Death Never Dies

by Milton Garby

  "You're telling me. The dead should stay just that, dead. And Sara, she apparently doesn't even understand what she did. She doesn't think anything about it. I'm worried, darling. What if her magic gets stronger? What else is she going to be able to do?"

  "At least she's not creating undead," he said with a grin.

  Katherine groaned. "Don't joke about this." She sat up. "I'm going back to work, and then I'm going to sleep. It's late, I'm tired, and I don't want to think about this any more. Can you handle Sara in the morning?"

  He gave her a thumbs up. "You got it. I'm heading to bed, meet me when you're done?"

  They both stood and she walked over to him, giving her husband a quick kiss. "You got it."

  Sara

  Other people in her school liked to talk about what they were going to be when they grew up. Some wanted to be great wizards and sorcerers. Others wanted to teach, or go into engineering. One girl, inspired by Sara's shadow magic, was probably going to be a warlock. Leira was bent on learning sword fighting to be a great soldier for the Alliance.

  Sara reclined in her bed and sighed. Grew up. Mom and Dad would laugh quietly in their heads if they heard her say that, thinking 'Oh, she's still just a teenager, and she thinks she's all grown up'. Well in Sara's opinion she was already more 'grown up' than most grown ups! Just wait until she turned eighteen in six years. The world wouldn't know what hit it.

  Glancing down at the book on her chest, Sara grabbed it and held it up. She'd gotten to the part about phobias, and it was a fascinating read. She wondered just what sort of trauma - if it even needed to be that extreme - could cause someone to be pathologically afraid of people staring at them. How would that look in their brains? How would the lines flicker in someone with that fear?

  How could she make them fear it?

  Sara placed her psychology book face down, not caring if the pages wrinkled, and swung out of bed. The motion kicked up a cloud of dust particles from her bed, which she resolved to clean later. Making her way past her bookshelf, her drawing supplies, vanity, and her wardrobe, she came across a tiny cage. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of animal, but looked at the mouse anyway. "Hey there little guy," she teased. The mouse wasn't moving, which was a shame. It was her fault, she knew, but why should she buy proper food and medical care for a little animal when she could just bring it back to life whenever it died?

  With barely a thought, she resurrected it.

  Mom and Dad made too big a deal about it. It was a mouse for crying out loud! It was so small and unimportant she could bring it back to life even if it had been dead for a month.

  "Ready for another test?" she asked the nervously squeaking mouse. She called up her magic and focused on the rodent's brain. There were still too many criss-crossing lines for her to make sense of it all, but practice made perfect.

  First of all, she paralyzed the mouse by snipping the line that lead to the motion part of its brain. She'd put it back later.

  "Okay, now..." She looked towards the collection of lines that played a role in the mouse deciding if something was friend or foe. Sara readied her magic...

  Knock knock knock!

  Yelping, she cut off the shadowy orbs around her hands and left the mouse paralyzed. She ran back to bed as the door creaked open and hid under the covers. She held up her book and opened to a random page, one about developmental changes. A moment later, her mom stuck in her head to her room.

  "Sara, lunch time. Come downstairs and get something to eat."

  "Okay Mom," she said while still under the covers.

  "Good. And for goodness sake get dressed, it's the middle of the day." Just as quickly as she'd come, her Mom left and closed the door behind her.

  Sara rolled her eyes and mouthed, 'get dressed, it's the middle of the day' but she still got back out of bed and went to her wardrobe. She put on a brown shirt, brown pants, and brown skirt, all color-matched, as well as shoes. Once that was done she opened up the door and went down the stairs two at a time, jumping the last four with a - to her - earth shattering slam.

  "Sara, honey," her father said from elsewhere in the house. "Not so loud. You'll break your legs one of these days."

  "I'm fine," she protested, walking through the house until she skidded into the dining room. Her dad was already there, dressed sharply for some reason or another with the newspaper in his hands. "What's for lunch?" she asked as she took a seat across from him.

  "Eggs and bacon," Dad said as Mom slid a plate containing them in between them. The plate also had... "Bread too, you need grains."

  "Yes Dad," she grumbled as she took her fork and slid over two eggs and three slices of bacon... and after a dirty look from her dad she also got a slice of whole wheat bread. She hated whole wheat bread. It tasted so much worse than the white, fluffy bread they could get at the store, which didn't feel nearly as... as heavy as the icky brown bread. Still, Sara was hungry, so she ate up quickly and eventlessly. When she was done, she pushed herself away from the table.

  "Okay, I'm done. Can I go back to my room now?" she asked. When her parents both said 'Yes' she bolted, heading up the stairs and back into her room, alone with the mouse.

  She loomed over it and smiled.

  "Alright, where were we?" she asked, calling up her magic. "Right, scopophobia." Sara looked into the rodent's mind, and picked out the friend-foe lines. She wracked her brain, trying to figure out how to make it see anything looking at the mouse as foe. Sara looked into the part of its brain that processed sight, and thought of linking them together.

  After about half an hour of trial and error, Sara was sure she'd gotten it down. She focused her magic harder, and began drawing new links in the paralyzed mouse's brain. She made them tight, and stepped back. "Alright, attempt one." Then Sara reconnected the mouse's ability to move, and it began to move and squeak crazily. Sara flopped down on her bed, waiting for the mouse to calm down. Then she made her way back to it, and stared at the small creature.

  The mouse stared back at her with beady eyes. Sara walked to the left, and the mouse followed her. Then she moved to the right, and it followed her. "No, not good." She wrapped its brain with her shadow magic again, looking for the error she'd made. Before long she found that she'd accidentally connected the concept of staring to the motion section of its brain instead of the friend-foe section. She fixed that error.

  The moment the new, correct links were in place the mouse took one look at her and ran to the corner of its cage. It scratched at the bars, paused to look at Sara and, seeing that she was still staring at it, went back to attempting escape.

  "Success," she said. Then she wrapped the rodent in her magic and overloaded it. Green lights flickered around it, and it dropped dead. "Alright, next on the agenda." She walked over to her vanity and opened a drawer. Inside was a handful of darts. Taking one of them in hand, Sara looked to her bed or more specifically, the dartboard hanging just above it. Sara stepped forward and held up the dart. She aimed, aimed again, then threw it.

  Walking over to the board, she pulled it off and looked at what she'd written on the section she'd hit. "Walk in the woods, sounds good."

  Sara took off her indoor shoes and replaced them with thicker shoes designed for outdoors. She stormed back out of her room, down the stairs, and towards the back door. "I'm going for a walk!" she shouted. "Love you, bye!" Then, without waiting for a response, she was out the door.

  Greenvale was fairly busy, at least as busy as a small town on the borders of Elwynn could be. Adults walked briskly and oh-so-stiffly from one place to another, and a crowd of snot-nosed little brats were playing some stupid game. She went towards the park, which was mostly empty except for a few adults playing with young kids, and from there she vanished into the woods.

  Her skirt got caught a few times on branches, and now and again she almost tripped, but over all Sara had little trouble walking through the woods. She tried making her way to a rocky clearing, where boulders had fallen together in an unu
sual formation. She usually liked to exercise her magic there. She was a lot stronger than when she was a little kid; magic was like a muscle, after all. The more someone used it, the stronger it got. Sara made sure to use it whenever she could, but it meant she had to get away from civilization to do so.

  The trees let through little light, so it was dark and cool, just the way she liked it. The air smelled of mulch and decaying leaves. Sara couldn't see any animals, but she did hear them running away from her as she walked. Before too long she arrived at the boulder pile.

  The boulders looked sort of like a bowl, if you squinted really hard. Large slabs leaning on each other, covered in dead black moss and something that looked like rust, and in the middle where she couldn't quite see, the rocks formed a hole. The grass around it was brown and brittle, the trees shriveled and bare. If she looked closely, she could see cracks in some of the larger stones, as if they'd been hit with a giant hammer.

  To Sara's surprise though, she heard someone else in the bowl. It sounded like they were exercising. She thought she recognized their voice, too. She walked to the bowl and started climbing up on it, taking care not to slip and hit her head. Sara got to the top of the five yard boulder pile and stared down at the middle.

  Leira stared back up at her. "Sara! I didn't expect to see you here." Leira wore a black vest underneath chain mail, and she had a shortsword in her hands that looked like a two-handed sword, since it was sized for adults instead of twelve year-olds. Her black hair was shiny, her horns were curved backwards instead of to the side like her mother's, and her skin was wet with sweat. There were white lines on the stones, and some of the stones looked like they'd been pushed outwards by some massive force that caused them to scrape across the ground.

  Sara smiled back and sat, crossing her legs. "What're you doing here, Leira?"

  "I usually come here to train," she said. Suddenly she held out her sword, then moved it around in a few formations that Sara knew nothing about. "This place is pretty nice and quiet. Weird about the grass, though. And the rocks."

  She rubbed the back of her neck. "Well, that's actually cause of me. I exercise my magic here. Pushes back the rocks just a bit, and some of it leaks out through the cracks and kills the grass."

  "Really?" Leira looked at the rocks. "Yikes, Sara." She tossed her sword up on the rocks and climbed up to Sara's right. She sat down next to her, her tail moving back and forth on the rock. "So, you use this place too, huh? What are the odds?"

  She shrugged. "Well, it's a good place." She grinned wickedly. "Wonder who else uses it that we don't know about. Can you imagine Michael coming here and pretending to use frost spells?" They both giggled a bit at the image of the boy pretending to throw around frost bolts.

  Leira wiped her brow. "I can picture it, the dork. So, how long've you been using this place?"

  "I think I found it on..." Sara thought. "The fifth of January two years ago. Yeah, that seems about right. What about you?"

  "Uh, I dunno. About a year, I guess." Leira looked behind her at the deadened plant life surrounding it. "So... you did that."

  "Yeah, I've got a lot of magic now." She let black smoke flicker around her hands, which made Leira shiver. "Can't wait to see what I'll have when I go to Stormwind." Sara turned off her magic and paused to think about what would be polite to say. "So, how's training going for you?"

  Leira frowned and looked away from her. "That's actually something I wanted to talk to you about. You know how I've been wanting to fight, be a soldier? Well, I'm actually going to be a squire for a warrior. Not like I want to, it's actually happening."

  "Really? For the Liberality Confederacy?" she asked.

  The draenei deflated and shifted her legs, causing her hooves to scrape against the rock. "Well, no. I'm not Kingslayer material, but I am going to be the squire for a Mr. Huan Earthsong in the Chimes of A'dal."

  She'd never heard of him, and she'd never heard of the guild. "That's great!" Sara said. "I'm so happy for you, Leira!"

  "Yeah, well, there's one problem." Leira looked over at her. "I'm going to have to leave for Ironforge to be his squire."

  She blinked. "Huh? What do you mean?"

  "I'm moving, Sara. Just me, my parents are gonna stay here but I'm moving to Ironforge to do this. I don't know when I'll get to see you again."

  Sara's heart felt cold. She stared at Leira unbelievingly. "... what?" she whispered. "But, I thought, Leira this isn't... y-you can't," she breathed.

  "I'll write you letters," she said quickly. "And I might be able to visit on Winter Veil, but no promises. I'm not sure squires get time off."

  "You're leaving me alone," she whispered.

  "This would've happened anyway when you went to Stormwind," Leira mentioned.

  "Yeah but that was, t-that was going to be in six years, not now!" she shouted, throwing up her hands. "This is so unfair!"

  "Hmph," Leira grunted. "Here I thought you'd be happy for me."

  "I am!" Sara countered. "It's just, I don't want to be alone. Everyone else in school's terrified of me, they think if they talk to me..." She held up her left hand and brought her magic to it. The flickering shadow energy began to change as Sara pushed more power into it, turning into a swirling orb of glowing purple smoke. "... that I'll blast them," she said, thrusting the hand out to the side to release the energy. A thick beam of violet energy surged outwards, smacking the dirt and killing the surrounding five yards of grass. It was far from the most magic she'd ever released in a single burst.

  Leira shivered as Sara's magic ended. "Well, are they wrong?"

  "Of course they're wrong!" she said, throwing her hands up in exasperation. "Do you have any idea how much trouble I'd get in if I blasted someone?" She lowered her arms. "When are you leaving?" she muttered.

  "In a week. I was gonna come over to your house today to tell but, well, you know."

  Sara looked down at the bottom of the boulder-bowl. "I'm really happy for you, Leira. I hope you have a lot of fun with Mr. Earthsong." She swung her legs around and jumped off the boulders, heading into the forest.

  There was a crash and Leira ran up to her. "Hey, Sara I'm sorry, but - "

  "No!" Sara said, turning on her. "No, you..." She pinched her brow, then let it go. "This isn't your fault. I knew what you wanted to do, and I should've expected this from the start. It's just, damn it. How often do you think you can write?" She turned back away from Leira and started walking through the woods.

  Leira kept up with her. "Probably every week or so. You can write back to me as well."

  "I guess it's not so bad, then." She pushed past a branch, then snapped it off the tree with her magic so it wouldn't swing back and hit Leira. "What're you gonna be doing as a squire?"

  "Well, I'm gonna be learning how to fight from him. Help with transporting gear and those sorts of things. It's basically an apprenticeship, just not called that. Gonna cut down on how much, like, regular schooling I can learn but really, I think Mr. Earthsong can teach me the important stuff and not just what we learn."

  "Ugh," Sara said. "Tell me about it. Who cares about the such-and-such member of the Arathi?"

  Leira chuckled. "Too bad you're still gonna have to learn about all that."

  Sara sighed. "Yeah, I guess. So. You're leaving in a week."

  She nodded. "Yep. On the Friday before I leave we're going to have some sort of going-away party, I already talked it over with the teacher, we're gonna have games and food and everything."

  Narrowing her eyes, Sara turned away to inspect a tree as if it were interesting. "So you talked with her before me."

  "She's the teacher, Sara. I kinda have to." Leira stopped talking for a moment as they squeezed between some trees that were close together. "You're being a big baby about this. It's not like I'm dying or anything."

  "I am not being a baby," she groused. "I'm just upset that you just sprung this on me with no warning."

  "Well then how would I have warned you?" Leira asked, light
ly punching Sara's left arm. "Baby."

  She winced, and rubbed her arm. "Oh shut up."

  They kept walking while Sara processed what Leira had said. She was going to leave. Leave her alone with all the idiots in school and town, to go pursue her dream. Just like Sara would've been leaving her in six years. Sara didn't really know what to think about -

  "So what were you doing out here anyway?"

  "I thought I'd go for a walk," Sara said. "No real reason. Funny I ran into you," she sighed.

  "Yeah. Funny." Leira nudged her. "Hey, cheer up. It's not the end of the world."

  Heh, Sara thought. No, I guess it's not.

  Sara walked the road that led to school, alone. There were some seventh graders in front of her and some others behind her as they made their way to the building.

  Once inside, Sara made for Mrs. Wirn's classroom, which was already half full. The classroom for seventh grade was a homey brick red, and the desks were all arranged in alternating rows, such that no desk had another desk directly in front of it.

  The atmosphere was noisy and happy, with her peers throwing parchment airplanes and generally being dumb in the few minutes they had before class started. Sara was paid about as much attention as everyone else who entered; she got no more than a brief glance to see who she was before the student in question went back to whatever they'd been doing before.

  Sara's seat was in the back left corner, so she could keep an eye on everyone else. She shrugged off her backpack, slid it under her seat, then rested an elbow on the desk so she could place her head in her hand.

  She glanced around; the teacher wasn't in yet, and judging by the clock mounted over the doorway, wouldn't be for another five minutes. So, Sara took her hands and put them in her pant's pockets, then began quietly channeling her powers. It didn't make any noise, but she could feel the black mist pulsing and squirming about in her pocket like a heartbeat. Sara looked around the class, then focused on Annabelle. Quietly and carefully she began to fill the inside of her head with her magic. It didn't do anything to her, it just let Sara see the lines of her thoughts. She found the hearing center of her brain, right around her ears, and imagined extending another line from her brain out, all the way through the air, and into Sara's own hearing center.