Literature / Book of the Dead (2021)

Those bones were already dead when he found them, honest!

For a moment he didn't move. Couldn't move. What Class was this? What had just happened?

When Tyron Steelarm turns eighteen, he goes with his friends to the Awakening Stone to receive his first and primary Class. He hopes for a Wizard class, looking forward to a future of retreating from the world to study powerful magick and someday rank up to Arch-Wizard, only being called upon when the kingdom has great need for his services.

The mysterious force known as the Unseen has other ideas. Tyron's desire for overwhelming power, and his yearning to be more in control of his circumstances, qualify him instead for the highly illegal Necromancer class. Faced with the prospect of giving up his dreams or losing his life, Tyron flees — and his dark patrons laugh at the chaos that follows in his wake, as he struggles to balance his principles against his survival in a world that sees him as a growing threat.

Book of the Dead is a LitRPG Web Serial Novel by RinoZ (also the author of Chrysalis (RinoZ)), originally posted in 2021 on Royal Road, and is in progress as at March 2024.

Not to be confused with the 2006 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

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Tropes granted level one:

A-L

• Apocalypse How: The world routinely faces Class 0 events, when a rift to another world breaks open and spills out a flood of monsters that slaughter and devour all life in their path. Eventually, the break will close, and high-level Slayers will be called in to eradicate the rift-kin that came through, but the rift then remains a little bit more prone to breaking again in future... Tyron survives a rift break by magically hiding the room that he's in. On the plus side, the survivors are distracted from searching for him. On the downside, everyone who could have helped him is dead, and the area will soon get extra attention to start the cleanup.
• Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: When Mayor Jiren opens a drawer to retrieve the Steelarms' very unwelcome orders, Magnin advises him to "think carefully about what you're doing before you pull that out." The mayor goes ahead anyway, and the two Slayers utterly annihilate his farm and his home — though not his family — in retaliation.
  Jiren: Is that a threat?
  Beory: Yes.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Tyron has been hit hard with this trope. The Necromancer class is already highly illegal, although pragmatically speaking, there's nothing necessarily evil about skeletons and zombies, since they're mindless puppets under the necromancer's control; the class is banned mostly because a high-level necromancer is a One-Man Army, and because the simplest and fastest way to get dead bodies is to make them. At the same time, however, Tyron was granted the Anathema subclass, a gift from the dark gods that levels up when he acts selfishly, spreads chaos, desecrates sites sacred to the five gods, pierces the veil to contact the horrors beyond, etc. Nonetheless, rather than have his classes burned out of him and be forever crippled, Tyron is determined to invoke this trope and someday prove that necromancers can still be good people.
• Battle Couple: Magnin and Beory Steelarm are possibly the two most powerful Slayers in the world. He is a swordsman, she's a mage, and they can kill giant monsters as a light workout. And they're the Magisters' choice to hunt Tyron down. Their response to the order is violent.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Tyron doesn't wish aloud, but in his heart, he wants to be powerful and in control. The Unseen sees it and gives him a class that lets him control vast numbers of minions like puppets. Too bad about all the grave robbing he has to do, then butchering rotten flesh to get it off the bones, fleeing from the law, fighting against former friends... Oh, and he's now the enemy of the five gods.
• Best Served Cold: Tyron knows it may be many years before he can strike back against the gods for taking his parents from him, but he's determined to make it happen. Rather than immediately go to war, he goes undercover and takes up a multi-year apprenticeship as an arcanist, learning to craft magick items to enhance his minions.
  It would take time, a great deal of time, but he would reach them.
• Boring, but Practical: Dove informs Tyron that there are endless ways to customise a sword's balance and shape and curvature and tip, sometimes costing immense amounts of money to get the "perfect" blade for a particular Slayer. Magnin Steelarm, on the other hand, possibly the best swordsman in the world, just has one requirement: not breaking when he swings it. He favours a simple longsword design, easily forged if you can find suitable materials, and easily replaced.
  Magnin: When you get to my Level, that's a tall order, most swords shatter. Keep the fancy enchanting rubbish away from me, it just gets in the way.
• Calling Your Nausea: The sight of Tyron stripping all the flesh from week-old corpses so that they can be raised as skeletons is enough to make even Dove, a disembodied head, queasy .
  Dove: That… was disgusting. When that eyeball popped, with the maggots inside? I thought I was going to chuck, and I don't have a stomach.
• The Cavalry:
  • Tyron is able to Hold the Line against a bandit assault long enough for the sun to go down and Yor the vampire to arrive. She easily slaughters the remaining attackers.
  • He's down to the wire and completely out of magick when facing Rufus and Laurel — until his parents show up. The first Tyron knows about it is when Rufus stops moving and then falls in two halves.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Before Slayers are legally allowed to advance their classes to higher tiers, they have to accept a magick branding that allows the ruling magisters to remotely inflict agonising pain on them if they step out of line. It also kicks in automatically if they cross lines like hurting innocents. Manually activating the brand for an extended period of time, however, is quite draining for the magisters. When they're trying to make the Steelarms submit and hunt down Tyron, they have to work in shifts, because the Steelarms are able to endure the pain for weeks.
• Combat and Support: Classes like [Corpse Weaver] and [Bone Shaper] don't really have ways to fight; they're about repairing and optimising flesh and bones for others to use. The Old Gods grant many of the Cragwhistle residents classes like these, laying the foundation of a war machine for classes like [Necromancer] to have a steady supply of powerful minions.
• Create Your Own Villain: Tyron would have been happy to stay home and use his new class for the betterment of society, creating Undead Laborers for the farmers and bringing the Night of the Living Mooks upon the rift-kin invaders. But since just having his class carries a death sentence, he's instead been pushed further and further toward becoming the monster that they fear him to be, having to lie, steal, kill, and make deals with eldritch abominations to survive. And then his parents die, rather than obey their orders to have him executed, and he swears revenge on the magisters who did it to them, and the gods who commanded it.
• Crime of Self-Defense: The Slayers are very upset by the news of Tyron killing one of them, even though he was the one who attacked Tyron with lethal force, without warning, and ignored Tyron's plea to stop and negotiate.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Yor threatens that if Dove doesn't curb his tongue, she will capture his spirit when he dies and bind it into a urinal.
• Defiant to the End: Subverted when Tyron can enslave people's souls and bodies as undead; "the end" is a flexible concept for him.
  Filetta: I'll never talk. I'll be dead in a few minutes anyway.
  Tyron: Yes, that's the point.
• Delaying Action: Even Slayers as powerful as Magnin and Beory Steelarm can't forever resist the Cold-Blooded Torture inflicted on them via their magical branding when they disobey. But for the sake of their son, they intend to hold out as long as possible, giving him time to gather strength and survive.
• Dem Bones: Tyron's very first minion is a zombie, but he quickly decides to set that path aside in favour of raising skeletons instead. It requires extensive, gruesome work to strip every trace of flesh from the bones, and then he has to weave a complex tracery of magick threads to hold the bones together and let him control them, but they're stronger than zombies, they don't have rotting flesh attached, and the corpse doesn't have to be fresh. His "skelly boys" soon become the mainstay of his personal army. When he reaches level 40 and needs to lock in a path for his class advancement, with options like spirit binding, becoming a lich, or advancing his control of death magick, he instead chooses one that gives mastery of skeletal minions, "Lord of the Ossuary".
• Destroy the Evidence: When Tyron has time to properly equip himself for a fight, one enchantment he keeps on hand is designed to draw in and absorb leftover magick, to hide the signs of his work.
  It wouldn't be able to remove all traces of what had happened here, but it would remove enough. Only a dedicated search would turn up any results, and there was little reason for anyone to go walking the sewers or streets, hunting for death magick specifically.
• Diagonal Cut: Using a combination of a magical blade and high Skills, Magnin cuts Rufus in two so cleanly that Tyron doesn't know what's happened at first, until he sees a drop of blood start to run down Rufus' forehead. The two halves fall apart a short time later.
• Dishonored Dead:
  • Mayor Janry is deeply upset at seeing what Tyron has done to the remains of his ancestors (who were Tyron's first test subjects for raising the dead), and takes a savage glee in giving Tyron's parents the order to hunt him down.
  • Even Slayers who might have been willing to give their lives bringing Tyron down will hesitate when presented with the prospect that he will then enslave their bodies and souls to serve him.
• Disposing of a Body: Filetta and her superiors become nervous about how many corpses Tyron wants to buy, because they can't understand how he's keeping so many bodies hidden.
  Filetta: We don't care what you do with the merchandise, only that they are disposed of in a manner that can't be traced back to us.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Abyss is described as what exists between worlds, and its more powerful inhabitants literally can't exist in or even approach the material realm; they're not compatible with it. Their mere presence is also exceptionally dangerous to mortal creatures. Dealing with them requires making special preparations and physically entering the Abyss oneself, which even Yor thinks is a very bad idea. Mere contact with a lesser Abyssal almost broke Tyron's brain by accident.
• Eldritch Location: The Ossuary is an extradimensional space with unusual necromancy properties. It's constantly saturated with dense death magick, from no visible source, so much of it that any undead brought inside are overcharged with extra, which leaks away once they leave. Bones left inside, despite being filled up with energy, don't spontaneously assemble themselves into wild undead, though. Tyron finds it to be a fascinating intellectual puzzle as much as a tool.
• Evil Mentor: Yor is powerful and helpful, but she is quite open about the fact that her mission is to persuade Tyron to become a vampire and join the Scarlet Court, whose approach to feeding is to keep hordes of slaves for snacking on whenever they like. Tyron both doesn't have the power to make her go away, and can't afford to turn down her help.
• Explosive Results: A miscast spell can easily explode in the caster's face, although Tyron doesn't tend to face that problem, because he has honed his abilities to perfection for years. When he takes on apprentices, however, he has to step in when they make mistakes, to dispel the warped magick before it can blow up.
• Expy: Dove is turned into a lecherous talking skull who serves as Tyron's mentor, comparable to Bob in The Dresden Files.
• Feed It with Fire: Even Slayers who might possibly be willing to sacrifice themselves to take Tyron down (such as Trenan's team) will hesitate when they realise that the result will be serving him in death and thus making him stronger.
• Gotta Kill Them All: Tyron launches a couple of "kill everyone who was responsible for X" campaigns.
  • He goes as far as selling souls to the Abyss in exchange for a tracking ability to hunt down every last member of a gang of bandits. Though he's left unsatisfied when he finds out that one of the targets identified by his ability wasn't a bandit as recently as a few days ago, so it's unclear whether the boy signed up with them or the ability lied.
  • He later makes a deal to consider releasing Filetta to the afterlife once everyone responsible for an attempt on his life is dead.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Elsbeth feels a little embarrassed about having a spell to preserve food, but Tyron, who has experienced life on the run, immediately assures her that that's definitely useful.
• Heroic Suicide: Magnin and Beory, when they can no longer bear the torture of their magick brands, kill themselves in a ploy to convince everyone that Tyron died too, so that he won't be hunted anymore.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Tyron wants to keep his principles, but as it becomes increasingly difficult for him to survive, he ends up crossing more and more lines to gain the necessary strength to protect himself. The fact that he encounters various people he considers acceptable targets for his nastier abilities (such as selling a soul to the Abyss) doesn't help.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: This is the essence of Tyron's diplomacy with the village of Cragwhistle, after he breaks a rift-kin siege. The villagers were slowly losing to the kin, and he just exterminated the kin, so if they truly think he wants to kill and harvest them all, they should be wondering why he hasn't.
  Tyron: Not to put too fine a point on it, but I could kill all of you right now if I wanted to.
• It Amused Me: The Venerable suspects that the reason he's favoured by the Five is because they find his struggles entertaining.
  They liked him, liked to watch him survive and push onward despite the suffering he endured, waiting for him to crack and beg them to take back their blessings.
• Keystone Army: Tyron's research reveals that when famous necromancer Arihnan the Black was beheaded, his whole army — skeletal knights, wyverns, undead spellcasters, the works — crumbled away. Tyron is actually intrigued by this, since the fact that Arihnan was directly responsible for all of that shows that the Necromancer class is capable of achieving immense personal power.
• Leave No Witnesses: Tyron is careful not to let any of the thieves delivering his corpses get away once a fight breaks out. Their absence is certainly noticed, but they aren't able to tell anyone about his skeletons.
  Tyron: No loose ends.
• Lesser of Two Evils: Tyron isn't an expert on the realm of dead spirits, but he suspects it's nothing very exciting, and suggests to Filetta's shade that being an intelligent undead, subservient yet not helpless, might be preferable.
• Libation for the Dead: Tyron only has water, not alcohol, for pouring over Dove's skull before crushing it and releasing his spirit. Dove is unimpressed by the lack of anything stronger, but does appreciate being freed.
• Losing Your Head: After Dove's death, Tyron cuts off his head and binds his spirit into his skull, since he lacks the knowledge of how to give Dove a proper body (and even the skull was a brilliant innovation that the Unseen rewards him for). Dove is supremely unimpressed by his new existence as a talking paperweight, but can't do anything about it, and does manage to make himself useful as an advisor, in between the snark.
• Luring in Prey: Yor the vampire has deliberately sculpted her body to be inhumanly beautiful, but is anatomically incapable of sexual activity. The point of her appearance is just to help her attract dinner. After seeing her, Dove is inclined to think it would be worth it.

M-Z

• The Madness Place: Tyron is indisputably brilliant at understanding and casting magick, but he can easily get lost in study, and on multiple occasions he has become completely absorbed in a project to the point where he neglects everything going on around him, though his results are impressive. Such as when he bound Dove's spirit into his skull with a brand-new untested ritual, but forgot to put up the magick warding to protect himself from the impending rift break. Or when he independently reinvented the procedure to create a Revenant, gaining the ability long before his Class would have granted it, but was so focused that he didn't even notice Dove and Yor chatting about him, then woke up the next morning with a pounding headache and not fully remembering what he did. Dove can't decide whether to be more impressed or annoyed.
• Magic Staff: Beory prepares a staff for Tyron as an Awakening Day gift, from materials so rare that they're not on the open market.
  A good staff was a magick amplifier, a ritual focus and a handy stick to whack things with all at the same time. Everything the aspiring mage needed.
• Magikarp Power:
  • At level 1, a Necromancer can do nothing special except raising a single zombie, perhaps two if the caster is especially powerful. The resulting minion is slow, clumsy, constantly drains the caster's magick to support itself, and is a mindless puppet that must be manually directed. However, as the Necromancer levels up, the quantity of minions they can support rises rapidly, and at higher tiers they get access to much more powerful types. A level 40 Necromancer is a serious threat to national security, and historical necromancers have controlled armies large enough to raze cities, including spellcasters, skeletal knights, undead wyverns, and various other horrors.
  • Tyron internally admits that a Raise Dead ritual cut down to its absolute simplest possible form may be his finest creation yet, even though it would produce a completely useless minion. Because it still counts as raising an undead, which will allow his apprentices — who lack his talent for magick and his long practice — to gain a level and start work on skeletons.
• Mentor in Sour Armor: Dove is crass, cynical, derogatory, and arrogant, while also being envious of Tyron's talent at casting magick. Still, for someone who has no one else, his advice is invaluable, and he does actually want Tyron to survive and succeed, if only to thumb his nose at the magisters.
• The Minion Master: The Necromancer class is designed to fight via minions, not directly, to the point where Tyron cannot gain experience and level up through personal combat, like most classes. He only gains experience when his minions fight on his behalf. He does, however, push back a bit against the class' usual Zerg Rush approach, preferring to focus on making his minions higher quality rather than creating a massive horde. Partly from academic pride, not wanting to produce sloppy work, and partly because he has very limited access to suitable corpses. Still, it's not all that long before he has dozens of undead puppets at his command.
• Mundane Utility:
  • The "Sleep" spell is normally meant for enemies, but it's also quite handy for an outlaw necromancer who needs to keep odd hours, allowing him to go to bed at whatever time best suits him.
  • It's entirely possible to use magick cores to create enchanted household items, for timekeeping, cooking food, etc. However, there's so much demand for weapons, armour, and other adventuring supplies, that domestic uses are relatively rare. Tyron targets the domestic market by using undersized cores that aren't useful for combat applications; with his painstaking attention to detail, he's able to make use of them, achieving usable results (eg a heating plate 70% as effective as usual) at a fraction of the cost.
• Nay-Theist: When a priest calls Tyron a "vile unbeliever," Tyron retorts that he does believe the five Divines exist — and he believes that they need to die.
• Necromancer: The Necromancer class deals with death magick in all its forms. The primary class ability is to animate and control dead bodies, but it also has options for communing with ghosts, cursing enemies with weakness or fear, and empowering weapons with an aura of death. What makes it really dangerous is that as a Necromancer's skill and power increase, s/he learns to handle very large numbers of undead, by studying and exploiting the death magick that empowers them, so they can field armies capable of depopulating cities (and then "recruiting" the casualties).
• Night of the Living Mooks: The Necromancer class is designed to be the support mage for an army of undead. The only ways to gain Necromancer experience and levels are to raise the dead and have them fight on the caster's behalf; Tyron can't level up by fighting in person, so he focuses largely on casting Status Buffs for his skeletons and area debuffs on the enemy. The individual undead mostly aren't very impressive, but they're hard to put down, and any fight he wins allows him to "recruit" from any (intact and compatible) bodies of his enemies.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Tyron is warned that if he bothers anyone, "The gold ranks will rip your feet off and beat you to death with them," and checks if the guard is joking. Nope, not a joke, that actually happened, yesterday.
  Guard: I'm not creative enough to make this stuff up, sir.
• One Free Hit: Magnin allows an irate Worthy to get a free shot, but only the one. Worthy quickly regrets going for a second, as Magnin's high level and skills make it like hitting a brick wall.
  Magnin: You get one, Worthy.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghostly minions are nearly invisible, though not very fast, and difficult to hurt through mundane means, making them potent scouts. Conversely, although they can't apply physical force, they can attack the living by entering their bodies and freezing them. Unlike skeletons, they retain their minds, and thus hate Tyron for enslaving them, though they're bound to obey his commands. At one point he notes that death seems to have made them more vicious than before.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires are intelligent undead (they consider themselves the highest form of undead), who need to consume blood to survive. They can either drain a sustainable amount of blood (causing both the vampire and the victim addictive levels of euphoria), or consume the victim's entire life force (even better for the vampire, but excruciatingly painful for the victim). They also can't endure sunlight, so the Scarlet Court where they typically live is in perpetual shadow.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Zombies created by the Raise Dead ritual don't contain any trace of the living person's mind or soul; they're merely flesh puppets, animated by magick and directly controlled by the caster's mind. They're slow and weak, only threatening in large numbers, although more advanced versions do exist, including some that can turn other creatures into undead.
• Out-Gambitted: Even though Tyron specifically mentioned that he had noticed rising tensions and suspected something would happen, Filetta still tries to lead an ambush to assassinate him, to tie off the loose end that he represents to their business. Tyron promptly reveals that he brought dozens of minions and an artefact that floods the area with opaque smoke, giving him time and space to start casting area debuffs. None of Filetta's people survive.
• Predator Turned Protector: Once Cragwhistle makes the mental shift to accept that Tyron is not going to massacre them all and raise them as an army, they're quite happy to have him and his skeletons on their mountain. The new rift and its monsters are no match for his army of skeletons, and he pays well for the bones they can recover from mass graves in the area.
• Projectile Spell: Before his Awakening, Tyron manually taught himself a few spells, including Magick Bolt, which simply throws a ball of force at the target. It's nothing really special, but if it hits in the right place, it can kill a human, and Tyron is proficient enough that he can launch it from any part of his body with enough concentration, not just his hands. Eventually he adapts it to create a version based on death magick.
• Quantity vs. Quality:
  • The Necromancer class is primarily about quantity; the default route to power is for the Necromancer to kill someone, make a zombie, kill two more people, make two more zombies, kill four more people, etc. However, Tyron's pride in his own work pushes him to prefer quality when possible, choosing skeletons with their lengthy preparation time but improved strength instead of zombies, studying the Raise Dead spell to make the resulting minions more effective, and taking feats to improve minion quality. He would rather have a dozen effective skeletons than fifty cannon fodder. Plus, since he doesn't want to go slaughtering villages, he has relatively limited access to corpses, and has to make efficient use of each one. When his class advances at level 20, he rejects the "Horde Master" option that would focus on controlling very large groups, and instead chooses the "Undead Weaver" that's all about refining and improving his technique — but he has still grown from struggling to maintain one minion, to routinely keeping dozens of skeletons plus a handful of more expensive ghosts.
  • Tyron applies a similar ethic to his work as an Arcanist, seeking to eke every last bit of efficiency out of each magick core. In some cases, he's able to use optimised networks of tiny cheap cores to do jobs that would normally involve a single large and expensive core.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Upon finding a group of bandits who have taken advantage of societal disruption to kill a group of farmers, take over their land, and keep the women locked away as sex slaves, Tyron kills those he can, imprisons the soul of one of the leaders, sells that soul to the Abyss in exchange for the power to know where all the survivors are, then tracks them down, kills every last one of them, and enslaves their souls as ghost minions.
  When he got the doors open and saw what was inside, Tyron no longer felt guilty. He found the women and children.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: The magisters' council isn't interested in hearing about Slayer unrest, so when Magister Poranus insists on discussing it, they assign him to a remote village, supposedly to monitor the situation.
  Magister Anwyn: Perhaps we may be able to strike two birds with one stone. Magister Poranus wishes for us to ascertain the extent of Slayer… disruption far from the Capital, and we are in need of a Magister to be posted in Cragwhistle.
• Revenant Zombie: Ordinary minions are just mindless puppets controlled by the Necromancer, but Tyron knows that intelligent minions are a possibility at much higher levels. After he gains access to ghostly minions and an improved form of bone stitching, he spends some time in The Madness Place and independently rediscovers the Bone-Soul Melding skill, allowing him to bind a soul to a skeleton in such a way that it can control the skeleton but is controlled in turn by him. Unlike a regular minion, the resulting revenant utterly hates him, but is still enslaved to his will, and retains access to the skills it had in life, making it orders of magnitude more deadly.
• Revenge by Proxy: The gods were displeased with Magnin and Beory trying to bypass the brand and continue becoming stronger, and are believed to have tampered with Tyron's Awakening to make him a Necromancer instead of a Wizard, in order to punish his parents.
• Sadistic Choice: Tyron's parents have the choice of personally ensuring their only child's death, or dying themselves. They tell Tyron that the whole situation was arranged by the gods to punish them for wanting to remove their brands and grow strong enough to challenge the gods directly.
• Salt the Earth: When the Steelarms go after Mayor Janry's farm, in revenge for ordering them to hunt down Tyron, they don't just tear down the buildings until not a brick is left stacked on another; they also burn the fields until the ground itself is scorched, shatter the wells, kill all the animals, and carve up the soil "as if a giant ripped it up with his bare hands." They don't harm the people, though.
• Shoot Your Mate: The reason that the Steelarms were chosen to hunt down Tyron was because of the expectation that they would refuse, giving the Magisters an excuse to kill them.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Tyron is certainly not above letting out an expletive when surprised or worried, but he's nothing compared to Dove, who constantly swears like a sailor. Often at Tyron.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: Tyron's focus on skeletons leads him to the Bone Armour spell, which seizes nearby bones and attaches them to him as a layer of protection. It has an ongoing magick cost to maintain, the protection isn't great, and bones are a valuable and limited resource, but it's at least lightweight and safer than bare skin.
• So Proud of You: Tyron's parents are absent a lot, but they really do care about him and are impressed by how far he's pushed his Class. It's a shame that they only get to tell him shortly before their deaths, but he does appreciate the knowledge that he did the right thing in their eyes.
• Status Effects: The Necromancer and Anathema classes offer a variety of spells to weaken and debilitate foes, such as the Shivering Curse that saps energy from an area, or spells for inflicting pain and fear. Tyron's usual cover story is to claim that his main class is Curse Mage.
• Super-Speed: High-level Slayers can be significantly superhuman. Magnin can go from standing casually with his hands on his hips, to holding a drawn sword at your throat, before a regular human can see him move.
• Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The Abyss has a lot of knowledge to share, for a price, but its inhabitants are not properly compatible with the material world or mortal minds. Tyron's first attempt to contact them almost kills him, although he realises much later that the babbling was actually trying to teach him things his mind wasn't ready for.
  The voices, the entities in the Abyss, they knew things that nobody should know, understood secrets that would ruin a mortal mind, had mastery over spells that would rot a human soul. They held it all just out of his reach, feeding him tiny drabs and they danced closer and closer to him, pressing themselves against the protections around his mind as they whispered more and more desperately.
• Time Skip: The start of book 3 is well past the end of book 2, and then it skims over Tyron's multi-year apprenticeship as an arcanist.
• Title Drop: The end of volume 2 reveals that the Book of the Dead is Tyron's own notes, which will come to be feared across the land.
• Undead Laborers: Raising a minion is a long and magick-intensive process, so once raised, Tyron just maintains them instead of dropping and recreating them. As a result, when he's not engaged in combat, his skeletons do most of his fetching and carrying. He has about thirty skeletons by the time he launches a full scale raid on a graveyard, allowing him to very quickly make off with a cartload of useful bones. He still finds it odd to have them lift his cooking pot off the fire when the handle breaks, though.
• Virgin Power: As Selene is the goddess of purity, her followers are encouraged to exercise self-control. After Elsbeth's Awakening as a Priestess, she finds that Selene refuses to accept her, which she and everyone else assumes is because she was intimate with one of her friends — who actually engineered the situation intentionally in hopes that that would happen and that she would travel with him, bringing a powerful White Mage into his party. However, a servant of the Old Gods claims that the real reason Elsbeth was rejected is because the Five are scared of Tyron and everyone associated with him.
• Workaholic: Tyron has a significant tendency to get lost in his work. His pre-Awakening development included the Night Owl feat, so that he could sleep less. Dove has to regularly remind him to eat and sleep. It gets results, though. He completes a six-year Enchanting apprenticeship in three years, by disregarding everything resembling a social life and just working.
• Zerg Rush: Even after Tyron's best efforts at refining the Raise Dead ritual, repairing and optimising bones, increasing magick conduit efficiency, and taking feats to improve minion quality, his skeletons are not the equal of a Slayer in single combat. But single combat is not how they are meant to work. They are meant to work in large groups, surrounding enemies and overwhelming with numbers. They are light, fast, coordinated by a single will, utterly without fear, and ultimately expendable (bones are always in limited supply, but if he's seriously fighting then he has new "recruits" at hand). By the time he's past level 40, with hundreds of skeletons at his command, even teams of Slayers recognise that there are just too many; fighting him means dying and joining the horde.

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Collaboration and documentation are your desires. They shall be granted.

You have received the class: Troper.

Skills granted level one:

Media appraisal.
Media preparation.

Spells granted level one:

Create wiki page.