A Summons Gone Wrong

by Corey Aislinn 

The Necromancer stood with all the somberness of death, contemplating the graves that stood before him. What secrets lay within them, and which would contain the most valuable. He needed the money now, and as wealthy families had hiding places for their heirlooms, he needed to get someone to tell him where these could be found. A difficult task for most, but he didn’t need to ask anyone alive, and it was more difficult for the dead to refuse an answer, those dead also would care less about the things and needs of a life.

He noticed in the third row of statues and monuments to the families a crypt box with a marble angle standing guard over it. Much more serene then the somberness of the other crypts it drew him in. And so he began to cast his circle, one inside another, the letters and numbers he scrawled between the two where carefully created in all twelve required languages.

            And so he began to chant, a chant he new will for twenty plus years and over a thousand such summons had made this almost routine. But sometimes as things become routine, those doing them grow sloppy. And on this night things where not to go right.

Stricken still with grief and still lonely after many years an old women risked the night to come visit her husband. Sensible and not at all superstitious she little expected to find a man surrounded by swirling blue light, standing before the forming apparition of her late husband.

A shriek pierced the night and startled the necromancer who happened to glance towards the sound. And as his voice faltered and his eye contact failed the ghost of the women’s late husband found itself with new strength. More importantly with his wife standing so near with love and fear in her eyes, he found a new motivation.

And so it was that the necromancers spell which should have been easy should have been routine was broken, and he fell to the ground, his head outside his carefully drawn circles and in reach of the ghost, who pounced as only something without form can.

            The women and a man with the spirit of her late husband walked home hand in hand to rediscover what not even death may truly part.