ONCE UPON A TIME, at the End of the World, there lived a necromancer. His name was Theodosius, and years ago he made the terrible mistake of falling in love. This is the story of his (mis)adventure. You should read it. Theodosius is mildly interesti...
LATER THAT EVENING, Theo sat down to the first home-cooked meal he had eaten in almost a decade. He had taken great pains and, with some useful suggestions from Elliott, he had managed to create something almost edible: a wild mushroom and onion stew. They ate it with wilted-looking bread and butter.
And wine, of course. Plenty of wine.
"I'm not supposed to drink wine," Sweetbriar said. They were seated in the workroom at a tiny table near the one window. The dining room was no longer suitable for company.
"Have some water in it, then. It isn't strong. I find wine is such a wonderful substance. It frees the mind, loosens the joints, steels the will." Theo nervously tittered and sloshed wine generously into his own cup.
Sweetbriar poured her cup mostly full of water from the ewer on the table, then added a dainty dribble of wine. She sniffed it with a grimace. "Where do you get your wine, the sewers?"
"Needs must," Theo muttered. "Please ... help yourself to the food."
Sweetbriar had quite an appetite, it would seem. Theo picked at his own food while the little girl devoured a plate of stew and bread with gusto. He was heartened to see that she appeared to think it palatable, which he determined by the way she didn't vomit it all up the way Tansy had when he'd cooked.
"This is good!" Sweetbriar said.
"Tell her it's thyme," Elliott whispered. He was sitting underneath the table, out of Sweetbriar's line of sight.
"What? Time for what? Not yet! Are you mad?" Theo whispered back, panicked.
"What? No, thyme, you idiot! Thyme. In the stew."
Theo, oblivious to those among the audience who are snickering at this unforgivable pun when they should instead be lobbing bricks at the Narrator's head, was about to reply...but then, Sweetbriar fell headfirst into her second plate of stew, splattering his beard and the table with little bits of mushroom and all-important thyme.
The necromancer rose to delicately extract the girl from her dinner, wiping her dear little face clean with a grubby rag from the sideboard.
"Now," Theo said. "Now it's time."
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