The graveyard was well maintained. The path was clear, and the graves were all cared for.
I looked to the willow tree behind her grave. It was swaying gently in the breeze. My mother’s grave was mae of dark stone and had a bunch of sunflowers before it. Her favourite.
I remembered the warm days we spend here. My mother and other relatives would work on maintaining the graves and laying flowers. My mother would always bring sunflowers. Then we’d go home and have a big meal. My Nonna and Nonno would make the best food. I miss their cooking.
I didn’t try to stand I just sat there and made my resolve.
“Caio Madre,” I said, crossing my legs. “It’s been a long time… I moved to Canada. It’s freezing. I’ve got some amazing friends; they’d be worried about me by now. I should call them… Oh, and there’s this guy…” I stopped, remembering Koa, how I’d seen him fading, how he was dying, and I didn’t even know. I remembered his bright smile, and how warm he always seemed to be. How his eyes looked in the sun, and how he smelt like smoke and firewood. I fiddled with my mother’s wedding band that hung from a cord around my neck.
Even though my mother and father weren’t married; my father had bought the rings, and he gifted to me when he married my stepmother. I’d worn it around my neck ever since.
“He’s dying… I need to see him. I’m stuck here and I don’t know what I am doing. I can’t control my powers. I know you said our powers are a blessing but right now they feel like a curse, a burden I have to carry alone. I feel like I’m drowning, and I forgot how to swim!”
I dug my fingers into the soil and let tears drip down into my fists. “I am drowning in the music, and I feel like I’m not good enough that I let everyone down. Dad, you, my friends especially, Pandora and Koa. Pandora’s the reason I joined Henbane, saying I would be great, and my powers were amazing, but I feel like I’m always falling short, and Koa, he’s saved my life more times than I can count! I can’t even return the favour to him!” I looked at her name carved in stone. “You told me I would be great, and I would do amazing things but, I haven’t. Mum and I can’t take it anymore, I just can’t!”
I looked back at the grave and there she stood. Her expression saddened. She still had her long corn silk hair that reached her mid back, clotted with blood. The gaping wound in her neck like a second mouth. Her dead eyes, filled with glass. Her broken limbs and crushed pelvis. How she glinted with fine glass partials.
She tilted her head at me. Opened her mouth and tried to speak, but her vocal cords were destroyed so the only sound that came out was gargling blood.
My mother placed a broken hand on my shoulder and tried to smile. I was still crying, trying to imagine her as the beautiful women from the photos, but I couldn’t. That women was gone.
I sighed getting up from her grave and walking towards a mausoleum. It was white building with Greek like columns. On the door were the words ‘Stai fermo perché C’è musica strana.’ In a fancy lettering etched onto the door.
‘Be still for there is strange music’
“e noi siamo i ballerini.”
‘and we are the dancers.’
The doors shuddered open, revelling a stairwell leading down into the catacombs. On the wall of the mausoleum, were torches and cloaks. I grabbed them and headed into the darkness.
The torch gave off a warm orange glow in the dark twisting tunnels. They were tight and made of crumbling stone. Rats scurried away from the light as I walked further and further down the tunnels.
I remember when I used to come down here with my mother. She tried to teach me how to use our powers. I remember how stale the air was and how we’d navigate our way towards the centre.
I can almost hear her signing as we walked. I started to hum, ‘Ninna Nanna.’
A slow and sweet melody. The sounds bouncing off the walls. The song, was about a mother thinking who will she give her baby to? An old hag, the bogie man, or a white wolf… singing it, felt so odd, like around me were the spirts of the children the wolf had taken.
I hummed that tune over and over again.
I remembered my last time in Rome just after my mother died.
I was sitting in my Zia Naomi’s house playing spinning tops with a little girl. She wore a time white dress and leather band around her head. In the kitchen my Nonna and Father were arguing.
“He must stay here to learn,” My Nonna yelled.
“He is my son!” my father retorted.
“He will suffer!”
“He is all I have left of her!”
The spinning tops went around and around. I giggled, and clapped, although it hurt.
“Virgilio belongs here with us where his powers will grow!”
“Powers! You mean that curse! He will be far away from you are your lot!”
They spun and spun, faster and faster. The girl giggled, It was a sweet sound, like bells.
“Cecilia would not have wanted this!”
“Do not use my wife’s name ageist me!”
My father stormed out of the kitchen, and we left that house. I waved the girl goodbye. We moved away to Black Rose City. Soon after that.
Finally, I got to where I was going. The largest chamber in the entire place. It was a necromanteion.
The celling was high and domed. The walls were decorated with bones. In the centre of the room was an altar, and there she stood, smiling, my mother.
She was beautiful, just like in her photos. My mother walked over towards me, cupping my face in her hands.
“My boy,” she smiled kissing my forehead. I felt tears running down my face. She felt so alive. Looked so alive. “How you have grown.”
“Mama…”
“Your powers are strong Virgilio, but unstable,” she said. “You can barely control the choir.”
My mother began to fade.
“Mum…”
“I love you so much mio principe.”
She kissed my forehead one more time before she was gone.
We are the necromancers; we bring spirts to our world, to tell their secrets, and walk the line between life and death. Long ago, death gave us a gift. We are the messengers, the keepers, the bridge. Those who take our name, who have our blood will hear the song, and share our burden.
I looked to the alter where a book sat. It was the book my mother used to read to me. I opened it up and started to read.
Page after page. Rule after Rule. I spent Hours training and fighting. warriors in an assortment of armour would arise, and I would try to control them. I’d summon voices and bones and skeletons until it was second nature. Marcella fought me, and I was left cut and bruised.
I huffed out a breath of air and slumped to the floor. To bring life takes energy. I just had to make it second nature. The choir was dull, and the air was cool. I looked at the altar.
It was basic made of stone, with intricate carvings and wax dripping down the sides from black candles. I staggered to my feet and tried the final spell one last time.
I let my mind relax and the choir expand to the area around me, echoing through the corridors. I opened the space to any spirt who wanted to approach me.
There he stood. Hair silver and aqua eyes. He smiled, his face wrinkled by time and a life of happiness. His skin was filled with life, warm and colourful.
“Hello, young man,” said the man. His voice was kind and gruff and echoed throughout the halls. He reached out and ruffed my hair the way a father would. “You are quite powerful. I heard you music from Ascendium.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Oh, please a necromancer such as yourself, should call me Daedalus,” said the man.
“Like the inventor?” I asked.
“Yes, my namesake, though I am no inventor. Now, what shall I call you young man?”
“Virgil.”
He smiled, placing a hand on my shoulder. “A good name,” Daedalus smiled. “Virgil might I ask a favour of you?”
“Of course.”
“My granddaughter is suffering greatly. I believe you know her. I want you to tell her I love her, and that my death was not by her hands, but by the hands of a man whom her father trusts.”
“Who is your Grand Daughter?” I asked, but the man was fading. I was feeling weak. He barely had time to place something in my hand before he was gone again.
I collapsed and looked at the thing the old man pressed into my palm. It was a photograph, yellowed with age. There was the old man, and two children by his side. One was a young girl with long brown hair and a wide grin, the other was a young boy holding onto the man’s leg. I turned it over. Pandora and another name I couldn’t make out. It was faded and hard to make out.
“I need to get home,” I told the air. I reached out my arm and felt a pull before a spin rocketed into my hand and formed into a synch.I felt the tug of the mist at my heels; and let it wrap around me. I took a deep breath, and I was once more beyond the veil. I focused on finding Koa, an ongoing home. I took a step through an archway was stepped out Infront of the hospital. I felt lightheaded and dizzy, stumbling slightly as I walked up to the door.
The choir was a hushed whisper. I staggered into the whisper, wrapping the spine around my wrist making a bracelet of silver.
“Hiya, Virgil,” a nurse smiled. She had a thick Sothern accent. She had warm dark skin, her black hair was in victory rolls, under a white nurse’s cap, with the symbol of the red cross. Her dress was also white and ended above her knee.
“Hello Alice,” I smiled. The nurses and doctors at the hospital were all ghosts who stayed to help people. They were almost alive.
Alice looked up at me and gasped. “You look liked death warmed over young man.”
“Yeah… you wouldn’t know were Koa is by chance would you?”
“Room B13, you know the way.”
I smiled and thanked her walking down the hall.
“Get some rest young man!” she called after me.
Walking down the white halls, I saw ghosts of children ducking into empty rooms or playing games. Ghastly patients sitting on beds or in the day rooms. They seemed to make a path for me as I walked. They usually made a path for the living. Coming out of Room B13 a nurse smiled at me and held open the door.
He was lying in a bed, looking out the window. I knocked on the door frame and he looked over to me, and my heart skipped a beat when he smiled. A soft, kind smile. The kind where his eyes would crinkle just slightly. It was a slight difference from his normal smile. His hair was falling around his shoulders, and his coffee eyes were tired but still warm.
“Hey,” He smiled as I walked over to his bedside.
“Hey.”
There was an awkward silence. He grabbed my hands, and it was cold. Unusually so. Tears stung the back of my eyes. “You didn’t think to call me,” I whispered.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Well you did,” I laughed. “Not great when I see my best friend slipping beyond the veil, you know.”
“Yeah…” He paused. “Why are you covered in spiderwebs and dust?”
“Catacombs of Rome, now don’t you go changing the subject.”
“I’m not and you went to Rome? How?”
“Whole, thing. Don’t feel like taking about it to be honest.”
I was about to tell him about the photo Daedalus gave me when a knock came on the door. Pandora.
“Your back,” she said. “Good.”
She tossed me two orange containers. Gabapentin and Cyclobenzaprine. “Take your pills.” She handed me her water bottle, and I swallowed my pills. “Now—” I raised my hand cutting her off.
“Sorry, I have a message for you.”
She made a gesture for me to go on.
“From Daedalus.”
Her face went pale, and she looked like she was going to be sick.
“Tell me.”
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