Alex.J.Cobalt

Manela looked at the corpse at her feet.

“Just do it,” Terak said. He always thought that this was easy to do.

Necromancy was an art. It was the art of the soul, of the thing that connected the conscious mind to this dull plane of existence.

Rain hammered around them. Manela wished it was sunny. Souls liked to come back to the land of the living it was sunny.

“Get on with it,” Terak hissed, kicking Manela in the shoulder. She glared at him, something none of the other street rats would be able to do. She was special and that meant she was protected from his wrath. He knew what Necromancers could do to a living soul. He’d seen it done before.

It was how he had found Manela in the first place.

Manela placed her hand over the corpse’s eyes. He was a fresh dead, found earlier by one of Terak’s runners.

Manela could still feel the pulse of the soul under her fingertips. Still lingering to life, trying to hold on.

Come back, she whispered.

Speaking to souls was not about control, it was about persuasion. Death was quiet, a comfort for most, especially those who had suffered in death. This man’s wounds, guts spilling out of his stomach, looked particularly painful.

The soul quivered, scared.

Come back, Manela thought. She brought her hand gently over the man’s eyes. There was a prickle under her fingertips, the man’s soul quivering on the edge.

“Get on with it,” Terak huffed.

Manela glared at him. Terak shied away, repulsed. They always did that with her red eyes, especially when she was calling a soul back from the beyond. It reminded them of who she really was.

Manela turned back to the man, pressing her fingers into his eyes.

She could feel the soul under her fingertips. She drew her fingers into a pinch, drawing them upwards like she was holding the ends of a piece of cloth.

The soul followed her hands, pulled up from the netherworld and back into the body again. The man’s eyes fluttered open, emerald green as reanimated corpses always were.

“There you go,” Manela said, standing up. She didn’t want to hang around for the next bit, when Terak interrogated them for information that he could then sell on.

Terak grinned, gesturing to his brutes to step forward. The man began to panic, trying to push himself from the ground but he couldn’t – his body was too weak.

They never escaped Terak’s graps once he had them.

Manela walked down the street, shielding her head from the rain. One day, she would be like the great Necromancers of old. Genive, Tranle, Inagle.One day, she thought, they will learn to fear me like they fear Terak.

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