The Heart of a Necromancer

by Eddie Patin

  "Great!" Riley exclaimed. "Good job! Let's go!"

  Jason squinted against the glare, trying to make out the murky scene that Riley was apparently satisfied with.

  "I can't see it yet! Are you sure?!"

  He felt Riley roughly clap his shoulder. "Good job, rifter! Move it!" The soldier dashed past him and leapt into the rift. Gliath followed.

  Jason pulled Dawnbringer from the dirt, hoped for the best, then leapt in after them.

  In the next second, disoriented by the darkness of the misty night and the dazzling orange sparks of the rift, Jason fell and took a spill on a stone surface. He immediately felt Riley's hands pulling him to his feet. The roar of the rift was loud as hell, but he didn't hear the cacophony of a bazillion clattering bones around him anymore.

  "Close it!" Riley shouted. Jason felt Riley let him go, then heard the smash of his sledgehammer on shattering bones. "Hurry up! They're coming through!"

  Gliath growled deeply and fought as well, a shadow in front of the blazing rift.

  Jason staggered to his feet and released the rift. The roaring, brilliant portal—currently brimming with bony knees and elbows and old sword blades and clattering skulls—spun and collapsed onto itself with a pop.

  "Shet!" Riley exclaimed, spinning and deftly pulling his lever action rifle off of its sling. "Gliath! Shotgun! More gargoyles!"

  Without a second thought, Jason dropped Dawnbringer to the roof. It landed with a clang, and he scanned around him quickly to figure out where the hell he was. Before he saw the first gargoyle rushing in, he had already unslung and shouldered his AK-47...

  Chapter 28

  "No!" Josiah Estren wailed. "You can't do this! Please! Let me go!" He squealed.

  Morgana felt her body hanging like a dead slab of meat. All of her skin was numb and half-frozen from the jilting ride through the cold night sky. Her mind reeled with horror and crackling fear. She could hardly move.

  The goddamned Magister hung somewhere near her right side in the gloom, screaming his fool head off. The soft old man cried and sobbed and begged as the young woman tried to make sense of her hazy, confused vision.

  She could barely feel that cold stone was under her naked feet.

  Every part of Morgana felt nearly lifeless. Still wearing nothing but a loincloth, plucked straight from her cross with her freezing body still painted black and her face no-doubt still caked with dried blood from the damned Virgin Oracles, her flight in the grip of the gargoyle that captured her had been overwhelming. While she was sailing through the sky under those stony wings, her heart had been racing so fast that Morgana feared that it would burst. During her unwilling transport, her nerves were so afire with fear and adrenaline that Morgana had thought that her freezing skin would peel away before they reached the beast's destination.

  Now, she was shackled to a wall in a huge, gloomy chamber filled with many blurry objects that she couldn't see. Morgana's whole body felt like sand; cold, numb sand.

  "My leg—I think it's broken!" Estren screamed. Others also moaned around them. Morgana heard the clanking and rattling of chains. A woman cried. Estren squealed and screamed on and on. "Please—you've got to let me free! I'm an important man! Please, sir! Let me go!"

  A grinding sound of stone on stone woke Morgana's seemingly-liquefied mind a little. She looked up from the floor with fuzzy vision and saw a large, grey gargoyle stalking past in front of her. Its heavy steps thumped on the stone floor.

  A man with a deeper voice than Estren's sobbed to the left.

  Morgana struggled to lift her head. She tried to focus.

  I must be in the necromancer's tower, she thought.

  The idea sent a flight of cold fear through the young woman's core, all the way out to her chilly fingers and toes.

  So there's some fear in me yet, she thought. Then her head pounded for a few seconds and her surroundings dashed out of focus again.

  A distant man's voice was suddenly singing. No—not singing. It was more like humming to himself with his mouth open.

  "La dee daa ... do do daa..."

  The crying and moaning around Morgana swelled in response. Other prisoners clattered weakly at their chains.

  "Please!" Magister Estren sobbed. "Let me free!"

  "Here we go then," a sharp, flat voice said clearly from out of Morgana's sight.

  The distant man grunted then there was a heavy clank, followed by a rising buzzing sound that filled Morgana's stomach and guts with an icy fright. The murky room was suddenly illuminated by an expanding green glow from up ahead. The shadow of the man standing there—shrouded in the flickering green fire—reminded Morgana perfectly of the terrifying form of the man flying through the streets, frying Oracles and Chosen soldiers with lightning as calling it down from the sky.

  The necromancer, Morgana thought, struggling to widen her eyes so that she could see more clearly.

  "Oh Goddess!" Estren cried. He sobbed and blubbered loudly as the dreadful sound grew in the room; something like a low buzzing combined with the crackling of a large fire. "Oh, my Golden Lady! Save me! Save me, my Goddess!"

  Craning her stiff, cold neck, Morgana looked around the huge, stone-walled room, now lit up brilliantly by a strange, blazing contraption in its center. Everything was washed in the pale, green glow of the odd fountain-like apparatus that roared as loudly as one of the star warriors' magical portals. She could see that the room was a huge chamber with vaulted ceilings. Two enormous, open windows to the outside night sky on different walls looked big enough to allow gargoyles to fly in and out with ease. Past the oddly still silhouette of the necromancer working on something in front of the green fire, Morgana saw the ghostly shapes of shelves upon shelves of various objects—most of them covered in sheets—and a prominent, dark door leading elsewhere closed on one wall under a long staircase that led up to the ceiling. Several gargoyles perched up on those stairs, watching her and the other prisoners with eyes that glowed crimson in the darkness.

  Looking to her right, Morgana saw Magister Josiah Estren hanging there just like her, suspended on the wall—low enough for his trembling legs to rest on the floor—quivering and blubbering with a face like pale bread dough. The man's white and gold robes were stained red below the belt and his sleeves were torn by the mighty, clawed hands that had delivered him here.

  To her left, Morgana saw several others hanging similarly; perhaps a dozen townsfolk in all, including two Chosen soldiers and one weeping Virgin Oracle, sunken deep into her tattered, dark-blue robes. A man dressed in dirty rags looked up to her from his misery, face stained with soot and tears. He glared at Morgana with intense hatred.

  The green-fire contraption in the center of the room came more into focus the more Morgana took in her surroundings. Her murky head was clearing and she was starting to get feeling back into her limbs again. Her wrists hurt like hell where she was shackled, and the muscles of her arms and chest were stretched and painful, but at least she could feel.

  More than anything else, Morgana wished that she was wearing some damned clothes. She felt vulnerable before—up on the cross—as Estren and the Oracles and much of the townsfolk leered and stared at her with fear and hostility. Now, surrounded by the very people that had tormented her before, she felt like the plaything of a terrible monster. She dreaded what the supposedly-dead necromancer would do to her naked, vulnerable body. Her skin felt so soft without clothes to protect it.

  Morgana wished that she had her ring. It wouldn't do much good until she was taken out of the shackles, but she felt completely exposed and helpless without her father's sword hanging in space between space within the grasp of her cold and painful hand.

  There was a scratching sound and a clatter.

  "No!" Estren screamed suddenly. "Get back! Leave me be! Oh—Golden Lady help me! Help your most devoted speaker ... please!"

  The necromancer laughed, flat and mildly amused.

  Morgana was afraid to look, but she did anyway. Soft and blubberi
ng Josiah Estren was writhing at his bonds, pressing his fat back into the stone wall with his buttery chin buried into his neck and his watery, grey eyes wide with stark terror as he cried. Two skeletons—nothing but brown bones walking on clicking heels as if living men without flesh, skin, blood, or organs—approached the Magister. As Estren screamed and struggled in vain to stay away, the monsters reached up with fingertips like dull, brown claws and grabbed his robes by the sleeves and collar. With surprising strength, the skeletons ripped the robes and other garments off of Estren's quivering, pale body, shredding the white and gold cloth with a tearing sound that made the other prisoners cry. Before long, the Magister trembled and writhed like a fat, white worm in his chains. Morgana saw that his now-naked right leg—plump and creamy without muscle and never having seen the light of day—was bleeding profusely from above the knee. It looked like maybe a shard of bone was sticking through the flabby flesh.

  "Oh, Goddess, please!" he screamed. "Please, sir! Let me go! I'm an important man! We can—we can work a deal! Oh, please, don't hurt me!"

  The skeletons deftly unlatched Estren's shackles and the fearful man fell forward into their dingy bones with a sob. They snatched him by the arms and shoulders and dragged the Magister toward the shadowy man who waited. Estren screamed the whole way, obviously in agony because of his broken leg.

  "An important man, you say?" the smooth, flat voice replied with a chuckle that sent a chill running up Morgana's spine.

  God—he was going to kill Estren ... or turn him into a gargoyle or something.

  And it looked like Morgana was next in line.

  "Oh, yes!" Estren replied with a choking sob. Morgana watched the eunuch's flabby, naked form dragged by the skeleton monstrosities to stand in front of the tall, straight man silhouetted by the green fire of his roaring machine. She could see well enough to note that the Magister was trying to smooth out his features; trying to recover from his desperate terror and pain as skillfully as he did back in New Bozeman whenever he smiled and purred a moment after spitting hatred and letting his mask slip. "I am ... I am Magister Josiah Estren! I am the Speaker of the Golden Lady's Communion! Please, sir—you must release me, please! I can ... we can have peace between my people and..." Estren's eyes crinkled in anguish as he considered his bony captors. "We can have diplomacy between my people and ... whatever you're doing here! I can—"

  The dark man laughed. "I do not need you, Magister. Not as a diplomat, anyway..."

  With that, Estren was howling in fear and pain again as the skeletons drew him into the bright green glare of the large, mysterious contraption that roared and lit up the room. Morgana saw the Magister's fleshy arms in silhouette against the green fire as the skeletal monsters somehow tied him—wrists up as if in shackles again—into the center of the light up on a pedestal.

  "No! Please!" Josiah screamed then let out a wail. "My people need me!"

  The necromancer followed him to the platform as the bony horrors withdrew. Morgana saw with a shot of cold flushing through her that the confident, slender man held a knife or dagger in one hand, and something fist-sized that glowed golden like her sword in the other.

  In an instant, she knew what it was. It was one of those glowing hearts that Jason and the others had been harvesting from the gargoyles.

  "Well then, good Magister," the necromancer replied smoothly. Morgana could hear the smile in his voice. "I shall give you a crown so that you remain an important figure. But, I confess, you will no longer be a man."

  "Please!" Estren squealed. "I don't want to die!"

  The necromancer drew in close to the hanging, quivering body of Magister Josiah Estren.

  "Oh, do not worry, Magister. You are not going to die."

  Then he stabbed Estren in the belly with his thin, dark blade.

  The eunuch screamed in pain and animalistic terror as the necromancer drew the blade all the way from Estren's flabby stomach up to his trembling throat. Morgana felt her own throat flip-flop when she saw the shadows of entrails spilling down, surrounded by the blaze of the green light. The hanging man's cries transitioned into a fierce gurgling, then rose into a pitch of extreme shock as the necromancer sheathed his blade and smoothly plunged his free hand into the vacuous wound he'd made. After two terror-filled breaths of Morgana's surging lungs, the dark man pulled something glistening and pulsing from Estren's chest.

  She knew exactly what it was.

  Morgana wasn't surprised when she then watched the necromancer push the glowing stone heart into the space that Estren's blood-soaked human heart had left behind.

  The young woman felt like vomiting, but even though her chest and stomach spasmed, nothing came out. Her horror was renewed when she recalled again that she was next.

  But her panic was just beginning.

  With the new gargoyle heart in place, the necromancer stepped back from Estren—who gurgled and writhed and screamed with bubbling and frothing sounds—and held the Magister's still-beating heart in one hand high as if making an offering to a dark, bloody god. The green light flared and the roar of the machine intensified.

  Suddenly, from below the pedestal, dark shapes rose from the churning green fire, rotating through the air and drifting up into the air to circle around Estren like molten globs of dull iron. The chunks of unknown material ascended from the evil, green depths more and more, slowly spinning around the man until the air around Estren's flabby, eviscerated body was thick with it. Then they flew in at his flesh, swallowing Josiah in an undulating sheath of flowing, grey sludge. Pieces formed themselves around the Magister's arms and legs. They wrapped around the gaping laceration running up his torso, then clumped in around his neck. Some longer, flat pieces affixed themselves to his back and gradually shifted into wings.

  Estren screamed. Morgana heard the crackling and crunching of loud snaps, like breaking a bundle of dry branches a few at a time. The stony shell forming around Estren's body was breaking all of his bones. He screamed as if insane with pain until the flowing globs of liquid stone smothered his mouth and covered up his face. The lily-white skin disappeared, likely to never see the light of day again.

  Fear coursed through Morgana. The necromancer was turning Estren into a gargoyle, of course. This was how he did it. This is how her brother was turned into a monster; likely the fate of all of the abducted townsfolk.

  Morgana would soon go through the same horrific process.

  The young woman clenched her eyes shut and felt panic and terror streaking through her like freezing rain. She looked to her left and saw the blanched and stricken faces of the other prisoners watching, their features stretched and twisted, their eyes and cheeks painted with tears.

  She wanted to cry out to the heavens. She wanted to explode from her body and burn up in a bonfire of fright! The dread of her impending doom pressed in on her like how she imagined it would feel to have cold dirt crushing her from all around if buried alive.

  After several seconds of wild, smothered screaming and bones snapping and popping apart, Estren transformed fully into a beast just like all of the other ones she and the warriors from the stars had seen and killed in her village and in the mountains. He even had a crude, carved crown sticking out of his head over a thick, bestial brow and stony grey eyes that suddenly flared with a crimson glow.

  When the Estren-gargoyle's red eyes lit up and the beast began to calmly look around, the necromancer reached up with long, slender arms and unhooked the shackles from his new soldier's stone wrists. Morgana was shocked that they had still fit during the transformation. Then, the dark man turned away uninterested, descending once more to where he had been adjusting the machine before as gargoyle-Estren wandered off. The necromancer dropped the bloody heart onto a stone table then turned to consider Morgana...

  Fear.

  The two skeletons who'd been standing by hardly noticeable during Estren's transformation suddenly skittered to life, striding up to Morgana with quick, nimble steps.

  "Oh my
God!" she yelped, wanting nothing more than to give in to the total panic that was rushing up behind her mind like a heavy storm. She wanted to plead for her life; to beg and cry just like Estren had. But she knew that it wouldn't do any good. If there was any way out of this horrific moment, it wouldn't be through begging.

  The monsters drew in close to Morgana—she smelled the odor of dirt wafting off of their bones—and unhooked her shackles.

  She immediately struggled against the horrific skeletons with as much fury as she could muster. Morgana screamed like a warrior and pulled against their bony grasp. She flipped her naked and black form through the air and even managed to kick one of them in the skull with a cold foot, but the monsters were solid and unfazed.

  The necromancer laughed.

  "Fuck you!" Morgana screamed, pulling and fighting against the skeletons with all of her might. "I'll fucking kill you!"

  "You're Morgana," the dark man said, his even voice hardly raised against the roar of the green fire machine. Somehow, she could understand him just fine. "The last of the Soloster family."

  The skeletons dragged her nearly-naked and struggling form toward the green fire. Morgana went by inches, kicking and screaming.

  "I am Morgana Soloster of the family Soloster!" she shouted, a swell of pride in her heart giving her a little more strength. "The people of New Bozeman are my people! I will kill you for causing so much death and ... devastation! You killed my father! You killed my Bryant! We were to be married!" She fought like a wildcat, but to no avail.

  "Yes!" the necromancer replied, walking up to her. Morgana could see by the pale green light of the terrible machine that the necromancer was a trim and well-groomed man perhaps in his forties. He was thin and fair with a short, even beard and pale blue eyes with untold power inside. He was dressed strangely with clothing perhaps from another time. His boots were as pristinely crafted as Jason's were, and his pants—seamed with impossibly straight lines and smooth fabric—had pockets on the sides. His smooth, dark shirt was nothing like she'd ever seen in New Bozeman. On his right hip, the necromancer had a small scabbard of some kind that held a little, shining weapon a lot like the one the star warrior named Riley kept below his belt. "I know who you are, Morgana, and who the Solosters are." He smiled. His face was the same face that she'd seen on that head; she was certain of it now. "I know that you are the true leader of your miserable, backward town; not this charlatan buffoon." He waved dismissively at the empty space where Estren had suffered his last pre-gargoyle moments.