The Necromancer King

First Mission.

Seraphine had one rule that kept her alive for six years.

Never stay anywhere long enough to become familiar.

Familiar meant predictable, predictable meant caught and caught for someone like her did not mean prison.

It meant a church examination room and an Inquisitor asking questions she would never answer.

She had stayed in those ruins with Kane for three hours.

Three hours with a boy she had known for less than a day, someone who talked to a dead king in his head and raised seventeen thousand soldiers from the ground like it cost him nothing.

She must have lost her mind.

She looked sideways at Kane walking beside her through the trees. Tall and lean, dark messy hair, grey eyes always looking at something just beyond whatever was directly in front of him. Like he was listening to two conversations at once.

Which she supposed he was.

He had no soldiers now. He lost both of them in the fight with Drav Solus.

She had watched the Hunter take them apart and she had seen the look on Kane's face when the second one fell, like losing the only company he had known all night.

She understood that more than she wanted to admit.

"You are staring at me," Kane said without looking at her.

"I am assessing you," she said.

"It's the same thing." He replied

"Absolutely not!. Staring is mindless, assessing is strategic." She shifted her bag strap.

"I am figuring out how much trouble you are going to be." She said.

"And?" Kane asked

"Still calculating," she said.

They walked in silence for a while. The forest was fully awake around them, birds loud in the branches above, thin morning light falling through the leaves in broken pieces.

"Your power," Kane said. "How does it work?"

She considered not answering. Then she remembered they were walking toward a location surrounded by Church soldiers and he needed to know exactly what she could do.

"I pull darkness," she said. "Any darkness. Shadows under trees, dark corners in rooms. I shape it, build walls with it and make it move like something alive." She paused.

"It cannot hurt anyone directly, but it triggers fear and I can make that fear press down on a person until they cannot think straight."

"That is not a dark power," Kane said. "That is a sophisticated one."

She looked at him.

Nobody had ever said that to her. Not for once in her entire life.

"The Church does not see the difference," she said quietly.

"The Church does not see a lot of things," he said.

She told him the rest in pieces. Her power appeared when she was twelve.

She practiced alone in the dark for two years, terrified of herself. Then her little brother caught her one night.

He was six years old and instead of screaming he sat down on the floor across from her and said show me again.

She made him a shadow butterfly and he laughed until he woke their grandmother.

Four months later Duke Harrow's men came through the village.

"They had a list," she said. "Three families with dark bloodlines. They called it a routine cleansing."

She kept her voice like she wanted to cry. "My grandmother, my two cousins, my brother were erased!"

Kane stopped walking.

She kept walking.

He caught up in two steps and fell back into stride beside her. He did not say sorry and did not say it was not her fault. He just walked beside her and let the silence be what it needed to be.

She was grateful for that in a way she had not expected.

"I hid in the well," she said. "I heard everything from down there and could do nothing. When it was over I climbed out and left. I have not stopped moving since."

"Why do they want you so badly," Kane said. "You are one person."

"Because I am getting stronger every year," she said. "Things I should not be able to do without training. It makes their Inquisitors nervous." She paused. "They want to stop me before I figure out what I actually am."

"Same reason they killed my mother," Kane said quietly.

"Same reason they burned my village," she said.

They looked at each other on that narrow forest path.

"Duke Harrow," Kane said.

"Yes, it's the same Duke Harrow," she agreed.

They reached the village just before midday. It was relatively small with a market square, a well, and a church notice board beside the main gate.

"I will go in," Seraphine said.

"I know," Kane said.

"Your eyes glow when you think hard. People notice."

"They are not glowing."

"They are glowing right now," she said. "Stay here, I'll be back in twenty minutes."

She moved through the market quickly. She got bread, dried meat, a water skin paid for with coins from a church patrol guard's pocket three weeks ago which felt fair.

She was almost at the gate when two soldiers talking by the notice board stopped her in her tracks.

She picked up a vegetable from the nearest stall and listened.

"Cross arrived this morning," the first soldier said. "Before dawn, eastern checkpoint and twelve paladins with him."

"Seraph Cross? For two fugitives?" the other soldier asked.

"High Inquisitor sent the order personally last night. The necromancer is priority." A short pause. "Alive!! Voss wants him alive!!" He said with a tone of surprise.

"And the shadow mage?"

There was a brief silence.

“She will be killed if need be,” the first soldier said.

Seraphine didn’t pause or look back.

She set the vegetable down gently and walked away at the same steady pace, her face calm but her eyes colder than before.

Kane saw her expression and straightened at once, the shift in her eyes telling him everything had just changed.

"Seraph Cross is at the eastern checkpoint," she said. "Twelve paladins. He arrived before dawn."

"Before we even left the ruins?" Kane said slowly.

"Voss sent word before Drav Solus filed his report," she said. "He knew which direction we would run before we decided to run there." She held his gaze.

"He has been ahead of us from the very beginning, Kane." She replied with assurance.

The trees around them were very calm.

Then something shifted in Kane's expression, he started calculating.

"Malachar says there is an underground passage, built three hundred years ago during the plague to move bodies east without going through the main gates." he said.

She stared at him. "A passage they moved plague bodies through?"

"Three hundred years ago. The plague is long gone. The bones are still there," he said.

She looked at him for a long moment. His eyes were glowing now. That deep quiet purple glow that she had already learned, meant he was completely serious.

She thought about Seraph Cross sitting at that checkpoint with twelve paladins and the High Inquisitor's personal orders.

She thought about six years of running, her little brother sitting in the dark saying “show me again”.

Duke Harrow's name was on everything that had ever been taken from her.

She adjusted the strap of her bag.

"How deep underground," she said.

"Malachar says it's very deep," Kane said.

She closed her eyes for exactly one second.

"Lead the way," she said.

Behind them in the village the two soldiers kept talking by the notice board, completely unaware that the two most wanted people in Valdris City had been standing twenty feet away buying bread.

In a room inside Church headquarters in Valdris City, Aldric Voss opened a file that had not been touched in nineteen years.

The name on the first page was Dorian Ashveil.

Kane's father.

He read without moving. When he finished he picked up his pen and wrote one line at the very bottom of the page.

*The son is exactly what we feared the father would become.*

He closed the file, blew out the candle.

And sat alone in the dark thinking about what happened to the last person who stood in the Church's way.