Rob
Pew Pew Pew
Moral Objection
1905 Words
1905 Words
“I’ll be... what now?” Rosa asked with a perplexed look on her face. “Preserving the dead? I’m not a fucking gravekeeper or am I? How the fuck do you want me to preserve the dead?”
“Now now,” the Crow responded with a tinge of sarcasm in his voice. “You’ve raised the dead before, you know the ins and outs of how corpses work better than most necromancers I’ve seen, so don’t go spouting nonsense about how you can’t preserve the dead.”
“But I can’t!” she yelled back.
“Sure you can,” he said. “You just need to have some faith in yourself. You see, preserving the dead is not much different from raising the dead, Rosa. The big difference lies in something that should come pretty natural to you already.”
“And what is this difference then?” she asked with a single raised eyebrow, still not completely buying the man’s words.
“The soul,” he answered. “What keeps the body from decaying while a person is a live is the soul. You’d probably think it’s the vital organs such as the heart and, of course, the brain, but those are driven by one thing, and one thing only: the soul. It is only when the soul has completely left a person’s body that it starts to decay.
“This is why we can resurrect them to do our bidding,” he continued, having entered full-on teacher mode now, “Because they do not have a soul, they have no allegiance to any particular person and so we can make them ours. The problem with this is that no matter how good a necromancer you are, the body will still start to decay slowly and cannot be repaired because it has no soul.”
“Okay, so the difference is the soul,” she said. “That still doesn’t tell me how to ‘preserve the dead’, though.”
“The answer to that is simple,” the Crow responded. “You add a piece of your own soul, attach a part of your essence to the body of the deceased and make it yours completely and irrevocably. This will allow you to both preserve and repair the body of the deceased in your charge.”
She wasn’t sure if she liked the idea of that, honestly. Attaching a piece of her soul to the body of a deceased person? That sounded... dangerous. There were very few things she knew more of than the soul that inhabited someone’s body, the essence of their very existence, and no amount of knowledge latched deep within her psyche could appreciate the idea of splitting one’s soul into pieces.
“That doesn’t sound very... necromantic,” she responded with scepticism filling her every word. “The very idea behind ‘necromancy’ is that it only works without the soul still inhabiting the body, right? So then why would we want to mess with that ideal?”
“Your worries are understandable,” the Crow responded as he walked back over to his son’s body and placed a single hand on the corpse.
When the man’s hand began to trace from left to right, up to down with the top line traced about half as short as the line traced to the bottom a strange line shot up from the newly traced cross. It glowed an eerie black, similar to a crow’s colour and soon the body began to seem more like the flesh it used to wear.
Then, with a flick of the wrist, the cross disappeared and the corpse returned to its original state.
“Your sign is the cross?” Rosa asked, hardly able to contain her amusement as she gazed in the Crow’s general direction.
“It’s an easy sign to remember and perform,” he retorted as a sigh escaped him. Pointing a finger at Rosa he continued, “A necromancer’s weakness is not the will, but the sign through which one escorts their will, Rosa. Now, show me yours!”
Moving over to the Crow’s dead son she kneeled down right next to him and placed three fingers on the right side of his chest and traced it with a circle-arch downwards while removing a single finger until there was only one line left. At the end she flicked it up in leftward motion, symbolizing a fully-fledged wing on the right and a broken wing on the left.
“Very good,” the Crow responded, nodding in approvement. “That’s a powerful sign you’ve got there, Rosa. You joked about my sign, but looking at my biggest regret, it’s easy to see why it would be. I was unable to break the cycle of this accursed blood of mine, and as a result my son had to die. I can live with his death, but not with my inability to break the cycle. As such, the dead of my son is a bit of a double-edged sword.
“It is both my biggest strength,” he continued with a stern look on his face, “and my most dangerous weakness. The cross symbolizes this perfectly.”
“Is that why your necromancy is so...”
“Powerful?”
“In a sense, yes,” he answered. “But, honestly, my sign pales in comparison to yours. If we simply look at the significance that both of our signs carry, yours is rooted much further down inside of you than mine is. My sign carries my inabilities and turns them into strengths, yours carries a curse.”
“That doesn’t sound very promising,” Rosa admitted.
Thinking about it logically, being able to take your shortcomings and turning them into strengths seemed like a pretty sweet deal to the redhead. Instead, her sign signified a curse cast upon her from birth.
“Ah,” the Crow continued, his raven-coloured hair catching the wind ever so softly as he moved back over to where Rosa had placed her sign on the corpse, “but that’s where you would be wrong, my dear student.
“Look.” He placed his hand on the sign Rosa had created, but retracted it almost as soon as he had touched it. Moving his hand towards Rosa, the young woman could see why he had done so - not in the least because his face was a grimace. The place where his finger had touched the sign was a small spot that resembled rotting flesh.
“A cursed sign is more powerful because it does not change anything,” he said with a deadly serious look on his face. “A curse is a curse no matter how you try to sugarcoat it, Rosa. There is nothing wrong with my finger, but it did catch part of the curse you placed upon my son’s body.”
It was true. After a second or two his finger returned back to its normal disposition, with nothing indicating that only a few moments ago it looked to be dying. Whereas previously Rosa had thought her sign acted as a catalyst not just inwards, but outwards as well, it now felt like the curse was more of a warning than anything else.
It didn’t hurt those that touched the sign, but it showed them a glimpse of the horror that awaited them.
“Yours still seems more... applicable, though,” she finally said after a while. “You say a curse is a curse, but that really doesn’t give much in the way of what is possible. Yours is more concrete.”
“And because it is more concrete,” the Crow began, “it is less fragile, but this does not need to be a good thing. Yes, my sign is more stable, more in tune with the world around it, but yours comes from the heart. Your sign is your soul, and as such has much more potential.
“We are getting ahead of ourselves, though,” he admitted as he scratched the back of his head. “You were going to preserve the dead, and we deviated into a discussion on the worth of signs. You took the first step, you placed the sign, now all you need to do is channel your essence through it.
“Of course,” he continued with a faint grin, “you could just use a phylactery, and you’ll find that’s probably easier, but that is not our way.”
“Right,” she responded and moved over to the boy’s dead body. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable raising your son back to life, though.”
“No?” the Crow asked. “Well, tough luck, Rosa, this is all you’ll get.”
Shrugging, Rose placed kneeled down and placed her hand on the sign she’d made before. Energy swirled around her arm with a dark and dangerous glow to it, before slowly moving into the sign. It lit up then, slowly, but surely until all the energy in the air had dissipated into the sign. And then...
Nothing.
The energy in the sign dispersed back into the air, causing Rosa to take a deep breath and try once more. This time, the energy she concocted was more violent, more volatile and as such the sign was filled up real quick. But, as with the last time, nothing happened. The body remained lifeless.
“I can’t...” she stammered, hanging her head low. “I just can’t... your son, I can’t bring him back. I’m trying but, my feelings... my thoughts, my ideals, my everything is against it. I killed him for a reason, and now you want me to bring him back so I can train, I get that, but I can’t. Not with him.”
Another sigh from the Crow was all that filled the air for a few minutes, before he finally went over to his son’s dead body and his apprentice’s failed attempt. Perhaps it had been a bit too soon for Rosa to fully get over the emotions swelling up inside of her. She did well to hide them, but they were obviously still there. If only she could step over this awkward moral barricade she set up for herself, she’d be so much stronger.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “No, actually, I kind of do. But, you have no trouble stabbing people in the throat and make them do your bidding, but when it’s someone you’ve killed because of an event that happened in the past, you clam up?”
“It’s not just that!” she yelled, her eyes filled with an odd mixture of fear and anger. “What he tried to do to me, the things he said, I don’t ever want to see him alive again! His soul may be gone, but I don’t want to risk it!”
“Rosa...” the Crow responded in an almost saddened tone of voice. “A necromancer’s greatest virtue is taking the hate of those that wronged you, and turn that into a driving force for the recently resurrected. You have got to get over this, or you’ll never be able to advance.”
Flinging his son’s dead body over his shoulders, he tuned to face away from Rosa.
“We’ll leave it at this for today. Your mother must be eager to hear from you, and I don’t want to keep her much longer. I’ll call on you again in a few days, Rosa. I hope you’ve learned to shut out those thoughts by then.”
With that, the Crow began to walk away. Leaving Rosa behind was perhaps not something he generally would’ve done after a training - usually they went out for lunch or something to discuss what she’d learned and whatnot - but today felt like a good day to let her brood on her own thoughts for a chance.
He just hoped that it would prove enough.