Tenebrae laughed. “Regardless, we tracked the raiding party and we caught up with them. We waited, and we attacked. In the battle, I was injured. You were injured. All of us were injured, but we kept fighting. I had dropped the dagger that housed my power. I was bleeding, tired, the dagger was just out of reach, and there, lumbering towards me, was the biggest ogre I’d ever seen. Twelve foot tall, green skin, dressed in stitched leathers with tusks as big as my arm.”

“He was half that size,” Skulduggery said. “And he didn’t have tusks, he just had really bad teeth. Also, he wasn’t an ogre. His name was Jeremy.”

“You really know how to spoil a good story,” Tenebrae said. “I was on my back, looking up, so he appeared to be a twelve-foot-tall ogre. One thing you cannot argue with is the size of the axe he was swinging.”

“It was a big axe,” Skulduggery conceded.

“Bigger than any I had ever seen.”

“Oh for God’s sake…”

“And just before that axe split my skull and found my brains, Valkyrie, Skulduggery staggered into view. He fell, reached out, grabbed my dagger, and sent fifty spears of darkness into the ogre’s chest.”

Skulduggery said nothing.

“I hadn’t given him permission,” Tenebrae said. “That power should have torn him apart. But he controlled those shadows, instinctively and without training, and when Jeremy the ogre was dead, Skulduggery dropped the dagger and went looking for the next enemy to kill.”

Tenebrae looked at Skulduggery. “From that moment, I knew you were special. I knew I would need to keep an eye on you. A few years later, we Necromancers retreated to our Temples and fortified our positions. We decided to let the rest of the world fight among themselves. But not everyone respected our neutrality. Nefarian Serpine, in particular, seemed disinclined to leave us alone. He surrounded the Temple I was in, threatened us with utter destruction unless we shared some of our secrets. The High Priest chose me to be the one to venture out and teach Serpine what he wanted to know.”

“The red right hand,” Valkyrie said.