Introducing Serials: The Zebra Unicorn

Chapter 2: The Necromancer

Hello friends!

Well, I had such a nice response to my zebra unicorn story that I decided to write another chapter. I got my girls to illustrate it. The majority of the comments requested more, which was awesome and cheered me up.

I did get one person who sent me a message that said simply, “STOP.” I assumed that meant that she wanted to be removed from my email list, so that’s what I did—maybe she just hates stories about princesses and unicorns.

But even that is useful feedback because it inspired me to create a new section for this newsletter called “Fiction.” If I’m working the controls correctly (which is doubtful) you should all be subscribed to it by default. Now there are three sections:

• Empowering Progressive Writers

• Politics

• Fiction

So if all you want to read is writing advice, subscribe to the first. If all you want is politics, subscribe to the second. If all you want is fiction, subscribe to the third. Or subscribe to two out of three or all three. Do whatever you want, just don’t send me messages that say “STOP.”

If you like what you read, consider upgrading to paid:

I expect I’ll soon be adding these chapters without these introductions, but maybe not. When I record the audio, it will only be the chapter.

If you haven’t read the first chapter yet, it’s here:

Chapter 1. The Zebra Unicorn and the Sleeping Princess

I’ll have to go back and add “next chapter” links as I go… sigh, I make so much work for myself, but I love it.

I hope you enjoy chapter 2!

Chapter 2. The Necromancer

The princess and Artemix the zebra unicorn continued to ride happily across the countryside without a care in the world. Unfortunately, anyone who dares spend even a few moments enjoying the brief, sweet, privilege of life runs the risk of becoming the target of nefarious attention.

If you so much as stop to smell the roses, it’s likely the mob that’s been pursuing you will rush up behind to bop you on the head with a lead pipe. Since the concept of pipe control is a non-starter politically, this is something decent people have learned they just have to deal with.

As a young and beautiful woman, Princess was already the undeserved target of all sorts of malfeasance.

And… it was about to get worse.

A little known fact about enchanted glades is that they tend to attract all sorts of activity. So it was that the necromancer came skipping up to what remained of the coffin.

Necromancers skip everywhere they go because they think it makes them look less creepy. In fact, it does the exact opposite. What makes matters worse is that they’ve all adopted this strange two hop skip that keeps their head perfectly level and allows them to zip along at terrifying speed.

Necromancers are very proud of their dumb skip. They’ll corner innocent people and bore them with long diatribes on why everyone should adopt this mode of travel. The only advantage of listening to this nonsense is that it delays any plans the necromancer might have to murder you.

It was the smell of death that had brought the necromancer to Princess’s glade. He came skipping in, then stopped and immediately collapsed onto all fours with his belly to the ground and his elbows bent out in an unnatural and painful angle.

He started sniffing loudly, and got up way too close and personal to the coffin. Necromancers have no consideration whatsoever for a person’s belongings or personal space.

After a moment of pawing and sniffing and being generally disagreeable, the necromancer stopped and sat up.

He was irritated. He felt he’d been cheated somehow. That was the perpetual mindset of all necromancers.

Ultimately, it stemmed from the fact that all necromancers are men. They prohibit women from joining their ranks. It’s idiotic because no women would want to join them anyway, but it allowed them to feel aloof and superior about themselves.

Secretly, it irritated them that only women could create life. They thought that terribly unfair and unjust since creating life is the most powerful act in the universe. They refused to consider that maybe the fact that men couldn’t create life was a pretty strong indication that men weren’t as important as they thought they were.

Well, if they couldn’t create life, the next best thing was to control the people who could. Sometimes they left women lying about in coffins. Sometimes they did worse.

You’ll often hear a necromancer admit, “We dabble in the dark arts.” Then they’ll go on and on to justify themselves if you let them. Decent people are inclined to interrupt.

“Dabble! Dabble! From the outside looking in it seems as if you have fully committed body and soul. The dark arts run through your blood. Evil has consumed you! You live it and eat it and think it and breathe it. The stench of death and decay is upon you! You are corrupt and foul to the core.”

Even if you’re very tempted to say something like this, you mustn’t do it. In fact, the best strategy is to let any necromancer you come across get so engrossed in their talk about skipping that you can slowly back away, get out of sight, and then run.

Because if you make them recognize, even for a moment, how bad they truly are, their eyes narrow and they come after you.

And in that regrettable moment you will find that they are actually correct about how fast and efficient it is to do a stupid skip walk wherever you go. They’ll come after you, and you won’t be able to get away.

In short, necromancers suck.

The one collective success of the necromancers had come in concocting a potion that was as close as a man could ever come to creating life. Necromancers were very proud of this potion, even though it didn’t really work at all.

The potion didn’t create life, it only created abomination. But admitting that would be a recognition that their life philosophy was wrong, so they denied that idea with every fiber of their being.

Unfortunately for Princess, this particular necromancer was dead set on making her life miserable.

He’d perched himself on the top of Princess’s coffin. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his nose. The scent came to him almost instantly, and he opened his eyes and began looking around like an eager squirrel.

He tapped his long, bony fingers together in delight. It looked like two gigantic spiders playing footsie.

Then he scrambled off the coffin and belly crawled over to the rocks by the river.

Necromancers were incapable of just walking normally. Everything they did made everyone around them uncomfortable. Even their breathing was loud and obnoxious. If you endured it without complaint, the necromancer made sure to get even louder and more obnoxious. If you ever complained, the necromancer quickly accused you of being insensitive.

But upon arriving at the rocks, the necromancer let out an un-necromancerlike squeal of delight. He’d found Roland’s body, and there was nothing a necromancer liked more than discovering a recently dead body. 

“Oh, this is perfect! What a find, what a find!” he said after giving Roland a few experimental pokes. 

He recognized right away that Roland was royalty.

“No scars. Good teeth. Well nourished! Ah-ha-ha-ha…” he began to laugh his obnoxious evil laugh.

He pulled the body onto the grass so it was easier to work with. The first thing he did was open Roland’s shirt to examine the wound. He touched it delicately and then brought his finger to his mouth. The taste made him wince, and he spat loudly growling, “Unicorn… pbth…”

He cast about in the grass for some spiders and beetles to help him be rid of the taste. After a moment of crunchy chewing, he went back to work.

The advantage of death by unicorn is that it’s a pure way to die. That meant that, though dead, the body was largely intact. The necromancer pulled some clay from an inner pocket to fix the wound. He smeared it in place on both the front and the back, confident that the dumb brute wouldn’t notice the difference.

Roland was set to be the next in a long line of failed rich guys who were propped up by dark forces acting behind the scenes. They were the perfect vessel for the kind of dirty work that necromancers didn’t like to do personally, and that’s saying something.

Necromancers knew it was better to watch their schemes play out from a safe distance. That allowed them to skip away if anything went wrong.

Once the body was mended well enough to suit the necromancer’s needs, he reached into the vest beneath his cloak and produced a vial of luminescent green liquid. He tilted back Roland’s head, removed the stopper, and poured the concoction in.

Bringing the boy back to life was the easy part. The potion worked well. The only side effect was that it turned the victim’s eyes the same lime green as the potion. It also made them glow in the dark, but there weren’t any mirrors around so the necromancer didn’t care about that.

The lad’s soul would also be condemned to an inescapable eternity of torment, but so what?

Roland coughed.

The necromancer patted him on the back.

“What happened?” Roland asked.

“It appears that somebody has cheated you. It seems really unfair. I expect that nobody in the world has ever been treated so badly.”

Another thing you wouldn’t expect about necromancers is that they are capable of expressing sympathy. But you’re wrong about that. Necromancers can express sympathy very well, they just can’t feel it. They use the language as a means of achieving their selfish ends. Sympathy also works best with people of privilege. In an odd inversion of nature, it turns out that the more a person has been given, the more inclined they are to believe that they’ve been cheated.

“You know sir, you’re right,” Roland said. “I have been cheated. I have been treated unfairly.”

“What do you remember?” the necromancer asked. Again, he cared nothing for the boy’s dim musings, but always did his due diligence to gather up whatever information he could.

“There was a girl, a beautiful girl,” Roland said.

“Ah, then why didn’t you go off and marry her and put her to work having babies and cleaning your house in accordance with the natural order?”

“I know, right? I dimly recall proposing that…” Roland’s voice trailed off. That was a problem with the recently deceased, they often lost their train of thought. The necromancer gave him a nudge, it was important that Roland didn’t dwell on his new, tormented reality. Fortunately, the necromancer was an expert in diverting the conversation away from any direction that might cause a complication.

“Excuse me but, are you cold?” Roland asked. He looked around in confusion. “I feel oddly cold, like right down to the bones. I’ve never felt this way...”

“Huh, that’s weird,” the necromancer said. “But tell me more about this girl. Was she disrespectful and willful?”

“Oh, yes, yes, so disrespectful. So willful. Here I am a most eligible bachelor and she turned down my marriage proposal. Can you believe it? What’s wrong with the women of today? I blame feminism. It will be the end of our whole society…” his voice trailed off again. “You know, I’ve just realized I can’t taste anything and my mouth is extremely dry. It’s almost as if...”

“Oh? I’m sure it’s nothing. What way did the girl go?”

“I’m not sure. I expect she must have stolen my unicorn.”

“The dirty little thief!” the necromancer exclaimed.

“Yes…” Roland said, but the mention of the unicorn churned up a memory. He looked down to examine his chest.

Noticing this, the necromancer took Roland’s hand in his own and gestured off into the distance. “Look out there son, what do you see?”

“Trees?”

“No, beyond those.”

“More trees?”

“No, think bigger lad.”

“Bushes?”

“No, that’s smaller. Bigger I said.”

“Big bushes?”

The necromancer sighed loudly and looked at Roland.

Roland looked back at him expectantly.

“When you were young, did the peasants try to hide the bounty of the harvest from you?”

Roland’s eyes lit up, “Why they did, they absolutely did, how did you know?”

The necromancer chuckled to himself and patted Roland on the back. “It’s because yours is a tale that’s both sad and old. Kindly lords such as yourself are always being taken advantage of by the people of their lands. You who provide protection and a place for them to live and work in peace. And how do the peasants repay you? They hold back for themselves what should rightfully have gone to you.”

“The fiends!” Roland said.

It wasn’t true of course. Roland was a glutton and had always taken more than his fair share leaving the peasants to die of starvation and disease. If they ever complained, he screamed at them that they were lazy and should work harder. The problem was that the more of them that died, the smaller the harvest was the next year. But if there was one thing Roland wasn’t prepared to do it was learn from his mistakes.

“You mean, I’m a victim?” Roland said.

“Yes, yes,” the necromancer said. “And I’m like the father you never had.”

Roland’s eyes began to water with unexpected emotion. At least he thought they did. The truth was that he couldn’t cry any more because he was dead. But he just pretended they could and that made it true for him. “All this time just because I lived in a castle and had the best medical attention in the world and always had enough food and comfort and servants to attend to my every need, people have told me that I had it ‘good’ and that I should be ‘grateful’ and that I wasn’t allowed to complain.”

“The deceit! The cruelty!” the necromancer said.

“But thanks to you good sir, I now see that I was the one who was suffering, not the overworked and starving peasant out in the fields, but me! All those years I slept until noon after a hard night of drinking, or finished only a tenth of my food and threw the rest into the fire before going back to my feather bed, I was the one experiencing true misery.”

“You were, you were!”

“Whether the servants did not attend me fast enough, or they served me food but not the food that I wanted, or they failed to recognize my discomfort, I…” Roland paused. He’d absently begun to fiddle with a flap of fabric over his heart and his finger had brushed up against his bare chest. “Clay?”

“What? Ah, no, probably not, anyway…” the necromancer said, “it seems to me that you have only one choice.”

“What’s that?” Roland said with excitement.

“You need to go off into the world. You need to find this girl that has treated you with such cruelty.”

“And kill her?”

“No, no, no,” the necromancer said in a grandfatherly tone that was both condescending and superior. “I mean, it would bring you a short term amount of satisfaction to kill her, but you have to think of humanity. You have to think of society. You have to do what’s right!”

Roland didn’t like the sound of any of that, but his curiosity was piqued, “And that is?”

“You should marry her. Help redeem her. She is but a lost lamb who knows not the way. What can you expect of a woman? They need to be shown their place in the world. It takes a good, strong, noble hand like yours to achieve this divine purpose. You need to be firm but fair.”

“Hey, yeah!” Roland said. He liked the idea of being in charge and forcing other people to do things. He liked it even better when he got to do it even as he insisted he was the victim.

“Can you put aside your grievances and be the bigger man?” the necromancer continued.

“Yes!”

“Can you be the man this world needs?”

“Without question!”

“Then get up son, shake off your lethargy and go forth to indulge in wanton labors of righteousness. We can’t stand by and let disrespectful and ungrateful girls corrupt the natural order by following their own hopes and dreams! No! They know not what they do! They’ll surely choose a path that leads straight to ruin. Though it is a burden we take upon ourselves, our shoulders are broad. Let us show them the way so that our culture, our very humanity, is allowed to endure!”

“You know sir, you’re right! Thank you so much for the illumination. I’ll rush right off and tell her. I expect she’ll thank me for it!” Roland paused again and absently put his finger to his eye, “By the way, does everything look green to you?”

“No,” the necromancer said. Then he got to his feet and helped Roland to his. “You aren’t a man of thought, you’re a man of action. Go out there. Do what’s right. Fight for our future, fight for tradition, fight for the natural order. Fight, fight, fight, and more importantly, don’t think.”

Then the necromancer did a giant fist pump.

Roland smiled and returned it.

Then the necromancer grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him around, and gave him a swift kick in the ass.

“Go… go get her, bring her kicking and screaming back to the kitchen if you have to, just get it done.”

Roland understood violence, so he began lumbering forward mostly running over trees because he couldn’t be bothered to turn aside.

The necromancer watched him go and smiled. He lived for these brief, flickering moments of spiteful satisfaction. But all too quickly the sense of peace went away, and he turned and started sniffing the air in search of some new way to create mischief.

After a moment he caught a new scent and went creepily skipping off. Perhaps he will return to this story, or perhaps only his machinations will be felt. Necromancers are unpredictable.

On a distant hillside, Artemix, who had been grazing on some lush green grass, paused and looked back in the direction they had come. He was a pure creature, and he knew when an abomination had taken place.

Sadly, such sensations were popping up pretty much from all directions all the time, but the last one he’d felt had been particularly strong and distressingly close.

“What is it?” asked Princess, who was already well in tune with what the zebra unicorn was thinking.

“Nothing,” Artemix said.

“Now Artemix, don’t lie to me,” Princess said.

Artemix shook away his bad feeling and looked at her, “I’m sorry Princess. Fine, I’ll tell you the truth. Something really bad just happened in the direction of the enchanted glade and I expect it’s going to cause us complications.”

Princess sighed. Then she stood up to pat Artemix on the neck. “What do you suggest?”

“I suggest we make tracks.”

“But you’re a unicorn, you don’t leave any tracks.”

“Fine, then I suggest we put some distance in between us and whatever is back there.”

“Will that stop it?”

“No, but it will give us a chance to prepare.”

“Then let’s go.”

So Princess mounted the unicorn and they were off again, but this time there was a sense of disquiet that intruded upon their enjoyment of the journey.