Gravedancer

5. TO YOUR LEFT, IT LOOKS LIKE A RAID...?

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless-

A lump of death-a chaos of hard clay.

-Darkness, Lord Byron, 1816.

"I don't get it."

Barney had melted Zombie Chicken back to his bones, and we were continuing our strolls to Warren's Witch House party.

"Don't get what?" Cora asked me as Barney packed in silence.

I stared at her. "My magic. I mean, when it first manifested in the Witch House, it was some sort of a defense mechanism, wasn't it? It made me Purge all the ghosts. It helped me cast spectrocide because the ghosts..."

I remembered the first slave I Purged - when she looked at me, I looked like a living neon light. She wanted my magic to strengthen herself. She didn't care what would happen to me if she did take my magic. She didn't care if I died. I shook my head.

"...because the ghosts wanted to kill me. My magic defended me. But that vampire...why wouldn't my magic just, I don't know, burn it to ashes or something?"

Cora reached for her pocket and began tying up her hair. She was nervous - she didn't usually tie her hair up except when she did sports or when she was nervous. "I don't know, Alden. Your magic is apparently more uncontrollable than I thought. The first time magic manifests, they don't usually push us to do spells. They usually just do things on their own. But your magic..." she turned to look at me. "We have to do several things now. First, train you in magic arts. You need to control your magic. We can't afford having another unpredictable slip. Second, we have to figure out a way to cancel this terraformation."

Barney was deathly silent, and from my few minutes of knowing this guy, it seemed pretty unlike him. I must've done something really bad that hurt his feelings or probably even worse.

I couldn't help feeling guilty.

You, young sir, have terraformed Calamity so that monsters thrive here.

And you, young sir, have let them out on the loose.

"By the way, what happened to that girl in the ritual circle?" I asked Cora. "Why was she in it - did she summon the vampire?"

"She's a Necromancer," Barney said grimly. "I've met her during one of our meetings. She's actually a pretty nice girl. A year our senior. It must've been a spell gone wrong. She might've accessed the wrong Door."

"Door?"

"Yes," Barney said. There was still that certain darkness in his voice. "When you let the dead go back to the realm of the living, you need to open the doors for them. Kind of a matter of politeness. But that's not the only Door there was. Basic necromancy had taught us to be careful about choosing the Doors. I had no idea how or why she got the Doors wrong."

"So a vampire is..." I remembered Zombie Chicken's haunting finale. "A vampire is a monster?"

"First off, that wasn't just a vampire. It was a vampire that's too far gone, a killer ghoul if I may. Usual vampires keep human characteristics and return to their human graves. That one clearly did neither. Secondly, no, a vampire isn't a monster, but their most suitable habitat is in the monsters' world," Barney said. Then he stopped walking, and we halted along. "The problem is, Alden, we are not used to fighting monsters. They were defeated hundreds of years ago and we never had to deal with them anymore since. To think that they're now everywhere..."

His voice trailed away. We all shivered.

We continued our strolls until the streetlights began getting scarce and the shadowy silhouette of the Witch House was taking shape. We should be near.