Renewed Grief

Aaron made another grave mistake.

Take it from someone who lost their world - no one gets years left with loved ones. No, they net a few days each year for a decade or two: birthdays, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Life doesn't grant you and your parents, siblings, and lifelong friends years. Life laughs at you and gives you days. So the next time you forget to call a loved one after getting distracted by something asinine: go fuck yourself. 

The river, its churnings illuminated with a ghastly glow from the full moon, babbled quietly save for a few splashes against the mud shore. The strong current's flow carried anything caught in its stream, from trash to trout, but Aaron needed the river's potential. He dipped his fingertips into the algae-murky water, cold slime clinging to his skin; Aaron shivered, but from the temperature or the sickening texture of the gunk on his hands, he couldn't tell. 

Scrutinizing the filth on his hands with his amateur magecraft, Aaron nodded in satisfaction, pleased with the river's wild mana. Just what he needed.

Aaron once made a grave mistake, a series of mistakes. He didn't call his little brother, Robbie. Frost would melt in the spring, the pavement would sizzle and shimmer their mirages of heat during summer, and then, suddenly, September would roll around for Robbie's birthday. Aaron would call and wish him well, exclaim that they wore Santa hats the last time they spoke and should try to find time to catch up. But then the calendars would become laden with trivial work-social events, and Aaron felt he had to attend for a leg-up in the promotion race. 

One day, Aaron couldn't call his baby brother anymore. 

Retreating from the river to the campsite - a generous term for his makeshift tent, propped up only by latching it to the hood of his pick-up - Aaron's approach silenced all of the wildlife's chirping and rustling. The hush felt eerie, alive. It reminded him of when the horror movie audience held their breath when they knew the monster lurked around the corner. Only now, the whistling wind's restraint and the forest's stillness were because of him. Aaron was the monster.

Hearing the news, it felt like a sucker punch when Aaron fell to the ground, breathless and crying. Boom. It's over. A piece of you is gone. Forever. Karma waggled its finger and shrugged, "You had your chance."

If he could, Aaron would reply with a finger of his own to Karma, saying, "I'm not like everyone else."

Indeed, the Karmacs retained a unique gift that, combined with the stubbornness of someone in the wake of grief, would prove terribly disastrous. Aaron Karmacs's family came from old, pure blood. The kind of blend that attracted the supernatural and, if he played his cards right, could grant him a proper chance to say goodbye.

When kid Robbie one day asked if their blood was racist, their mother doted, "No, sweetie; just think of it like adding too much to your palette. No one wants ginger with their creamer or wasabi with their cider." Aaron never thought much of it. Until Robbie died.

Do you recall all those tall tales of Medieval monsters, ancient dragons favoring royalty, and what have you? Well, they're bologne. Mostly. Survivors of supernatural events skewed a few key details, positing learned lessons and morals after the fact. Aaron and Robbie's parents told them that they'd keep their hands clean as long as they stayed away from the shit. To summarize many childhood occult lessons: don't do it.

Aaron made a mistake. He ignored the warnings and swiped any relevant text from the Karmacs's archives that he thought may help. Aaron haphazardly flitted every crumbling page over in his dim apartment when he deemed its secrets useless. At one point, the kettle on the stove screamed, and he grumbled his regret for choosing tea instead of tequila. It helped, however, to keep a sound mind when translating archaic Latin spells.

"Hexes, wards, alche- no, no, no. No, but that's interesting." Aaron had turned the page at astrology, "Huh, 'as the events occur, our energy traverses both time and cosmos, influencing the stars that we read for horoscopes'... Blah blah blah... 'By the time the light of the stars reaches Earth, our fortunes are no longer a preview of our future but a reflection of our near-present." Aaron shut the tome, coughing and waving away the dust buffetting by the pages. He nearly gave up for the night, but the residue hung in the air, caught in the light of a lamp just long enough to catch his attention. And it gravitated toward the third to last book in his shrinking stack.

When Aaron placed his hands on that book, his tongue tasted metal, his ears popped, and his vision blurred. He grinned, already knowing he had found the right book, but his body reflexively shunned any further contact with its contents. Aaron made a mistake by opening and reading that book. 

The book detailed untold ancient, archaic secrets. One of them, damningly, instructed Aaron on how to raise the dead.

Not getting a wink that night, Aaron devoured the details of the necromancy. He barely acknowledged the warnings. His ancestors knew the spell worked but never utilized such taboo power; Aaron deemed them cowards. Well, his suffering did. 

Underneath the tent, tarp, whatever, Aaron hovered his hand over the foldable table piled with food and supplies. He devoured the salty crackers and lean grilled chicken to deepen his mana pool for tonight and double-checked the spell's materials. You would think that magic, especially of this nature, would require a ridiculous list of ingredients, but Aaron found that, in a way, it acted like a modified summoning spell. Breaking physics came easy to magic; all one needed to displace matter was to pull the desired object from wherever it was in time and space and replace it with an equal amount of mass. Simple enough.

But binding someone's soul back to the realm of the living? Little more complicated. Luckily, the river could channel much of the extra necessities. The ancient Egyptians got one thing right: a river's flow is associated with the travel of the dead, just not the way they thought. 

Aaron needed an absurd amount of mana to call Robbie back, so much that if he tried to cast the necromancy on his own, then his body would shrivel like a raisin, drained dry of life. 

Exhilarated from the two doses of adrenaline Aaron hit himself with, his body vibrated as he trudged back to the river. His teeth chattering in excitement and fear, he felt - he knew - he would soon see his brother. Aaron's mana hummed, noticing everything, from each droplet of sweat on the back of his neck to the smell of grass, mud, animal scat, and something that smelled like ozone. Himself, probably.

Stepping into the riverbank, Aaron felt his skin prickle from the cold water, his footsteps slowing as he stepped further and further into the current; he felt the bed at the bottom gripping his boots as if something corporeal tried to slow him down. Waist deep now, Aaron began the spell.

The words and actions don't matter, at least to the observer. To Aaron, he memorized it until they rolled off of his tongue easier than his own name. To anyone else, it sounded like incoherent nonsense, like two audio tracks of a foreign language played over one another, each scratchy and growing louder and louder. Aaron felt the current slow, the moonlight weakening, and the air grow stale and rank with sulfur. He knew that the spell had begun to work. Aaron made the fatal mistake of not stopping. 

Despite the water beginning to form a frigid whirlpool around him, Aaron continued, gleefully smiling while he finished the last few lines of his spell. Upon the final note, something in the heavens cracked a BOOM that sounded like something heavy dropped and echoed its thud along a tall ceiling. But this thunderclap seemed to span the globe. 

Looking away from the dimming stars, Aaron turned his attention to the river, now a sorry shadow of its former self. It only reached his ankles now, and it looked milky and purple, as if poisonous. Eyes widening, Aaron couldn't believe he burned up so much mana; sure, he knew the river would suffer a little, maybe drop an inch, given it ran for miles. But this? A moment longer incanting the necromancy, the river would have dried entirely, and then the spell would have taken his mana as a substitute. 

"Aaron?" said a familiar voice. 

Aaron turned to find Robbie, confused and scared but alive. Aaron got his little brother back and began bawling before he embraced Robbie. Nervously laughing at first, Robbie's chuckle turned to a carefree tune, perhaps realizing that he had come back. Oddly enough, Robbie came back wearing the hospital gown he died in. 

Pulling away from the hug took Aaron great effort, as if a new gravity had formed between them. He said to Robbie, "Hey, Robbers."

Robbie rolled his eyes, "Hey, A. Uh, I'm a little confused. The last thing I remember... Shit, did I die?!" When Aaron nodded, Robbie retreated a half-step, his paling, terrified expression tugging heartstrings in Aaron's chest. "Aaron, you used magic? To bring me back?.."

Confused, Aaron spread his hands, "Y-yes, why wouldn't I? You were too young and I-" he fought a choked sob, "I never even said goodbye, Robbie."

Shoulders sagging, Robbie seemed to relax, but his tone betrayed his disappointment, "You used magic. I died, and you brought me back." Aaron's little brother locked eyes with him, shaking his head, "You shouldn't have done tha-" Robbie faltered. 

Aaron's body went cold, "Robbie?"

Robbie coughed once, twice, and then vomited blood; his head dropped down to look at his chest, his hands cupping at his heart. And then Aaron realized his mistake. He brought his little brother back with the condition that killed him. A fatal oversight.