Why Not Be A Necromancer {missedstations & Kawamura}

[missedstations]

A new year, a new apartment. Dominic was getting rather fed up of moving every time someone found out what he was and caused general panic. Seriously, why was resurrecting some crying little girl's hamster the cause of so much damn uproar? It was just as if it hadn't died at all and it would have had a perfectly normal lifespan!

He directed the movers with a kind of resignation. The landlord had only agreed to rent him this shitty little cupboard after he had promised he would not kill anyone, not perform experiments on animals or people, not summon the souls of any dead, not to keep any human remains, and summon no familiars. Oh, and no pets, especially not cats. A goldfish or two, apparently, would be fine. Crazy old man, with just enough gift to tell the nature of Dominic's power. No doubt in less than a day every neighbourhood mage would know that a necromancer had moved in. He might as well carve his sigil in the door. Necromancer for hire. Need own premises for rituals, will not resurrect anything that has been dead for longer than a day, does not create zombie armies however much you pay. That would be the day, when he could advertise his services openly.

At least he did not look like a necromancer at first sight... The stereotype was gaunt and pale, but Dominic was just lean, and looked as if he actually saw sunlight every so often. His hair was black though, tied back in a ponytail. At least he didn't wear black. He didn't even to his mother's funeral. (Though, admittedly, the rest of the family were against him attending, and the priest had frowned at him all through the service, as if Dominic didn't know what a natural death was and might turn the whole thing into some perverse necromantic ritual at any time.) His preferred clothing was just jeans and a white shirt, both stained with paint because he didn't actually own anything that wasn't. At least today his socks had no holes in them.

It wasn't his fault that necromancy was the only thing his talents had been suited for. Better than he knew what to do with his powers than, say, mess up and accidentally kill people. So slowly, he began to unpack the boxes. The books first. Some black and suspiciously stained grimoires, interspersed with modern classics and the occasional dirty magazine. Eventually, after working for most of the day, he ended up with piles of random crap all over his living room/kitchen, a pile of clothes in the bedroom, canvases stacked against a wall. At that point he gave up.

It was a tiny apartment. A bedroom, a bathroom the size of a small wardrobe, and the living room and kitchen combo that barely fitted a sofa and a table. His priorities were clear though: a massive bookshelf took up most of one wall. The parts of his computer were stacked in the corner of the room. Sadly, he could not bring back technology from the dead, for all his attempts. At least considering the size of the rooms, he would not have a problem with heating!

Dominic was used to his power being frowned upon. Officially, it was illegal to discriminate by type of one's powers, but he knew far better: at the moment he had found himself unemployed. Fucking gossip. He could live on his savings for at least a few months, but he was bound to find some work before that. Maybe he could sell a painting or two as well. For now he just preferred not being homeless.

He put his little pot of African Violets on the window sill, opened the window as far as it could go and looked out. An attic apartment gave a surprisingly nice view. Sure, he was above the main road, but he could see half the city spread out before him. He lit a cigarette and leant out, blowing the smoke into the city air. It was, after all, a beautiful day.

 

[Kawamura]

Re: Why Not Be A Necromancer 101 {missedstations & Kawamura}

Will spends the first three days wandering, aimless, the noise and crowd of a new city drowning out what would be a gentle, if quiet, hum. He is not without resources: he has his bank card and a list of families that would be honoured to put up a shaman from an old family like his, but he's too busy looking for that. A few people give him hand outs: he is easily recognizable as some sort of wandering mage, the old sort, the sort that comes from crazies. His coppery hair is beaded and threaded into many, tiny braids. He's in jeans and a shirt, nothing odd there, but with him is a worn staff just as tall as him. People do not disturb him, do not really even know how to deal with him and, so, just ignore him most of the time.

The redhead closed his eyes, searching for something under the overwhelming, the ragged sound and smell and taste of black magic, but like some faint flavour taken over by rotten meat, he had lost her.

He finds her the fourth day: she is surprising but not, like when one predicts that a monster will pop out of the closet just so in a movie. Will is startled when she meets his eyes. Her face is brown, her hair straight and dark. Indian, maybe. Or Pakistani. The two are so similar, the dirt the same. Her family couldn't have been here but for a few centuries, and yet, and yet she is tied, body and mind and blood and sinew to the ground and the people here. She looks away. Will does not.

Yeah, rotten meat. It was a good comparison. Will pressed his frame to the side of the apartment complex, gulping down air, drowning. The smell, the vibration was something sweet, pungent, the last stage of decay. Blood magic, necromancy, something. He hadn't expected that and, god damn it, it frustrated him. Someone passing by gave him a weird look, a "what the hell are you doing, buddy
look and the large shaman bared his teeth in something that was trying to be a smile but failed. Ended that conversation before it ever began, it did.

There's something just a little off about her. Her family knows it. The living things around them know it. You don't have to be magic to feel it: she's just different. A good different. Different like Will is. Certainly she feels this, since she turns back and gives him an enigmatic smile, a tiny think tugging at the corner of her lips, but then she's gone, disappearing into the commute crowd on the sidewalk. Will pushes through folks, going against the current that she somehow manages to swim sliver through. He's getting close when he's distracted.

He loses her.

And here he is, angry, pressed up against a wall. Without knowing that he's doing it, he grabs something from the ground. A discarded shoe, it sings hoarsely to him of the little boy that owned it. He throws it to the window above, across the main drag, the open one, with the flowers and the stench. It misses, of course.

Except it doesn't.

 

[missedstations]

Re: Why Not Be A Necromancer 101 {missedstations & Kawamura}

Dominic lived with the feel of his power most of hid days, but to know that someone thought of it like rotting meat he would be deeply offended. To him, it was always the stale smell of catacombs, the feel of dust on forgotten shrines, stillness of places abandoned by life. His powers had always leant towards the 'long since dust' than to 'putrefying'. He had summoned spirits, and (arguably) bargained with demons. He had even, once or twice, left his body and wandered where he wanted, seeing the world as a ghost. Never could leave for too long though – he didn't want to actually die. Exchanging the knowledge of the dead for the pleasures of the flesh was far too high a price.

While some of the books on his shelves described rituals to turn living flesh into a vessel for the necromantic will, he had always skipped those chapters. To create a puppet from a person you just killed – that was easy. Child's play. Virtually all necromancers could do it, and most never got further than it. Getting arrested for murder and subsequently executed for dangerous magic was a rather abrupt career killer. Dominic, on the other hand, preferred bone and his own blood when he needed undead minions. Carving bones – sometimes human, Dominic could not deny that he had not done his share of corpse thieving – and then animating them was quite something. Maybe he should write a book no one would want to publish on it?

His 'familiar' had been one of those. He had carved the ivory into a snake form, made it live with over a pint of his blood, and then summoned a spirit willing to live in such a body. He rather missed Ophiuchus these days. The snide comments were rather entertaining, but he preferred his life easy. (And both of them had been filthy minded enough to engage in certain acts that Dominic could not possibly be sure counted as necrophilia.) Maybe one day when he was rich and could afford to be eccentric he'd do it again.

So, while he was almost getting in the mood for getting onto his bed and masturbating, a shoe hit his plant pot. However good his mind was at making up sexual fantasies, most were generally interrupted by ceramic shattering on the floor. Who the fuck threw shoes at windows? Were they trying to kill Sally? That was just not nice.

He put his cigarette in the sink, grabbed the shoe, and threw it straight back, leaning out and shouting, “What the fuck? What did Sally do to you?”

Dominic didn't quite care about the power he could sense from the other man – he was too upset about his plant. His last boyfriend gave him that! Admittedly, he was handling it better than last time someone threw things at him or his property. The last time he had called some decidedly vicious spirits, and enjoyed the subsequent show.

 

[Kawamura]

Will couldn't help but stare, just for a moment, at the shoe. It made no sense, it did, hitting a tiny plant at that level with that small of a shoe. Laws of physics, and all. He hadn't expected a direct hit, hadn't expected to kill the poor violets (who had, after all, done nothing wrong except maybe take up too much sun in the nursery at the expense of some nearby pansies, pansies that must have more connections than the African violets had known, and wasn't that a bitch), certainly hadn't expected the source to stick his pale out and shout back.

For some reason, he had expected the shoe to come back. So he dodged that one, good on him. Still left him in the rather awkward moment of having a conversation with a stranger that had started with a horticultural murder. Sorry I knocked your plants out of the window, he could have said, the polite and sane part of him remarked. Didn't mean it. I'm on my way. Want me to just head over to the corner store and pick up a new one? Instead, he scowled, freckled and tanned face twisting that looked more angry than petulant (though the petulance wasn't exactly missing).

â??What the fuck are you doing here?â?

Right. Sane and civil? Pfft. Unnecessary, really, good manners. Something tickled behind Will's eyes, his nose, reminded him that he hadn't really had a good meal or a good night's sleep since he'd left for this damned town; he could blame his poor mood on that. And the fact the other mage, the one that played with Bad Things, he was stinking up everything with magic so â?¦ vile, it had trampled out the song of that girl. The one he'd been looking for.

â??Put up some wards, for chrissakes,â? Will remarked, somewhat anti-climatically, not because he'd gotten a few odd looks from pedestrians, but because he hadn't really planned out what sort of conversation he was going to yell up at the man. Having already gone and exhausted the more direct form he preferred, he was left with little else but the magical equivalent of banging a broom handle against the ceiling and yelling 'turn that shit down'.

 

[missedstations]

Well, they had both avoided a shoe to the face. That was a good thing, right?

“I just fucking moved in. So sorry I haven't yet got around to stabbing myself and making sure my fucking magic was acceptable to fucktards like you.” He was, however, starting to feel a little ridiculous shouting down from the top floor apartment right down to the street level, and he didn't hold any particular ill will towards anyone... The day was far too nice for that.

That really was the annoying thing about necromancy. Even a simple ward involved stabbing something. No wonder so many got bored and started stabbing other people. It was no fun at all to keep cutting yourself, was it? It hurt every time! It never hurt less, either, however often he'd done it. Dominic was powerful, but lazy. It worked out in the end. He'd never tried to do a big ritual because he didn't quite see the point of showing off, and because he was sure it wouldn't be worth the effort.

“Buy some compost round the fucking corner and put the wards up for me, and I'll cook you something and give you a bed for the night. Don't worry, it doesn't stink yet, I haven't slept in it.” Okay, a necromancer putting up a shaman was not standard at all, but it could be done. There was that box of vegetables he had to do something with.

“And you know, you could make sure I have no undead in my wardrobe. Or something. Whatever you people think I do.” When it came to it, few actually understood the practice of necromancy. The reputation ruined everything for anyone responsible.

He glanced at the smashed pot on the floor then studied Will down below, leaning on the windowsill. He'd probably tell Dominic to go fuck himself, but the words were out already. It wasn't Dominic's fault he could instinctively tell how close to death someone was, and Will was getting there. A few more missed meals and even less sleep would land Will at least close to hospitalisation. It was always a shame when the living died, no? Wasn't that why the first necromancer chose to step into death? It was always easier for all concerned if no unnecessary dying was done in the first place.

“You're killing yourself like that, you know.”

 

[Kawamura]

â??I--â? Will started, then stopped, brain incapable of supplying any sort of predicate to that sentence. Now that was a shocker: black magic workers didn't really invite people over for supper. They weren't exactly social folks, something he knew from the lapsed necromancer who had married into the family some ten years before Will. Hell, even his necromancer didn't take dinner with him most days, and he hadn't even thrown a shoe at Eoin. Luckily for him, this sort of frantic, confused thought process took place very shortly after that aborted attempt at being angry again, or else he would have really looked a fool, wouldn't he?

â??What?â? the redhead finished stupidly, not entirely sure where he had lost the flow of the conversation. Nasty magic. Check. Shoe throwing. Check. Second shoe throwing. Check. Angry. Check. Dinner. Oh, good, it wasn't him that had gone and thrown a curve ball. The bear of a shaman wasn't exactly a subtle man, so his conversation partner could probably see the look of disbelief that had taken over the man's whole face even from that height.

Needless to say, Will was a horrible poker player.

He was, however, a good shaman. And since this Ward had no Warden, he'd, well, he'd have to take care of the magic spilling over, wouldn't he? The damned place was a city, sick enough with pollution and buildings that had been of materials never asked for. It didn't need a bunch of black magic seeping in as well, poisoning the place further. â?? Fucking hell.â? Rather than remark on the â??killing yourselfâ? bit, he tramped off towards that corner store to pick up what he needed. Not compost, of course, since he did most of his work with chalk and herbs, not humus. Shamanism was as much a misunderstood tradition as whatever his good fellow upstairs was practicing on dead bodies (undead, he had said. Necromancer, then. Perhaps other things as well, who knew?), at least that's what he figured whenever some New Age pothead asked him questions.

The clerk there didn't even blink an eye when Will, all one-hundred-ninety centimetres of him, purchased a bucket of sidewalk chalk and a half-dozen candy bars. It must be the hair and the giant stick. Got him nearly everywhere, it did, without much of a question. Why is that man buying candy and chalk? Is he a peadophile attempting to attract children? Or just nuts and hungry? Whatever, he has feathers in his hair and a giant stick. Not going to mess with him.

Returning back to the necromancer's building wasn't all that hard: there was a shoe, after on, laying on the street right next to the sidewalk. Will picked it up on his way across the street, jaywalking like every good city-dweller. It wouldn't be hard to find which door was the necromancer's; this close, and the magic was â?¦ visible. He had no other word to describe the almost-colour of aura seeping out along the floor and steps, slithering down to the ground. Fucking Christ on a damned pogo stick, but mages were always so stupid. Didn't they see the mess they made? Shamans weren't magical maids to clean up their messes. He knocked on the door using his knuckles, the shoe tucked away in his large hand. There were tattoos even down his fingers, aboriginal magic users preferring to use their bodies as their main spell books, after all.

 

[missedstations]

Dominic just couldn't help but snigger at Will's face. The offer was worth it for that alone! Maybe he should paint that scene. Never that great at portraits though... Dominic's paintings were mostly cityscapes: in brilliant colours when he painted them for sale, but different when he painted death. Death the realm, not the personification. Those were the paintings he always leant facing the wall, strange cities of bone and dead wood, with red skies and red trees. It was how he saw it in his trances. It had never been unpleasant to him. A permanently autumnal world, into which he would pass forever one day. (Only sometimes when he entered he saw winter, but he did not fear that either - he always saw death as peaceful rather than terrifying.)

After Will left, he tossed the cigarette butt onto the opposite roof. There was already a little pile there, obviously he was not going to be the only one with that particular habit. Maybe he should have asked the shaman to pick up some milk too. There was far too much missing in his fridge, but there was enough stuff from his old apartment to get by on for at least a few days.

Turning back to the kitchen, he picked up the violets. Dark purple flowers, soft furry leaves, and the mass of roots still holding onto the earth. He found his smallest cooking pot and put the plant in there, then gathered up as much of the earth from the floor as possible. It would do for now. They had probably needed repotting anyway. New compost would be nice. He threw away the broken pot, and then there was the knock on the door.

“It's open,” he shouted. It wasn't as if he had anything worth stealing. Artists only ever became famous after they died, so maybe he should do himself in? No, he never was suicidal. Dominic stayed where he was, sweeping up the last of the dirt and dropping it into the bin.

No doubt Will would fail to be impressed when he opened the door and stared straight into the bookshelf. Books with titles like On Death, Necromantic Ritual, Summoning of the Dead, Ceremonial Magic... There were more standard texts there too, like a treatise on runic magic and on basic divination. Will had probably never even seen a necromancer work, but oh well. Dominic doubted that the shaman could possibly want an education. No one ever did.

In the actual flat, there was already the faint smell of oil paint, from the not-quite-dry paintings. Rather than leave the canvases to slowly stick together, he had spread them against the wall and against the lower edge of the bookshelf. A city square in the rain, umbrellaed pedestrians hurrying to leave. City park in winter, buried in snow. A café scene. A bare tree and bone houses, with an orange sunset and the faintest white clouds, the same colour as the bleached bone. His style was light, making every scene dreamy and still. When he painted, he would do it in the same trance that he practised necromancy, and it was hard to keep his feelings from the canvas.

“My name's Dominic, by the way,” he told the shaman, as if they did not have that ever so uncivilised exchange earlier. He was an artist. All artists were insane. It was quite possible solvent fumes had fucked up his brain, but it was too late to care about that.

 

[Kawamura]

Opening the door and stepping into the flat put one face to, er, spine, many spines, with the magician's bookshelf. It must have been organized for effect, because the nastier books would have been eye height on a normal sized man, while Will's extra height had him looking at something much blander about divination. Not the books were all that much of a concern to him: his husband, after all, was theorertically a book shop owner (not that they really sold things, as was proper of used and magical book shops) and that meant both unnatural books and unnatural hours (as was proper of used etc, etc).

It was just the, the balls of it. Practicing in a Ward with no Warden? He might as well have dropped tro and rubbed his ... his little skulls in the face of Earth.

Will wasn't entirely sure what the job-related terms for a man's family jewels for necromancers, since Eoin didn't really have a sense of humor.

â??Will,â? the shaman responded, fingers trailing along the paintings. Hrm. Synthetics. The paints didn't sing like the old stuff did, sadly. There was a tune, but it was flat, like a poorly stringed instrument. Kinda like the whole flat, if one ignored the roiling current of magic that stayed about shin height. Dark magic was sorta like cold air: it sunk to the bottom, least that was how Will felt it. Made his ankles ache. â??Did you think no one would notice the stink?â? he asked, half irritable, half amazed. Who knew with â??properâ? mages. They did't often think that far. That's what shamans were for, after all.

So, yeah. Sort of like the world's nannies. Kind of sucked when you thought about it that way, always cleaning up after the others who left their magical equivalent of refuse all over the place. â??Who sent you here?â? Will didn't know how it worked everywhere, but when his family had to remove a magic user, they told the magic user and the folks that were to get them. They even sent a nice note! (Old fashioned, they were, since he'd recieved a text message from a shaman, once, before the young woman had dumped a necrophilliac bloodmage over his border with nary a thank you.) Will bent over, braided hair swinging into his face as he started scribbling on the floors in chalk.

 

[missedstations]

“I just moved in a couple of hours ago! How am I meant to sort everything out in that time?” he asked the shaman with a frown. “I just moved all my furniture in, and I was trying to have a smoke, and then you start throwing shoes at me.”

The things he used to actually practice his magic were still at the bottom of a box somewhere in his bedroom, and also now unlikely to be touched for weeks. If the shaman was going to do the 'cleaning', then he'd probably have no need to get them out at all. It wasn't like he practiced much. It was one of those things that were simply too dangerous to leave around untrained. Dominic managed to earn most of his income selling painting.

And the question of course was going to provoke a rant...

“Oh, no one really. I resurrected a hamster for a little girl. She was five. She had no concept of death! She thought it was asleep, and she was trying to wake it up.” It was a perfectly justifiable reason to resurrect something, when no one concerned would be able to tell the difference. It might have taken a few days off Dominic's total lifespan, but he really wasn't counting that high.

“But this tosser of a geomancer felt it, so he got me evicted on a fucking technicality.” Dom used to feed a local stray cat, and that, apparently, counted as having pets and was a violation of the contract. “Do you know how hard it is to find somewhere to live when no one wants you there? This is the only goddamn place I could find where I can't hear restless spirits and the landlord doesn't look like he wants me to fuck off.”

He paused for breath.

“But you want to know what he's doing instead? He's charging me extra because he knows that otherwise my only option is to go live in a fucking cardboard box. Oh, and no one wants to give me a goddamn job.”

Yes, it was all so glamorous. Being able to raise the dead, live forever by murdering people, talk to spirits... And living on unemployment benefits for half the year because of discrimination. Lovely. Matching his anger, his magic was restless through the room, but that seemed to irritate him too, because with a muttered 'for fuck's sake' he forced it into the other realm. It was a good way of keeping other necromancers away, at least.

 

[Kawamura]

Jesus. What was it with black magic users and being pissy?

Will sarcastically chattered along, safe in the knowledge that his host wasn't really watching him as he stooped and scribbled chalk all over the place. Things were getting a bit louder, pissy themselves, as neatly wrote down rules that said nope, can't do that and ooh, yeah, nope, not that either to the magic. Scratch being a nanny. He was now an obnoxious mid-level manager as far as the other man's magic was concerned.

Hey. Maybe he did need to eat and sleep. His metaphors were... falling apart at the seams, or some other metaphor that he could balls up when he had time.

â??I've actually seen some pleasant boxes on my way here,â? Will remarked amiably because he was of the old school of social interaction, which was to kill with kindness that which you were annoyed with. But, yeah, the place was small, and, yeah, probably marked up. Shamans like Will didn't catch shit like that for the same reason that big guys like Will didn't catch shit like that: because he was a big guy and he carried a big stick and he could, if he wanted to, probably set things on fire. A frame like that and the ability to place a curse made most folks, including landlords (who were often on the line between person and not) go â??all right, you know what, I like you, so I'll give you a deal.â?

You'd think they'd do that for someone who could kill them then raise them then kill them again, but apparently, since there were rules about that sort of thing (and policing mages who lived their who lives practising their more painful spells while they dreamed of necromancers killing landlords), the threat didn't hold as much sway. â??Sorry 'bout the flowers,â? he added, reaching into one of his many pockets and pulling out one of the many cloth bags (he'd use plastic zip bags if he could, but one of his wives was a druid and plastic bags were on her NO list) of questionable herbs. â??And the, you know, shoe. Not the yelling, though.â? Dried remains of leaves fluttered like ashes until they hit the chalk and, with a little white smoke and a smell like burnt tea, disappeared, taking the chalk with them.

 

[missedstations]

“I like plants, but they tend not to like me,” Dominic replied, permitting the change in conversation. Necromancy again, sort of. “That thing's only alive because I put in a spell for-” He stopped, because he was a mage in the end and mages didn't share research. Then again, he'd probably been the only person insane enough to attempt to create resurrection spells for plants. Turns out, dead cells were dead cells, whatever the structure. The lack of 'soul' in plants made the spells surprisingly different.

He coughed to cover the slightly awkward moment. Obviously he got bored sometimes of not being allowed to practice. “Anyway, it's weird, but apparently plant necromancy doesn't eat my life-force... Can I even call it necromancy? I mean, can't actually communicate with the thing, not like human souls...”

Now there was a philosophical question.

And then the shaman was done with... Whatever he was doing. “Damn, that feels weird!” That was the most thorough ward he had ever seen. “All... Nice and neat.” He really seemed amazed at that, sniffing at the rather odd smell.

“Oh, wait. Can you mess things up again a bit? I can sense a corpse somewhere close.” God, that was annoying. Was there anywhere there weren't dead people?

He suddenly remembered his promise to provide food. “Rice or pasta?” He asked, as if death and food went together in the same thought. He had some sauce, and some meat that was now mostly defrosted.

 

[Kawamura]

Will grunted at the awkward slip. Whatever it had been, it was not his concern, it didn't feel dangerous and whomever had been Warden for the kid last time didn't catch him on it, so it really wasn't a big deal for Will to grab him and force the words out or anything. Besides, he thought as he rocked forward subtly, ankles pleased by the lessening of raw, dark magic, shamans didn't really fall on the side of the Church and those were the ones that really, really didn't like necromancy (outside of, you know, their own god, but that was apparently a special case).

â??Heh. Neat.â? Will dug around again in his coat, the sort of ugly, canvas thing that looked as if it had been filched from a professional mendicant. Which, at the moment, it sorta did. He pulled out a rather long pipe and stuffed a little of the herbs in the bowl, but when he managed to light it â?? with a cheap plastic lighter that was a bright red and didn't go well with any look he might have been going for â?? the smoke was closer to cloves than burnt Earl Grey.

Apparently, he hadn't just burned the herbs when he laid the lines.

â??It's not longterm. Your Warden, when I find her, will have to lay you a more permanent one. And nope.â? He stuck the pipe between his teeth, grinning jauntily. â??Ward stays as it is until someone else makes a new one. And pasta's fine.â? He figured pasta was easier and, more importantly, quicker: the necromancer (Dominic, right? From the Latin dominus, patron saint of astronomers and the non-guilty guilty, and he doubted Dominic was any of those).

He started to wander, and it was a trick to do it in such a tiny, bare place. He ended up at the bookshelf, of course, because the flat, dead paintings did little for him and books, even books in a place like this, sang like birds. â??You need help finding services? You know. Soup kitchens or something?â?

 

[missedstations]

Corpses had to be laid to rest right, and this nagged at him almost as much as the dark magic had nagged at Will. He should do a finding later, and sort it out. As much as it wasn't his duty, he doubted anyone else would. The more chaotic sort of necromancers got used to the 'mess' sooner or later, but Dominic had just not murdered enough people to be happy with it.

He slammed a pan on the counter with a little more effort than was necessary and put some water to boil.

It was going to be a simple meal: a tomato sauce with some added vegetables that he had left over, some herbs, and whatever was left still out. Dominic could only be considered a good cook by the ability to make a meal out of anything... But the taste was never what could be considered 'delicious'.

“No, I just need a job,” he replied, dropping a knife in the sink and stirring the sauce with his other hand. “Should be able to sell a couple of paintings, should tide me over.” Begging was below him, and... Well. He wasn't sure his pride would live with having to go for free meals. He'd rather sell his skills on the black market than do that. There were plenty of people who were happy to pay under the table to talk to the dead.

If Will lifted any of the books and flicked through the pages, he would find annotations (and sometimes corrections) to spells and rituals, written sometimes in pencil and sometimes in charcoal. Apparently Dominic had considered the costs and benefits of much that his magic could do, and in places there was evidence that he had matched his magic and his art. The doodles in the margins had vague shapes of power, and the smell of blood. The paintings on the floor were deliberately empty.

 

[Kawamura]

Of course Will touched the books: he lifted them, opened them, fingered them, flipped them, even smelled the pages of one or two when something particularly rank wafted out. Hell, if the necromancer hadn't be around, he might even have licked one or two of the odd stains (being generally stronger than any suspicious stain he had encountered before). Not the healthiest of habits, but curiosity tended to kill shamans less often than cats.

“You could always try raising a few dead on the side. I'm sure that'll work great.” Will plucked the pipe from his lips and placed it carefully on the top shelf before he plucked out another book to explore. Flipping through that one, he added in a pleasant tone of voice, “I hear the Church here has some fantastic scholars in the dark arts. I saw the slides from what they did to the last guy who tried that.”

Because, of course, there were conferences. Will had been invited to one a few years back since it had been hosted in one of his towns and, well, he'd even gotten a lovely little mug and a pen charmed to write in one of twenty colours. And people said clergy were boring! Free food and slides of gristly punishments for black magic users? What more could you want?

He replaced the book, fingers sliding along spines that had a few choice words for him. Some of these books were Bad. “I don't mind heading to a shelter for dinner,” he said, eying a particularly nasty book on the bottom shelf, three over from the left. “If you don't have enough to go giving to guests.”

 

[missedstations]

“I really prefer not to. Raised dead tend to smell and leak all over the floor.” He had never been into rotting flesh... Or rotting anything. Dominic had made his own spells as clean and sterile as they could go: not too many funny smells, and as few things that could stain carpets as possible. “If I need to do things in this realm, I prefer bone elementals.”

Well, that was what the laymen called them. The real denizens of death, but who were willing to cross over when asked nicely. They usually consisted of little more than few scraps of hair and bone, animated by more will than any raised corpse could have. They were more difficult to summon, and even more difficult to control... Since apparently most enjoyed contemplation more than action. Most necromancers never bothered with such beings.

“I wouldn't touch that one,” he said, apparently keeping an eye both on the stove and on Will. He gave no other advice though – telling people there was a gate to death in the pages of a book never worked out well for anyone. Who originally made that mess Dominic didn't know, but it needed to be looked after.

'Light' magics kept their relics all nice and organised, in museums and churches, on display or stored safely in vaults. Necromantic relics, on the other hand, got passed along by being dug up from graves, stolen, inherited, killed and raised for. To find one, all those paths had to be tracked, and their keepers traced. The Map of Death was probably one of the lesser relics... Risky to use, and apparently so unimportant that it tended to get forgotten for centuries at a time. The ability to travel between planes and cut across them was nowhere near so interesting as, say, eternal life.

Correspondence between realms had always been the field of the eccentric, but sometime, someone hit on the brilliant discovery that the landmarks in certain worlds were not as fixed as those in the physical plane. It wasn't quite teleportation... But map-magic was a reasonably effective field. (Cartomancers tended to be very odd though, which came with not living in only three dimensions. They tended not to get the concept of specific destinations.)

“Are you always this rude to your hosts?” Dominic asked suddenly, violently draining some macaroni. Questioning his ability to feed a guest when he'd offered in the first place... It was a worse offence than threatening him with the Church. Dominic would rather starve than be unable to feed someone in his own four walls. Pride. Somewhere he heard that it led to the dark side, but he never took much stock in popular culture. (Technically, wasn't he on the dark side already?)