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“Culturally, Arindell is a very unique city. Hospitality and kinship with one’s neighbors is regarded over personal pastimes. Dinner parties are popular, and the local community center is the hub of social activities.”
-New Arindell, its Life, and its People.
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Chapter 11:
Leave the Scar
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#11.1 – Saturday, the 14th day of the 9th month…
“Ow,” Scarlet remarked.
“Hold still!” Hezikah commanded.
Scarlet sat on the kitchen counter while Hezikah probed her arm with medical-like delicacy. She felt excruciating pain in the brief minutes it took to find an unlocked door. Being inside and letting someone who presumably knew what he was doing* look at it made her feel better. Her wrist ached and had a strange bulge on the side she didn’t remember seeing before. But Scarlet was more interested in Hezikah’s hands than her own.
As someone not often on the receiving end of physical contact, Scarlet felt her skin tingle at his hands on her. They were rough, calloused from his daily activities, but still Scarlet found herself quite taken with the sight of them.
“You’ve been struck before,” Hezikah’s voice sounded grave.
“Was it the bandages that tipped ya off?” Scarlet tilted her head, trying to bring the bloody gauze out of Hezikah’s eyeline. She should have changed the dressing, but didn’t like to see the ugly cut underneath.
“By the same children?”
Scarlet shook her head.
“Your wrist is dislocated,” Hezikah said. “I’m going to have to return the bone to its proper position.”
“Can’t ya just fix it with magic or something?” Scarlet closed her eyes and fought through the pain. With his face so close to hers she could smell the sweet aroma coming from his headwear. He kept a cone of wax laced with scented oil in his headdress, which melted over the course of the day and released a pleasing scent.
“Necromancy has no healing capacity,” Hezikah explained. “Some of our cult learn what you could call ‘regular’ magic to perform such acts, but most of us rely on mundane methods. This will hurt a lot.”
“Well if it’s gonna hurt, don’t do it!” Scarlet said.
Hezikah placed his free hand on the side of Scarlet’s face and looked deeply into her eyes. It was by no means a longing, romantic look. His gaze came across hard, serious. Not cruel, just firm.
“Quiet your mind,” he instructed her. “Think of a memory that is of great importance to you. Let it be a calming place. Separate your mind from the pain, and you will feel little.”
As he spoke to her, his hands twisted, and Scarlet heard a sickening pop.
Biting her tongue to keep from screaming, Scarlet forced herself to think of the memory the dragon had given her. Through the pain she could not resolve the room or the faces, only the feelings that came with it. The strong, underlying sensation of… simply being a dragon. Scarlet found the deep, low breath cycles to be the most amazing. A dragon of the size that Fumer had been in this memory would take a full two minutes to fill its lungs; an entire inhale and exhale cycle might last as much as five.
This worked pretty well for dragons, but was not the sort of thing a human should attempt to emulate.
Long story short, Scarlet blacked out.
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* #11.2 (Saturday, 14/9) *
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Scarlet awoke to find herself laid out on the couch in the living room, a clean bandage on her head and an improvised splint on her wrist. Undead milled about the house, doing various chores, while Hezikah sat peacefully in a chair.
“You gave me quite a scare, there,” he told Scarlet. “You fainted and nearly fell off the counter.”
“Did you pick me up and carry me?” Scarlet asked, unsure if she was dizzy from the head wound or his intoxicating aroma.
Before Hezikah could answer, the front door opened and Scarlet’s father came in.
“Scarlet, Shirtless Boy,” he said cordially, handing his hat and briefcase to a nearby zombie as if he did this sort of thing every day. He proceeded into the kitchen and poured a glass of water, then returned to the living room and settled into his recliner. “Scarlet, would you care to introduce me to your new friend?”
“This is Hezikah,” Scarlet said. “He’s a Necromancer.”
Roy took his slippers from the zombie offering them and handed back his shoes. “A Necromancer, you say?”
The door opened again and Ann walked in, startled for a moment by all the bandage-wrapped creatures, but still let one of them take her hat and purse.
“Scarlet?” she asked.
“Welcome to my army of the damned!” Scarlet threw up her hands heroically. “…although Necromancers do not believe in hell…”
“I do apologize for the crowd, Mrs. Jusenkyou,” Hezikah said. “It seemed there was to be a heavy dewfall, so I had to bring them inside. They are prepared for outside work, but we try whenever possible to keep them dry.”
Ann, who had been nodding along as Hezikah spoke, turned her attention back to Scarlet. “Little bird, would you mind explaining?”
“Can Hezikah stay for dinner?” Scarlet asked.
“If I am to stay much later, I will need to contact the temple and ask to have a vehicle sent,” Hezikah said. “There is a city ordinance which bans the undead from riding public transit after sunset.”
“How do you pay for them?” Roy asked. “Do they get a children’s fare?”
“As it happens, in N.D. two-ninety-three, we successfully lobbied the transit authority to have them classified as baggage,” Hezikah explained. “They are allowed to ride for free, but must be accompanied by a living Necromancer. Unfortunately, that same year the undead were also banned from the cinema, when it was revealed that multiple Necromancers could see through a single undead’s eyes. From what I recall, quite a number of our youths were sending adult zombies into town to attend R-rated films.”
“So… no undead on the train alone or after dark, and no zombies at all at the movie theater?” Roy questioned.
“The Council of Litches remains very upset about both points,” Hezikah replied.
“I can imagine,” Roy said.
“Mr. Hezikah?” Ann interrupted.
“It is just ‘Hezikah’,” Hezikah explained. “I abandoned my familial name as well as any form of title when I began a strict regime of asceticism two years ago. In another eight I will complete the ritual and ascend to the priesthood, at the age of thirty.”
“O-ok, Hezikah,” Ann’s eyebrows squeezed together and drew down. “Well, we were planning to have pot roast and beans for dinner, is that ok?”
“Many of my people in the past have confined themselves to strict dietary regimes, I myself do not conform to any,” Hezikah replied. “In short, that sounds lovely.”
“Splendid, the more the merrier,” Roy clapped. “Scarlet, we have another guest on the way; would you please go and get cleaned up and put on something nice?”
Scarlet nodded and raced off through the kitchen in the direction of her room, but her mother caught her in the hallway and placed a hand on her arm to stop her. “Scarlet, at what point did you think that bringing home a young man, not to mention several of the undead, was appropriate? And when we weren’t even home?”
Scarlet huffed, yanking her arm free. “I needed help in the yard! And he gets community service hours for this. I didn’t even have to pay him.”
Ann’s eyes narrowed but her face softened. “It’s normal at your age to be interested in boys, but there are certain boys it would be… inappropriate to pursue.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Scarlet scowled, turning to head toward her room again. She paused and looked back at her mother. “Wait a sec, am I not allowed to date him because he’s too old? Or is it because his genetic makeup gives him the magic to command armies of the returned dead? Cuz if it’s the second one, that’s racist!”
Ann pinched the bridge of her nose. “Just… go… get changed,” she growled.
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* #11.3 (Saturday, 14/9) *
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Scarlet returned to the living room just in time for the guests to arrive. Her parents threw dinner parties just slightly less often than they changed their sheets, so Scarlet was no stranger to entertaining. She quite liked it, her parents were always excited to trot her out and impress the guests.
Her parents drilled the concept of “manners” so thoroughly into her that she could comport herself quite eloquently. This made up a large part of her mystique, since she never achieved such feats with just the three of them.
The guests for the evening were apparently old friends of Roy(in point of fact, Scarlet suspected everyone everywhere in all of the known worlds had very likely been friends with Roy Jusenkyou at some point. Possibly in alphabetical order). Daniel Hramond and his wife Litisha, whom Roy swore Scarlet already knew when he introduced them.
“And this must be the brilliant young Antiquarian I’ve heard so much about!” Daniel announced as soon as he got a clear look at Scarlet.
“Pleased to meet you,” Scarlet said, giving a small curtsey.
They settled in at the dining room table, and Daniel brought out a valise.
“Just to clarify,” Roy gestured at the bandage-wrapped undead serving the meal. “This doesn’t bother you?”
“Honestly, I expected nothing less,” Daniel admitted. “I knew from your stories at the club that your daughter was clearly not an ordinary child.”
“We don’t normally have zombies over at the house,” Ann said.
“They must be kept inside at night, to remain dry,” Hezikah explained.
“Yes of course, proper care and maintenance of the undead is vital to their long-unlongevity,” Daniel agreed. “You’d be surprised how many necromancers I work with.”
“How do you deal with undead, exactly?” Roy asked. “We learned earlier that the transit authority regards them as baggage.”
As Roy spoke, the zombies began to serve the meal, placing delicately prepared plates in front of each human.
“I-I was just going to get up and start serving,” Ann stammered.
“There is no need,” Hezikah smiled. “My minions are quite handy in the kitchen.”
Speaking more to Hezikah than Roy, Daniel answered the question. “In a legal sense they are fixed, non-transferable assets—kind of like entail. They can be deeded, but not sold.”
“Hmm, most are property of the temple as a whole,” Hezikah replied. “I’ve not known of individual necromancers to ‘own’ the differently-living.”
“There’s a small temple on the far side of town,” Daniel explained. “Their membership consists almost entirely of one extended family and people who’ve married into it. They’ve got about three score ‘minions’ and when the head of the house passed, there were some questions to be resolved.”
“Curious,” Hezikah said.
“What exactly is it you do?” Scarlet asked.
“Oh, didn’t your dad tell you?” Daniel blinked. “We do go way back, but I’m here on semi-official business. I’m an estate attorney.” He paused and popped open his valise. “I’m executing the will of the late Dr. Emmerich Thompson.”
“You knew Emmerich?” Scarlet said.
“Eh, not as well as I’d have liked to,” Daniel admitted. “And… not as well as I really should have. He had some grand ideas about dispensing with his estate, but didn’t plan on using them any time soon.”
“W-what are you talking about?” Scarlet gulped.
Daniel took a folder out of his brief case and passed it to Scarlet. “This is his last will and testament. He didn’t expect this day to come for many years. But he’s left you a few things.”
Scarlet’s eyes blurred with tears as she opened the folder. She didn’t suspect she’d have been able to read it anyway, just pages of complicated legalese like her father’s papers.
But Daniel kept talking, and that helped.
“Dr. Thompson has left to Scarlet: all of his personal papers, his research lab at the Library of Arindell, and his Assistant-level Membership in the New Stormwind Antiquarian Society.”
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End:
Chapter Eleven
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