Tale of Necromancer - dark fantasy/horror story
This is a dark fantasy/horror story of a man whose existential reflections led him from a simple craftsman to a dark power.
Here is is the text version: https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/tale-of-the-necromancer/ Here is the audio version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCdlph835qc
And here is the fragment.
Today I’m going to tell you about a necromancer… Not just any necromancer, but the Necromancer… The one who was the first to make a pact with Death, who was the first to learn its dark secrets, who coined the creed of the ancient brotherhood of graveyard sorcerers….
But let’s start at the beginning. Centuries ago… No, more than centuries, thousands of years ago. It’s hard to say how long ago, because there are no chronicles so old as to date back to that time… In some country in the East; the name of that land, the name of the people who inhabited it, the language that people spoke, the names of the cities they inhabited. All this is lost in the darkness of oblivion….So, as I say, thousands of years ago, in some country in the East, there lived a man. An ordinary craftsman. He made pots out of clay. He couldn’t be called rich, but he certainly wasn’t poor. Well, he earned enough to provide a decent living for himself, his wife and two sons. And he could even afford small pleasures from time to time, such as a jug of wine for dinner or a small trinket for his beloved….
But, although his wife was beautiful and diligent, and his sons were healthy and diligent too, this man was deeply unhappy. What was the reason for this?… His profession.
First of all, when a man sits at the potter’s wheel performing monotonous and familiar motions by heart, he often does so in passing, while his mind is sunk in contemplation. Secondly, the potter’s life and work provided him with plenty of material for musings that were not very cheerful.
But before I go any further, you should know something : the people among whom the man lived have always been afraid of wraiths( the cursed corpses that walk the earth to harass the living). Ironically, the people feared the undead at a time when there was still no necromancer who could summon them from beyond the grave…. Therefore, they did not bury the corpse as we do today. Each body went to a pyre made of dry wood, which the priests set on fire. The pyre burned until all that was left of the deceased was ash, at which time the assembled family praised the merits of the deceased and raised a lament. The conflagration ritual was meant to ensure that the dead would not take revenge on the living, and the annihilation of the body was meant to prevent them from doing so, should the rite itself not be enough. When the fire was extinguished, the priests would collect the ashes and pour them into a clay urn, which was then buried in the ground.
We should remember that the future Necromancer was engaged in the processing of clay. But, as you already know, his creations were not only used to store wine, beer, water or milk… They were also a resting place for the dead members of his community. So, the Necromancer was not only a simple potter, but also a bit of a mortician. Every time someone died, the family of the unfortunate person would come to the potter’s workshop to order a new vessel in which the ashes would be placed. Therefore, the craftsman was aware of every death occurring in the area.
At first, this man felt a certain pride in the important role he played in society. After all, he ensured the souls of the dead a peaceful rest, and guarded the boundary between the world of the living and the hereafter… He had a stake in this as much as the priests. After all, they knew what prayers to say during a funeral, but they themselves could not create urns that were at least as important as the prayers they offered.
It was not uncommon for a potter to go to a funeral to watch what was left of the deceased’s mortal shell go into an urn. A person’s body, his entire earthly life, was finally housed in the vessel that his hands had made….Yes, at first this reflection was a cause of pride for the craftsman. He was young and foolish at the time. But over time, the thought that everyone, sooner or later, would become just a pile of ashes enclosed in an urn buried in the ground, became a cause of anxiety and bitterness for him.
Everyone was dying. Everyone. There was no turning back. This thought did not leave the future Necromancer day and night. As he caressed his wife’s hair and skin, he couldn’t relish it – he kept thinking about how her beauty would one day begin to fade as the inexorable old age arrived, until it would disappear completely when the inevitable death came. Looking at his sons, full of joy of life and strength, he couldn’t be proud of them ; all the time thinking about the fact that their youth was merely a postponement of judgment. While molding another urn, he couldn’t rejoice in his future earnings. He kept thinking about the fact that one day someone would pour his and his loved ones’ ashes into such a vessel. When he went to bed, he thought about how sleep was similar to death. When he woke up in the morning, he thought about how pointless it was to get out of bed ;after all, everything he had done was just a plaything in the face of what had to come. He might as well lie there and wait to die.
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