But his revenge on Terandria? That, he would have done for free. Feren stopped to pant, clutching at his side. He forced more curses out—this time at his destroyed army of the dead. Zombies and skeletons pilfered from graves, the idiots who couldn’t even cast [Deathbolt].

“Useless. Useless, all of you. All I had were ghouls. If I had the bodies, time—I could animate Crypt Lords.

Draug!”

The [Necromancer] had once been part of a true cabal. Full of powerful individuals who practiced death magic. But they had split apart. One had been captured. And she had been an artisan of death.

Gewilena.

The apprentice who’d joined them had run off to join the Academy of [Mages], at Wistram.

Pisces.

And the others had split away, after those hunting them had gotten too close. Xorce, the girl who’d named herself, Rednei. Loxus. Ama.

But if they’d been together…

Feremont remembered them as he paused beside a tree. This latest cult of fools? Incomparable to the one before. There had been talent, art, even…hope. Of a kind.

He remembered smiling. The [Necromancer] closed his eyes for a moment and recalled the chiming of that stupid bell. Laughter.

A field being farmed by undead. How ironic that he should now be attacking a place like that. Afiele was just a glorified farmstead, tended to by the living. Why not the dead? Why not like Khelt? Why—

Why did they murder her?

His eyes snapped open. He’d almost passed out. The [Necromancer] was slumped against the base of the tree. Wearily, he pulled himself up. Move. He had to move. They would be closing the net…

“Bodies. I need bodies.”

He came to a road and hesitated. Down it lay one of Afiele’s few villages…

He could slaughter a village if there were no high-level individuals among them. But the Hunter’s Guild in Noelictus was fearsome. They would track him all the harder; they could and had slaughtered hordes of thousands of undead.

And it was a village. Feremont looked down the road, towards distant stacks of smoke and the houses that he could not see, but surely produced them. He dismissed the first thought.

He was not a monster. And if he did monstrous things…no. He didn’t need to raise the alarm, even if he could…acquire bodies. There was a way to wipe out nations by slowly accumulating dead—but he doubted he could manage it. He needed hundreds, thousands of corpses to begin that horde. Right now the only body he possessed was his own.

Better to hide. The [Necromancer] cast his favorite spell. [Invisibility]. He vanished and crossed the dirt road, heading towards the forest beyond.

He rustled among the trees and grass. Hide. Flee Noelictus and damn the job. There was no way he could take the keep, anyways. Not even if he had a hundred zombies—