Necrotech Read online

  Necrotech

  Magitech Legacy Book 3

  Chris Fox

  Chris Fox Writes LLC

  Copyright © 2020 by Chris Fox

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  The Magitech Chronicles

  Previously On

  Interlude I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Interlude II

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Interlude III

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Interlude IV

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Interlude V

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Interlude VI

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Note to the Reader

  The Magitech Chronicles

  Buckle up, because you’re about to enter The Magitech Chronicles. If you like Necrotech, we have a complete seven-book prequel series with an ending already available.

  Our pen & paper RPG successfully Kickstarted and the game will be live on July 30th, 2020. You can learn more at magitechchronicles.com or our Magitech Chronicles World Anvil page.

  We’ve got maps, lore, character sheets, and a free set of rules you can use to generate your own character.

  I hope you enjoy!

  -Chris

  Previously On

  You know that annoying feeling when you pick up a sequel and have to make that monumental decision? How well do you remember the previous book in the series? Do you dive right in or do a reread?

  I always tell myself I’m going to do the reread, but I can never wait and so I jump right into the latest book. Sometimes I can’t remember what happened, so my solution for my own books is to write a Previously On, delivered just like the recap before most of our favorite TV shows.

  Here’s what happened in Hatchling, told from Jerek’s perspective.

  Last time on Magitech Legacy…

  Hey there again, uh…you. So, I’m supposed to recap my amazing adventures. Here’s the TL;DR version.

  After Kemet blew up, we inherited some big problems. We needed supplies, and we needed to find a way to pay off the very Inurans who’d destroyed our world.

  The minister charged me with relic hunting one of the derelict Great Ships, and I chose the Flame of Knowledge. Knowledge is power, right?

  Well, the ship wasn’t empty. In fact, they were expecting us, and had been for, like, 9,000 years. They even had a prophecy.

  We fulfilled it, and got out of there with a hold full of knowledge scales. That wasn’t the real treasure though. We exchanged our junky version of the Remora for the pristine version that existed thousands of years ago.

  After we got off the Flame we learned the Inurans, under the command of someone named Jolene, had assaulted the Word and were trying to seize control.

  We stopped them by bringing in the Confederacy.

  I captured their leader, a guy by the name of Bortel.

  Wow, the short version is pretty long.

  The longer version…

  The story began with us flying through the Vagrant Fleet to the Flame of Knowledge. As you’d expect, we were ambushed right off the bat…by an ancient Wyrm. If you’re not up on relative combat strengths, the ancient Wyrm is the boot, and my freighter the Remora is the bug getting squashed.

  She slapped us around and ripped a hole in the hull, then threatened me specifically. The dragon wanted my Heka Aten armor, and we quickly figured out it was Headmistress Visala. The dragon I’d feared back at the Academy had turned out to be a literal Wyrm.

  Anyway, my crew is pretty slippery, and my sister is one depths of a pilot. Rava crashed us into a cargo bay on the Flame, and I had the brilliant plan of using a sonic pulse to draw the locals to the crash site. It was my hope that they’d drive away the dragon.

  They did!

  Then one of these creepy scuttling arachnidrakes (who’ve since become friends—still creeped out…dragons and spiders should not be combined) shot me in the face with a fire bolt. You can just heal that, right? Sure, Vee took care of it with her life magic. But you can’t regrow eyebrows. Have you ever had to pencil in eyebrows? No one takes you seriously.

  Right after I lost my eyebrows I met Xal’Nara, a beautiful demon goddess, and Frit, a beautiful Ifrit goddess. Both claimed they’d come to learn more about the Vagrant Fleet, and wanted to purchase ships for their respective nations. These goddesses knew each other, and behaved a lot more like childhood friends, and less like rivals. There’s a story there. I’m sure of it.

  Anyway, after the hot goddess-i? goddesses? left the scene we were on our own inside a derelict and very much inhabited Great Ship. There were upsides. I found a workshop with knowledge scales dating back ten millennia. They had star charts, maps to Catalysts, and who knows what other secrets. Their value is immense, and I still have them. I just need time to study them.

  We rested for the night then set out both to find something valuable enough to sell to the Confederacy, and to find parts to repair the Remora. Her drive was shot through, and she had a dozen other structural problems we needed to solve before she’d be even nominally spaceworthy. Vee did not seem optimistic.

  I figured I’d seen all the creepiness the Flame could throw at me, but then the Great Ship was all…hold my beer. We ran into actual spiders. Swarms of them. Everywhere. Webbing in my hair. On my clothes. On my junk when I relieved myself. Gah, I crawl just thinking about it. And I’m not the one with a phobia of spiders. That’s Kurz. It was bad enough that I don’t want to repeat it.

  These spiders arranged themselves into a face to talk to me. Turns out they belonged to something called the swarm, an insane magical intelligence created before the last godswar. What drove it mad you ask? A massively powerful artifact called the Web of Divinity.

  It allows you to perceive and manipulate events across many possible realities. Past. Present. Future. What if’s you’ve always wondered about. This thing made it all reachable.

  But using it drives you insane. Remember that later.

  The arachnidrake who burned off my eyebrows approached me in the ship’s archive to apologize, and introduced himself as Kek. He claimed that the Remora’s arrival fulfilled a prophecy, and gave me a copy like a Wyrm Faithful passing out pamphlets back on Kemet.

  I studied it, of course, and learned that he was right. There was a prophecy about the Remora. It wanted me to use a temporal matrix on the bridge, the Web of Divinity, to deposit the old Remora, my Remora, in the past, and in exchange would allow us to pull the Remora from 10,000 years ago into the present.

  There were a few more complications before we made the attempt. An ancient and powerful Wyrm, a goddess in her own right, I’d wager, controlled much of the ship near the Web.

  They were fascinated by Briff, because they don’t have any life Wyrms on this ship. They asked him to come back with them to meet Cinaka, and he wasn’t with us when we reached the bridge, which is where I accessed the Web for the first time.

  The shadows still lurk in my vision, especially when I’m tired. I hear whispers sometimes, but not in any language I’ve ever heard. It’s awesome, and by awesome, I mean terrifying.

  Anyway, I accessed the temporal matrix and performed the ritual, and it worked. But I
should have known every ritual has a cost. In this case the cost was my father. To bring a life to our time we had to put one back to balance the scales. My father was sucked into the past, while we brought the Remora and its ancient pilot into the present.

  That pilot turned out to be a guy by the name of Seket, a paladin of Inura. Seket is the most handsome, dashing, honorable, tub of vanilla I have ever met. I hate him so much. But not really because infuriatingly you can’t hate Seket. He’s too nice. Bastard. How dare he be…awesomer than me.

  During our crawl through the ship we found a forge, complete with schematics. Vee made me a pistol! Which I still haven’t named. It’s pretty awesome though. I’m thinking something like Eradicator. No, maybe she’s Eradicata? Eh, I’ll work on it.

  Right around then we learned that the Inurans had begun an assault on the Word of Xal. They were using the legions they’d created from the survivors on Kemet, and had ordered Bortel to take the ship. That put us on a clock even more than we’d already been. Worse, the Inurans were jamming all normal and magical communication in the system preventing us from calling for help.

  Kids versus hardened mercs. The kids didn’t stand a chance unless I could figure out a way to bring in help.

  We collected Briff from Cinaka and got ready to head back. I worried it would be a firefight, but it turned out that Cinaka and her people are massive Arena addicts. They sit around all day playing video games, and she refused to stop doing that to help us deal with Jolene and the Inurans trying to jack our fleet after blowing up our planet.

  She did, however, send a platoon of her best hatchlings to help us storm the bridge and use the Web of Divinity to contact the Confederacy. I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Remember me mentioning that the swarm of billions of spiders was insane? Well, it hates Cinaka and the arachnidrakes, and I’d been friendly with both groups. That meant the swarm suddenly saw me as an enemy, and the spiders decided they wanted to wipe us out.

  That’s where Kurz had his breakdown, but he got through it. I was impressed and proud of him for facing what he did and coming out the other side.

  We clawed our way back to the bridge, and I used the Web of Divinity to break the Inuran jamming. The cost was high. I took some of the insanity into me. I can feel it. Right now. It hasn’t receded or changed. It hasn’t gotten worse, but it isn’t getting better.

  I missived a goddess named Voria, and explained the situation. If I thought my mother or the headmistress were intimidating, then this woman put them to shame. This woman could probably have them both bowing and simpering with a single glance. She scary.

  Voria called in a single man. Or god, rather. A guy by the name of Crewes. Crewes brought his buddy Aran, another demon god, and proceeded to wipe the hold with Bortel’s forces, saving the kids at Highspire.

  I had two pretty cool pivotal bits that I added to the battle. First, we used the tobacco in Bortel’s vape pen to track him, and then teleported him from commanding his forces into our brig, which denied his forces a leader during combat.

  Bortel told me all about Jolene, the leader of the Inuran forces. He gave me everything we needed to assault her cruiser and deal with the woman who’d both blown up our planet and conspired to steal our legacy, the fleet itself.

  Crazy as it sounds, I assembled a strike force of arachnidrakes, hatchlings, and my crew. We stormed that ship…and promptly failed. We almost reached the bridge, but were stopped by a ward that prevented teleportation.

  Desperate and out of options I did what any smart adventurer does. I prayed to a demon goddess and begged for help. What could possibly go wrong?

  Nara showed up and made a covenant with me. If I agreed to protect and spread knowledge, and to visit her on the Husk of Xal when I become a demigod, then she’d give me the power to survive the current situation.

  I agreed. The ask didn’t seem that big. If I never become a demigod, then all I have to do is protect books. I do that anyway.

  I used my new weaken miracle to punch through the deck, and we stormed the bridge and wiped out the defenders. To be honest it was all a little too easy, so on a hunch I scryed the past hour until I figured out the truth.

  Jolene left behind a simulacrum. A double. She got away. On the plus side? They declared her dead so she lost all her assets, including her ship. Haha. Jolene, I hope you’re reading this from some seedy dive where you wipe down counters and have to wait on other people for a change.

  So we won. We stopped Bortel, who is still in a cell. We kept the ship. We met our closest neighbors, the Flame, and helped Kek become the new ship’s Guardian. If he can maintain his sanity I’m sure we’ll be great friends.

  And that brings us to the present. About an hour ago I got a missive from the minister to meet her on the Inuran trade moon, where our case will be heard.

  If we are very lucky they’ll dismiss the eleven billion credits we owe them. If not? Well, at least I’ll finally be able to pass off the captaincy to my mother, and go back to being a regular relic hunter.

  I can’t wait.

  Interlude I

  Necrotis wore time differently than most beings. She understood the Great Cycle itself, something that had been lost to this epoch, in this sector. Not a single god seemed aware of their origins, nor the true nature of reality and how it fueled itself.

  They clung to the magic of creation, of this realm, and declared it natural. Fire was natural. Life or air was natural. But void? To be feared, because it came from elsewhere. And spirit? To be reviled and held in contempt, because death fueled it. Dream was considered nothing more than whimsy, instead of the fundamental core of the cycle that it truly was.

  The sector had forgotten the artificing of necrotech, though she’d heard rumors that demotech survived among Xal’s children, and that they were now making leaps forward for the first time in millennia under the guidance of some new smith. If etherealtech still existed somewhere she doubted the creators would allow word of it to escape.

  All of that suited her purposes perfectly. Conquering the sector would require two things. First, she must understand her enemies. Second, she must keep them ignorant of her agenda.

  She stretched both delicate hands and adjusted the heavy golden diadem until it sat perfectly along her forehead. Even now, all these millennia after she’d abandoned life in favor of spirit, long after her flesh had gone cold, she still valued appearance. And why not? Death was cold, but nothing said it could not also be beautiful.

  She ascended her ivory throne, which glided into the air and hummed its way from her quarters and onto the bridge of the Maker’s Wrath, a vessel to rival Inura’s Spellship. All four consoles flanking the spell matrix were manned by young women with milky unseeing eyes. Silver cords connected to their temples, and better allowed them to regulate the flow of souls to the Great Ship’s drive.

  She’d smothered their consciousness of course. It wasn’t that she feared underlings, or betrayal, or even the rise of rivals. Allowing her servants free will meant they could make mistakes. They might be a touch less agile without that will, but it meant they made unerring servants, and she valued competence over expediency.

  The matrix itself held a young human man with his arms and legs lashed to the golden ring, which spun him in a slow tumbling circle. Wisps of ghostly white leaked from his chest, bits of soul slowly digested by the Wrath. The boy had endured three shifts, which surprised her. He would not last a fourth.

  Necrotis willed her throne toward the scry-screen dominating the far wall, which currently displayed the fleet disposition and strength of their primary opponents, the Inuran Consortium, their father’s murderers and the thieves of her inheritance.

  Inura had been a naive god, and had given freely. The Consortium had taken every scrap of it, including his mastery of artificing, if their ships were any indication.

  Nearly three hundred capital ships were docked on the surface of the Inuran trade moon. There were no doubt countless spellfighters as
well, and perhaps even a fleet of drones. Who knew what the Inurans had prepared? No one had ever assaulted a trade moon and lived to report on it, so nothing was known.

  Of course, no one had ever attacked with a Great Ship, either. She could begin the assault now, if she wished, but thought better of it. Not all the pieces were in place yet.

  Much had been readied. Her ship was fully restored, and the modifications they’d made to the spellcannon had been completed. Gone was the simple magitech, and in its place much more powerful necrotech. No living Inuran remembered its use.

  Not even she, though Necrotis was unliving.

  But Inura had kept meticulous records of his more experimental youth, and this had been his stronghold of magical creation. They’d been sealed, of course, and the wards had thwarted her for decades.

  That had left her the balance of ten millennia to experiment, and thanks to the steady flow of souls from the planet Kemet she’d never lacked for subjects. She’d devoured every bit of Inura’s research, and then began her own.

  During that research she’d spent time in the spirit realm, something most mages didn’t even realize existed. Everyone knew about the void equivalent. The Umbral Depths were critical to interstellar trade. But the ephemeral dream realm hadn’t even been named by scholars, and the few who knew of the spirit realm simply called it that.