The Revenant

Prompt: The Shadow Isles
Word Count: 1549

Emhara felt the tendrils of magic creeping in rivulets between the cobblestones as she walked in the chill evening air. Frowning as she recognized the cool touch of necromancy, she changed her course to follow the magic’s trail further down Charbonnet Street, where the shadows pooled thick under the eaves of worn shops and shabby walkups.

The magic led her to a walkway too narrow to be a true alley between two buildings that clung to the street like soot stained leviathans. A driftwood staircase led down to a wooden, iron-banded door. Stepping down the stairs steeped Emhara in the wake of the necro magic flowing from the other side of the door. The muffled sound of men cheering sounded like the crash of tide against the surf.

Emhara hid her face in the shadows of her cloak’s hood before knocking on the door.

The spyhole’s plate slid away revealing a pair of narrowed eyes that took her in for a moment before being replaced by a mouth full of stained teeth that demanded in a Southwharf guttural, “Bettor or mancer?”

“Mancer,” she replied. Knowing that the doorman was watching a dead . . . mouse, Emhara’s necromancy told her, in a cage, she oblingly fed her magic into the creature, reanimating it briefly, making it stand on its hind legs and execute a bow to the Southie doorman.

The door swung inward on banshee-loud hinges, allowing a warm, smoky collection of air out as Emhara walked in, her hood still up and her pale eyes flicking under it to take in the lamp lit, narrow corridor. The scuffle of the heels of her boots against the earthen floor was drowned out by a swell of applause and the raucous calls of a crowd coming from the end of the corridor.

The smell of too many men and their vices, underlied with eddies of rotten meat, met Emhara’s nose, reaffirming that the place was a fighting den featuring dead sport. The necro magic suffused the air, but it originated from the fighting pit, a circular ring dug ten feet into the ground, she saw, as she pushed her way through the crowd. Gentlemen, dockworkers, and factory men stood cheek by jowl with no heed paid to the normal boundaries of class and society.

As she reached the side of the pit, Emhara saw a betting table run by a board man and marker man. Bettors carried a pair of matching, carved marks, one with a hole drilled in it. As they placed bets, the marker man took the holed marks and hung them from hooks on the black board , under the outcome the bettor waged on. The board man wrote the wagers, figured odds, and kept the winnings tallied by each marker. No names in this place, thought Emhara with anger, only markers.

Emhara’s attention left the betting table when one of the two wooden portcullis-style doors at the far end of the pit drew up, allowing a dead man to walk haltingly into the pit. The man’s deep grey skin was elaborately tattooed, his eyes foggy marbles in his slack face. He wore only loose trews tied with a crude belt of hemp rope. Though he was controlled by another necromancer, Emhara gave him a sip of her magic to establish a bond, just enough to learn of his life and death: Caleb Wright, boatswain of the sloop called the Maiden’s Mercy, a sailor in his life, murdered for his body in order to become a necromancer’s marionette. Casting her pale eyes around under her hood, Emhara searched for the necromancer, but the magic spooled back to the portcullis, the necromancer mostly likely controlling the dead man from the safety of the other side.

Emhara clenched her leather gloved hands when the second portcullis drew up, and three square-jawed brindled pit dogs flung themselves toward the dead man, eerily quiet as they focused on their prey, despite its uncanny nature.

The dead man knocked the first dog away with a wooden chop of his forearm, but the second and third dogs latched on, one burying its yellow teeth in the man’s arm and the other hanging from the man’s thick neck till the cold flesh gave way. The dog fell to the ground, dropping the flap of torn skin and immediately leaping again. Still hanging from the arm, the second dog shook its powerful head and shoulders, making the dead man wobble as the necromancer controlling him tried to inexpertly compensate for the wriggling weight of two large dogs while another leapt against him.

With every moment, Emhara’s disgust and anger drove her magic to seek release, a flood held back by a cracking dam. In the Shadowed Isle, her homeland and the bastion of necromancy, the dead were honored, called upon to fight only in defense of home and family. To use the dead for sport, for the entertainment of the crowd, was not only a blasphemy against necromancy, but a worse blasphemy against the man’s family. After death, men and women of the Shadowed Isle gladly gave their bodies for preservation so they could defend their loved ones. This man’s body was given to the teeth of dogs to alleviate the boredom of selfish men.

Before the dogs could knock him down, Emhara released the floodgates of her magic, washing the other necromancer’s bindings away as easily as a sandcastle before a crashing wave and taking control of the tattooed man. The dead man’s movements became limber, moving under her control like kelp dancing to the music of the sea.

With his free arm’s hand, the dead man tore off the dog hanging from his other arm, throwing the dog into the pit wall hard enough to leave it twitching and crying when it hit the packed earth. Under Emhara’s control, the man sank to one knee, and the dog at his neck thrust itself forward for a more secure grip as soon as its paws touched the ground. Locking the dog’s head in an embrace, the dead man twisted and rolled over the dog’s wide back, breaking its neck even as it refused to release its hold. As soon as the dog died, Emhara took control of it, allowing her magic to repair the neck damage, though the dog itself remained dead. Moments later, she did the same thing to the twitching dog after it died and used both dead dogs to drive the live dog back into the still open portcullis from which the dogs had originally emerged.

The crowd had gone from wild cheers and shouts to confused muttering when the two dogs reanimated and joined the dead man’s side, so, when the amateur necromancer pushed his way through the spectators shouting that he wasn’t controlling the dead, the men in the crowd began to look around themselves nervously.

Emhara pulled down her hood, revealing her silvery grey necromancer eyes and onyx hair. It was like dropping a stone into a glassy pond. The crowd ripples as the men simultaneously turned to stare at her and step away.

“I am Emhara Raeth of the Shadowed Isle,” she said in a low, yet carrying, voice. “This man was Caleb of the Maiden’s Mercy before he was murdered and his body desecrated for your sport.”

Her magic swelled, swamping the room in magic like a fog rolling off the sea. The men around her murmured, and several markers fell to the floor when the dead man’s voice joined hers, echoing her words as she as continued, “Be grateful that this is not my homeland, or I would be compelled to kill you all. If you are not responsible for Caleb’s death, I suggest you run now.

“If you are responsible for his death,” Emhara smiled slowly, “I suggest you run now. And never stop.”

As panicking men crushed themselves into the narrow corridor to flee, Emhara’s magic flowed into the dead man, making new branches, altering the current course of the magic that animated him. She bound him directly to the Nethersea, the source of necromancy magic, then severed her own control of him. Caleb was now a revenant.

Revenants were constructs of vengeance, unebbing creatures of retribution, made to seek out their murderers. No necromancer controlled a revenant, rather it was directed by a need to find and destroy those responsible for its unjust death. They were implacable till their vengeance was fulfilled, no matter how long it might take to reach that fulfillment.

By the time Emhara’s magic ebbed, only she, the revenant, and two reanimated dogs remained in the fighting den. Taking a plank from where it leaned against the wall, she slid it down into the pit and directed the dogs up it with a twitch of her magic. The revenant followed them up out of the pit. His skin was now a lustrous deep grey, like seal skin, and his tattoos gleamed with a silver-edged light, like the flash of a fish’s scales under the water. As he passed her, he gave Emhara an expressionless nod and continued down the corridor to the gaping door.

Smiling wider, Emhara raised her hood, again. With a dog on either side of her, she walked out of the den and into the bottomless night.