proud deathcraft

The End

Enter: Their shared death, their great equalizer. They spent the velvet of the dark ages first as hostile, then as working accomplices, then as neighbors, then as something more, that undefinable characteristic of intimacy and collective need, but not yet desire.

First act of kindness: when she rose (the first time) he waited still, plying her cocoon with firewood that lit it up against the Shadow like a bright billowing autumn leaf of a lantern. And after emerging (the first time) she agreed to use magic again; agreed to manipulate it, to play with it, to let it sing its own songs. 

After he found the first of the dragons in its slick of death, she used magic to build paddocks from carved selenite posts; she hung lanterns of sunlight around their camp; she pulled a dead river back to life and sunk wells for the troughs of the horde.

Hadden had hand-built his cabin, felling its stone logs from their new world’s endless petrified forest; above it, held in a cradle of dead air she hung her new ootheca, woven from new silk she spun from the dead planet’s dead dust. They squatted their new homes on the tip of the dead cliff’s obsidian tongue and got on with their work. 

In the beginning, they spoke of escape: she could (still) portal, after all, and he was (still) stronger than anyone above them.

But Annwn, or Death: natural habitat for a duet of Necromancers. They kept it clean for the mortal souls that needed no aid to pass through; kept daily watch on the cosmic slick at the back of the red cave that caught immortal souls needing necrotizing release.

They did this satisfactorily for many centuries and Hadden eventually found immense contentment in his deathcraft. But he would not release any dragons he could nurse back to life, his hoarded husbandry well-rewarded with a herded horde. 

She, however, compulsively released herself from Death every seven thousand years. She wreaked havoc on the cycle of life: release and containment, like a tide, receding before rushing.

Need deepened to knowledge deepened to desire deepened to love: the thread she used to pull her raft home to him.