The Necromancer’s Light by Tavia Lark
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Shae
The earth is dark and wet beneath Shae when he gasps awake. Death fills his lungs, so thick he chokes on it. He scrambles to his knees so fast that the blood rushes from his head, and he slumps sideways again. His hands are numb. His wrists barely support his weight as he sits again more slowly.
Gray light filters through the clouds above. It’s impossible to tell what time it is. Corpses surround him. Riverswords and bandits, and gods only know what else. The older corpses that Izen dragged to fight. Ashes of dead vaidkos mingle with the bloodstained dirt. Shae’s stomach seizes, and he breathes through the nausea until it subsides.
Standing up takes longer than it should. He falls again to one knee. Counts his breaths. Touches a stud in his right ear for a quick burst of strength that finally gets him upright. He barely feels the magic as he uses it. That’s how he knows he’s really, truly cold.
He drags himself around the wreckage and checks each fallen body for life. It’s useless, he knows it’s useless, but he has to. None of them have any breath left in them. A couple of the Riverswords feel warm to the touch, but Shae doesn’t know what that really means. He’s so cold himself that the newly dead bodies would naturally be warmer than him.
He counts six Riverswords. Two men and four women—almost all the ones who rode into Lyrisenia with him. Only Georgia is missing. She must have gotten away, leaving Shae alone on the bloody ground. He’s too numb to be mad about that. Running away was the smart thing to do. None of them were any match for Izen with the array this weak.
Shae’s still no match for him. Not in this condition. Maybe not ever. He laughs sharply in the middle of the spread of bodies. He thought he learned the lesson of hubris when he was twelve years old—that wanting something with every bone in his body doesn’t mean he can have it. But no. Once again his recklessness has consequences.
Just as well he left Arthur behind. Maybe the paladin’s magic could have made a difference, or maybe Arthur could be lying lifeless in the dirt too.
Shae can’t help missing him, with a fully-body ache that rivals the cold.
He lifts his hands. His fingertips look blue already, and he needs to find people fast. But the nearest settlement is too far away, and he doesn’t remember exactly how to get there. He definitely won’t make it back to Lanwatch on foot. He’ll die before then.
Shae kneels beside a dead bandit. The man is older, with a patch over his eye and blood in his scraggly gray beard. Shae doesn’t know if he was a good man or a bad man. The sort of man that rode through the Nightven homestead and killed Shae’s parents, or just a hungry man trying to get by. Maybe both, or neither. He’s not good or bad now, just dead.
And the violence and fear of his death wait in the shadows of his soul, ripe for the plucking. All the bodies around him are a source of power too. If Shae wants to banish Izen, if he wants to end all this and get rid of his necromancy for good?
He can’t fix anything if he’s dead. Whatever the risk, he has to take it.
Hands shaking, Shae unfastens the silver feather from his right lobe. Drops it on the ground next to the one-eyed bandit’s corpse. It’s easier than Shae thought it would be. The last protective wall crumbles from his soul with barely a whisper of sensation.
He covers the dead man’s mouth with his palm, and closes his eyes.
No words. No apology, no incantation. He doesn’t feel sorry, and he doesn’t need to beg. The power floods into him immediately, eager and desperate for the slightest invitation, and Shae welcomes it just as desperately. The darkness is a rushing river. His breath hitches. His eyes fly open but see nothing as the dark power surrounds and fills him.
It doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts. Shae breathes in the shadows and calls to the other corpses. The last remnants of power inside them rush towards him too. Intoxicating. He should have done this years ago.
When the corpses are empty, Shae rises to his feet. He opens his mouth to thank them, then laughs. They’re dead. They don’t matter. They were only tools to feed his strength, and now they’re not even that.
He can’t feel anything. No pain, no fear, no sorrow. No warmth, but no cold. He can survive like this. But is it enough? The only thing he feels is a new, dark hunger crawling through his body. He needs to be strong to face Izen. Surely more power would be safer.
A memory surfaces. A little homestead, at the far eastern edge of the Lyralan Crater. The memory should hurt, but it doesn’t now. All that matters is the two graves behind the house. Perhaps he can take one last gift from them, as recompense for leaving him.
***
When Shae reaches his childhood home, the memories feel like they belong to someone else. He’s not the boy who lived in the single-story stone building. He’s not the boy whose mother patched the walls with magic, or whose father thatched the roof with his own two hands. He’s not the boy who drew water from the well out front, or threw pebbles down it to see how long they fell before they splashed.
His father held some other boy on his shoulders to pluck the fruit from the trees behind the house. His mother showed some other boy how to darn the holes in his socks.
Another boy ran as far south as he could, another man kept running and running, for fear of angering the dead, for fear of drowning in sorrow like a pebble sinking into water. Another. Not Shae, who feels nothing besides hunger.
The dreamlike haze carries him to the orchard behind the house. The trees are still black and twisted from his last visit home. Some of them have fallen, tangles of twisted branches without leaves or fruit, their roots exposed and dead. At the center of the dead grove rest two gray stones. There are no words on them.
Shae stands above his parents’ graves. “You left me,” he says quietly. “And you refused to come back when I needed you. So I’m not asking this time.”
Another thought briefly crosses his mind. Why does he need to banish Izen now? He’s not afraid of the power anymore. He feels so much better now that he’s given in. Maybe he should kill Izen instead, to make sure nobody else can ever banish him and rob Shae of his newfound strength. Or he could join with him, work together to become even more powerful, consume even more, and kill anyone who ever tries to stop them.
He laughs. Whichever path he decides, he needs this power.
He draws his knife. But before he can slice open his arm, the sound of hoofbeats thunders from the west.