Chapter Text
There are many strange sights to be seen in Erde. Rhea had seen more than her fair share of them. Almost nothing fazed her anymore.
And yet.
Rhea sat in her cove, reading a grimoire she’d stolen from a passing caravan, when it happened. A shockwave of magic beyond anything she had ever experienced in her centuries-long life rippled through her dwelling. Like an ant watching a bear gouge its prey, Rhea felt the sheer supreme force that had been concentrated into whatever caused that shockwave. She had no doubt every living being with a shred of mana sensitivity this side of the continent did too.
As an undead, she didn’t freeze in terror like any other species on the planet would have. Instead, she immediately leapt out of her cave, staff at the ready.
Nothing happened.
Even as she waited one hour, then two, then three, nothing more happened.
But she’d felt it. Goddess above, she still felt its reverberations, four hours later. It was magic on a scale that would make any mage’s eyes bleed should they have gazed on the spell itself.
Rather than stick around or investigate the cause of the disturbance, Rhea did the reasonable thing and packed all of her bags to flee in the opposite direction.
She wasn’t strong enough to deal with that, and she knew it. She’d started as a mere mindless undead, one whose creator and animator had perished. She’d gotten very, very lucky, though.
Rhea had been animated as a skeleton mage. As such, she had the ability to retain her own mana and had some kind of pseudo-soul to herself (the intricacies of which she wasn’t quite clear on despite her long life). Her creator—the name and race of whom she couldn’t recall, mostly because she didn’t have the mental capacity back then—must have been immensely powerful to accomplish something of that scale. She’d probably experienced several decades of service before she finally experienced sentience and autonomy for the first time, likely due to the gradual solidification of her soul.
It was then that she’d had her lucky break. Her creator taught her the ability to reanimate undead so she could better serve them as a lieutenant of sorts.
And then her creator died.
It was pretty anticlimactic, really. Just keeled over from a heart attack or something. Thinking quickly, Rhea managed to reanimate herself before her creator’s magic wore off, and she became a fully functional and independent undead.
And now she was here. Running as fast as she could from whatever the Goddess’ grace that had been.
Her pet, Flucht, rapidly flapped its skeletal wings alongside her. Rhea glanced over her shoulder as she fled south. Her mind had already come to a conclusion.
That was a spell by the Demon King.
There was no doubt about it. Almost nothing else could have created such immense power, and, based on the arc of the shockwave, have been felt that far.
Though Rhea was a hermit, she interacted with the outside world enough—mostly through the theft of books and the like—to understand that there were exactly two great powers at play that could have been responsible for that spell.
Well, maybe three, but Rhea was an atheist, so she discounted the Goddess from her equation.
There was Serie, the head of the Continental Magic Association and the Great Mage—the Greatest Mage—from eons past.
And there was the Demon King.
Most of the texts Rhea retrieved noted that Serie basically sat around on her throne all day all the way in Strahl or Äußerst, both of which were south of where Rhea lived. The magic pulse had come from the northeast, and the only thing in that direction was Ende.
Perhaps there was someone else who could have caused the pulse, but Rhea only had so much information to go off of.
That begged the question: what had caused the Demon King to cast a spell of that calibre?
Rhea had a few hypotheses, but she didn’t deem any of them significantly more likely than the others, so she was left only with questions. Whatever the answer was, she sure as shit wasn’t going to stick around and find out.
Cursing under her breath, Rhea pushed branches aside from her path as she booked it, full throttle. Thankfully, one of the perks—one of the only perks—of being undead was that she couldn’t get tired, so she simply ran with all her might.
Flucht flew alongside her, eventually settling on her shoulder instead of actively attempting to dodge the tree branches above.
“Dammit, dammit, goddammit…”
Why?! Why now?! She’d so close to finally cracking the case for her magnum opus, to finally creating the spell that would rid her of her damned skeletal body once and for all, the labor of so many of her years. The spell that would transfer her soul to another’s body. An impossible task, at least according to her research, and she’d almost done it. Though it wasn’t even close to being safe to use, the main component was almost finished. And now this just happened to come up. Truly, Fate hated her.
“Goddamn you…”
Calm down, Rhea, she told herself. These things happen. You’ll find another home base soon enough, and you’ll finally be free of this damned thing.
Rhea didn’t know how long she ran. The sun went down, then the moon came up and went down as well before Rhea finally stopped, more out of boredom rather than anything external. Given the difficulty of running in the deep snow of the northern lands, Rhea figured she must have traveled maybe sixty kilometers. And that was good enough. It probably would shield her from any and all possible collateral damage from whatever was happening.
Unfortunately, though, future-her would curse her past self for fleeing in exactly the wrong direction.