"I can hardly believe it," he remarked, a grin spreading across his face. "Someone actually made it up here uneaten."
—
“Uneaten?” Momo squeaked.
Something about this man dissolved her confidence into a wet rag.
There was just an air to him; something familiar, in the way a hand around your neck becomes familiar if it chokes you long enough.
“Why, yes,” he sighed pleasantly. “I’ve sent my babies to feast. I figure they've been deprived of human flesh for so many years, better late than never.”
Human flesh? Who the hell is this guy?
Is he a…
“Are you a necromancer?” Momo accused, air filling her lungs again. She carefully peeled Chevri off of her, making sure she was alright before stepping in front of her protectively.
He seemed impressed by her (admittedly, very simple) deduction.
“You’re an observant one. And a true believer at that. Yes, I am. An Expert one at that. Most people these days consider us an extinct species. Kyros’s little obliterated blight. But I make a habit out of driving my heel into that perception.” He looked up to the sky with glee as the dark wyrm circled the clouds and bit at the air. “I figure I’ll take these new dead pets of mine and lay siege to one of his precious cities down there in the valleys.”
Momo looked at him in confusion. The people of Aloysius knew necromancers were far from extinct. Their literal queen was a necromancer, not to mention a good portion of their neighbors. Under Momo’s rule, the population of necromancers-in-training had increased exponentially. Schools of necromancy had cropped up in every city, village, and hamlet; even Kalendale of all places was now welcoming the dark arts back into its poorly-constructed walls.
“Um, no offense, but…” Momo squinted. “Just how long have you been up here?”
Despite her tone, he looked positively offended. Scandalized.
“Up here? What is that supposed to mean? Like my head is in the clouds?”
“No no no. Like, literally. On this mountain. Do you even know who runs this continent now?”
“Well one of Kyros’s puppets, of course.”
Momo stared at him blankly. His pouting increased.
“Am I wrong?”
“Well—” she bit her lip. “Yes. Kyros has no presence here anymore. His puppet Jarva is dead. I’m the queen now. And I’m also a necromancer. One with a slightly different moral compass, but, hey, same team.”
She offered him a fist bump. He stared at her for several seconds in shock, his mouth agape.
“Really?” he said after a minute, his voice breathy. His mouth formed an unassuming o.
“Yep.”
“That’s quite, well…”
He looked at the sky.
“Quite disappointing.”
His gaze dropped to hands. Red, angry scars ran up and down them, stitched with small faded lines of fabric. He seemed almost sewn together; a grandmother’s hatchwork project.
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“It seems that the spell that Holy Warlock put on me lasted a bit longer than anticipated,” he said under his breath, slightly embarrassed. “I thought I had been asleep in the tower for a few months, maximum, but this is a little…”
Momo was seized by a strange sense of sympathy for him then. She reached a tentative hand out, and placed it on the side of his arm, squeezing it.
“I’m not really a big fan of the feeding-innocent-mountain-people-to-your-wyrms thing,” she began quietly. “But I get that you must feel disoriented. I’ve been there. If you want to talk about it, we can. I have time—and you’ve got a really nice view.”
As she gestured toward the cliffside, the nightmarish wyrm roared in the sky, bursting through another cloud. It slapped its wings through the air restlessly, waiting for direction.
“Well, maybe we can talk after you put down the dragons,” she added.
He folded his arms and tilted his head up. “Urgh. What a buzzkill you are. You sound just like somebody I used to know.” His forehead creased, and he began snapping his fingers to jog his memory. “Oh, what was her name? Tall, luscious, terrible woman. Smelled of pests. Talked in riddles. Color of her eyes changed with the weather, and the weather changed with her mood.”
Momo’s throat thickened. The cold winter air felt suddenly warm, like the abrupt onset of spring.
“You know Valerica?”
He whipped his head toward her and beamed. His prosthetic eye did a full 360 in its socket.
“Valerica! That’s her. Gods, it’s been so many years… One day someone is the light of your life, the next you’re on a mountain possessing dragons and they’re a name you can barely recall.”
“Light of your life?” Momo paused, her stomach turning. “Were you two… seeing each other?”
His cheeks reddened. “Oh, gods, no. She wouldn’t get within a foot of me even if I wanted her to. Those poisonous lips were always all over that, that—” he snapped his fingers again, and groaned. “The reclusive one. Always murmuring to herself in her room. Writing spell books all day and night. Always talking about creating an army of lifeless, groaning fleshbeasts.”
“Sera?”
The image of Valerica with her lips all over Sera made Momo momentarily suicidal.
“Yes!” He cheered, then sombered, giving her a strange look. “Wait, why do you know all this?”
Momo blinked; he leaned closer to her and inspected her thoroughly, like a detective without the magnifying glass or the credentials.
“You look too young to have been part of Morgana’s original circle,” he remarked. “Could it be, then? Valerica really made good on her plan?”
Momo swallowed. She knew Valerica had worked with a lot of necromancers in her days before the Dawn, but she didn’t know any had survived the war. It seemed that this one had been put on ice.
“Her plan?” she pried.
“Well, yes. It was the whole reason I stopped hanging out with her in the first place. Aside from the fact that I was desperately in love with her, and she couldn’t even remember my name two times out of ten. But her plan—that was her real love, not that disgusting Sera—was one that went beyond corpses and skeletons. She wanted to revive someone… siy-ko-logi-cally.”
Momo’s ego took two arrows to the heart. Her conversation with Valerica back at the Viper once again floated back to the tip of her consciousness: how she had claimed that reviving Momo from her asocial, impotent self to the strong, independent Nether Demon she was now was Valerica’s greatest work of necromancy yet. Her pride and joy.
Sweet, in a way. Humiliating in most others.
“So she wanted to become a therapist?” Momo said, begrudgingly.
He gave her a look of earnest concern. “I’m not sure in which language you’re speaking, but, sure, perhaps. Whatever you would like to call it, she was morbidly obsessed with the revival of the soul. Something even Sera’s research was not powerful enough to touch upon. To turn something darkened and twisted to something light, pure, powerful, and vice versa.”
He touched his fingers to his ice-chapped lips, displeased.
“Oh gods, now I can hear her voice in my head again. It’s like she’s possessing me, delivering one of her terrible lectures through my very mouth. What a powerful curse that woman is. No matter what you do, you can’t scratch her out of your veins. She must really have mastered that magic of hers—the magic of emotional manipulation.”
Momo snorted.
How perfectly put.
Still, her heart stung as she thought about Valerica’s letter, because all Valerica ever seemingly wanted to be—besides the owner of a thousand little golden baubles—was someone who could help the people she cared about. Elevate them. Like she had done for Momo. Like she was trying to do right now, for Morgana. Even if her plan to help Morgana was a bit misled—and involved the coldblooded murder of several deities—it was coming from a place of selflessness.
Well, as much as Valerica could experience selflessness.
It seemed that everyone in this universe understood empathy to be more of an uncanny science experiment than an innate principle of human nature. But it was not very different from Earth in that way.
“Come on,” Momo muttered, impatiently taking the man’s hand and dragging him toward the cliffside, where there was a perfectly clear view of the Ivories. “You talk, I draw. If I come home empty-handed because of Valerica, Sumire is going to be sending me to the Nether a whole lot quicker, and more permanently, than anticipated.”