His waking was abrupt, the last remnants of the nightmare beading on his forehead and running down the sides of his face. Dark dreams were a common friend of his, comforting in a strange way, but so are the sleeping fantasies of those who dabble in death. Still, this felt different. Fell hadn’t truly woken from a terrible nightmare in years. Raising the dead from the ground tends to mean most things don’t frighten you, but complete and utter destruction of all things? That would bother anyone, even a necromancer.
He sat up in his bed to find his sheets soaked in his sweat. He stood and made his way to the washroom down the hall, all the while walking in a near-stupor. He couldn’t shake what he had seen, or at least what he could remember from the dream. The red streaks, the loud crashes, hot wind and dying screams. It echoed around in his head as he washed with luke warm water in a man-sized bucket.
He tried unsuccessfully to shake the feeling and while a sense of doom was something he generally nurtured on a daily basis, this felt real and true deep within him. “Today is going to be a dark day,” he said to himself as he pulled his black tunic over his head and fetched his vest. “And I still haven’t heard back from Tanus.”
Tanus, his contact in Aelyria Prime for publishing his poetry, hadn’t responded in his normal timeframe. His response wasn’t late or anything, but Fell was pretty used to his responses arriving quickly from the capitol city. He needed the coin after all and it was important to him that his latest piece make it into the broader papers so that those in Candaceburg would be able to read them. He didn’t let himself think about his sister reading his poetry often. The sense of hope it brought him would only crack like thin egg shells and fall away, bringing him pain.
“Oh well. Patience, Fell” he said to himself in the mirror. Fell tended to talk to himself, though he preferred talking to one of his walkers if he could help it because he felt it made him less crazy. Unfortunately, staying in a fairly crowded town momentarily meant no zombies looming about. That sort of behavior, no matter now benign, would have him getting arrested in no time.
“I think I need to find a pet,” he said as he laced his boots. “Maybe a bird, a raven.”
Downstairs he was able to get a simple breakfast of bread and eggs from the tavern keep before heading outside to breath the rather stale air that awaited him on his walk to the market. He needed more wax for his letters and he was fairly certain he had seen a stand selling colored waxes not a week before on the day he had arrived. Within a few minutes of looking about, he located the stand.
“Serale there,” an older man in a droopy hat and bright red doublet said to Fell as he walked up to the stall. “Can I interest you in some writing supplies, perhaps some wax?”
Fell nodded. “Aye, I have come for wax.”
The old man moved to show Fell the waxes he had of various colors, but picked up only the dark grey wax and lifted up a sample for Fell to see. While he spoke he face grimaced slightly at Fell’s attire, which while rather stately, was quite dark.
“I assume you’ll be wanting something dark in color? This dreary grey might suit.”
Fell let a half-grin slip past his lips. “It would, I agree.” Then he picked up a purple colored wax sample and handed it to the old man. “But I prefer my letters, unlike my general appearance, to have some color.”
The old man laughed, shaking his head in the affirmative. Then he went to the back of the stall and brought out a small pot sealed with purple wax. He signaled the cost with his fingers while he spoke. “Very well, then. I hope I didn’t offend. I try to guess the color wax for each of my customers you see, and well…” he motioned to Fell’s clothing.
Fell smiled. “Not at all and I understand completely.” He handed the man the payment in coins and took the pot. The purple was deep, but not too dark, and he was glad to have it as he had used the very last of his red wax on his last letter to Tanus.
Returning to the tavern with his pot, he went upstairs to fetch a sheet of parchment and his ink pen. He returned down to the tavern barroom proper and found a table in the back corner where there was very little chance of being disturbed, especially since it was only late morning.
No one was working the room, but the barkeep cleaning the bar itself looked up at him. He was the same person who had served Fell breakfast just an hour before. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked.
“No,” Fell replied. “But I will repay you for the space and quiet later with ale I assure you.”
The barkeep laughed. “I have no doubt,” and with that he went back to cleaning in silence.
Fell’s eyebrow raised at that. He had drank in the tavern each night since he arrived in town, but was his drinking so wanton as to mark him a drunk? It certainly seemed like the barkeep could have meant such a thing, but Fell didn’t want to believe it. More-so, he felt like it was wholly stupid of himself to let what that man had said affect him at all. “He probably just means that you’ve been a paying customer for the past week is all” he thought to himself as he arranged his paper and pen on the table.
Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, Fell did all he could to let what the man had said leave his mind so he could focus on the task at hand. There was a poem somewhere inside of him and he had felt it coming to the surface over the last few days. There was something about the way the throngs of people in the market had been that he felt like he could turn on its head a bit and try to explore.
He wrote for a few hours, stopping only to eat an apple he had in his room for lunch. What he had at the end was a sheet of parchment covered in scribbles, crossed out lines, circled lines of bits he particularly liked, and some aggressively blotted areas that he hated with every fiber of his being. The writing process was a roller coaster of emotion and self realization for some. Fell was no different, but today’s adventure had been mostly marked by an inability to get across the idea he was reaching for.
He folded up the parchment and placed it in his pocket before grabbing his pen and wax pot and returning them to his room. He still had a few hours before it became socially acceptable to drink in the bar without attracting unwanted attention, so he stayed in his room with the window closed and door locked. Using his blanket from his bed, he blacked out the window the best he could and took a moment sitting on the floor to focus on his arcana.
There was no end goal to his meditation aside from simply spending time with the entropic energies he could bring to the forefront about him. He focused on the concepts of death and decay, their place in the cycle of all things, and how he could manipulate them with his will. As he sat, cross-legged and eyes closed, a thin scent of decay tickled his nostrils. It was familiar and comforting to him in a way that knowing one’s destiny is to die like the millions before them was comforting. It was part of life, for flowers to wilt and petals to fall, and for civilizations to do the same.
A quiet ticking sound caught his attention and he peeked ever so slightly to see a beetle slowly making its way across his floor. He could feel the life inside the insect as it slowly walked, segmented feet moving one at a time to bring it across the floor much slower than it should have normally moved.
“You did not expect this,” Fell whispered to the beetle. “We rarely do expect death, but it comes for us anyway.”
The bug seemed to stop and look directly at him as he gestured with his right hand, his fingers rigid but brought together before being flicked subtly. A tiny swirling disruption in the air around the beetle clouded the view of the insect ever so softly as it layed on the floor and stopped moving. Fell felt nothing as the miniscule life being leached from the beetle would be too little for him to notice while completely healthy himself.
He let the spell go short of killing the beetle. “Not yet,” he said to the insect with a grin.
The black-shelled beetle moved a second later and found its speed scurrying in a confused path under his bed and into a crack in the floor. Fell watched it leave and considered that if he had a pet raven, it likely would have eaten that beetle before he could have taught it that crucial lesson, if it even understood it at all.
Sometime later, Fell took down the blanket from the window to find that the sun was going down. “I guess it’s time,” he said to himself, looking in the small mirror on his wall while running his hands through his hair. “Don’t drink too much.” He grabbed his small bag that held everything he owned, and resolved to not need it that night. He had been chased from a town before. Sometimes alcohol and keeping quiet about being a necromancer didn’t mix well and since then he had always taken his bag with him when he went drinking.
Three hours later, Fell had met absolutely no one whose name he could remember, but he had managed to drink a pair of tankards and while he certainly wasn’t drunk, he knew that a third tankard would get him there. His back-corner table was the worst lit in the room at night and generally no one messed with him, though he did have a few conversations with people who thought it wise to engage him until he ultimately made them regret that decision.
“You’re a gloomy fellow, aren’t you?” said a barmaid.
Fell recognized her as someone who had worked every night he was there. They had spoken before, just drink orders and questions about food, but he remembered that her name had been something old and beautiful. Constance, perhaps?
“Gloom is simply a natural state of understanding that death is a natural state of life,” he replied between sips of ale.
She laughed a deep belly laugh. “You’re a real charmer aren’t you?”
She was pretty in a classic way, her skin pale like porcelain. She reminded Fell of Vera and that in turn made him want to get sick or fall asleep, anything to forget his shame and her disappointment in him.
“I do apologize,” he said. “You’re a young, beautiful girl and you should be off smiling and laughing instead. I’m afraid you’ll only find the opposite at this table.”
She stopped smiling and looked intensely at him for a moment. Finding her grin again, she took his empty tankard and said, “You are a charmer.” With that she flashed a big smile and walked away into the barroom crowd.
Fell watched her walk away wondering what it was he had said that made her react in such a way. He certainly hadn’t been flirting with her, but some women were just attracted to the dark side of things. He understood that attraction because it too captured his imagination at a young age. He smiled at the thought of her grinning at him and reached for his tankard, forgetting she had taken it when she left.
What he touched instead was a book, but not just any book. It was a thick gilded tome wrapped in scales and chains, heat resonating from along where it opened. As he touched it, an eye on its cover opened, causing Fell to jump slightly. He looked around to see who had left such an object on his table only to find absolutely no one paying attention to him. The crowd, the noise, the laughing and stories and beer flowing was all there, but it felt at that moment like he was alone with this book. More than that, he found himself entirely unable to do anything other than stare at the eye staring back at him.
“What are you?” he whispered.
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