Friday, July 25, 2014

Full-Time Necromancy Now A Vanishing Occupation

Full-Time Necromancy Now A Vanishing Occupation
by
Bobby Derie

At one time, the Necropolis attached to the Gallow's Hill Cemetery supported three full-time necromancers and up to half a dozen interns and apprentices; nowadays it makes do with just two part-time masters of the dark arts.

"It's not what I expected when I left the Black College," Gerrard Montelier admitted. As a student Montelier had excelled at practical reanimation and exorcism, serving three internships overseas in the catacombs of Paris, the barrow-mounds of Caermaen, and in a modern coven in Boston, and was editor of the school paper. Looking forward to a full-time position once he finished his studies, he found no openings, and after a year of work had been forced into taking a secular job in human resources to make ends meet.

"The market is shrinking," Montelier said, "as more and more people choose cremation or forgo traditional post-funerary rites of supplication. Antibiotics, of course, are rather more effective than amulets warding against spirits of disease, and most of the mom-and-pop funeral homes are being replaced by larger, more efficient corporate facilities designed to channel spiritual energies away from gravesites and so limit manifestations and with more strenuous disposal practices that reduce much of the human error that can unquiet spirits."

Most corporate mortuaries don't even keep a full-time necromancer on staff, or else have one that cover multiple facilities in nearby districts, filling the pointy hat of three or four black magicians under the old scheme. These changes come at the worst of time for university graduates like Montelier, where ballooning tuition costs mean that they enter a very tight job market with few prospects - and those of limited value.

"Necromancy hasn't been really lucrative for generations, of course, but it used to be a respectable middle-class occupation." Montelier told me, "We were standard for many treasure-seekers, to exorcise guardian spirits, and for those who wanted to place guardian spirits properly, for example. There was a good sideline in bones, babyfat candles, ashes, hands of glory and other things, though now the enchanters and health guidelines have taken the bottom out of that. A few Doctors of the Art can still call up a demon for wealth and influence, but most of those have moved into supplying student loans - the terms aren't much different, and my own spirit is mortgaged considerably just to pay for my education."

Spiritual and financial debt among necromancers is spiraling ever upwards, in a trend that doesn't look to reverse itself anytime soon, and isn't the only problem facing the field. The United Association of Necromancers & Nigromancers reports that members are retiring at twice the rate as new dabblers in the Dark Arts are entering the field, and "bivocational necromancy" is on the rise as more and more necropolises, funeral homes, cemeteries, and shrines cut back on the pay and hours for their resident necromancer positions.

"It's increasingly becoming very rare to see a sole practitioner," Montelier told us, "Co-ops are the norm, sharing facilities - not easy when there are different traditions involved." Some places are beginning to realize the difficulties of student debt and are offering to help share the burden in exchange for binding promises to assume the grey mantle for a particular place of death, but those are still relatively few, and difficult to make with the shrinking pool of congregants. Still, Montelier remains hopeful.

"While I wish I could support myself solely through my Art, I thank the Dark Gods that I have the position that I do have."

###

Friday, July 18, 2014

In the Shadow of the Labyrinth

In the Shadow of the Labyrinth
by
Bobby Derie

Now it came that Minos, his mind yet filled with dark oracles and the screams as the queen labored in the barn, set to Daedalus his task.

The father of engineers went about his work without question. The king had set aside a piece of ground beyond the palace proper, in a field that had been left for grazing, but was considered poor for its swampy ground. With stick and string and lodestone Daedalus walked the fields with measured tread, and on the earth he drew his circles within circles, and alone among men he went to see the child named Asterius, and looked into those blue eyes without fear, to measure the length and shape of its limbs. So in six days he returned to the king and asked for men.

Pasiphaƫ recovered from the birth under the ministrations of her handmaidens, but when Daedalus had his plans Minos ordered her to return to court, leaving the child with those two women from the east. Yet she was still nursing, and so every day would leave to give the boy his suck, to the great consternation of the king.

Yet before the trenches were dug or the walls were laid, before the marshy ground was drained away by walling off a little stream, and before with quiet anger Minos stormed out one night to light a torch to the mocking shell of a cow that had cuckolded him, Daedalus built a house on the edge of the field with rooms for the child and the handmaids, where they were to stay while the prison was erected. When it was done the handmaids examined it, and one turned to Daedalus and said:

"We shall need a stable, for the cow."

"What cow is this?" said the engineer.

"The child must be nourished, and we are neither of us wet. So we shall have a cow."

At this Daedalus furrowed his brow, yet he simply nodded. A stable for a single cow was no great thing, and in the back of his mind always was the shape of the circles-in-circles.

When the stable was built, one of the handmaidens came forward with a great cow of strange breed, unknown to Daedalus eyes. For though he was no herdsman he had studied something of the cattle on the island for the Queen's device, and had taken their measure in many things. It was an unassuming beast, clearly female and with pendulous teats that bespoke a great milker, yet for all that of no great beauty, its coat mixed white and grey, with a nose so black as to be almost blue. But he saw when it moves a simple grace and the definition of great muscles that bespoke a power beyond its bulk, and as those brown eyes met his there was a wisdom greater than mere animals that stared back at him, and a shiver not of nerves but as though he stared into the face of a cold north wind.

When the cow was ensconced in its stable, Minos forbid the queen any more contact with the child. Before she left for the final time she gave the child a single gift: Asterius, the name of Minos' own father, and whether there was wisdom or spite in that, none could say.

Daedalus set about the building, ordered the men to move the earth, testing the stone, a common sight as he walked up and down with his staff and string and lodestone. He commanded, as some engineers do, with quiet words and hard-edged movements of the hand, as though he carved the building out of the very air. And every day he came to see the boy Asterius, and measure the length and strength of his limbs. He was not an unkind man, Daedalus, but there was not of love in those grey eyes or curling beard. To him, Minos' request was no stranger than that of PasiphaĆ«, and though some have said he was as much a midwife as those handmaidens for his part in the whole affair, all that Daedalus ever saw was naught but a challenge set before him.

The boy grew quickly, and strong, and well; every day he sucked from the cow's teats, exactly as a calf, and the great old cow stood it with great forbearance. The handmaidens themselves cared for cow and child alike, and as the weeks came to months and the shadows of the walls fell upon the house Daedalus had built for them, they borrowed a bull to keep the cow's milk flowing.

After some months, as the labyrinth neared completion, and Asterius tottered about, already walking and babbling, Daedalus asked the handmaidens:

"What cow is this, that you have brought to feed the child? For I have never seen its like."

"The first of her kind, fashioned when the world was young. Some say she lived on the river Veh, and on the other side was the first man. Some say she sprang from the rime, and at her teats the giants suckled. It matters little, for her spirit was set among the stars, and has been created back into the world many times. If for nothing else, than for this."

Daedalus pondered her words and furrowed his brow as he worked, measuring the growing limbs of Asterius, who gave a lowing laughter as the engineer absently tickled him.

Yet when he went back to his earthworks and stonemasons, he ordered that the walls should be thicker and higher still.

###

Friday, July 11, 2014

Tea with the Brain-Dragon

Tea with the Brain-Dragon
by
Bobby Derie
In the pre-dawn, ninja homeschoolers sat in ambush of their public school peers, homemade smoke-bombs ready to count coup and earn their stars. The blood-seers sang their sad farewell to the night as they retreated in lines to their suburban hive-crypts, and trucks blew their horns as they passed the zebra crossings, heedless of the lights. Somewhere down by Holburn came a mournful howl, rising into a chorus: a Drachma girl was shedding her first coat, and all the lusty young werewolves could smell it.
On Greymont, up on the hill, the apartment faced the rising sun. Marne was on the patio, naked, doing her downward dog, rising into a salutation. Watching that ass rise, the shadow of sunlight creeping over her breasts, made Jaq’s dickache. But the night was done and paid for, so she pulled on jeans and jacket and left, shoes hanging down her neck.
The sidewalk was checkered with squares of moss, green and grey and purple turning to brown, little mounds that the Council had set in after the Verdevists had staged their polite coup, rushing the polls with promises of a renewed urban ecology. Jaq hopped from one to the other, feeling the springy earth beneath her bare feet, then landed in a squelch on one that an early-rising neighborhood dog had already marked. She wiped her feet on the dry concrete and turned down Hawthorne, wondering where the green money had run out.
A Bar was open early, in defiance of the blue laws; old Tim was laying down fresh sawdust and shredded newspaper, and nodded at Jaq as she passed. The thin and balding bar owner had once confided in her, the night they made the secret menu, that he had only named the bar that so it would be first in the Yellow Pages, back when there had been a book for phone numbers. It had given him an unearned reputation for cleverness he’d tried to live up to ever since.
The cafes at the bottom of the street already had their tables out, bright and early, though few were occupied. A steady flood of grey and black suits came and went to the counter, exchanging watches and chits for eggshells packed with coffee; Jaq watched with amusement as a black suit with blue hair handed over a Rolex and was rewarded with an ostrich egg mocha, the harried woman suck at the hole in the top as her heels clickety-clacked on the tiles down to the bus stop, her body and spirit both aimed at downtown.
A mangy lapinmade occupied one table, and Jaq tried not to stare. Hairless hares seemed stretched and frozen in grim outline of a humanoid form, as many as two hundred rabbits squeezed together in the shell of a man. He was sipping tea from little blue eggs, his too-close together brown eyes each from a separate rabbit, their heads smashed together as though stuck in an eternal French kiss. Each finger of his hand was a separate paw; one held an egg, the other thumbed carefully through a leather-clad tablet. Jaq hurried past, stomach rumbling at the smell of green tea and black coffee, but there were miles yet to go.
She turned the corner onto Twelth Street, only to see a passel of construction-monks, garbed in orange robes and white hardhats upon their shaven pates. Their scaffolding was all bamboo, and the cigar-chewing overseer was leading them through the morning meditation. Behind the workers jaw made out the red of old brick, densely covered with faded posters and scribbled artwork, the bare outlines of a building from the last century, up for teardown or renewal, she knew not which. Backtracking, Jaq walked another block and turned onto Thirteenth.
Memories came at her, for Thirteenth was the street of regrets, what some called the Street of Old Lovers, shadowed by three-story buildings north and south. A deep ley ran right beneath it, the subduction of two sleeping gods torn apart by tectonic forces. Jaq sweated cold in the morning heat as the mist took on familiar shapes, mostly women, the street suddenly crowded with ghosts: shortstacked Adele, whose tits were her pride before the Pink Ribboners had got to her; thin Candy, who only wore the clothes other people gave her and who lived too many secrets; Troy…Jaq pushed through his misty avatar, suddenly angry and the car dealer’s smile and bitchboi’s bod. She glanced down the cul-de-sac where Detective Bastard lived, but couldn’t see his step for the storm of half-shaped swirling around it; he was the only one she knew who could live among his regrets, but he claimed the rent was alright.
Thirteenth took her to Miracle Mile, the Street of Shrines, lit throughout the night by votives, the sidewalks so strewn with offerings and sacrifices that everyone walked in the street. It had taken years, but eventually the Council had given up on enforcing traffic, and just blocked motor vehicles altogether, setting up phallic stone tapu-markers on either end to ward off anything bigger than a bicycle. A couple months later, Jaq had been part of the clique that had desecrated the statues, and she ran a hand over the stone vulvas she and her brother-sisters had carved into the concrete pylons.
Blood ran on the Mile, flowing freely from the Virgins Corner, where clustered white statues dripped endless gore, to puddle and flow in the gutters. Jaq scooped a bloody handful of peach blossoms from the red stream and stopped to pay her respects to Tlazolteotl. The old, black-faced priestess who squatted by the sandstone statue, called Jaq a child without mother, but passed along the bottle anyway. Jaq took a mouthful, careful not to touch the rim with her lips, and swallowed, careful not to waste it even as tears came to her eyes. The priestess nodded and passed a shard of bone shaped like a maguey thorn; with her left hand, Jaq brought it up to her left ear and pressed hard against the fleshy nub, biting back the pain until she felt the point press through and prick her thumb. She passed the bloody instrument back, and let the blood run as she put her shoes on.
The Brain Dragon lived off Miracle Mile, in the pseudo-temple of the Egyptian Masons. Street lore said he had appeared to them one night and bought the whole building with a gem of pale fire from behind the mountains of the West. The guards where Ghostkillers, caught between east and west, rapping Bullshido and the Five Percent, they smiled at her as she passed, hands never leaving their swords, eyes never leaving her ass. Jaq was expected.
In the rooftop pond, the Brain Dragon took with the Necronaut, a place set out for her. Mutant koi flopped and flashed in gold-green and glowing tronlines, begging for scraps. The black-and-brass diving suit that was the Necronaut obliged them, crumbling scones in one skeletal glove, tossing the crumbs to the strangely intelligent fish. Jaq bowed from the neck as she approached, and the pulsating, fluid, transparent skull-sac of the brain dragon flashed a permission to sit.
Greek tea today, grape leaves and bitter tears, but it left no grounds to divine by. Jaq sipped the tea, her ear still hurting, wondering what the Brain Dragon wanted not to be heard.
###

Friday, July 4, 2014

Force Forge

Force Forge
by
Bobby Derie
The rains came to Bastion. Winters on the old capital-world were mild affairs, and snow was rare at any latitude, but the freezing rain and fogs would come down and soak a sentient to the bone. Stormtroopers knew how, if their armor was not in perfect condition, it would seep into every crack and seam, running down spines and puddling in boots; most of the commanders issued them raincloaks for that specific reason, but even then there were few who didn't stand a few long, shivvering watches on guard duty outside, wanting nothing more than to return to the barracks.

Crawling through the mud, Eiven Task knew how they felt. He was cold, inside and out. Rain and thin, freezing mud squelched inside his own armor, his toes and the fingers of his flesh-and-blood right hand already numb, his body aching from the fight he had lost. Only his prosthetic left arm didn't ache, and he used the superior strength of the tireless limb to propel himself along. Yet it was the words and actions of the blademaster that had cut him deeper than any lightsaber. Found wanting, the ex-Imperial Knight had broken Task and ordered his pupils to toss the human outside, as something not even worth the killing.

Inside his helmet, as he struggled on towards the dim grey outlines of distant buildings, Eiven's face was stuck in a rictus grin. Leaving him alive was always a mistake.

*

By the time he reached the shipyards, Task was walking, albeit needing to use his lightsaber pike as a staff for support, limping from a twisted ankle.

The ship was called The Memory of Alderaan. Once it had been a small cargo craft, based loosely on the TIE-designs, one of the many variations. Popular, if not ubiquitious, and it made it easy to find spare parts. Eiven keyed the code and stepped through the small airlock into the cargo container, converted to his living quarters. Drugs came first, the haze of nullicane taking the edge off as he stripped off his filthy clothes and armor, taping up his ankle and ribs. Then came food: imperishable lumps of protein dissolved in hot water, swimming with bundi rice, and a tin of the strange local beer. Task couldn't read the script it was in, but it featured a cartoon reptilian alien decked out as a stormtrooper, and privately he thought of it as Lizard Squeezings.

Once he felt almost human, he flicked a hidden switch. Smuggler panels in the walls hissed and retracted, revealing his armory - bits and pieces of Sith and Jedi gear, tools and weapons from the old Imperial armories, half-assembled lightsabers. The head of the droid A1S1 stirred into life on its shelf as Eiven came forward, assembling the things he would need, silent and waiting, and the row of holocrons flickered into life, seven ghostly masters watching as he picked and chose his tools.

*

The plasma forge was small, but powerful; enough to soften durasteel enough to work or serve as a crucible to grow a lightsaber crystal. Eiven had used it for both, before. For raw material he chose one of the spare ship springs - high-quality metal, but nothing too fancy or elaborate. The small anvil and wood-handled hammers with the strangely rounded heads and tongs were older than Task, and belonged to a swordsmith from old Tython.

Task's hand itched as he waited for the forge to heat up, the window revealing a cherry-orange glow. He knew how to do this. The stories and lectures filled his head, he could visualize what he needed to do. The hammer was in his artificial left hand, wishing he could feel the grain of the wood shaft, but knowing it didn't matter.

When the forge was ready, Eiven carefully fed in the spring, already sweating from the heat. He began to control his breathing, the first step of meditation. The air he drew into his lungs was hot and dry, tinged with ozone and burnt iron. The Force filled him for the space of each breath, and he held it, then released, letting it flow out of him as he expelled the air. As the metal began to glow, Task dragged it out of the forge, set it on the anvil, and brought the hammer down.

Rage flared in his heart at the peel, the glowing spring now deformed by the blow. Task brought the hammer down again, setting up a steady rhythm, the tireless arm working with mechanical efficiency as he shaped the metal. With every blow he breathed, the Force flowing down his arm, through hand and hammer, into the lump of metal. Every pulse was tinged with anger, the burning pain and rage born from his defeat, stoked by his long and agonizing crawl, now brought to a flame.

Eiven had gone berserk in battle before. Had lost control as the Dark Side filled him almost to bursting, driving him to madness. It was not invincibility, he knew, nor omnipotence. The Force did not push him to the cruelties he had committed, the faces he had scorched away, to let the owners claw at themselves, blind and in pain, unable to even scream with the tongues burned out of their mouths...Task pictured those faces as he pounded the metal, remembering as he stalked the field of corpses, the glowing red blade an extension of his hand, stabbing into any bodies that might yet be alive...and over and again he came to the blademaster, droning on, mocking him.

"What do you hate?" the ex-Imperial Knight had said. Task snarled as the blade took shape. Soon enough, he would know.

*

It took weeks. Hatred is no substitute for skill, and Task fed his spite on the practice, discarding the flawed and broken products, collapsing exhausted at night, only to rise again. The final product was unlovely and unexceptional to look at, even after he had taken the stone and polish to it, and more of a large double-bladed dagger than anything else, perhaps thirty centimeters long from hilt-stud to point. Yet it was a solid piece of work, and Eiven was pleased with it. In the cold durasteel a bit of the Force slumbered; when he touched it rage flared into his thoughts, and seemed to tug in his grasp as his thoughts turned violent, visions of self-mutilation filling his mind. Task grinned as he focused his thoughts, pushing them out of his mind so he could slip the blade back into its sheath.

The failed Jedi celebrated his success with Lizard Squeezings; the forging had left him drained as he contemplated the hungry blade, and the revenge it would win him against the blademaster.

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