Between the Bones by Adan Jerreat-Poole
In a gothic underworld, Edith is captivated by a fellow student of necromancy - although their teacher is determined to pit them against each other.
Proximal Phalanx
I saw her hands first, spidery fingers skittering across yellowed bone as they coaxed a shattered knuckle joint back together - not an archeologist studying the human form, but a god creating life. The reanimated skeleton knelt before her like a supplicant at a shrine, but my gaze lingered on the curve of her finger joint, a perfect hinge. Her touch brought breath to the breathless; she made broken things whole.
Necromancy is a science, my teacher at the academy used to say. He said it so often it was part of a popular undergrad drinking game. We'd all take furtive sips of whiskey from our flasks in an auditorium that smelled of dust and leather and decaying keratin. Later, Professor Acton supervised my Master's thesis on the symbiotic relationship between the undead and a particular species of earthworm that only lived in the lower crypts. A science, Edith, not an art. Precise, immutable, exact. Cold and unforgiving; knowledge that could cut as sure as a sliver of shinbone.
But she made it look like music, a conductor ushering an orchestra to crescendo.
I'd heard about her, of course. She was strange, the other students whispered, cold as the undead she kept company with. Not like the rest of us, huddled together to keep warm, passing a bottle of cheap vodka back and forth, lighting candles and daring each other to step on the fresh graves when the Dean wasn't looking. We were in a ghost story; she was in a chivalric romance. Even her name, Luciferin, belonged down here with the shimmering flora and fauna. I heard she'd picked it herself.
No one could make the skeletons dance like she could, ballerinas perfecting their pirouettes over the funerary grounds.
Maxillary Canine
My peers grew tired of perpetual twilight and the stink of fresh soil and dead skin. They left the whispering mausoleums behind and crawled towards the surface, reaching for sunlight and train tickets and the glitter of solar panels on skyscrapers in the cities above ground. But I had grave dirt under my fingernails, and I'd come to admire the opaline tinge of cyanosis.
I stayed, and so did she.
In our first semester of grad school, we were both assigned to work as teaching assistants for an introductory class entitled "Demystifying Death." We showed fresh-faced, wide-eyed students how to coax a spirit from a corpse - the easier process; only upper years would practice the reverse, and few would master it - and how to prepare a body for funerary rites.
One night, I caught her singing to the dead. They were laid out on a stone table like the centerpiece of a kingly, if macabre, banquet. Waiting for our scalpels, our prayers, our soft hands ghosting inside their body cavities.
I caught a flash of her left canine: slightly pointed, yellowing. I guessed the mesiodistal width of the tooth was 7.3 mm, and the gum sulcus looked healthy, 3 mm max - I'd always had a knack for anatomical mathematics. The edge of her tooth gleamed like pearl, and I fumbled the aspirator, the instrument clattering to the ground.
Her song cut off, sharp as a wire, and her head turned to me.
I was already gone, fading back into the shadows. I had learned early how to move softly over the sacred earth, how to fold myself into quiet dark. I was a servant of the bones, my mouth full of memory and mourning. I had never been very good with living, breathing people - could never say the right words, could never make my face twist into the perfect puppet smile.
I wanted her attention, but it scared me. I didn't trust my face, my underused vocal cords. She only ever looked at the dead; the rest of us were spectres, haunting her, or perhaps a hazy cloud of gnats - irritants, but essential to the ecosystem. She tolerated us.
When she sang, I could see the lipless mouths of the dead curve into smiles.
The power she had over them, she had over me, too.
Orbital Socket
Most necromancers, the ones used for ordinary banishings and possessions and everyday funerary rituals, do not need additional training after graduate school. They enter an apprenticeship and dwell forever in that liminal space between life and death, light and darkness. They are a bridge between worlds, the fascia of society.
I desired to go deeper. I longed to explore the ancient tombs, commune with eternal spirits, and birth the undead into their secondary consciousness. I continued my studies. She was my only peer, now, and soon, a rival - Professor Acton was constantly pitting us against each other, pushing us to compete.
"That reanimation is sloppy, Edith. You forgot to rotate the left ankle. Lucy's was superior."
"Your reconstruction of the thoracic spine needs work, Lucy. Do you want to be a grave digger for the rest of your career?"
"Grey's theory of soul attachment is derivative of Whitlock, and it's been disproven." (This was in response to my latest paper proposal for the annual Symposium of the Graves. Only one of us would be allowed to give a lecture, and I wanted it so badly I woke up with muscle aches and jaw spasms.)
Every dismissal scaped away the thin epidermal layer of my confidence until I thought plasma would be leaking from my pores. Years of study and practice and devotion, and I was no better than my students, who thought I couldn't smell the moonshine on their breath. They were children who flinched away from skeletons, their eyes wide as flashlights, limbs tangled together as if trying to keep themselves from getting swept away by an undertow. I had let the currents take me, but now I was drowning.
I fought back tears at Professor Acton's harsh words, but she was stoic and unyielding, her eyes on the ground, as if she could see through the rock and earth to the bodies underneath us. As if she knew where her future lay - at the heart of the Tomb, at the apex of our reversed mountain. I resented her confidence, her gaze that always looked further into the dark, and I hated myself for it.
"If you kept up with the contemporaries, like Lucy does -"
"Luciferin," she said.
His voice stuttered and stopped, the interruption unscheduled and unwelcome. "What?"
Her voice was calm and measured. "My name isn't Lucy. It's Luciferin."
I raised my head to look at her, scandalized and overwhelmed by this small act of resistance. She wasn't looking at the dead, or at our professor as he praised her superior theoretical framework.
She was looking at me.
Our eyes met, and electricity pulsed between us. My stomach cramped up, and I forgot about Whitlock and the symposium and my aching tendons.
Her eyes were brown, cool and steel-tinged. They reminded me of the ceremonial pools where I'd strewn flowers for the plague deaths to soothe their restless spirits. They reminded me of veins of ore shimmering across the jet walls of the first sepulcher.
I held her gaze, my heart twitching out of rhythm.
Nail Plate
I didn't see her for six months after graduation. I was assigned to the ancestral haven, spending hours every day trimming the nails of the dead as carefully as a gardener prunes topiary. My new supervisor, a pitchfork of a woman, did not approve of speaking to the dead unless they had been reanimated or were haunted by a playful spirit and could respond directly. But I remembered the way the skeletons had smiled for Luciferin, and so I spoke to them nonetheless, when no one was watching me. I told them of Grey's theory of soul attachment, of the phosphorescent fungi that was taking over the embalming rooms, and of her perfect, ridged fingernails.
I had no one else to talk to.
It wasn't lonely. I could feel the soft chill of the dead brush against me like a cat rubbing against my knees and purring for attention. I held the hands of those who had died centuries ago. I felt honoured to serve them.
But I missed her, the shimmer of bioluminescent moss to my dull slate. We were stalactites and stalagmites, sparring with oleander and lace and loam black as rot. I wanted to be the dead she sang to. I wanted to surrender control over my motor functions to her. I feverishly wrote in a journal, If I die, give my corpse to Luciferin. It was the only gift I could think of that I thought she would appreciate.
Alone, I stagnated, as unchanging as the brackish water lit by spirit lanterns that flowed between burial mounds.
Lateral Cuneiform
Abruptly, I was summoned away from the lullaby of service. A malevolent spirit with the power to control the dead was shambling its way to the world of the living. An army of half-built skeletons, mostly rats and squirrels and other small creatures, followed behind it like ribbons on the tail of a kite.
A spirit with that kind of power meant only one thing: necromancer. A former professor who had died angry or unsatisfied. Perhaps it didn't like the way I spoke to the dead as I cut their nails, or the way she sang in the sanctuaries of silence. Perhaps it simply wished, once again, to have the kind of power it wielded when it was alive.
I cleaned my obsidian ritual knife, packed salt and rosewater, and went to war.
She was waiting for me in the vestibule between the apex of the underworld and the above; the acolytes-in-training called it the 'scab' - what kept us, the blood vessels of society, from oxidizing in the sunlight. A knife was clutched in spindly fingers, and her hair had grown long and tangled. I felt the familiar sting in my elbow, that itch to impress her. She nodded at me, and I nodded back. The silence changed; it was humid and static and tasted of floral perfume.
We drew circles in the dirt, buried the donated bones, and sprinkled the lines with salt. I noted the difference between us - I moved in a counterclockwise fashion, while she favoured clockwise. My lines were simple but deep, while hers were thin and ornamented, a tangle of geometric and organic shapes rioting across the protective barrier. She had always been the artist; I had the mind and hands of a scientist. I had been trained that way.
The undead came too soon, and I shuddered inside my circle as the skeletons entered the chamber. A badger started digging out the bones of my enclosure, and a rabbit scratched at the lines.
"It won't hold for long," she said, her eyes on the human skeleton that guided them.
We threw salt and rosewater at the horde, reciting prayers to sooth angry spirits. Nothing worked. We raised our blades as a warning, a threat - only to be ignored.
"We have to end this before they reach the surface," she said.
"Protocol says -"
But it was too late - she stepped outside her circle.
I felt the enchantment shatter, brittle as ice. My fingers tightened around the blade. A dozen half-decayed rat skeletons swarmed her, but she moved as gracefully as a dancer switching partners. Soon, she had reached the horror at the centre. The horror that, one day, could be me. Could be us.
The dead necromancer tried to match her movements with sharpened bones and old teeth, clawing at her soft, mortal body, but it couldn't touch her. Each step was awkward, more than I would expect from a risen necromancer.
Then I saw it - a small bone in the left foot, twisted awkwardly, clicking against its neighbours. The body had been buried broken. Pain bloomed behind my eyes - to disrespect the dead like that was a great taboo.
Her blade arched towards its spinal cord. A beheading was the surest way to stop the unruly dead. Yet somehow, I found my thin, unpracticed voice. "Wait!"
She hesitated, her blade stuttering a fraction of an inch from its neck.
I swallowed, and my eyes lingered on the imperfect architecture of its body. "The gait. It's misaligned. Someone buried it too quickly, without setting the bone. Wait, please."
She kept her knife levelled at the skeleton. A single movement, and she would sever the spirit from bone. A single moment, and it would be over - and the spirit would be gone, and guilt would grow in my stomach like black mold.
"Please," I repeated. "Trust me."
Tension tightened her jawline, and I could feel the sharpening of my shoulder blades. We held life in death in our hands, and for the first time, I felt that weight.
Slowly, she lowered the knife.
I exhaled shakily and moved towards the animated cadaver. "May I?" I gestured at the foot.
It inclined its head and then stilled, unmoving as only the dead can be. Carefully, I bent down, replacing obsidian with copper wire and linen bandages. I coaxed the bones back into place while murmuring the litany of rest. A moment later, another voice joined mine in a choral chant of respect and understanding. I could feel her watching me, and a thrill shivered across my spine.
Around us, an army of undead creatures waited like a rapt audience.
Distal Phalanx
The Dean murmured a list of academic achievements as I wrapped Professor Acton in the shroud of grey and gold, making sure that the symbol of the Tomb was perfectly aligned over his unbeating heart. This was how we paid homage to our colleagues as we delivered them to the grave as gently as an obstetrician welcomes an infant into the world.
Beside me, Luciferin cut his hair to give to his widow, then wrapped his arms in the rust and phlegm-coloured ribbons of the academy. We were his last students, so it was our burden and honour to do the rites. The tip of her finger brushed against mine; it was colder than rigor mortis, and softer than aged bones that have been marinating in soil for generations.
For the first time, a dangerous freedom slipped between my ribcage, and in my mind's eye, I flashed through a hundred moments and words and commands. Acton was gone. I felt his absence like a lost tooth, a palpable gap that I probed until my gums were sore. There would be no more competition, no more scrabbling over scraps of approval. My hands shook at her nearness. (The Dean was still talking, something about lifelong service, something about deepening our understanding of pelvic girdle alignment.)
"What are you doing after this?" she whispered, her eyes still turned towards our deceased mentor.
"Anything you want," I said, the words dragged from a dry throat that hadn't spoken in several hours. The words scraped my throat, drawing blood. It felt fitting, to taste copper and iron during a funeral. "Anything, as long as it's with you."
When the rest of the necromancers had left, we lit the ceremonial candles in silence, our bodies symmetrical, our movements aligned and flawless - mathematically precise. He would have approved of that, I think.
Then we held vigil, watching the fire burn down as his body, in the waning light, metamorphosized into a corpse, leaving an empty husk behind.
I risked a glance at my rival, my colleague, the woman who danced with the dead. A strand of hair was stuck to her lip. The skin was dry and cracked, and at the corner of her mouth a scab was crusted with black blood. We were all parched and withered down here, slowly mummifying next to our dead. She was beautiful.
Her eyes found mine, and I felt that pulse between us again - not hot as fire, but cold as the geometry of frost, artful as the cracks radiating from a shattered fibula. Slowly, I reached out and pressed my thumb against the wound. I could feel her pulse beating, or maybe it was my own pulse. Maybe we had one heartbeat between us; after all, we were closer to the undead than to our families and friends on the surface.
I heard her inhale, a quiet, sweet sound. I let my hand fall from her face, embarrassed and desperate and unsure. She reached for me, intertwining our fingers until the knuckle bones rubbed together, the friction rough and electric. Our hands had the appearance of a ribcage, holding something precious between the bones.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
I saw her hands first, spidery fingers skittering across yellowed bone as they coaxed a shattered knuckle joint back together - not an archeologist studying the human form, but a god creating life. The reanimated skeleton knelt before her like a supplicant at a shrine, but my gaze lingered on the curve of her finger joint, a perfect hinge. Her touch brought breath to the breathless; she made broken things whole.
Necromancy is a science, my teacher at the academy used to say. He said it so often it was part of a popular undergrad drinking game. We'd all take furtive sips of whiskey from our flasks in an auditorium that smelled of dust and leather and decaying keratin. Later, Professor Acton supervised my Master's thesis on the symbiotic relationship between the undead and a particular species of earthworm that only lived in the lower crypts. A science, Edith, not an art. Precise, immutable, exact. Cold and unforgiving; knowledge that could cut as sure as a sliver of shinbone.
But she made it look like music, a conductor ushering an orchestra to crescendo.
I'd heard about her, of course. She was strange, the other students whispered, cold as the undead she kept company with. Not like the rest of us, huddled together to keep warm, passing a bottle of cheap vodka back and forth, lighting candles and daring each other to step on the fresh graves when the Dean wasn't looking. We were in a ghost story; she was in a chivalric romance. Even her name, Luciferin, belonged down here with the shimmering flora and fauna. I heard she'd picked it herself.
No one could make the skeletons dance like she could, ballerinas perfecting their pirouettes over the funerary grounds.
Maxillary Canine
My peers grew tired of perpetual twilight and the stink of fresh soil and dead skin. They left the whispering mausoleums behind and crawled towards the surface, reaching for sunlight and train tickets and the glitter of solar panels on skyscrapers in the cities above ground. But I had grave dirt under my fingernails, and I'd come to admire the opaline tinge of cyanosis.
I stayed, and so did she.
In our first semester of grad school, we were both assigned to work as teaching assistants for an introductory class entitled "Demystifying Death." We showed fresh-faced, wide-eyed students how to coax a spirit from a corpse - the easier process; only upper years would practice the reverse, and few would master it - and how to prepare a body for funerary rites.
One night, I caught her singing to the dead. They were laid out on a stone table like the centerpiece of a kingly, if macabre, banquet. Waiting for our scalpels, our prayers, our soft hands ghosting inside their body cavities.
I caught a flash of her left canine: slightly pointed, yellowing. I guessed the mesiodistal width of the tooth was 7.3 mm, and the gum sulcus looked healthy, 3 mm max - I'd always had a knack for anatomical mathematics. The edge of her tooth gleamed like pearl, and I fumbled the aspirator, the instrument clattering to the ground.
Her song cut off, sharp as a wire, and her head turned to me.
I was already gone, fading back into the shadows. I had learned early how to move softly over the sacred earth, how to fold myself into quiet dark. I was a servant of the bones, my mouth full of memory and mourning. I had never been very good with living, breathing people - could never say the right words, could never make my face twist into the perfect puppet smile.
I wanted her attention, but it scared me. I didn't trust my face, my underused vocal cords. She only ever looked at the dead; the rest of us were spectres, haunting her, or perhaps a hazy cloud of gnats - irritants, but essential to the ecosystem. She tolerated us.
When she sang, I could see the lipless mouths of the dead curve into smiles.
The power she had over them, she had over me, too.
Orbital Socket
Most necromancers, the ones used for ordinary banishings and possessions and everyday funerary rituals, do not need additional training after graduate school. They enter an apprenticeship and dwell forever in that liminal space between life and death, light and darkness. They are a bridge between worlds, the fascia of society.
I desired to go deeper. I longed to explore the ancient tombs, commune with eternal spirits, and birth the undead into their secondary consciousness. I continued my studies. She was my only peer, now, and soon, a rival - Professor Acton was constantly pitting us against each other, pushing us to compete.
"That reanimation is sloppy, Edith. You forgot to rotate the left ankle. Lucy's was superior."
"Your reconstruction of the thoracic spine needs work, Lucy. Do you want to be a grave digger for the rest of your career?"
"Grey's theory of soul attachment is derivative of Whitlock, and it's been disproven." (This was in response to my latest paper proposal for the annual Symposium of the Graves. Only one of us would be allowed to give a lecture, and I wanted it so badly I woke up with muscle aches and jaw spasms.)
Every dismissal scaped away the thin epidermal layer of my confidence until I thought plasma would be leaking from my pores. Years of study and practice and devotion, and I was no better than my students, who thought I couldn't smell the moonshine on their breath. They were children who flinched away from skeletons, their eyes wide as flashlights, limbs tangled together as if trying to keep themselves from getting swept away by an undertow. I had let the currents take me, but now I was drowning.
I fought back tears at Professor Acton's harsh words, but she was stoic and unyielding, her eyes on the ground, as if she could see through the rock and earth to the bodies underneath us. As if she knew where her future lay - at the heart of the Tomb, at the apex of our reversed mountain. I resented her confidence, her gaze that always looked further into the dark, and I hated myself for it.
"If you kept up with the contemporaries, like Lucy does -"
"Luciferin," she said.
His voice stuttered and stopped, the interruption unscheduled and unwelcome. "What?"
Her voice was calm and measured. "My name isn't Lucy. It's Luciferin."
I raised my head to look at her, scandalized and overwhelmed by this small act of resistance. She wasn't looking at the dead, or at our professor as he praised her superior theoretical framework.
She was looking at me.
Our eyes met, and electricity pulsed between us. My stomach cramped up, and I forgot about Whitlock and the symposium and my aching tendons.
Her eyes were brown, cool and steel-tinged. They reminded me of the ceremonial pools where I'd strewn flowers for the plague deaths to soothe their restless spirits. They reminded me of veins of ore shimmering across the jet walls of the first sepulcher.
I held her gaze, my heart twitching out of rhythm.
Nail Plate
I didn't see her for six months after graduation. I was assigned to the ancestral haven, spending hours every day trimming the nails of the dead as carefully as a gardener prunes topiary. My new supervisor, a pitchfork of a woman, did not approve of speaking to the dead unless they had been reanimated or were haunted by a playful spirit and could respond directly. But I remembered the way the skeletons had smiled for Luciferin, and so I spoke to them nonetheless, when no one was watching me. I told them of Grey's theory of soul attachment, of the phosphorescent fungi that was taking over the embalming rooms, and of her perfect, ridged fingernails.
I had no one else to talk to.
It wasn't lonely. I could feel the soft chill of the dead brush against me like a cat rubbing against my knees and purring for attention. I held the hands of those who had died centuries ago. I felt honoured to serve them.
But I missed her, the shimmer of bioluminescent moss to my dull slate. We were stalactites and stalagmites, sparring with oleander and lace and loam black as rot. I wanted to be the dead she sang to. I wanted to surrender control over my motor functions to her. I feverishly wrote in a journal, If I die, give my corpse to Luciferin. It was the only gift I could think of that I thought she would appreciate.
Alone, I stagnated, as unchanging as the brackish water lit by spirit lanterns that flowed between burial mounds.
Lateral Cuneiform
Abruptly, I was summoned away from the lullaby of service. A malevolent spirit with the power to control the dead was shambling its way to the world of the living. An army of half-built skeletons, mostly rats and squirrels and other small creatures, followed behind it like ribbons on the tail of a kite.
A spirit with that kind of power meant only one thing: necromancer. A former professor who had died angry or unsatisfied. Perhaps it didn't like the way I spoke to the dead as I cut their nails, or the way she sang in the sanctuaries of silence. Perhaps it simply wished, once again, to have the kind of power it wielded when it was alive.
I cleaned my obsidian ritual knife, packed salt and rosewater, and went to war.
She was waiting for me in the vestibule between the apex of the underworld and the above; the acolytes-in-training called it the 'scab' - what kept us, the blood vessels of society, from oxidizing in the sunlight. A knife was clutched in spindly fingers, and her hair had grown long and tangled. I felt the familiar sting in my elbow, that itch to impress her. She nodded at me, and I nodded back. The silence changed; it was humid and static and tasted of floral perfume.
We drew circles in the dirt, buried the donated bones, and sprinkled the lines with salt. I noted the difference between us - I moved in a counterclockwise fashion, while she favoured clockwise. My lines were simple but deep, while hers were thin and ornamented, a tangle of geometric and organic shapes rioting across the protective barrier. She had always been the artist; I had the mind and hands of a scientist. I had been trained that way.
The undead came too soon, and I shuddered inside my circle as the skeletons entered the chamber. A badger started digging out the bones of my enclosure, and a rabbit scratched at the lines.
"It won't hold for long," she said, her eyes on the human skeleton that guided them.
We threw salt and rosewater at the horde, reciting prayers to sooth angry spirits. Nothing worked. We raised our blades as a warning, a threat - only to be ignored.
"We have to end this before they reach the surface," she said.
"Protocol says -"
But it was too late - she stepped outside her circle.
I felt the enchantment shatter, brittle as ice. My fingers tightened around the blade. A dozen half-decayed rat skeletons swarmed her, but she moved as gracefully as a dancer switching partners. Soon, she had reached the horror at the centre. The horror that, one day, could be me. Could be us.
The dead necromancer tried to match her movements with sharpened bones and old teeth, clawing at her soft, mortal body, but it couldn't touch her. Each step was awkward, more than I would expect from a risen necromancer.
Then I saw it - a small bone in the left foot, twisted awkwardly, clicking against its neighbours. The body had been buried broken. Pain bloomed behind my eyes - to disrespect the dead like that was a great taboo.
Her blade arched towards its spinal cord. A beheading was the surest way to stop the unruly dead. Yet somehow, I found my thin, unpracticed voice. "Wait!"
She hesitated, her blade stuttering a fraction of an inch from its neck.
I swallowed, and my eyes lingered on the imperfect architecture of its body. "The gait. It's misaligned. Someone buried it too quickly, without setting the bone. Wait, please."
She kept her knife levelled at the skeleton. A single movement, and she would sever the spirit from bone. A single moment, and it would be over - and the spirit would be gone, and guilt would grow in my stomach like black mold.
"Please," I repeated. "Trust me."
Tension tightened her jawline, and I could feel the sharpening of my shoulder blades. We held life in death in our hands, and for the first time, I felt that weight.
Slowly, she lowered the knife.
I exhaled shakily and moved towards the animated cadaver. "May I?" I gestured at the foot.
It inclined its head and then stilled, unmoving as only the dead can be. Carefully, I bent down, replacing obsidian with copper wire and linen bandages. I coaxed the bones back into place while murmuring the litany of rest. A moment later, another voice joined mine in a choral chant of respect and understanding. I could feel her watching me, and a thrill shivered across my spine.
Around us, an army of undead creatures waited like a rapt audience.
Distal Phalanx
The Dean murmured a list of academic achievements as I wrapped Professor Acton in the shroud of grey and gold, making sure that the symbol of the Tomb was perfectly aligned over his unbeating heart. This was how we paid homage to our colleagues as we delivered them to the grave as gently as an obstetrician welcomes an infant into the world.
Beside me, Luciferin cut his hair to give to his widow, then wrapped his arms in the rust and phlegm-coloured ribbons of the academy. We were his last students, so it was our burden and honour to do the rites. The tip of her finger brushed against mine; it was colder than rigor mortis, and softer than aged bones that have been marinating in soil for generations.
For the first time, a dangerous freedom slipped between my ribcage, and in my mind's eye, I flashed through a hundred moments and words and commands. Acton was gone. I felt his absence like a lost tooth, a palpable gap that I probed until my gums were sore. There would be no more competition, no more scrabbling over scraps of approval. My hands shook at her nearness. (The Dean was still talking, something about lifelong service, something about deepening our understanding of pelvic girdle alignment.)
"What are you doing after this?" she whispered, her eyes still turned towards our deceased mentor.
"Anything you want," I said, the words dragged from a dry throat that hadn't spoken in several hours. The words scraped my throat, drawing blood. It felt fitting, to taste copper and iron during a funeral. "Anything, as long as it's with you."
When the rest of the necromancers had left, we lit the ceremonial candles in silence, our bodies symmetrical, our movements aligned and flawless - mathematically precise. He would have approved of that, I think.
Then we held vigil, watching the fire burn down as his body, in the waning light, metamorphosized into a corpse, leaving an empty husk behind.
I risked a glance at my rival, my colleague, the woman who danced with the dead. A strand of hair was stuck to her lip. The skin was dry and cracked, and at the corner of her mouth a scab was crusted with black blood. We were all parched and withered down here, slowly mummifying next to our dead. She was beautiful.
Her eyes found mine, and I felt that pulse between us again - not hot as fire, but cold as the geometry of frost, artful as the cracks radiating from a shattered fibula. Slowly, I reached out and pressed my thumb against the wound. I could feel her pulse beating, or maybe it was my own pulse. Maybe we had one heartbeat between us; after all, we were closer to the undead than to our families and friends on the surface.
I heard her inhale, a quiet, sweet sound. I let my hand fall from her face, embarrassed and desperate and unsure. She reached for me, intertwining our fingers until the knuckle bones rubbed together, the friction rough and electric. Our hands had the appearance of a ribcage, holding something precious between the bones.
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