Romulus was no Nobel laureate, but he could recognize patterns.
The Trial of Might had been pure machismo and power, pitting him against enemies that grew in strength as their numbers diminished. It tested his stamina, resolve, and critical thinking—all three of which were crucial to avoiding a sudden and brutal death at the hands of empowering foes.
He decided to ignore the fact he’d almost missed their ‘stronger through death’ secret entirely.
The Trial of Magic was evidently designed to test not just his actual magical capability, but his attunement. It was highly doubtful that anyone without a [Dark Mana Channelling] ability would be permitted to undertake the trials for Dark Autarch. Lilith’s [Brand of the Dark Lady] was undoubtedly a key to not being absolutely curbstomped upon entering the Necropolis—as had reportedly happened to all previous entrants—but did not represent the sole consideration.
Romulus narrowed his gaze at the indented receptacle and took a breath.
His mind shifted down toward his body, and he sought the now-ever-present feeling of the Dark Mana stretching out from his Core. Somewhere above and behind his navel was where the energy was housed, and he worked to try to coax it out for his use. The moment he did, that same feeling of blood-chilling cold entered his body, and the power utterly refused to be influenced.
“Fuck,” he said eloquently into the too-silent corridor.
Lightsbane pulsed with amusement at his side.
“Okay, let’s think,” he continued aloud. “Dark Mana. What is Dark Mana? It’s the essence of Darkness, which controls Death, Entropy, Sin, Shadows, and things that go bump in the night.”
Lightsbane pulsed its curiosity to his final words, and Romulus smiled wryly.
“It’s a saying from Earth, where I came from. I’ll explain later.”
The runeblade vibrated in excitement but subsided dutifully.
“What did Lilith say… Darkness is about Agency… Path will be difficult…” he started to pace idly while he considered, holding his chin in his right hand and tapping his forefinger against his lips. “Enemies everywhere… take whatever I want… only law is—” he stopped, snapped his fingers mid-speech, and then turned back to the doors.
“The only Law is Might,” he repeated with a grim realization and took another breath. “Okay. Dark Mana operates on a law of strength, which means coaxing it is like trying to convince a toddler with a lollipop to give it up willingly. I gotta steal the candy from that baby.”
Romulus rubbed his hands together and rolled his shoulders.
“Heart of the cards, baby, heart of the cards…”
Lightsbane pulsed its bafflement, but Romulus ignored it for the moment.
Instead, his focus shifted into his body again, toward his Core, and he let himself truly feel the potency of the Dark Mana therein—the shadowy, destructive, consuming maw of icy strength lurking within, stubbornly refusing to yield. Romulus breathed steadily and, with a face he suspected looked constipated, locked his jaw in concentration. His use of physical muscles was a crutch he’d have to divest himself of, but in the moment, it helped him focus.
His palms lifted to point at the indent between Lilith’s platinum fingers, and he sought to grab the Dark Mana within him using pure Willpower. Mental images of scoops, shovels, black bags, ‘JUST DO IT’ chants, and the people’s elbow filled his mind. He mentally heaved while focusing on forcing the power out of his Core and into his hands.
The mana resisted as stubbornly as he did on his worst day, and then almost begrudgingly yielded to his Willpower. When the energy came, it was not a trickle, but a flood. Icy destruction raged through his body, flowing within him with an hitherto unfelt sensation. It was like lightning, adrenaline, raging heat, and icy cold all at once. There was a mix of raging vitality and void-silent lifelessness inherent to the feeling of Dark Mana.
Romulus didn’t think he’d ever truly be able to put it into words.
Dark Mana flooded out of his palms in a surge of abyssal incarnation, and he marvelled at the strange appearance of it. Under the cold illumination of the corridor, the mana looked like a stream of pure shadow. It rippled and danced, undulating with things unseen and whispering with unheard voices—as contradictory as that was—while crashing into the door’s waiting basin.
The moment the mana interacted with the doors, a series of black-purple veins ignited across their surface. They spread from where he poured in the energy outward across the doors as if they were coming alive. Romulus stared in surprise and fascination, idly aware of his mana very steadily ticking down toward zero while more luminescence exploded to life before him.
Details he had not seen, like cloaked and hooded figures wielding beautiful and wicked scythes, knights holding aloft runeblades in worship, masses of people raising their arms in reverence, and outlined skulls of the dead or dying were thrown into stark relief. His eyes roamed over the newly visible elements of the doors, and he whistled quietly in appreciation.
“Whoever designed this knew what they were doing,” he said with appreciation.
Lightsbane pulsed its enthusiastic agreement with his words.
When the veins of the door hit its edges moments later, Romulus heard a dull da-dum like the sound of a heartbeat and instinctively pulled his hands away, cutting off the dark mana in the process. Another moment passed in which he watched the door to see if he had ruined the process, only for another da-dum to echo, this time with more power.
“Okay. Looks like I did something ri—”
His words cut off when the doors started opening inward mid-speech.
“Yep. Definitely did something right.”
While both sides continued their slow grind toward full opening, a System message appeared in his vision.
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SYSTEM MESSAGE
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Congratulations, Acolyte Romulus!
You have passed the Trial of Magic by harnessing the power of Dark Mana and proving yourself as a true follower of the Dark Lady.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Your final Trial awaits.
Complete the Trial of Mind in order to be eligible for selection as the Autarch of the Dark Lady.
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“Huh…” he said skeptically and waved his hand to dismiss the screen. “That’s… anticlimactic. I expected some sort of fight, puzzle, or magical quick-time-event. Juicing up an old door wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for ‘Trial of Magic’,” he concluded while patting Lightsbane to soothe his wariness.
The runeblade pulsed encouragement, but otherwise had little to offer.
When the doors completed their full opening a moment later, Romulus noticed that a curtain of complete darkness lay across the entrance. He had initially confused it for a lack of illumination, but he realized quickly that it was in fact some sort of barrier, one comprised entirely of Dark Mana. A mix of curiosity and learned wariness filled him, and he stepped forward, raising his right hand to touch his fingers to the field of abyssal black.
A chill echoed from the contact, but he remained otherwise unaffected.
“Probably not the wisest choice to touch the shield of entropic energy, moron,” he reprimanded himself a moment later, though thankfully he’d suffered no ill effects. A lesson learned for the future, though, certainly.
“I guess we go through?” he asked Lightsbane, from which he received an affirmative pulse.
Trusting Lightsbane not to mislead him, Romulus stepped forward warily and extended his right hand before him. His fingers led the way through the curtain of power, and he followed his hand carefully into the solidified wall of darkness. The moment he stepped through, he felt something twist in his mind, and an avalanche of pure mental pressure assaulted him like a hammer. Fear, terror, self-doubt, and a sense of utter worthlessness assailed him in the same instant.
It lasted less than a second before he felt [Indomitable] activate in response.
The moment it did, Romulus felt his mind clear and his control over his body return.
He stepped determinedly through the wall of darkness and emerged to another System screen.
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SYSTEM MESSAGE
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Congratulations, Acolyte Romulus!
You have passed the Trial of Mind and have proven that your mettle and Willpower are beyond reproach.
By successfully completing the Trial of Might, Trial of Magic, and Trial of Mind, you have proven yourself worthy of aspiring to the mantle of Dark Autarch.
Proceed onward, and claim what is yours by right!
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“Wait, seriously?” he said aloud to the air while staring at the System screen. “That’s it? That’s the Trial of Mind? What a j—”
He paused mid-gripe when an errant thought came to him, then turned back to the wall of darkness. From the side he now stood on, it was transparent, and he could see the corridor beyond, not unlike looking through thin, sheer black curtains.
“...Hm,” he mused quietly. “Without my Skill, though…”
[Indomitable] had all but slapped away the effects of the ‘Fear Wall’, but without it, perhaps the Trial might have been far, far more dangerous. The level of sheer terror he had felt upon first entering the wall had been enough to blank out his mind and freeze him in place. It was a level of fear, despair, and worthlessness that he had never before experienced. Had he not possessed the Skill, there was a very real chance he might have failed the test.
Did Lilith engineer this, too, knowing how lacking I am in strength?
It was not unreasonable to assume so. The Divinarch seemed highly aware of what he needed to do and what he would encounter. If the Dark Autarch was a being of singular power as Lilith’s direct representative, it was not outside the realm of consideration that someone of his current level should never have been able to pass even the first trial, let alone the last two.
Both the Might and Magic trials had been doable, but with deeper consideration, they very likely should not have been. Basic skeletons and lighting up a door seemed exceedingly basic for a Necropolis that had purportedly claimed the lives of people many levels above his own.
“Tradition must bow to necessity, I suppose,” Romulus murmured before turning away from the wall and back to whatever was waiting for him. His left hand idly stroked Lightsbane’s hilt, and he walked forward into the darkness of the room he had entered. His footsteps echoed quietly, and a deeper darkness than anywhere else in the Necropolis veiled everything.
“Is this another tes—?”
Before he could finish the sentence, he was interrupted once more, and the darkness receded. When the torches and chandeliers lit once more, the sight he beheld captured him in silence.
A massive throne room with vaulted ceilings, platinum-veined black marble flooring, and what appeared to be an obsidian throne of brutalist simplicity greeted him. The entire area was open, with no pillars or needless ostentation present. Tattered banners hung along the walls, long forgotten by time, and a deep emptiness seemed to abide within the area.
That, however, was not what held him still.
It was the fact that the throne was occupied.
Romulus continued forward in stunned silence toward the being on the throne, as if pulled in by its presence.
The best way to describe it was as a creature of blue flame and blue-veined black steel. Its head was cold fire in the shape of a skull, with a loose solidity to its form and an endless mist that seemed to bleed from the top of its head and the joints of its armor. A jagged steel crown, brutal and imperious, was present atop its flaming skull. The skull sat above a gorget and obsidian breastplate, its pauldrons wisping with eddies of blue fire.
The cuirass was elegantly worked and formed a solid shape that covered what Romulus suspected was a body made entirely of the same phantasmal flames. A sapphire lay prominently near the top of the chest plate, with thick cuisses connecting to legplates with human skulls over the kneecaps. The armor was simple rather than ostentatious and spoke to a personality that valued function over form.
A Revenant Runeblade sat in the creature’s right gauntlet. Its blade was comprised of solidified blue fire emanating from the skull positioned in the center of its cruciform crossguard. In many ways, its blade was even simpler than Lightsbane''s, yet it emanated a terrible power despite its simplicity.
“At last you have come,” the entity said into the silence when Romulus halted meters from the throne, having found himself approaching without realising it. Its voice, his voice, was a thunderous whisper—a sibillant tolling of inevitable doom. His presence filled the chamber with power, ancient and unknowable, and an aura of pure might that sent goosebumps across Romulus’ skin.
“You knew I was coming?” Romulus asked, before instantly feeling stupid. It was a game. This was probably a scripted event. He tried to use [Examine], and received absolutely nothing in return.
Not a good sign.
“I knew She of the End would send someone eventually,” the creature answered in its haunting voice, seemingly oblivious to his attempts at Examining it. “The Dark Lady would not allow Herself to be chained for eternity. Death must be free for the Cycle to continue.”
“Who are you? What are you?” Romulus asked with genuine awe.
“I am the Revenant-King,” the undead monarch answered with words that seemed to shake the air around them. “Autarch of the Dark Lady, Crowned Power of Death, and Harbinger of the End.”
Its flaming skull cracked into a macabre grin, and Romulus felt his heartbeat spike.
“Are you prepared to die, Darian King?”
The Revenant King