1) Necromancer

It seems to me now that my life really should not have been the way it was. I was the eldest son of a very wealthy family…...at least; they were wealthy before the famine. All their money was dwindled away during it. The money seemed as though it might run out because of the famine but my father, the bastard, became so worried by this that he took on heavy drinking and all of the money we had was diverted to his need to be in a state of perpetual drunken stupor.

Aside from that, I don’t remember much about my family. I know I had three younger sisters. I had a younger brother, I think, but he caught his death of a cold. Lucky bastard. One of my sisters died from hunger. I’m not sure about the others. It’s all very blurry to me. I was quite young, after all, when Master Slade took me away from them.

My memories of that day are quite clear, despite the haze of all my other memories of that time in my life. I still see it some times when I close my eyes and try to sleep. The rain had let up and there was mist every where. And corpses. Lots of people were dieing because of the famine. There had been so much rain for so long…..nothing could grow, it all drowned. Master Slade was riding through in coarse black robes on his great horse, a creature that could’ve carried on the night on its shoulders, and behind him the dead were rising and following him mindlessly. It was like the grim reaper himself was riding through the village.

I was never quite sure why he chose me for an apprentice. He never really talked about it. He might’ve seen something in me………might’ve just felt sorry for me. Whatever it was, he held out his hand and I took it. He pulled me up onto the great black mammoth of a horse and carried me out of the village and to his home.

His house was just across the river from the village. At least, the land he owned was just across the river. His home was some way away from the river. In the space between the water and the building, there were graves. As we rode past the raised mounds that were these graves, the earth began to stir. I remember vividly the sharp fear in my lungs. Master Slade just pulled the horse’s reigns to speed him up. After we were a bit away from it, the grave would stop moving. Though it didn’t really matter much, as the graves we had gotten next to had begun to stir.

I buried my face in Master Slade’s robes and trembled with fear. Without a word he sped his steed up. The rain began once again. That horrible rain, straight from the mouths of demons that brought only death to the land………I began to cry.

Master Slade lived in an old building with a wooden frame and stone walls. It was old and dusty and there were cracks in the foundation. The stained glass windows, huge upon its front, were like the eyes of weeping women. It was a giant place……..entirely haunting in the heavy rain and mist. The horse galloped up to the door with muddy hoof beats and stopped just under the overhang of the roof. Master Slade dismounted and then helped me off the great beast of a horse. He took me by the hand and led me in while his horse tossed its head and snorted impatiently.

We walked into the house just a short way and then Master Slade stopped and let go of my hand. He kneeled down beside me. The hood of his robe cast impenetrable shadows over his face. I trembled and rubbed the hand he’d been holding. His skin was so cold……..my hand was freezing…..

“Are you…….very afraid of me?” He asked. His voice was very light and seemed to come from very far away.

I nodded slightly and took a step back. There was unfathomably long pause before he spoke again.

“Why?” He finally said.

“B-because,” I said quivering. “You’re a d-demon straight from hell……..”

He reached up his hands—large hands, covered in cuts with that strange symbol carved on the back—and pulled back the dark hood of his cloak, allowing the feeble illumination from the few torches in the room to shine on his face. He had a youthful face, stuck in a state of happiness that seemed almost to be forced. His hair was a deep black that shone blue where the light glanced off. His bangs fell down to his eyebrows and were pushed away from the centre of his forehead where the same mark from his hands was carved deep. His eyes were the same crystal blue as a shallow brook of slow moving water. To see them focused on me made me more nervous than ever.

“I want to make this perfectly clear, childe,” he said with his clear blue eyes on mine, gripping my shoulder with one of his scarred hands. “I am no demon. I am a man of magic, a Necromancer, but I am far from a thing of evil. Please understand that.”

I shook, half from the cold of the room and half from anxiety. He continued to stare at me.

“Are you still afraid?” he asked softly.

I stared at the floor and bit my lip. I shook my head passionately.

“Don’t lie,” he said.

I stopped shaking my head.

“Yes,” I said in a voice that was barely a voice at all. “Yes, but…only a little…”

I could feel his eyes on me. After a minute he stood.

“That’s fine,” he said. “You’ll feel as you’ll feel. It’s not something that can be held against you…I need to put Steorra in the stable…wait right here. I’ll show you to your room when I’m done…”

He smiled and pulled his hood back over his head. He walked slowly back to the door and then stopped.

“It’s a bit embarrassing,” he said. “But I forgot to ask your name.”

“My name is Raettonus, sir,” I said staring down.

“Raettonus, eh?” He turned back towards the door. “That’s a very unusual name…I like it.”

He opened the door and walked out into the rain. I stared after him for a moment. When he had disappeared completely I looked around the large, high-ceilinged room. There was a wide stair case a bit behind me and several open door ways. The stone walls were covered with shelves that reached almost to the ceiling. These were piled with heavy tomes, ancient texts, dusty scrolls and occasionally a few odd items.

One such item was a knight’s shield. It was red and black with a crimson gryphon rearing upon it. The light slid over its rim like water…wood set in metal, perhaps? Yes, yes. I could see the bolts in the corners where it had been joined to the metal.

I had, at this point, walked over to the shield. I ran my fingers over its smooth surface and traced the outline of the gryphon carved there. I ran my nails through the thin line that was its mouth.

“Careful, it may bite you,” the necromancer said behind me.

I jumped and he laughed good-naturedly. He was very stealthy…I hadn’t even heard him open the heavy door when he came back in.

“Come on, then,” he grabbed a torch off the wall and started up the stairs. I ran quickly to his side and followed him to a room in the upper most level of the manor.

---

Master Slade was the kind of person that collected objects of strange and varied natures. He had travelled much and met many people. He showed me these trinkets proudly.

“This,” he said as we stood in a large underground room where many of his treasures were kept out of the way. “This is a medallion of luck. It saved my life more than once, you know.”

I looked at the wooden pentagon and its strange designs and its worn leather strap. He smiled and set it on a cluttered table.

“What’s that one, Master?” I asked pointing to a shabby metal pendant.

“That was given to me by an old vagabond. He said it helps fatigue but I’m not so sure…” he picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

He moved his other arm, the one with the torch in it, slightly. The light of the flame caught on something and it gleamed in the corner of my eye. I turned and pointed to it.

“Master…what’s that?”

He turned as well and looked at the dusty old prism. He set down the damaged pendant and put his hand on his hip.

“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s nothing really…”

“Nothing?”

“Well,” Master Slade shrugged as he walked over to it. He placed his hand on the glassy side of the prism. “A very dear friend of mine gave it to me when he was on his death bed. He was a magician, the most powerful I’ve ever met. He gave this to me and he told me its secrets. But his illness made him delirious and I really could make any sense of what he said…of course he did give me his own journal on how to work it…but I can’t figure that out either.”

“What does it do, Master?” I asked getting so close to the strange object that the tip of my nose almost touched it.

“He said it moves through time,” he answered wiping some dust from it. “Not just time but physical distance…”

He reached up into a nearby bookshelf and pulled a book with a mark on it that I had never seen before. He opened it and began to read.

“I walked on the rainbow over the water. It was here that women with seashell eyes told me of the kingdom cradled in waves with the five elemental pillars and the warrior that commanded them…” he shook his head and closed the book. “It goes on like that for a bit and then there are some weird characters the origin of which is a mystery to me….”

He held out the book to me and I took it. I studied the strange characters Master Slade had spoken of. They were indeed odd, more or less a random jumble of shapes. After a moment I handed it back to him and he replaced it upon the shelf.

“Maybe one day I’ll figure the blasted thing out,” he said. “It might take me the rest of my life, but one day it’ll come clear to me. I’m sure of it…”

He smiled and walked over to another shelf.

“Look here,” he said. “This is a memory adjustment potion a witch woman gave me…it can respond to a spoken command before being swallowed. You just tell it what you want to forget and that’s what’ll happen…”

“Amazing,” I said.

“Yes, quite,” he agreed before moving on to another treasure.

---

The first time Master Slade tried to teach me to raise the dead, I fainted from overexertion. The second time I vomited violently. But on the third try I was able to get the corpse, a dead rabbit, to stand. I was so surprised that I lost my focus and it fell back to the ground.

“That’s okay,” Master Slade said patting my back. “Don’t worry. It gets easier with practice. When you get better, when you get older, you’ll be able to make the dead stand with barely a thought. You won’t need to focus so much…but it’s okay. You’re doing well…”

He pointed to the rabbit and it stood up on its hind legs, it eyes rolled back in its head.

“It’s important that you understand how Necromancy works,” he said. “There are two types, really. Quality raisings and quantity raisings….”

“Quality…?”

“Yes,” he closed his large hand and the rabbit went limp once again. Master Slade sat down and, leaning against a nearby gravestone, he motioned for me to do the same. “The type of Necromancy that produces thinking corpses is made for quality, but it is a very lengthy process and is very…restrictive. It involves pulling their souls back to earth and binding them, once again, to their bodies.”

“How long does that take, Master?”

“Well…it really depends on how long they’ve been dead and whether they’ve crossed over correctly,” Master Slade answered, casting his gaze into the clouds. “If they exist as a ghost, they won’t have gone too far physically and no where spiritually. Ghosts are generally the quickest to bring back. If some one has just died, it’s also very quick to bring them back, up to about a week. After that the time required increases steadily. Anyway, to pull a ghost back to his body takes about half an hour.”

“And the other type, Master?” I asked. “What’s the other type of Necromancy?”

“The other type does not involve the person’s soul,” Master Slade answered. “It’s the same thing we did with the rabbit. In this practice it is the Necromancer’s own energy that is used to raise the dead. As such, a powerful Necromancer can easily raise a dozen or so corpses at once. But this way does drain the Necromancer of his own strength and after a while, depending how much energy he had in the first place, he must stop and rest to recover from the strain.”

“So, then,” I said slowly. “The idea is to reattach the soul to the body, or to attach our own energy?”

“That’s exactly it, Raet,” he said smiling.

“But, Master, how do you find the soul to reattach it?”

“Well…,” Master Slade put his hands on his hips and looked up into the cloudy sky. “It’s hard to explain, really….you sort of half to…feel it out with your energy…It’s hard at first, but…”

He shrugged.

---

A complete and ultimate mastery of Necromancy was not the only magical skill Master Slade had. As a matter of fact, more often than I had seen him raise the dead, I had seen him conjure things. He conjured items and elements.

He liked to conjure water. He just held out his hands and they’d fill with water. Every now and then from out of nowhere a black and red vase with a gryphon on it would appear in his hand, filled with crystal clear water. This was Hydromancy, his favourite magical art.

He tried to teach me once. Just once.

We went to the river that wound between us and the village I had came from. He told me to try and stop the water moving. I tried but nothing happened save for the water climbing up the bank a few more centimetres.

Master Slade frowned.

“Alright,” he said. “Why don’t you just try bringing it out of thin air?”

I nodded and concentrated on it, the way he had told me for conjuration, calling the element to me. After many minutes, my fingers became slightly moist. That was all.

He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Sorry Raet,” he said. “But I think you might just be water proof.”

“Oh,” I said and looked at my slightly moist hand. “Is that good or bad, Master?”

“Well, that really depends on your attitude,” Master Slade answered and smiled broadly. “I couldn’t really see you making rain and rivers anyway. You’re just not that person.”

Master Slade had been a knight before he became a Necromancer. He told me often of his travels as an armoured warrior on horseback. He had been a knight only for three years before he began to teach himself magic. After two more years, he quit thinking of himself as an actual knight and began thinking of himself as a Hydromancer; for that was the art he loved most passionately.

He had gone wandering for a whole year, simply searching for other sorcerers so that he may learn from them. It was from the people he met on this journey that he had acquired many of his books and mystic relics.

He gave much credit for his skill in Necromancy to an elderly man he had met, the one who gave him the strange prism on his death bed, a man named Brigham whose son was a knight right along side Master Slade.

I remember when I first met Brigham’s son. He had come looking for Master Slade one spring afternoon. I was outside feeding Master Slade’s horse, Steorra, when I heard the beats of a horse’s hooves pounding the hard path. I walked around the side of the building and peaked out at the path.

Sure enough, a fully armoured horse was trotting along the path. Upon its back was a man about the same age as my Master, covered in mail and steel plate armour with a lance strapped to his back. He stopped just as the graves ended and looked around. Then he began forward again, this time at a slow walk. He stopped again before reaching the structure and looked around. I pressed myself against the stone wall and began to slowly inch away from the strange man, back around the building but before I could get around the corner he caught site of me and trotted over.

“Young man,” he said waving a hand to make sure I saw him. Of course with the clinking of his armour and the heavy hoof beats and hard breathing of his horse, I couldn’t have been unaware of his presence if I hadn’t any eyes.

“Young man, I’m looking for Sir Slade,” he said. His eyes were a deep brown, rather like the mud of much travelled paths on rainy days. His face was red, rather like he’d been drinking, though he did not smell of alcohol so I simply assumed him to be one of those people who were born with a strange blush painted on their cheeks.

I stared at him for a few minutes and he stared back, waiting for me to respond. His horse flicked its tail and ears impatiently and when it became evident that I had no intention of speaking, he continued.

“I am Sir Rhodes, son of Brigham the magician,” he said. “I am an old friend of Sir Slade. Is he here, boy?”

I continued to stare at him silently.

“Err…” he looked around a bit uncomfortably. “Well, then…I’ll check back later…”

Master Slade came upon us at that moment and stopped where he stood. He called out, “Why, Sir Rhodes. What brings you here?”

The man turned his horse slightly so as to look at Master Slade. He smiled. “Sir Slade, it’s been too long. Too long.”

Master Slade looked him up and down for a moment before asking, “Are you…expecting some sort of battle, old friend?”

“Eh?” Rhodes looked down at his armour and shrugged. “Well, you can never be too careful these days. People are rouges this far out. You get out this far into the wilds and you find all the bandits lurking around every tree and in every ally way.”

“Is that a fact?” Master Slade asked as he smiled good-naturedly.

Rhodes nodded gravely. “Oh, yes,” he muttered.

“Well, I’m very…” Master Slade paused for a moment. “…sorry to hear that.”

“Actually, I’ve come down here to take care of some thieves south of here,” Rhodes said. “Apparently they’ve been a hell of a problem. As I was riding down, it occurred to me that you live here…”

“Are you asking that I join you, Sir Rhodes?” Master Slade asked with a very slight smile. “I have no interest in battle, as you do. Aside from that, I’m ill equipped. I lost my sword a couple years back in an assailant’s side.”

“Haven’t you still got a lance?” Rhodes said crossing his arms.

“Well, I do,” Master Slade said hesitantly. “Though I’d feel rather bad about using such a high impact weapon on a man who is without any armour to protect him.”

“Come now, Slade,” Rhodes said waving a stubby finger. “These men are ruffians and scoundrels. They kill and loot. Besides, death is death, no matter how what the force of the weapon that causes it is.”

“I suppose,” Master Slade said at last. He turned to me. “Raettonus, go get my lance. It’s beside the bookshelf.”

“Which one, Master?”

“There’s only one lance in there, Raettonus.”

“I meant which shelf…”

“Shelf? Oh, yes, shelf. Down the hall to the right, past the second door. That shelf.”

After I returned with Master Slade’s lance he was already on Steorra. He took the weapon from me and set off. It was two days before he returned, and when he did he was injured, dirty and alone.

“What happened to you, Master?” I asked him. “Where’s Sir Rhodes?”

Master Slade’s clothes were heavy with dirt and blood. There was sweat all over his cheeks and his usually shining black hair was matted. Blood dribbled down from the symbol, the Double Omega, on his forehead.

He handed me his lance. “Go put that back where I had it, Raettonus. I’m going to go lay down. It was a tough fight.”

That was the only thing he ever did say about it.

---

Master Slade was happy. Not really, but he wanted me to believe it. He wanted to believe it. He smiled. He always smiled. When I looked at the world with fists clenched, hate swelling in my chest, he smiled and put his cold hand on my shoulder. “It’s alright. They don’t know any better.”

“They do, though, Master,” I’d say to myself. But they don’t….I know they don’t. It’s easier to believe they do…easier to hate them when I believe they know why they throw rocks at me, try to chase me away. And, damn it all, I need to hate them Hatred is an anaesthetic. A damn good one, too.

But Master Slade did not hate those people. He did not hate any one or any thing. He just smiled and tried to believe that every thing was fine. On the surface, he looked convinced it was, but…Those eyes. They were a world of sorrow, irises that wept for the injustice done to their owner. And some times when he smiled I could not bear to look into his eyes because it tore my heart to look as such unwilling grief. And when ever he said that things were fine, that every thing was alright, I found myself hating him in that instant.

There had only been two occasions when I saw anger touch that face. It is the first time I wish now to discuss because the second time…well; it’s really some thing for later.

I believe I was nine at the time, but I could’ve been as old as twelve. Small details such as age become slurred after a life lived as mine was. Though, whenever it was, I remember the day clearly. Master Slade had been busy with some magic trinket he was trying to get to work. Left to my own devices for the afternoon, I wandered out to the river, where I sat and threw rocks at fish.

Tiring of that, I waded into the river, for it was rather shallow where I was, and splashed around a bit before, under the warm afternoon sun, I crawled to the nearest bank and fell asleep. I had happened to fall asleep across the river from Slade’s property.

After a while I was awoken by a couple of boys about my own age. They had been coming down the road in a loud and clumsy fashion, laughing and shouting and hurling rocks into the river.

“Hey, what’re you doing, sleeping here?” one of the boys asked me as I sat groggily up.

I gave him no reply. Instead, I yawned tiredly and lay back down.

“If you don’t go,” said the second boy. “That demon’s going to come out and eat your soul.”

“Huh?”

“You know the one,” said the boy crouching down and leaning in close. “The necromancer…”

He stretched the word out in a way that made my muscles stiffen. I sat up.

“He’s the reason people die,” the first boy said, looking out towards Master Slade’s home with hate in his eyes.

“He is not!” I said getting fiercely to my feet.

“Yes he is!” The boy responded poking me in the chest, where the collar bone meets the sternum. “He brings death upon our land and then the corpses rise and follow him out here! He’s a demon and that’s the only reason he wasn’t driven out years ago!”

“Shut up!” I yelled as the blood rushed into my face.

The second boy, now sitting on the grass where I had been, gasped. “Hey! This guy is the demon’s boy! The one they talked about being taken from the village years ago!”

The first boy looked at me closely. “I think you’re right…To stand up for such a vile creature, he must be his puppet…”

“Shut up…”

“Horrible famine bringing zombie herders,” the boy said. “You and your master should go back to the depths of hell and just die there…”

“Shut up…”

“You’re abominations, you and that demon necromancer. Horrible bastard, bringer of only strife and misfortune…”

“Don’t talk about Master Slade that way!”

I clenched my hands into fists at my side and bit down so hard my teeth felt like they were breaking.

“Why not? He’s a no good, hate filled piece of goat heart, and he should be stoned.”

Control past me, I punched that boy so hard in the mouth that blood gushed from his nose as he fell to the ground. As soon as he hit the ground, I was right on top of him, punching him in the face until blood covered my hand. When I had thoroughly distorted his face I pulled a small knife from my belt.

I pulled my arm back to stab that boy in his throat, when suddenly I was knocked off of him from behind. I got quickly to my feet, turning as I did. I expected to see the boy’s friend but I didn’t. His friend had fled when I knocked him to the ground.

Master Slade had been the one who had saved that boy from death. The boy, spattering blood with every breath, scrambled up and ran swiftly away, thankful for his life or, perhaps, fearful of Master Slade’s presence.

And now, looking upon the grotesque face of my angry master, I was filled with dread. I did not know I had done any thing wrong.

Master Slade stepped suddenly towards me and lifted me to his eye level by the front of my shirt.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” He hissed, his face almost right against mine.

“But, M-Master, he—.”

“It doesn’t matter what he said, what he did,” Master Slade said. He threw me to the ground hard enough to knock all the air out of my lungs. “You should never kill another person unless your own life is directly threatened! You don’t kill out of anger!”

His voice shook my ears and I rolled into a ball and cried.

“I’m sorry, Master! I’m sorry! But he—.”

“There are no excuses for trying to kill some one!” Master Slade shouted. He kicked me in the side and I trembled and closed my eyes.

I could hear his angry breathing. It was weighted with rage. After a minute it lessoned and slowed back to normal.

“Come on,” he said in his usual calm and soothing voice. He picked me up and carried me across the river. “Let’s go home…”