Rob
Pew Pew Pew
Preserving the Eerily Deceased
1700 Words
1700 Words
Okay... so, next day’s training wasn’t exactly what she’d expected from it. As per usual when she went out to train with the Crow, she hadn’t bothered prettying herself up because she knew she would probably end up worse for it. As such, she was wearing a set of worn-down jeans with a black tank top that had seen better days. She did wear her hair in her usual bun, though, with two hairpin knives keeping it all together, and her dark-brown head-wings rest comfortably atop the sides of her face pointing towards her cheeks.
When her stormy gray eyes rested upon the Crow’s visage that morning, though, she found herself becoming a little bit puzzled.
“Why is there a corpse on the ground in front of you?” she asked with a single raised eyebrow and a look that made you wonder if she’d seen a ghost. “Actually, no, let me rephrase that: why is your deceased son’s body lying on the ground in front of you?”
It was a bit of a miracle that she had managed to make out the contours of what used to be Alain’s living features. He obviously hadn’t been dead long enough for any of the flesh to completely rot itself away from his bones, but given the smell it wasn’t too far away from decomposing completely either.
No, the thing that ticked her off was the rather distinct crack on this corpse’s head that made her completely certain of the person’s true form. After all, it was she who’d smashed his head in with a metal pipe months prior. It was a long story, one too long to recount really, but she remembered him trying to come onto her and when she next came to her senses he was dead.
She was caught soon afterwards, thrown into some dank and dreary cell and was to be executed on grounds of murder and all that jazz when the son’s father, the man standing right in front of her as of this very moment, had decided to take her in as an apprentice once she’d served two years in prison.
Now there were all kinds of strange theories and questions she felt she needed an answer to. Like, why had he bailed her out when it was his son that had been killed? Why did Elara befriend her almost immediately after she’d become the Crow’s apprentice, why did the mother love her like her own daughter? But, also questions like: why the hell was his son’s dead body now lying in front of her?
More importantly, though... why now?
“Well,” the Crow began, scratching the back of his head in the process all the while looking a bit sheepishly at Rosa. “That is a good question, I’ll give you that. Before I explain, though, let’s just put some things to rest. Why did I bail you out that night, and why did I take you in as an apprentice?”
“Also,” Rosa interject, “why do neither your wife, nor Elara seem to care much either? Because I’d think it’s a pretty fucking big deal that I killed your own and only son. I know I don’t care, because he got what he deserved, but I wagered you, as his direct family, would at least care.
“Why didn’t any of you seem to care?”
Sighing softly, the Crow seemed to scratch the back of his head even harder now. It was almost as if what he was about to say was going to sound either really cheesy, or really stupid. Or maybe a bit of both. There was still a lot she didn’t know about Elara’s family bloodline and heritage, but that was also because she didn’t dare ask, really. The tales she heard about Balthazar the Mad and his offspring, well... it would make anyone afraid to ask.
For a moment longer, the Crow seemed to consider Rosa’s disposition, the way she stood, the way she breathed. His brown eyes narrowed slightly, and his short, raven-coloured hair accentuated this feeling of dread all too well. It didn’t really help that he was tall and pretty muscular, or that his villainous-looking moustache - the one that curled upwards near the end on both sides - gave him a look of absolute authority.
She would be downright scared of the man if not for the fact that he was his mentor, and that her entire life was essentially trying to cope with the fears of her past.
“Our line of blood...” he began in an ominous tone of voice, “it requires, let’s say, a blood sacrifice every generation.”
“A sacrifice?” Rosa asked with a perplexed look on her face, even though she really should’ve seen that answer coming. “Like, me killing your son somehow made things easier on you, or something?”
“You could say that,” he said with an almost sad look on his face. Almost, but not quite. “Like my sister before him, and my grandfather before her, every generation requires the blood of a Vahlmore.”
“But...” she began, finding it difficult to keep up with the conversation, “what for?”
In truth, she kind of had an inkling as to what this sacrifice was really for. The dead of a Valhmore, the blood of royalty - weathered or not - was necessary to keep the city of Valmoor what it had been for all those years: a secret.
“It is necessary to keep the mist up. As for why I, my wife and your best friend didn’t mind you killing our son, her brother, was simply because we’d already discussed this prior to the event. He was going to die, he’d already given himself up for sacrifice. He justed wanted to go out with a bang and so he sought out to conquer you.”
“Me,” Rosa stated dumbfounded. She didn’t even question it because it sounded so stupid, so retarded. The boy - man now if he were still alive - whose name she forgot the minute she’d killed him had set out to go out with a bang by... banging her, and in doing so inadvertently signed his own death warranty.
“Why me?” she finally managed with a look of disgust.
“Well,” the Crow continued, chuckling - which startled the young laicar-enlil, “I remember your family coming over for dinner one night, and I also remember a certain mother of yours told our son - who had been ogling you the entire night - that if he so much as dared to touch you, she’d turn him into the sacrifice she needed to resurrect her mother, Arachne. She’d told him he would become her host, an empty shell to be used for her mother’s plans.
“Now fast forward to when he tried to seduce you, and it’s easy to see why he did it. He was hoping your mother would be the one to kill him and turn him into a host for our lovely lady Arachne.”
“But I killed him instead,” Rosa responded. “Okay, that kind of, sort of, explains why you lot seem fine with it, but that still doesn’t explain anything about why the fuck you dug him up or something.”
“I just removed him from his coffin,” the Crow corrected her, “but I suppose ‘dug up’ is ample enough of an explanation as any. The reason why I dropped him off here is simple: you need materials to work on your necromancy skills, and I’d rather not have to kill some hapless resident or some passing merchant just because our supply of dead bodies has dwindled since you were last here.”
She wanted to ask why it had dwindled, but she could kind of guess the answer. With Rosa gone, it wasn’t really necessary to keep all the dead bodies around because the Crow was quite the grandmaster at necromancy already anyway. So, most bodies were burned up for as a sacrifice for Lady Arachne, not the resurrecting kind of sacrifice, but more the appeasing kind of sacrifice. As a result, most dead bodies in Valmoor were those that were buried.
Now, this was were things got a bit tricky. Necromancy was, by all accounts, a skill shunned by many as an affront to all that was life - which it was. It was the antichrist of whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. It was bad business and the people that dabbled in it - yours truly and her mentor, among other unsavoury magi and miscreants - were the spawn of hell themselves.
Fine. That was all fine and dandy, really. The thing people tended to forget, though, was that desecration of the deceased was a big fucking no when it came to the recently, or less recently, buried. When someone was buried they stayed buried unless you got the explicit ‘go for it’ from the surviving family members. Rosa generally didn’t care much for rules, but this was one unspoken rule among necromancers that she took to heart and as such was the only reason why her necromancy was always accompanied by bloody murders. If someone just died - for instance by your own hand with a knife through their throats - then all bets were off.
Necromancy ho!
For the Crow to retrieve his own deceased son from his last resting place meant that he either hadn’t bothered to find anyone willing to lend their dead family member to him for his protege’s training, or he just couldn’t be bothered to ask and decided to just choose the easy way out and use his own son.
“Couldn’t we have just done this on some dead animal then, though?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” the Crow began, “but the skill I’m aboto teach you is easier done on a corpse or carcass that’s of relative human size than just any poor animal.”
“And what is it that you’ll be teaching me then?”
His face brightened up and a smile crept on his otherwise stoic face as the Crow moved away from his deceased son and over to Rosa.
“Today," he said as he pointed towards his son. "Today you’ll be attempting to preserve the dead.”