Necromatic

excerpt from Necromatic: a young adult fantasy novel

available for publication

Prologue

            Jael shivered and walked faster, her feet hardly making a sound as they left boot prints in the ashy dirt. Gray and black, all around her. Limp leaves hung from shriveled branches. A film of soot blocked out the moons. Had all three risen? Jael thought they must have. The darkness was less overwhelming than usual. A hint of light sought its way through the trees, the slightest threads of silver. A pack of Riven snarled and shrieked in the distance.

            She would never get used to it. The Riven weren’t natural, products of damaged magic, damaged souls. These creatures had once been men. It rang in their every cry, a tense awareness ridden by insanity. They were excited. They smelled their prey.

            Clenching a hand tightly around the wilted dandelion leaves she’d managed to scavenge, Jael moved faster, scrambling over roots and low-growing bushes. Kiran is fine, she told herself. He’s fine. He’s fine. She’d left him sleeping on a wide, high tree branch, sitting against the trunk with his arms tucked close to his empty belly. She’d promised that if he went to sleep, she’d have something for him to eat when he woke. She promised him the same thing every night. For once, she would be able to keep her promise.

            Cackling rose louder between the trees. What could they have picked up? It couldn’t be Kiran, not her little son. He was in a tree, he was safe. They’d walked through a muddy stream before she helped him climb. He knows not to climb down without me. I told him. Didn’t I? Surely the Riven wouldn’t find him. Surely they wouldn’t think to look up.

            The laughter dissolved into snarling, ripping. Jael ran. Dandelion juice dripped down her smallest finger and onto her wrist. Not my son. They’d taken everything else from her. Not this. Not my son.

            The leaves dropped from her hands as she fumbled at her belt, pulling a slim length of olive wood from its strap. The wand wouldn’t help her against Riven. They had little mind left to reach, little soul to grasp. But she could use it to contact Kiran and warn him to stay in the tree. She gripped the Olive wand firmly and sent her mind beyond her body, seeking the familiar connection with her son. It was easier to speak to his mind than anyone else’s. Blood sang to blood, soul to soul.

            Nothing. He wasn’t there. Jael stumbled to a halt. Reached out again. Nothing. With numb fingers, she fumbled the wand back into her belt. Walked forward. The air suddenly felt too thin as she dragged it into her throat, into lungs that wouldn’t fill.

            The snarling quieted, then picked up into satisfied laughter again. Jael paid no attention to the sounds, hardly noticed that they were moving away from her.

            She saw the blood first.

            Fendor had been the first of the kingdoms to fall to Serethia’s war. Jael had been happy. Serethia was bigger, stronger, and much more knowledgeable about the magic arts. Young and eager, Jael hadn’t been content with a future of homemaking. She wanted to have children eventually, someday, but first she wanted to escape, to learn magic, and the only way for her to do that was for Fendor to become part of Serethia. The moment it was allowed, she’d left her home and travelled to Serethia to be educated at the Academy of Mages. By the time she graduated, fully certified and with near-mastery of two wands, she had calmed into adulthood. She returned home, married, and had her son, content in the knowledge that she could fend for herself if she so chose. Serethia continued on its warpath, taking Ahkisat after a longer struggle. When they went to war with Tantaris, Jael was called to aid her kingdom, and left Kiran behind with his father.

            The war between Serethia and Tantaris was long, and bloody, and for the first time, powerful mages fought on both sides. Serethia prevailed. The land lost. Jael lost. Magic disliked fighting itself. It was an energy deep within the soul, and while the body might battle, the soul was never made to do so. Forcing mages to fight and kill each other resulted in twisted power that seeped into the ground and ruined all it touched. The border between the kingdoms was irreparably tainted: the trees grew shriveled and gray, a cloak of ash blocked out the sun, the creatures became savage, and any who lived there were damaged – turned away from the humanity they’d once possessed, unable to control their magic, to keep it from lashing out at everyone near.

            At the end of the war, those twisted by the tainted magic were banished to a land as dark as they had become. When Jael had closed her eyes and sought out the light at her core, she had glowed, as she always did when she brought her magic to the surface. However, instead of the lilac, almost pale blue, she’d once been, her magic was deep violet, close to black. Jael’s husband had died in the mines, so Kiran, only five years old at the time, went with her into the Shadowlands. In the three years following their banishment, all but a few of the humans had died, victims of the Riven or hunger or their own suddenly dark power. Jael had kept Kiran alive, kept him safe.

            But there was so much blood.

            Jael’s hoarse cry echoed through the trees as she fell to her knees beside the ruin that had once been her son. There was nothing left of Kiran’s face. His body had been ripped open, gutted, mangled. The Riven hadn’t even tried to change him, to make him one of them. They’d just wanted to play.

            Jael gathered her son as best she could, holding him together in her arms, heedless of the red that stained her limp blonde hair and tattered once-blue dress. She pressed her face to his head, where a few clumps of brown hair fused themselves to his scalp with blood and the liquid remains of his brain.

            Something built inside her, burning and suffocating. The power at her very core lashed inside her, rising up her throat, and she thought she might choke on it, on her grief. She opened her mouth to scream. In that moment, Jael hated the world and everyone in it, everyone who had brought her to this. For the first time, she understood why the Serethian Council had decided that everyone tainted in the war had to stay behind. Hate was strong. Hate was power, and Jael had no intention of letting that power go to waste. Cords of purple light whipped through the air, reaching, leading. She let them guide her.

            Kiran’s left leg was little more than bone. The muscle had been ripped apart, the tendons snapped. It was easy, pulling the larger bone of the shin away from the rest, snapping it off at the knee and ankle. The Riven had done most of the work for her. Feeling strangely calm, she brought it to her lips, pressed a kiss to the bloody surface, breathed in the metallic fog of her son’s spilled life. Her stomach roiled at the scent, then calmed. Instinctively, she let her magic work, braiding itself around the bone like ribbon in a little girl’s hair, crystallizing marrow and infusing petrified tissue with dark power. No one had ever done this before, created a wand of Bone.

            Jael held up her new wand, the first of its kind, running her fingers over it in the dim light of dawn. It needed shaping, refining, but this was the tool that would allow her to thrive in the Shadowlands. She licked the blood from her lips. Surviving wasn’t enough.

            Directing the Bone wand was easy. It was stronger than any wand Jael had seen before. A nudge of power toward Kiran’s body and he twitched. Another push, and he stumbled to his feet, his intestines oozing from the gash in his front to trail in the dirt.

            “No need to worry, little one,” Jael said. “I’ll sew that up for you.”

            She led him away slowly, taking care not to get too far ahead. In his new state, Kiran would be slow, especially with the lame leg, but they had to move. Jael had had enough of fading away in the shadows. The Bone wand thrummed warmly in her hand as she pictured her new future. She would need a power base. Abandoned forts from the war were scattered through the Shadowlands. One of them would do well enough. She would explore the possibilities of this new wand, use it to subdue the Riven, build herself an army of the dead. When the time came, she would take an apprentice. She would teach them this new craft. The magic of death. Necromancy. It might take generations, but Jael could be patient. Someday her successor would return to Serethia and Jael would have her revenge. The mages would pay for taking her son’s life.

            Jael breathed in the scent of blood and smiled.