Deus Necros

Ludwig let the silence hang for a breath longer, allowing the question to settle, then tilted his head very slightly. Not arrogance. Not challenge. Just measured thought. His voice came out low, matter-of-fact, but with an edge of grim understanding beneath it.

“There’s nothing that burns like envy,” he said. “Nothing that clings so deep it reshapes the soul. It’s never satisfied. Not with taking. It has to ruin.” He tapped his gloved knuckle lightly against the table. “Been there after all, you’ve seen my memories right?”

“I suppose, I saw how others, your peers, were quite envious of you, but that does not answer the fact you came to a perfect deduction of my… nemesis…”

“Didn’t get there yet, but I understand it. What you’re suffering… it reeks of that. Not grief. Not wrath. Something deliberate. Something that isolates, corrupts, deforms… out of spite.”

His eyes shifted, briefly, toward the bandages that concealed her form. “If I had to guess, it wasn’t a battle that did that., Not a punishment for a crime, or something you were born with. It was probably a curse unearned. And seeing you now, it was definitely envy. Envy of you. Maybe your beauty so you were deformed. Maybe your strength and power, so you were defamed a witch. And maybe what you became, and what they couldn’t. So, you were sealed away from the world for only they to stay in it”

He paused, letting his next words fall with care. “I’d wager you weren’t just the victim of envy. You were targeted by the Envious Death itself.”

For a moment, the air in the room shifted. It grew dense, not with heat or weight but pressure, like the breath before a landslide, the hush in a cathedral before the choir rises. The walls, once so still, seemed to flicker at the edges. Not visibly, but in sensation. As if something beneath the wood were trembling with laughter before the sound reached the surface.

Then she exhaled, and with it, came the laughter.

It began softly, a slight shake of her shoulders. Then it rose, cascading through the chamber in waves that bent the air itself. A laugh not of mockery, but of stunned, cathartic disbelief. Her veiled form trembled, and the curtains on the far wall rustled though no wind stirred. Her laughter became a storm, not loud in volume, but in effect, the bookshelves quivered, the flame in the hearth shimmered oddly, and even the table between them seemed to buzz faintly as if reality itself recoiled from the sound.

It wasn’t madness. It was recognition. As though Ludwig had said aloud a truth she herself had never dared utter.

“Necros,” she breathed at last, when the laughter finally dwindled to something manageable. “Necros is incredible.”

Ludwig raised an eyebrow. “How did we get to that conclusion?”

She leaned forward, resting her hands over the rim of her cup, voice hushed now, steady. “All of his apostles, every single one, is a power-hungry lunatic. That’s the usual story. Born strong. Gifted at birth. Made monsters through the blessings of a god who sees only potential in chaos. They are brutal. They are cunning. They know they are above others, and so they ascend without resistance.”

She held his gaze now, the veil of silk shifting with each breath. “But you, Ludwig Heart… you are the opposite. You began as nothing. A skeleton. A remnant. A creature that any man, any farmer with a dull shovel, could’ve destroyed the day you were reborn. You were a mistake. A fractured soul given breath through stolen arts.”

She paused.

“And yet here you sit, on the path to surpassing all of them. Your heroic strength is stolen. Your knowledge, patched together. Your soul, torn and re-threaded. And still, you climb. You learn. You endure. You reason. Necros saw in you what no one else did, and perhaps not even you see yet.”

Ludwig shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t call that comforting.”

“No. It isn’t meant to be,” she said, more gently now. “But it is true.”

A long breath passed between them.

Ludwig looked at her hands again, delicately folded, hidden in wrappings. “So. The Envious Death. Who is it?”

“It? No, who is she…”

Ludwig frowned, “I suppose unlike the other two I know of…”

“She wasn’t the same as them, they were far older than her, they were the concept itself, I mean Gluttony and Wrath, but her, she became Envy as I watched her grow…”

“Relative?”

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“Twin Sister…”

“Oh…”

“You couldn’t deduce that one, could you,” she laughed.

“I’m still reeling from the idea… that an Usurper was actually given birth to…”

“Born of the same mother. Same power. But where I was content to build, to heal what others destroyed… she sought to possess. Every art I mastered, she wanted. Every spell I crafted, she tried to imitate. But when her own limits failed her, envy took root. And from that root came rot. She became something else.”

Ludwig’s gaze didn’t waver.

“She didn’t just want my gifts,” the witch continued. “She wanted to unmake me. To ensure I could not exist in a world where she was lesser. And so, she cursed my body. Unraveled my presence from the world. Sealed me here, in this pocket, this sliver of suspended time, where I could do no more good. And where I would be forgotten.”

Her hands trembled just slightly.

“That is what envy does, Ludwig. It cannot stand rivals. It cannot bear to see others thrive. It doesn’t hate. It hungers.”

For a moment, neither spoke. The fire continued its silent flicker. Somewhere outside, beyond the temporal veil, time likely stood still.

Then Ludwig asked, “So what now? You want me to kill your sister?”

“Impossible, for you right now so no,” she said. “Not yet. You will cross her path in time. Not because of me, but because of your own journey. When you do, when the moment arrives, you’ll know what must be done. And you will have to choose.”

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