Bullets From the Heart – Part 6

I can’t promise I won’t backpedal.  I can’t promise I won’t make mistakes.  What I can promise is this: I will continue to work.  Just like my writing, just like my health, I know these things will not be done overnight, but I will not quit.  I’ve given too much to let something like a necrotic mindset ruin it.  

Okay!  Enough serious things.  You came for stories about writing and about worlds that are like our yet altered in subtle ways.  SO BE IT.

Writing has become easier for me.  Not that the act itself has changed any.  And I cannot say for certain that I am a more studious or educated soul. Yet I have been weathered.  In the words of one of my favorite proverbs, “Be humble, or be humbled”.  I have chosen the route of being humbled.  It is…. far rockier.  Yet it comes with it’s own form of wisdom, earned by walking over the jagged edges of my broken promises.  You learn a bit about what not to do.  And even more, you learn about all the things you need to do.  

So I write.  Even when it feels like I’m meandering.  Even when it feels like I’m working on yet another project that will become dustbin fodder for all of eternity.  I write.  Because in the end, that’s what this job is.  That’s what this life is.  Trying to capture small moments of the Eternity around us, and spread them across the bread of our daily lives for savory consumption.  The world, the galaxy, the Universe.  Those things are large.  But we can relate to the single man, the single woman, the single merperson.  Because seeing the world through only one set of eyes is something we can all relate to.  

So I write, and I see, and I hope.  That’s my job now, even if the pay is awful.  If you want to hear a secret: I think this is the best deal I’ve ever gotten.

It had taken me only twenty three hours to run the roughly eight hundred miles from the Mausoleum in Detroit.  When you don’t have to worry about things like food, water, sleep, or the normal limits of a living human body, you can do some pretty fantastic things.  It’s why I had become a necromancer in the first place.  Learning at the Mausoleum had been exhilarating.  Successfully passing my thesis and becoming a card carrying member of the everlasting undead had been the proudest moment of my life.  Unlife.  Existence.  

Now, here I was, my korin in tatters, my treacherous body once more stirred to life.  Each heartbeat felt like failure.  And pain.  My blood hadn’t been rocketed around my body for hundreds of years.  I had pressed on, sure of the information I had gleaned from my agents, positive I had found the Treatise Necrosia.  The original book combining science and spirit energy.  The first of the Necromancers to arise were raised on the knowledge in that book.  Without it, we would have nothing.  It was in those pages that the process of korin manufacturing was contained.  Only one living necromancer had that knowledge, and he was beyond any reach.  Necromancer Pheril and his knowledge of korin manufacture were the basis of all Necromancer politics and power grabs.  

Necromancer Pheril had refused to pass on his knowledge, and churned out korins at an agonizingly glacial pace.  He taught no one, worked with no one, and his demesne in the heart of the Mausoleum was the most highly fortified edifice in all of The Fracture.  In the nearly quarter century of his existence, only the members of the Council had ever even seen the man.  Or woman.  That was the subject of much debate while I had been learning.  While I still considered the other students my friends, rather than future competition or potential slaves. 

Only one korin a year was gifted to a new student.  Just one.  And if your korin was destroyed beyond repair…  I lifted the jagged pieces of the gun in trembling fingers.  The shards were less like metal, and more like crystal hardened beyond belief.  The runic carvings that had encircled the entire exterior of the weapon still glowed faintly, discharging the enormous energy they had never been designed to channel.

I looked again at the ruins of the necromancer sent to kill me.  Bryce, from the look of the face remaining.  Almost sixty years my senior and one hell of a deadly foe.  I’d gotten lucky with the grenade.  It had been a smart move, using such brute force tactics to achieve a clean victory.  If I hadn’t been using all my energy and focus to keep myself together, I might have missed the thing plopping down next to me altogether.  

I cringed, but mustered my courage and made my way over to the twice dead body.  Like all necromancers, the corpse had begun decomposing with astonishing and disgusting rapidity.  It was a mess of rotten meat which smelled only a little worse than the most vile charnel house imaginable.  My body, freshly possessed of such things as ‘smell’ and ‘stomach acid’ gagged, and I couldn’t keep the bile from flowing up.  I wretched even more from the sheer shock of the taste in my mouth, centuries unused to such things.  

The miserable thought kept me company as I ripped some of my mud covered robe off and wrapped it around my face.  I steeled whatever was left in my stomach, and marched over to the pile of disease which might contain my only salvation.  

I wish I could’ve made my hands stop shaking as I went.