The Necromancer's Folly

“I didn’t have a choice,” said the man with the staff. “I need these spirits for a dire ritual. You understand, ignispawn.”

Chiaro Arkenraye looked up at him through a haze of red. He felt Éabha’s last shuddering breath, held against him as she was. The only thing stopping him from leaping up and strangling the man with his own fancy robes. The only thing that had kept him tethered to this life up to this point.

Well, the good news was he had a new tether.

He blinked the ashes of sleep from his eyes and sat up. His nightmare–a memory, really–had reduced his camp to a crater of smoldering embers. Scowling at himself, he gripped the worn handle of his paintbrush and dipped it into his pot of magic.

“Pthalo Blue for water,” he said, and drew it out. He splattered the paint everywhere; they left his brush as strokes, but splashed as water, dousing the flames. Flames which were, despite the appearance of most of his magic, quite different; more tongues lashing fury on the world than the careful brush strokes of a painter. Nevertheless, they were put out all the same.

Good thing I thought to get that hellskin bag, he thought, reaching for his bag of possessions. He put on his change of clothes, then stood, swinging the bag over his shoulder.

He glared into the distance. In the mists, the form of a tower stood menacingly above the land, its shadow falling over him. Wasting no time, he strode toward it, keeping his emotions in check as he travelled lest his footprints start another wildfire.

Chiaro made it to the edge of the property by midday. The walls around it only came up to mid-thigh; he would have expected them to be taller, more foreboding. Perhaps made up of a darker black stone, owing to the way people viewed dark colors up here. Though, to him, lighter colors were far more sinister, so maybe the pale limestone was set for him.

The courtyard didn’t seem to be booby-trapped, but he took out his brush anyway.

“Dark Sienna,” he said, and dipped his brush. With one sweeping motion he drew in the air a vaguely feline shape. Drips of paint made up its whiskers, more paint dribbling down to form legs. It pounced from its spot in the air to the ground before him, looking up at him with glowing blue eyes matching his own.

“Check for traps,” he said, then stepped back.

The painted cat dipped its muzzle in response, then bounded away. It circled the yard, covering every square inch in droplets of brown paint. Several tripwires were triggered, throwing arrows and beams of flame across the property. Statues with bows were the most common culprit, and he nodded in appreciation of the use of art.

Éabha would have appreciated it too, he thought, his thoughts darkening. He felt his fiery hair heat up, and took a deep breath to calm himself. Not yet.

The painted cat bounded back over to him, though most of the paint had dripped off its invisible body, giving it an appearance almost like some ghostly tuxedo cat. He smiled, then put his brush to the tip of its nose.

“Thank you,” he said, and drew the magic–and the paint–back into the brush. The cat vanished, and he stood, striding down the path toward the door.

Locked. Of course. Or, rather, lacking a doorknob. He shoved on it, and it wouldn’t budge; and being made of stone he wouldn’t be able to just burn it down, even with painted magic.

Glancing to the side, he noticed two statues standing sentry on either side of the door. He curled his lip at the grotesque faces the sculptor had carved into them, though if he was really thinking about it, he didn’t think they were carved statues so much as petrified people. Those couldn’t be un-cursed except by killing the monster that did it to them, and even then the magic would be slow to fade from them, like most things involving stone.

He blinked, then peered at one of them. The statue had its arm outstretched. The limb wasn’t a human limb; clearly made of metal at one point, clockwork at its joints and iron bars for its bones. And, unless his eyes and the light were conspiring against him, there was a seam around its shoulder.

Once more he plucked the pot off his finger. It was a tiny thing, little more than a thimble, and to the uninitiated may look empty. He dipped his brush into it.

“Yellow Ochre,” he said, narrowing his eyes at the statue with the clockwork arm. “A lasso.”

Yellow paint dripped from the brush, and in the air he painted a rope; he’d had to work at this one his first time, studying how the knots looked and how to tie them. He couldn’t just whip something out of nowhere, after all; he had to know how it worked.

He gripped the end of the rope in his other hand, coiling it and eyeing the shot. He had to give it a couple of throws, but finally he managed to drape the loop around the wrist of the statue, then hauled it downward.

At first it didn’t budge, as if the statue was trying to decide if this counted as magical or not. He threw his weight into it, nearly sitting down before it finally, with a grinding noise that made him clench his jaw, bent downward.

The door opened inward, though as he let go of the rope it began to close again. Leaving the painted lasso dangling from the statue’s arm, he raced in before the door clicked closed behind him.

“Gods-damned puzzle doors,” he muttered to himself, glaring at it before looking around to take stock of the interior.

As always, his hair served as a dim orange-and-blue light despite the gloom. The room felt almost as tall as the tower itself, but he wasn’t worried about sightseeing. He looked up, narrowing his eyes. There, about halfway up, was a balcony, alight with a sickly green glow. His eyes followed a spiral staircase down to the ground level; there were rooms dotted along the path, tapestries decorating the walls between each. At the base, the stairs split into two paths, curving around a central fountain. No water flowed from the meticulously placed limestone, though it glistened with water regardless, the green of lichens lending an air of rot to the place. At the base, a pool glittered with an unearthly light, studded with crystals Chiaro knew to be the kind used in necromancy. A sort of quartz many people misnamed as “bloodstone” because of its murky red color; the man well-versed in magical stones would know it to be a Tartarus point, named after the place it was harvested from.

Expensive, unless you hazarded the trip to collect them yourself.

He started toward the staircase, then stopped. The fountain was still glowing, a soft green emanating from the red crystals. The two colors very nearly muted each other, but in this dark room it was easy to see. He tensed, then held his brush at the ready.

These things were active. Probably drawing power from whatever the owner of this tower was doing above. And as he watched, shapes extended from them, extricating limbs, blinking open eyes. Their forms began to solidify, but only just.

He didn’t wait around to watch, however. He took off up the staircase. He wasn’t here for these things, no matter how devoted they were to guarding the way.

Unfortunately they were faster than him. Much faster. He felt his leg yank back and he fell forward as he was dragged back down, yelping in pain as his nose hit the velvet-lined stairs. Well, at least there was a cushion.

“Viridian!” he snapped, dipping his brush. He’d landed at the top of the fountain, and as he painted green the lichens extended, becoming thorny vines and entangling the…

The…

He stared wide-eyed at the creatures he’d captured. The monsters were wyrms. Dead ones, obviously; a necromantic ritual wouldn’t exactly resurrect things back to life. The three ghostly figures were dropping rotted flesh from yellowed bones, scales peeling away, that green glow emanating from their eyes as they snapped fleshless jaws and flailed rugged talons at him. The vines entangled them, but he hadn’t thought before he stroked; they were trapped in the thorns, writhing angrily, tails whipping, teeth flashing.

Directly on the staircase he’d been climbing.

Narrowing his eyes, he considered his options. A vine cracked, but didn’t break–but they wouldn’t last long. They only really had until the paint ran out.

It was dark enough in here, though, perhaps he could…

“Mauve.”

Squinting one eye, he painted one tiny purple dot at a point up near the lit room, being careful to place it between the bars of the railing from his perspective. He wouldn’t want to end up off the edge of the stairs like last time. Then, that done, he spun in a circle, painting around himself.

The wyrms cracked free of their prison. He landed on the stone steps far above them, then pressed himself against the wall, waiting for the light below to fade. Wyrms weren’t the brightest under the best of circumstances, and definitely–ironically–not when they were reanimated as a necromancer’s glowing guard dogs.

Once the scrabbling died down, he took a deep breath, chancing a peek over the edge. The crystals were still glowing, but the wyrms were indeed gone. He checked his pot, noting where the indicator was on the side.

Not quite as much as he was expecting to be left, but he only really needed one more use of it, as long as the necromancer had done what Chiaro thought he had. Glaring at the glowing green emanating under the door above him, he strode forward.

He heard Éabha’s voice at his ear again. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “I wouldn’t have wanted this.”

He was silent, though her voice calmed him somewhat. He would rather not be calm; but he supposed he should save his real anger for the confrontation.

“You’re dead,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you would have wanted.”

He swung the door open. As he’d guessed, the noise he’d made below had alerted Istraethrum to his intrusion. A gaunt, sheet-white face, framed with a sleek black goatee and thinning black hair, glared at him from eyes glowing with the dead green of the ritual. The man’s robes were far more intricate than the ones he’d worn on that fateful day, studded with Tartarus points down the breast and lined with gold accents. He delicately placed a bookmark in the tome he’d been reading out of and stepped out from behind the altar.

The center of the room was outlined in a circle using simple white chalk, then studded with more of the death crystals, each connected to the others with a series of sweeping lines. At the center was the biggest specimen of that crystal Chiaro had ever seen. He narrowed his eyes, noticing something dark at the center of it. Was it…moving?

“I should have made sure you were dead,” Istraethrum said in a creaking voice, bringing his attention forward. “Your spirit with the rest would have made a much more potent elixir.”

Chiaro scowled. He wasn’t in the mood to make idle chatter. But those words… “The rest?” he demanded.

Istraethrum’s waxen wrinkles deepened, and he spread his arms wide. “What do you think I was collecting souls for, ignispawn?”

Collecting souls? His eyes fell on the crystal in the center of the circle again. His cold husk of a heart sunk into the pit of his stomach.

“What is that for?” he demanded.

Istraethrum regarded him, eyes not so much narrowed as hooded. “How do you feel about immortality?”

“Overrated.” He would know. “Ignispawn” like him weren’t restricted to the seventy-odd years granted to most earth-walking species of humanoid.

Istraethrum smirked. Chiaro’s hair felt like a bonfire atop his head as he restrained the urge to slap that smirk off his face.

“Succinctly put. Yes, boy, immortality is the goal of many of the unenlightened. You could throw a bone and hit some fool working on his own elixir of life. But…what is immortality in a world full of things that live for centuries?”

“Then why even bring it up?”

“Because those fools are, quite often, the type to think that if they spend a few coins now in the pursuit of immortality, they’ll have all the time in the world to make those coins back, and then some.”

Great. He’d been suckered into a monologue. Or, well, he supposed this was more of a dialogue, but it at least gave him time to get his bearings. “So your end goal is…what, exploitation? You did all this, torched several villages, terrorized the kingdom, for a few measly crowns?”

Istraethrum’s smile widened. “You’ve got half of it,” he said.

“You’ve congealed half the kingdom into this Tartarus crystal to sell some elixir of life in a convoluted get-rich-quick scheme.” Chiaro folded his arms. “What’s the other half?”

“It isn’t an elixir of life,” Istraethrum said. “Oh, it’ll make you feel wonderful, for a time. You’ll be glowing with radiance for the first couple of weeks or so. But the longer you drink it, the more you’ll rely upon it. And then, when you run out, when I’m inconveniently gone when you try to refill…well, let’s just say those wyrms you saw down there were not originally wyrms, the statues not originally statues. Earlier experiments, I should say. I did have to test it to get the potion right.”

Chiaro took a deep breath to control how wildly his hair was flaming now, tongues of it trailing down his neck.

“So, when you called them fools…”

“We must cull those of lesser intelligence to better our future,” Istraethrum said. “You, however, are clearly not a fool. You managed to get in here without a scuff on you. You took in at a glance what I was doing. You could join me. We’ll bring our world into a tomorrow we can be happy with.”

He narrowed his eyes. “A fool by whose standard? Yours?” he demanded.

Istraethrum’s face fell. “Of course,” he said. “I’ve been alive a long time, boy. I know the folly of mortals. I know the sins they’ve all committed. I know by which metric they should be judged.”

Chiaro thought about it. He glanced once more at the huge Tartarus cluster crystal. Éabha’s spirit was in there, swimming in the tar pit of that soul sludge. He could pull her out, he thought. Perhaps they could still be…

But no. Her body was dead, had died before the spirit left it. He could free the soul, but they’d never be together again. In the years after her death, he’d made an uneasy peace with that.

Still, he couldn’t leave her in there to be mixed into some killing drug.

“I’ve lived a long time, too,” he said, looking back up at Istraethrum. “Centuries. In all that time, I’ve only ever known one person that made me feel the rest was worth it.”

He took a deep breath, then held out his hand.

“Alizarin Crimson.”

He’d said it like he was introducing himself, looking up at the necromancer as he eagerly shook Chiaro’s hand. In a flash, though, he swiped the paintbrush across Istraethrum’s neck.

And the necromancer bled.

He screamed as the paint formed into a gash, lifeblood spilling from it over his fancy clothes, dribbling over the death crystals. One thing Chiaro had learned from his centuries: you never touch a Tartarus point with any part of the body.

Especially the blood of a living person.

He threw himself out of the room before the explosions started, but the force of it threw him back anyway, the metal railing catching him. His head took the brunt of the blow, however, and he blacked out.

He groaned as he came to. A hand touched his cheek, gentle and warm, smelling of the campfire he’d sat by so many years ago. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the pit full of smoldering coals, the sky full of stars, and Éabha’s green eyes smiling back at him.

He saw none of that. Instead he saw the wreckage of the necromancer’s ritual, stone bricks and shards of inert crystal lying strewn about. The window had been blown out, the altar was in splintered pieces, and Istraethrum’s body lay in a heap against the wall. No hand graced his face but the gentle touch of the breeze coming through the broken window.

For a moment, though, he’d felt Éabha’s spirit, perhaps thanking him for freeing her so she could pass on.

Chiaro stood carefully. He’d used the last of his pot, and hadn’t brought Titanium White anyway so he’d be hurting for a while. He glared down his nose at the remains of the necromancer.

Ritual stopped, spirits freed, necromancer dead. Chiaro could go back to wandering now, searching the world for some other tether. But he wasn’t in a huge rush to find one. For now, he glared down at Istraethrum’s pulverized body.

“Sorry, old man,” he growled. “But I didn’t have a choice.”