the consequences of necromancy

Back from the dead in a world in constant peril. I died in an explosion. She did everything to bring me back. Even aid a demon in overtaking his progeny and rising from the depths of Hell. She did terrible things. Killed people and did experiments on them. So many friends and family got dragged into her cruel designs. Our mothers, my teacher and her wife, anyone who could trace my soul.

I remember being dragged through a parallel timeline and forced to replicate her wicked deeds. I built a newfounded power over the ebb and flow of space and time. Made to make a choice between sparing a cruel tyrant witch and a paragon of justice. I chose the paragon, because I was told to choose what I knew was right in my heart.

When the timelines merged, I stood in an apartment that reeked of death. I looked at myself and saw ivory, pallored, sickly skin, so pale I looked like I was white. The mark of undeath. It felt like wax and chilled like ice. I did not breathe, and I did not give off heat, but I still thought and moved like I was alive. Looking down at myself disgusted me.

I found Anya weeping over an empty cryo-chamber. I saw bodies everywhere. And when I saw her… When she saw me, dared to embrace me and cry and say she missed me…

I decked her. Sent her sprawling to the floor.

Whatever bond we had before my death was broken when she committed these heinous acts for power. It astounded me and disgusted me that she was so audacious as to think I would be okay with what she had done. That “because you’re my beloved sister” would still work on me after this. Did she expect love? Pity? That I would be cowed by her supposed well-meaning intentions?

She had gone too far this time.

But then she merely clenched her fist.

And I was silenced. I couldn’t speak out against her. Couldn’t finish the job. She asked me if that was better, I must be under so much stress after being brought back.

I was a prisoner in my own body, a soul that should have passed on but was now sealed within my own corpse. It hurt. Everything hurt.

My sister had deluded herself into believing everything was fine. I was alive, I was still here, I was breathing and warm and my heart still beat, and I still had my free will. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. And the longer this went on, the worse it became. The angrier I grew. The more I was able to pull away from her control. She only learned how to control the body, but the spirit within was beyond her grasp. And as I grew angrier, I grew more powerful.

It was small things at first. A few pans knocked off of the kitchen rack. A gurney rattled, knocking the body she was experimenting with off of it. She thought it was nothing, mere power discharge, while I glowered in the corner. When the effects got more extreme, she began to worry, but she never suspected it was me. When her couch tried to eat her, she stuck tags to it and tried to bust the ghost herself. When her vat of formaldehyde tried to consume her and poison her, she sealed it shut until she needed it. But still, she never thought to look at me.

Because why would it be me? I was alive. I was thankful.

She didn’t know that I was tantamount to a pack of mentos in a diet coke bottle. All shaken up, and waiting to burst. Enraged and frenzied at being dragged around to be her attack dog.

One day though, the cap finally blew off.

She tried to pull my leash, tried to make me hurt innocents who were trying to help people, stop her from what she was doing. And enough was enough.

I felt my skin begin to split open, and black ichor spill out of my arms, my legs, my mouth. At first she thought the binds preventing my decomposition were beginning to wear off. They pooled on the ground and began to grow into tentacles with mouths and fangs that sought the blood of the sinner. I felt my chest split open, my ribs become a yawning, biting, gaping maw and my organs spill out, all except for the heart that began to beat again. They bent themselves and twisted themselves into fleshy tendrils and graspers that hungered for necromancer meat and viscera.

I saw the realization in her eyes as my body began to twist and bend like it was being shaped from clay by the hands of a horror artist. All those incidents, all the supernatural events around her apartment, they were all me. She tried, in desperation, to halt my transformation, but her necromancy no longer had any sway over me.

I felt my spine stretch to thrice its length and my legs grind and snap and rearrange and my arms lengthen and my hands sharpen into wicked bone claws that split out from the skin and muscle in my hands and all the while my internals wrapped and twisted around me into new skin and new flesh. I could feel my face lengthen and grow and my teeth stretched into fangs and I felt my eyeballs rearranging even as they still functioned and all she could do is look on in terror as the writhing strands of blood and hate bound her down and drained her blood and grew bigger, stronger.

The innocents fled as the very streets around them came to life and cracked and grew limbs and eyes and mouths where there shouldn’t have been. It was all my power. All mine. Time and space grew distorted around us and the very world began to break apart. To her, I had become an engine of judgment and rage that could no longer be held back by her hand.

When the transformation was finished, I bit her in two. And when her soul left her body, I reared back to expose the mouth that had grown on my chest, and I bit down on that, too. Years of affection and love and codependency all burned in my mind and it only made me angrier that she would soil it like this. If she wanted to be together for all eternity, now we would be. Now, I had consumed her utterly. The undeniable link between us could never be broken as long as she was inside me. I would never have to suffer that pain, and she would forever live to regret her own hubris in my gut.

And with her gone, I turned my rage toward the breaking world that had killed me in the first place.

It started with the city block, and only spread from there. My essence subsumed the very soil and made it my plaything, and I could feel it. Fleeing footfalls upon my earth and personal belongings being pulled away from me. I began to lose myself, and lose all the mercy within me.

Through it all, only one pair of footfalls came toward me.

I soon found my monstrous form facing down one singular man. He looked as if he had just fled a business meeting to stand here and meet me, and he held in his hands a set of spirit beads. I could feel their power. It was a chaining power, and I hated it. I struck at him, and the very earth struck at him, because in that moment, I was not myself and I hate him. Hated it. Hate.

But he was deceptively nimble. Despite his solid build and elegant dress, he was quick, able to barely keep himself ahead of me. He looped that string of beads around my neck, and I screamed with white hot fury as my power drained away.

Because I couldn’t lose agency again. I couldn’t become someone’s slave again.

Just let me go.

My vision began to darken. One eye fell to the earth below and spattered on the pavement. The other sank slowly into my skull as the twisted flesh fell away. All feeling faded. My anger drained away with my ability to bend the world around me.

When I next became aware, it was dark and quiet. We stood in a wild reflection of where I had become that twisted monster, one where a city had never been built. When I looked down at myself, my skin was no longer that sickening ivory color. It had been restored to its rightful coppery color. In front of me was the man who had brought me down, but I felt no ire toward him.

“Do you remember what’s happened to you?” He asked me, staring me in the eyes with a compassion I hadn’t seen.

“I… was trapped in my own body. I was undead. She held me down with an iron fist after she brought me back. She thought everything was fine and kept doing those… horrible, awful things.”

“So you’re the reason. For the killings, the attacks, the burglaries.”

“I guess so… it got to the point where I couldn’t anymore. All the anger started leaking out, and I… I don’t remember what happened after that.”

“There was a woman bitten in half at the scene. What happened, is you twisted into a monster. There was no spirit in sight. I can only left to assume that her soul was subsumed by yours.”

Though on some level, the thought shocked me, I couldn’t say I felt disgusted or angry at myself. She had it coming.

“Once she was gone, there was nowhere else to direct your anger, so you unleashed it upon the world around you. Had I not arrived, the city would have been forfeit.”

“… Thank you. For stopping me. I’m sorry for letting go.”

“Hush now. It wasn’t your fault. She should have known well the consequences of holding hostage a soul before she dabbled in necromancy.”

“Where are we…?”

“This, is the other side. You’ll be safe here. You’ll be allowed to rest. This is a place of peace, and sanctity.”

“Mmm…”

“Is something wrong?”

“She’s gone. Forever. I’ll be lonely...”

“You don’t need her. Remember what she’s done to you.”

“Then… are you able to stay a while? Not forever, but… long enough to have a talk. I’d like to know about you. Since you stopped me and all...”

“...certainly.”