Vessel, Book I: The Advent
Page 13
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It was during these times that Dahrkren had begun speaking with death.
In a way, Dahrkren had always known how this worked. He was a necromancer, after all; death was his bread and butter. Knowing all about death, naming its many forms, understanding how to please it, recognizing what it looked like and how it was going to happen―all of this was his craft. It was his arena to attend to the dying (primarily the more important ailing individuals from both Nifushunm and Amphet) and to ensure that they departed in the proper manner.
Just as importantly, he kept a good correspondence with the deceased. From their dreamy, other-planed existence, he could glean cryptic messages about the future and reminders about the past. To do this, Dahrkren used all manner of carefully calculated processes and states, tools and trances, some too old to have names. He lived by himself and worked with no one, yet he was rarely alone. The shadows of the dead and their voices filled his thoughts often; they had a near-constant, combined presence. But these were beings who had already lived and walked the earth and died. They were not death itself.
Death, Dahrkren knew, was not a being. It wasn't anything which would've warranted a capital letter in some holy book, had the diviners lived in a late enough century to write one. Like the winds that changed the shape of the earth, or the hand that held the Ket in its cradle, death was simply a force. It did what it did according to the order of things, and at times, in readable and measurable ways, it responded to the actions of the living by behaving differently. But it did not think or speak. It did not change. In doing so, it would disrupt the seamless engine of everything else.
As Dahrkren and other necromancers understood, the force of death lasted only a moment. It was a negative force, a vacuum, and it was permitted only a glimpse of the living plane while it worked. Its only purpose was to detach something living from its earthly shell and then send it along. Along to where, not even the necromancers knew. The dead had to be somewhere, of course, because the necromancers could still hear them, but not even Nifushunm's most anointed could determine where exactly they had gone.
Or if they were happy.
And that itself was the big mystery, the reason that necromancers of all people, of all diviners, were the most sober and joyless individuals. They knew everything there was to know about what happened when a person died, down to a science, but after that? Nada. Where do you go? How do you feel? Is there suffering? Is there peace? Are you alive again? Do you become part of something else? Something that shapes the universe? Like water or air?
Oh, they asked. For centuries, necromancers asked the dead these questions. But the dead ignored them, always continuing with their unrelated advice. The possibility of a famine. The outcome of a battle. So most necromancers had to settle for their best guess, that the energy of the dead got caught up in the rest of the universe and forever coursed through the earth, in flames and rays of light, in wind and water.
Something like that.
Well, Dahrkren wasn't so sure. And he was greatly troubled by this uncertainty, more so than his predecessors had ever been. The more death he encountered, the more uneasy he felt, the more he became aware of how each day was bringing him closer to his own death, his own variable eternity.
So he started looking straight to the source for certainty, secretly attempting a connection that no other necromancer would have dared to even endorse. Line after sacred line was crossed, and by the time he attended to the passing of his own elderly king, Dahrkren had already begun to question death itself for the truth. And death, that nameless, starving vacuum, seeing an open window, was more than happy to answer him.
It answered him with deceit. He fell for it. And together they threw a big, crooked monkey wrench into that seamless engine I just mentioned.