The crimson citadel

Elara found a seat near the back, as inconspicuous as possible. The bench was ice-cold.

“Necromancy,” Morvan’s voice rasped through the hall, dry as bones grinding together. It required no effort to fill the space. It simply was, a sound that slithered into their ears. “Is not a parlor trick for summoning departed relatives for a chat. It is not a means to build a workforce of compliant skeletons. Such notions are for children and fools.”

He pushed away from the lectern and began to pace slowly before them, his robes whispering against the stone.

“Necromancy is the art of imposing will upon that which has been relinquished. It is the ultimate expression of power over entropy, over the final, pathetic surrender of death. To command the dead is to spit in the eye of fate itself. It is violence. It is domination. It is pain.”

He stopped and swept his ghastly gaze over them. “Your first lesson. A simple test of will. Of ruthlessness. Of your capacity to inflict your desire upon the unwilling.”

He clapped his skeletal hands once. A door at the side of the dais swung open, and a hulking jailer entered, dragging a large wicker basket. With a grunt, the jailer upended it onto the dais.

Dozens of small, brown-furred bodies tumbled out. Rats. Dozens of them. They were limp, their fur matted, their eyes glazed and empty. They were very, very dead.

A wave of revulsion passed through the students. A girl in the front row gagged.

“Silence,” Morvan hissed, and the sound was like a lash. The girl stifled her retch instantly, her face pale.

“Your task is simple,” Morvan continued, his lips stretching into a rictus that might have been a smile. “You will come down here, one by one. You will place your hand upon a subject. And you will command it to live. You will pour your will into its vacant shell and force it to serve you once more.”

He let the impossibility of the task hang in the air for a moment, savoring their dread.

“The method is irrelevant. The result is all. Success earns my… attention.” His hungry eyes gleamed. “Failure earns a demonstration of what true mastery looks like. And you do not want to be my demonstration.”

He pointed a long, bony finger at a hulking boy with thick tusks from House Ignis who had been smirking. “You. Begin.”

The boy swaggered down to the dais. He grabbed a dead rat, held it in his meaty fist, and closed his eyes, his face contorting with effort. He grunted, he strained, his face turning purple. Nothing happened. He shook the rat, then threw it against the wall in frustration. It landed with a soft, pathetic thud.

Morvan sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. “Pathetic. You seek to bully it. To intimidate a soul that has already fled. You have the subtlety of a hammer.” He gestured to the jailer. “Hold him.”

The jailer grabbed the boy’s arms, pinning them behind his back. Morvan approached, his movements fluid and menacing. He placed his hand on the boy’s forehead.

The boy screamed. It was a short, sharp sound that was cut off abruptly. His body went rigid, his eyes rolling back in his head. Then, the dead rat on the floor twitched. Its legs kicked spasmodically. It flopped onto its feet, took two jerky, uncoordinated steps, and collapsed again, truly still.

Morvan removed his hand. The boy sagged in the jailer’s grip, unconscious, a trickle of blood seeping from his nose.

“I forced his life force into the rodent,” Morvan explained conversationally to the horrified class. “A crude transfer. Wasteful. But illustrative. The body is a vessel. The will is the wine. You do not ask the empty cup to fill itself. You pour.” He nodded to the jailer, who dragged the unconscious boy away. “Next.”

One by one, students were called down. The results were variations on a theme of failure. A girl from House Corde wept over her rat, begging it to come back, to no avail. A Venenum student pricked his finger and smeared his blood on the rat’s muzzle, whispering poisonous words; the rat’s fur blackened and shriveled, but it did not move. An Ossis boy chanted in a low voice, trying to rearrange its bones from the inside; a leg snapped with a sickening crunch, but that was all.

Lysander was called. He strode down confidently. He picked up a rat, held it by the tail, and stared into its dead eyes. His own eyes glowed with a faint, grey light. The rat shuddered. For a moment, it hung limply, then its back arched violently. It began to swing itself back and forth on its tail, a grotesque pendulum. It wasn’t alive. It was a puppet on a string of stolen will. After a few seconds, the motion stopped, and the rat went still. Lysander dropped it, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

Morvan gave a slow, approving nod. “A clumsy puppetry. But a glimmer of understanding. You pulled the strings of the flesh, not the spirit. Passable.”

Lysander returned to his seat, a smug look on his face, which he directed pointedly at Elara.

Her turn was coming. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. She had no idea what to do. She had no magic. She had nothing but a void inside her that had made a stone scream.

“The new tithe,” Morvan’s voice cut through her panic. His cold eyes were fixed on her. “The one from the Stone. Let us see if the void has a voice. Come.”

Every eye in the room was on her as she walked down the steps, her legs feeling like lead. The dais seemed miles away. She could smell the cloying sweetness of death now, mixed with the musky scent of the rats. She stopped before the pile of small, lifeless bodies.

“Choose your instrument,” Morvan purred.

Her mouth was dry. Her mind was blank. Command it to live. How? She had no life to give. She had no will that could overpower death. Kaelan’s words echoed in her head. A spark… snuffed out…

No.

She would not be his demonstration. She would not end up like the Ignis boy, used as a battery and discarded.

She looked at the dead rat. She saw its emptiness. Its stillness. And something in her recognized it. It was a reflection of what she had felt her whole life. A hollow vessel.

She couldn’t fill it. She had nothing to pour.

But perhaps… she didn’t need to.

She remembered the Tithe Stone. It hadn’t responded to her blood. It had responded to the void in her blood. It had devoured the light.

She wasn’t a vessel to be filled. She was a drain. A negation.

She didn’t reach for the rat. She didn’t touch it. She simply knelt down on the cold stone, ignoring the filth, and placed her injured hand, palm down, on the dais beside the creature. She closed her eyes, shutting out Morvan’s expectant gaze, shutting out the other students.

She didn’t try to push anything out. She did the opposite. She reached for that cold, empty place inside her, the one that had always made her feel separate, wrong, alone. She embraced it. She focused on the dead rat, not as something to be filled with life, but as a symbol of stillness. Of an ending.

And she invited it in.

She imagined the emptiness within her stretching out, not as a force, but as a space. A silence. A perfect, peaceful nullity. She offered the rat’s corpse an escape from the indignity of decay, from being a lesson, from being a puppet. She offered it the void.

You are still, she thought, the words a cold ripple in the stillness of her mind. You are empty. You are at peace. Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing move you. Be as you are. Forever.

She poured her will not into animating it, but into enforcing its absolute, perpetual death.

For a long moment, nothing happened. She heard a derisive snort from somewhere in the tiers. Morvan let out a disappointed sigh.

Then, the shadows around the rat… deepened.

They pooled around its small form, not cast by any light, but born from it. They thickened, becoming a shroud of tangible darkness. The faint, sickly light in the lecture hall seemed to bend away from the creature, repelled.

The rat itself began to change. Its fur lost what little luster it had, becoming a flat, matted black that seemed to absorb light. Its body didn’t move, but it seemed to… settle, as if its weight had tripled, fusing it to the stone dais. It didn’t look dead. It looked like it had never been alive. It became a sculpture of void. A perfect, eternal monument to cessation.

The sneers and whispers in the room cut off abruptly.

Morvan was silent. He took a step closer, his skeletal hands clasped behind his back. He leaned down, his hungry eyes wide, examining the rat-not-rat. He reached out a finger to touch it, then pulled back as if shocked by the absolute cold radiating from it.

He straightened up and looked at Elara. His expression was unreadable, but the cold light in his eyes was blazing now. It wasn’t approval. It was the look a miner gives a vein of unprecedented, dangerous ore.

“Fascinating,” he whispered, the word a dry rustle. “You did not command it to live. You commanded it to… cease. Absolutely. You did not pour wine into the cup. You shattered the cup so it could never be filled again.”

He circled her, a vulture assessing carrion. “You enforced a state of being through sheer negation. You didn’t animate the corpse. You made the concept of animation itself impossible for it.”

He stopped in front of her. “You didn’t give it life. You gave it the opposite.”

Elara rose to her feet, her knees trembling. She met his gaze, her own eyes wide with a shock that mirrored his, though for different reasons. She had done… something. Something she didn’t understand.

“A perversion of the art,” Morvan said, his voice rising to address the class, though his eyes never left her. “A heresy. An abomination.”

A slow, terrifying smile stretched his parchment skin.

“Well done.”