Esoterica 1: Liam's Awakening: A Lovecraftian Fantasy Harem Adventure (Esoterica Chronicles)

by Virgil Knightley

  Her cold eyes finally grew bored of me. Without a word, a shroud of black smoke appeared at once, concealing her in one instant and vanishing along with her in the next.

  “I'll see you soon, necromancer,” I heard her voice rasp in my mind as she faded away.

  I tried to rest. I honestly did my best. But there was absolutely nothing about the situation that was conducive to sleep. I should’ve been back home working the night shift by then. And with all the excitement, adrenaline, mystery, and change that had happened in the last few hours, I somewhat doubted that I would ever be in the mood to sleep again. This was a new opportunity. This was a chance to leave behind the scars of my past, an escape from constant reminders of my loss, and an incredible distraction from my grief. A nap seemed utterly irresponsible given the opportunity I had in front of me, even if I only had just begun to understand it.

  It may sound cheesy, but growing up, I had enjoyed reading Harry Potter, like so many other kids. But I often complained that Harry, having grown up in a world without magic, didn’t have a realistic appreciation for the situation he found himself in when he suddenly learned the truth of his origin. If I were Harry Potter, I would have been more like Hermione, spending hour after hour learning everything I could about magic. The fact that in book seven, Harry still heavily depended on Expelliarmus made my eyes roll. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

  I sat cross-legged on my bed, eyes transfixed on the books on the wall-mounted shelf beside me. My fingers grazed the rough leather bindings of the tomes as I studied their names.

  Life Force Manipulation. Necromantic Summoning. Contacting Spirits of the Dead. Golems, Ravens, and Servants of Death. Reaping Souls. Introduction to Necromancy.

  That last one. That's where I should start, I thought.

  I pulled the book off of the shelf and began reading. The book was about forty percent theory and sixty percent practice. A massive chunk of the book was spells, rituals, charms and talismans, etc., but the first hundred pages were dense with expository essays on various topics. I knew I’d have to work through that, but first I wanted to try to cast something, anything. I wanted to impress my charming Integration Assistant when she came back to take me out for breakfast. After all, impressing hot girls was one of the most powerful motivators there was.

  I flipped through the pages until I settled on a section called “Necromantic Spells for Beginners.” Oh yeah, this would do nicely.

  I read aloud the titles of some of the spells as I scanned over them: “Lesser Life Drain, Lesser Essence Drain, Lesser Aura Shift, Wood to Bone…”

  Hold the phone. Wood to Bone? That sounded badass and weird enough.

  I gripped my cane and waved it in a sort of S-shaped motion, as close to the diagram in the book as what I could manage, and I uttered the incantation: “Mng'bu vir N'yara phi!” To complete the spell, I tapped my bookshelf.

  To my delight, the wood on the shelf twisted and warped to bleached bone. It looked like the shelf was made of some kind of flattened rib cage, and the foundational parts holding the thing together now resembled a spine. I realized that it took almost exactly the shape that I had imagined it would and wondered if that was how it always worked.

  “One way to find out,” I said to myself, and I cast the spell again, this time on the bed frame. The legs of the bed changed to monstrous skeletal legs, exactly as I pictured, and the remainder of the frame's exterior became lined with skulls.

  With that, my eyes went back to the book. I had never been so glued to a book before, and I was always an avid reader. I had already memorized the incantations and gestures for half the beginner spells when the door finally knocked a few hours later.

  By that time, I had replaced wood and metal parts inside the door with enough bone so that I could use a simple “Control Bone” hex to make the door swing open on its own, and I did exactly that.

  On the other side of the door was a very bewildered-looking Carmilla. She’d clearly washed her face, changed into a different dress, and retouched her makeup, looking gorgeous as ever.

  “Holy shit, dude!” she shouted as she looked inside my room. All the furniture had been replaced with thematically appropriate necromantic decor. I admittedly went a bit crazy, but I didn’t mean to—it was all in the name of experimentation. I was sitting on a throne of skulls, reading the introductory book with my legs crossed, waiting for her in the black school cloak that I found folded in the storage trunk at the foot of my bed. Unbeknownst to me at the time, though it’d come up later in Carmilla’s retellings of the event, my eyes were glowing white from all the spellcasting I’d been doing.

  “Hey, Carmilla. Ready for breakfast?” I said with a smile.

  “How the frick did you do all this?”

  “I already met the Headmistress,” I explained. “She'll be teaching me. She left me some books to study and, uh, pimped my cane,” I said, holding up my new spell focus.

  “Wow! Then that means we can skip right to summoning your familiar immediately after breakfast!” she said excitedly as she did a little jump. “I wonder what it'll be!”

  “What's yours?” I asked, and suddenly a little black squirrel appeared from under her cloak. The squirrel had bright red eyes and distressingly long fangs where its standard-issue buck teeth should be.

  “This is Sheridan, my vampire squirrel!” she said excitedly, and she nuzzled her face against Sheridan's as he crawled onto her shoulder.

  “Vampire?” I asked. “As in, real vampires?”

  “Yeah. Oh, you didn't notice? I'm kind of a vampire, too!” She opened her mouth and poked at a sharp fang. “See?” she said, though it came out in a lisp as her tongue mingled with her fang and finger. At the emergence of her fangs, the whites of her eyes went black, and her red irises lit up.

  My world had just been rocked with the sudden realization that vampires were real, but I didn’t let it show, trying not to make Carmilla uncomfortable with my reaction. Thinking fast, I pulled a glass of water from my shelf and tapped it with a few words of incantation. The water swirled in the glass and when it finished, it was red.

  “Well, in that case, may I offer you a glass of blood?”

  Both Sheridan and Carmilla's jaws dropped.

  “Liam, you mastered Wood to Bone and Water to Blood in like, three hours?”

  “And a ton more.” I said, grinning, but then suddenly felt a bit subconscious from her quizzical look. “Is that weird of me?”

  She tapped her forehead, like she was trying to make sense of it. “Well, no, but you don't have any transmutation abilities, so it's a bit surprising you mastered this one, but I guess since bone and blood are linked to necromancy, and you're attuned to that...”

  “Do you wanna drink it or not?”

  “Did you drink from it when it was still water?”

  “Uh… yes.”

  She crossed her arms and cocked an eyebrow. “I don't want your backwash, dude,” she smirked.

  “But… it's blood now. What the hell am I going to do with a glass of blood?”

  She looked at her squirrel. “It's all yours, Sheridan.” With that, the squirrel leaped face-first into the glass. Its head submerged in the red liquid as its little feet kicked up excitedly, trying to keep its face in the glass and avoid falling out. “Familiars don’t even need to eat, but we might as well treat him.”

  I grabbed the vampire squirrel by the butt and lifted it so it could drink securely. “Bottoms up, little guy,” I chuckled.

  “Pun intended?” asked Carmilla as she put her palm in front of her face with a cute giggle.

  “That time, yes.”

  Seeing Sheridan finish the glass of blood, I looked up at Carmilla anxiously.

  “Ready to go?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “But where do we eat?”

  She eyed me in a way that was almost seductive, and punctuated the look with a long lick of her crimson lips. “Well, technically, you could let me have a bite of you anytime, anywhe
re…”

  I cleared my throat and tugged at my collar nervously. “Okay, let me rephrase that—”

  “Where do you eat?” she finished for me. “The second and third floor of this building. You can dine any time. But right now, roughly an hour after sunrise most days, is the best time to go for breakfast, if only because you'll get to eat with some of my friends.” She grinned ear-to-ear, so tremendously that her fangs were both plainly visible for the first time. “And they’re on the third.”

  “Awww, introducing me to your pals already? Am I being recruited into your clique?” I teased her.

  “Ahem,” Carmilla cleared her throat with mock seriousness and put a hand over her heart. “As your Integration Assistant, I am responsible for facilitating your successful arrival and assimilation into Esoterica’s culture and practices.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” I said, chuckling. “Alrighty, let’s meet your squad.”

  “Yay!” Carmilla squealed impishly with another little jump. The two of us left the room, and once again the vampiress grabbed me by the hand, leading me with urgency and excitement toward the elevator.

  The ride down the elevator was short and smooth, and within moments the grated doors were opening to a lavish banquet hall with floating candelabras and chandeliers of crystal hanging over elaborately carved hardwood tables with a chocolate-brown stained finish. The chairs matched in color and craftsmanship.

  Adorning the walls were enigmatic paintings of various landscapes. Some were rather earthlike, even familiar. One appeared to be a rendition of a moonlit Grand Canyon. Other landscapes were far more alien and otherworldly, with flora that seemed altogether extraterrestrial.

  The walls themselves were painted with a gaudy golden paint, with the exception of the polished wooden beams every three meters or so that were stained to match the furnishings. Along the walls, on each of the four sides of the enormous room, were impressive fireplaces that appeared to burn both endlessly and without need for fuel. The floor was a deep red marble that reminded me of Carmilla’s perfect lips, which she restlessly licked as she scanned the room.

  The banquet hall was already full of people dressed in similar cloaks to mine and Carmilla’s. There were a few, though, dressed more casually. The people themselves were a colorful bunch, and this could be said literally as well as figuratively. A table of interesting looking twenty-somethings waved at me and Carmilla as we entered the room.

  “There they are!” Carmilla said, waving back excitedly. “Come on!” She practically sprinted to the table, but I followed behind at a more modest pace. Truth be told, I was excited, too, if not more than a little nervous.

  When we reached the table, the motley crew looked up at Carmilla and me—mostly me—with an assortment of expressions. Most of them smiled to some degree or another, though whether it was a polite but disinterested smile or a genuinely enthusiastic grin seemed to vary from face to face.

  “Hey, everybody!” Carmilla said. She grabbed me by the arm with both hands and pulled me another step closer to the table. “This is Liam Elloway. He’s a human. He’s my Charge, so be nice.”

  Voices uttering “Hello, Liam”, “Hey,” and “Hi, Liam” all rang out in unison with varying levels of enthusiasm and engagement, but no one seemed hostile or unwelcoming.

  “This is Randolph Carter III,” Carmilla went on, pointing to a blond man with a parted cut and a roguishly handsome vibe. He wore slim black slacks and a tight white button-down shirt that showed off his well-defined arm muscles and the top of a smooth chest that he probably groomed himself. Aside from that, he also wore the same cloak that Carmilla and I wore.

  “Hey, bud,” he stood up and reached out to shake my hand, offering a warm smile to go with it. I smiled back.

  “Hey, pleased to meet you,” I said, thankful for the warm welcome.

  “Pleasure’s ours, man. New arrivals are always fun.”

  “And this is Brian Adder,” she said, indicating an unnervingly good-looking man with dark slicked-back hair and a tight-fitting blue flannel shirt under his black cloak.

  “Cheers,” he said with a thumbs-up, and his attention turned back toward his food, at least visibly.

  My attention turned to the two other girls at the table next. They’d both been eyeing me intensely since I approached their group.

  “Well introduce us, Carri!” the redheaded girl asked. She spoke with a faint Irish accent, but her most peculiar feature was a pair of ram horns coming out of the side of her head and, now that her mouth was moving, a forked tongue. She wore a white tank top through which a black bra was barely visible, and her eyes were reddish orange, like her hair, and seemed to glow like embers. She was thin, similar in build to Carmilla, but instead of nails she had black claws on her hands. It must make it hard to pick things up, I noted. And yet, even as I thought that, she easily manipulated a fork in her hand, flipping it between her fingers artfully.

  Sitting next to the plate in front of her was a fat red salamander that was probably about a foot long and chunky, too. A juicy little guy, probably her familiar.

  Oookay. This was a lot to take in.

  “This is Evelyn Wilde,” Carmilla said, gesturing at the hellish-looking redheaded beauty. “And this is Dahlia White.”

  The last woman at the table had ghost-pale skin and hair as silvery white as the moon. She wore a lacy white summer dress to match. Her eyes were pools of starlight swirling in a midnight-blue sky. That isn’t me waxing poet, by the way. It’s literally what they looked like. I almost gasped at her ethereal beauty. And there was something else about her, too, that magnetized me, something I couldn’t yet place, but I certainly tried as I breathed in the divine sight of her gorgeous face and voluptuous figure.

  She made no move to extend a hand or offer any word of greeting but just kept watching me with a soft smile. Her gaze never broke from me.

  “Uh, hi,” I said to the two of them.

  Suddenly, Brain’s voice interrupted the conversation. “I’m picking up vibes here, Liam. All anyone wants to know is this: gay or straight?” I noticed something vaguely resembling an English accent in his deep voice. He was clearly well-muscled, and the high protein meal on his plate helped to explain that.

  The table collectively chuckled and groaned, but everyone looked at me almost immediately, seemingly curious to hear my response.

  “Straight as the day is long, I’m afraid,” I said. I could feel my cheeks flushing at the question.

  The man shrugged weakly as he chewed something he had just put in his mouth. He swallowed and looked over at Carmilla. “He’s all yours, love.”

  “Oh, shut your fucking mouth,” she groaned through reddened cheeks, rolling her eyes, even as she still clung to my arm somewhat possessively.

  “Well take a fuckin’ seat, lad,” Evelyn said, pointing at the chair across from her. “We don’t got all morning to get to know you.” Her accent charmed the hell out of me, but I still struggled to do anything but gawk at the girl called Dahlia.

  I took the seat, but before my asscheeks had even hit the wood, questions started flying from all sides.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Minnesota, in the USA.”

  “That’s Earth Gamma-8379C,” Carmilla added, to my confusion.

  “You’re really human?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. Was that weird?

  The two other men at the table shot me a thumbs up and a grin. “Represent, baby,” Randolph said, flashing the devil horns ‘rock-on’ symbol with his right hand.

  “I’ll have you know that’s more than a little offensive,” Evelyn muttered, tapping her very own horns.

  “Cancel me,” Randolph said with a smirk and playful wink. To my relief, the sultry demoness rolled her fiery eyes and smiled back.

  “Liam here is a necromancer,” Carmilla said, and she put a little extra edge on the last word as she almost whispered the revelation to her friends.

  The eyes of everyone in the g
roup widened in unison. Brian even stopped chewing for a moment.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Randolph said. “That’s insane!”

  “I haven’t even met a necromancer!” Evelyn gasped.

  “Quick! Do something necrotic!” Brian commanded with a dramatic pointing of his finger.

  Without missing a beat, I remembered a cantrip that I had studied back in my room. Mostly useless, but it seemed like a good party trick. I tapped the table with my cane and all the meat on everyone’s plates withered to the bone, and all the fruits and veggies became dry and browned with death.

  There was a pause as everyone took in what had just happened. Brian broke the silence. “I don’t know what I expected, but I regret everything,” he said, holding up a dried-out chicken bone that had once been dripping with tender fat.

  “Well, that was rad,” Randolph said in astonished amusement.

  All three of the women at the table seemed to agree as their mouths hung open in surprise. They exchanged significant looks before Carmilla finally said, “Welp, looks like Liam and I aren’t the only ones without food, now. Why doesn’t everyone go get a new plate?”

  Grunts and utterances of agreement sounded out from the group. Everyone stood up and made their way to the buffet table. I was astounded by the selection. There were assortments of bread, cookies, biscuits, muffins, rice dishes, meats and eggs of all kinds, and even some foods I didn’t recognize. All the food had been lying on the table since before I arrived at the latest, yet all of it had the heat signature of a dish that was freshly prepared and just ready for eating.

  I dug in greedily. It was a meal that reminded me of the cafeteria of my university back on Earth, but that couldn’t compare to this. The only thing I missed, really, was pizza. And tacos, too.

  “Do they ever do Mexican food here?” I asked.

  Randolph sighed. “Thank you. I have been saying we need a Taco Tuesday tradition here for months now, and no one has been listening.”