True Love and Necromancy [Featured Story!]

Chapter XVI

THE SECRET TO REANIMATING THE DEAD is simple.

All magic has to do with exchanges of power. More complicated spells require rarer, more powerful ingredients and a higher level of knowledge and energy on the part of the practitioner; they also require a special kind of magic.

Magic comes in many kinds, you see; think of it as ... flavors of candy. Healing magic is like strawberry liquorice. Protective magic is like chocolate. Weaponized magic is like spicy cinnamon candy. Binding magic, like love spells and luck spells, is like ... okay, let's reel it back from the simile already. You get it, right?

Necromantic magic is like those hard little candies at the bottom of the candy dish at Great Great Uncle Orville's nursing home. The kind that have cat hairs stuck to them and were probably produced three decades before? Yes. Those.

Not a lot of people want to pop those babies in their mouths, so there is always a reasonable supply of them.

So it wasn't a matter of needing the magic—there was plenty of raise-the-dead magic ready to go in the back corner of the Magic Supply Warehouse of the seventeeth dimension.

The difficulty was with the academic side of things. If invocations were frowned upon, necromancy was grimace-of-horrored upon. It was difficult to find texts on the subject, so Theo had had to employ the Inter-Hidden-Library Loan Program liberally to find the rare texts that addressed raising the dead. Slowly, over the course of years, he had built upon his knowledge with scraps of information from all across the world.

The rare ingredients in the equation were the crystals, which held the life essence of other creatures. He had used these to reanimate the birds, the hideous opossum, and Elliott. Typically, he purchased these by mail order. They were expensive, especially considering shipping and handling. The producers of essence crystals could ask for whatever price they wished, because trapping a soul required being there at the moment of the creature's death and ... well. You can guess what sort of person was in the essence crystal trade. There wasn't exactly a lot of competition to drive down the cost.

Anyway, all of this is to say that a the end of the day, necromancy was a surprisingly simple equation. Knowledgeable necromancer + essence crystal of a sufficient power + disgusting cat hair candy-flavored magic = reanimated dead. Child's play, really. After all, most souls want to come back.

With Elliott's snide commentary serving as a constant, invigorating undercurrent to his days, Theo continued his necromantic experimentations. He practiced first on a freshly-dead raccoon. Then he practiced on a boar with limited success (although he succeeded in reanimating the creature flesh and all, he had been required to purchase it via mail order; not only was it skinned and gutted when it arrived, it was not altogether fresh).

Theo graduated to poisoning (to kill) and reanimating (to un-kill) deer. Once he had dramatically murdered and even more dramatically un-murdered three of those innocent creatures, he considered himself quite ready for chef-d'oeuvre, his obra maestra, his mestermű, his—well, it's no use lightening this up with exciting foreign language vocabulary.

Theo was ready, at long last, to reanimate his dead wife.

It had all been rather horrible, Tansy's death. Theo didn't like to think about it, being, as he was, averse to pain and distress of any kind. She had just taken ill, grown weak, and died. She'd done all three in an alarmingly short time, not two years after they had wed.

Naturally, being a sorcerer of taste, Theo had insisted on a glass casket. He had placed where the dining room table once had stood. Within it Tansy could still be seen wearing her wedding dress. She was nine years dead, a skeletal mummy of the woman she once had been. Her shrunken frame caused her lovely dress to sink into the pitiful hollows of her body and slump sadly around her twig-like wrists. But her glossy dark hair lay artfully coiled around her wasted face.

She had nearly always worn it braided, but Theo had never learned how. And it was pretty, loose like that.

Every day, Theo lovingly wiped away the dust and cat footprints from the glass casket and gazed in at the mummy of the woman he had adored. It was hard to see Tansy in the shell she had left behind, but he tried, and in the trying he found the strength to continue his research into the black arts of necromancy.

And so, we come back to the beginning.