The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Three

I followed Jack through the gardens. There was a long winding path that brought us through the middle of an overgrown garden. Flowers spilled out of their beds in wild disarray. There was something almost cheerful in their disorganized freedom.

In the distance I could see a great stone building. I'd call it a castle but that would imply something smaller than the building we were approaching. Its hulking mass cast a mammoth shadow across the gardens so that we were walking in darkness for hours before we reached the doorways.

I kept trying to crane my neck back to look at the building properly, but no matter how I turned my head, I couldn't seem to see the whole thing at once. The outside of the building looked at least as big as Brisbane... an entire city enclosed in monolithic walls. Jack kept turning to grin at me as we approached it and I thought he'd chosen the creepiest route to the – whatever it was.

"What is it?" I finally asked, starring at the mass of stone. If it weren't for the clearly delineated towers, I might have thought it was a mountain.

"That is The Great Court of the Fae," he said, in a way that you could hear the capital letters in his voice.

I feel like an idiot looking back on it. The sheer gravity of the building's façade, dripping with lines of moss, should have warned me. It looked like a battle scared and weary monster had collapsed against a landscape of beauty. Alarm bells should have gone off in my head; I should have at least wondered at the kind of society which would hold their "Great Court" in such a depraved and decrepit building.

But I didn't think that. Not then. Not until it was too late to run, screaming into the night.

Maybe I was just caught up in the magic of it all. I remember being so happy that all of this existed. That I wasn't the only strange and 'magical' creature in the universe, that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't as alone as I'd always thought.

I should have sensed the weight behind their magic. The eons of death and destruction which poisoned the land. It seems sickeningly ironic to me now; a necromancer who failed to notice death, but I'd been summoned there to raise the dead, it didn't seem like there was anything wrong about the feeling of death that permeated the atmosphere. What I can't stop cursing myself for not noticing, though, is the ghosts.

A city like Brisbane, which in the grand scheme of things, isn't that old, was literally crawling with ghosts. I shouldn't have been able to walk through a place as old as the otherworldly Court without being swamped by the dead, but I could. There wasn't a single ghost in the gardens, or the Great Court, or in the cemetery that night. I should have wondered where they were, but I didn't... until it was almost too late.

"What do you have to do with fairy politics?" Tyler asked, incredulous. He seemed to be struggling more with the idea of me being involved with politics than he did with the Fae's existence. I guess, after assimilating the idea that his roommate was a necromancer, nothing mythical fazed him. Or maybe he was just in the process of suspending disbelief. That seemed very Tyler somehow; suspend disbelief, suspend judgment, get the goddamned story.

"They actually prefer the Fae," I said, not wanting to voice any of my thoughts out loud. Why was it that, after everything, Tyler was the one whose reaction was unexpected? Why was he behaving so... unpredictably? "Most of them don't have wings and they're not particularly fond of being thought small."

"What do they look like then?"

"There are all different kinds, actually. They have this whole caste system depending on what species you are. But the higher orders, the royal court and everything, they look. Actually, they look a little too human. If you can imagine how we'd look if we were absolutely perfect..."