silent.
August stands alone in the center of the chamber, surrounded by the ashen remains of a legion that no longer exists. He's breathing hard. The exertion is visible, his shoulders rising and falling, his hands trembling at his sides. But he's standing. Upright. Clear-eyed.
Voss is on his knees.
The effort of fighting August for control has cost him everything he had left.
The corruption has consumed him. His skin is more black than flesh, the veins covering him so thickly they've merged into a continuous darkness.
His corrupted blade has fallen from fingers that can no longer grip.
His breathing is a shallow, rasping wheeze.
He looks up at August with eyes that are more green-black light than human, and the expression on his ruined face is not anger.
It's despair.
"They'll turn on you," Voss whispers. "When they don't need you anymore. When the crisis is over and you're just a necromancer again. They'll put you in a cell, or they'll kill you, and everything you've done for them won't matter. It never matters. Not for people like us."
August looks at him. And Vale, watching from behind, sees something cross August's face that he doesn't expect.
Compassion.
Not pity. Not agreement. But the genuine, terrible empathy of one dying man looking at another and understanding, with perfect clarity, the fear and the loneliness and the rage that brought him here.
"Take the Crown," Voss breathes. "Take it for yourself. You've earned it more than I have. You could live forever. You could be with—" His burning eyes move to Vale and back. "You could be with him. Forever. No corruption. No dying. You'd never have to—"
"No."
August's voice is quiet. Certain. The word carries no anger, no judgment. Just a truth, spoken simply, the way August speaks all truths that matter.
"No one deserves that kind of power over death," August says. "Not you. Not me. Not anyone."
Something breaks in Voss's expression. The despair curdling, twisting, the dying man's last hope collapsing into the specific rage of someone who has been denied the one thing they believed could save them.
Voss screams.
It's a sound that's barely human. Rage and grief and a hundred and seventy-three years of service and betrayal and loneliness compressed into a single, agonized cry.
He lunges from his knees toward August, his corrupted hands reaching, death magic blazing from his ruined body in a final, desperate surge.
Cassidy's blade takes him through the chest.
She moves with the clean, precise violence that defines her.
Stepping past August, her longsword trailing holy fire, the thrust perfectly placed.
The blessed steel enters Voss's body and the holy energy detonates the corruption on contact.
Voss's eyes go wide, the green-black light flickering, stuttering, and for one instant, one terrible, suspended heartbeat, the corruption recedes from his face.
And underneath it, just for a moment, is the face of a man. Not a monster. Not a rogue Templar or a vengeful necromancer. Just a man. Tired, afraid, impossibly old. Someone who wanted to live and couldn't find a way that didn't require becoming something unforgivable.
Then the light goes out, and Maren Voss folds to the vault floor and is still.
***
Vale reaches August three strides after Cassidy withdraws her blade.
August is standing where he was. Hasn't moved, hasn't flinched, his eyes on Voss's body.
He's tired. Vale can see it in the set of his shoulders, the fine tremor in his hands, the faint darkening of corruption on his forearms that speaks to the enormous expenditure of power he just sustained.
But he's standing. He's steady. He's here.
"August," Vale says.
August looks at him. His grey eyes are calm. Sad. Carrying the weight of what just happened. A man who tried to destroy the world brought down not by holy magic or blessed steel but by a dying necromancer who simply had more practice at compassion.
"The rifts," August says. His voice is hoarse but level. "The ones upstairs. We need to make sure—"
"Will they remain open without Voss?"
August shakes his head. "They'll close on their own. Voss was maintaining them. They're tethered to his magic, not anchored independently. Without a necromancer sustaining them, they'll collapse within the hour." He pauses, looks down at Voss's body. "They're already weakening. I can feel it."
As if in confirmation, the ambient death energy in the vault shifts.
A subtle but unmistakable ebbing, the oppressive pressure that has been building since they entered beginning to drain.
The small rifts throughout the Cathedral above them will be flickering, shrinking, sealing themselves shut as the magic that held them open bleeds away.