Worlds burned.

Worlds died.

Worlds were reanimated as the corpses of the dead rose once more.

And more worlds burned and died.

Gerain observed his map of the multiverse and clicked his tongue in irritation.

He rarely bothered these days to pay much attention to the war. His involvement was no longer necessary for the most part. He consulted once a month with the generals of his armies, as they murdered their way across the multiverse one reality at a time, seeking to end the war that had begun a thousand years ago. Even now, there were those that resisted and fought back against the inevitability of death and failure. Now in Kragen’s world a band of would be heroes were attempting to turn the tide, forces gathered from various realities, all conspiring together to make a stand. Doubtless, one or more of them would attempt to bring an army through a portal to the world Gerain had made his residence. Another futile and empty gesture.

The Alliance of the Seven Suns was doomed to failure and death.

The end now was closer than it had ever been.

Gerain was immortal. And Gerain would not allow himself to be killed. He wasn’t even sure if he could be killed anymore, although his character sheet assured him he was still bound by the same system restrictions as everyone else. He had reached the highest level possible over seven hundred years ago, when he had taken his own world and turned it into the necropolis that it was today. His experience points were in a constant state of being calculated, as the tertiary experience gained from commanding the troops he did continued to rack up world by world. He barely noticed them any longer, as there was little benefit to be gained.

He sipped on a green tea and watched as another world turned black. Its population was added to his army, which numbered by his calculation, at over seven hundred billion. Perhaps more. Perhaps less. It was hard to say.

After a while, the numbers that he commanded became too vast for him to comprehend, and so he preferred to view things one world at a time.

He had long ago grown weary of viewing the details of the slaughter. Truth be told, he had almost - but not quite – forgotten how this had all begun, or why it had continued for so long. It amazed him that, after all this time, the Seven Suns continued despite his best efforts.

He doubted any of them even recalled the origin of the conflict, or the true meaning behind their name.

It was the seven sons, he thought irritably, not the seven suns.

Once, a thousand years ago, Gerain had been nothing more than a humble necromancer with a talent for artifice. His skills on both fronts had often been in demand from passing adventurers wishing to gain an edge over the small pockets of undead that they came up against here and there. Gerain had been content enough to craft various trinkets and items to help them, applying his knowledge of the undead arts to the crafting. He hadn’t been unique in that respect, although even now he liked to think that his craftsmanship had been of a superior quality.

He had shied away from the adventuring lifestyle, content to learn through practise and repetition as he investigated the mysteries of life and death and how to command them.

This was what Gerain could not recall any longer, however: what had made him so preoccupied with the dead and the undead, and the mysteries of life.

Perhaps he had been a sickly child, he mused. He had almost died at a very young age? He recalled that he hadn’t believed his parents’ reassurances that, even if he died, he would go to a better place. These promises had always seemed like fairy tales to Gerain, of suspect provenance and with little to no evidence to substantiate them.

The gods, if they existed at all, displayed little to no interest in the welfare of the living.

Or perhaps Gerain had suffered an early loss as a child, a parent or other loved one who had died, cruelly ripped away from him. That also seemed possible to Gerain, now that he considered it.

Whatever had occurred, it had sparked in Gerain a burning interest in the divide between life and death. With the help of a mentor whose name he had also long since forgotten, he had begun his investigations at an early age, far younger than any other fledgling necromancer.

He recalled he had been considered a prodigy, even if his vocation was often frowned upon in polite society. But there had been much coin to be made from allowing the bereaved to speak one last time to their loved ones. Gerain knew he had grown up in poverty, that much he was sure of. His tower was situated upon the peninsula where he had grown up, in an out of the way fishing village that had been mostly disconnected from the wars and dramas of the rest of the world. It had been remarkable only as a stopping point for adventurers heading into the wilderness to the north or the badlands to the west, and even then the village had been eclipsed in importance by a much larger town, Basel, which was but two day’s ride distant.

Such humble beginnings, he mused. A boy in a fishing village with an aptitude for necromancy and crafting trinkets.

And a burning terror of death.

Gerain had never understood how others lived their lives without the constant fear of death. To him, it seemed as if they all lived in their own dream world, where the thing that they should most fear – death itself – was of no consequence to them. This, more than any other aspect of people’s behaviour, was something that had always puzzled the young boy. As soon as he had learned that there was such a thing as death – had it been a bird felled by a cat that he had discovered? Or a deer that had been slain by a hunter? More likely, it would have been the sight of a fish, flopping and gasping for breath before its head was bashed in and its insides gutted. Again, the details were hard to recall.

But whatever had caused Gerain to fear death like nothing else was also what had driven his interest in the arts of necromancy. He had sought his mentor... a man, or a woman…

Gerain grimaced and sipped on his tea. Even this detail escaped him.

He could, of course, open his character sheet and scroll back through his history to discover the root cause of everything, but the fact was that it would take him at least two years of scrolling to get to the beginning of his history. Since it registered every event that he was responsible for and every death that had occurred under his command, there was a lot of text to go through.

He flicked across the map of the multiverse again and considered taking a stroll through it. It had been so long since he had walked amongst the worlds that the idea appealed to him. Here there were only the dead to converse with, and those trapped in his hall of heroes. These days, despite the fact that everyone was trying to kill him, there were very few who knew his true face.

He had seen murals and statues where he was depicted as a skeletal monster, an avatar of death. In some realities images of him had eight arms, whilst in others, three terrifying heads. On some worlds he was depicted as a silver angel, in statues that towered into the sky.

In fact, Gerain was an unremarkable looking, sandy-haired man who appeared to be in his early thirties. He wore a cloak out of habit, but beyond that there was little ostentatious about his clothing. Anyone passing him in a street would have paid him little attention.

But Gerain had long since stopped walking through the worlds.

Once he had been interested in the discovery of a new reality, even as his troops had swarmed through it, but no longer. He had seen the edges of the multiverse and what lay beyond, and had balked at exploring any further.

There were realities beyond those that Gerain dominated, countless worlds, where the laws of reality as he knew them were different. The systems there ranged from a passing resemblance to the one that governed his section of the multiverse, and systems that were different and often confusing.

Breaching through to those strange worlds cost an enormous amount of mana and effort, and the rewards had been limited. Gerain had long since resolved to limit his life to that which he understood. Indeed, he had ensured through the control of various sorcerers that it was now difficult, if not impossible, for most to cross through the barriers that separated one multiverse from the next.

It was not in Gerain’s self-interest to have spent all of this time and effort staying alive only to find himself killed in a section of the multiverse where the rules were so substantially different that he made a mistake.

He grimaced as the sound of wings that rode the winds of the stars and a smell of other dimensions reached his nostrils. An emissary from beyond had arrived. A creature that reeked of madness and other systems.

Despite his tower being unassailable, those from beyond seemed to find it of no matter to reach it.

“Greetings, Gerain, lord of darkness, burner of worlds, master of the undead, slaughterer of billions. Greetings, immortal overlord, he who cannot be slain, great majesty of darkness….”

“The answer is still no,” Gerain spoke, cutting the emissary short.

“Ah, Gerain, how many times must we have this little dance? My lords from beyond find your antics pleasing to their slumbering ears. They would reward you mightily were you to agree to allow your worlds to join theirs….”

Even now, Gerain felt a tremble of fear in the presence of the vile creature.

It hunched on the stone windowsill, immune to the wards that he had in place. This was one of the more unpleasant aspects of becoming a lord of the multiverse; being forced to deal with emissaries such as these. No matter how much he strengthened the barriers, they could always find a way through, once every few decades.

The creature, known as a byakhee in its own worlds, was from beyond Gerain’s realms. It was not the black leathery winged, sharp clawed and fanged visage that caused Gerain a chill of fear. Nor was it the slime which dripped from its slick skin, or the multiple eyes that winked and blinked in its horse-shaped skull. It was what it represented that gave Gerain a chill of fear. There were worlds beyond his own where the laws of reality were warped beyond all recognition, and where things that should not be ruled supreme. Recently – if you counted four hundred years as recent – these beings had become interested in Gerain’s corner of the omniverse.

“As I have made clear many times, I have no interest in joining your dark gods,” Gerain replied, “And I will consider any attempt at incursion a gross breach of courtesy.”

The byakhee snickered.

“My lords and ladies care little for courtesy,” it chuckled, “As you well know.”

“And yet,” Gerain noted, “They fear me enough to send an emissary with a request and an offer rather than attempt an incursion.”

The byakhee cocked its head to one side, tittering, and stepped off the window ledge and into Gerain’s war room.

“And this is very true, great majesty of darkness. Never have even my dark lords seen a single human capable of causing so much death and destruction,. There are many ballads written about you in our realities. They haunt the dreams of men, women and children, driving them insane with fear. Would you care for me to sing you one?”

“Cease, or suffer the consequences.”

Gerain could smell the reality warping system rewriting notes that were already burning off the creature. He did not fear the creature itself. Here, now, it was bound by the steadfast rules of this corner of the multiverse. But the longer it remained and the more leeway he allowed it, the more it could corrupt the system.

He could not be certain that the admin would be able to intervene.

“Ah, Gerain, you caught me once more,” the byakhee tittered, “You are sly and wise. Even half a verse would have likely driven you insane.”

The byakhee slipped across the room to the map of the multiverse. Its oily black eyes examined the three-dimensional map that Gerain had been studying mere moments earlier.

“I see you have a new reality being initiated. Ah, such virgin territory. So many souls that could scream in unison as my lords flayed their minds...”

“I grow impatient with your overtures,” Gerain said. “Is this why you are here?”

“Indeed, dark lord, you know what a prize a newly initiated world is. Even from our corner of the omniverse, we can hear it. Perhaps it would not be so noticeable if the screams of the damned were not so loud. You are a remarkable creature, Gerain. To have mastered death to such a degree is something that has not been seen for aeons. Your actions never fail to amuse the elder gods.”

Gerain shivered beneath his cloak. The mere mention of the elder gods that ruled worlds beyond alerted him to the fact that he had gained a single fear point. Perhaps the first he had gained in three decades. It was almost a welcome novelty, a new sensation that he had forgotten the taste of.

But Gerain knew that with fear came debilitation, and that was not something he could afford, especially in the presence of this being.

“I grow weary of your prattling,” Gerain commented. “My answer is the same. I will not tolerate an incursion into this multiverse, and these worlds are mine and mine alone. Nor do I have any interest in expanding my activities to your realities, or joining your eldritch gods in their infernal dance across space and time. My answer is the same as it has always been, and always will be. Now begone.”

“Ah, great overlord, this I am sorry to hear. I shall return with these frustrating tidings, and doubtless be tortured for another hundred years.”

“And then you shall return with the same offer, I presume?”

“And then I shall return.”

With that, the emissary hopped to the widow and was gone. Gerain turned his eyes away from the sight of the tear in his reality that the byakhee opened and flew through. He knew from experience that even a glimpse into the rift it opened could compel him to more fear and madness.

Worse, it might tempt him.

 

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Author's note: Hey folks, I've decided to catch up/reply to comments during the week all in one go the following morning (UK time) as it frees up a bit more writing time for me, so replies will be a bit slower than before, hope that's okay!

This chapter should probably have a subtitle "Interlude 1/4" or somesuch but I couldn't get it to look right. Anyway, yup we're taking a bit of a swerve for the next 4 chapters (this one included) before we get right back to Gary and co.

Cheers :)