“Welcome! Wait, I already said that didn’t I?” The pale man waves his hand toward a set of ancient chairs that have weathered the years well compared to everything else in this room. Everything here is decayed, and there is a stubborn spot of mould growing from the corner of the ceiling, near the shelves overloaded with old books. Many of which are themselves encased in layers of dust, others are just piles of carefully kept pages, torn from their covers.

They’re well beyond the point of reading, not that I’d want to.

It’d take me years to read any one of these thick tomes, but it looks like this man has read them all through and through.

“I would offer you… I would… offer…” He gazes past us for a few moments, the others are gripping their weapons, still trying to figure out who and what this man is. “Sorry, I lose myself sometimes… it’s… I was offering drinks, but I have no drinks… I don’t drink anything anymore. I guess old habits die… Well, they don’t, do they? Nothing here dies… It crumbles eventually, but it doesn’t die.”

“Who are you?” I ask, stepping in closer, Ruby is close by my side and Lothar follows a second after, not quite his usual self. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… I’m Rindel. I believe I was once… A… a… I can’t remember? Was I a soldier? No, no, I wasn’t… I was a friend. His friend, but now he’s gone and we’re still here.”

“Rindel?” I hold out my hand to him. “I’m Syr.”

“It is good to meet you, Syr,” his brow presses together as he barks a short laugh, shaking my hand. He’s much stronger than he looks, and I don’t think he’s putting in any real effort to try and squeeze my hand. “An elf that doesn’t act at all like an elf. Always a pleasure, most of your kind are so stuffy, and I truly hate to deal with them, but you seem different.”

His hand is cold.

Not like Rea, whose skin has a life and energy completely her own, but instead a neutral cold, like the air around us.

He’s undead.

It shouldn’t be surprising, with where we’ve found him. The bed that I see over his shoulder looks like it’ll fall apart the moment someone even brushes against it. No living person could survive in a place like this, even an undead like Rea would be deeply offended at the idea of staying in a place like this.

“You’re a person,” I say, staring at his face and looking into his eyes. He’s moving naturally, unlike the knight outside who seems to be working only with the basic orders given an age ago. What would a necromancer need to do to make someone behave like this?

“I am a person,” Rindel laughs, it’s dry and husky, but still close enough to healthy that I can tell that his insides are still all there. “Not that I pride myself on that fact. That’s the minimum you can expect of a man, I would think.”

“You’re talking a little clearer now,” Thayne comments sneaking closer with his hammer on his shoulder. “Did you just need to warm up?”

“Warm up?” Rindel tilts his head and thinks, his expression twisting about. “I… I… am used to working around the holes in my mind. I just need to know where they are. It’s been a long time since I had to talk, and I hadn’t realized just how much that part of me has been damaged over the years.”

“What are you?” Parker asks, ready for a fight just like the others. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”

“Ah, I suppose then that he has failed to achieve his dream,” Rindel nods, lowering his head with a frown. “I had guessed, but I suppose some part of me still hoped that he would return. That perchance, he simply lost his way and couldn’t find us down here. A mad dream, but there’s not much for me to do down here but dream.”

“You’re not making much sense,” Thayne approaches, but Ruby stands in his way.

“I… suppose that I have acquired a tendency for monologues… having myself as my only company does do that to a man,” Rindel stares at the wall, rubbing at his chin. “I… well, I suppose then that my friend is dead? Henry Lithingwait, a necromancer of most high prestige.”

“Henry?” Ruby asks.

“Doesn’t sound like the name of a necromancer, does it? Maybe that’s why everyone forgets his name?” Thayne says, peaking past Ruby at the undead man. “If he’s the necromancer that caused havoc a couple of centuries back, then yeah, he’s dead.”

“I see,” Rindel, takes a seat and lets out a long weary sigh. “It’s… hearing it hurts a little harder than I thought it would.”

“So… what are you doing here?” I ask.

“Waiting,” Rindel says, shaking his head. “Waiting for someone who’ll never return. Waiting for someone to come destroy me, or for my soul to finally fail me completely. I don’t know anymore what I’ve been waiting for.”

The others are already lowering their weapons, the man is clearly not a threat, at least he’s not acting like one. I’m not quite sure that I believe it. He’s undead. He’s not acting for himself, but he’s like the knight, following orders he was given by a necromancer who knows how long ago. Exploring that knight has taught me a few things.

I can give orders to my undead so that I don’t have to think too clearly about how to control them, but it depends on what state their memory is still in. If they don’t remember how to fight, then if I order them to ‘fight’ they’ll struggle and make a sad little effort to achieve it. I always have a direct connection to my undead, Crow in my bag is still bound to me through the æther flowing between us.

It’s not the same for these two. The knight is filled with orders from his necromancer, even though the necromancer is long dead, and he’s still following those orders, reacting to things the way he was told to. So, if Rindel was told to kill anyone who says ‘red’, he could turn on us at any moment, his personality and ‘choices’ wouldn’t matter at all.

“What more can you tell us?” Ruby asks, nudging my shoulder and looking down at me encouragingly.

“What more do you want to know?” Rindel asks. “I can’t say that I’m all that well informed about anything interesting. I have some few stories that are interesting but unless one of you is interested in taking up the magic of necromancy, then they would be little more than historical intrigues.”

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Go on,” Ruby says, pushing me forward, closer to the man.

“Well, I suppose that I could tell you about the dragon Henry and I found the once.”

“A dragon!” Leech squeaks. “They were dead long before your time.”

Rindel chuckles, leaning back in his seat.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” He asks. “We found a dead dragon, but again, who do you think you’re talking to?

“We found it when excavating another hollow in an æther well, just like this place. Somewhere to store his vast armies, where they still no doubt slumber. The bones and scales remained, but the flesh was obviously rotted away long before we were ever born. It was his hobby for over a decade, rebuilding that dragon scale by scale, and trying to bring back its flesh through the more advanced of his magics.”

“An undead dragon…?” I ask. “Aren’t they powerful?”

“Oh, indeed they are,” Rindel nods, closing his eyes. “So powerful that he couldn’t do much with it. I’m sure that it’s still buried there where he left it. We could never find any way to store enough concentrated æther flow to keep it active for even a minute outside of its nest in that æther well. Even resting where it is takes up most of its energy, or at least that’s how it was then.”

“That doesn’t explain why you’re here,” Thayne asks, glaring at the man. “Why are you under this city?”

“I thought I’d explained that, or at least inferred it,” he explains. “It’s the æther well we rest on here. The æther flows much more powerfully through here than it does in most places, allowing undead like myself to thrive where we would otherwise crumble. The entire world is in quite serious competition over these locations, even the wild animals would fight one another for the right to nest here.”

“Cildr…” I whisper the name of my old home. A village built on an æther well. A village burnt down by bandits, possibly at the whims of some terrible vampire sitting in the castle above us.

It’s not what I’m here for.

“In any case, now that Henry is dead… he did say, more than a few times that he wanted his dreams to survive him. He’s been scratching out little notes for as long as I’ve known him, hoping that he could one day find an apprentice. He is dead and crumbled, but his dream might still live on.

“He’s left those notebooks around all over the place hoping that someone would take after him, and come searching for him…” Rindel closes his eyes, pausing for a long while, thinking back about his friend. “The least I can do is preserve his final will.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Thayne grumbles, Ruby keeps between him and Rindel “What was his final will?”

“That someone inherit his purpose and his magics,” Rindel says, sitting up and facing us. “Before you misunderstand any further, as I’m sure that countless lies have been spread, I will explain what I mean.

“Henry was… he was a visionary, or a madman. Both, maybe. He saw what others couldn’t. A world without pain and suffering. Where we could all live in perfect harmony for eternity, but to achieve it we would all need to die. He would make us into the undead so that we could create our own holy land here in the mundane world.”

“Yeah, your right, he was insane,” Thayne grumbles.

“Do you even see me?” Rindel says, waving at himself. “It all sounds awful when ‘undead’ means one of the rattling corpses outside of my door, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about myself. I’m still who I was when alive, I still have a soul. I can read, I can go out for a stroll, and I can do just about anything I could in life.

“If he’d succeeded, we would all be living together in harmony. Everlasting peace and happiness. He just wanted to conquer death, for all our sakes, and he was close, too.”

“He would give that to everyone?” Parker asks. “Or just his friends?”

“He was troubled by that question,” Rindel asks. “If he turns more and more people undead, eventually there would be too many of us and not enough space for us to survive, but he dreamed that he’d find a solution one day. I suppose he never did.

“Perhaps, someone else can. Or at least some part of him can live on, in the things that he’s created.”

“Apart from yourself?” Thayne asks.

“No, no, I’m already crumbling,” Rindel says, shaking his head. “I will pass on his knowledge and let another learn who he was by his craft. It is all that I have left to do. His armies are still here, buried, and I’m certain that a new generation would be able to achieve something wonderful with all of this, or something terrible perhaps. So long as they can prove themselves worthy.”

“That sounds interesting,” Ruby says, nudging me again and nodding at the man. “Do you have any questions, Syr? Anything you’d like to learn.”

“Necromancy,” I say, hesitantly licking my lips. “You’re all still here, but he’s dead. Why haven’t you all turned to ash like other undead?”

“Why haven’t we crumbled?” Rindel asks. “The natural flows of æther here are powerful enough to flood our channels and keep us in our peak condition. Outside of here, it might be more challenging, but so long as we don’t stray, we are safe here.”

“Yeah, but how?” I ask. “Necromancers have to feed magic into their undead to keep them from ‘crumbling’, right? The natural æther shouldn’t matter.”

“No, no, no,” he shakes his head. “I’m not a necromancer, and I’ve always treated my magic like the hammer of justice it is, but even I know a thing or two more than that. An enchantment doesn’t need the enchanter sitting right there feeding magic into it all the time, does it? No, they carve æther channels, into a medium, and the magic is then channelled and formed through those enchantments. It’s the same with us.

“The necromancer forges new channels into the dead so that the natural æther can flow through them and keep them moving. Of course, natural æther flows aren’t always enough for magics like this, the living don’t need to worry as much as they draw the æther to them, but enchantments do best in places like this.”

“Okay, okay…” I nod thoughtfully, trying to understand what that really means. My magic isn’t something that I understand clearly, it’s a thing that I feel rather than thinking about it. So, what does ‘carve æther channels’ mean with how it feels to cast the magic? What does it feel like to carve channels into something? “So, it’s like enchanting?”

“Something like it,” he sits up straight looking at me again. “Now I can’t personally teach you anything, but I do have his notes here with me. The ones that he always spread out to find himself an apprentice. If you want I can give them to you?”

“Syr, it sounds like we have what we’re looking for, doesn’t it?” Ruby asks, looking down at me with a smile.

“You want to rediscover necromancy?” Thayne asks, looking between Ruby and I.

“If it is?” Ruby asks, turning to look at the man, her spear ready.

“Leave it, Thayne. It isn’t any of our business what they want,” Parker says, turning to address Ruby, “So long as our debt is paid at the end of this, we don’t care what it is you’re here for and we’re not going to say a thing about it.”

“You’re wanting an army of the dead,” Thayne grumbles. “Necromancy hurts the soul, don’t you know that? Shialla is kind enough to heal those who are hurt, but that doesn’t mean that we should just recklessly cast more broken souls her way. It’s a terrible thing to do to a person.”

“Thayne,” Leech whispers insistently. “This is none of our business.”

“I…” Thayne grips his hammer tight. “Can I convince you to let this go? I won’t make a fight out of this, but I don’t think you understand the damage this does. Just let me show you how you’re wrong.”

Ruby sniffs at him, turning back to Rindel.

“What else can you offer a budding necromancer?” She asks the undead man. “You’re special aren’t you, maybe it would help to study you?”

“If you can find a necromancer, then I would be glad to allow it,” Rindel nods agreeably.

“Syr, you’re up,” Ruby, pulls me by the shoulder and forces me forward at the man. “You’re here to learn, and this is your best chance. Don’t waste it because you’re afraid of the idiots back there.”

I try to ignore the stares drilling into the back of my head, as I reach out a hand for Rindel again.

“Sorry for not telling you,” I say, positioning myself so that I can watch the three mercenaries that Semi sent with us. They stare at me, and I can’t tell what they feel, but I don’t feel safe leaving them at my back anymore.

Couldn’t Semi find someone better to come with me?