“No, no I don’t want this.”

“What did you expect to come from my tutelage?” Ahn’Khareen asked, with genuine curiosity in her voice. “You must have known from the beginning that I was a necromancer. I am a lich; I have escaped the grip of death to continue living far past my time. I could of course teach you the fundamentals of magic, but when you agreed to become my apprentice surely you must have known that you would be learning necromancy.”

“No, I didn’t know!” Didn’t I?

Ahn’Khareen stepped out from the tables of bodies and began to pace as she walked, making a slow counterclockwise circle around me. I was frozen in place, unable to turn my head away from the bones laying out in front of me, and I kept thinking of the dead man in the bed on my first day here. His bones had disappeared, and I had never investigated where they had gone. Where they right here, in front of me? Why had I never tried to figure out what she had done with them?

“I told you that I had the secret to the continuation of life, and that countless applicants had tried to learn from me. You knew that all others had failed in their quest to become my apprentice, and yet I chose you. If I did not think you were capable of this, do you believe that I would have extended this offer?”

She paused behind me, and her thin whisper sent chills down my spine. “Do you think that you would still be here if I did not deem you worthy?”

“But necromancy is wrong!” Ahn’Khareen was a skeleton though, she always had been. I had even gotten used to it, letting her comfort me when I missed my mom.

She continued walking, her bare-boned feet clicking softly against the floor as she moved in front of me and placed a tender hand onto the bare skull of the dog.

“Is it though? There is nothing inherently wrong about necromancy, only society teaches us that it is. It has been used for evil, yes, but so has all magic. Do you think that the illusionists, capable of tricking even the most keen-eyed men and women, have done no harm? Psychics and mind-mages are not outlawed by every nation, even though they could do more damage to the living than a necromancer. And thaumaturges, mages who control the powers of the elements around them, can wipe out an entire village on their own. Do you know what they used to call groups of thaumaturges?”

“No.” I whispered, and Ahn’Khareen finally looked me in the eyes, her own emerald-green orbs of fire dancing with power and passion.

“They called them a massacre. And yet all those mages are celebrated by the nations of the world while necromancers are hunted down and killed. Why?”

“Because… it’s wrong?”

“You would not know about the ancient Zeminean Empire. It was a utopia, two thousand years ago. Citizens would live in idle luxury while the dead tended the fields, performed manual labor, and took care of every dangerous aspect of life. All that the living would have to do was give up their bodies after death, and during Their life they would live like royalty. To this day, the ancient Zemin’s on average lived longer than any of their respective race in our current time. Can you guess what happened to them?”

My heart felt heavy. I could tell where this was going. “They were killed?”

“Exactly. They lived a life of luxury, and they were hated for it. Every single one of Zemin’s neighbors allied together, and killed every single man, woman, and child who had a single ounce of magical potential in the country. Tell me, is that fair?”

“Of course not.” My mouth was dry, but it was the only answer that I could give.

“Of course not. Necromancers, who only wanted to make life better for the men and women who lived with them, were slaughtered. What about the great lich Alimundus? He proposed a new world order, where if everybody experienced lichdom, then there would be no death, no need to struggle and die only to prop up one’s social betters. A great world, unrestricted by any form of government, where people would simply support one another. A crusade was called by the churches, and a vast army destroyed him and his noble ideas.”

The scary thing was that I could feel myself slipping, because some of what she was saying made sense. Every depiction of necromancy in everything that I had read was bad… but Ahn’Khareen wasn’t bad. In fact, the civilizations she was describing didn’t sound terrible to live in at all. There had even been ideas like what those back home, often ending with similar results. As well, Ahn’Khareen had saved me when I was nearly dead. Then she had taught me magic, actual magic that I had only ever dreamed of before. Would learning necromancy truly be so bad?

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. “What does any of this have to do with me though?”

Ahn’Khareen let out a sigh, slowly shaking her head. “Those great necromancers of old and their ideals still exist in me, even if the rest of the world has tried their best to stamp them out. My master learned from his master, who learned from her master, who learned from their master, and so forth. My knowledge has been burned out from every library in the world, except for those small collections which dare to speak of the taboo. What I am offering you is to continue this tradition. Learn from me, learn necromancy, and you will have a power that is feared by the entire world. It is both a blessing and a curse, and you will be persecuted wherever you go if the people learn the truth of what you are. But if you can muster through the persecution, you will have power. Power enough to find those who brought you to this world, to learn their secrets, and perhaps find a way back to your home.”

My heart lurched, and my knees felt even weaker.

“I could do that?”

“I cannot promise you anything. I cannot promise you that you can find the people who did this, nor can I promise that there is a way back at all. What I can do however, is provide you with the power and training possible to find out.”

“Do I have to…” I waved at the bodies. “Work with those?”

“Yes.” Her reply was almost a hiss. “There are no half measures in magic. Not in thaumaturgy, not in illusions nor conjuration, and not in necromancy. You either cast a spell, or you do not. You either learn the intricacies of death and bodies, or you do not. You only survive, or you do not.”

It wouldn’t be so bad. I told myself, thinking of my mother, my friends, my home. It would be like doing archaeology. Or… or like those medical skeletons in classrooms.

And if what she said was true… then necromancy didn’t make you evil, it was only what you did with it that made you evil. A sword wasn’t evil, only when you used it to murder people. In fact, swords could be heroic, when they were used to defend the innocent. If I only used magic for good, then wouldn’t that make necromancy be good?

Swallowing all the many, many reasonable objections that I still had, I nodded. When it came down to it, if I had to choose between learning necromancy or to stop learning magic entirely and possibly give up on returning home, then I would choose necromancy.

--##--

My education in life after death began with a rat. To be fair, it began with a long lecture by Ahn’Khareen that necromancy was not about bringing back the dead. While that was the goal of many necromancers, and Ahn’Khareen had accomplished it in becoming a lich, practical necromancy was simply about the manipulation of dead bodies.

The stereotype of necromancy in the public eye was to use dead bodies as soldiers, Ahn’Khareen explained, but the undead were arguably a much better labor force than they were warriors. According to her, in war the most successful necromancers used living people to do the fighting, since they could learn and adapt to fights in ways that no undead could. The undead would then be used for logistics, to haul supplies for the living. In a pinch, the undead could be used in mass wave tactics, but an individual zombie or skeleton was weaker than just about any living creature.

“But what if I’m not planning to lead an army?” I asked.

“Then the necromancer instead moves from the large scale raising of weak undead and focus on smaller numbers of high-quality creations.”

A basic undead according to necromantic teachings consisted only of a skeleton with a basic enchanting upon it to follow orders and keep its shape. Sometimes zombies could be used, but Ahn’Khareen preferred not to use them. She pointed out that rotting flesh could cause several diseases, and if the goal of the necromancer was to improve people’s living conditions, then giving them diseases was counter intuitive.

More complicated and stronger undead could be created, depending on how much time and mana a necromancer wanted to spend on it. But Ahn’Khareen assured me that creating such undead was far beyond me now, and instead we would focus on the basics.

Thus, the rat.

Now I had never really interacted with rats before, or any kind of rodent really. Sure, everybody knew that rats lived in the basement of our apartment building, but I had never ever seen one. And one of my friends back in elementary school had a couple of rats as pets, but apparently they liked to fight one another, and one rat pulled the other rat’s intestines out. The point being that I had no idea how a rat’s skeleton was supposed to fit together, which was a bit of a problem considering I was supposed to reanimate the rat laying in front of me on a stone table.

A lot of very small, very fragile looking bones were laid out on a black cloth laid out on the table, as well as a thick leather-bound book that was open to a page helpfully titled “Common Rat (Northern Continents)” and had a magnificent hand-drawn image of a rat’s skeleton and a spell matrix. I had asked, with more than a little trepidation, if the book was bound in human skin and Ahn’Khareen had assured me that it was not. Apparently human leather was not nearly as good as people made it out to be, which was a relief to me.

“Have you studied the spell matrix sufficiently?” Ahn’Khareen asked, several hours into our lesson for the day.

“I think so.” I said slowly. “It’s a lot different from the other ones I’ve seen. I’m not sure but it seems more… I don’t know, circular?”

“Indeed, it is.” A note of approval was laced through her voice, and I felt a flash of triumph at having gotten it right that left me a little confused, considering the macabre circumstances. “It has to be circular since it is meant to contain the magical energies within the skeleton of the creature, excepting of course the connections to your own mana. The spell will draw upon the ambient mana of the world around it to sustain itself but will rely upon a connection to you to maintain its structure.”

“But if the only way to maintain a spell is to continue concentrating on it, wouldn’t that mean if I lost my concentration the skeleton would fall apart? What would happen if I went to sleep, for example?”

“Ah,” Ahn’Khareen’s green eyes flared in their sockets for a second. “I believe I see the confusion. That would be true for the common spells we have been casting until now, but summoning spells work differently. They are tied directly into your own personal mana, not drawing upon it as that would slowly kill you, but merely a connection.”

I saw what she meant, or at least I thought I did. It was like a puppet if I was understanding her right. The strings, the personal mana connection, would keep the puppet from collapsing and direct it to move; but they didn’t require any energy. Instead, the energy would come from an outside source, in terms of necromancy it would be the ambient mana around us, directed through the strings to the puppet which made it move. It wasn’t a perfect comparison, but it made some sense to me.

“Do you think you are able to cast the spell now, having studied the matrix?”

That was a good question, and I thought about it carefully before responding. While Ahn’Khareen had spent a lot of time making sure I had committed the various spell matrices she had given me to heart, it wasn’t technically necessary to memorize them at all. Anybody with a sufficient supply of mana could cast a spell if they understood how to channel it and shape it with a matrix. The memorization was only required for those spells which needed to be cast quickly, so if you had a grimoire in front of you with a matrix you understood, you could cast that spell without memorizing it.

“I think so.” I eventually said.

The matrix for animating a rat’s corpse was more complex than anything I had cast yet, but I was pretty sure I could see how it worked. I was still confused on the morality of necromancy, but I couldn’t deny that I was intrigued by the math and science behind it.

“Excellent. I know you still have your doubts young William Amsel but believe you me – necromancy is not the evil the rest of the world makes it out to be. It is simply another tool for a mage to use.”

She was right about not being confident, but I was too far in it now to back out. I took a deep breath in, then opened myself up to the mana around me. The crackling energy filled my body and I shaped it carefully following the lines of the spell matrix before me. The process took longer than I had expected, and by the time it was finished I was holding onto the stone table to keep myself standing while sweat practically poured out of me. But the spell was done, and I released it onto the rat skeleton with a shuddering word.

“Reanimate.” I croaked, my throat dry, and the bones of the rat shuddered as soft blue magical energy cascaded onto it.

I could actually see the lines of the spell matrix etch themselves onto the bones of the rat with blue fire, before vanishing and leaving a smooth ivory surface. One by one, all the bones lifted into place, held aloft with invisible threads as the magic reconstructed the form of the rat. When it was done, a skeleton of a rat stood in front of me, perhaps a foot long including the tail, with little blue flames dancing in its eyes. I could feel in the back of my mind a line connecting me and the rat, like the strings on a puppet that I could pull and command. The rat looked at me and squeaked, using its boney paws to rub at its bare skull as if it was cleaning itself.

“Huh.” I said, staring at the rat, then passed out.

--##--

Waking up to find skeletons with glowing eyes staring at me was starting to grow old, I decided. Over the past couple of months, I had lost count of the times when Ahn’Khareen would surprise me in my sleep, but this time it was worse. This time there were two of them.

I was in my bed when I woke up, with the now-familiar green fire of Ahn’Khareen’s eyes watching me carefully. Sitting in her lap, however, was a tiny skeleton rat with blue fire dancing merrily in its miniscule eye sockets. Upon seeing me wake, the little undead rat squeaked again, and shifted closer towards me. For my part, I closed my eyes and let my head rest against the pillow.

“So, it wasn’t a dream.”

“If you are referring to the creation of this creature, then no. It was not a dream.”

“Shit.”

I laid there quietly for another minute, running through my breathing exercises to calm down. I hadn’t been doing those recently since things had begun to get better, but I was starting to think that I should pick the habit back up.

“Why are its eyes blue?” I asked, my own eyes still shut.

“Pardon?”

“I noticed it before I collapsed, but its eyes are blue. I thought the color of necromancy was green, like your eyes.”

Ahn’Khareen did the dry laugh that continued to unnerve me. “The color of an undead’s eyes is tied to the eye color of its creator. The eyes are the wells which plumb the depths of the soul after all, and thus since your eyes are blue all your creations’ eyes will be blue. My original eyes were green, and thus my eyes are the same shade.”

I cracked open my eyelids, looking at her eyes. They were a brilliant shade of emerald-green, which would have been stunning if she wasn’t a skeletal lich. My life is so weird.

“Your problem continues, however. You took in too much mana and wasted enough that you collapsed again.”

“I know.”

“You say you know, but you do not change your process.”

“I’ve gotten better though! I don’t collapse after every light spell now.”

“That is true. You merely collapse every time you try and cast a new spell. You must learn control, William Amsel.”

I sighed, shifting my gaze to stare at the ceiling. “I’ll try and do better.”

“Good. But for now, rest. I will ensure that your next meal is ready for this evening.”

She got up, easily picking the rat up by its spinal cord, then dropped it onto my stomach as she walked by. I could barely feel it landing, the rat’s skeleton was so light.

“Wait!” I called as she left, picking up the skeleton which squeaked happily with my touch. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

She stopped at the door, and my mind flashed back to the first time she had left my room like that months ago, just after she had saved me from the goblins.

“Why it is your pet. Pray, make sure it doesn’t die after all the effort you put into getting it.”

She vanished down the hallway, rasping laughter following her. I looked at the rat, which looked back up at me.

“God, sometimes I really do wish this was a dream.”

The rat squeaked again.

“Me too buddy, me too.”