LII.

LII.

Harmlig was slightly ahead of him in the crowd that had gathered to observe the procession of black-clad figures. The Pathogen Magister had taken off his mask, but Jakob kept his equipped, even though it seemed to draw a lot of eyes to him.

I wonder how bad we must smell, Harmlig suddenly commented. Jakob noted that the people around them had cleared away somewhat.

I used to live in the sewers of Helmsgarten, Jakob replied, this much is nothing.

You are certainly a peculiar one, even amongst Magisters, the man replied, though, despite the words, it seemed a compliment.

As the closed casket of cherrywood passed by, Jakob locked onto one of the figures trailing directly behind it. Life seemed to have been drained from him by loss and it was clear that he had not groomed himself in a while, as his beard was unkempt and his hair unruly. When he looked up for a moment, his face sparked recognition in Jakob, though he could not fully place it. The man saw Jakob as well and seemed to freeze in place. Then he suddenly strode straight towards him.

Jakob almost unleashed his prosthetic and its hidden magic, but before he could make a decision, the grief-stricken man embraced him firmly, putting his head on Jakobs shoulder and letting out a gut-wrenching sob.

If only if only I had known you were here!

Just then Jakob remembered the man. He was the noble who had set him up with the clinic in Rooskeld.

Who is in the coffin? Jakob asked, dreading the answer.

Pernille my dear niece, Count Bastian replied, and then he was overcome by grief and let out a wailing cry, muffled by the inhuman fabric of Jakobs robes.

As though turned to stone, Jakob could only follow the cherrywood casket with his eyes as it proceeded past him, a train of servants and family following close behind, all in similar states to that of the man embracing Jakob.

It felt as though his brain was on fire.

I had saved her. Protected her from Guillaume by sending her away...

This makes no sense why would she be dead?Updated from novelb(i)n.c(o)m

Why wasnt I informed?

Thoughts whirled around his brain as he tried to comprehend the situation. His breath seemed locked in his lungs, with no ability to escape.

She sidestepped a lunge, then slapped away his follow-up, and was about to ram her blade through his torso, when suddenly the Northerner pushed her off-balance with a gust of condensed air, making her stumble for just a second, as he speared her through her shoulder, somehow bypassing the bone armour she wore and managing to grate the bone of her shoulder joint.

With a kick to his stomach she created distance between them, then lifted her hand and popped his head like a pumpkin smashed with a hammer, before tumbling to the ground, a profuse amount of blood leaking through the segments of her armour.

Heskel roared and flew over to her and with a single motion tore open her carapace shell, putting his powerful hand on her shoulder wound and beginning to mutter a string of sing-song words, but she passed out before she could figure out what for.

Wothram had lifted Pernille out of her casket and gently lain her down on the stone coffin that she was meant to be interred within for eternity. The Golem stood near the backwall now, watching patiently as seemed his wont whenever not assigned a task. Count Bastian sat on one of the stone benches in the catacombs they found themselves in, his head in his hands, and Harmlig was busy removing the malignancy from Pernilles body to the best of his ability.

Jakob meanwhile was knelt on the hard ground of the Tingleif family tomb, where the stone coffins of Bastian and Pernilles ancestors lay entombed, many of their sarcophagi sculpted to match the likeness of their faces and covered in longform poems that seemed to incapsulate the essence of their lives.

Where Jakob knelt, he was desecrating the floor with a piece of charcoal, drawing out the lines of the Twinned Heart Rite. The implications of the ritual were grim, but, to him, it seemed the simplest way of bringing the full spirit of Pernille back from death, without having to cavort with conniving Daemons. Bastian easily agreed to the plan, though, in truth, Jakob would not have given him a choice. Though, for the Twinned Heart to work, cooperation was a boon, but not a requirement, least of all when he still had enough Demons Blood to force the man to serve.

After a few hours, where Jakob oversaw the work Harmlig was performing, the time for the ritual arrived. The longer they wait, the worse off Pernilles body would be and the more complications could follow, so when Jakob deemed Harmligs work sufficient to stave off death, he bade Bastian lift the corpse of his niece to the drawn-out Necromantic Sigil on the floor of his familys tomb.

Following the prescribed nature of the ritual, as put forth in his Of Undeath and Bone Necromantic tome, Jakob adjusted the Count and his niece, such that they lay within the hexagram, the Eternal Serpent surrounding them, and formed a vague resemblance with a heart while staring at each other.

Count Bastian had fallen mute, which Jakob took as a sign that the grief had permanently altered his mental state to a point of disabling his functions of logic and reasoning. But it ensured his cooperation, which was all that Jakob required.

Harmlig walked over to where Wothram stood statue-still and observed as Jakob placed the six human tallow candles at each point of the star, where they overlapped the outer ring. Then he knelt at the feet of the two figures, one dead and one catatonic, and began to recite the spell rite.

Two hearts become as one,

Two minds become as one,

Two souls become as one,

Conjoin these two in a single embrace and connect their souls with a single thread,

Merciful Serpent of Eternity, whose coiled figure surrounds us all,

Make of these separate hearts a single whole,

And even in death be they twinned of heart eternally.