Necromancer's Curse

Chapter One

Necromancy, a dark art of a dark art frowned upon by all societies known. Harbouring the demonic practitioners could throw the entire town at you, putting every last thing you ever loved or held dear at risk. The worst thing about the evil men and women that profess themselves to the practice is that there is no driving them out of a community. The dead will rise, the atmosphere of the entire town will tense, the sane will drive themselves to lunacy, and the inevitable destruction of the once peaceful population will sooner or later come around. That is, unless the necromancer has an apprentice.

In order for the practice of the mad to continue alive and well, a necromancer that has believed him or herself to have achieved mastery must select an apprentice to carry on the necromantic profession. The process of selecting an apprentice is never through voluntary application, but by the necromancer deciding which child who survived the destruction of their beloved home would be worthy of being damned to the dark arts. The child was usually around five or six years of age, and the necromancer would do anything to keep it safe. Safe would never necessarily be synonymous to good shape, but the child would be kept alive by the necromancer responsible for it as long as the child was still an apprentice.

For the first few years the child is kept in complete secrecy and the necromancer goes about their usual business, dedicating the nights to training it. During these years there's little to no worry that the necromancer must face, as the child is normally too struck with fear that they wouldn't dream of the horrors they would have to overcome if they were to leave the pseudo-safety that the necromancer's home provided. However, this doesn't last long. Once the child ages around five years and must soon be infused with a demonic spirit, it tends to cause much trouble for the necromancer.

Before the child is ready to receive a demonic spirit it must do a series of initiation-esque tasks and these tasks may sometimes lead to the discovery of dark arts within a town. If townspeople were to find out that the child belonged to a necromancer it would be taken hostage and when the necromancer came to retrieve it, a member from the church would be ready to execute the once-human creature. The only way to kill a necromancer is to pray it has an apprentice stupid enough to make any mistake.

This is why I always wished I was smart.

~

The thick air of the basement in which I resided in for a majority of my nights was something I never got used to. The air felt almost as if it were tightening around my neck or solidifying with the stench of chemicals that were used to craft preposterous mixtures said to do impossible things. I myself have witnessed atrocities that have reduced a normal human being to a pile of guts and ashes, with gore painting the surrounding environment in disgustingly strong colours, but I myself have never thought it to be through the aid of potions but rather through the aid of magic itself.

The evil art to which my guardian and mentor uses to feed off of the living and damn innocent souls to hells deeper than what one could ever imagine is an art powerful enough to get anything one would ever want done, completed in a mere instant by the use of an equally powerful catalyst. Objects of sentimental value power the division of magic known as necromancy. The more sentimental value any one object holds, regardless of what the object is, the more destructive the power it could yield.

While I lied on my cot in the basement deep below the floor of the establishment that was on ground level, these thoughts circulated throughout my mind and occupied the time normal people would use to sleep. Sleep was a pleasure to which I had little to no time allocated for me to indulge in, and even deep within the night when Aristide could come in at any moment demanding that I prepare my things and ready myself to venture far from the area to which we currently occupied, the event that caused this was always so rare that I always thought that now of all times would be an excellent one to get rest and to allow my tired body to recompose itself.