Bullets From the Heart – Part 9

Today had me in a bad way.  Then I came home and things got better.

Then I had a toddler who did toddler things and I had to run away to a gym.  Then at the gym there was a lap pool and wonderful hot tub and wonderful shower and I was better again.

Now I have orange soda and a small measure of rum and root beer, and it’s writing time. 

Not too much more I can say about today.  It’s over, and I need to get on with the blog post.  I promised all of you and myself that I would do my best to keep negativity out, and the tiny updates area is part of that effort.

Bullets From the Heart – Part 9 

I had to be real honest with myself as I sat with a mouthful of roasted bird, chewing contentedly on my fifth such victim this day.  Susan, despite her constant snark and complete lack of respect, had some pretty good ideas.  I had been alive so long, mired in the politics, bureaucracy, and backbiting that made up the Necromancers world, that it had been a long time since I actually cared about what was in the sky above me.

The satellites had all long since burned up in atmosphere or ceased being useful.  No one was alive who could even replace them, that technology having been lost when the Fracture had been born.  The years of the Long Winter hadn’t helped either, and the advent of Necromantic abilities and powers to try and wrestle some form of order from the chaos had pushed electronic and scientific aptitude ever backwards. 

So when Susan had proposed a use of soul power which basically turned us into a giant echo-locator, I had scoffed at her.  First, I didn’t know if I even could use my abilities anymore.  The freakish shot of the broken korin not-withstanding, I wasn’t dead.  I had no subjugated souls.  I had no enslaved servant spirits.  How in the name of Pheril’s black blood was I to even keep myself alive in this nonsensical wasteland.

Susan, the annoying sass-monster had solved the issue, of course.  Although I had noted the quiet warmth which never faded, despite all the exposure and horrifying rain, it was Susan who noted that it had only happened after she had decided to cement herself to me. 

That still galled, no matter how many times I tried to peel her off my soul.  In accepting her death, in forcing me to consume her in the fashion she chose, she had managed to cheat death. 

It made me burn with the silent fury of a thousand dying suns, but it also seemed that her presence was what gave me this new-found power.  I would have to work with this… this… insufferable wench if I wanted to continue surviving.  True death hadn’t been nearly so frightening when I had already died once.

Now?  With a meat suit that continued working despite everything saying it should be dead?  I had suddenly found vindictive suicide a far less attractive option.

In the days following the hellish encounter in the ruins of some place named ‘Topeka’ (which Susan insisted meant ‘land of good potatoes’), I had also learned that Susan hadn’t been some mindless trapped animal, tortured beyond the point of insanity into a snarling caged beast.

Instead, I found a woman who had been scarred by her captivity, and then after awhile had learned from it. Unbeknownst to the Necromancers at large, by sticking her soul into the korin, Susan had become that korin.  In the way that a soul inhabiting a body made that body a person, and when that soul left the body was only so much meat and bile good only for decomposition. 

That meant that with enough practice, she could ‘hear’ the voices talking around her.  Not so much with her ears, but she could detect, trace, analyze, and absorb the sound waves that lit against her runic markings.  As Necromancers compulsively kept their korins with them at all times and in all places, and as we… as they didn’t need to sleep or to eat that meant Susan had centuries of twenty-four seven Necromancer activities and research to draw upon. 

When her soul wasn’t being pressed into service, or the Necromancer who had eaten of her essence was using another soul to do his workings, she’d had time to think and plan.  I’d thought about the implications of this, and realized with chilling clarity that it was more than probable that some, if not most, of the Necromancers I knew weren’t actually themselves.  We’d trapped souls, and then given them hundreds of years of education and a litany of reasons to hate the crap out of us and silently plot vengeance.  They had experience with being as dead as any Necromancer, used to utilizing their spiritual energies to control inanimate matter, and had every single nuance and mannerism dead to rights.  I bet they had practiced their captors tone of voice and inflections with mindless determination, too. 

In my darkest moments, I had begun to quietly marvel that I had managed to subdue Susan at all.  She was smart, abrupt, and cagey as hell.  I ruthlessly began smashing down on that line of thought.  I’d figured out the trick of sheltering my thoughts from Susan’s half of my soul almost immediately, but I’d be twice-dead if I’d ever admit to liking the woman.

To be continued…

Winterfully,
Justin