By Rajiv Moté
From Goblins & Galaxies #0 Summer 2025
Solu’s light cast dappled shadows through the forest canopy on the cabin Davender had watched since morning from a hunting blind. Hexbreakers were trained to move against rogue necromancers during daylight, when their targets were at the height of their powers. But Davender was confident he could creep into the cabin at night, stuff the rogue into a sack, and turn him over to the Bone Tower without bloodshed or stealing his target’s magic.
The High Necromancer himself had ordered the man’s capture—or execution. Davender preferred capture. The target was an initiate of the Bone Tower, but newly-raised. He’d fled for reasons Davender hadn’t bothered to ask. The rogue was young, with delicate features and a slight build—a scholar, not a fighter.
Davender was trained in violence from childhood, even before the Tower had inserted the Blackstone needles into muscle and joint, making him a Hexbreaker. But he’d grown weary of it.
The rogue received visitors throughout the day—messengers and provisioners—and they didn’t stay long. No mages, which the High Necromancer had ordered would become targets too. The rogue had no allies. He was alone.
The sun sank to the treeline. Solu’s light was brighter outside the Hostur, necromancer country, but still dimmer than what Davender remembered from childhood. That was the way of memory: the past was bright, simpler.
A man rode down the forest trail to the cabin. The newcomer was a fighter, armed with bow and spear. He conferred with the rogue, then took up a post in front of the cabin. Just one guard, but the rogue likely believed a shout would wake him, and then his magic would settle any threat. But the Tower sent a Hexbreaker.
Alas, there would be bloodshed after all. Davender waited until deep night.
It took only an arrow. Davender felt no shame over killing from the shadows. A Hexbreaker’s pride was in completing the mission. Sometimes, that just meant clapping someone in irons. Sometimes, it meant burning a village. At least he could use the guard’s horse to carry the rogue back to the Tower.
The cabin door swung open without a creak. It paid to try the easy way. In his youth, Davender played the fool, kicking in unbarred doors. Unlike in tavern tales, they seldom yielded to the first blow.
Inside, the fire had died to embers. The pallet near it was piled with blankets. Davender’s sword was out, but he hoped a drubbing over the head with the pommel was the most he’d have to deliver.
“If you try necromancy, it won’t go well,” he announced. “Get up, fetch your cloak, and we’ll have you back in the Tower.”
“I don’t think I will,” said a voice from the shadows on the other side of the room.
A sharp pain pierced Davender’s calf. Something slithered from the covers, glowing pale green as marsh gas. Its shape was hazily serpentine, though its fangs felt solid enough. The Blackstone needles in his leg seemed to ignite at once. Davender dropped to his knees with a gasp.
“I wondered when they’d send a Hexbreaker,” the voice said. “That they’d send you means they understand the stakes.”
The venom in Davender’s leg was fire that the cold blaze of his Blackstone did little to cool. Two flavors of agony warred in his leg. Suddenly, a shape blackened the open doorway. A big man with a spear lurched into the cabin. In the embers’ glow, Davender saw his arrow sunk deep into the man’s eye.
“If you’re wondering how, I’ve conjured a wyrm to have ready every damn night since I left the Tower.” The rogue stepped into the emberlight. He was in rumpled bedclothes, his dark hair tousled as though abruptly roused from sleep. “As for this fellow, his death triggered my alarm. I animated him before your gifts could interfere.”
The dead guard raised his spear.
“I’m sorry they sent you, Davender. But I’m not going back.”
Davender managed to writhe away, the dead man’s spear taking him in the shoulder instead of the heart. A third agony seized him. The wyrm thrashed without releasing its bite, as if it too was in pain.
His fingers found the wyrm, and squeezed. After all these years, Davender no longer noticed his Blackrock needles when he moved. They were truly a part of him. The wyrm, biting him, had impaled itself on one. If Davender pressed hard enough…
The Blackstone in his palm ground against bone until finally, the other side broke skin and pierced the wyrm’s throat. Something in the warring agonies shifted, and the thing’s glow faded. It dissolved like mist.
Wyrms were creatures of the Shadowlands, where necromancers drew their magic by sacrificing Solu’s light. They were vulnerable to substances from that strange realm. Like Davender’s skeleton of Blackstone thorns.
“Interesting,” the rogue necromancer said.
The dead guard raised its spear once more. Davender’s hand still held his blade, and he hacked the tendons that connected the walking corpse’s calves to its heels. It toppled. Rising to one knee, Davender wrenched away the spear and then wildly, blindly, flung it at the rogue who somehow knew his name. He didn’t hear it clatter to the ground, so he assumed it connected, just before he blacked out.
*~*~*
Davender opened his eyes to Solu’s light streaming into the open doorway. The guard’s corpse was dead again. The embers in the fireplace were ash. The rogue sat with his back against the wall, a spear through his belly.
“You were always lucky,” the rogue wheezed.
“You know me,” Davender said. “How?”
“You’re famous in the Tower. We all watched you train. The girls. The boys. You were…” The rogue grimaced. “Impressive.”
Davender’s vision blurred and refocused. His limbs were lead, but the agony of the wyrm’s venom had been countered by his Blackstone, leaving the more mundane pain of the spear-wound in his shoulder. The rogue across the room—Kamar was the name on the assignment—was certainly bleeding out. “You should have let me take you to the Tower. Your magic won’t work around me, you know.”
Necromancy couldn’t heal, anyway. Well, it would help Davender when his Blackstone stole it to energize his body, but there was no magic to save the rogue’s life.
Kamar wheezed again, or maybe laughed. “Oh, I have another trick. It’s why the Tower wants me dead. If you cared to ask.” A look of concentration came over Kamar’s face, but then it broke, and he sighed. “Did you ask?”
“What’s to ask?” He did recognize the rogue, now that he thought about it. A quiet youth, bookish, who liked to watch the Hexbreakers train, as so many young necromancers did. He’d never spoken a word to him.
“They train you to be true believers,” Kamar said. “They have to. You’re as dangerous to them as you are to…” Kamar tried to shift his weight, but winced in pain. “Still. You should know why you’re killing someone.”
“I didn’t want to kill you. I’d sooner have taken you back to the Bone Tower. You had a choice. They all get a choice.”
“I had no choice. Do you want to know my secret, Davender?” Solu’s light slanted through the window, illuminating Kamar’s face.
Davender tested his limbs. He might be able to crawl. Of course, now that Kamar had the sunlight on him, he would probably shunt the light through the Shadow Door and pull at the eldritch energies from the Shadowlands. Necromancy. It would fail. Anything Kamar tried to pull from the Shadowlands would be caught in the bramble of his Blackstone and energize Davender instead. Kamar would know that.
The rogue had that look that necromancers got when they conjured great works. Davender could sometimes feel the energies moving, and he thought he did now, but his Blackstone wasn’t snagging anything out of the Shadowlands. The rogue began to pull at the spear in his belly, and astonishingly, the bleeding slowed. How had he bypassed the Blackstone? And healed? But the man’s face went slack, and the spear remained in his gut.
“You tried something,” Davender said. “You worked around my Blackstone. Is that your secret?”
“I discovered… a new magic. Or an old one. Older than the Shadow Door. But there’s an irony. An awful, hilarious irony.”
Davender wondered what the man considered “hilarious,” with a spear stuck in him.
“You said you didn’t want to kill me,” Kamar said. “Did you mean it?”
“You’re dead already, friend.”
“Not… yet. But if I heal your shoulder, will you do the same for me?”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“We won’t be using necromancy. Swear you’ll heal me. If I show you how.”
The dying rogue was clearly addled. “I’ll do what I can.”
“I need more sunlight on me.”
“You move, and you’re dead.”
Kamar coughed, or maybe laughed. His teeth were red with his own blood, coming up from inside. “You’ll have to take off my clothes, Davender.”
Davender scowled.
“I need as much sun on my skin as possible.”
Davender crawled over, keeping his shoulder still, and cut the man’s shirt from him, taking care not to disturb the spear in his guts. The wound was as bad as he’d ever seen, and certainly mortal. “You’re tougher than you look.”
Kamar’s breathing slowed, deep and deliberate. Davender waited for his Blackstone to flare cold with captured Shadowland energies. Davender didn’t put any stock in this “new magic.” Necromancers wielded Shadowland energy. Hexbreakers took that energy. That’s all there—
Something was happening. Not in his Blackstone, but in the wound in his shoulder. Instead of a chill, he felt unexpected heat. His flesh… moved. It was painful in the way muscles become sore after training. But the wound was knitting itself together.
“My turn,” Kamar said. His voice seemed at the edge of panic, as well it might be. Davender had no idea what the man had done, much less what he had to do. He was no necromancer. Davender said so.
“Never mind that. Strip, all the way, and go outside. Get the sun on your skin. Really feel it, the warmth. Solu’s light. Draw it into your body.”
Davender gave him a flat stare.
“I’m in no state to enjoy the show, you oaf. Do it. You swore.”
Davender had done no such thing, but he shrugged out of his coat, and pulled his shirt over his head. There was no pain from his shoulder.
“The Tower truly does torture you Hexbreakers,” Kamar said. Davender knew what he looked like under his clothing. Hundreds of Blackstone needles pierced him. They could be seen just under his skin. It was a gruesome sight. Even the Khalits, who made the needles, never used more than a few. But the necromancers took Khalit inventions to levels the Khalits never dared.
Davender stalked out the door, into the wan light of the sun. “What now?”
“Soak in Solu’s gift,” Kamar said.
He remembered golden sunlight on summer days in his childhood, hot enough to burn skin too long exposed. Davender pulled on that memory as much as the sunlight itself. Whatever Kamar wanted him to do had to happen now.
“The warmth you’re holding? Put it into me. Your hands on my wound.”
“I’m not a—”
“Try!”
He could humor the dead man. Life after life taken in the name of the Bone Tower, and for what? He laid his hands around where the spear entered the man’s gut.
“Imagine a flow,” Kamar rasped. “Warmth, from you to me.”
Kamar’s blood on Davender’s hands had become sticky and cool.
“Imagine I was your lover,” Kamar said. “Just imagine. You don’t want me to die. You’re lending me life…”
Davender winced. “Stop talking,” he growled. He didn’t want the man to die. He didn’t want anyone else to die by his hand.
“Yes… Like that!”
The man was delirious. But he began to feel warmth in the wound. Maybe the last of his lifeblood.
“Yes, a circuit… Push the warmth back.” The man’s hand wrapped around the spear shaft. “Focus on the flow, Davender. From you, to me, to you. Keep it cycling…”
The cabin seemed to brighten. Suddenly Kamar wrenched the spear out of his gut, and Davender felt the man’s hot lifeblood gush onto his hands. “You idiot!” Davender cried, and pushed against the life spilling out of the wound.
The spear clattered to the floor. A crazed grin exposed both rows of Kamar’s blooded teeth. “We’ll make a mage of you yet.”
Davender’s hands were drenched in blood. But the belly beneath them rose and fell in slow, deep breaths. Not shallow, dying gasps. Davender lifted his hands tentatively, ready to push them back if the blood again gushed forth. It didn’t. He looked at Kamar’s belly. There was no wound.
“How did you do that?” Davender had felt nothing in his Blackstone.
“That was your work, not mine.” Kamar barked a laugh—a laugh, not a wheeze. He reached for Davender to help him to his feet.
Davender obliged. There was no pain where he’d taken the spear, nor in his bitten leg. It was like all the blood in the room belonged to someone else. He glanced at the guard lying in the doorway, with the arrow through his eye. Well, some of it did.
“Our work, anyway. I think that’s the trick of it. It needs to be collaborative. Or perhaps… selfless.” Kamar shrugged as if to apologize for such a notion.
“The trick of what? I’m no mage.”
“Everyone’s a mage. That’s what the Bone Tower doesn’t want people to know. That’s why they sent you to kill me.”
“I was to bring you in.”
“The High Necromancer would kill me.”
“I’m no mage,” Devender insisted. “I’ve… tried. My Blackstone intercepts what necromancers exchange through the Shadow Door. But I can’t push anything through the Door myself.”
“Interesting,” Kamar said, his dark eyes becoming thoughtful. “I wonder if you tried pushing it through your…” He shook his head. “Never mind. Forget the Door. This is new magic. No exchanging energy with the Shadowlands. We exchange with… each other. With the world. It makes a circuit. Instead of using up the energy, it gets amplified—”
“You can explain it to the High Necromancer.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? Didn’t you see what we did? This changes everything!”
“Not for me. They made me for a job. I’m going to do it.”
“They’ll kill us, Davender,” Kamar said. “You’re an accomplice!”
That gave Davender pause. The Blackstone in his body, even more than his training, was an investment the Bone Tower had made that they would not easily waste.
“I doubt that. Get cleaned up. I intend to get some distance before nightfall.”
*~*~*
The sun was at its zenith by the time they’d washed the blood from their bodies and clothes, mounted, and joined the road leading back toward the Bone Tower. Kamar’s horse—formerly the guard’s—had its reins tied to Davender’s saddle.
“You didn’t choose this life, Davender,” he said. “Not at the age they begin training Hexbreakers. I know removing all that Blackrock would kill you. They made it so you could never choose anything else.”
“You know a lot, it seems.”
“I was a promising young acolyte,” he said, ignoring the sarcasm. “But I learned more than they were willing to teach, and now they’ll kill us unless we—”
“They won’t kill us. The Bone Tower gives order and justice to the realm. Nations fall in line instead of march to war because of the necromancers. Magic is regulated because when it wasn’t, there was no order, no justice. You know this.”
“I know what they’ve taught us. I also know that there are gaps in their lessons. Did you know that they’ve burned libraries—”
“There’s always a whispered story, a hidden plot. I’ve heard them all, from every rogue I’ve ever taken. Do you know what they have in common? They’re spoken by those who crave more power than they have. Who think they should be in charge. You want to found a rival school of—what?—love magic?”
“It does need a name. Something to rally around. Some kind of light magic, that conserves instead of sacrifices Solu’s gift. Life magic, instead of necromancy. Why not love magic, that can’t be used selfishly? That heals—”
Davender scoffed. “Beg the High Necromancer’s forgiveness. Let the Tower control this new magic. They might even put you in charge of it. Why wouldn’t they want this power in their arsenal?”
“I think they already know. They can’t control it, so they want to stamp it out. How many ‘rogue mages’ have you killed? Or brought in, to be killed? Scores? Hundreds? Have you ever been sent to burn entire villages, where not a single person tried to use necromancy?” Kamar didn’t wait for an answer. He already knew. “Have you never wondered why?”
Davender didn’t answer. When he became more proficient at capturing without killing, most of the rogues went to trial. Most of those submitted to the Tower and went on to do great works. Merciful justice was aspirational. Those who administered it needed skill and strength, to then show mercy. These young rebels leaped on personal failures as proof that the entire structure of power was corrupt. And they never stopped talking.
“Use your new power,” Davender said. “Use it to knock me out, throw me from my horse. Then run fast, so I can tell truly that I pursued. Find allies. Mount your rebellion. Hopefully it will come when I’m retired on a farm far away, and won’t have to deal with the fallout that you haven’t thought through.” Davender knew there would be no retirement for him. The necromancers could energize him through his Blackstone until he keeled over dead—and even after that.
“You know love magic doesn’t work that way,” Kamar said. “But there’s another way out. If you have the courage.”
Davender shook his head. The rogue prattled on. They were all alike, the rogues: heads filled with so many ideas. But no wisdom.
*~*~*
By their third day of riding, the stretch of road was cold and empty. Kamar hadn’t tried to escape. He’d focused instead on badgering Davender, from every angle, into joining his hopeless cause. As well he might. If you were pitting yourself against necromancers, a Hexbreaker was a powerful weapon.
“Would you be free of the Blackstone?” Kamar asked.
“Impossible.”
“It’s a leash as much as a weapon. They’ll never let you go.”
“As you said, it can’t be removed.”
“Not with necromancy. But we have a new tool, you and I.” Kamar grinned. “Take off your clothes.”
“Give up, rogue.” Hexbreakers weren’t tempted by fleshy pleasures. Davender had tried to take a lover in his youth, another Hexbreaker. He’d gazed at her body, and she at his, finding beauty in their grotesquely pierced flesh as only Hexbreakers could. But to intimate touch, the Blackstone needles brought more pain than pleasure. Besides, nothing compared to being suffused with Shadowland energy.
Kamar’s face became serious, and his voice took on an intensity that surprised Davender. “I can’t hurt you, trying this. You should know what the Tower actually has over you. Don’t be held by threats we can overcome.”
Davender was unconvinced. He did not voice agreement. Yet he found himself reining their mounts off the road. They dismounted and sat facing one another in the wild grass.
“Where would you like me to start?” Kamar’s voice was almost shy.
Davender unlaced his shirt to bare his chest, crisscrossed with scars and riddled with black punctures.
“There’s a Blackstone spike in my heart,” Davender said.
Kamar nodded slowly. Davender expected a quip, but none came. Instead, Kamar put his fingertips over Davender’s heart and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply.
Warmth spread through Davender’s chest. Only the Blackstone remained cold. Then came pain as his punctured heart tried to knit itself together, pushing out the spike.
“Give it back,” Kamar whispered.
Davender’s hand closed on Kamar’s wrist. He pushed the warmth back to the man. A circuit, Kamar had called it. He lost track of time as pain and heat cycled between them.
The Blackstone broke the skin of his chest, emerging.
Sweat soaked Davender. His breaths came ragged. Then, something fell into his lap. He released Kamar’s wrist to touch the space over his heart. The skin was unbroken.
Kamar picked up the Blackstone spike, held it up between them, and then pressed it into Davender’s hand.
“You can be free of them. You can right the wrongs they made you do.”
*~*~*
They made no attempt to extract more Blackstone. Kamar had made his point, and Davender needed to think. They spoke little as they continued on the road. Kamar had done something impossible. What it would cost, Davender couldn’t guess. He’d never had reason to imagine what he could be if not a Hexbreaker.
At night he laid his hand over his own heart, feeling it beat.
The next day, the road entered the Commons, the lands that no ruler had yet incorporated. It was no more or less dangerous than any particular kings- or queensroad. The Commons were a place of flyspeck villages and subsistence farming. Mostly, those who chose to live here tried to live in peace, beneath the notice of those who would use violence to take what little they had.
Davender would’ve ignored the sad little rows of cabbages had Kamar not sat bolt upright in his saddle, concentrating on something above the gentle, cultivated hill that ran alongside the road.
“Do you feel it?” he asked excitedly. “The flow?”
The wan sun felt unusually warm, but it could have just been the pace of their ride. Davender relented to Kamar’s pleas to investigate. He touched the belt pouch that held the spike that had once pierced his heart. He owed Kamar that much.
Over the hill were more cultivated rows—many more—and it had the undisguised air of prosperity. Workers, stripped to their loincloths, walked among the crops, running their hands over the stalks and leaves.
“There,” Kamar said. “They’re all in a circuit. The workers, the plants. How did I never notice this?”
Davender shook his head. Whatever it was Kamar was so excited about was either in his imagination, or something only mages could sense. But did that make all these laborers mages? Or was Kamar simply mad?
“It must be this way everywhere,” Kamar said, his words and mind racing. “This is how they grow, even with Solu losing his light. Do they even know they’re using magic? They have to… Or maybe it’s so steeped in their traditions they don’t even… But any necromancer would know. They must sanction this. But then…”
Kamar looked desperately across the rows, muttering and ranting, asking half-formed questions of nobody until a look of horror came over his face. “These people are in terrible danger.”
“What do you mean?”
“These are the Free Commons. No rulers. No compacts with the Bone Tower. This is more than subsistence farming. These people are using magic for commerce. It’s unauthorized.”
Davender stared at him blankly.
“These are the farms the Bone Tower sends you to burn.”
It was true. All the eradication missions were in the Free Commons. Burn the farms. Round up all the farmers, all the workers, all the families. And kill them. Never once in these missions had he felt the icy flare in his Blackstone. He’d thought they didn’t try to use magic against him, knowing what he was. But no, they were just farmers. Using some sort of folk magic to grow crops under the dying sun. Davender felt sick.
“If these are your rebels,” Davender said, “you won’t survive. Warn them, if you want. But stand with them, and you’ll die.”
“I’m a dead man anyway,” Kamar said. “I could die on my knees, before the High Necromancer, or on my feet, protecting people whose only crime was using their birthright.”
“You can’t protect them.”
“But you can. You have the skills. And the power.”
“Not against an eradication squad.” Squads were led by Hexbreakers but made up of soldiers. Too many to handle alone.
“I’ve seen what you can do when energized. You said you’re tired of killing for others. But you’ll have to kill. Where do you choose to swing your sword?”
“Your neck, if we don’t leave right now.”
Kamar had the temerity to grin his madman’s grin. “You wouldn’t do that, Davender. I know you want something different. You just don’t believe there’s a way. Not yet. But you’ll see.”
“We’re going back to the road. Whether you’re slung over the saddle is up to you.”
A cloud of dust on the road ahead spoke of many riders. Davender’s hand went to his sword hilt. He pulled it away, too late. Kamar noticed.
“It’s a kill squad, isn’t it? They’ve come for the farmers.”
Davender nodded.
“Time to choose, Davender. I can free you of the Tower, given time. But those people back on that farm… They’ll die today if you don’t do what’s right.”
What Kamar was suggesting was madness. Severing his own leash. Running away with this besotted young rogue, fleeing from village to village, preaching heresies, fomenting rebellion, maybe even finding a ruler tired of bending knee to the Bone Tower. Becoming a mage in his own right, with a power the High Necromancer wanted nobody to have. Davender saw that path in his imagination, and it was ridiculous. Something out of a tavern tale. No, out of a children’s story. Naive fantasy.
“If I exchange through the Shadow Door now, will it empower the other Hexbreaker too?”
“Not at this distance. Not yet.”
“Then it’s time to be a hero, Davender.”
The sun seemed to dim. Every Blackstone needle in Davender’s body went ice-cold. It should have been excruciating. But power filled his body in a rapture that crowded all pain from his mind.
His eyes sharpened so he could see every rider. The Hexbreaker at the fore was a woman he knew, Kaliya, a skilled fighter. He’d trained her himself. Eight ordinary soldiers rode behind her. If she’d chosen them, they’d be tough and hardy.
But with the amount of power in him now, every muscle felt engorged. Even his skin felt denser. He could crumple armor with a punch. He felt light enough to leap and close the distance to the squad. Everything around him seemed to slow as the power accelerated him.
Kamar’s mouth opened. “Let’s save th—”
A punch, in his current state, could have knocked Kamar’s head off. Davender’s tap still flung the man off his horse. He rolled in the dirt and lay still. Davender watched for three slow heartbeats until he saw the man’s chest rise and fall. Davender moved, still accelerated by the captured necromancy. The man-sized burlap sack came out of his saddlebag. A length of rope. He slung the rogue over the saddle of the second horse, as he should have from the beginning, and rode toward the squad.
“Good hunting, Davender!” Kaliya called when she was close enough to recognize him. “You got your rogue?”
“No fuss, Kaliya. Where are you headed? Nothing back there but open road.”
“Nest of rogues,” she answered. “We could use your help, since your business is wrapped. You’ve completed more of these than the next three Hexbreakers together.”
Davender shook his head. “The High Necromancer wants this one home. Went astray, but he’s eager to get back into the Tower’s good graces.”
Kaliya raised an eyebrow. “In a sack?”
Davender shrugged. “He’s not much of a rider.”
Kaliya threw her head back and laughed. She turned to her soldiers. “This one taught me everything I know,” she said. “But every time I see him, I learn something new!” She saluted him with more formality than was called for. “Wish me good hunting, Davender.”
Davender forced the words out. “Good hunting, Kaliya.”
He kept Kamar in the sack almost to the border of the Hostur, necromancer country, brooding in the road’s deathly quiet.
*~*~*
Kamar was conscious when Davender freed him from the sack. Nonetheless, Davender took the man’s head between his hands and pushed the warmth he’d absorbed during the ride into him. After a moment, he felt the backflow, and he let the warmth cycle between them, building. That would do for the goose egg he’d raised on Kamar’s skull. He may have imagined it, but the gloom of the skies above the Hoster lessened a fraction.
Kamar glared at him with his big, dark eyes.
“I’m not a child, and neither are you,” Davender said. “Beg the High Necromancer for mercy and tell him you realized you were wrong. Tell him whatever will keep you alive. Then get to work on a real plan. You won’t accomplish anything out there, on the run, chased by Hexbreakers. You won’t survive. You can’t change anything by dying.”
“You could have helped me survive,” Kamar said. “And those farmers. But instead, you chose to kill us all.”
“Be smart, Kamar. This is a journey, not a sprint. I’m… sympathetic.” He touched his heart. “But this isn’t the time to act.”
“The mighty Hexbreaker is afraid. It will never be time to act, because you still think they have more over you than you have over them.”
“They have a Tower. An army. A nation. They have alliances with every other nation. One rogue necromancer, even with a rogue Hexbreaker, can’t change that.”
“‘One’ never becomes ‘many’ if the one never begins.”
“Then begin. But be smart.”
“They’re going to kill me, Davender.”
“They won’t. I promise.”
*~*~*
Traitor’s Court was an open amphitheater outside the Bone Tower, circled by rows of stone benches. As the one who had brought in the rogue for judgment, Davender had a place at trial. But as a Hexbreaker, he had to stand in the furthest ring, so his Blackstone enhancements wouldn’t steal the magic of the necromancer tribunal. That wasn’t unusual. But the only ones present today were the three highest ranking Necromancers in the Bone Tower, Kamar the accused, and Davender. That was odd. Trials were public. Davender had planned on a crowd.
He’d spent the ride back to the Tower instructing Kamar how to make granting mercy appear, to the citizens of the Hostur, an act of grand benevolence. The High Necromancer would be eager to make that gesture—and accept Kamar’s offer of the new magic. But a private trial changed that.
And Davender was complicit. Kamar might think to buy himself leniency by accusing him. Maybe he should.
In a voice suited to addressing crowds, the High Necromancer spoke the charges: the practice of “heretical” magic. Not merely “unsanctioned.” That was unexpected. It was a word that didn’t allow forgiveness.
Light magic. Life magic. Love magic, the dark-eyed rogue said, with his lopsided grin, when they laid hands on each other’s bodies to heal—after nearly killing each other. This was Kamar’s so-called heresy. And his own.
Kamar, on his knees in the middle of the stage, hands bound, responded to the charges with words Davender couldn’t clearly hear. He looked defiant. That was bad. He’d specifically told Kamar not to be defiant. And if Kamar told them what they’d done together, the necromancers would…
What could they do to him? Hexbreakers were immune to necromancy. Hexbreakers were trained from childhood to serve the necromancers, to hunt rogues. Until Kamar pointed it out, it’d never occurred to Davender that he was the deadliest weapon against both.
Don’t throw your life away. Davender wasn’t sure if the thought was for Kamar, or himself. Kamar’s testimony continued, and there was nothing in the posture of the necromancers to suggest it had swayed them.
“The sentence…” the High Necromancer finally intoned. The sun was always weak in the Hostur, so near the Shadow Door, but Solu’s light died for an instant. Davender felt eldritch energy flood through the Door. Even at this distance, some of it was caught by his Blackstone net, the needles burning with icy fire, charging his muscles and senses. He could now make out every detail on the Traitor’s Court stage, the defiant thrust of Kamar’s chin as he stared up from his knees. His backward glance at Davender. The terror in his eyes, despite the defiance.
Energized, Davender could probably reach the stage in a leap. He bore no weapons but could disable the Necromancers in a blur. He could seize Kamar and go… where? Anywhere. Away. Kamar said Davender thought too much before acting, that there would be no time to hesitate when the moment arrived—
“…is death.” The three necromancers spread their arms.
Davender’s muscles clenched. He crouched to leap.
A globe of green witchlight enveloped Kamar. Davender’s enhanced vision saw the life leech out of the young man’s flesh. He crumpled. Collapsed.
Kamar’s form crumbled into dust.
Davender was frozen where he crouched. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It made no sense. What was the point of suppressing a power that healed and preserved, while necromancy diminished Solu’s light year by year? Why destroy a man who could bring them something better?
From the stage, the High Necromancer spoke to Davender in his theatrical voice. “You’ve served the Tower well by bringing this heretic to justice, Hexbreaker. Your name and your service will be honored throughout the Bone Tower.” With that, the tribunal left the Court.
A breeze stirred what remained of Kamar.
Davender bounded down to the stage and tried to shield the dust from the wind. As Kamar taught him, he tried to feel Solu’s wan light on his skin, to pull it into himself. Kamar encouraged him to get undressed for this. A laugh caught in Davender’s throat and became a sob.
As he absorbed the miniscule warmth, he pushed it into the dust. But the new magic only worked collaboratively, life supporting life. No life remained here. Davender’s hesitation had seen to that.
The necromancers had seen to that.
They took the light from the world. They took and took, and murdered any who would try to restore light, or life, or love.
Davender’s hand went to his pouch, and he removed the Blackstone spike Kamar had removed from his heart. The black metal, slimmer than a finger in width, was dull in the waning sun. Its purpose was to take as well. To take power. His purpose was to take power. The power of the necromancers. He’d been a fool not to see it.
A breeze picked up, carrying away the bits of Kamar and his would-be rebellion, a mote at a time. The spike remained heavy in Davender’s hand.
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Rajiv Moté is a writer and software professional living in Chicago with his wife, daughter, and a tiny dog. His stories appear in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Reckoning Magazine, and other publications. His stories are linked from his blog at https://rajivmote.wordpress.com/published/ and he can be found on BlueSky at @rajivmote.bsky.social.
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