A coach bearing a necromancer and his new apprentice trundled down the road. The coach’s roof shielded its occupants from the midday sun. It was spring currently; the sun’s light was already growing in intensity as the season progressed towards summer, and the wide highway the coach was traveling down had little in the way of foliage overhead to soften the sun’s gaze.
To the average onlooker the coach’s occupants may have looked like any other pair of mages if not for two facts: the coach was pulled along by an undead horse by now made up of nothing but bone and driven by no coachman, for a master necromancer could easily control his familiars remotely. That was nothing unusual; necromancy was a respected specialization. Every town worthy of the title was home to at least one.
Necromancers served primarily as undertakers. They could retrieve corpses, move them, and embalm them without ever laying a finger on the body. This eliminated any uncleanliness from the process, reducing the spread of disease as a result. As a result, necromancers were seen as a more hygienic alternative to mundane undertakers.
Even so, if that were all necromancers could do they might still have wound up just as much pariahs as ordinary corpse-handlers. Little disturbed a person quite so much as seeing the dead bodies of their loved ones puppeted around. What truly made necromancers respected was their next most well-known skill. Their ability to recall the souls of the dead from the beyond made necromancers utterly invaluable to society. A necromancer could give families a chance to say a final goodbye to their loved ones or settle matters of inheritance—there were points in Ennos’s history when entire wars of succession were averted thanks to a necromancer calling upon the soul of the previous ruler.
All of that meant that Orkis had nothing to fear as he returned home from a distant, nameless village, new apprentice Lilia in tow. She was an odd girl, and older than the typical apprentice at seventeen, but she held promise. Too much promise, in fact.
Despite being born in a village far too small to sustain a necromancer’s workshop, Lilia had taken an interest in the necromantic arts from a young age. Even after extensive questioning Orkis had yet to discern where she’d learned to raise the dead. Lilia might have simply been a prodigy. Either way, the girl had somehow tethered a soul to a dead rabbit at the age of five and she’d been an outcast ever since.
The denizens of Lilia’s village had little contact with necromancers. To them, Lilia was simply a creepy child whose “friends” were moving corpses. Her parents hadn’t approved, but they hadn’t abused her either. They’d spent years hoping that Lilia would eventually grow out of it; that she would eventually make some real friends and lose interest in her puppets.
When that didn’t happen, they realized Lilia would never live a normal life and began reaching out. Orkis wasn’t the first necromancer they’d contacted in the hopes of finding someone to take her in, but he was the first to take an interest. There was a key detail in the letter he’d received that had caught his eye.
“Master, I see a town ahead. Is that where you live?” Lilia asked for the fifth time since they’d set out. There was no town in sight. All Orkis could see, looking through the “eyes” of his skeletal horse, was a road that stretched out into the horizon, occupied by a few other carriages.
“Yes, child, that is where I live,” Orkis confirmed after taking a moment to sigh. She’d likely sighted Ethelton through her connection to one of her familiars. A cardinal. Lilia had raised that bird nearly a decade ago, but although it had long since lost its colors, she’d managed to preserve the familiar’s feathers well enough that it could still fly. Any novice necromancer could have managed that much, of course. If that were all Lilia had accomplished, though, then Orkis would never have given her parents’ letter a second glance.
It was the fact she’d created a familiar at all that was interesting. Not the degree to which she’d kept it preserved. It wasn’t a fluke, either, as two more familiars accompanied the coach from the outside. One was a bear that was more skeleton than zombie. The other was a bobcat with half of its skull exposed.
“I’ve been meaning to ask…where did you learn how to create familiars?” Orkis asked. In the seat across from him, Lilia tilted her head to the side.
“What’s a familiar?” she questioned in turn. Orkis scrutinized Lilia carefully, but he couldn’t detect even a hint of deception. She seemed to be genuinely lost.
“Your friends,” Orkis clarified.
“Oh! Why didn’t you just say so? Um, I’m not sure how to answer that, though. When I found them, they were empty. All I did was fill them up,” Lilia replied as if it should have been obvious. Orkis frowned.
“Do you mean to insinuate that you were able to see whether a body contains a soul or not from the start?” the master necromancer asked next. Lilia blinked in confusion.
“Of course. Can’t everyone?”
“No, child. That is a technique which should have been among my first lessons for you. I’ve never heard of someone being capable of it without instruction,” Orkis informed the young woman. He stroked his close-trimmed beard idly with two fingers as he considered his next question. “Tell me this: do you understand the difference between an undead thrall and one of your friends?”
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“What’s a thrall?” Lilia asked with the same tone and inflection as she’d used for every question so far. If he didn’t know any better Orkis might suspect Lilia was doing it on purpose, but she struck him as the type that had never learned what sarcasm was.
He sighed. “Very well; if we must begin there, then listen closely. A thrall is a corpse which has had a soul artificially tethered to it. Typically the soul of a similar creature so that it instinctively knows how to control the body. A bird’s soul for a bird’s body, for instance. That allows the thrall to move around without a necromancer having to puppet it directly.
“A familiar is a step beyond that. To create a familiar, you must tether the original soul to its own corpse. Locating and calling that soul from beyond is no simple task; many necromancers complete their apprenticeships before mastering it. Doing so allows a familiar to access its own memories, however. They are more intelligent. More autonomous. Able to follow complex or vague instructions,” Orkis explained. “Which brings me to my next question. Could you explain to me how you even located the souls of your familiars?”
“Isn’t that just where they belonged?”
For nearly half a minute Orkis just stared at Lilia. She didn’t even appear to comprehend the question. To her, the solution she’d arrived at was beyond obvious. She’d never even considered another method for raising the dead. From the very beginning Lilia had simply seen a corpse and decided the only thing to do was to place its soul back inside it.
And then, against all odds, she’d done it.
“I don’t know whether to be inspired by your talent or terrified by it,” Orkis admitted, further confusing the poor girl. He had no time to elaborate, however, as the town gates were drawing near. Orkis dug inside his pocket and retrieved his family seal. He commanded his familiar to halt when they pulled up close to the guard post, then lowered the window closest to himself with a wave of his hand.
“Master Orkis?” asked a guard clad in the baron’s colors. He sounded surprised, but Orkis paid it no mind as he flashed his seal. “Ah, confirmed. Proceed.”
A routine interaction. One Orkis had repeated many a time while making house calls to nearby villages. That was why he almost missed it when, as his coach pulled away, the guard cast a spell and then whispered four words into the air.
“Master Orkis is back.”
This, too, Orkis shrugged aside. Perhaps the guard knew someone that needed a necromancer’s services and wished to let them know of Orkis’s return. But Orkis’s coach had barely entered Ethelton before more unsettling signs began to pile up. A whisper here; a pointed finger there. Stares directed towards his coach. Traffic parted before him as if the townsfolk felt a need to give his coach a wide berth.
Had something happened in the time since he and Lilia passed through the previous town on their route? It was hard for Orkis to imagine what. Public opinion of necromancers had dropped in the early days of the war against Barkolt’s Dead Tide, but Orkis had striven tirelessly to dispel concerns and assure people Barkolt was an outlier. That conflict had raged for years now; it had faded from the forefront of peoples’ minds, aided by the fact that it was occurring on the other side of the continent.
Unless there had been a new development in the war. Something of consequence, even here. But what? It must have been colossal, as the public reaction this time was far more noticeable than the minor unease of the past. Orkis decided that he needed to get out in front of whatever rumors were spreading and calm the people.
Lilia kicked her feet idly as the coach rumbled on, oblivious to Orkis’s inner thoughts. He was certain there should have been signs on his face that might have clued Lilia in that something was wrong, but she hadn’t picked up on them. That was good. The less she questioned what he was about to do, the better. Hopefully he was just being paranoid.
Orkis reached out to a thrall in his workshop and bade it open a hidden door ahead of his arrival, then told another to open the doors to his stable. He was careful to close the stable doors behind him before leaving his coach, beckoning for Lilia to follow him.
“Come, child,” he ordered. She stepped down from the coach but hesitated.
“What about my things?” she asked. Orkis fought off an urge to sigh in frustration, realizing that leaving signs of her presence behind would be a mistake.
“Grab them quickly and follow behind me.” Nodding happily, Lilia grabbed her bags from the coach. Orkis led her through a door into the main part of his workshop. He didn’t have time to show her around. Instead he took her directly to his pantry, where a section of the floor had retracted into the wall to reveal a ladder leading down. It was no mere trapdoor—several feet of the building’s stone foundation had been moved aside.
“Lilia, you are to descend this ladder and await my return,” he instructed. She made a noise of confusion.
“What about my lessons?” she wondered, unaware of the danger she was in. But Orkis had no time to explain.
“This entrance to the shelter beneath my workshop can be opened only by a thrall I have hidden below the foundations. Your first task will be to override my control of it in order to open the entrance yourself. But you are not to emerge until I return or the supplies I have hidden away run out. If the latter occurs first, you are to tell no one that you are a necromancer,” Orkis told Lilia, barely managing to hide his impatience.
Fortunately, she asked no further questions. “Oh, okay! I mean, yes, master! I’ll do my best,” Lilia replied. She dropped her bags down the ladder and then climbed down after them, not a care in the world. Orkis waited until Lilia’s familiars followed her down before closing the entrance; it was a tight fit for the bear in particular, but that one was mostly bones and was able to squeeze through. It was still closing when he heard a knock on his front door.
“I will be with you in just a moment,” he called out in lieu of having a familiar open the door. Something told him that wouldn’t go over well at the moment. Once his panic room was hidden again, Orkis made his way to the front of his workshop and opened the door. Outside stood the baron’s son at the head of a group of men-at-arms. Behind them a crowd was forming. He couldn’t make out any words, but he felt the anger in their shouts.
“Master Orkis, I must ask you to step outside and answer my questions,” the lad commanded imperiously. Orkis raised his hands peaceably and put on a nonchalant smile, but he noticed that at the boy’s hip hung his father’s ceremonial sword.
“Of course. I will gladly tell you anything you wish to know,” Orkis replied.
He would tell them about anything but Lilia.
A Magical Journey Through Outer Space (Space ships and aliens- but with magic!)
Mistworld (Exploring a world stitched together by isekai!)
Only Death May Die (Fantasy world zombie apocalypse.)
Slaying Aliens and Infringing Copyrights (SCS Fanfiction) (A Stray Cat Strut Fanfiction)
Patreon! I've currently got the next ten chapters of Only Death May Die up there, and I've begun posting chapters of A Magical Journey Volume Three as well.
