Chapter 6: 6. Forsake in Hubris

Excerpts from Master Khahul’s ‘Neophyte’s Necromancy: Dealing with the Departed.’

“To begin a consultation with the departed, it is advised the neophyte make certain preparations. To begin with, research the disposition and motivation of the person in question immediately prior to death, as such thoughts are ingrained upon the being of the spirit the soul has become. It is also prudent to prepare various wards against attack or possession, including a suitably sturdy robe in case of poltergeists.”

“If you are all prepared, seek out a local haunt and make contact with your previously studied ghost—if you do not have any local haunts, jar-caught is fine. If you are reading this passage having just encountered a ghost but have failed to internalise the following chapters of this tome, skip ahead to Chapter 17: Bargaining for Your Life.”

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The ghost just down the trail was most assuredly kesh, as far as appearances go. They were a pathetic-looking creature, stunted and malnourished. A rough kesh if Yenna ever saw one, dressed only in ragged scraps covering their upper half¹. Pale eyes that gleamed a moonlit white stared down the mage, a shiver of malice emanating from the creature. It was only once she had examined the apparition further that she saw it held a farming implement in its ghostly hand—a crudely crafted wooden three-pronged rake or hoe.  Despite its half-faded presence, the kesh gripped the haft of that tool as tightly as it clung to the mundane world.

Yenna stood frozen in surprise as she desperately attempted to recall her learning regarding dealing with the dead when Demvya strode forth. Narasanha lifted an arm to stop the spirit, only to be stopped in turn by the captain—It seemed she was willing to at least see where the events would lead. Eone’s eyes turned to Yenna, her hands making a complicated gesture. The clarity of the captain’s signalling impressed the mage, even allowing someone unfamiliar to understand the meaning behind the gesture—ready yourself, in case this gets ugly.

Not wishing to provoke the ghost, Yenna quietly pulled out her spell book and flicked through its pages as she kept an eye on the unfolding situation. The silvery figure shouted silently, their words lost on the living but their intent obvious for all to see. The kesh ghost waved her tool about as they noiselessly ranted and raved, her attention now fixed on the approaching Demvya. The guardian spirit showed no fear, holding both arms out wide in a placating gesture, head held high—It seemed no ghastly admonishment would have them bowed.

At first, Yenna thought Demvya might converse with the ghost or possibly destroy it—she had no knowledge of a guardian spirit’s feeding habits outside of mortal attentions, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for any spirit to consume a lesser of their kind. Instead, Demvya plucked one of the white flowers from their newly lengthened hair and pushed it into the messy, patchy remnants atop the ghost’s incorporeal head. The flower shimmered and became part of the ghost—Yenna scrambled for her magical sight spell, inwardly cursing her slow movements and making a mental note to bind the spell to a magical item for faster use in the future. 

Activating her spell in time to watch the end of the transformation, Yenna observed as the flower dissolved into magic and suffused the ghostly spirit with energy. The scant scraps of magical potential the being had left flared to life, and through mundane eyes the ghost appeared to shake off her bedraggled appearance. Skin filled out and covered her bones, her hair grew back, and her twisted, angered visage calmed to a serene acceptance. The spirit of the kesh smiled, mouthed a word of thanks, and dropped her farming tool. Turning, the ghost leapt away into the air and vanished.

“What did you do…?” Yenna couldn’t help but ask. “Did you just unbind that ghost?”

“PRAY, TWAS ONLY MY DUTY. ONCE, LONG AGO, THAT SHADE WAS ONE OF THE PEOPLE OF THE VALLEY. IT PAINS ME TO SEE THEM SUFFER THUS. WE MUST SEE THEM ALL SET FREE.” 

Demvya barely waited for a response before continuing on, and Yenna counted her blessings that Jiin didn’t seem to be a particularly fast walker. It helped that Demvya practically insisted on a kind of strut instead of walking normally.

The scene repeated itself a few more times as they descended further into the town. The illusory buildings faded somewhat as they drew closer, existing only out of the corner of their eyes, and entirely collapsing when Demvya granted a flower to its former inhabitants. After watching the sort of purification occur multiple times, Yenna concluded that the illusions were the product of stale, unmoving magic tethered to the various ghosts.

“Could these be the places they last saw…?” Muttering to herself, the mage scrawled several notes into her floating journal—holding the magical sight spell in one hand, she was just glad that levitating objects required a relatively basic spell. With the magic in the area being so stagnant and still the hovering book had nothing to impede it, though at the same time it could not refresh its magic from ambient sources. 

The excitement that arose from discovering the fascinating nature of the ghostly village was offset by the tragedy of the environment. The long-ruined remnants of buildings, fences and fields, and even the dirt told a tale of harsh living. It was dry and dusty despite being so close to a stream of water, and riddled with small stones. Even in the fields, where the farmers had likely taken the best and most arable sections of soil, the ghosts congregated around pitiful clumps of weeds that seemed to be barely alive. Yenna was no farmer, but she did know a few things about growing plants—this place was desolate, and utterly incapable of supporting plant life.  

Yenna did her best to keep up with Demvya, taking a small sample of the dirt from the farmland along the way to the baleful glare of a ghostly farmer. The ghosts appeared agitated in Eone and Narasanha’s presences but seemed less fussed by Yenna’s, allowing her to keep a close tail on the spirit. They soon arrived at an open area that appeared to have once been the bustling centre of the town. The moon had risen far into the sky, its pale, cracked surface lending the haunted village an ethereal quality. Here at the centre were more of the ghostly structures, their foundations barely remaining in reality with the exception of a single structure. 

Crumbled stone walls held together with ages of grime and dirt outlined where a small stone temple must have stood. A simple, square building, it may well have been the site of worship for the people of the valley. What stood out to Yenna was the complete lack of ornamentation—though age had crumbled the stout building to the ground, it had a conspicuous lack of objects of worship. Where all the temples Yenna had seen or heard of had endeavoured to instil a kind of permanence in the representative of their worship, there was nothing but a cracked recess in the stone floor of the building that had been partially filled with dirt. Moonlight glinted off the corner of something buried beneath the soil, and Yenna stepped forward to investigate.

A cold wind pushed against her, causing her hovering journal to slam against a distant wall, followed by the sound of a heavy wooden door crashing shut behind her. Yenna froze in place with surprise and nervously looked around. The ruined walls, small enough for her to step over, now extended several metres above her to a vaulted wooden roof. A simple but sturdy door had appeared in the opening she had walked through and though she desperately tugged on the handle, she couldn’t get it to budge. A panicked realisation came to her—if the door was illusionary, she wouldn’t have been able to touch it at all.

“Captain?!” Yenna shouted up at a small wind-hole above the door, hoping to catch the attention of her allies. “Demvya? Narasanha? Anybody?!”

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The sound of her voice barely made it beyond her throat, fading instantly into silence. Yenna shivered—it was so cold in here! The mage raised a hand and began to incant a simple warming spell, only to feel a lack of the familiar flow of magic between her fingers. She tried a simpler spell of light, or her magical sight spell—nothing seemed to work.

“Thou’rt sure of this, priest?” A deep voice rang out behind her, and Yenna turned to see a pair of kesh standing before a familiar stone pillar—Demvya’s pillar! One was a brawny, rough kesh, wearing a simple woven tunic, while the other was a dignified old kesh, fine in her bearing and dress—a black robe that covered her from shoulders to nearly her hooves. In the rough kesh’s hand was a thick rope of many colours, and in the other’s was a metal-bound tome.

“Yea. Too long have we laboured for but half our reward. Bind the pillar. We’ve no use for one so demanding.” The priest, Yenna guessed, motioned to the book in her hand, a self-assured grin on her face. Neither had noticed the mage’s presence, so she began to move forward only to find her hooves making no sound on the stones. Yenna tried to call out, but her voice still could not be heard. This was some kind of magic to be sure, but Yenna didn’t know what! Her usual bevy of spells were of no help, but what of the items in her pack?

As she began to reach back and rummage through her baggage, the priest turned to face her. Yenna gasped as the fine kesh’s delicate features suddenly contorted into one of pure anguish.

“O, how wrong I was! A fine fool I made, and doomed us all asides! O Demvya! Gracious goddess of the harvest! Thou wert salvation, and I have foolishly cast thee aside!” With staggering steps, the priest began to walk towards Yenna. With every step, the temple around her began to degrade—the walls cracked and crumbled, the cushions and benches withered and turned to dust, the roof degraded away. Through it all, the other kesh seemed determined to complete their task. Binding the stone pillar in rope, she called to her fellows and lifted the entire shrine out of the ground.

“No! Fools! We spell our own doom! We, who wished for a simple existence, have consorted with beings beyond us! This place, once blessed, now cursed in absence!” As the kesh lifted the mass of stone, the priest herself began to wither away. Bloody bruises and cuts opened on her body, and her robe was torn and burned as though some invisible mob was murdering her there on the spot. 

Despite her shaking limbs, Yenna finally found what she had been looking for.

In her hand she held a small metal ball covered in tiny spikes. Steadying her breathing, Yenna held it up and squeezed it tight. Her concentration broke and she screamed—the world around her collapsed and fell into nothing. When she opened her eyes, she was collapsed on the ground of the ruined temple. In one hand, covered in blood, was the spiked ball. In the other, the hand of a burned skeleton that promptly collapsed into dust. Scrambling to her feet in fright, she was greeted by the footfalls of Narasanha and Eone.

“Are you okay?” Eone was leaning to help her to her feet, while Narasanha’s eyes fell curiously on her bleeding hand.

“I…I fell into a vitrified dream, it seems.” The blank looks that followed were to be expected—it wasn’t a commonly known concept. Yenna took a moment to calm herself before she explained. “The priest of this temple d-died in anguish. All of their pain, sorrow, and regret turned not into a ghost, but a kind of…living memory. The stillness of the magic here let it linger, until I walked into it. I, erm, dreamed about what happened here.”

“A dream? Then, why are you bleeding?” Eone rather brusquely pulled the metal ball out of Yenna’s hand. The spikes were not nearly so sharp as to draw blood. “Isn’t this a massage tool?”

Yenna chuckled. “Yes, for sore hands, though I don’t know why I keep it—it tends to just hurt my hands more. When I realised I was in a dream, I knew a good sharp pain would wake me up. I didn’t think my imagination would create such pain that it would actually harm me, though.”

Drawing a small bandage from a pouch on her belt, Eone patched up the perforations on Yenna’s palm. The mage blushed at the attention, not quite expecting so intimate an event after such an ordeal². Narasanha remained on guard, despite the unlikelihood of her blades’ effectiveness against ghostly intents. Yenna quickly explained what she had seen to the group, her creeping sense of curiosity pouring back into her now that there was no direct danger.

Sweeping aside some of the dirt, Yenna retrieved the object that had glinted in moonlight. She gasped as she held it up to the moonlight to gaze upon it—it was the very same book held by the priest in the dream.

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¹ - Amongst the kesh, and many of the peoples of this world, an absence or lack of clothing is not a scandalous event, though in Yenna’s time it was growing increasingly so. Rural farmers deride the restrictive and costly nature of the caparison covering their lower halves, given the size and weight of such garments, but kesh of the time all agreed that one appeared considerably more ‘civilised’ when fully clothed. To be completely unclothed is often associated with a feeling of vulnerability or barbarity, though personal preference can swing the other way. Interestingly, mereu culturally abhor being seen even partially undressed, and even their earliest depictions render them clad in cloaks of leaves. However, this author will endeavour to keep the sensibilities of your world in mind when forming descriptions—unlike one Yenna Bookbinder, whose gaze was frequently wandering.

² - Case in point for Yenna’s appreciation of the feminine, the original almanac spends a florid two paragraphs simply describing this bandage dressing. Some contemporaries had dismissed it down to her being unused to such an act, but it is with hindsight we know that Mage Yenna was quite fond of women. I will do my best to impart upon you the intent of Yenna’s writing without wasting countless words on the ‘breathtaking closeness’ of certain yolm women.

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