Druid's Folly: A Druidverse Urban Fantasy Novel (The Trickster Cycle Book 1) by M.D. Massey

Author:M.D. Massey [Massey, M.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Modern Digital Publishing
Published: 2021-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

“Oh, come on,” I said as stood upright, yanking on my right arm with my left to set my dislocated shoulder back in place. “Why can’t anything ever be easy?”

Behind me, the truck’s engine sang to life, a welcome sound if ever there was one. Still, we couldn’t just drive away, not with these things running loose. For all we knew, they were headed into College Station—or worse, they’d follow us to Austin.

Oh hell no. But if brute force and swordplay isn’t working, then it’s time for some druidry.

Necromancy was a weird, fucked up kind of magic, one that distorted the natural order, subverting death until it became a sort of second life of its own. Zombies could be created by necromancy, and those created that way were functionally identical to the infected variety. Some even believed that the undead vyrus was derived from the version that created ’thropes, having been mutated in a necromantic experiment eons ago.

It made sense. The therianthrope vyrus was basically life on steroids, enhancing human DNA by magically grafting it to animal DNA. On the other hand, the vampire vyrus was full of death, killing the host and reanimating them in a permanent state of undeath.

Maybe ’thropes had come first, a part of the natural order, and then some necromancer had decided to experiment with their blood to see what they could create. Who could say? All I really knew was that druidic magic was the antithesis of necromancy. If anyone could fuck up a necromantic working, it was a master druid.

I shifted my vision back into the magical spectrum, forcing myself to examine one of the necro-golems in detail while they were busy adding more dead to their frames. The death magic coming off them in waves made me nauseous, but it was nothing that my Hyde-side couldn’t control. Soon, I managed to spot details in the necromantic spells that powered them that I hadn’t seen before.

Tiny lines and flows of magic held the corpses together, like stitches in the patchwork of a quilt. As the necro-golems neared one of the dead, the magic pulled the corpse toward it like iron filings to a magnet, drawing it in and securing it with tiny lines of dark energy. And deeper within the golems lay a magical core, a mass of necromantic energy that both fueled the spell and provided a rudimentary intelligence for the creature.

Now that I’d stopped fighting them, I observed that the creatures weren’t interested in me at all. I wondered what had caused the first one to charge us, then I realized it might not have been coming after us. After all, it hadn’t attacked until I tossed a concrete barrier at it.

Shit, I bet these things weren’t even meant to attack us. They’re probably the work of some crazy necromancer, who sent them out to gather bodies for his experiments or some shit.

My guess was that their primary function was Hoovering up the dead. They probably only attacked anything that appeared to be a threat, and if I hadn’t confronted it, the golem might’ve ignored me completely.

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