Nightmares and Necromancers
(Part 11 of the Afterlife Chronicles)

	In the sea of ink, in the place of my dreams, I floated endlessly without rhyme or reason.  I don’t know how long I’d floated, but I had for what felt like moments.  I slowly opened my eyes in that sea of Black and saw in the distance, a shadowy creature.  Hulking and massive with two horns of jet extending from its skull, its bright gold eyes watched me like a hawk watches its prey.  As I stared, it suddenly gapped its jaws and laughed the same eerie laugh from the day I’d died.

      ~Thirteen years later~

      I jerked awake and looked around in fright.  No one should know I’m here.  Panic set in as I noticed there were ornate candle holders embedded in the walls.  The stark white candles burned brightly in them, illuminating the once darkness.  How did they find me? How long had I been asleep?  Before those thoughts could finish playing through my mind, pain unlike anything I’d ever felt burned every fiber of my being.

	Oh gods… It was like I was being baptized in the flames of hell.  I looked down at myself, ready to pat out the flames when I saw my body wasn’t on fire… and that I was only merely bones.  I had never seen my own bones before, except my teeth but those don’t count.  I stared in horror at my empty ribcage, my pelvis, my legs and feet.  They were stark white against the dark brown of the cave dirt.  I raised a hand and saw it was only bone as well.  How I could move it, I didn’t know.  It was then that I realized I couldn’t feel anything other than that burning, which, while at first had been intense, was now playing in the background of everything else like terrible music.

	The candle light made my bones mar the dirt with shadows of black.  It was a marvelous horror that was both incredible and sickening.  I couldn’t understand why I’d lost my flesh, or how I was even still alive.  That was when he entered.  Like being birthed by the shadows, he materialized from them and gazed down at me.  He had hair the color of pitch slicked back against his head and wore clothes of nearly the same hue.  Only his hands, neck and face were uncovered, revealing skin pale from lack of sunlight.  Everything about him radiated human, yet not human.  All I knew is the second my gaze locked on him, hunger ignited.  How could I feel hungry, or even see, without organs?  I was off the ground in an instant and launched myself at him but before I could reach him, he held out a single hand.

	I froze in the air, held by a force I couldn’t see but could feel.  On the back of his hand, a single rune glowed the same eerie green as his eyes.  “You have been asleep a long time it seems,” he said in a slow, cold voice that neared monotony.  “Your flesh has rotted away, leaving you weak and hungry.  Pathetic.”  He dropped his hand and the force that was holding me in place vanished.  I fell to the ground in a heap, unable to move, feeling like all the strength had been sapped from my body.  “You need to feed again, or else you really will die.”

	I tried to open my mouth but no sound came out, however he seemed to know what I was saying. “What do you want?” he mimicked my voice perfectly, “I want your service.  When you feed again, you will be many times more powerful than you were before.  You will be reborn a perfect representation of your DNA.  A masterpiece of God and Devil’s creation.  I want your power.”  He laughed suddenly a painful sound, cold and cruel; obviously hearing what I was thinking, “Fuck you.  Is that really what you want to say to Logan, your savior?”  I could hear a shuffling coming from further up the cave and I managed to raise my head to watch a grotesquery shamble in, dragging an unconscious human along.

	This monster was tall and brutish, possessing sickly gray skin and a shaved head.  Here and there he looked stapled and stitched together.  His only modesty was a simple hide around his hips.  “This is Goliath and he is one of my faithful servants.  He is a Zombie, though not quite like you.  He is the product of my powers as a Necromancer, thus has no mind or soul of his own,” the man explained.  “My other servant Nostros guards the entrance of this cave, and has done so for the past three years, ever since I found you here.”

	Oh god, he’d known about me for three solid years and I hadn’t even stirred once.  What had that monster been in my dream?  I was sure that I had only awakened because of it, but I knew not to count my blessings or fear the worst.  “Now eat or I’ll force you to do so,” spoke Logan once again, watching me with the same hawk-like gaze as the monster in my dreams.  He didn’t have to tell me, I was already crawling over to the unconscious woman Goliath held by the hair.  I set into her with a hunger the many years of my sleep had brought on.  I picked clean the bones then watched as they turned to ash.  With that, I looked down at my hands… nothing was happening.  “Wait for it,” Logan purred, smiling a sickly grin that I did not notice.

	If I could have screamed, I would have shattered eardrums and curdled blood.  Unlike the fiery burn of that bone deep hunger, this pain was like God’s wrath, terrible beyond words and human inkling.  My brain and nerves, then blood vessels and organs grew out of nothing, filling the spaces inside my ribs and wrapping around my bones.  Muscles grew next, cloaking organ and smothering bone.  The pain slowly eased as pale skin covered muscle.  My new eyes took everything in with a clarity that my phantom ones couldn’t achieve, but the blinking of my eyelids was like sandpaper against wounds.  Hair from my scalp, eyebrows and eyelashes on my face, nails burst from fingertips and toes to glisten with bright blue blood.

	It was as I lay panting, each breath a labor, getting used to my new grown flesh, that the Skeleton Nostros walked into the light.  Wearing a rusted helmet and carrying a rusty blade in one hand, it threw a dusty but otherwise new blanket onto me.  The soft fabric abraded my skin almost painfully, but I sat up and wrapped it around me for modesty’s sake.  Logan had turned his attention away from me, kneeling and going through the discarded purse my meal left behind, and pulled out a small hand mirror.  “Look for yourself at your new body,” he said simply and held the mirror up for me to look upon my face.  The face in that mirror held none of the imperfections I knew should be there.  My nose was straight, my cheeks blemish free and without hint of hair.  My hair itself was a red like flame, so much unlike the rusty red it had been.  It was also long and straight, extending all the way down to my shoulders without hint of curl or wave.  Where before my skin had been sickly gray and translucent, it was now pale and here and there little blue veins could be seen, nothing noticeable unless you looked.

	“This is me?” my voice was hoarse, I’d not yet used it since growing back my lungs and voice box, and yet it was strangely velvet like.  “I don’t understand.  I don’t look… anything like I did.”  Scratch that, my eyes were still the same steel blue gray and still held the same cold, distant look in them.  On a sudden whim, I looked down and opened the blanket, looking at my chest and my legs, looking for but not finding the scars my body had picked up over years of being human.

	“You will find nothing of your human self on your new body.  That is the beauty of starting anew with this method.  You are a Revenant now.  Stronger than you ever were as a Zombie, even more so than you were as a human.  Very few of your kind ever make it to this state.  That is why you are a gem.  I must have you on my side,” Logan spoke, dropping the mirror as he straightened.  “But I am aware that you have been asleep for quite some time.  I will grant you the right to view how much the world has changed in your years of absence.”

	Without another word, he stepped aside and I struggled to my feet.  My body didn’t hurt anymore, in fact I felt so invigorated that I honestly wouldn’t doubt if I could run for a week without stopping.  I left the cave, never once glancing back, putting as much distance between me and that bastard of a Necromancer.  I didn’t want anything to do with him.  The world was messed up enough without worrying about whose side I was on…  But why the hell were there sides?  What had happened in my absence?  I had to know.

      I left the Rocky Mountains, walking basically blind in the afternoon light until I finally stumbled upon a road.  It was old and the pavement cracked, but that didn’t stop me from following it for several miles.  I had been watching my feet so long that I hadn’t even noticed the huge welcome sign till I had nearly walked into it.  “Welcome to Nightmare City,” I mumbled aloud, then laughed.  No city could be more frightening than the beast in my dreams.