Necromancer Jabir of the Waste
The Wastes had no mercy for the untidy.
Wind dragged sand in low ribbons across the salt crust, searching for seams to pry open. Dawn was a thin rim of light, just enough to make the flats look like hammered metal.
Jabir of the Waste stood at the edge of the Dune Scar, black robes falling in clean lines, pale turban wound in exact symmetry. The single red stone at its center caught the cold sun like a drop of blood on porcelain.
Beside him, the skull of Master Alhuan floated, suspended by an eerie green flicker, its faint sparks snatched away by the breeze before they could fall. The air bent subtly around it, a shimmer like heat over stone, though the morning was still cool.
Below, the canyon swallowed the horizon. Somewhere inside its shadowed ribs lay the tomb, and within it, the Tome of Duskwater Binding and a relic still humming with stolen breath.
“You’re late,” Alhuan’s voice said from his bone. Smooth, amused, the tone of someone who had spent his life finding fault.
“I am precise,” Jabir replied, eyes still on the canyon mouth. “The sun gives me the light I need, and no more.”
High above, the Onyx Wolf stood on a ridge, black against pale rock. Its eyes shone faint violet, the color of bruised glass. It cast no shadow, yet the air near it seemed to warp.
“The Purifiers are in the area,” the skull murmured. “They’ll burn the tomb before you’ve turned the first page.”
Jabir stepped forward. “Then I’ll have to be quicker than their fire.”
The descent was steep, carved into the fault wall long ago by hands that no longer had names. The salt and iron veins in the stone caught the thin sun.
Halfway down, he reached a wall of black rock that seemed to drink the light. Faint ripples moved across it, like water held in stone.
He pressed a gloved hand to it, tasting the air. Brine and stale rain. And with it came a memory.
A much younger Jabir, sleeves too long for his arms, lips shaping the hook-syllable of a summoning chant. A sharp cuff to the back of his head, hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“Louder,” Master Alhuan’s voice snapped. “The dead do not hear courtesy. They hear the barb in the word. Hook them, or they drift.”
The boy had swallowed the sting and tried again, face unreadable.
Now, in the canyon, Jabir let the syllable spill from his lips, perfectly formed and soft as cloth. The black stone shuddered. The water-ripples slid into a narrow seam, which opened without a sound.
He stepped through.
The corridor was cool, the air thick and faintly metallic. Salt crystals popped underfoot. The skull’s green glow lit thin lines on the walls, runes long faded, their edges worn down like old teeth.
“You break wards with less noise these days,” Alhuan said, almost approving.
“I learned not to announce myself,” Jabir replied.
The corridor opened into a wide chamber. Most of its shelves sagged under the weight of dust and brittle scrolls. A mummified guardian slumped against an altar, the blackened remnants of ceremonial wrappings hanging from its frame.
Upon the altar lay the Tome, its cover pale and stretched taut, as if it had once been alive but no longer cared to remember it.
Beneath it, clenched in the guardian’s hand, protruded a dagger. The blade was dull, the color of overcast sky, but it hummed faintly in his palm, a stored breath, patient and ready.
A faint sound reached him, measured steps in the corridor beyond, accompanied by the low murmur of disciplined voices.
“Purifiers,” Alhuan said. “Five at least. One with a brazier.”
They entered in formation, five men in etched armor, white-orange fire licking from the brazier carried by their leader.
Rhamis Sunbrand. The flame cast no smoke, but the skull’s green dimmed under its heat.
“Place the book and the weapon on the ground,” Rhamis said evenly. “Step away.”
The Onyx Wolf stepped from the shadows behind the altar, eyes burning faint violet. Its gaze met the Purifiers and held them still for a heartbeat too long.
“You keep strange pets,” Rhamis said.
“They keep themselves,” Jabir replied.
The brazier’s flame leaned toward the skull, hungry. Alhuan’s glow faltered.
Jabir lifted the dagger, whispering seven words. The mummified guardian sat upright. Salt in the walls brightened as two more figures pulled themselves free.
“Hold them,” Jabir told the dead. They obeyed.
Without hesitation, he crossed to the far wall where a narrow, low tunnel waited, its entrance half-hidden by a fallen shelf. He had noted it on his way in.
The skull’s light slid after him like a blade.
The tunnel was damp, smelling faintly of algae.
Alhuan’s voice moved in the dark. “You run well for a man who claims the shadows.”
“Survival is an art,” Jabir said.
They emerged into a smaller canyon, its walls iron-streaked. The Onyx Wolf waited there already, still and black against the light.
Rhamis appeared at the far end, brazier steady in his hand. “We are not finished,” he said.
“No,” Jabir agreed. “You are not.”
The wind rose, pulling grit from the canyon floor. Jabir gestured, and the Onyx Wolf moved forward without sound.
The Purifier captain stepped back, not fear, but recognition of something older than him.
Jabir turned away and walked into the dunes.
In the shadow of a half-buried rib of stone, Jabir set the dagger upright in the sand and placed the skull before it. A thin trickle of vitality poured from blade to bone. The green glow swelled, sparks drifting.
“You are learning,” Alhuan said.
The words were the same as that night.
The lamps had been burning late, their smoke curling around the edges of the green light spilling from Alhuan’s circle of chalk and bone.
The master’s robe was open at the throat, his turban set aside, as if this final stage of his great work deserved a kind of intimacy.
“Tomorrow,” Alhuan had said, “we begin taking what we are owed.”
He had been exuberant, which for him always meant crueler than usual. He poured wine for himself, then for Jabir, setting the apprentice’s cup on a shelf and forgetting it there.
The final notes of the life-binding spell lay on the table beside him, neat as coins.
Jabir had stood just outside the circle, shadow pooled around his feet, watching the lamp smoke coil through the green light.
He could feel the spell in the air already, the scaffolding of something that could hold the breath of a king, the vitality of a predator, the memory of a lifetime.
Alhuan had looked over his shoulder, half-smiling, expecting obedience. “Bring me the binding ring,” he had said.
Jabir had stepped into the circle without the ring.
He spoke the incantation exactly as it was meant to be spoken, cadence perfect, tone steady. The green light surged, the air tightening like drawn cloth.
Alhuan’s mouth opened in surprise.
“You—”
The rest folded into a sound that wasn’t a word. His skin sank to the bone in seconds, veins shriveling into dry lines, eyes dimming before they could even widen.
His body fell inward, collapsing under its own absence until all that was left was a skeleton lying inside its robe.
Jabir did not rush. He had the vessel ready, the skull, clean and pale, its runes carved in his own hand.
He spoke the binding that tied mind to bone, catching what might have escaped and folding it into permanence.
The green light shrank to the size of the skull’s gaze and stayed there, flickering.
Alhuan’s voice, already changed, already bone-deep, had murmured, “Correctly done.”
Jabir had carried it out into the night, robes unwrinkled, turban perfectly set.
The wind in the Waste tugged him back to the present.
The skull hovered before him now, its glow steady from the dagger’s gift.
“It keeps you strong,” Alhuan said.
“I keep it useful,” Jabir replied.
His gaze drifted to the satchel at his side. The Tome’s weight was a steady presence, its sealed ink glittering faintly in the green light.
“Will you read it now?” Alhuan asked.
“When it wishes to be read,” Jabir said.
Beyond the dunes, the sun caught on something, a distant glint of metal where the Purifiers were regrouping.
Rhamis Sunbrand would not give up. Jabir knew the type, zeal with patience was a rare, dangerous alloy.
He stood, brushing no dust from his robe because there was none to brush.
The Onyx Wolf appeared on the ridge above him, as if it had always been there, head lifted toward the horizon.
Jabir pointed toward a crooked line of rock teeth. “That cut will give us shade until the next tomb.”
The Wolf moved ahead. Jabir followed.
The Waste accepted his steps without sound, the Tome riding at his side like a sealed thought, the skull drifting in its slow, green orbit.
Somewhere far behind, fire would be preparing its argument. Somewhere ahead, stone and shadow waited for his answer.
Jabir walked as he always did, unhurried, precise, untouchable, through a land that had no use for speeches, and no mercy for the untidy.
Entered by: 0x6424…79B4
