Chloe walked down the hall, staying beside Eloise until they reached her room, at which point Chloe darted ahead and opened the door for Eloise. Chloe smiled to herself as she saw the amused expression on Eloise’s face, the exuberant gesture seemed to have at least somewhat distracted Eloise from whatever was worrying her.

Eloise sat on her bed, and Chloe sat down beside her. The amusement of a moment earlier was gone, and Eloise’s hands were clasped and squeezing at each other spasmodically. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, but said nothing. As her breathing became more and more rapid, Chloe stood up and walked directly in front of her.

“Calm down, everything’s going to be fine. Over the years I’ve been called a number of things, a cold-blooded bitch, a manipulative schemer, and a heartless monster, but one thing nobody has ever called me is a coward. I don’t know what you have to tell me, but a can’t think of anything that would scare me away. Trust me.”

It took a moment, but then Eloise took a deep breath and visibly relaxed. Chloe sat back down beside Eloise, this time Eloise nestled up against her, rested her head on Chloe’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and began to speak.

“Now then, where should I begin? I suppose it would be best to start with a bit more of an explanation of necromancy, as it has had such a large effect on my life. Tell me, do you actually know where the fear of necromancers comes from?”

Chloe though for a moment, “Isn’t it because you can kill with little more than a touch? I know it’s the next thing to imposable to ward against a necromancer’s magic. “

Eloise smiled slightly “No, well that is a part of it, but not the root. Whether it’s a peasant striking you in the back of the head with a cobblestone or a sorcerer who’s just burned through the last of your wards, anyone can kill you if given the right opportunity. While it’s true that the difficulty in warding against our magic would make people nervous, it wouldn’t inspire the sort of bone-deep fear most people are taught as children to have towards necromancers. No, the fear of necromancers comes from what our affinity is.”

“As I told you before, a necromancer is a soul mage. Whether it’s at the hands of the peasant or the sorcerer, when they kill you, that’s the end, your soul goes to Zalane’s embrace, and that’s what’s different about necromancers. Depending on what a necromancer has on hand, they may be able to damage, or even capture a soul before it can reach Zalane, and that is why people truly fear necromancers. Of course, for most people, the fear of necromancers starts with the nursery rhymes and children’s songs and eventually becomes simply a fear of the undead or of the inability to defend against our magic, but it’s the people who recognize the true danger a necromancer can pose who write the songs and the rhymes. So, tell me, are you truly prepared to have someone who could tear your soul apart standing next to you? And are you prepared for how others will react to seeing someone, who they’ve been taught to fear since the cradle, standing next to you?”

Chloe wrapped her arm around the Eloise and pulled gently, pressing their sides together even more firmly. While giving what she hoped was a reassuring embrace, Chloe paused for a few moments to think about how to phrase her reply.

“An old philosopher once said “Lonely is the head that wears the coronet” and he wasn’t wrong. For most of my life, the people close to me will either work for me or be lesser nobles who owe fealty to me. For the former, how they viewed me would hardly change, I could have any one of them killed at any time anyway, and hiring a necromancer if I wanted to do something to their souls would be fairly simple. As for my nobles, my job isn’t to be their friend, it’s to keep them in line, keep them from turning each other’s lands into burned-out wastes, and to protect them from larger threats. Having them be a bit scared of me will only help with all three of those things. And as for the rest of the people, the ones who will just know me as their lord, what they will care about are the taxes and duties I impose, not who’s standing next to me.”

Chloe paused, squeezing Eloise tighter for just a moment. “And as for me, I’ve seen you, and I have a good idea of what kind of person you are, I have no fear that you’ll tear my soul apart in some fit of madness.”

Eloise just leaned against Chloe for a minute, an expression of relief and pleasure on her face, then her expression turned serious and she began to speak again.

“That’s actually the next thing we need to talk about, do you know why so many necromancers go insane?”

Chloe shook her head silently

“It’s because, despite what I just told you, necromancers almost never use intact souls. We use the spirit echoes that animals leave behind as often as we can, but those almost always need to be housed in an animal body to be useful, and that takes time and is less powerful than what we can do with souls. When Zalane takes a soul, she works with it to strip some of it away, generally the pain and fear surrounding the death, as well as much of the anger, resentment and sorrow that build up over the course of a life. It’s these remnants we use for our potent spells. A little bit of power from a necromancer can turn one of those fragments into a wraith that will eat the lifeforce right out of a person. Or we can house them in a body, the power we give them makes them far stronger than an ordinary person, and it takes complete dismemberment to stop them. Either way, when we are giving them their power, selecting which the emotions should be driving them, and directing them, we feel them.”

“Do you know what it feels like to be stopped in an alley on the way home to your family, to know that if you give up the money you just got, your family will be going hungry before the end of the week, to know, as you lie in the alley with a knife in your gut, what your death will mean for your family, what your wife will probably have to put food on your children’s plates? The utter despair you feel, and the burning hatred for the people who did this to you are truly overpowering. That’s the sort of thing you feel when you touch a soul fragment, and that’s assuming you have the luxury of only touching one fragment at a time.”

Eloise fell silent, she had started shivering as she described what it was like to touch a soul fragment. Chloe just held her, as she clearly battelled back the memory of other fragments she had touched. After a few moments, Eloise resumed talking.

“And with that, we come to what you have to know about being with a necromancer. It’s the necromancers who have something that truly matters to them, be it a cause or a person, who are the most likely to hold onto their sanity. Having something that matters more to you than yourself to hold onto while the emotions flow over you, and to orientate yourself with when they pass, is just about the best thing possible for a necromancer. On the other hand, there’s are few ways quicker for a necromancer to lose themselves than to touch a soul fragment when they're already emotionally hurt, it’s can become impossible to tell where to fragments pain ends and theirs begins.”

“For that reason, if you want to be with me, it can’t be anything casual or temporary. I know this isn’t exactly a romantic way to put it, but if you want to be with me, you need to understand, it has to be permanent. Of course, it’s possible we'll find we're less compatible them we think and we'll simply drift apart, but even with just the short amount of time I’ve known you, I find that highly unlikely. So, if you are willing to agree to a relationship with me after I tell you a little about my past, I will promise you that I will give my all to making the relationship work, and to making you the person who matters that much to me. In return, I will need a promise from you, a promise that no matter what, you will not cast me aside.”

Chloe looked down and paused for a moment “this could get awkward” she thought nervously.

“While I would happily agree to that, I’m afraid there are a few things about being with me that I should also tell you.” Chloe said nervously.

Eloise laughed “Chloe, as you’ve probably already guessed, I was raised I The Empire, I’m used to how a noble family works.”

Chloe almost sighed in relief, that would deal with a number of possible problems. In most of the countries on this side of the continent, a noble almost always married a magician of some sort. Political marriages to other nobles or having more than one husband or wife was fairly uncommon, but things were very different in The Empire. In The Empire, a noble would always marry another noble, but then they would usually only spend one night together, and do in in the presence of a water mage who would ensure that the one night would be all it would take to produce an heir. After that, both the husband and wife would generally openly keep several concubines. The Children of the concubines were expected to become the trusted retainers of the heir, and when the ever-expanding borders of The Empire swallowed up a new land, it was these Children who would be raised to the nobility to rule the new land.

“Now, I promised to tell you about my past, and what you are getting into being close to me personally, rather than just necromancers in general. My father is an imperial noble, my mother is an arcane knight, and was one of his guards until his marriage, at which point she became his first concubine. I was the eldest, and groomed since birth to be Alycia’s right hand, to be the one to watch her back and hold her secrets. I have a full blooded younger brother and sister, as well as two younger half-brothers and one younger half-sister from fathers other two concubines, not that only being half-siblings mattered, all of us were treated the same, it was like we all had three mothers.”

A tone of reminiscent happiness had entered Eloise’s voice, and Chloe could see the smile on her face.

“I’d had it all planned out you know. I was supposed to go to war with Alycia, the family troops were going to perform with distinction, I was going to save her life in one of the battles. Then, when it was all over, I was going to be one of the ones raised to the nobility, of course that dream ended as soon as my power began to awaken. With an arcane knight and a mage as parents, I always knew I would be a magician of some sort, or at least an arcane knight. I was so happy when the magic in me started to be generated more and more rapidly, matched only by the rate at which my capacity to hold magic increased, I knew that meant I was a mage. Then I began to sense soul fragments, and I realized what my affinity had to be. Now, while being necromancer on this side of the continent means you will never be popular, in The Empire it’s a death sentence. It’s considered a disgrace for a family to produce a necromancer, and it’s something that never happens in noble families. Oh, sometimes there may be a hunting accident, or maybe a mishap where a sword slips from the hand of a sword master during training, and a child who is just around the right age for their talent to awaken may die tragically, but no noble ever admits to necromancy being involved.”

“When I realized what I was, I tried to keep my growing power a secret as long as I could, and started making preparations. I ran away one day when father and Alycia were going on a trip, I hoped that everyone would assume that I had convinced them to take me with them at the last moment. It probably worked, as I had some time before I had to deal with pursuers. My father is a pragmatic man, and would have assumed I would just come back on my one when I saw how much better I had it with him. The first pursuers were almost certainly hired simply to appease mother, and they were far from competent. Based on the way the competency those pursuing me increased steadily but slowly, I suspect my father decided I might be suited to act as an agent for Alycia. That came to an end when one succeeded in cornering me, and I had to use necromancy to escape. Luckily, I had made it quite some distance by that time, but as soon as my father learned what I was, he sent everything he could after me.”

Eloise paused for a moment and raised a hand to rub at her side. “He actually caught up with me himself at one point, getting away from him and his personal guard was one of the hardest things I have ever done. It still hurts to know I probably killed several people who, when I was a child, would slip me treats from the kitchen, and who, when I was older, trained me in everything they thought I would need to know to guard Alycia. Eventually I was able to get far enough away, and obscure my trail sufficiently, that father gave up on directly sending men after me directly, at that point he put a price on my head. I spent years simply heading west, trying to get as far from The Empire as possible. I would sometimes stay in a town or city for a few weeks or months, or find a good place in a forest and stay there a while, but with the size of the bounty on me, I never truly felt safe and sooner or later I couldn’t keep myself from running further west.”

“I met Vice chancellor Murtsum the summer before last, he was trying to defend himself against two natural wraiths. I dealt with the wraiths, and he offered me a place here at Alir as a thanks for saving him. While there are no instructors who actually know any necromancy, all the ones who had ever met a necromancer made time to talk with me last year, and helped me learn from what they had seen. The library here also has copies of the journals of several necromancers, and honestly, those have been more helpful than the instructors.”

Eloise paused a moment, then gave a snort.

“So that’s what’s on offer, a partially trained necromancer with a price on her head that would make even the long trip to The Empire a very profitable endeavor. One who, while she does have a solid grounding in everything from sword fighting to etiquette, was on the run during the years that she should have been building on that base. So tell me, would you be interested in such a Necromancer?”

Chloe smiled and moved so as that she could bring both arms around Eloise in an embrace.

“Definitely. I promise you that you will always have a place beside me. And as for the price on your head, I doubt any bounty hunter would be stupid enough to try and get past the Yinara family guards, and if they are, well, the citadel has plenty of spikes that would probably look good with a head on them.”

Eloise gently pulled free and Collapsed backwards onto the bed, just laying on it, eyes closed, for a few moments.

“By all the gods, I swear opening up and telling you all of that is was the scariest thing I’ve had to do since I had to rip away a chunk of my own soul.”

Chloe lay down beside Eloise and closed her own eyes.

“I told you to trust me, and I meant it, as I said I promise I’ll always be glad to have you beside me.” Chloe paused for a moment then continued. “Not that it will matter to our relationship, but a have to ask, just how partial is your knowledge of necromancy?”

Eloise Laughed “Don’t worry, the spell you’re wondering about was thoroughly described in several of the journals, when the time comes I can help you in having an heir.”

They both stayed silent for several minutes, then Eloise started to speak again.

“Well then, even if making this deal wasn’t the most romantic way to get together, I will be trying my best from now on. If we don’t find any glaring incompatibilities in the next few weeks I can promise one positive thing for you, to go with all the negatives you’ve accepted, I will probably end up as the person most devoted to you in the entire world.”

Silence returned and soon Eloise’s breath took on the slow and steady rhythm of Sleep. Chloe smiled, somehow the sound of Eloise breathing peacefully was truly soothing. But just before sleep claimed her one final, partly amused, partly guilty thought ran through her head.

“No Eloise, you’re wrong about that last bit, I’m afraid you’re just too sane to ever claim the position of the person most devoted to me.”