Souls from Below

"Disentomb" image by Alex Horley-Orlandelli

© Wizards of the Coast 2012

Necromancy is tricky, on moral grounds. Now I know what you're going to say -- Ben, awakened dead have minds of their own, and mindless dead are useful tools. Ben, it's just a body, just a mound of flesh and bones and nails and teeth, if there's even that much. I'd agree with you, if the necromancer were making something from nothing, that would be quite grand. Now you may have read some fiction in which "magic" can be used, just make something from nothing, but where I come from, you have conservation of heat and conservation of mass and science. Now there may be people who can go grab fire out of another place and send it here, or who can make a mother fertile and kill a man, or slow down a train just a bit and thus throw a man sixty yards. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's done.

Even if some schmuck thinks he's making fire out of nothing, that's simply more dangerous, because he could put out a fire really anywhere at all, and half the time his magic might not work, when he comes across a guarded fire. If he's powerful it's even worse, he could put out a protected fire -- in the king's forge or in an orphanage -- and not even realize why it was an ounce more difficult to overcome. I'm telling you, if you've heard that you can make something from nothing, the person telling you is lying or being very dangerous or both, and you ought to make sure they understand so they don't ruin anything. So it is with necromancy.

A body needs a soul, and the easiest soul to fill it with by far is the one which came out of it. So you pull it back from heaven or hell, but you need powerful friends to do so, which ends up meaning that the soul is reversed. If you pull the soul from above, you need help from below, so it goes evil, by which I mean it acts evil, can't help but do so. And really most souls go up, which is why necromancers get such a bad rap -- they're irresponsible and power hungry and evil, swiping souls from heaven. But if you pull the soul from below, well that's quite another thing entirely, because then you trap the evil soul in the body but it goes good, whether it likes it or not. I've oversimplified it a bit, good and evil, up and down, really the souls just go opposite their ideas, which is a hard thing to do to anyone but if you don't like them very much that's usually alright by you. Which is really the trouble; whether you liked someone or not doesn't really help you guess whether you'd like their opposite or whether they were judged evil by God or The God or The Gods or the gods or The Light or The Darkness or The Lampkeeper or whoever you like. So you've got to be careful, and necromancy is tricky business.

It's usually best to keep away from necromancy unless you're okay with your own soul going bad or you've got some way to know whether a soul's in hell or not. That's how Lantros was - he knew his craft pretty well and he trapped the bad ones whenever he could, and this was one of those times when he had a challenge ahead of him, but there's no words or senses for it. I could use "feel", say it was sortof like heartburn and fear, and he had to use the iron will he had developed over his life to keep that pain going and to keep the fear within him. If he warded off this poorly described, poorly imagined (though I take no blame for that. Imagination is on you.) feelings of pain and fear (approximately,) he would lose the spirit and it would go loose in the world and really it was quite an evil spirit, so no one wanted that.

He hit the sarcophagus hard with the hammer, not caring really how bad off the body was - they function either way. He cleared the top of the sarcophagus out of the inside, away from the bones (fortunately this time there were only bones, no flesh or rats or maggots) and prepared the body for the spirit to enter it. He started the ritual, and in the end, after some push and pull even more inadequately described than the most basic part of the craft, he overcame his foe, pulled the foe up from hell to the world, and pushed it slowly, little by little, into the body, and chained it there. His angelic contact gave a gesture comparable to a high five, just as casual, just as inappropriate from an angel in Lantros' world as you might think. Lantros was a man of heaven, and the contact had been helping him for some time, and this was quite a big deal, quite a soul to nab the opposite of.

The angel drank ambrosia and Lantros drank wine and ate cheese. They gave their new friend some of each when he woke, since he was able to have both, and ambrosia is quite good but really it's not worthwhile to eat ambrosia forever - they say you'll never get tired of it, but you do, and the angel was mildly jealous. Not overly jealous understand; he was going back to heaven in a few moments while the two saints in front of him stayed here to affect the earth. They finished their meal and said goodbye, the raised dead off to wage war or debate policy in some grand nation that was terribly important, and the necromancer to raise more dead, and save or trap, as your perspective may dictate, more souls from below.

"Souls from Below" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V

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