Broken Pieces: A Tale of Romance and Necromancy

[12]

Raizia woke up surrounded by darkness.

She sat up—but didn't make it very far. Her forehead slammed into something hard.

"Ow!" she cried, reaching up to rub her head—but then her hand brushed against something.

It took her a second to realize she was in a very small space, and another second to recall the last thing that had happened to her.

We were in the graveyard... We banished the dark spirit... And then there was chanting...

Suddenly she realized what was going on.

"No. No, no!" she said, hands reaching out in front of her, tracing the hard box she had been placed in. She banged on the wood, but it didn't budge; if anything, a few specks of dirt trickled in through the tiny cracks at the edges of the coffin.

I'm being buried alive. Buried alive.

Her heart started racing. Her breaths came quickly, one after the other—but she forced herself to slow down.

Easy. I can't waste oxygen by hyperventilating.

It was so dark that she couldn't see a thing. But now that she had calmed herself down, she realized she could hear something.

She turned, pressing her ear to the wood, helping the sound from the above-world transmit.

After a few seconds of listening, she realized there must be a large crowd of people above her. She couldn't make out individual voices, but instead heard a cacophony of sound.

A gathering to witness my execution. Of course. Wonderful.

Suddenly, she thought of Aris. What had happened to him? Had he been captured as well? Was he also being punished, forced into another box in the ground?

No. Aris is too close to the King, and too high up in the leadership. They wouldn't do that to him, even if he had been consorting with a necromancer.

Raizia clenched her teeth. She needed to get out of this coffin. Otherwise, she would be dead—and unlike the other two times, this would be permanent.

"Come on, magick," she whispered, placing her hands on the coffin lid. "I've practiced with Aris all this time... please tell me I can do it on my own now."

She focused on her greatest desire—getting out of this coffin—and began to form the words of a spell. "Leshae... mytae... ooloo... viate..." She felt her magick well up inside her, warm and ready to be used. It traveled through her chest, snaking down her arms, through her wrists, into her hands—but then it stopped, refusing to flow out.

No, come on, she urged, focusing harder, chanting more loudly, pressing her hands against the wood with more of her strength. Destroy this coffin. Get me out of here. Get me out of here!

Yet despite her frantic pleadings, her magick still refused to come out.

Raizia's hands fell to her side. The chant died on her lips. And her eyes welled with tears. Shit, she thought. This is it. This is how I die.

Despite the fact that she had died before, she had never dwelled on the thought of eventually dying for good. It seemed far away, the curse of being young. She had once assumed that over the years she would slowly crumble away, losing pieces of herself with rogue spells, until she was nothing but a husk anyway, ready to enter the darkness that came after a long life of necromancy.

But now, for the first time in a long time, she didn't feel like an empty husk. Her life had started to mean something again. She had something—and someone—to live for.