Necromancer’s Nightmare
When I was a child I lived for heroic literature. I had three different versions of the tale of Kasalorn Kinsaver, and I had each nearly memorized. And now… I have become everything Kasalorn fought to prevent. Children are idiots, and I was no exception.
–Kelestor Sar, “Journal”
Kelestor Sar looked out over the sleeping city and thought about his love/hate relationship with the Haskalads. They had made him rich and powerful; their parties were marvelous, their slaves were fabulously well trained, and they all but worshipped warp. But for all of that, their petty cruelties and incessant political gaming just made him tired. It was time to gather up his possessions and find a place of his own. He didn’t want much, really. A few square miles, a few dozen slaves, and isolation. But isolation was the great trick.
There was a warpstorm forming in the distance, and Kelestor thought that some lucky necromancer must have found a shape shifter to drain. He looked back at his borrowed bed, half expecting to see the slave girl sleeping there, but she had returned to her pallet at the foot of his bed once he had finished with her. He thought that she embodied most of both the good and the bad of the Haskalads: she was a nearly perfect servant; she was attentive, thorough, fastidious, and almost painfully eager to please. She even tried to give the impression that she enjoyed and took pride in her work. But if you looked into her eyes… There were wells of terror in her eyes, along with that constant plea: Please don’t beat me; please don’t maim me; please don’t kill me.
He looked back out the window; the warpstorm was either much larger or much closer, perhaps both. He watched the lightning flash its unnatural colors across a sky that seemed to occasionally open onto the Void itself. He could just begin to feel the pleasant pulse of the warp in the pit of his stomach.
Of course, that reminded him of his great secret, the fraud that haunted his every movement among the Haskalads. They assumed that he was a master necromancer, just because he knew more spells than any of them did, just because he had learned the theory behind magic and not just a list of spells. But for all of his power, he had never drained a single shapeshifter.
The Haskalads assumed that he must have been a great power at home, because of his knowledge; they didn’t know he had been driven from home in fear for his life when his peers had found out he was practicing warp magic. He had been given one chance to forswear warp forever or die, and he had chosen instead to abandon family and friends to take his chances with the Haskalads.
He couldn’t give up the warp. From the first time he had twisted a spell into one of the permutations his instructors had specifically forbidden, he had been hopelessly hooked. It didn’t matter how much harm it did to the world around him; it didn’t matter how much it hurt afterward, and it frequently hurt a great deal. While the warp rush was on him, it was simply too wonderful for words.
He knew how to drain a shapeshifter, of course; he had long since worked out the intricacies of the death drain, and the month long ecstasy of the soul drain. He even was fairly certain that he knew how to make a soul gem in which he could store the stolen energy. But in the Celestial Empire, shapeshifters were protected from necromancers, and in the Haskalad Empire, shapeshifters were reserved for powerful nobles.
The storm was nearly overhead now; a bolt of green and purple lightning reached forward and hit the roof above his head. The building shook, and Kelestor was momentarily deafened by the roar of the instantaneous thunder. He felt a rush of warp run through him, and he grinned. As his hearing returned, he noticed odd sounds coming from the room behind him, and he turned to see a unicorn struggling to free herself from the wreckage of her bedding and rise to her feet.
He reached out a tentative hand and said, “Stop. Just relax, and try to shift back. Everything will be fine.” He knelt beside the girl and tried to comfort her, tried to coach her to change back to her original form, tried to be as friendly and as helpful as he could. But even as he was at his most charitable, his mind was saying, “No one else knows she’s a unicorn. She’s a Haskalad slave; she’s been assigned to you; as long as no one knows she was a unicorn, you can kill her for any reason you want, and no one will think twice about it.” And the storm raged overhead.
The girl was back in her own form now; Kelestor helped her to his bed and wrapped her in the blanket. He kissed her forehead tenderly, and assured her that he would be able to keep her safe. Once they got through the sweep for new shapeshifters that followed every storm, he would buy her from his hosts (her owners) and he would take her away to a Valerian enclave that he knew about. And while he talked, and comforted her, he found his belt dagger and quietly drew it from its sheath. And the storm raged overhead.
He sat beside her on the bed and brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. It was such a pity, really. She was a sweet girl, quite pleasant to look at, and she had tried so very hard to be good at the job that had fallen to her. Kelestor ran his hand up the back of her neck and knotted his fingers into her hair. He shifted on the blanket and bent down to kiss her softly on the lips. Her arms and shoulders were pinned by his weight on the blanket; her head was held firmly by his hand in her hair. He looked into her eyes, smiled lovingly, spoke the key phrase of the death drain, and cut her throat.
Kelestor felt a warp rush that made all of the others fade to shadows; it felt so good that he was certain that he would explode from the pleasure. A second bolt of lightning hit the roof above his head, and suddenly he WAS exploding, and the pleasure to the point of pain had just become pain, and more pain. The girl’s expression turned from horror to confusion just before her eyes glazed over; he threw her body away from him, stood and clamped his head between his hands, and roared in pain. Something was in his way, restraining him; he thrashed against it, and it shattered. The room was on fire, but it didn’t seem to matter; he kicked and thrashed his way to the window and threw himself through it.
It seemed like every bit of pleasure he had ever drawn from a warp spell was demanding its price in pain twice over and all at once. He waited for the impact with the ground to smash him straight into the void, but instead he caught himself on wings he did not remember summoning. He climbed into the storm at a muscle burning pace, screaming in pain as he did so.
Impossibly, the pain was still building. He had long since been certain that it could not get any worse, and yet it continued to build, and he had to get away from it. He saw the nexus of the warp storm below him, and he turned to dive into it, and he remembered one forbidden spell outcome that he had known better than to investigate for a hidden warp spell; it was too obviously simply fatal. Even as the pain continued to build in his body, he cleared his mind of any concept of location and twisted his thoughts into the patterns of a teleport spell. He hit the energy ball at the center of the warpstorm, and teleported to nowhere.
Kelestor returned to consciousness and little else. He had no awareness of his body, and all of his senses were disturbingly quiet. He wondered if this were the void, and wondered how long it would take his consciousness to disintegrate. Of course, since he wasn’t inclined to boredom, he attempted to entertain himself as best he could, with only the contents of his own mind to work with. His life had not been long, but it had been fairly full, and he had read a great many books.
He soon realized that there was no satisfaction in anything that lacked a strong narrative, but his memory held several novels, a few biographies, and of course his own life. It disturbed him that when he laid the narratives side by side, he liked his own story least. He had unquestionably been a villain, and a rather lackluster villain at that. He would have to do something about that if he ever got out of this whatever it was.
It was not completely silent; there were occasional sounds dimly heard, and other odd flashes of sensation, but they seldom lasted for very long, and he could not make sense of them. He did find, however, that three new stories were being added to his collection. One of them was yet another retelling of the war between Elethay and Jikadell. It bothered him that his sympathies were with Elethay, and yet he had lived under Jikadell’s banner.
Another of the new tales was the story of Valaria the heretic, and the third was the story of an amnesiac orc whose moral resolve was absolutely terrifying. Kelestor admired him, and fervently hoped he would never meet him. He was fairly certain he could kill the orc, if it came to that, but he was also fairly certain it WOULD come to that, and that would be a shame.
There were voices in the distance again, and as always Kelestor concentrated on them; this time he found he could actually hear what was being said.
“Because we NEED a doorway; it’s in the nature of the exercise,” said a cultured male voice.
“And the universe will conform itself to our needs?” asked a gruff male voice.
“Not the universe, no,” said the cultured voice. “Just this odd little piece of it. And I suspect that things would go easier if you would relax and believe in it.”
“You want him to believe in what he sees?” asked a female voice. “When he knows that it isn’t real?”
“You’re not helping,” said the cultured voice. “Do you want this to turn into a discussion of metaphysics? For us, at this moment, what we see is absolutely real. It’s just a little more malleable than the world he’s used to.”
Kelestor found that if he focused on a single speaker, he could get a sense of the person. Though they all seemed to be humanoid, the cultured voice was a dragon; the woman was a unicorn. The gruff voice… the owner of the gruff voice had avoided classification, somehow. Kelestor wondered what that meant.
“Here, you see?” said the dragon. “A doorway. And behind it… Fascinating metaphor, Quill. This should be interesting.”
“Excuse me?” asked the gruff voice, as Kelestor realized that this might be the orc from his story.
“We are in a labyrinth lined with books. It must be a metaphor for the way you see your own mind,” said the dragon.
“Do you have any idea how Ravin died?” asked the unicorn. “I’m beginning to think someone may have stabbed him to shut him up.”
The dragon laughed, and the gruff voice answered, “We could ask him, but then we would have to listen to the answer.” There was more laughter.
“I thought we were going to run into nightmare creatures,” said the gruff voice.
“Do you have nightmares?” asked the dragon. “We are trying to find the girl, and set her free. Anything else we run into is just your own mental clutter, and there seems to be precious little of that. Probably the result of your memory loss.”
The girl? Kelestor wondered about that. If they were looking for the unicorn girl he had killed, then they were probably also looking for him, and they were enemies. He did his best to focus more closely on the intruders.
There was something about the dragon and the unicorn… Kelestor realized that there was a spell of some kind supporting their presence. The third person-the orc-Quill-was different. He belonged in a way that the other two didn’t. And it was definitely preferable to deal with one enemy rather than three. Kelestor concentrated on the dragon, attempted a simple counterspell, and the dragon disappeared. Kelestor would have smiled if he had had a face to smile with.
“What happened to Ravin?” the unicorn asked; there was a touch of panic in her voice that Kelestor enjoyed.
“He was thrown out. I imagine you’re next. Thanks for trying,” Quill answered her calmly. Kelestor attempted to grind teeth that didn’t exist and prepared a second counterspell.
“Good luck, Quill. I’m sorry I wasn’t more help,” said the unicorn. She threw her arms around Quill and kissed him energetically, then disappeared as the dispel hit her. The exchange made Kelestor angry for some reason.
Quill continued down the dark, book lined corridor; Kelestor continued to watch and found that he hated him. This pathetic orc had started with nothing and had made himself a hero’s reputation and a circle of loyal friends in a few short months; Kelestor had, or had once had, power and money and a circle of sycophants, but never admiration. Kelestor would kill him.
Quill’s corridor came to an end, and now he was in the room where Kelestor had killed the unicorn girl. The girl was lying right where she had fallen, and there was a book that Kelestor did not recognize on the table. Quill healed the girl’s throat; she revived and he wrapped her in a blanket and helped her to her feet.
“Quill?” the girl said uncertainly. “What happened to Lord Sar? Was it all a dream?”
Quill shook his head. “No, I don’t think it was a dream. More likely this is a dream; I would have thought the wound on your throat was fatal. I take it you are Tayma?”
The girl nodded. “I am Athame Sweetwater, though everyone calls me Tayma. What happened to Lord Sar?”
“Again that name. And who is Lord Sar, Tayma?” Quill asked.
“Kelestor Sar is a guest of my master’s; I was assigned to him. He is said to be a great scholar of Necromancy.”
“Wonderful,” Quill said disgustedly. He picked up the alien volume. “This has his name on it; let’s see what it has to say. Have a seat; this may be a while.” Quill sat at the table, opened the book, and began to read.
As soon as Quill opened the book, Kelestor’s ability to see Quill and his surroundings began to fade, and in moments the room was lost to Kelestor’s sight. He found that he once again had a body, and that he was in the same book lined corridor in which he had watched Quill. He shrugged, guessed at which direction he had to go, and set off.
Eventually the corridor ended at a blank panel; Kelestor pushed on it, and it opened into a small room with a large doorway at the far end. The panel Kelestor had pushed turned out to be the back of another bookshelf, and the door from the doorway opposite had been torn off of its hinges. Through the door was a large, high-ceilinged room lined with books, and in the far side of that was another door.
Kelestor sensed that the world of the living was beyond that door; he ran to it, opened it, and stepped through blindly. The world wrenched, and suddenly he was lying on his back in a darkened room. He heard an unknown voice say, “Perrin! He’s shifting!”
A powerful hand clamped on Kelestor’s throat; a bass voice said, “Hold him down; don’t let him up, and try to stop him from doing magic.” Kelestor fought to control himself and choke back the panic. If he could just get off a couple of spells, buy himself some breathing room, and then teleport away…
Kelestor was pulled violently back into the large, high-ceilinged room. He tumbled like a rag doll, then looked up to see Quill standing over him. “It’s not that easy, Lord Sar. It’s not going to be NEARLY that easy,” Quill growled.
Kelestor rose to his feet carefully; he saw the girl (now fully clothed, a fact which irritated Kelestor far more than it should have) standing behind Quill. “You’re ME,’ Kelestor answered; he tried to make it sound accusatory, but it was mostly incredulous.
Quill responded with a slow blink. “If you wish,” he said quietly. “Have you solved the whole riddle yet, Kelestor? What happened that night? Why does Tayma still exist? For that matter, why do I exist at all?”
Kelestor looked at Tayma briefly, then back at Quill. “Something aborted the Death Drain…”
“Something that caused you, or made the aborted spell cause you, intense pain.” Quill advanced slowly as he spoke, driving Kelestor back into the alcove with the ruined door. “So instead of consuming Tayma’s soul, you welded it to your own. She’s trapped here, a mind with no body and only enough soul to sustain it. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”
Kelestor’s back was to the wall now; he tried to find the hidden door, but it seemed to be gone, and he was afraid to take his eyes off of Quill. “I needed to know what it felt like, and she was doomed anyway…”
“By the Lady, you disgust me. Did you ever do ANYTHING worthwhile when you weren’t reading?” Quill spat out the words; he was only a short reach from Kelestor now.
Kelestor looked up suddenly. “I had wings,” he said. “Why did I have wings that night?”
Quill smiled coldly, “I don’t know, Kelestor, why did you have wings that night?”
Kelestor thought back; there was something… he looked behind Quill to the girl. “You!” he said. “You saw something, just before you died. Tell me what it was.”
Tayma walked around Quill until she could see both of their faces. She looked at Quill and he shrugged. “Tell him if you want. He has no power here,” Quill said.
Tayma nodded and sighed. “You turned into a dragon,” she said quietly.
Telestor’s eyes widened. “Yes! I remember now… But you were already there. You wouldn’t let me hit the ground.”
“Something like that,” Quill said quietly. “Not really, but something like that.”
“But why did it hurt so much? I never knew there could be that much pain…”
Quill shrugged. “I don’t know. It may not have been real. It may have been the aborted spell; it may have been my consciousness emerging. It may just have been your conscience. You don’t strike me as the type to handle pain well.”
“But… What do we do now? We have three minds and two souls in a single body; I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Kelestor’s curiosity began to take the edge off of his fear and confusion.
“We?” Quill growled. “We don’t do anything. There is no ‘we’. YOU finish the job you started, and flutter off to the Void, and leave me to live my life.”
“But… No. I am a master necromancer. You’re a common warrior,” Kelestor said as he finally began to find his sense of self. “I’ll destroy you. I’ll…”
“How? If you destroy me, you destroy yourself. The only way to be rid of me is to get me to concede, and go voluntarily. Which will never happen.” Quill grinned wickedly as he spoke. “You aren’t tough enough to live as a dragon in this world, Kelestor.. Particularly as a dragon who is also a former necromancer who has no friends. And even more particularly, as a person who has a personal torturer living in his head making every conscious moment as miserable as possible.” Quill punctuated his words by backhanding Kelestor in the face; Kelestor fell full length to the floor.
“Leave, Kelestor. Give up. Quit. I am perfectly willing to destroy myself to take you out of the world, and you don’t have the stomach for the fight. You really don’t.”
Kelestor looked up at Tayma. “What about her?”
“You killed her, monster. Do you think she wants to continue existing trapped in YOUR head?” Quill kicked him in the face. “Leave, Kelestor. It’s over.”
Kelestor looked up with bleary eyes and saw one of Quill’s eyes starting to swell shut. “When you hit me… You feel it,” he said incredulously. Quill nodded, shrugged, and stamped on one of Kelestor’s hands; Kelestor bounced away from the pain and whimpered, “You’re insane.”
Quill smiled through the bruises. “No, just determined. Leave.”
Kelestor’s face lit up. “I’ll kill the girl.”
Quill looked at him, thought for a moment, then calmly bent back one of his own fingers until it broke. Kelestor doubled up in pain. “I can’t stop you,” he said quietly. “I’ve already decided that your death is worth her life. Now we’re just playing out the endgame.” He broke another finger.
“Do you want a happy thought to take to the void with you, Kelestor?” Quill asked, as he backhanded the wall with his maimed hand. “You were well educated, and you had excellent taste in literature.” He broke another finger. “That, it seems, it what you built me out of. The rest was just a complete waste.” He used his good hand to ball the maimed one into a fist, a process which brought gasps of pain from Kelestor. “For those things, I will always be grateful to you. Now GO!” he roared, and slammed the maimed fist into the wall with all of his strength.
Kelestor screamed and writhed, then was still. He turned to look at Quill. “Gratitude, at least, for that,” he said quietly.
Quill nodded. “At least for that.” Kelestor nodded once, and faded away.
Quill leaned against the wall and slumped to the floor; Tayma rushed to his side. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked.
Quill looked at her with his broken face and grinned. “You? Are asking me?” He shook his head and moaned at the sensation. “Let me catch my breath, and do a bit of healing magic, and I will be fine.” Tayma nodded and waited. Quill did nothing for a long while, and then used witchcraft to repair his hand and his face. When he was done he looked at Tayma and said quietly, “What do YOU want?”
Tayma spread her hands in bewilderment. “What is there? I’m dead.”
Quill nodded. “There is that. But you’re also bonded to me, somehow, and I’m not dead. So you can either stay with me, and share as much of my life as you are able, or I can arrange to have you sent to the Void. Neither one of them strikes me as particularly desirable.”
Tayma smiled. “You don’t mind if I stay?”
Quill shook his head. “You are welcome to haunt me in any manner you wish, for as long as you wish. I just wish I had more to offer you.”
Tayma smiled more broadly. “Then I will stay.” She hugged him, and he winced.
Quill got to his feet. “I think it is time to rejoin the others,” he said. He took Tayma’s hand, and walked through the door to the outer world.