The Realms - D. R. Rosier Page 0,2
chest, and he shook his head in wonder at the man’s prowess and stupidity. If he was trying to rip the lich’s heart out, he was in the wrong kingdom to do so.
The lich twisted his staff and stabbed down, but the stranger’s left hand struck like a snake, so fast he didn’t even see it happen. One moment death’s blade was headed for him, and the next he held the end of the staff firmly, the blade a hair’s breadth away from his face.
The lich struggled for several more seconds, then froze, and impossibly turned to dust. The undead army fell to the ground in a wave centered around the stranger, and the clouds parted shining a shaft of light down on the battlefield.
He was too shocked to speak.
The queen said, “We must meet our champion.”
He grunted, and nodded in agreement, even as he wondered if the queen’s words hadn’t been a tad breathy. If he didn’t know better, he’d say she was turned on.
Chapter One
Muranth grunted, and wiped off his back leathers, which were covered with dust. The dust of the dead. He hadn’t been in the realm for five minutes, and he’d already been in battle, and needed a damned bath. Not that he minded battle, he excelled at it, but he was hoping for a less noticeable entrance to this realm and world.
As far as the other problem, he used his magic to cast a simple cantrip, that both removed the dust from his leathers and cleansed his body.
“I’m going to kill Khalea when we got home, I asked for a subtle entrance to this world.”
There was tinkling laughter from beside him seemingly from nowhere. In truth it was from his bonded guardian and his only trusted companion, April. She was a fairy, covered by concealment spells, and brimming with the magic of life. She was also a spy of sorts, a way for his people to keep track of his walkabout, though it wasn’t that simple.
She was just six inches tall, although a perfectly proportioned woman of that size, with white gossamer wings. If visible, she had long white-blonde hair, shockingly vivid and dark blue eyes, and a mischievously beautiful face. Her body was lithe with proportionally generous rounded breasts. She was small, but no doubt a full-grown woman of her kind.
His people’s customs demanded their young prove themselves in the middle realms, and to grow their fortunes and power before returning to their higher plane, though still technically one of the middle realms. It kept things relatively peaceful there, if their instinctive desires to accumulate things when young were sated, they didn’t fight each other as much.
He looked around and sighed. He was completely surrounded by the cleansed undead. They’d all been powered by the lich’s fell magics, and they’d fallen when the lich’s power had been cleansed. It hadn’t been easy to find the necromantic connection to its heart, and cleanse the magic so it failed, but he’d managed it.
He sighed, “Thanks by the way, the lich was hard enough to deal with.”
It’d been April’s life magic and white glow that had taken down any undead close to them, and which allowed him to focus on the source of the undead plague. The people of this world must be weak in magic, or perhaps simply weak in understanding, because based on what he saw the lich was about to turn this place into the kingdom of the undead.
Ridiculous, the power of necromancy was undeniable, but at the same time it was easily transformed with the magic of life. Necromantic magic was inherently unstable, which made it especially easy to cleanse.
That’s what his race was known for, the ability to shift magic, change it directly. Well, that, and their martial prowess. They couldn’t just shift their bodies, they could also shift their magic, transform it, as long as they were familiar with it and had a source to match nearby. Being bound to a fairy meant he had easy access to the magic of life. Other magic could be more… difficult, and it resisted better.
His own intrinsic magic was amorphic in nature.
The source didn’t have to be a bonded link to a creature with that magic, but it made it easier. He could have managed it by casting a healing spell, and by using that as the source of life magic to cleanse the necromantic magic, but that way was much more difficult and took an amount of focus he hadn’t yet mastered.
She replied,