hiiii

this is the prologue for the romantasy book (1117 words long), it’s about a girl who’s super into her horny boyfriend, but he dies unexpectedly, so she decides to go find a hedge mage who specializes in necromancy to apprentice under so she can bring him back. unfortunately/fortunately she falls in love with the necromancer instead and things get complicated. it’s set in a vaguely late medieval france sort of setting and there’s magic, but the focus is mainly on the character dynamic rather than the central focus of the story.

i had a few different pitches rejected awhile back so i convinced myself i’d missed my chance at writing anything publishable, so now i’m just having fun writing magical indulgent shit!

xoxox

In the centre of the village, where they normally held the weekly market, the bodies were laid out in their finest clothes. In the many cases where their deteriorated condition made clothing impossible, they were draped in the flowers of mid-spring and tucked into blankets to cover the worst of the rot. Alliums, tulips, phlox and forget-me-nots were kind on the eyes, but there was no hiding the smell, and Colette was grateful for the wooden mask that hid her grimace from the desperate, watchful eyes of the living, standing at the fringes.

Beside her stood a figure, robed to the ground in deep green and masked just as she was, and when he spoke his voice was pitched low and just for her.

“If you need to be sick, find a way to do it discretely. You can go behind the houses if need be.”

She nodded once, then realized the motion would scarcely be seen by moonlight and lantern, and spoke up from behind her mask, resisting the urge to lift it.

“Yeah, good to know.” Her voice shook only a little.

While it felt unearned on her - stolen valor, as of yet - the ceremonial garb suited him perfectly. The carefully carved skull mask and heavy strips of green wool cloth gave him a regal bearing that she was unused to seeing in their day to day life. His calmness, too, was contagious. Despite the fact that they were about to be surrounded by death for hours on end, he seemed unbothered, reaching into the eye socket of his mask to scratch his brow.

“What do we say to them?” She asked, wishing for a sliver of his stillness.

“Nothing. From this point on the idea is to let the dead speak for themselves.”

She took this as her cue to hold off on any further questions.

Before them, the former villagers lay silent. Some stared upwards, their expressions vague, their eyelids dried permanently open, while others had no eyes left at all. Their vacant skulls were easier to look at, but almost certainly harder to reanimate, and with so little material left to work with, Girart would have his work cut out for him.

He stepped forward into the main square and surveyed the arranged corpses.

In silence, she followed him to the nearest body. She had been a girl of about fifteen, her skin intact but blotchy, strangely colored, and fighting a losing battle with gravity. Her hair had been braided up like a crown and stitched through with ribbon, and someone had done their best to set her bare fingers around a pine bough.

Girart knelt by her feet, and Colette stood just behind him, her own hands twisted together beneath the folds of her robes.

A woman stepped forward from the assembled crowd, perhaps a few years older than the dead girl. A sister, perhaps. She cleared her throat and spoke directly to the both of them, gaze moving from mask to mask.

“Good mages, this is my sister Ysabeau. She drowned while doing laundry in the river. We wanted…” She paused to lick her lips, seemingly unaccustomed to speaking to necromancers. “We wish to say goodbye.”

Colette had no sister of her own, no darling confidant, or worst enemy, or whatever form they seemed to take, but it was easy to imagine that if she did, she likely wouldn’t be able to string together a sentence anywhere near as coherent. To lose a sister seemed impossibly hard, and she was glad she would never have the opportunity to know the feeling.

Girart nodded and settled in place, laying his hands lightly in his lap. He said nothing, and merely looked ahead at the drowned girl. From an outsider’s perspective it likely seemed as though he was doing very little, sitting, unmoving, by the girl’s boots, but it wasn’t long before his magic began to weave its way through her lifeless body, and the onlookers began to stir.

Ysabeau’s skin started to lose its mottled colouring, and her body began to plump on the bones and relax into something more expected and reassuring. As Colette watched, the girl’s fingers closed around the pine bough in earnest. She took a breath, first haltingly, as if someone was performing the gesture for her, then with practiced ease, and at last her eyes opened and focused on the world around her.

“Oh my goodness,” Ysabeau said, pushing an errant tulip petal from her face. “Oh, did I fall? I knew it! I’m so sorry!” She propped herself on her elbows and looked at the faces around her, clearly embarrassed by the attention and the fuss she’d caused.

The composure of her older sister dropped away in seconds, and she fell to her knees and threw her arms around Ysabeau, weeping into her hair while the deceased girl did her best to console her. The family began to step forwards from the crowd, first with hesitation, and then in a rush, pouring reassurances and forgiveness to the little laundress, promising everything they knew to offer, touching her flushed face, her rosy fingers, the hem of her dress.

It was a heartbreak to know that the joyful reunion would last only as long as Girart could hold the spell, and as experienced a necromancer as he was, that period was not forever. Ysabeau had, generously, a few minutes to settle her young affairs and say her final farewells, and then decay would claim her once more.

Colette tore her gaze from the family and looked to Girart. She watched as his hands, resting before, began to curl in, gripping at the fabric of his robes for support. Beneath his mask she could just make out his eyes, and they were wide open and filled with discomfort. The masks made more sense now. Not only did they give a sense of pageantry and ceremony to the ritual, but they hid the quiet agony of the mage beneath them.

There was nothing Colette could meaningfully do for him. This was the nature of the spell, and the character of necromancy as a form of magic. It was what they’d come here to do, but that knowledge didn’t make the act any easier.

She lowered herself to the ground next to him, saying nothing that would risk him losing his focus, and sat close enough for him to know that she was there.

Over the years she’d witnessed all manner of beautiful pieces of magic - sand sculptures that moved and waterfalls that flowed upward, but there was no question about it; the magic before her, invisible, unpopular, and crushingly short lived, was the most beautiful magic to ever exist.