Chapter Text
The natural order is sacred, life and death especially so. To give life is the work of the divine. To give death is the hallowed responsibility of Ebott Empire’s warriors. To give undeath, an unnatural state of existence, is the work of demons.
Demons no longer walk freely, thanks to your ancestors of a few hundred years ago, but they sow wickedness from below ground with their corrupting magic. It’s because of their influence that an abomination like you exists. At least, that’s what the Royal Priestess teaches. You’re cursed with unnatural magic. Not the good kind of unnatural either, not the healing magic of seraphim—the unholy abilities of a necromancer.
The Imperial Academy insisted on reminding you of your lower status with every step of your progression. Bleak grey robes, a demonic delta rune written by your name on all documentation, a necklace, adorned with the sigil of undeath, to be worn always. It marks you as an outcast to everyone you encounter. The Academy’s condemning messages were undermined by the resources they diverted into training you. It seems no matter how cursed or evil your nature is, you are still of use to the empire. It’s that usefulness that’s protected you from the worst of the discrimination from other mages.
You were brought up with the rest of them as peers, the mages that work within the natural order, not against it. They can manipulate the elements, becoming valuable artificers or specialized soldiers in Her Holiness’s army. They made up some of your most treasured companions.
That was before.
Before, when you travelled with your company, going city to city resuscitating dead crops and using your mage team’s abilities to help the citizenry in any way.
Before one member of the citizenry decided he didn’t want your cursed, unholy help.
Before you’d been killed.
Your gloved phalanges fiddle with the necklace that resurrected you. You’d imbued it with your necromantic magic over the years. Now it is empty, all its magic occupied in animating you. It’d been experimental, a side project you’d tinkered on when your mana stores were in surplus. When you’d ‘woken up’ from your death a few months ago, you’d been thrilled to find that it worked. You’d been less thrilled to find out how long it took to work.
You’d unearthed yourself from an unmarked grave to find your flesh had long since wasted away. Not all bad. Undead flesh has its inconveniences. You’d preferred resurrecting humans that had reached this stage of decomposition as skeletons are much less messy than newly deceased corpses. A wash in the river was all it took to slough the stink of death off you.
Your project had seemed like a success until you’d returned to the Academy to find you’d been dead long enough for everyone you know and love to perish of natural causes. You were alone. Completely alone. The only living names you recognized were those of institutions. The structure of society was, for the most part, unchanged.
The Academy was your anchor. The familiar halls and sight of excitable initiates gathering in the mess hall was enough to keep you from slipping entirely into hopelessness, for a while. It wasn’t meant to last. Staying at the Academy as a nonstudent meant earning your keep. The instructors deemed the best way for you to do this was as a subject of study for the other necromancers. A practical and reasonable idea. You’d successfully developed a method of passive resurrection, after all. They had much to learn from you! But that wasn’t what they wanted. They didn’t see you as a mentor. Hell, they didn’t even see you as human. You could tell from the jaded looks in the mages’ eyes when you spoke that it was only a matter of time before one got bold enough to try casting “Command Undead” on you.
You didn’t linger long enough for that to happen. Despite not having much to live for, you weren’t going to roll over and let some cavalier apprentice turn you into a puppet. You’d left, but you’d had nowhere to go.
You wandered, your vagrancy a sad, solitary mockery of before, when you’d traveled the same roads with your friends. Cloaked and covering your bones to avoid the damning stares of your fellow humans, you simply watched as the hardships of a frosty spring devastate the local agriculture. You hated your cursed, undead existence, but you still feared losing it. Using your magic to help these people would mean drawing mana from your limited store. There was only so much put away in that necklace. It’s impossible to know how long it’d preserve your undeath but using it unnecessarily would certainly hasten your final demise.
That’s how you’d existed, for a time. A passive observer. Waiting for nothing, saving your magic for nothing. Until one day, you’d had enough. You tracked down your friends’ graves. Not caring if it doomed you, you’d revived them, just long enough to see them and hear their blessed laughter again. They told you about their lives, who their soulmate was, where they settled down. They spoke of how they’d missed you. They said their goodbyes, and for the first time since your death, you wanted something besides returning to rest.
You were hungry. It didn’t make sense. You’re undead, a self-contained, limited system. Food did nothing for you. Yet, you found yourself craving it. You’d indulged the impulse, bartering for roasted quail and fruit. Sitting under a tree at dusk, you’d sat with your spoils, unsure if you could truly make use of them. The scents flow senselessly through your skull, but it did look delicious.
An odd buzzing had overtaken the center of your head. Warmth. Then…sensation. You could taste the air. You opened your jaw and a spectral, translucent tongue rolled out. You ate. You savored. And the food replenished you, dissolving into energy.
It was unprecedented. Impossible, as you’d been taught. But that was only the beginning. Your magic seemed to…change you. At first it was subtle, benign changes, old human senses returning. Your tongue was the first. Your eye sockets filled with a light that functioned better than your living eyes had. Your bones eventually gained sensitivity to temperature and touch. You started sleeping and dreaming again.
The changes weren’t only practical, either. Your form fluctuated. Your bones filled out in places, lengthening in others. Your human shape returned in the form of a ghostly torso over your spine and pelvis. Ecto-hair sprouted from your skull, floating down to your collarbones. Your soulmate tattoo appeared on your bones below where it was marked on your skin in life. Supposedly, it’s the name of your one true love, the person you’re destined to be with. However, your mark has always been indecipherable to you. It’s in an unknown language. Even the characters and lettering are foreign, unlike anything you’d seen. It’s been a constant mystery to you, even more so now, that it would reappear after your soulmate is likely long since dead.
It amazes and terrifies you. Amazing because you feel alive again, more alive than you ever had! Terrifying because of the crawling sense that you're drifting further from your own humanity. Perhaps Her Holiness was right to condemn necromancy. It's turning you into a demon. This fear affects the changes, your self-directed paranoia warping your image into something increasingly demonic. Black horns jut from the frontal bone of your skull. If they grow any longer, they’ll be impossible to cover with your hooded cowl.
You take a swig of ale and let your tankard thunk heavily against the wood table. The darkest corner of the tavern is where you’ve camped out tonight, recovering your mana from a mass resurrection of a merchant’s silkworms. They wouldn’t be able to reproduce or live as long as they would’ve, but they’ll continue to weave their valuable threads for long enough to stave off financial ruin.
A man at the bar meets your eyes. A bold one. Most people are too afraid to look at you directly. By his rugged clothing and excess of pouches and packs, you mark him as a fellow traveler. He takes your appraisal of him as some sort of acceptance and he strides over to take a seat across from you.
“Enlighten me, freak.” The sword in his scabbard clatters as he settles on the bench. “How do you drink that ale of yours without it spilling through ya and staining the floorboards?”
You hesitate to answer, not wanting to indulge the adventurer’s morbid curiosity and become the object of his entertainment tonight. “It’s magic.”
“Not any kind of magic I’ve seen,” he counters gruffly, “And I’ve seen a lot.”
You’re silent. You hope he’ll get bored with you and leave you alone, but he seems content to simply hear his own voice.
“I’ve seen a lot,” he repeats. “Mages gone mad with power. Entire cities corrupted by demonic energy. A contraption that harvests lightning. You wouldn’t believe half the things I’ve seen.” The boasting doesn’t faze you. You begin tapping your distals against your tankard, a not so subtle hint of boredom. Undeterred and determined to pique your interest, he leans forward and continues, “Even seen a place that worships freaks like you.”
That manages to spark your curiosity. You’ve never heard of anyone worshipping anything but the healing light of divinity. Is anything else even allowed? The traveler notices your attention and basks in it.
“Yup, quite the anomaly. Incredible that a nature-fearing man such as myself made it out of that undeath cult unscathed. Tried to educate them about the ways of Her Holiness’ but they wouldn’t hear it. Told ‘em it’s a quick trip to the gallows if they take advantage of the Empire’s privileges without honoring its ways. Still didn’t listen. Kept blabbering on about their skeleton gods and their ‘gifts’.”
“Ah, well, I won’t bore you with the details,” he makes a show of getting up to return to the bar. When you grab his arm to stop him, he smirks gallingly.
“Wait!” you swallow your pride and distaste for the man in favor of gleaning more information. “Please tell me more of this strange place.”
“Suppose I could. But firstly, I’d like to make a toast,” he raises his jug and gestures for you to do the same.
Ah, of course. He was curious about how you were able to drink and now he wanted to see it up close. It’s irritating, but this kind of attention is no worse than the open disdain you get from most villagers. He’ll get his freakshow. You only want to know what kind of place would respect and worship ‘freaks like you’.
“What are we toasting?” you inquire cautiously, lifting your tankard.
“To seeing new things!” he cheers, colliding his cup with your own and sending droplets of froth raining onto the oak tabletop.
“To seeing new things,” you parrot. You chug your drink and wipe your teeth with the back of your glove. He’s watching closely and when you put down your empty tankard, he seems unsatisfied.
“It’s harder to see new things when you’ve got all those layers on you. Why don’t you take another swig after you’ve peeled back a few, then we’ll talk.”
You sigh and lift the cowl from your collarbones without removing your hood. Your neck and collarbones are exposed to his gawking. “If you want me to drink, you’ll have to buy me another,” you hand him the empty stein. “I’ve run dry.”
He takes the cup with a more forceful than necessary swipe and buggers off to the bar, cursing under his breath about having to spend his precious gold on a corpse. When he returns, you accept the refill and take a slow swallow of it, letting him see how it disappears into the chasm of your skull instead of draining down your spine and onto the floor. “Satisfied?” you query, snark half quelled.
“Aye. That’s some magic you’ve got there,” a menacing note breaks through his previous veil of civility, “Downright unnatural.”
“All necromancy is unnatural. It is forgiven in service of the Empire,” you defend with lines from your training tomes.
“You drinking this tavern’s piss-poor excuse for ale is service to Empire? I shouldn’t think so.” he derides, rising half out of his seat, hand on his dagger sheath in silent threat. “Your types should steer clear of civilization. Run off with the other heretics and outsiders, to where us goodly folk don’t have to see you.”
After you jumped through all his hoops, he still won't tell you what you wanted? Anger makes you reckless in your response, “I’d love to run off with the freaks and cultists, but your muck-spouting mouth won’t tell me where they are!”
The traveler tenses for a moment, before bursting into chortles. “The cadaver’s got a point. That demon-cursed place is a few day’s ride north of the mountain. If you get lost, ask the locals where the haunted forest is and they’ll point you to it. Now go. And take your fellow freaks with you.”
He snatches the drink he’d given you and spits at your feet. Revolting man. You gather your things and rush from the tavern into the cold night. As you walk to your horse, you think about what he’d said. A haunted forest... If there’s a place you’d expect undeath cultists to reside, that’d be it. Even as a possible creature of nightmares yourself, you find yourself uneager to venture to such a foreboding destination. Yet the promise of other sentient skeletons, would-be gods or not, is tempting. You might not be alone. It’s a small chance, but there could be others like you. Others that won’t glare, gawk at how you eat and drink, or throw stones at you. The very thought is enough to make your soul shine with excitement.
You arrive at your horse’s resting spot, a pile of equine bones underneath a blossoming wild fruit tree. You don’t keep her reanimated while you’re away. It wastes magic and is unnecessarily cruel to force her to exist only to wait around for you. Siphoning a portion of your mana into her, you watch as the purple glow levitates her bones, each into its proper place until you’ve got a functional horse skeleton. You don’t allot enough magic for her mind to sustain any social capabilities, or anything much more than the urge to move and move fast, yet you’ve somehow managed to get attached. Her name is Dusty, called such for her tendency to kick up all the dust of the road to float past her spine and into your every joint and socket. You cover her back with a woolen blanket as a bone buffer and climb on. “Ride, Dusty. Let’s find some friends.”