Necromanson (Beta) Chapter 12 (Patreon)

Henry opened his eyes. He lay on his back beneath the sheets of an unfamiliar bed, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. His memory of the day before turned hazy after he suffocated Zack. Henry realized his bladder was full, and so he tried to sit up, muffling a shout of pain when his side began to throb.

Henry moved his arm to run a hand over the cut in his side, and found it covered in gauze taped to his skin. Henry shifted to gingerly climb out of bed, and found himself kicking bare flesh under the covers. Henry painfully twisted, and barely made out a bit of brown hair poking out from under the covers beside him.

Carefully, Henry climbed out of the bed, turned and assessed the situation. Athena snored quietly on the left side of the bed, snoring quietly in her underwear. She was buried beneath the covers, but he made out a long stretch of smooth brown skin revealed by the shifting fabric. Her pants and shirt lay on the ground beside the bed.

Henry was interrupted by his bladder, and he limped to the toilet, finding himself unexpectedly dizzy. Henry took care of business and found himself overwhelmed by thirst, putting his head beneath the faucet in the sink and desperately drinking, despite the pain the contortion caused him.

Finally sated, Henry rode a wave of exhaustion back to the bed, and painfully crawled back under the covers, his skin brushing against Athena’s. Her quiet breathing lulled him back to sleep, and this time, Halil didn’t butt in.

Henry awoke again to the sound of metal ringing. Athena stood in the corner of the room, her feet braced in a wide stance, swinging a weathered sword, so notched that the edge looked like a piece of worn out chewing gum. The ragged edges and thin blade made the sword look like it could snap off at any time. The scene of Athena swinging the sword around looked like the opening for a tetanus shot commercial.

“What are you doing with that?” Henry said, raising his body with a groan. Henry’s hand pressed protectively against the wound in his side for a moment as he carefully sat up. Athena glance over at Henry and stopped swinging the sword. Henry nearly sighed in relief, a self-inflicted stab wound from his childhood resurfacing in his mind.

“Practicing,” Athena said, turning to show him the ragged blade, with pocked and pitted steel. A single word adorned the blade, nearly illegible. ‘VLFBERHT’ read the weathered inscription. The handle was leather wrapped around the steel tang, and the Pommel was more simple iron, completely lacking in decoration. The hilt seemed to have some grooves where precious metals could have been inlaid, but they were long sense stolen.

“Gonna need weapons if we’re gonna fight monsters,” Athena said with a grin.

“Ok,” Henry said, raising a finger. “first, what makes you think we’re fighting monsters? You heard Zack, he couldn’t kill the damn thing.”

Athena shrugged, swinging the sword a few times in the air. The wind caught in the jagged edges of the blade and made the blade ring as it sliced through the air. “He couldn’t kill you either,” she said. Her gaze fell on Henry. “And what makes you believe a word he said? Do you think he even tried?”

“And second,” Henry said, his brows lowering. “What makes you think you could ever use an antique like that-“ Henry’s words cut off when the sword sang through the air and bisected a nearby hardwood chair, the two uneven halves of the furniture falling to the floor.

“And third,” Henry said, his mind trying to catch up. “… Where the hell did you get that?” Athena reached out and grabbed a gnarled staff leaning against the wall and passed it to Henry. Henry took it, and levered himself to his feet.

“It’s better if you see for yourself,” Athena said as she turned away and walked out the door, leaving Henry no choice but to limp after her, muttering to himself. As Henry limped down the hall, he gradually figured out a shuffling gait that caused the least pain to the wound in his side, relying on the staff in his hands.

Henry couldn’t help but become anxious as he followed Athena, his eyes gradually wandering away from her lithe form in front of him. How long would it take before Zack was missed? Was the old wizard accountable to anyone or could they afford to rest and recouperate here for a while?

What if they simply took whatever cash they could find and ran? Henry shook his head. Sooner or later they would find themselves surrounded by police outside a dingy motel. Maybe Athena was right. If he used whatever Zack had at his disposal to kill the Mansonator, the majority of supernatural influences on his murder case would be gone.

Athena stopped in front of a massive steel door that had been swung open. Henry took in the arcane symbols carved into the door and glance over at her. “Did you open this?” he asked.

Athena shook her head. “I think it was the blonde,” she said. “He was gone when I looked for him.” Athena pointed to an open box among the dizzying array of treasure. “It looked like he took whatever was in there,” Athena’s hand moved to point to a red puddle beside a bloody knife on the floor. “Got hurt there, and then walked away.” The puddle showed faint traces of being walked through, disappearing back the way they came.

Henry’s hair stood up on the back of his neck. “So that giant is still alive in here somewhere?” Henry asked, turning to keep watch behind them.

“I don’t think he stayed,” Athena said. “The front door was unlocked, and I found a smear of blood on the handle.” Athena turned thoughtful. “Besides, he seemed nice enough.”

Henry looked back at her, disbelieving. “Didn’t he try to kill you?”’

“He was very polite about it,” Athena said with a shrug.

Henry took a deep breath and his eyes wandered over the assembled artifacts that littered the room. “Do you think he would have known which of these would turn us inside out?”

“Maybe not,” Athena said, running her finger through a square patch of ash beside the puddle of blood. “Something must have gotten him, but he lived.”

“We’re totally in the dark here,” Henry said. “Let’s leave the vault alone for now, don’t close it, because we don’t know the password, but sometime I think we’re going to need some of the things in here.” Henry thought back to the library in Zack’s study upstairs, and the simple glyph Athena had used to save his life.

“What do you wanna do now, then?” Athena asked as Henry crooked his finger, and the ominous looking tomes scattered about the vault floated from their resting places to follow after him.

“We’re going to hit the books,” Henry said, leading a train of floating books slowly up the stairs to the main mansion. Henry was pleased with his clever wordplay, but Athena scoffed.

“Then what?” she asked, outpacing him on the stairs. Henry didn’t mind, as it gave him something to look forward to.

“I’m going to become a wizard,” Henry said, pulling himself up the stairs one at a time. “I don’t think Zack was lying when he said the Anima Cogitationis would let me learn it easier than most, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking about himself when he was going on that power fantasy.”

“Sounds good,” Athena said, “There was enough macaroni and cheese in the kitchen to keep us holed up here for months.” Henry shuddered as he reached the top of the stairs. Macaroni and cheese was all right, but months? After a few days, Henry began to dread the mush. Athena, sensing his discomfort spoke up.

“I grew up with mac’ n’ cheese,” She said brightly. “I know a million different ways to cook it.” Henry, for his part, resolved to learn to change his appearance as soon as possible. If he could go to a supermarket without being spotted, he could escape that cruel fate.

Henry placed all the books beside a deep recliner, then fetched the introductory and theory books from Zack’s workshop. When he finished moving, he collapsed shaking into the chair. After a steadying breath, he reached down and grabbed the first book, basic tenets of Magic. After a few minutes of reading the dry introduction, Henry heard a screeching sound, and looked up.

Athena dragged another recliner diagonally across from him, sharing his pile of books. She picked up one labeled Laws And Theory Of The Arcane. Athena glanced up at Henry over the heavy book. “trade you when we’re done?” Henry grunted assent and went back to reading.

After a few minutes of reading, Henry’s brain began to overheat, and after an hour, he and Athena had set a fifty pound Webster’s dictionary and a stack of notes between the two of them, in a struggle to unpack some of the denser, more obscure words.

The evening wore on, the silence only broken by the two of them asking each other vocabulary and the quiet shuffling of pages. Hours went by, and although it was comparable to eating flour, Henry finished the first book, handing it over to Athena, who had finished hers a half hour earlier. Henry took a moment to rest his eyes, made some coffee and a sandwich, then settled back into the cozy couch to begin the second book.

Henry started awake when the top of the second book struck him in the forehead. Athena was across the pile from him, leaned back in her seat, her head lolling to one side, the book folded over her thumb. Henry watched her, wondering what motivated her to stick with him for as long as she had. Normal women don’t run off with a suspected serial killer. Her dickhead coworker might have had a point, but unlike him, Henry found it hard to find fault with her. Henry set the book down and let his eyes fall shut.

The next day was still a struggle, but the two of them began making progress in their preferred directions. Athena, mortified at how Manson had nearly controlled her through the TV, focused on defending and disrupting magic, looking for ways to apply the symbol she had stolen.

Henry was more focused on how to make things happen, and though they had begun at opposite ends, they wound up meeting in the middle. Magic, in its most simple form, was building a reservoir of energy, and then piping it through mental maps of spells. That, combined with the will behind it, would achieve the desired effect. In essence, there was no way to make a spell happen without knowing what it was supposed to do, even if you had the formula, the last ingredient, will, would be missing.

Athena learned about the mental piping via the defensive side of magic, with techniques ranging from optical illusions, to fluctuating inverse pressure, causing the mental model of the spell to burst at the seams.

Nursing a suspicion, Henry opened one of the actual spell books, and he found the maps of each spell clearly drawn on each page, with a meaningless codename, and no description of what they did. “Fuck,” Henry said, setting the book down and returning to the theory books, looking for clues as to what the complex web of lines on each page might do.

“What’s up?” Athena asked, raising her head from the book she was studying.

“The spells all have codenames and no descriptions,” Henry said, flipping back and forth between two pages of the book, studying the minute changes in the spell circles inscribed in the theory book.

“Could be a personal spellbook,” Athena said, nodding to the History Of Magic book she had read. “Oftentimes, when a wizard makes his own spell, he’ll give it a codename, and hoard the knowledge of what it does, passing it on only to a select apprentice. Once, somewhere along the line, the apprentice spills the beans, and it winds up common knowledge, it’ll be added to your everyday spellbooks.”

“So what if the master gets suffocated before he tells anyone?” Henry asked aloud. Athena raised her brow. Both of them knew the answer, so with a wrenching gut, Henry tossed aside the book of spells, searching through the stack for another. Henry crossed his fingers internally as he flipped through tome after tome. Finally, Henry found a two inch thick book of spells, in visibly worse condition than the rest, made of more common materials.

Henry let out a whoop when he turned to the first page, and saw a simple spell, labeled ‘fire’. Henry flipped through the pages, stooping over the book and laughing as spell after spell revealed itself.

“That’s creepy,” Athena said, looking over at Henry with her brow raised. Henry straightened and swallowed the evil laugh that had been welling up inside him, but it felt like instead of letting it out his mouth, it was now singing through his veins.

“Found a spellbook,” Henry said, waggling the book. “labelled and everything.”

“Sweet,” Athena said, taking it from him and looking it over. “cleaning clothes, changing your appearance, calming animals, digging holes, forming steel, growing plants…” Athena flipped through a few more pages. “It’s a hell of a mixed bag, but there’s some good stuff in there.”

“Goddamn right,” Henry said, accepting the book back from her, and cradling it like an infant. Henry wanted to start with the first one, but he couldn’t justify experimenting with fire without any means to stop it. Henry picked up the book and began running through the checklist of things he needed to get started, his heart pounding with excitement. Open space, safety equipment, and a focus.

All the introductory books mentioned two things that any wizard needed to make magic work, A reservoir, and a focus. The two could be separate, but for practicality’s sake, most wizards made their reservoir into a focus.

Henry thumbed his chin. Did he need a focus? Zack’s focus had been broken, and he still managed to… Henry’s eyes went wide and he sat up straight, groaning in pain as he tugged on his stitches. Athena glanced up at him, her eyebrows raised in a query.

“We didn’t bury Zack!” Henry said, climbing to his feet, summoning the staff to his hands before he began limping out the door.

Athena cocked her head to the side. “Oh, yeah,” she said, rising to her feet.

The smell grew stronger as they went down the steps to the basement, something worse than decay. “Are dead people supposed to smell this bad?” Athena asked, her face crumpled in disgust. Henry had smelled plenty of dead people. This was worse. The odor had a caustic sting to it that reminded him of chemical waste mixed with burned rubber and human waste.

“No, they aren’t,” Henry said, locking his jaw against the eye watering stench. As they came closer to the room itself, Henry had to stop and dry heave for a moment before he got his stomach back under control, a thin trail of saliva hanging from the corner of his mouth. They turned the corner and spotted the old wizard’s body.