dark-arts-and-crafts-universe - Tumblr blog

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 1 year

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 17)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Lorcan Verdigris is not a necromancer. Anymore. But when the leader of the local necro coven comes to him with a request he really, really can’t refuse, past collides with present and he finds himself back in a world he’d tried to leave behind. Someone is trying to steal a powerful magical artifact, one whose destruction could unleash chaos upon the city. Or save it from an even greater danger. Or do nothing at all. Who knows. See, this is exactly why Lorcan stopped messing with the stuff.

Unfortunately, one way or another, Lorcan’s the one stuck dealing with it. He’d like to say this is a challenge that will take all his magic and his ingenuity to overcome, but let’s be real, stopping this threat will take something even more dire: actual effort. At least he’s getting paid this time…

Previous | Table of Contents

Chapter 17: What Remains

Word count: 3,618

Content warnings: no major content warnings

So this is the last chapter of A Dying Art! I’ve been really nervous about posting this, wanted to make sure it was as good as it could be to end the story strong. I do plan to write more with these characters and universe (because wow is there a lot more story to tell) but this work represents the first major chunk of Lorcan’s arc. If you’ve stuck around until the end, thank you so much! I hope you had as much fun reading this as I did writing it.

Osiris did live up to their promise to pay him if he survived. They even threw in extra to cover expenses. Lorcan got the letter in his mail five days after the mall battle–he almost didn’t check until the kids pestered him about it. Alongside the cash was another message. It read: Darken my GameStop one more time, Lorcan Verdigris.

The normal people were definitely staring when Lorcan entered the mall. He couldn’t blame them–he’d found a big stick in the small patch of grass outside and was regularly jabbing it into the walls on the off-chance something started breathing. He tossed five rocks onto the escalator before deciding it was (probably) safe.

Of course, if the mall was still evil and liminal, his time sense would be killing him again and everything there was comfortably usual. So. His slipshod plan had worked, then. The scenesters hadn’t connected the mall dimension back to their plane of existence, and Osiris hadn’t taken the space for themselves. Maybe this incident wasn’t entirely over, but some things were back to the way they’d been.

“You did not bring your familiar this time,” Osiris’s voice greeted Lorcan as he stepped into the shop.

“Well, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice and I really will irradiate you to death.”

“We see,” they said, then: “That was not Dexter’s death curse.”

If Lorcan was a little bit snippy, it was because he was still catching up on sleep from the week before. He ran a hand through his hair, then asked, “Did you summon me to your shop to say things we both already knew?”

Because, duh. Dexter Young would never bury anything important in a place he and Lorcan had explored together. His trust extended just far enough to let him help with the mostly-useless first attempt, ten years ago.

But, “The prototype looked close enough to fool the others.”

“Not us, however.”

Yes. Osiris had all of Dexter’s memories. That was how that worked.

“I didn’t need to fool you,” he told them. “I just needed to get you in a position where it benefitted you to play along. The fight had been going long enough I figured you’d want it stalled, if nothing else.”

And they nodded slowly, like Lorcan had given them something they needed. “An intriguing gambit.”

There was almost a note of respect in their voice–exactly what Lorcan had hoped wasn’t going to happen. Aside from the ethical implications…he’d only been able to get the drop on Osiris because they’d underestimated him. He would bet that wasn’t going to happen in the future.

“Not without its consequences, of course,” the Crown said, probably thinking the same. “What you gained from the ploy must have been worth the risk.”

Not this again, Lorcan thought, pretending very suddenly to be interested in one video game on the shelf in front of him about…cars? “I thought my demands were clear enough. My son, and the petty, fleeting thrill of victory symbolized by a pair of overpriced shoes.”

Osiris let out a hum.

Before that hum could turn into a barbed comment, or worse a question, he added, “So I guess you won the fight, then? I mean, this place looks less hell-dimension than last time.”

He couldn’t say things seemed entirely normal–he was studiously avoiding the new, very artistic posters the Crown had added to the decor since last time–but it was still Osiris’s store, so he had to assume things had worked out for them.

“More or less,” they answered, with a tilt of their head. “After your…outburst, you could say the adrenaline of the moment had dimmed. The Dominion sought respite for their injuries–”

“Who the fuck is the Dominion?”

“The ‘scene crowd’. Their collective nom de guerre,” Osiris told him. They frowned. “They had a monologue about it when the fight began. Were you not there for that?”

“No, I was busy being left for dead,” he said.

“Ah.” They gave it a second’s thought and moved on, “The Dominion broke to in-fighting soon after you left–petty complaints about being ‘frightened’ and ‘dying’. It was as if they had not yet considered murdering a powerful necromancer might involve some degree of personal consequence. We know that you would never be so foolish.”

And Lorcan flinched at that, because it was true in exactly the way he didn’t want Osiris to think about. “They seemed pretty young,” he offered.

“In years, they did not differ much from you. In maturity…” They nodded once. “Their worldview is very much marked by youth: the old is worthless, everything must be fresh, new.”

“...like the New Osiris?”

A scowl. “That was part of the monologue, yes. A quite vainglorious sobriquet–the name Osiris is not for any common ruler to claim. It belonged to a truly admirable individual.”

Lorcan did not resist the urge to roll his eyes. “You know,” he drawled, “some people would pretend to be humble.”

The look of unamusement on Osiris’s face was expected. But it seemed different from usual. Somehow more solemn. “We mean the first Osiris. Contrary to popular belief, we chose the name out of respect.”

He turned that over in his head. The first necromancer in the area to call himself Osiris was before Lorcan’s time. But he did know the stories. “He convinced his enemies to merge their covens together,” he said, working through the thought. “No enchantments–supposedly–no shows of force. Just words and charisma.”

“Osiris the First achieved through will alone what for others required powerful magic.”

“And you…admire that?” he had to ask. Osiris (the Second) did value hard work, and skills separate from magic. The GameStop was proof of that.

What Osiris (the Second) didn’t bother with was charisma. Needing people, trusting people–Lorcan had seen their lip literally curl enough to know their disgust at the thought. The necromancer souls that made up the gestalt had needed people, and they’d failed to achieve anything close to the first Osiris. He’d think, with their ego, that would more likely lead to envy.

“You admire someone,” he repeated.

“We do have a heart, Verdigris,” they said. “On occasion it is capable of positive emotion.”

“So is this–” Lorcan pointed at himself, then the Crown, and the store. “--one of those rare moments of gratitude, then? Because I saved your ass back in that fight?”

There was the lip. “Whatever minor assistance you rendered was, truly, unnecessary in the grander scheme of things.” They paused. “But, as the opportunity did arise, we decided acquiescing to a momentary stalemate would allow us to allocate our remaining stamina for this upcoming shift. Besides which, the ritual circle had been damaged in the battle somehow.”

“Oh?”

“The liminal death dimension still exists,” Osiris explained, “but its connection to our own plane has been frayed. A new bridge would need to be built before the space is again usable.”

Little victories, Lorcan thought.

“As for the physical Spirit Halloween in this mall,” they continued. “It has vanished as quickly as it appeared. A front the entire time, we assume.”

Osiris let out a small huff of breath, not quite a sigh. It was still more defeated than Lorcan had ever seen them. “A clean victory would have been preferable, though it seems this time that was not quite possible.”

And for a moment, Lorcan could feel a sense of kinship with the wistfulness in the Crown’s voice.

“Things keep happening.” He looked down at his hands. “You don’t want to be the one who has to handle them. But you’re the one who’s there and that means it’s up to you. It sucks.”

“Indeed. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the’…” They trailed off mid-quote, and pointed to their crown upon their head. A soft, halfway-chuckle slipped out of their mouth. “True rest escapes us still. The Dominion’s fiendish accountancy knows few bounds.”

“I thought you’d have dealt with that by now.”

“You know as well as we that the advent of online shopping was the dagger in the metaphorical intestine of the American mall,” they informed him. “It bleeds slow, but death is certain.” Sad silhouettes of signage flashed into Lorcan’s mind. Empty halls and dusty floors.

“The only locations turning a profit at this complex are this GameStop and–” Osiris let out a disgusted shudder. “--the Hot Topic. Pre-orders alone may not be enough. We will likely need to devote even greater attention to this job simply to hold the line. We may even have to cut down on our extracurricular murders.”

Hm. “That’s rough.”

“Yes. We must all make sacrifices in this trying time.” Then, after a pause, “Or rather, some of us must make fewer sacrifices. But the time of separating business from magic, at least, is at an end.”

Lorcan wouldn’t say no to less extracurricular murder, but it was overall a somber statement. A lot of necromantic status quo in the area was going to get upheaved. It might, emphasis on might, work out better for the locals for a new enemy to distract Osiris’s attention. But there was a lot of new room for innocents to get caught in the crossfire.

It had been the same way back before the Crown had merged into a necromantic gestalt, and Lorcan didn’t know what he, as one mid-tier wizard, could do to stop it.

“You did not answer our question, Verdigris.”

They were doing this, then? They were really doing this. “I’m pretty sure I did, actually,” he said. Argumentative, but there was no helping that.

“We wish to hear why you did what you did that night.”

“You know damn well why,” Lorcan snapped. “Is it really so confusing I might want to protect my children? My children who I love?”

“Perhaps.” Osiris raised an eyebrow. “It is such a feeble, human emotion, after all.”

Yeah, he didn’t buy that. “I’ve heard you do have a heart on occasion.”

It was too easy an answer: the evil, inhuman villain who does evil things because they don’t feel love. Better than admitting your old friend had just stopped caring. No, for all Osiris insisted they were no longer mortal and weak, their evil was human enough. Something about the specifics of Lorcan’s family did seem to be tripping up their inestimable wisdom. But it wasn’t that.

Osiris liked to avoid emotion. Lorcan knew firsthand that didn’t stop you from feeling it.

“And you know what,” he threw out like a challenge, “you never answered my question: did you call me here just to talk about things we both already know?”

The words were more confident than he felt, and Osiris stared at him, eyes piercing, stance sure. Lorcan tried not to shift, not to fidget. Whatever they were looking for, they were only going to see what he’d already explained. For a moment, he could see hesitation flickering in the dark of their eye.

When the Crown finally spoke, they said, “Dexter was surprised when you began calling yourself a father.”

And how could Lorcan respond to that except, “I was, too.” It was a vulnerable admission, and for once, Osiris didn’t press their advantage.

The feeling in the silence that fell prickled at his neck. It was almost like…uncertain smalltalk back in Belial’s tattoo parlor. A kind of verbal joust he still didn’t know the rules for. He was missing something big, he just didn’t know what. So there was a moment of relief when the door to the back of the shop opened, enough that he didn’t think to question who could be coming out of it.

There had to be wards hiding Jennifer Lynn’s shimmering spectral form from non-magical eyes. Even in a dying mall, there were too many people who would notice a translucent woman carrying a stack of games to the shelves like she was any normal employee. It was a sign of the upheaval Lorcan had been the unwitting architect of, he thought with a sinking heart. The days of the Crown Osiris’s GameStop being a place safe from magic were over.

Then he saw the person standing behind Jennifer Lynn.

Necromancy made a lot of common idioms hard to say with a straight face. So for Lorcan to say that spotting Kyle, in the flesh, carrying a stack of video games was like ‘seeing a ghost’--well, there was a ghost right in front of him. This was more shocking.

“You are staring,” Osiris noted.

“I’m just surprised to see him still–” Alive. “–employed.”

“Clearly we overestimated his ability to lead independently of our instruction,” they said. “It does not matter. We have long been in need of a footman whom we can provide with much firmer management.”

“And how’s Kyle feel about that?”

“Kyle?” Osiris asked him.

“Super grateful for not being dead, um, your royal magic-ness Opal ma’am!” The kid had a plastered-on smile that looked only halfway fake. “I mean, the new hours suck a bit, but it’s better than food service. Also being a, uh, footman comes with health insurance?”

It sounded more like a question than a statement. Lorcan glanced back at Osiris.

“We bound a wraith into the fabric of his soul to ensure his body will not expire before our use for him has,” they said. “That counts. Honestly, we would not have bothered in the first place,” they added with a wave of their hand. “But Jennifer Lynn saw potential in him.”

The realtor’s shade hadn’t looked at Lorcan since she walked out, almost pointedly ignoring him. It wasn’t until the split second where Osiris turned to examine a display that she met his eyes.

Huh, he thought. How about that?

Lorcan wasn’t going to insult Jennifer Lynn’s intelligence by letting slip any more than a single nod, barely more than a twitch of his neck. But when she pivoted back to her work as if nothing had even been communicated, he thought she got the gist.

It was a bigger favor than Lorcan thought he could ask for. The situation Kyle was in was not ideal by any means. It was a lot of trouble Lorcan didn’t know if he could get him out of. But more achievable than full resurrection–he wasn’t that good a necromancer.

“You will need somebody to keep the shop running,” he said, because anything that kept Osiris from doubting Jennifer Lynn’s judgment was good. “Even if you black-market-gem your way out of debt, the customers are what keep the mall alive in the first place.”

Osiris disfavored him with a sour look. “Why should we surrender our own wealth to fix others’ inadequacies? No, we have found a more ingenious solution to our budgetary distress,” they pronounced, eyes glittering. “We have garnished Kyle’s pay.”

Lorcan glanced over to Kyle. “Hooray for capitalism,” he said.

He shouldn’t even be surprised anymore. Osiris was who they’d always been. As Dexter, as Opal, as the full gestalt. These were all people who would do anything to never need anyone.

Kind of like Lorcan. He took a deep breath. He was trying to be better. “Look, Osiris. This might be out of hand–”

“Then do not say it?”

He pressed on, “But you could consider giving a little more recognition to your underlings. There’s stuff they’re doing that you can’t, or won’t, and it doesn’t hurt you to let them pick up that slack. And maybe,” he added, “if you happen to owe someone for past services rendered, just pay them? I cannot stress enough that you’re a rich person who can do that.”

Osiris hummed to themself, seeming to consider it. “What you are saying is that re-investing in our minions now is the opportune moment to secure more unwavering loyalty in the future. Achieve our goals through mundane manipulation, like our predecessor.”

“No,” he said. “No, do not take this and turn it into a necromancy power grab. I’m trying–I am trying to be nice here, goddammit.”

“We know. It is a strange gesture. It hardly suits our working relationship.”

He sighed. “Yeah.”

“And yet you slave to the impulse in your mortal mind to meddle so. Our nigh-infinite wisdom is at a loss to explain it.” Their voice lilted for a moment, like it was a funny joke. But if they had seemed amused at first, their next words made it clear they were very, very not: “One would think the collateral damage alone from your interferences would deter you.”

Lorcan’s heart stuck in his throat. “Is that a threat?” he asked, and tried to sound confident.

“To your, ah, children? No, we have resolved that to attack ones so frail and helpless no longer befits the dignity of our gestalt. Consider it a courtesy after all you have done for us.”

Sure, he thought. That was the reason.

“No, it was,” and Lorcan knew exactly what the Crown would end that sentence with, “a simple observation. You must know by now that your nature is a poison, rather than a balm. Look at what you have wrought in the last week alone–was any of it ‘good’?”

He didn’t react. He didn’t let himself. His very breath stopped. Osiris was looking for a reaction, and he would not give them the satisfaction.

They smiled, and it was as unkind as anything Lorcan had ever done. “Some people were not made to be helpful, Verdigris. Remember that if you seek to interfere in our affairs again.”

Message received, Lorcan thought, mouth suddenly very dry. “Right,” he said, mechanically. Going through every motion. “It’s been real, Osiris. Corporate must love your progress reports.” He turned to go.

But this time, they didn’t let him leave with the parting shot. “Do you know how a conflict between us would end, Lorcan Verdigris?”

This again? “Yes,” he said tightly.

It was an obvious, obedient answer. So it sent a chill shock through his system when the Crown told him that, “We are no longer so certain. But if need be, we will put the question to the test.”

If there was one thing Lorcan had learned about Osiris, the thing that was new and strange about this person who was almost an almost-friend, it was that they liked their labels. It was their way of making the world predictable. Life and death. Work and magic. Threats and fools.

And if there was power in breaking boundaries, Lorcan might have done the worst thing he could in the long run by establishing himself as a threatening fool.

The unsettled feeling stuck with him all the way back to the apartment. “Hey, you’re still alive,” Vulk said, watching TV.

“Yeah.”

<But it’s done.> Frank flickered his light, letting out a satisfied creak.

“...Yeah.” He looked over to the desk, where Loretta’s light shade had swiveled to peer directly at him. “Loretta. Could…” He trailed off.

Going back to a lazy schedule meant he didn’t have to wear himself down thinking over everything that had happened. It meant he had plenty of time to do it anyway. And some thoughts were less avoidable than others.

His nature…a crafter’s art and their magic reflected who they were. It wasn’t supposed to be as simple as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of magic. But maybe Lorcan was just an unlucky jerk with nothing below the surface.

If he was a little nicer, would he have ended up with magic like Kryptonia and her friends, something that created instead of destroyed? A seer knew, at least, what it was they were supposed to do. Whether their actions would help or hurt. He could admit he envied that.

When Lorcan first saw the vision of red, he assumed it meant blood. The consequences of a bad choice. Frustrating, vague, and in the end it had been a clue to something else entirely.

No, despite the hint Lorcan was all alone, making his own choices the best he could. And look how that had gone.

In one week, he’d injured several people in a magic fight, gotten a hapless GameStop employee near-permanently subjugated, and threatened to destroy an entire mall. He’d potentially maneuvered the Crown Osiris into a position of even greater strength if they managed to win this necromantic power struggle. Vision or no, maybe there was going to be blood on his hands after all.

“I need a little more light in my room,” was what he said.

Loretta tilted her lampshade. “Sure thing, Dad,” she replied. “You’ve had a rough day.”

Lorcan took her back into his bedroom and plugged her into the outlet by his bedside table. Once he had, it felt like all the fight drained out of him; he slid down the edge of his bed to the floor, head resting against the table.

“Mad and sad, you said?” he asked softly.

He heard a squeak of metal hinges, then her voice in his head. “You did what you had to.”

“I did,” he said. “I don’t regret it. I’d do it again, if any of you needed it.”

“I know.”

His hands were shaking, and he could still feel the mall’s deathly chill. “I just wish--if my magic wasn’t like this--anybody else would have had other options.” His voice was pathetically weak as he asked, “Why me?”

Loretta didn’t answer, and Lorcan didn’t expect her to. He closed his eyes.

When he woke up hours later, his children had crowded their way into the bedroom, entertaining themselves with soft conversations in hushed voices. Loretta was watching over him, Vulk’s cord gripped his wrist, and Terry was wrapped around his shoulders to keep him warm.

Some things in Lorcan’s life were predictable. And despite everything, it was good.

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #lorcan's family #osiris #necromancy #a dying art #thanks again to anyone who read this far #it really means a lot

6 notes · View notes

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 1 year

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 16)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 16: No Good Deed Is Commemorated Here

Word count: 4,670

Content warnings: magic violence, allusions to gore and murder, non-explicit references to death by radiation. Once again I must stress that these characters are magic and fictional and you should not assume anything they do with (magical) radioactive things is in any way safe in real life.

The trail went cold after eight different storefronts. Vulcan must have run out of breadcrumbs. But judging by the scorch marks that dotted the floor in front of him, Lorcan wasn’t far from where he needed to be.

It made sense that the scenesters had positioned themselves directly in this new mall’s found court. The whole area was encircled by a thick curve of red paint–abandoned, at least for the moment. Graffiti tags dotted the circumference, probably to mark where each scene kid was supposed to stand in whatever ritual they needed to finish this.

The biggest one, in the entryway, read The New Osiris. Their leader, then. The one who’d bought weird name brand shoes to…flex on regular Osiris, or something. He didn’t understand fashion. And he certainly wasn’t calling this kid ‘Osiris’ too. That would just be confusing. The Crown Osiris was a name for an intimidating sort-of stranger who didn’t care about him and didn’t pretend to. Not someone who put a fake smile on his face to stab him in the back…with another smiley face.

Fuck it, Lorcan was just going to call this guy ‘Smiles’.

He’d brought one thin bottle of acetone in his left pants pocket. He didn’t have much space left after he’d packed up, so he could really only justify bringing the most versatile of his time magic tools, the one that bit through almost anything.

Lorcan uncapped the bottle and let the liquid splash onto the paint as he walked towards the fray. There was no time to scour it properly, he was just going to hope that once the fight ended it would slow the winner down.

A nearby trashcan gave him decent cover and a good vantage point. The open court was a lot bigger now, and the food adorning the tables was…aesthetic. Candy but also blood and apples oozing with something slimy. And it looked like every smoothie was pomegranate-flavored.

He was missing the rest of the mall’s desolate solitude already. Truly, the hell dimension was always greener.

The scene mages–were there still eleven? A couple might be dead by now–had scattered throughout the area, probably trying to surround Osiris. The Crown had found a good spot with a buffet at their back, and for the moment at least seemed to be holding their own. They were also holding Vulk.

One scene girl with purple feathered hair stepped out from behind a meat stand, piercing gun in her hand. Lorcan had just enough time to notice the starter stud glint before the spring was released and a screaming phantasm exploded from the ‘barrel’.

Osiris met the attack easily. Their right hand had a glove he’d never seen them wear before, and it took only a theatrical flourish for invisible force to cast the specter through the skylight into an unforgiving void. They gestured behind them. Smoke wafted out of a meat platter on the buffet and shaped itself into a large bull. With a single point of Osiris’s finger it charged the purple piercer, who cursed and started to reload.

The exchange took less time than Lorcan would need for even one spell.

As the piercer fell back, another moved in. One leg of his pants was yellow and the other was black. Which. Why. He stuck a kazoo in his mouth and hummed. Dark, buzzing clouds popped into the air above him. Ah, Lorcan thought. He was summoning bugs.

He had something like that. It let Lorcan conjure a horde of flesh-eating beetles, which he mostly used to scare off the non-magical. Your typical bug summons could be cast very cheaply–individual bugs didn’t really need much life energy, such as that could be quantified–but that also made them easy to snuff out. Plenty of necromancers got their start learning how to kill bugs with their mind. Even Lorcan could do it. If this guy thought an insect swarm could stand up against Osiris, he must have put a lot of oomph into it.

The swarm–hornets, it looked like–murder hornets, probably–moved to surround the Crown on all sides, easily pushing through the buffet. Osiris themselves looked unconcerned.

The Crown shook their shoulders, coronet glimmering, and a mantle of shining light burst from their back. Lorcan could see Vulk’s power cord shiver as the rippling, rainbow wave hung in the air, like a cape caught in an impossible wind. Every wasp within range fell to the floor in the same moment, twitching as they died.

They'd used necromantic energy to ionize the air like an aurora, Lorcan realized. Turned the immediate area into a giant bug zapper. It was…an incredibly inefficient use of power. Smart–a better spell would risk taking long enough to get stung. But the amount of raw energy you had to waste to force a spontaneous localized aurora in the air…it was offensive just how easily they'd done it.

He’d heard stories about the Crown Osiris’s fighting prowess, of course. Between thirteen necromancer souls, they had magic and they had skill. The gestalt that operated their shared body could multitask spellcasting in a way no single necromancer could match. But knowing it and seeing it were very different things.

This was a necromancy fight. This was power.

In one way, that was good. It made being held in Osiris's arm the safest place in the fight. Heck, all that electricity was probably perking Vulk up. For the time being, Lorcan could be confident that nothing was going to hurt his son except Osiris.

Which, of course, was the fundamental problem. And he couldn’t exactly deny his own inadequacies while looking straight at the most powerful ‘singular’ necromancer in city limits.

He pulled out his own insect summoning tool, a replica scarab. It was one of two spells from his old stash he’d brought tonight. His insects would be far less hardy than the murder swarm had been, but at least he wasn’t sending them at Osiris.

The horde sprung out of cracks in the decrepit mall around him, going unnoticed in the chaos. When he finished the spell, Lorcan gave them their command, and the army of coleoptera marched towards the combatants.

The scene kids were nowhere near Osiris’s level, but they’d been throwing around enough death energy that most of Lorcan’s summons died instantly. Didn’t even count as a distraction at that point.

Even with the survivors climbing over their brethren’s corpses to reach their targets, there were only a handful that managed to reach flesh. One necromancer hissed in pain and swatted at her neck, but she recovered quick, throwing another hex at Osiris’s maelstrom. The bite hadn’t slowed her down.

That was okay. That wasn’t the plan anyways.

In the heat of the fight, with two different sets of bugs littering the floor, spells in the air and spirits bursting from the walls, no one noticed a few beetles returning with their spoils. A few strands of hair. Drops of blood. An earring torn straight out of the cartilage.

He took out a bandage and set to work.

The hair strands were dyed a bright orange, which was handy; he could pick out exactly which necromancer it had come from all the way across the battlefield. If only all Lorcan’s enemies came color-coded.

The orange-haired necromancer was working on some kind of hand-weaving curse, it looked like. His fingers twisted the knotwork tight, and over by the buffet Osiris’s gloved hand spasmed. That didn’t look good.

Power was one thing. Osiris had so much magic it made Lorcan gag, but as a gestalt entity they still only had one human body. It was a weakness, for all they proclaimed they had none. If the scene kids managed to hammer at it, they just might win.

In a battle Osiris was ready for, they’d have semi-loyal servants watching their back. People like Belial, whose minions could fight the small fry while Osiris took out the leader. Eva, who’d no doubt leap into the fray herself to draw fire if Opal’s body needed a chance to recover. Gravelord’s keen eye dissecting the situation, offering strategies and weak points.

Even the Crown Osiris needed other people. Right now, all they had was Lorcan.

What the knotwork crafter was doing had to be an act of sympathetic magic, linking physical muscle and nerve to yarn so both could be manipulated at once. Lorcan pulled out a small pack of bandages, the other spell he’d brought tonight.

The life-leeching unguent on the bandages was hopefully still functional after ten years. In the hands of a strong necromancer, it could be used to potentially fatal effect. In Lorcan’s out-of-practice ones, it would be a nuisance. But his strength as a necromancer had never been raw power. It was knowing how to get the most of the tools he had.

He looped the orange strands of hair around the middle finger of his right hand, like a ring. Over top, he wrapped one bandage, tight enough to sting. The most Lorcan could do with a spell like this was rob a target of a small bit of life force, in a very localized area. But life force circulated through the body, just like blood. Even a small blockage could do damage if it was in the right place.

Lorcan could feel his finger going numb. The orange-haired crafter, linked to the spell by sympathetic magic, felt it necrotize.

The man screamed, the woven curse unraveling as he thrashed in pain. He could probably still do something even without the one finger, Lorcan knew, but this was an interruption he wouldn’t be able to ignore. And back at the buffet table, Osiris’s hand steadied.

The others kept up their assault, probably assuming the blow had come from the Crown. But one necromancer–the one who had been bit on the neck–turned, looking for other attackers.

Well, he thought, that wouldn’t do.

Lorcan let his one beetle scrape the blood onto a finger. He rubbed it onto his neck where the woman had been bit, then slapped another bandage right on the carotid artery. In the moment her eyes met Lorcan’s, they rolled back into her head as the supply of blood to her brain slowed. She passed out limply onto the ground. (Alive. He wasn’t going to…she was still alive.)

It went like that for a little longer. He managed a few cheap shots, knocking out one more opponent and mildly injuring two, before the leader started making gestures to search him out. And Osiris’s eyes had been scanning the field since he took out the knotwork mage.

Alright then, Lorcan thought. “Hey, assholes!” he yelled, stepping out of cover. The fighting stopped a moment, everyone’s eyes turning to Lorcan as they assessed the new threat.

“You don’t need to shout,” one said, in a normal speaking voice. He scratched at his ear with a wince. “We gave the space non-Euclidean fight acoustics. Makes it easier to banter across the room.”

Lorcan aimed his body right at the guy, cupped his hands around his mouth, and took a deep breath in.

“Well,” Osiris stepped in, with a carefully composed expression. “We have certainly underestimated your resolve, Verdigris.” Damn right they did. “But while your assistance in this matter is appreciated, this fight is far outside your capabilities now that you have removed the element of surprise. You may leave.”

“Gracious. You’re right, I’m not as strong a necromancer as any of you here, but that’s why I came prepared.” He shifted his backpack off his shoulders and reached inside it for the first time that night. “And I’m not here to help you. Or you,” he told the scenesters.

Osiris’s eyes widened. “You…what?”

“I’m unambitious,” Lorcan told them. “I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t dealing with someone like you without a contingency.”

Out of the bag he pulled a twisted iron statue, as big as his entire arm. It looked something like a horseshoe, except that it looped in ways almost like a Mobius strip. The thing glowed in the places it folded in on itself with a sickly green light.

The Crown Osiris gasped, audibly. Thank you, non-Euclidean acoustics.

“Yeah, I thought you’d recognize it. See, Dexter told me all about his little dreams of radioactive destruction back when we were teens. And where he planned to bury the trigger.”

“That was seven years before he actually developed that curse,” Osiris said. Their expression was flat, unreadable. “You assumed he would not select a different location?”

“I assumed he hadn’t changed,” he replied, looking them square in the eye. “Turns out, he didn’t.”

He turned to the scene group, brandishing the thing with all the drama sixteen-year-old goth Lorcan had ever managed, and declared, “This is the death curse of one Dexter Young. A necromancer lord with a talent for radioactive blight. I think you’ve heard of him.”

The scene crew seemed to confer with themselves with a few pointed glances, and Smiles, the leader, stepped forward. “Duh, we know Dexter Young,” he said, while the rest settled into defensive positions around him. His face twisted into a condescending smirk. “We did our research on everyone…important to the current Crown.”

That wasn’t even worth an eyeroll. “Great burn, consider me roasted. Since we’re sharing important details, do you happen to know what this curse does?”

The smile dropped. It appeared he did not.

“Huh,” Lorcan said. “Because I do. Dex loved having an audience for his fantasies of deadly revenge against his enemies. Let me think…it was something something, wave of magical blight that destroys every cell of organic matter it hits, leaving a radioactive wasteland behind–who here’s made of organic matter? Show of hands,” he asked. Then when no one responded, “Don’t be shy, we’re all not-friends here.”

“Look, Young was powerful, but so are we. We can fight off a death curse,” one sneered at him. “You might have some trouble.”

“That’s funny, I remember Dexter’s enemies being strong, too.” A flinch. Point, Lorcan. “And he really wanted to make sure he finished them off, so he rigged the curse with this cascade effect. Consumes any other magic the blight encounters, then sets itself off again with the obstacle removed. That includes wards, other curses, revivification–but sure. I bet you’d fight it off just fine.” He glanced over to Osiris. “Did I get all that right?”

“An amateurish explanation,” they said, in a petulant tone, “but essentially accurate.”

“So no, it’s a ridiculous overpowered curse and we’re all lucky the murdergame didn’t set it off ages ago. Also this entire mall dimension is basically made of magic, so you could say goodbye to that, too. You think the place looks bad now?” he asked, wry. “Just wait until the curse goes off.”

“But it won’t.” Smiles straightened in place. “Dexter Young isn’t quite dead, and he’ll stay that way so long as the crown stays in one piece. Unless you think you can destroy the current Crown’s symbol of power?”

Ha, Lorcan thought. “In a fight? Obviously not.” It was the only answer he could give, under the circumstances. He was playing with fire enough as it was. “But Dex’s big problem with curses was keeping them stable. One time, at freshman homecoming–” Actually they didn’t need to know about that. “--the point is, exposure to radiation sets them off, too. Now, does anyone want to guess how my time magic works?” he asked.

“It–his magic is radioactive,” Osiris told the others. “His mere proximity triggered a number of Dexter’s curses in our shared youth. But–but you would not dare do so here.” The shock was clear in their voice. “You lack the nerve. With a spell of that curse’s magnitude, the entire city could–”

“I wouldn’t, no,” he agreed easily. “City-killing’s not really my thing. But we’re not in the city, are we?”

He gestured at the space around them. “This mall is a liminal death-space separated from reality by the void of absolute boundary or whatever. That’s got to be great for containment. And considering what you plan to do with it–” He shot a glare to the other necromancers. “--maybe it’s better this space remains an irradiated, unusable husk forever.”

And there, the scenesters started to look nervous.

“Holy shit, dude,” one spoke up. “Don’t you think that’s going a little too far?”

“Too…far?” he repeated, with a purposeful incredulity that made a few of them step back as if in fear. It was probably the deadly radioactive curse he was holding in his offhand that did it.

“As opposed to, what,” Lorcan asked, “just an ordinary, restrained magical firefight in the middle of a liminal death dimension? This is what necromancy does, MCR! It pushes you ‘too far’. Nobody in this goddamn mall is capable of interacting with necromancy in a calm and collected manner. None of us gets to pretend we’re above this!”

A scoff cut through the air.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.” It wasn’t nothing. Smiles shrugged. The easy fluidity of the motion suggested hours in front of the mirror to get the superior air just right. “It’s funny to hear from someone trying to play vigilante.”

“I’m not playing–”

“What, just because we’re killers means your hands are clean? Releasing a death curse is all for the greater good if it means some gullible geek gets to see another anime convention?”

Lorcan didn’t know how to respond to that, because Smiles wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t right, either. He shouldn’t have brought up Kyle if he wanted Lorcan to think so.

These necromancers would need supplies if they were going to seize control of the local covens without provoking a power struggle. ‘Supplies’ was, of course, another necromantic euphemism. And having a giant portal to a hell dimension just about anyone could be lured into would make that easy. Osiris, meanwhile, made no secret about wanting to do many, many murders. The world would, objectively, be better off without any of them.

But was Lorcan the person to make that call? His judgment hadn’t been foolproof lately. Sure, he might be the only necromancer here who hadn’t ever committed homicide before. He was better than them in that respect.

That didn’t mean he was good enough. There were no clean answers.

“I’m a guy standing in a death dimension, wearing a necromancer’s robe and holding about half a Chernobyl of radioactive death in my bare hand,” he said. “If I knew what the greater good was, I wouldn’t be here.”

“What do you want, then?” Smiles asked. His jaw was clenched tight.

Lorcan considered that. “I’d think it was obvious. But I guess you never bothered to study me beyond the best place to ambush me buying eyeliner, did you?”

“I was lying about your wingtips, by the way. They were shit.”

It was an insult for insult’s sake. Lorcan was used to it, hanging out so much with necromancers when he was young. But god, why had he bothered?

“You don’t know me,” he told the other man. “You don’t know anything about me. We’re strangers, and that’s all we’ll ever be.”

“What does that have to do with–”

“These usurpers may be strangers to you, Verdigris,” Osiris spoke up. “But we are not. And we know if you were to actually use that curse, you would be killing your familiar as well.” Confusion tinged their voice, because Osiris had known him once. “Your child, Verdigris. You must recognize the lamp’s spirit is made of magic as well.”

Lorcan looked at them, and nodded. “I was wondering when someone would bring him up. As it happens, I’m a simple man with simple demands. The only reason I even put this option on the table is that you put my son in danger. Give me my son. And both me and this thing–” He shook the curse. “--go away.”

The purple-haired piercing mage suggested, “Or we could shoot you. Can’t set it off if you’re dead.” She lifted the gun (he noted it wasn’t loaded) and mimed a shot.

“If you knew anything about time magic,” Lorcan told her, “you’d know it’s not entirely under my control. I have been concentrating very hard not to let it leak into this curse. But no matter how fast you kill me, there’ll be a moment where my concentration slips. Try again, MCR.”

“...You already said ‘MCR’.”

“I don’t know any other bands!” he shot back.

“We could get your thing back for you,” Smiles spoke up, with an icy…well. “If you give us that curse–”

“Stopping you right there. This is not a game you can chessmaster your way to victory with. The options are me, with the curse, here. Or me, with the curse, out of your blast radius. And it’s not your call which, unless Osiris–”

“No,” they said loudly. No doubt wanting to snip that dangling thread of potential collusion. “To us, the choice is clear. There is no sense dallying.”

They began to walk, carefully, through the food court. The cape of necromantic light stretched out behind them, a reminder that attempting an ambush now would be very unwise.

“Verdigris has been generous to lay out his terms so plainly, and as it happens it is easy to acquiesce.” They reached Lorcan, and held out his son. The warmth of his bulb as he settled into Lorcan’s free arm was stark against the mall’s natural chill. “It has served its purpose, anyways,” Osiris finished with a tight smirk, and began walking away.

It would serve the smug bastard right if he really did set this curse off right there, Lorcan thought. But Vulk was safe. Everything was going to be okay.

“Can you lead us out of here?” he asked.

Vulk whispered back, “Yeah. There’s a back exit nobody noticed yet.” Lorcan shifted his son in his arms, cataloging all the little twitches and shivers that told him yes, Vulcan was scared but fine.

“That’s it, then?” Smiles asked. “All you want is that stupid familiar?”

And, well. Lorcan never was one to let go of a grudge. “Give me your shoes, too.”

“Wh–my shoes? These are a limited collector’s run,” he protested. “You can’t get them online anymore.”

“Good,” Lorcan said. “Think about that next time you decide to fuck with me and mine. Time’s a-wasting. Tick tock.”

The guy fumed, but took off his chunky brand names and lobbed them over. It was clear from the low, underhanded toss he thought Lorcan might actually try to catch them. That was funny.

The shoes thumped to the floor.

“What do I look like, a jock?” he asked. He wasn’t stupid enough to risk fumbling a catch while holding both his familiar and his leverage. “Thanks though, these’ll look real cool in my basement with all the other junk.”

It was, he realized, a quip too far. He knew that the second his smart tongue pushed it out of his dumb mouth. With people like Osiris, he at least had some idea of how far he could push things. A few fuckups, sure, but a better track record than he had with total strangers.

Smiles was a stranger. He’d been a stranger when they’d met, and he was only stranger now that Lorcan knew the truth. And there was no smile, fake or otherwise, on his face now.

With a strangled growl, he charged directly at Lorcan. Physically. With his fists clenched.

That could have been the end of it. Lorcan froze in place–he didn’t have a backup plan for this. He remembered strange neighbors and fear. Then the metal prongs of Vulk’s power cord scraped against the back of his arm.

Lorcan and his oldest son didn’t always see eye to eye. But there were moments they were perfectly in sync.

He lifted the arm holding Vulk upwards. His fingers curled, as if in an arcane configuration. Behind it, Vulk’s cord stretched out to the air.

If he had still needed proof the Crown Osiris was a fight out of his league, he only needed to look at the aurora they’d made out of magic and will, keyed in directly to their presence. Already, the space in front of Lorcan where they’d been standing was losing its glow, fading to a dull glitter. That was power.

Lorcan jabbed his finger forward, straight at Smiles. Vulk could channel power.

The glitter in the air turned into a dark bolt of lightning that hit the floor a mere foot in front of his opponent. The man stopped. Lorcan could almost see him mentally re-calculating.

He put a look of careful indifference on his own face, like any powerful necromancer would when launching an attack they could totally pull off a second time. “Vulk, the shoes,” he instructed. His son coiled through the laces, lifting the prize into the now-empty backpack.

Lorcan took a few steps backwards, and gestured towards the death curse. “Remember, if any of you feels like a last minute double-cross, my death’ll make this whole thing explode. Otherwise, we’re out.”

The two were too tense to speak on their way out of the food court. Lorcan only knew they were safe once Vulk let out a slight, nervous chuckle. “So. I guess the friend thing’s a bust. But you did do a fashion today,” he added. “Doug’s gonna be happy.”

“They’re not exactly my style,” Lorcan remarked, but the shoes weren’t bad. Mostly black with deep, multicolor accents. A solid trophy. “I suppose Smiles could have worse taste.”

“Is that what you called him in your head?” Vulk asked, sounding almost like their usual banter. “I was calling him Tino.”

“Tino?”

“The New Osiris.” He emphasized each word. “T-N-O.”

Lorcan snorted. “That’s great. Tino Smiles, evil necromancer. I bet he…” He trailed off. The silence hung heavy in the air, and what came out next was: “Good work there, Vulk. With the lightning and–staying alive.”

His son’s voice was almost a whisper when he heard it. “Thanks, Dad.” Lorcan hugged him just a little closer.

The mall dimension’s exit was, somewhat predictably, inside a hidden Hot Topic. That’s not what stopped Lorcan in his tracks. No, that was the pretzel stand right in front of it.

He checked inside the machines–yup. Same stand. Same pretzels. A last-ditch effort to keep him and Vulk from leaving.

“I don’t want those pretzels,” Vulk told him solemnly. Which, good. Good.

Maybe Lorcan was feeling introspective in the wake of metaphorically selling his soul to dark magic, but this just felt sad the second deathtrap around. A dead mall’s kiosk, plaintively offering treats to passers-by. Still, it didn’t have to be so repulsive about it. It was like the place wanted…

He paused. It was like it wanted to push people away.

Fuck, he was empathizing, wasn’t he? He was. For all he knew the place wanted to murder him, Lorcan did get it. If you spent enough time being lonely, it was easy to forget you’d ever wanted anything different. Forget how to reach out. People could be mean and also lonely.

And maybe he might want to change that.

It was a scary thought; Lorcan had his sharp edges for a reason. They wouldn’t smooth out all at once. But he could try, once he got out of here. He might have to–he couldn’t keep doing this alone.

A classic-style mall goth leaned casually against the register in the store, flipping through a magazine and blowing a large gum bubble. How were they–the store wouldn’t have even been open when the rest of this shit went down. Fucking Hot Topic, nobody understood it.

“You know there’s a bunch of necromancers having a death match just outside, right?” he asked the employee. (He said he would try after he got out.) “And also the entire mall has been turned into a hell dimension.”

“Yeah, yeah,” they said, not even looking up. “You gonna buy a shirt, or what?”

Lorcan bought the damned shirt.

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #lorcan's family #osiris #necromancy #time magic #a dying art #bigger chapter than usual #hope you've enjoyed #next one is the end of this story

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 1 year

Text

This is a writing blog for modern fantasy stuff! We’ve got three writers working on stories we post on this blog, not currently super keyed in to writeblr but would definitely enjoy talking with other writers here.

Is anyone following me or reading this a writer, particularly in High Fantasy and Modern Fantasy? I’d like to get in contact with other writers, published or not, on this cite but I don’t know how to find and get in contact with them.

174 notes · View notes

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 1 year

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 15)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 15: A Mirror Darkly

Word count: 3,315

Content warnings: brief gore mentions

The worst part was, Lorcan had no idea how long he was laying there.

Time wasn’t moving. Time wasn’t changing. It was Halloween. It was closing time. He didn’t know. He had no way to tell, nothing to measure against. Was this how it felt for normal people to wait for things? It sucked. He hated it.

At least the physical and sensory discomforts kept him from thinking about his son’s scream for help as Osiris took him away. His inability to keep his own kid safe. No, wait. He was thinking about that right now. Cool. He was sick, helpless, and a failure as a parent.

It didn’t mean he wasn’t going to stop trying, though. If he could shift a little, pull his hand closer to his ear–his watch’s ticking might be able to substitute for his natural sense for time–a wave of new pain rocked his skull like a bad hangover.

Dammit. Damn. It.

This was bad. However much time had passed so far, he was running out of it. Vulk was gone. Taken. He’d sworn he would keep his son safe, and he was failing.

Somewhere off by a sale sign, an electronic skeleton cackled.

The problem was time. Time, and his own magic. If he had a different kind of magic–any different kind–he’d easily be able to follow after Osiris. How, when the Spirit Halloween was an unending magical labyrinth designed to trap all intruders…that was a problem for future Lorcan. The first step was to get up off the floor.

“...Wallow,” a voice told him. “Wallow in your pitiable stupor.”

He cracked his eye open at the familiar tone, wincing as the store’s halogen lights cut right into his vision. Somehow they managed to be dim enough not to banish a single ominous dark patch while also being blindingly painful. Or maybe that was just the time sickness again.

There was a worn, old-looking headstone on the floor in front of him. Topologically-impossible grave dirt was mixed with the carpet, out of which a grinning skull was slowly unburying itself. Its shadowed eyes held no light, and yet Lorcan could tell when its attention fixed on him.

“Your usefulness…at an end.” This voice came from behind, bone rattling against bone as it presumably crept towards him.

It looked like Lorcan had found the magical upgrade to Spirit Halloween’s lawn decor. He recognized the things they were repeating–there was a subtle distortion in their delivery, that weirdly nasal tone that people loved giving skeletons. But Osiris’s words were impossible to forget.

“Bet–” he started, then gagged as everything wrong with him fought against the words in his throat. “Bet you stayed in your soil when Osiris walked past,” he finally spat out.

Even from where he stood…er, lay…these were incredibly weak undead constructs. Which was why they were only showing up now, after Osiris left–for a necromancer of the Crown Osiris’s power, it would have been effortless to bind them, bid them silent. Lorcan was just an easy target. Beaten while he was already down.

More laughs. Far more than just two skeletons. A chill swept through him at the realization. “It must be difficult…” one said.

“...Barely worth the estimation,” added another.

“...So helplessly reliant…”

“Stupor, stupor!” a particularly parrot-like skull said, punctuating the words with wild chortles. “Wallow…stupor!”

He didn’t know how long the feeling lasted; time wasn’t working right. No more than one second, maybe two. But for those two-ish seconds, Lorcan felt fear. He’d been able to handle a situation like this once when he was younger, at the height of his necromantic skill. He’d never been good at binding creatures someone else had raised, but he could have at least destroyed a small skeleton crew.

Now, though? Ten years after he’d stopped seriously practicing, lying on the floor in agony because of his own time powers? If they moved to kill him, he didn’t know what he could do.

But just as that fear hit, something else came with it. Anger, thick and fierce and determined. It didn’t matter what these things did. Lorcan would survive, because Vulk was counting on him. Simple as that.

The bones stopped laughing, like they should sense the changing tides.

“You think a few mean words are going to do anything to me?” he asked. He was too weak to put any volume in the words, and his throat seizing gave what did come out a harsh croak. But in the quiet, it carried. “I invented the art of hating myself. I know exactly what I’m capable of.” He took another breath. “If you want to hurt me, you’ll have to try harder.”

Silence. And then–

“Dad!”

Lorcan stiffened, then cried out as his spasming muscles revolted against him. Not the move he’d been expecting. But one he should have. It’s what Lorcan would have done in their place. The skeletons erupted into a gleeful hubbub.

“Dad, help!” the one sitting in front of him said. In his son’s desperate voice. With his son’s plea for help.

“I’m…not okay with this! Dad!”

“Dad, help!” Cackle. “Dad! Dad!”

He stared at a spot on the floor, breathing thickly through his nose just to keep from doing anything else. Yelling, cursing, raging–it would only show them just how much it stung hearing that exact cry, the cadence of Vulk’s protest as the Crown pulled him away. The nerve. Lorcan was going to be hearing that sound in his nightmares real soon anyways, he didn’t need these glorified answering machines to remind him of it.

But the barbs told him something important. The skeletons had quieted when he stopped feeling afraid. Rejoiced at his pain. If they wanted to kill him, he’d be dead by now, which could only mean that…they didn’t.

He remembered Osiris’s sadistic smile, a last parting shove to someone who was already on the ground. What they wanted was for Lorcan to hurt.

And this time, he could oblige. Lorcan didn’t win fights the way Osiris did, with overwhelming force. It never went well for anyone when he tried. The problem with a scorched-earth approach was the flames burned you, too. But he’d gladly watch himself burn if it meant the kids were safe.

“You want to hurt me?” he asked the space, again. “Try this.” Lorcan let a thought cross his mind. Something he needed desperately. But it would hurt. God, would it hurt.

The air moved around Lorcan, an uncomfortable feeling. Like he was in the throat of an enormous creature while it took a breath. The wind came back sharp and heavy, bringing with it fog that hugged the floor and probably-on-purpose clogged his lungs for a hot minute (not that he could keep track).

Whenever it was he finally stopped hacking, he muttered out a quick swear and blinked until he could see again. Things were still blurry–turns out a big fall and moist fog did not help eyeglasses stay on one’s face–but he could see a single costume rack now stood where the headstone had been. The place did like his idea after all.

He gathered his willpower. He just needed one…small time…of pushing through the pain. Just had to do the one thing. He moved into a crouch, one he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up long. Already his head was spinning dangerously.

The costumes in a regular Spirit Halloween–well, they were costumes. Their fabric was too stretchy and fake, obviously not meant for use outside a holiday where everyone agreed to suspend disbelief. But this was a magical, liminal Spirit Halloween. As far as Lorcan could tell, all the costumes here were also real.

And that meant the black robe in front of Lorcan wasn’t made of something shiny and shapeless with a few cheap cords wrapped around the waist. It was heavy and thick, solid black wool. It looked just like the one he used to wear when he still cared about midnight graveyard rituals.

This space worked directly against his time magic. But it was designed to strengthen necromancers.

Lorcan had really thought he wasn’t going to be tempted back to this.

The robe slipped over his head. Time’s constant, ticking buzz, like a clock that was out of whack and wouldn’t shut up and never fucking stopped, quieted. The cool, steady feeling of inevitable, final death surged. And when that feeling clicked into place, Lorcan stood fully.

He was still a time wizard. The sense of being in the wrong, wrong, wrong time didn’t disappear all at once. But the weight eased enough to feel certain in his footing once again. (Even if another weight seemed to take its place, settled in his shoulders where the black fabric bunched.)

He took a deep breath, this one for nerves rather than nausea, and leaned down to pick up his glasses. The floor-length mirror was exactly in front of him when he straightened back up, perfectly illuminated. Because of course it was.

The robe fit better than he remembered. The sleeves ended just past his wrists, short enough to make any wild gesticulations visible and long enough to let him hide sneakily within them. The hem trailed in a way that would swish around like swirling shadows at his feet. The color gave his skin a ghastly pallor and matched the sunken look around his eyes.

It seemed, no matter how hard he tried, there was a part of Lorcan Verdigris that would always be a necromancer deep down.

His palms itched where they held his heavy backpack. It wouldn’t be hard at all to lash out at the revelation, just swing his weapon into the reflection and watch glass ripple from the impact site. He was a necromancer–for the moment, anyways–and that’s how necromancer-Lorcan had always operated. Something hurt him? He’d hurt it back.

But, he thought, as he looked into his reflection’s eyes. That was how time-Lorcan operated too, wasn’t it? Destruction and decay…like breaking a mirror. He’d done that exact thing plenty of times in his workshop. Wear and tear was a great way to antique something.

Everything here in this liminal death space already looked antique. Old things and dead things weren’t too different. Aesthetically or magically. Osiris had thought him a fool for believing he could separate the two sides of his magic. Maybe they’d been right the whole time: no matter what kind of magic was, Lorcan’s magic was still only Lorcan.

A shattered mirror would fit in better broken among the bones and fog. It wouldn’t change his reflection in it. That would stare back at him just the same, the image itself whole and undeterred.

Lorcan had gotten what he wanted, he supposed. It would never stop hurting.

Right. He took a breath. That was enough feeling sorry for himself. He had a problem to solve, and things now he could do to solve it. He adjusted the straps of his backpack and got moving; Lorcan was just going to have to hope that Osiris’s exit had been a straight shot from where he saw them last. It wasn’t the best of leads, but it was all he had.

It wasn’t an easy walk. Dangerously sharp costume racks stabbed their way into the footpath, and it didn’t help that everything with a face (and a lot of these stupid Halloween props had faces) got to watch him flounder through their little obstacle course with ominous, knowing smiles. An escalator from hell tried to eat his sneakers.

Well, it tried to eat him via his sneakers, probably. Like noodles. It almost served Lorcan right for not remembering until then he had a magic flashlight in his pants pocket that would probably be useful for avoiding death traps.

“Yeah,” he said, shining it down the pitch black tunnel of the escalator’s maw. He was utterly unsurprised to see the steps dead-end in a spike pit coated in conjured blood. “That’s gonna be a no from me.”

He couldn’t say how long he walked before there was a light in the distance. He approached carefully, wary of another trap, but the glow resolved itself into a door. Battered, grimy. ‘Employees only’.

A voice reached him, as if floating on the breeze. The skeletons were nowhere to be seen. “If you…survive,” it said. “...hope it hurts.”

He shoved the door open.

Lorcan liked dead things. But he supposed he’d never put much thought into what a dead place would really feel like. Sure, he’d been to graveyards with the same heaviness in the air. His apartment was easily as dusty and dirty and worn as space around him. But for all that Lorcan craved solitude, it had been a long time since he actually experienced it.

As an introverted child, Lorcan’s room had been his safe space. But with three siblings, his mother, and Dad whenever he could stop by, it was never quiet. In college, well–there was a reason Lorcan hated roommates. And his kids were there after that. His apartment was old, yes. But it was alive, every second of every day. It made solitude hard to come by, and whenever Lorcan could sneak away, it was rarely private. There were always neighbors getting in the way, mall patrons, other crafters. He’d forgotten how different it was to truly be alone.

The echoes of his footsteps lingered in the large mall walkway. He kept turning, expecting to see someone sneak out of the fog and each time the realization that no one else was there rattled him. Lorcan expected peril. This was something else.

The skeleton constructs, an easy way to personify a malevolent mall entity, were gone. He found himself latching onto other things instead–he needed some way to guess what it was this place wanted. The ghosts of storefront lettering, clear lines of text that stood out against faded walls. The dust sitting thick on the floor, not a single footprint to be seen. For the space to lay out the evidence of neglect so starkly felt like an accusation. Like Lorcan was personally being held to account for its isolation.

It was funny, in a way. This dimension had been created by the scene folks earlier that night, in exactly the state it was now. But it was created as a place with history, as a space that had been alive and was now dead. It remembered people it had never met, ghosts that had never been alive.

In the time this place remembered, which had never happened and would never happen and didn’t happen before the end of October which it was now and would be forever, the mall would have been lively. There would be warmth and music in the air, light shining from the ceiling. Lorcan could almost bring himself to imagine it.

But then he saw the wiring along the walls–every outlet and fixture in the place had been cannibalized long ago. Stripped down to the wire like bone. He pushed the thoughts of all his children who were electrical appliances far, far out of his mind, but he couldn’t forget: this was a corpse he was standing in. A dead space, with nothing left but the loneliness that had killed it.

Maybe that was why the place hadn’t instantly murdered him with magic, Lorcan thought. It hated him like it hated everyone who’d abandoned it, but a living prisoner was just better company.

There was one kiosk sitting by the railing, the closest thing to a sign of life yet. It sold pretzels and had to be a trap. The thought of Vulk, and how he’d react if he saw a pretzel stand in a place like this, was the only thing that had him investigating further.

He swept the flashlight’s beam across the seemingly-lifeless machinery, and–those pretzels were not made of bread. Never mind. He hoped Vulk had been focused in the other direction when Osiris took him past this.

As far as death traps went, it was even more obvious than the escalator. Felt like a kind of ‘flies, vinegar’ situation, there. Lorcan was just saying, if the mall wanted to kill him it could work a little harder to appear harmless. And if it wanted him alive, it could work less hard at killing him. But then, something could be lonely and still be mean. He’d bet the space would be disappointed if he got himself disemboweled by a pretzel machine or whatever. Just like. Not enough to stop.

The stores didn’t give much clue where his son had been taken. Behind Lorcan was a silent, deserted Spirit Halloween. Directly across the way, Spirit Halloween. And on both corners. One pathway wound around a column, making it look for a moment like it might be going somewhere new. But then–shocker–another Spirit Halloween.

There were seven new paths to explore just from here, and he bet each one would lead to another crossroads just like this. The further away he got from Vulcan’s trail, the greater the risk he lost him forever.

The thought locked him in place for–a moment, maybe. But failure was not an option. Not here. Lorcan could be a fuckup with everything else. But not with his kids.

There had to be something he could do. Something he could track. Lorcan’s little sister had given him some footstep-tracking candles for his last birthday, but of course he hadn’t brought those with him tonight (not enough room in the backpack). And…he remembered there were no visible footprints on the floor. None at all.

Lorcan’s heart gave a trembling flutter. Precursor to some kind of fear-induced attack, he was sure. But that was fine. The state of the mall wasn’t a literal, physical manifestation of reality. The mall wanted to scare people, so it looked scary. It felt abandoned, so it looked abandoned.

He drew a line on the floor with the toe of his shoe, just to confirm. He was right. He had to be.

The dust swirled forward, erasing the mark as soon as he made it. It was the same with the footprints he should have left behind him. The flutters didn’t stop, but they did slow down a little. Lorcan wasn’t lost, not yet.

Think. He knew mess–his own apartment, just to start. Besides footprints, there were plenty of other ways to track a person through mess. Torn cobwebs, scuff marks from rubber soles. The symbolic nature of this dimension couldn’t scrub all of them out, right? He aimed his flashlight down and ran a hand through the dust. Most of it fell from his fingers as soon as it left the low-hanging layer of fog, but a few specks of gravel remained.

Not gravel, he corrected himself, looking closer. Crumbs. That was…out of place. You couldn’t have a lonely, neglected death dimension without grime, but dust and spider webs were different from what smelled like fresh, salty breadcrumbs. The pretzel stand didn’t even use bread, so where had these–

The answer hit him like the best kind of freight train. Relief bubbled out his mouth in a cackle to rival any of those damn lawn ornaments, and for a moment he didn’t feel quite so alone. It was just so perfectly Vulk. That beautiful son of a Lorcan.

Vulcan still couldn’t eat the pretzel he’d bought, the one saved underneath his cap. But he could use it to lay a trail.

Lorcan rubbed at his eyes. He wasn’t crying, shut up, he was flexing his eyeballs to spot the crumbs better. It didn’t take long to find the path snake its way down to the Spirit Halloween in the far back. Which was going to be very safe and fun, he was sure, but Lorcan would survive. He had so far.

And he had to believe that, wherever he was, Vulk was holding on too.

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #necromancy #two more chapters after this #coming soon #a dying art

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 1 year

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 14)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 14: Out of Time

Word count: 2,466

Content warnings: mentions of nearly vomiting

They got to the mall in time to buy the pretzel, though not to do much else. “I feel generous so you can have half,” Vulk said, not even making his usual attempt to ‘eat’ the whole thing.

Lorcan grunted, unable to stop his nausea at the thought–his stomach still wasn’t settled from last night’s fight at Osiris’s house. “That’s okay, you can keep it.”

Vulk was silent a moment, then said, “Alright I’ll save it for leftovers.” He stashed the snack inside the copper cap on top of his glass bottle. Hopefully it wouldn’t overheat. “Mall’s buzzing with something,” he told Lorcan. “More than just Osiris, I think.”

So the scene kids were setting up their trap. They took the long way around again.

“Hey!” he called out as soon as he approached the GameStop. The gate had been opened back up since he left, but he was sure the wards would kick in if he got too close. “Osiris, it’s me.” It was late enough he wasn’t expecting to be overheard; the store was empty.

The Crown Osiris was locking up game cabinets, and bared their teeth at the sight of him. “Verdi–”

“I found who’s after you, and why,” he said. “Get your crown now, we need firepower.”

After a studying pause, they waved a hand and a smoky tendril hurtled out the back room. It carried their crown, the thing dangling loose from one end. There was no pomp in the way it set itself on their head, only grim efficiency. “Tell us who we should kill,” they said.

Lorcan couldn’t help but wince. “Look, it’s this…secret gang of scene-aesthetic necromancers. They’ve been trying to run your store into debt so they can use the mall for–”

“--the energy of a dying place,” Osiris finished, eyes widening in realization. “They would be able to thrust the site into a space between life and death itself.”

“Yeah,” he said and, admittedly, he hadn’t quite thought that far out yet. “What would that do on, like, a broader level? For the city and all.”

“Oh, chaos, undoubtedly,” they said with a dismissive wave. “The nature of such a space would amplify the magic of any necromancer within its borders, but they must have measures in place to ensure they above all others seize the greatest advantage. Were a skilled necromancer to circumvent those–” And here Osiris adopted a thoughtful look. “--it would allow one to easily solidify an existing power base…”

“For sure,” he cut in. “But, I mean. If it was me, I’d know that you’d be able to do that. I’d be leveraging everything from the start to wipe you out before you had the chance.”

They nodded. “The point is taken. The counter to swiftness is even greater swiftness. Strike now, before any chance of their gambit’s success is established. Where do we locate the usurpers?”

Whew, he thought. An Osiris with control of whatever these scene kids were cooking up was absolutely the worst of all worlds. “At the Spirit Halloween,” he said.

Osiris’s face took on an expression that, until now, Lorcan had only seen directed at him and maybe also Kyle. An enlightened, gestalt being encountering a concept too stupid for even their mind to comprehend. “There is a Spirit Halloween? At this mall?”

“Yeah.”

“It is far too early in the year for that.”

Lorcan threw up his hands. “That’s what I said!”

They shook their head. “No matter. Direct us to this Spirit Halloween.”

“Right…how about I point you to a map instead?”

The Crown Osiris fixed him with a sharp glare. Lorcan couldn’t hold their gaze, but he also wasn’t going to back down. Because. Given a chance. Lorcan would really like to be able to gracefully extricate him and Vulk from this situation. Osiris could deal with these jokers themselves–they weren’t paying him nearly enough for anything more.

Unfortunately, the nearest mall map was in the same direction as the Spirit Halloween, passing by the food court. The open area, set up for lunch rushes of a much livelier era, made sneaking damn near impossible. It meant the small crowd headed in their direction spotted them immediately.

They stood at two corners of the food court: Osiris and Lorcan at one side, about ten scene wizards on the other.

For the first time, Lorcan really looked at them, past the bright neon colors he hated and their relatively-youthful faces. Gone were the easy expressions and casual slouches. Tonight, there was a determined set in their mouths, purpose in their stances. These were fighters, schemers. The sort of people who could set up a kid like Kyle and leave him hanging out to dry.

At the very front was the one Lorcan had first met at the CVS. The one who’d handed him a tube of cursed eyeliner. When they’d met, his face had been stretched into a wide, guileless smile.

He was a better liar than Lorcan was, that was for sure.

“Oh, so you did figure it out,” that one said.

Osiris swept a hand to the side. “Did you truly believe you would be able to hide from a mind such as ours?” They looked far more imperious than one should ever be able to pull off in a black polo shirt. “The moment you chose to plot against us, your undoing was inevitable.”

Sure, Lorcan thought wearily. It wasn’t like he’d done all of the legwork or anything.

Of course, if Osiris was trying to overlook him, the scene kids (scene…sters?) weren’t. The one in front–Lorcan got the impression this one was the leader–turned his gaze towards him and smirked. “And here we were being so friendly.”

That little– “Oh, yeah,” he spat back. “‘Come with us into our spooky store, alone, so we can give you cursed eyeliner and gouge your eyes out’. Real friendly.”

“It was worth a shot, can you blame us? It’s just too bad,” he said, shaking his head ruefully, “that you’re not a little more trusting.”

“Hey could you guys, like, not,” Vulk spoke up. “You’re reinforcing some very bad worldviews here.”

Vulk was not supposed to speak up. He was not supposed to draw attention. And it was the one time he couldn’t just hide the lamp away inside his backpack, either. “Vulcan.”

“What I am just saying this is a rare occurrence and not what you should be building your behavior around. Also I wanted you to like these people because I thought they were fashion but on a second glance their look reads more like shallow consumerist parody.”

“Vulk.”

“They bought those jeans pre-ripped! It’s not very punk rock is all.”

The leader’s face, which Lorcan knew could look perfect and open and inviting, curled up in chilly disgust at Vulk’s words. He scuffed the toe of his shoe against the mall flooring before he said, “If I had a familiar that mouthy, I’d do more to shut it up.”

Lorcan decided then and there that somehow, some way or another, he was going to ruin this asshole’s life.

The Crown Osiris took a step forward. The motion covered Lorcan halfway from the scenesters’ view and for half a second, he wondered if that was on purpose. Then they said, “We did not think you orchestrated this scheme to address the help. Speak plainly of your aims to us, or not at all.”

“That should be obvious,” the leader said. “You’ve had a good reign, your highness. But it’s time for someone else to step in. And I’ve got a boot with your name on it.”

(Son of a bitch, Lorcan thought. Those sneakers really did say ‘Osiris’. He would never understand fashion.)

“You think a mere ten wizards are enough to fell us?” the Crown asked, perfect confidence on their face. “You have lost already in numbers alone, and all of you together could not match a fraction of our might.”

The scene guy shrugged. “You might be right about that. But you’d have to catch us first.” Behind him, a woman with a wicked grin set down a piece of heavy equipment.

Lorcan had a moment to recognize it–a goddamn Spirit Halloween fog machine–before the implications hit him. He needed to get out of here. He needed to get Vulk out of here.

But the realization did not come fast enough. Lorcan’s perfect sense for time counted five seconds before the fog machine started belching out hazy, red-tinged fumes. Five seconds where his heel could only start a slow pivot away from the scene. Five seconds before his thoughts blotted out.

Switching back to his senses was like a sleepwalker coming awake. He focused on the familiar metal and glass in his arms, the shifting of his heavy backpack. Finally, vision swam back into focus.

Lorcan, Vulk, and Osiris were alone in a room, the scene kids nowhere to be found. Rows of fabric surrounded them, in bold but dark colors. Mirrors reflected shadowy shapes that weren’t there. Elaborate sets of grasping skeletons, flickering flames dancing above cemetery stones, signs declaring sales in every direction but no sign of which path led out.

A liminal place of death and darkness, between two worlds. The entire mall had become a Spirit Halloween.

His head spun. It felt like the floor had dropped out from underneath him and the only way he knew it hadn’t was that, when the sudden migraine spike took him out at the knees, he had to have fallen on something. His eyes swam with auras--not the magical kind just the really painful distracting kind--and he had to take in big, gulping breaths of air to not throw up. What had been a mild nausea, a slight rebellion of the stomach, was now almost overpowering. Ooh, fuck.

He could feel the cold prongs of Vulcan’s electrical plug against his temple, gentle in a way the lamp almost never was. “Lorcan? Oh no,” he whispered.

Osiris was less concerned. From what Lorcan could hear, anyways. “Is that all it takes to undo you?” they asked, the judgment ringing in their words.

Fuck you, he would have spat out, if he was willing to risk other things coming out as well. Of course this wouldn’t affect them the same way. Osiris was a necromancer, through and through. But Lorcan’s magic was time. He felt it, constantly, thrumming through his veins, beating alongside his heart, deep in every breath he took. And when time was wrong, he could feel that, too, in the worst ways possible.

In a Spirit Halloween, the time was always the end of October.

He managed to set Vulk’s glass body safely on the floor next to him. Soon even staying in a crouch wasn’t going to be possible.

“The entire mall has been decoupled from its coordinates in physical space,” Osiris observed. “Separated from the veils that stretch across our reality by a boundary of pure, unending void. They will need to reopen portals back to our home dimension before they can properly leverage the energy of this place–we suspect we have been cordoned off so as not to interrupt the process.”

The sound of their monologue gave him something to focus on, at least.

“That is ‘we’ as in our inestimable gestalt,” they added, while Lorcan tried to hold back a sudden, heaving retch. “You have proven yourself to be barely worth the estimation. Though–” He could hear them stepping around him, carefully, assessing. “--we suppose that you have achieved exactly what was asked of you. We do wish you had uncovered the plot before it unfolded this far, but from one such as you, it is…an exemplary effort.”

Unfair. Lorcan was going to lodge a complaint. “Mmmf,” was what he grunted.

The Crown went on, “However, it is clear your usefulness to us is at an end. If you are able to survive and escape this dimension, we will pay the remainder of your fee. In the meantime, we shall handle these seasonal employees.”

There was a snap of fingers, then silence.

“A shame,” Osiris murmured. “With no direct authority over this space, our existing shades cannot be summoned. Their assistance would be preferable, but we suppose we shall manage with the option left to us. Our thanks, Verdigris, for supplying it.”

That…that didn’t sound right. “W--what?” he managed to croak out.

“It should be simple enough to follow, even in your state. These usurpers are clever, shifty, but they chose this battlefield because they cannot prevail in direct conflict. We shall have to march ahead, while you wallow in your pitiable stupor. Here the liminal nature of this spirit-space comes into play. Without a guide to mark the path, we would become lost for a thousand Halloween shopping seasons.”

“Fortunately for us,” they continued, and the cool comfort against his temple disappeared, “your familiar’s sense for magical energy shall prove a perfect wayfinder.”

“No.” Lorcan tried to push himself up. “No, you can’t.”

“Um,” and Vulk’s voice sounded so far away, “I’m super not comfortable with this. Dad, help!”

“Do as we command, familiar, or we shall strip that scrap of your father’s soul out of its vessel and set you to fall apart on the breeze.”

“Vulk,” Lorcan said, pushing himself on one arm to look at Vulk, who the Crown Osiris held in a tight grip. It sounded weird to say a lava lamp could have a certain expression, but Lorcan knew his oldest son. He was terrified. Just as he saw this, his muscles started to shake. He wouldn’t be semi-upright long. “They mean it. Don’t argue with them, just--wait for me to come get you.”

“Oh? You’ll come get it, you say?”

The look of amusement on Osiris’s face was stark. Their eyes almost matched the crown for glimmer. Lorcan didn’t know which coven leader this specific brand of sadism had come from. Maybe it was something more than the sum of its parts. He supposed it didn’t really matter now. The necromancer reached out with a foot, and placed the barest pressure on his shoulder. Not even their full weight. He collapsed.

It didn’t stop him from staring back into their gleeful eyes with hate. “I will,” he vowed.

The ghost of a smirk crossed their lips. “If you insist. It must be difficult,” they added, as if as a parting shot, “to be so helplessly reliant on those around you. So much has changed since we were so vulnerable that we hardly remember the feeling. But we do hope it hurts.”

“Dad!”

Osiris walked off. And took Vulk with them. Lorcan was alone, in a mall inside a hell dimension that was experiencing an untimely October, surrounded by costumes and mirrors and the stench of death.

#original fiction #writing #mystery #fantasy #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #lorcan's family #osiris #a dying art #i was really excited to get this one out by halloween #very timely considering #and yes we're in the endgame now folks

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 13)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 13: Oh No

Word count: 3,577

Content warnings: no major content warnings

If Lorcan took the most circuitous route out of the mall, that was his own business. He was trying not to have a meltdown in the middle of the mall and a stranger saying hi would surely push him over the edge.

It was pathetic to think how fragile he felt at the moment. He wasn’t the victim here–Kyle was most likely going to die before Lorcan even left the mall, and it was his fault. If he hadn’t chosen to confront him now, if he’d realized Osiris might be listening in–Lorcan had been walking around with bloody hands all day. He guessed now it was symbolic, too.

And Jennifer Lynn…he knew there wasn’t much she could do to help him. Not much reason to, either. They weren’t friends or anything. There was really only so far acquaintanceship could take a person, wasn’t there?

He pulled out his phone and texted his mother, writing, “Are you sure I’m not a fuckup?” Because he wasn’t, not at all.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, until Vulk spoke up to ask, “Did we just get fired?”

It was a fair question. Would Osiris still be expecting Lorcan to deliver on the rest, after all of that?

The idea was tempting. This assignment had been nothing but misery from start to finish, a reminder of every way he’d failed in his own life. If he stopped his work without Osiris’s explicit say-so, though, and it turned out they still expected him to deliver–“Safer to assume not.”

“Okay, so…what next?” Also a good question. His necromancer suspects had picked at a lot of old wounds. Especially Gravelord, the only one he had yet to rule out. But the only reason they’d been suspects in the first place was they knew where Osiris lived. If the usurper had gotten that information from Kyle, it meant whoever it was didn’t.

Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows wasn’t Lorcan’s perpetrator. Which meant everything he’d put himself through was for nothing. He had no leads. No hope of success.

He glanced at his hand. It was a clue, technically, but he couldn’t return-to-sender a curse he didn’t even know how he got. And if Belial, Eva, and Gravelord were innocent (well, ish), he had to have picked it up before his investigation.

So maybe something happened at the seer’s. A splinter of glass in his hand, a contagious element designed to hamper anyone who was getting anywhere close.

If it was, Kryptonia and her friends would be in trouble, too.

Lorcan’s shoulders sank. They had to have caught on how wrapped up he was in necromancer stuff by this point. He couldn’t just walk up and ask, especially if he’d managed to get them cursed twice.

But if the curse had carried itself through the fragments of Kryptonia’s rig, he thought, then there’d still be evidence. He started walking faster, something almost like a spring back in his step. “I have an idea,” he told Vulk.

“I’m just saying, it’s very on-the-nose that you’d rather dig through a dirty dumpster than talk to a person,” Vulk was telling him. “Grandma showed you tons of social skills you can lean back on here you know.”

His mouth quirked up in a smirk. “Don’t forget I’ve got your grandad’s skillset, too,” he replied, grabbing the handles he’d been taught to use. Like most of the city trash bins, this dumpster wouldn’t have been emptied since the Monday before he visited Luminous Fortunes. “It all evens out.”

He wasn’t exactly a climber, and it took a moment to get steady once he was in the dumpster. He almost didn’t notice the buzzing vibration of his phone in his hip pocket. He opened it up: his mother had finally replied.

“Are you okay?” her text asked him. “Do you need me to call?”

Family never let him down. Couldn’t family go too far sometimes, though? Lorcan’s mother never gave up on him, but he kept fucking things up. Fucking people over. After a while, it was obvious the problem was him. Lorcan shoved the phone back in his pockets and shook one of the trashbags to listen for glass sounds. Maybe a little too forcefully.

“Ahem, Lorcan,” Vulk said about five minutes in.

He lifted his head up above the lip of the bin. “What?”

Kryptonia the seer, standing in a propped-open side door leading into the neighboring building, waved her high-tech button glove at him. “I could have sworn you’re not a garbagewixen,” she said. “Want to explain why you’re rooting around my trash?”

“Um.” He thought about it. “I’ve got nothing.”

“Garbage inspection?” Vulk suggested.

“No,” she told them. “Get out of that dumpster, come inside. You’re lucky I’m free until two. Try not to stink up my chairs.”

Kryptonia’s shop didn’t look that much worse for wear from the fire. There was a new laser rig, obviously, one that wasn’t so cleverly camouflaged under the crystal ball, but otherwise the damage was pretty well masked. Her table suddenly had a tablecloth, and every power outlet Lorcan could see had an air freshener running to cover up the burnt under-smell. But otherwise, things seemed fine.

The seer fiddled with her remote glove to turn on the stereo. After a moment of consideration and a few more button pushes, a song started playing. It had a psychedelic vibe much like the last time, though this one had lyrics.

“Ooh, nice,” Vulk said, and tapped Lorcan’s arm. “Lorcan, get it?”

He didn’t, no. “You know I don’t know music.”

“There go my ideas for small talk,” Kryptonia said, sitting down. “But then, I don’t have that long before my next customer comes by. You could have picked a better time to stop in.”

“I wasn’t exactly planning for you to scry me out–”

“I heard you, actually,” she told him. “You’re not that stealthy. Look…Tuesday was a lot. Clo’d rather I not get involved any more than that. She says you were trying to scry the Crown Osiris’s--uh, crown. That not many other necromancers in this area use those anymore.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think I knew the risks when I got in, and whatever you’re wrapped up in probably puts you in more danger than me. Wasn’t even sure you were alive until I saw your familiar outside.”

“Hm,” Lorcan grunted. “Well, this is my own mess to deal with. You don’t like me. You don’t have to feel responsible for me, either.”

Kryptonia tilted her head. “When did I say I didn’t like you?” she asked.

“I mean, we just met.” He shifted slightly. Wasn’t it obvious? “Your friends don’t.”

“Clo doesn’t trust you, that’s a different thing. You’re making an effort, at least, more than I can say for some. And Lacie just thinks you’re cool.”

“She spent the whole time insulting me,” Lorcan said.

“Teasing you,” the seer corrected. “It’s how she shows camaraderie. And she likes that you poke her back.”

“She thinks necromancers are bad news.”

“You remembered that, huh?” Kryptonia waved a hand, and said, “Well, she does, but she also thinks it’s funny to freak Clo out. So after, she decided it’s neat actually that you’re friends with a necromantic mafia lord.”

And Lorcan had to defend himself there. “We’re not friends.”

“My bad. Acquaintances?”

Oh. That was even worse. He buried his face in his hands, muttering, “Fuck.”

“He doing alright?” he could hear Kryptonia asking Vulk softly.

“It’s a work in progress.”

Lorcan pulled his hands away, noting the way the red had smeared all over his face. Kryptonia had, too, by the sudden alarm on her face. “Oh, look, a change of subject,” he said weakly, waving his hand. “I think I might have picked up some kind of lingering curse when your crystal ball exploded. Maybe the laser rig had some kind of residual dark energy or something. That’s…that’s why the dumpster diving.”

The seer steepled her fingers. “I check all my stuff for magihazards before throwing it out. The curse got us through the light show, the actual materials were fine.”

Shit, he thought. Then when had…

“Sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were hoping for,” she continued. Then, bafflingly, “Do you have a therapist?”

Lorcan guessed the look on his face was answer enough.

Kryptonia sighed. “Right. Consider it? Because you clearly have a lot going on, and it’s above my pay grade.”

“I’m just having a bad week. Things are usually a lot better.”

“What’s a usual week like for you, then?” she asked.

A usual week? Well, Lorcan would maybe get an online order or two, pick up supplies and hole up in his workspace putting them together. Watch TV, talk to the kids, go to sleep. Nice. Safe. Predictable. “Nothing much.”

“So,” the seer said, “you’re fine as long as you’re doing literally nothing.”

“Yes. Wait. It sounds bad when you put it like that.”

“I’m sure your future therapist will say it nicer.” Wow, and here Lorcan thought her buddy was supposed to be the snarky one. “They might also wonder why your social life is such a touchy subject.”

Ugh. “It’s my social life, isn’t it? It’s everyone else who gets weird about it.” He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “Look, people have…broached the subject of me being a little bit friendlier, when I do my work.”

“He means me,” Vulk explained, “I’m ‘people’.”

“And sure, I can be rough, but, I don’t know–everyone acts like I’m the bad guy for not wanting to be friends with the people I talk to. Even–” Lorcan cut himself off. “I try to do good. That should be more important, shouldn’t it? Saving lives, protecting people?” He wasn’t thinking about Kyle. “Just because I don’t open up while I do it, that doesn’t make me bad. Does it?”

“Right, so I just met you, time guy,” Kryptonia said. “I don’t know the balance of your soul. But I do get what you’re saying, a bit.” Lorcan looked up at her, and she shrugged. “I give people hints of the future for a living. I like to think it puts some good out into the world, but…people can be stubborn. They don’t listen. I wouldn’t be doing myself any favors if I acted like every client I’ve ever had was a friend. Or that whatever fates they bring on themselves are my fault.”

And that was exactly what Lorcan did. Or. Tried to do. Because, in the end, hadn’t he done a lot to try and reach people who just wouldn’t listen? Didn’t it hurt, even when he told himself he didn’t care?

Hadn’t Kryptonia invited him inside when she didn’t have to? He was someone stubborn, determined not to listen, and she kept talking to him anyway. Just as he realized that, the last notes of the song faded.

“Anyways,” she said, in the silence that fell, “that’s the stuff you should bring up to someone who can give you real advice. I have…not a lot of time before my next reading, so I’m gonna have to kick you out.” She stood from her seat, and nodded to Vulk. “See ya, retro lamp.”

“Bye. Thanks for the help.”

Lorcan let out another slow breath. “I can pay you for your time,” he told the seer. “Since I interrupted your break and all.”

“You really won’t let yourself understand this, huh?” she asked. From this angle, the look in her eyes was almost pitying.

“Sorry.” He meant it, too.

He was thinking about the conversation for the entire bus ride home. “I don’t want to be a bad person,” he told his son, and felt the lamp’s plug come to rest on his shoulder.

“I don’t think you are,” Vulk said. “You’re grumpy and you mope a lot. I wish you could have somebody besides just us. But you’re not bad.”

Vulcan was–he was lazy, and flighty, and of course he was family. By all accounts, hearing reassurance from him shouldn’t really mean much. But it did help. He was one of the people who knew Lorcan best, after all.

So maybe he could try a little harder to see some good in what he did. When he talked to people like Belial and hir crew, Eva, Gravelord–of course he’d end up seeing the bits of himself he hated most.

But Kryptonia had seen someone who needed help, even if he didn’t think he did. And she tried, the same way he tried to help Eva, and Gravelord. If what she said about her friend Lacie was true, he had plenty in common with her, too–sharp tongues, and an excitement to use them. Clo…okay Clo was kind of a cipher, he still didn’t know what was up with Clo.

But Lorcan had been seeing only the worst of himself lately, in the worst kind of people. Maybe he could try finding himself in people who were good, too.

When they finally got home, he pushed into the stairs of his apartment complex. There was another figure walking up, which Lorcan didn’t think much of at first. But then he noticed they’d exited on his floor. And had an envelope in their free hand.

“Hey!” he called up, hexes at the ready, running headlong up the remaining flights towards what might be another nasty fight. He shoved open the door. “You there–”

It was his landlord. Which. Shit.

“Ah, are you…looking for this month’s rent?” Lorcan asked.

The landlord frowned. “It was due yesterday.” Yep, fuck, it was. The envelope the man was holding, despite being splashed with a very menacing crimson stamp on the front, likely contained the much more mundane threat of a late notice. Lorcan got a lot of those, too.

“Right. Hang on, I’ve got most of it here.” He took Osiris’s payment out of the money clip. About a hundred short at this point, but he’d get paid the rest later, hopefully. He said as much to the man.

The landlord rolled his eyes, starting to turn away. “It’s tenants like you who keep me in the red,” he muttered.

Something about the phrasing froze Lorcan in place. “What did you say?” he asked.

His landlord gestured with the cash in his hand. “I can’t pay my bills if you don’t pay yours,” he said. “You like keeping the AC running? Having maintenance come by to fix your problems?”

“Whatever.” Lorcan walked off, deep in thought. Why hadn’t he seen it before? “Vulk, Kryptonia’s vision. She saw us ‘in red’--or ‘in the red’. Like debt.”

“We know we can’t pay our bills Lorcan, we don’t need a seer for that.”

“It’s not our debt, though. Osiris said their GameStop location has been going into debt because of all the extra shifts they’ve been working. That’s the red the vision meant. Why the GameStop?”

Vulk’s cord flicked out, and Lorcan braced himself for some comment about Nintendos or evil video game haters. But instead Vulk said, “The GameStop is the only part of the mall that isn’t dying. That and the Hot Topic.”

Holy shit, he was right.

“If your goal was to kill the mall completely, you’d need to weaken those two holdouts. And if you can force the GameStop’s manager to overspend on the store’s budget…That would mean the crown is just a distraction. The attacks on Osiris have been about the mall this whole time.” So much for the hope that Lorcan could turn this into a chance to take Osiris out of the equation. Their crown had never been in any actual danger.

He paused. “Who would care this much about the mall?”

“Oh no.”

“What’s ‘oh no’?” he asked his familiar sharply.

“Well, uh, Doug says the scene movement draws inspiration from a variety of other subcultures before it, like alt-rock, emocore...and um. Mall goths.”

Lorcan took a deep breath. “You’ve been trying to get me to hang out with mall goths?!”

“Technically, they are a derivative subculture!”

“That explains why they’ve been so goddamn sociable this whole time!” Lorcan had known it was suspicious. “You know what the lesson here is, Vulk? Friendship is a scam and will only hurt you.”

“That’s not the lesson.”

“They’re college-age kids who work at the mall. Would’ve been easy enough to find Kyle after work.”

“We just went over this with the future lady.”

“Share some makeup tips, my ass,” he muttered as he approached his door (probably a good thing he’d caught his landlord before the man saw the bloodstain). “I’d be easy prey alone in their home turf.”

He found his hard proof in the back of his closet. A tube of green eyeliner that, when he asked Vulk to do his sensing on it, positively reeked of dark magic.

Lorcan had been worried about the tattoo doodle, or the stamp from the concert. Maybe even Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows’ spilled mojito. But before any of those had touched his skin, that scene kid had drawn a smiley face on his wrist in cursed eyeliner. He was right, again; you could hex someone with a smiley face.

And if he’d ever bothered to wear the stuff, it might have hit him hard enough to take him off the case completely. The curse was making him bleed from the hands. Lorcan didn’t want to imagine the stuff near his eyes.

“Ha!” he crowed to Doug. “Boring fashion sense saves the day once again.”

“Has he been like this the whole time?” Doug asked Vulk.

“Preeetty much.”

He ignored the jibe. He was busy remembering everything that had happened after that. The scene kids had–they’d gotten into line ahead of him. Paid with a bunch of change. Change the cashier had handed back to Lorcan.

The name jar. The concert door fee. Paying Gravelord’s tip. Fuck, Lorcan had passed the curse on to his own suspects and he hadn’t even known it.

It was a decent way to stir up more chaos, keep him focused on Osiris’s old crew and maybe even get him killed in the process. And a dangerously indiscriminate one. What if Lorcan had paid with a card, or spent that change anywhere else?

The eyeliner sat heavy in his hand. It had been too much to hope that whoever was after Osiris had good reasons at heart, hadn’t it? He’d given up on running into an altruist after what they did to Kyle, but a lesser evil, at least? This, though–these people weren’t even trying to make things better. Lorcan shuddered to think of the collateral damage if they got their way.

Speaking of, he took out the info sheet on Osiris’s ex-friends. “Hey Gravelord, I gave your bar some cursed coin sorry it was an accident but maybe you want to fix that.” It took forever with his shitty cell phone’s shit number pad, but he sent the text, then: “PS you blocked my burner but please do not call this number ever thanks.”

The next step was to alert Osiris. He could call them through Jennifer Lynn, but. That felt painful now. Besides, the GameStop might not have closed down, but if the goal was to get Osiris’s store in debt–they were already there. And the scene kids had tried to stop Lorcan when they spotted him in the mall, but not that hard.

If revealing Kyle would have hindered their plans, they’d have done more. But they’d cut him loose. By now they’d know Osiris had learned about his betrayal.

Which meant whatever their endgame, it had to be going down soon. Soon enough they might even be ready for Osiris themselves.

“Necromancy shit always starts at midnight,” he said, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. “But then…Vulk, if these kids are planning some sort of mall necromancy, would closing time count as a liminal hour?”

“You’re asking me?”

He seemed surprised. Lorcan told him, “You’ve read the mall’s energy, and you actually like socializing.”

Vulk’s cord flicked around, but Lorcan could tell his kid was thinking hard this time. “Yeah. Closing time makes more sense.”

“Then we’ll aim for closing,” he said. “This is going to be a big fight. Stay close to me, alright?”

“Alright.” The lamp paused. “If we’re going near closing time anyways.” Uh oh. “Can I buy another pretzel?”

Lorcan looked out the window and sighed. If the best time for the ritual really was closing, he had a lot less to work with than he thought. If he left right now, no delays, he might be able to catch them before they started their whole plan. But it was a risk. They might already be setting up for the ritual and if so–he’d be walking into a firefight. On one side, however many scene kids, all complete unknowns regarding their magic and ability (and Lorcan hated unknowns). On the other, the Crown Osiris.

And he couldn’t go in without Vulk, either. Who knew what these people would be planning–he needed Vulk to get the lay of the land. But he couldn’t risk a fight like this without being sure his son would get out okay. Couldn’t risk being unprepared again.

“There’s one thing we need to do first.” He googled a spot he remembered from teen-hood and grabbed his collapsible shovel. “But if we get there in time… Yeah. I’ll buy you a pretzel.”

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #the moirai #lorcan's family #a dying art

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 12)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 12: With Enemies Like These

Word count: 3,462

Content warnings: murder threats mostly

Lorcan had never gotten a parking ticket before. This wasn’t a difficult feat considering he didn’t have a car, but he imagined that the way non-magic, car-driving individuals felt about parking tickets was the same way he felt when he got back to the apartment and found a death threat on his door.

The note was stuck into the wood by one of those metal dart things that got associated with ninja. Lorcan was sure he could remember what they were called if he wasn’t dead on his feet but for now all he could think was he’d definitely seen an anime character posing with these fuckers.

The note was…a little confused, Lorcan thought. First in deliberate, if somewhat amateur, block letters, it read:

KEEP SERVING THE CROWN,

AND YOUR BONES WILL BE MEAL

FOR THE BUZZARDS!!

(Did it mean his bones would be a meal for buzzards, he wondered, or like. Ground into bonemeal? Because those were two different threats.)

But underneath, in regular black pen and a hasty scrawl that asked:

Holy shit dude are you okay? Like, I was gonna threaten you and all but there’s a bloody handprint? On your door? Do you need me to call somebody??

So. There was no way a hardened necromancer wrote this. Even a newb would know the difference between red ink and blood in this lighting.

Vulk was able to confirm with a tap against the door, Lorcan’s magical wards were untouched. Nobody had even tried to crack them. If the person behind the note wasn’t a necromancer, could it be possible they were an entirely un-magical accomplice?

Lorcan wasn’t going to underestimate Gravelord, his last real suspect left. He might drink too much for Lorcan’s comfort, but he was cleverer than his so-called friends gave him credit for. He didn’t write this note. But he could have pushed someone else to.

He walked back inside, and had Operator call Osiris’s home number (they shouldn’t be home yet if the situation really had them this worried).

“Hey, Jennifer Lynn?” he asked. “I may have a lead.”

Whatever computer person over at Uber who was responsible for tracking Lorcan’s location data was going to be confused as all get-out today. Generally speaking, rideshare services didn’t like it when you told them you didn’t know where the hell your destination was, so Lorcan’s efforts to follow his target had consisted of a lot of wild guesses, readjustments, and small hops with different drivers to triangulate on where the enchantment was leading him.

He was absolutely going to charge Osiris for expenses.

Osiris’s would-be usurper had slipped up, letting a non-mage write him a threatening letter. If you knew a magical postal worker (which he did, thanks to Jennifer Lynn putting him in touch with Osiris’s mail-bodies-to-Switzerland guy), you could get an enchantment that would return that letter back to its original sender. And for only sixty cents postage, too.

He’d finally gotten the enchantment, which showed him where to go using subtle tugs from the envelope in his pocket, to center on a specific bearing. It wasn’t any of the addresses listed in the dossier he’d gotten for Gravelord. It wasn’t Belial’s tattoo place or Eva’s garage.

It was the mall. The same mall where the Crown Osiris worked.

“You’re sure Osiris hasn’t been casting magic here?” Lorcan asked Vulk. He hadn’t brought the cardboard box disguise. Hadn’t thought he would need to.

“Uh huh,” Vulk said. “It’s way clean.”

“Hm.” Lorcan shifted on his feet for a minute–the Uber driver drove off while he was debating with himself–then started walking in.

Osiris wasn’t behind this. That wouldn’t make sense. Making up a threat against themselves? He could see that, maybe, for some weird necromancer politics thing.

But there’d be no reason to make up a threat and then bring Lorcan into it. That would mean…that would mean Osiris had some interest in him, personally. A big one, to risk looking weak in front of their underlings. And Lorcan was a necromantic nobody. That couldn’t be it.

When he entered the mall, things were…well, still dead, but it was a Friday so slightly more crowded than last time. A few groups walking around, and some noise, like the voices of college-age kids calling for someone’s attention.

It wasn’t until one of those voices yelled “Eyeliner guy!” that Lorcan even considered they were talking to him.

He turned, finding himself at the open maw of the out-of-season Spirit Halloween store and two familiar scene kids. They were wearing store aprons, probably in the middle of their workday, and had a few other friends who also appeared to be wearing ‘scene’ underneath their uniforms. They were putting up a big banner proclaiming a sale (this early?), the stepladder placed awkwardly between a large cut-out of a spooky tree and a fog machine.

“Um,” Lorcan said stupidly. “Me?”

“Yeah, man,” one of the two he’d met at the CVS replied, halfway up the ladder. “We thought it was you! What’s up?”

“Not much. Making a return.”

“That’s going to be hard without the original packaging,” another one said, nodding at Vulk as she loaded the fog machine with fluid.

Lorcan grabbed hold of Vulk’s cord, which had started to wiggle. “No, it’s a different thing actually. I’m holding this for unrelated reasons.”

“I often carry around large electronics for no reason, too,” she confided, a wry smirk on her face.

“Excellent,” he sniped back, “We’ve established how unremarkable my behavior is. Let’s stop remarking on it. Did you…want something?”

“Just to say hi. It’s wild seeing you again. Small world, right?” The guy hit him with a wide smile, resting a foot on the next rung up. For a briefest moment, the brand name splashed across the tongue came into view. He pressed on, “Did you like the eyeliner?”

Lorcan was so caught up in the case he was seeing things. His mind was filling in Osiris’s name in places where it didn’t belong. He pulled his gaze away from the shoes.

“Ten out of ten,” he said (and ignored the memory of Eva saying that mouthing off would bite him later). He, of course, had not touched the stuff since he bought it. “My world was in black and white and now I see in blinding technicolor.”

The kid laughed at that, out loud. Well okay, Lorcan thought. Sure, he was trying to be funny there, but it was strange to see his quips actually taken as jokes.

“You know, those were great wingtips you had that night,” he told Lorcan, waving a hand at the store’s interior in invitation. “You have time to show me how you did them?”

“Aren’t you busy? Or–supposed to be, anyways?” If the mall was dead, a Halloween store in the summer was even deader. He couldn’t see anybody but the kids inside.

“The boss lets us do whatever we want.” Somebody let out a snicker. Some kind of private joke? “He won’t mind.”

Lorcan glanced deeper inside the store, then back at the group. “Watch a makeup tutorial or something, I’m not going in there.”

“What,” the kid asked, “are you too cool to hang in a Spirit Halloween out of season?”

“Yes,” he said, walking off before anyone could protest. Well, he was, but that wasn’t the whole story either.

Lorcan hoped it was abundantly clear at this point that he was a time wizard. He could sense the flow of time as easily as he read words or heard music. But the thing about time was it wasn’t as set in stone as people assumed. Not just a law of physics, it was a thing that stretched and warped based on human understanding, and Lorcan could feel that. Intimately. Painfully. Daylight Savings’ was enough to lay him out all day, for crying out loud, and that was only from an hour changing on either end. He rarely traveled between time zones if he could help it.

And for all that Lorcan loved the Halloween holiday, he hated going to Spirit Halloween. Because in a Spirit Halloween, the time was always nearly the end of October. That’s just how it worked.

“You could still talk to them,” Vulk spoke up, once they were far enough away not to be overheard. “They’re working up front, you could stay outside the store.”

“I’m on the clock,” he answered smoothly, checking the letter to see that his target was still ahead of him. “Can’t give this person time to run.”

“Saying hi to someone for five minutes would do that?”

“It might.” Lorcan bristled. “Besides, there were like five of them plus their boss. I’m not going anywhere I’m that outnumbered, thank you.”

“Okay,” Vulcan said, “but if that’s true doesn’t that mean you’d be always outnumbered all the time everywhere?”

Lorcan didn’t even need to touch that one.

“Ugggggggh,” Vulk let out a long groan. “Why. Are. You. Like this.” He punctuated each word with a flick of his cord against Lorcan’s arm. “Alright alright, look. You say you’re lonely but then you do things like this. That guy didn’t want makeup tips, he wanted to hang out with you.”

“It’s a bad idea,” he said. “I can’t hang out with people who don’t know about magic.”

“But why not?” Vulk asked. “You freak out when magic people don’t like necromancy. Then when you talk to necromancers you freak out when they do. If you want to stop being lonely you’re gonna have to talk to someone who won’t do either.”

Lorcan paused. He did actually have a point there. “I’ll think about it.”

“You’ll think about it like with the Switch or like, actually think about it?”

He sighed. “Actually think about it.”

“Because I did work out how to use it I just need a lot of coils.” Oh great, Lorcan thought. His restless and energetic oldest son figured out how to constrict.

That concerning image fled his mind the second the enchantment started tugging the other direction. He’d passed the sender. Lorcan turned around to see…the GameStop?

That mistrustful voice started up again. No, Lorcan told himself. They didn’t have a motive. Besides, Jennifer Lynn had told him Osiris was going to be at their house for most of the day, to try and lure out the mastermind and also something about balancing store budgets. It had to be someone else.

Lorcan’s eyes widened as it hit him. Shit. Shit.

He set Vulk outside the shop–“Scream if you need me.”--and rushed inside.

It didn’t take long to spot the employee, who flinched the moment he saw Lorcan. “Look, guy,” the kid said, “Opal’s not scheduled in for–”

“Another two hours, I know. Good thing because this time, Kyle, I don’t need to talk to the manager.” He reached into his pocket, pulling out the dart that had been pinned to his apartment door. “Care to explain this for me?”

He didn’t know much about this Kyle person. He didn’t seem to enjoy retail work–but then, who did? For all Lorcan knew, he could be malicious or a schemer or just some idiot who didn’t deserve to be caught up in Osiris’s orbit.

Kyle looked at the dart, eyes wide. Looked back at him. Then: “That could be anybody's sick-ass kunai.”

“Oh my god.” This kid was worse at lying than Lorcan. He was so dead.

“You’re not, like, a cop or something?” Kyle asked. “You have to tell me if you’re a cop, that’s the law.” So fucking dead.

“Shut up.” First things first. Lorcan needed answers. “You left the note on my door.” It wasn’t a question; the enchantment in his pocket was practically about to take flight. The kid nodded anyway. “You were surprised to see a bloody hand on it.”

“Are you okay?” he asked again, a disbelieving note in his voice.

“Unimportant,” Lorcan said. So whoever got him to do it really hadn’t briefed him on anything else. “You know Opal’s home address. Because of this job?”

“Opal keeps a lot of forms in her office. She gave me a key when she promoted me.”

A key to the office, which wasn’t warded against nefarious intent, because Osiris didn’t like magic at their day job. Fuck. “And somebody asked you to get them that information?”

Another nod.

He took a deep breath. “Listen the fuck to me, Kyle. The person who wants to mess with your boss is playing a dangerous game, and you? Are their fall guy.” That, or this mastermind really thought Lorcan would be scared off by a threat so weak. Either way, he was being underestimated. “They do not give a shit if you get murdered or worse, so if you want to survive this clusterfuck you put yourself in, you are going to have to sell out and sell out hard.”

“It can’t be that bad,” Kyle said, but his face was pale. “Opal’s…fine. She almost complimented me in a performance review once!”

“Kid, when ‘Opal’ is through with you, a performance review will be the least of your problems. Your boss tries very hard not to be dangerous here–you don’t know the shit they can do. They’re like a bear that was sleeping. Until you poked it. And now it wants to eat you.”

“Metaphorically?”

“Maybe. Now, who asked you to do this?”

“Um–see. Well. It’s a funny thing about that…” Kyle scratched the back of his head. “I don’t actually remember?”

“You what.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. The sound held only fear. “I thought it was weird too and all, especially when I knew I had to threaten you, for some reason, but whenever I think about who asked me it’s just…fog?”

Oh, goddammit. The mind-whammying curse. Lorcan steadied himself against a shelf, mind racing.

The only way he could even think to begin parlaying for this kid’s survival was if he had information. Lying would be the ideal–Osiris couldn’t decide to murder their employee when they never knew he was involved. But there were too many what-ifs with that plan. What if can’t-lie-for-shit Kyle gave himself away? What if Osiris pressed on where Lorcan got the info?

If they found out, but Kyle still had something to give them, then maybe he could convince Osiris not to go full vengeance mode. Maybe. He’d never quite been able to rein Dexter in back in the day. He probably couldn’t do anything to convince Osiris, who was a hell of a lot worse.

Still. He might not be able to do anything. But Lorcan was the only one who could do something.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, that’s fine. We’ll retrace your steps, figure out where your memory starts to cut out. From there we can start listing suspects who might have been responsible for it.” Maybe if Vulk could sniff something out…?

“Oh, that’s a good idea!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Lorcan told him. “But there’s only so many people who would want to hurt Osiris–uh, Opal–and who you’re likely to run into. We’ll narrow down our options, I can tell the Crown I tracked them down myself, you’re probably going to have to find a new job before you can say something you shouldn’t–”

“We must say–” And a chill set in his bones. “--This was not the scene we were expecting to return to.”

He whirled around. The Crown Osiris was in the shop. Lorcan’s eyes slid past them in a panic. Vulk’s lamp body was still visible past the edge of the shop, and as he watched, the familiar wiggled his plug. It was a guilty, apologetic movement. But a sign of life nonetheless.

“I had heard you wouldn’t be here for a few more hours,” he said, slowly.

The other necromancer met his gaze evenly. “Do not be so foolhardy to assume you have our full counsel,” they told him. “We shall deceive you if and when we perceive it to be necessary.” Their eyes narrowed. “And so it appears to be now.”

Lorcan tried to ask Vulk with his eyes how long ago Osiris got here. He wasn’t sure the meaning totally got across, but Vulk made a few gestures from behind Osiris’s line-of-sight which he took to mean: long enough for him to thoroughly screw himself. “I was just doing what you hired me to do. I didn’t think you’d try so hard to micromanage your ‘agents’.”

“Not under ordinary circumstances. But we now suspect you might have hidden information from us about a traitor in our midst, had you the chance.” They took a step towards Kyle. “What did the usurper promise you? Money? Power?”

“They said you’d stick around the shop more!” Kyle blurted out and–what?

“What?” Osiris echoed his thoughts.

“The person had a plan to go after your house and they said if they did that you’d spend more time at the store–”

“You–”

“--and that sounded great because I really need your help more, it’s hard being the only one running things!”

The Crown’s face, which had been stuck in a look of pure confusion, changed to something offended. “Our location runs efficiently enough that it requires no surplus labor to succeed, Kyle!”

“You keep saying that!” Kyle shouted back, “But it gets busy, and the customers are angry and when you’re not around I can’t handle it and I needed you here!”

…He poked the bear for this?

“Well,” Osiris said. “You shall not need to worry about running the store alone for much longer, we promise you that.”

“Um.” Lorcan moved between them. It was a dangerous position to be in when they spoke with that tone. “This kid’s obviously an idiot. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“And yet he did inestimable damage to our livelihood,” they informed him. “Do you realize how the budget has been affected by your actions, Kyle? The overtime pay we require–dozens of hours since this has begun–threatens the delicate fiscal balance of the store. This location teeters on the edge of debt. A single day of low sales could plunge us over. And then where would we be?”

“Yeah, that sucks,” Lorcan cut in. “It’s just–”

“This no longer concerns you, Verdigris,” they said through gritted teeth. “You have done your duty as my agent.” Then, in a voice hard, cold, and final, “You may leave.”

He paused. “I don’t…”

Osiris lifted a hand into the air, and snapped their fingers. A figure shimmered into opalescent being next to them. “Jennifer Lynn,” they instructed. “Remove Mr. Verdigris from my store. He is no longer welcome. And ensure my employee does not escape.”

Jennifer Lynn didn’t acknowledge Lorcan. He knew why she couldn’t. It was fine. She wrote something on a clipboard, and a ringing noise like an alarm sung inside Lorcan’s head. The sheer might of Osiris’s will pushed at him like a wind. The store was theirs, he was trespassing, and he found his legs taking him outside the store without his active participation.

Vulk whispered, once he was out, “They threatened me not to warn you.” His power cord was bent oddly. Like someone had stepped on it.

“I figured.”

He turned back to see the Crown Osiris lower the store’s metal gate, marking the bars in Sharpie with what Lorcan knew would be a powerful ward.

“So you’re using magic here again?” he asked, weakly gripping one of the bars.

“We no longer appear to have much choice. Perhaps it is true that sooner or later, all boundaries break.” They tilted their head in his direction. “Very much like our patience.”

“But–” Lorcan couldn’t direct a plea to Jennifer Lynn. She didn’t owe him anything, and showing any familiarity could put her in danger. “He can’t do any more damage like this,” he addressed the Crown instead. “You have nothing to gain from killing him.”

“Verdigris,” Osiris said, staring him down through the bars of the gate. “You left your familiar on the eaves of my store. Made from a scrap of your soul. Such a simple thing to undo. Turn around and leave, without another word, or we will undo it.”

Lorcan’s fingers flexed tight. He couldn’t chance that it was an idle bluff. The Crown Osiris was merciless; they could, and would, murder Vulk to prove a point. It’d be easier than killing Kyle, even–who would care, or even notice, if a lava lamp stopped moving? Lorcan couldn’t risk it. He was on the outside looking in this time, he thought. This time he was the one being threatened.

Tearing his eyes away from the terrified kid, Lorcan picked Vulk up and hurried away. Just like his own neighbor, he was too afraid of the monster in the cage.

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #lorcan's family #a dying art

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

State of the blog:

Hi, all. A status update for those who are still interested. We’ve finally hit the point in A Dying Art where the big scenes got written ages ago, which means chapters are getting finished up a hell of a lot faster. Right now, there are three full chapters of the work that have been completed and are going through basic beta reads, and it would be *chef’s kiss* perfection if I could get those all posted before Halloween. So, look forward to that. Chapter 13 has us entering the endgame, and I’ve been excited for that pretty much since I started writing this story. Hopefully, you all are too! Thanks so much to everyone reading!

#update

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 11)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Lorcan Verdigris is not a necromancer. Anymore. But when the leader of the local necro coven comes to him with a request he really, really can’t refuse, past collides with present as he finds himself back in the world he’d tried to leave behind. Someone is trying to steal a powerful magical artifact, one whose destruction could unleash chaos upon the city. Or save it from an even greater danger. Or do nothing at all. Who knows. See, this is exactly why Lorcan stopped messing with the stuff.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 11: Late Night Showdown

Word Count: 4,362

Content warnings: very brief examples of minor body horror

Necromancy shit always started at midnight, which happened to be the exact time that Operator called for him after a long and unproductive day of staring at blurry pictures of his own hand and catching up on sleep.

“I’m up, I’m up,” he said, walking into the living room. “What’s–”

“One of Osiris’s people says she needs to talk to you,” Operator told him. They tossed him their headset (Op was a faux-1900s candlestick rotary phone plugged into Lorcan’s landline).

Someone who worked for Osiris. But sensible enough to call on a phone instead of summoning a million dead bugs–the realtor? “Hello?” Lorcan asked.

“Hello, Mr. Verdigris.” It was the realtor. “There is a situation at the Crown’s estate we need you to deal with. Intruders on the premises.”

He frowned. “And they can’t handle it because?”

“Osiris is doing a ‘nighttime inventory’ at the store. Minimizing time spent here until the security holes are patched.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “But one, I don’t have a car, it’ll be at least half an hour to get there if I’m lucky with the buses. Two, do you really expect me to fight someone that can go toe-to-toe with the Crown Osiris?”

“I’m not asking you to fight them, Mr. Verdigris. The methods of these intruders seem different from before. Less subtle. They’re angry about something.”

“Unsubtle anger doesn’t usually make a fight less likely. Guess how I know.”

“Mr. Verdigris,” the realtor said, and there was something in her voice that made him stop. “No one has broken through Osiris’s security system before. I doubt these intruders will, either. But we are the system. Do you understand that?”

Oh, he thought. The retorts died before he could get them out. She wasn’t asking him to help Osiris. She was asking him to help the poltergeists patrolling their estate. Lorcan might not survive an encounter with whoever was trying to break in. But neither would the shades. And they didn’t have a choice.

She was asking him to help.

“Do what you can to stall, I guess,” Lorcan told her. “I’ll call an Uber or something.”

He heard a pause. “Thank you.” Then she hung up.

“Are you doing the lock-and-load montage?” Vulk asked him before they headed out.

“It’s not an anything montage and there’s nothing to lock or load. I’m just checking over my supplies.”

“That’s still a lock-and-load montage. We should play some music.”

“Do not.” Lorcan sighed.

His best suspects were still Belial, Eva, and Gravelord. Lorcan didn’t know as much as he wanted to about their minions, but he could at least be prepared for them. He still had his necro gear from the night before, and a few other tricks up his sleeve.

One ghost flashlight with fresh batteries, a stained glass filter for its lens that his father had made for him. A small scalloped shell his sister imbued with some voice magic went into his pocket. Lorcan’s family always had his back.

He shoveled a spoonful of instant coffee powder into his mouth–look, it would keep him from falling asleep on the ride over, stop fucking judging him–then he and Vulk headed out.

His hand started curse-bleeding again while he locked up. He should go back inside, Lorcan thought, make sure the curse wasn’t doing something worse to him. Grab a towel to at least wipe off what looked like a very bloody handprint on his door before the neighbors noticed. The realtor could wait a little bit longer–

He stared at his hand. “Uh, Lorcan?” Vulk asked from the backpack.

The thoughts felt plausible, almost like things Lorcan would actually think. But not close enough. “It’s fine,” he told his familiar. “Let’s go. Lock and load, or whatever.”

“Lock-and-load!”

In the darkness that bathed Osiris’s front lawn, the shimmering, opalescent figure of the realtor stood out. Next to her were two shadows in the dark, obviously human. Lorcan squinted, then turned on his flashlight.

“Belial Blithe. Eva the Inevitable,” he announced, trying to sound casual. The two of them stood exactly at the edge of Osiris’s aquascape protections. Belial’s sleeves were rolled up with a set of pitch black garters to display hir elegant magical tattoos–classy, and yet also imposing–and Eva was tuning her haunted guitar with menace. They hadn’t attacked yet, but the threat was there. “What are you doing here?”

Not that he expected a full confession or anything, but well. If they were aiming to steal the crown, they wouldn’t be standing out in the open like this.

“We were looking for you, actually,” Belial said, turning to face Lorcan fully.

He blinked, looking at the rich green lawn around him. “So naturally,” he drawled, “you figured you’d find me at Osiris’s house.”

“Snarky,” Eva remarked. “But that smart mouth’ll do you in one of these days. How do you know this is Osiris’s place? They’re very protective of that information.”

Well, fuck him sideways, Lorcan thought. She was right.

“You knew about it last night, too. When you snuck into my concert spouting lies.”

“Alright, you don’t have to monologue,” he said. “Yes, I know where Osiris lives and yes, that’s super suspicious. And once you figured that out you, what, called up your buddies, asked if anyone else noticed me lurking around?”

“Actually, Belial called me.” Eva smiled tightly. “It’s nice to know somebody remembers old friends.”

“For a spy, you’re being quite forthcoming,” Belial said.

“If yesterday night taught me anything it’s that I’m a crap liar. And at this point, I figure there’s a real risk of you just killing me out of annoyance. I’d rather not.”

Belial scowled. “You should have thought of that before trying to burn down my tattoo parlor.”

“Wait, what?” he asked.

“Dad,” Vulk whispered (he was not supposed to be drawing attention to himself). “Did you burn down a tattoo parlor?”

“No!” he whispered back. To Belial, he said, “No. That wasn’t me.”

“You said you wouldn’t lie to us, traitor–”

“Yes, because as mentioned I am bad at it.” Lorcan let himself fidget nervously with the scorpion bracelet on his wrist. They had to have noticed it by now–it was the flashiest thing he’d brought.

So, he loosened the buckle and let it drop to the ground. Then he raised his hands to show they were empty except for the flashlight. He was trying to look open. Trustworthy. Vulnerable.

“You both saw through me last night,” he said, “and I doubt I could fool you now. You’re too dangerous for me to risk trying–there’s nothing I can do to stop either of you from killing me if you really want to. Can we start from the beginning? What did you think I was doing at your places yesterday?”

Lorcan knew necromancers. Necromancers lived and died (and re-lived, and re-died) by threat assessment. Osiris only trusted him as far as they did because Lorcan Verdigris was, fundamentally, not a threat to the Crown Osiris.

Even Belial and Eva could easily wipe the floor with him in most fights. There was a time to challenge that assumption, but not now. Being weak enough to dismiss would get him the slack he needed. He saw the look they traded at his admission of fear, and relaxed the tiniest bit.

Belial started: “Osiris has been acting cagey. Someone’s been gunning after them, and Eva thought it was you.”

“You knew about the mansion,” Eva threw in. “Either you’d show up here yourself–which, you did–or we’d have someone to sell out to Osiris once they got home.”

“Well, you’re too late, I sold you out first,” he shot back. “Look, I was contracted by Osiris. They gave me this address themself. You can ask her.” He pointed at the realtor.

“It’s true,” she confirmed. “The details of his task are confidential, but he is no threat to the Crown.”

“Are you sure about that?” Belial asked. “We haven’t gotten the part with my shop yet.”

“I didn’t burn down your shop,” Lorcan said.

“You burned one of my amps,” Eva noted.

“Yes, and I am–” He took a deep breath. “--sorry about that. What happened with the shop?”

“One of the needle guns got a frayed wire,” ze said. “And my guns don’t fray. It had to have been–”

“A curse,” Lorcan finished. “That sounds like–something else that happened to me. Did you get hit, too?” he asked Eva. “Besides the amp. Which I’m sorry for.”

“Uh huh. We can’t afford to lose any of those, you know. We’ve already got to replace the three that lit up during the morning marathon rehearsal.”

“...was that the curse?” Lorcan asked. Behind Eva, Belial waved hir hand in a ‘sort of’ gesture.

“Well, it was more than usually crap out on us,” she said, giving hir a sour glare. “Still, didn’t think much of it until Belial called about the shop. Hir defenses are no joke, either, do you know how many health inspectors the wards have to turn away from that place?”

Lorcan thought about how easy it would apparently be to add corpse ink to the shop’s inventory. “I can imagine.”

He held up his hand–the ‘blood’ had been getting thicker the more they talked about the curse, easily visible next to the flashlight’s glow. “A cursed fire nearly got me a few nights ago,” Lorcan explained, “and there’s this. Trying to distract me, I think. I honestly figured–at your place, one of your minions drew something on me that could’ve been magic.”

“Who?”

“Uh,” Lorcan said. “I’m really trying not to rat people out to angry necromancers without evidence–”

Belial ran a finger halfway down a tattooed ulna. Both it and the tattoo along hir knuckle started to glimmer like moonlight.

“Fine, dammit, this guy named Ray? I don’t have any proof, please don’t kill him.”

But ze just snorted. The tattoos went dormant. “Ray? He wasn’t cursing you, he was flirting with you. Thirsty bitch.”

Lorcan flushed. “I know that now,” he grumbled. “So, yeah. Somebody else. Not you, I’m guessing. And not me.”

“Osiris hired you to find out who’s after them,” Eva said.

He glanced over at the realtor. ‘Confidential’, she’d said, but well…what else would Lorcan be investigating?

“Osiris thought I should look into you because you knew things about their old life,” he said. “But I didn’t tell them which of you I was investigating. I’m not going to set the Crown Osiris on someone without being sure you did the thing you’d get killed for.” He paused. “Or unless I really needed to get the heat off me.”

“How courageous.”

“But fair,” Belial said. When Eva glared at hir, ze added, “What? You threw plenty of people under the bus back when they were still Opal.”

The mention of Opal deepened her scowl. “You’re buying this pretty quickly.”

“I don’t know if I entirely believe him,” Belial told her. “But his story does add up. Besides, do you really think Osiris would be frightened of him?”

That stung, but it was accurate. He was in the same boat, anyways. None of this proved Eva or Belial’s innocence, but it didn’t make sense if they were guilty. That only left…

“So, um. While we’re trying to make sense of all this.” He paused. Had to ask. “Is the Marquis of Shadows with you, by any chance?”

“Gravelord? Of course not,” Belial said, in a dismissive tone that Lorcan did not like. “Why would he be here?”

“Because I talked to him last night, too. Did he not mention?”

“Gravelord can barely remember ritual incantations these days,” Eva spat out, “much less who’s spying on him for who. Heck, isn’t that fraternity buddy of his still selling you information?” she asked Belial, who glanced away with a guilty look.

Yay, Lorcan thought. He was right, again. That was definitely triumph he was feeling now. “I thought you were his friends,” he said.

Belial blinked. “Gravelord’s a liability. He needs watching.” Ze sounded almost defensive.

“I’m surprised you even care,” Eva told him. “Aren’t you a sad little loner who thinks everyone’s going to hurt him? Friends turn on you or they die, right?”

“I don’t care.” He did. “I’m just surprised you don’t.”

“It’s none of your business. You’re not involved in any of this.” The look on Eva’s face was stormy. Uh oh. What did Lorcan do this time? “Opal would’ve come to us, you know. We protected her from threats just like this.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” because wow was that a can of worms Lorcan knew better than to open by now. “Osiris doesn’t really trust other necromancers these days.”

“And what do you get out of this?” Belial asked.

These two didn’t know about the crown being in danger (or were at least pretending not to). They might actually be on board with Lorcan’s plan to maybe destroy the thing if he got the chance. But could he trust them? Could he trust Eva to sit still and wait until Lorcan knew breaking the crown wouldn’t blow up the city? Belial not to decide Lorcan was a liability himself?

“They paid me,” is what he said, and apparently Lorcan had not learned his lesson about Eva, because he couldn’t help adding, “Turns out rich people were always able to do that.”

“Shut the fuck up. What does Osiris even think you can do to help them anyways? You’re nothing. You couldn’t even defend yourself, let alone them.”

Eva’s words didn’t worry Lorcan. What worried him was the way she fingered the neck of her guitar as she said them.

He’d have to tread lightly. “You don’t have to understand why, but Osiris does trust in my ability to deal with this issue. Messing with me could look like…” He reached for the right phrase. “A challenge to their authority.”

“That’s only a problem if someone tells them,” Belial said, and Lorcan’s stomach dropped. “And we can take care of that easily.” Ze flicked hir eyes over towards the realtor.

“Hold on. Do you really want to do this?”

“I do.” Eva’s eyes flashed. “Maybe it’ll teach Osiris to pick a better protector.”

Well. He’d known all along this was going to end in a fight, hadn’t he? Lorcan inched his backpack off his shoulder. He handed the whole thing, with Vulcan inside, over to the realtor. Just inside Osiris’s barriers. “Keep him safe, please,” he told her.

“Yes, keep it safe, shade,” Eva said. “How’s the sorry excuse for a mage going to fight without his familiar?”

“Tough words from someone who can’t let go of a guitar haunted by someone else’s thrall,” he said.

“Hey, I don’t need it. I’ll fight you a capella if you need the reminder,” she declared, setting her guitar with care on the manicured lawn next to her. That care disappeared as she strode forward, with a raspy hum that rattled his bones.

Minus the bone-rattling, it was exactly what he was hoping to goad her into. “We don’t have to do this,” he said. He needed her to get just a little closer.

“Oh?” The word echoed in his ears, dancing in and out and in and out. He swayed on his feet–for a second it felt like the ground was bucking underneath him. “How do you plan to defend Osiris if you’re not even willing to fight?”

His heart stuttered, carried through five beats at once by that last vowel. “I was going to let Osiris handle that part, actually,” he grunted in response. “They don’t need my protection.”

“Why are you here, then? Did it finally hit the almighty Crown that they can’t just carry on as a one-gestalt army? It must have stung to need help from someone as pathetic as you.” She leaned in with a sneer.

“Osiris doesn’t need me,” Lorcan said. He pulled a bedazzled scallop shell out of his pocket with his free hand and tossed it in Eva’s direction. “And they don’t need you either!”

And Eva. Fell. Silent.

Not from his words. Because Lorcan had just used a shell enchanted by his sister’s familiar, a magical mollusc with a talent for stealing voices. The singer’s hand went to her throat. The guitar behind her, forgotten, for just a moment.

And god, if he could just get her to listen–“Look, I didn’t know Opal. But just because I have some skepticism whether she deserved your loyalty doesn’t make me the bad guy. Sometimes our friends suck. It happens.”

Eva didn’t respond, obviously. He doubted the message would sink in, but if he was really lucky she might be rattled enough to leave.

A sharp pain pierced through his outstretched arm. Ulnar nerve, Lorcan thought, and whipped his head over to Belial.

“A voice-stealing hex,” ze said, tattoo now glowing, vivid in the dark of the night.

Lorcan felt at the arm carefully. Everything from the elbow down was frozen, wouldn’t bend. He hid his concern with a casual shrug. “It’ll fade eventually.”

“You said you couldn’t win a fight against us. And that you weren’t going to lie tonight.”

Fucking hell. “I didn’t,” he said. “I can’t win a fight against you. Not my fault you assumed I wouldn’t come prepared anyways.”

“Prepared to fight against us.” And there was that threat assessment, working against Lorcan now. He’d caught them by surprise, and that wasn’t always a good thing. It meant he could do it again.

So, he did. Lorcan flipped the glass filter over the front of his flashlight, and the beam of light that came out looked brighter, healthier. The grass seemed to drink it in where it fell.

“Sunlight,” Lorcan said. “I brought it here to deal with Gravelord, but it’ll work on you, too. Let me explain: I am a time wizard. I can make anything break. How long do you think your tattoos will last in direct sunlight? The pigments dissolve. The colors fade.”

“You think you’d take me out in one attack? Your magic can’t be that strong.” Hir eyes had narrowed, uncertain. Belial didn’t know anything about Lorcan’s time magic, he’d wager.

But bluffs were a last resort. Scorched earth. It worked or you died. Tonight he had to play the long game.

“It’s not,” he admitted. “If we fought, you’d win. But I’d make you hurt for it. You two noticed Osiris slipping–how long until your rivals start wondering who else has weaknesses to exploit? Can you afford to be rusty? After all,” Lorcan added, enunciating each word, “tattoos take so much time to touch up.”

Ze took a single step back, and glanced over to Eva.

She’d picked up her guitar, mouth set in a snarl. A chord filled the air, then another. Lorcan felt his heart rate pick up, palms sweating, then two sets of skeletal finger bones formed in the air. One flew to Lorcan’s right leg and…strummed, phalanges passing straight through Lorcan’s flesh and setting every fiber of muscle in his calf to vibrate.

He kept from letting out the yelp of pain but couldn’t stop the convulsions from taking him to the ground. His focus was on the flashlight, keeping it gripped tight, which is why he didn’t notice the second set of fingers until they grabbed for his throat.

Eva made two mistakes there. First was not going after the flashlight so Belial could back her up. The second was overlooking the bone necklace tucked under Lorcan’s shirt. It reacted to the ghostly presence, coming alive to wrap around Lorcan’s throat like a protective snake. The fang of the pendant darted out, batting away the hand for a moment.

Lorcan looked back to Vulk, set on the ground just inside Osiris’s wards. He nodded.

Sometimes he and his kid had trouble communicating, Lorcan knew. But every now and then they were perfectly in sync. Vulcan’s cord whipped into the ground, his plug sinking directly into the boundary line of Osiris’s wards.

Vulk could sense magical energies like ley lines, ambient energy, and wards. And with a strong enough source of magic, he could also tap them.

The lava lamp lit up, overcharged and magically luminous. Everything inside his radius was hit all at once with the anti-necromantic energies of Osiris’s aquascape defense. It tore the ghost hands off Lorcan in an instant like leaves in a river’s rapids. The bones flew apart, losing coherence until they simply faded into the night.

Familiars one, haunted thralls zero.

Lorcan pushed himself up. Eva couldn’t use her guitar’s magic against him inside the protective radius, and Belial’s paralytic tattoo curses wouldn’t reach him either. But his left arm was still frozen, and Vulk couldn’t keep this up long. He had to take Eva out of the fight for good.

The not-bluff he used on Belial wouldn’t work on her. Eva was angry, and Lorcan knew anger could make the future seem inconsequential. No, he’d need an equally emotional target.

He stood up to his full height, raised the hand holding the flashlight to rub at his own neck. It was a perfectly natural action after nearly getting strangled. He hoped Eva didn’t notice the way he lingered on his bone necklace, stiff and lifeless inside the anti-necromantic light.

Her mouth moved. She’d really forgotten that her voice was missing, huh?

“What’s that?” Lorcan asked. He didn’t even have to try to give it just the right mocking tone to set Eva off. “I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

She stalked closer, possibly planning to beat the shit out of him with her bare hands. Lorcan was sure she could. He stepped forward, out of the light.

Like the scorpion bracelet, Lorcan’s bone necklace was magically inert until the right conditions were met. It animated when exposed to necromantic energy. The red ink of a dark curse worked well enough.

The necklace, following his mental commands, slid down his left arm and wrapped itself tight between paralyzed fingers. Lorcan launched himself at Eva.

A summoned hand passed straight through his gut, and Lorcan was definitely going to be feeling that later, but in the meantime he let the toothy pendant arc right at the guitar.

Magical objects were usually warded against serious damage, and Eva’s guitar was no exception. She should have remembered time magic ripped straight through those wards. The fang scraped across the body of the guitar with a keening screech, and Eva froze in place.

It lasted only a moment–a single strum summoned another bone hand to shove Lorcan to the ground–but even after she’d gained space Eva simply held the guitar in front of her, staring at the gash in the guitar’s perfect ivory coating.

“That’s one hit,” Lorcan said in the silence that fell after. “And if I got close once, I can do it again. You’d risk a lot to fight me, but are you willing to risk that? It is your only reminder of your dear departed friend.”

Belial let out a shocked whistle. Without a voice to speak words, Eva seemed only to be able to give Lorcan an open-mouthed stare.

“I told Belial,” was all he said. “I can make it hurt.”

Eva looked at her guitar. Rage, heartbreak, grief warring on her face. Finally, she whirled in the grass and stormed away, boots stomping heavy footprints in the grass.

As Lorcan picked himself off the ground, Belial said, “Don’t think that trick’ll work when Osiris gets tired of you. They won’t let you get close.”

“I’m aware.” He didn’t relax until both of them had disappeared, and Vulcan’s glow could finally fade.

Shoulders drooping, Lorcan turned to the realtor. “They’re not looping back around?”

“Not as far as the other shades can see,” she told him.

“Good.” He reached for his stomach, which very much wanted to hurl all over Osiris’s perfect lawn. Whether that was from the fight or the gut-scrambling, Lorcan couldn’t say. “You paid attention to the spells they cast, yeah? Did any of it look like what our mystery assailant’s been using?”

“You let yourself get cursed on purpose?”

He snorted. “Don’t give me that much credit.”

The realtor thought a moment. “No, actually. We’ve seen strange fog, cloaked figures, some sort of ghost lights. You think they’re telling the truth about not being involved?”

“I think so.” They could still be playing a long game, but, “They’d be risking a lot if they were connected somehow. Showing their faces, letting us go. Ugh,” he groaned, “I really don’t like the idea of Gravelord being my best suspect.”

“What’s wrong with Gravelord?” Vulk asked, and well. Lorcan didn’t want to talk about that with Vulcan, of all people. The kid knew way too much about the context.

“Later. Maybe,” he said, picking up the lamp. They’d have to clean the mulch out of his prongs when they got home.

“So that’s how a time wizard fights,” the realtor remarked, shaking him from his thoughts. “It’s surprisingly effective.”

Lorcan breathed in. “Time is slow,” he said. “It doesn’t break things all at once, it just grinds them down bit by bit. But it never stops.”

She nodded, giving him a studying look. “We appreciate your help tonight, Mr. Verdigris. I don’t think those two would have left us unscathed.”

And how was he supposed to reply to that? ‘No problem’? He’d only risked his life against two angry killers armed with dark magic, after all. “Call me Lorcan,” he finally said.

“Jennifer Lynn,” she told him. “But don’t take it personally if I say I hope we don’t have to meet again.”

He didn’t. He preferred it, actually. Jennifer Lynn…she was something like a spirit, in a situation that Lorcan, being a living breathing human person, couldn’t understand. She had a sense of pride that, despite it all, he did sympathize with. She was a decent person to be acquainted with.

Lorcan might not be able to solve her problems with Osiris. Not yet. But he could feel a little bit proud, himself, of what he’d done tonight. For once, he’d done something good.

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #lorcan's family #necromancy #a dying art

0 notes

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 10)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Lorcan Verdigris is not a necromancer. Anymore. But when the leader of the local necro coven comes to him with a request he really, really can’t refuse, past collides with present as he finds himself back in the world he’d tried to leave behind. Someone is trying to steal a powerful magical artifact, one whose destruction could unleash chaos upon the city. Or save it from an even greater danger. Or do nothing at all. Who knows. See, this is exactly why Lorcan stopped messing with the stuff.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 10: Trauma’s Toll

Word Count: 4,136

Content warnings: This chapter touches on a few heavier themes--in particular, alcohol use, alcohol abuse, and recovery from alcoholism. It features a dissociative incident due to trauma. There’s an extended content warning under the cut to just clarify some stuff about my intent with this chapter.

Extended content warning: Alcohol and addiction are notable themes in this particular chapter. I do want to note that this chapter is not meant to represent all people who drink, or even all people who specifically struggle with alcoholism or addiction. In this chapter, my intent was to explore Lorcan’s specific experiences with alcohol, shaped by his own specific perspective, and I hope what I’ve chosen to do here makes sense given his character. I’ve looked into additional options to make sure I am portraying this topic respectfully, but if there is something that I’ve missed, please feel free to let me know.

Lorcan’s last stop was a bar, shortly before closing time. He paused a moment before walking across the threshold.

Eva was a good enough suspect, wasn’t she? She had motive, skills. (A mean kick.) She wasn’t afraid of Osiris the way other people were. He probably didn’t need to investigate Gravelord. He’d scheduled this one last for a reason.

But then, of all of the necromancers Lorcan had prank-called, Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows was the only one who hadn’t tried to curse him. He’d just hung up. That kind of restraint in one of Osiris’s necromancers was worrisome. Lorcan stepped inside.

His first step was to talk to the bartender. Not about Gravelord–though, he wondered, would it be weird to at least ask? She had to know tons about this guy. It’d be weird, he decided. “I will tip you well,” he informed her instead, “but do not let me order anything alcoholic tonight.”

Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows, was sitting at a table with two other necromancers. Lorcan would bet these necromancers also doubled as drinking buddies, which made them three of his least favorite things. One of the minions wore a nice striped sweater and the other a preppy polo shirt with a collar.

The man himself had a smooth goatee and a black button-up shirt. The top button was undone and sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He wore sunglasses despite it being night, and indoors, which was the only thing marring the image he presented of a professional loosening up after a long night on the graveyard shift.

Oh god, Lorcan really was getting tired if he was making jokes like that.

“Necromancer, new in town, looking at the local scene,” he plowed forward when he reached the table, before anyone could ask. “Tried some other covens, nobody was really giving me the right vibes.”

Gravelord’s head tilted slightly. Probably studying him underneath the shades. “What d’you want to drink?” he asked. “I’ll buy you a round.”

“A soda.” There was an obvious, questioning silence Lorcan filled with, “I heard Gravelord here was into chemical magic. I like chemistry.”

Lorcan knew Gravelord’s magic was an unusual one, some kind of art working with photoreactive chemicals. And Lorcan really did like chemistry. After the Eva snafu, he figured he should stick to the truth as much as possible. Judging by the nod Gravelord gave as he stood from his seat, appealing to his craft was a good move.

The Marquis headed to the bar, stumbling heavily even on the short walk over. Lorcan grimaced–he’d seen worse, but he couldn’t help the way his skin prickled when he saw someone that intoxicated.

“How, uh,” he asked the other two. “How often does he do this?”

“It’s not that bad,” the guy in the striped shirt said. His slouch got defensive. “Once a week, really. And it’s none of your business.”

That was true enough. Lorcan shifted in his seat and tried to ignore the itch.

He asked, casually, “What other topics are none of my business?” Stripes must have been pretty drunk himself, because he didn’t hesitate to warn Lorcan not to ask why Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows was called Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows.

“--and now Opal’s in charge and they’re the only one allowed to use royal titles!” Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows snarled. He’d been going on like this for twenty minutes. “I got Opal into heraldry in the first place, and suddenly I’m the one who’s presumptuous?!”

It was an informative rant, for sure. Lorcan had learned the difference between an earl and a count, and the etymology of the word ‘marquis’. Most importantly, he learned that Gravelord, like everyone else in Osiris’s orbit, had plenty of reason to hate them. Lorcan didn’t know why he’d expected anything else.

No, he knew why. Gravelord hadn’t cursed him on the phone earlier, and restraint was an unusual quality for necromancers. The kind that raised zombie armies and hung out around the Crown Osiris, anyways. A restrained necromancer, one who knew how to hide their grudges, would shoot straight to the top of Lorcan’s suspect list.

The Marquis of Shadows didn’t look restrained as he sat across from Lorcan taking heavy, desperate gulps from his lime mojito. He’d done the same thing five minutes ago, and five minutes before that.

A person could drink a lot and still be competent. Lorcan knew that. A person could drink a lot, be absolutely incompetent in every way, and somehow still be a massive threat. Not naming names or anything. But surely, he thought, if Gravelord was in the middle of enacting a vengeance plot, he wouldn’t feel the need to vent like this. The promise of revenge-to-be was a balm against many of life’s petty irritations.

Was that it, then? The phone call was just a fluke, and Lorcan had come all the way to this bar for nothing?

Gravelord swirled the remains of his drink–there was the smallest puddle at the bottom of his glass–and looked up at him. “New round. Want something stronger this time?”

He really, really didn’t.

He gave his order in words that felt empty once they left his lips. There was a ringing in his ears that wouldn’t go away. His first thought was another curse, that red mist again, but that couldn’t be right–Lorcan could still think, it was everything else that felt muddy. Every now and again, he could hear Gravelord and his buddies break into laughter, that noise of cheery camaraderie where things were funny just because you were having fun and it was so familiar and yet so distant. The air itself was heavy with alcohol.

Lorcan needed to ground himself. He turned his head.

The minion in the collared shirt had gone back to the bar while he was–he was going to call it ‘distracted’. The bartender was pouring drinks, craft beer for one of them, something with a liquor shot for another. She reached for the soda fountain gun to make Lorcan’s rum-and-coke-without-the-rum.

For a second, her back crossed over his line of sight to the drink, and his breath caught. His heart skipped one beat, then another.

What the fuck was happening to him, he wondered. This wasn’t…this couldn’t be…it didn’t make sense.

A smudge of movement entered his overcrowded vision–the bartender was waving a hand at him.

What was she–breathing slowly, trying to get at least some oxygen back into his lungs, Lorcan lifted his own (shaking, trembling) hand from the table.

The bartender pushed aside the full glass she’d already poured and held up the soda gun, stretched out from the back wall as far as it would go. She used it to top off a new glass. This time, Lorcan could see everything. And when Gravelord’s minion reached out to grab the drinks she stopped him, walking to their table herself.

“You doing table service now?” Gravelord asked.

“Consider it a one-time thing,” she said smoothly, eyes flicking over to Lorcan for the briefest moment.

He took his drink with a slow nod, and a numb feeling in his fingertips. Lorcan had just enough composure to take a single sip of soda–sugar, carbonated, nothing else, it was safe–before he blurted out, “Bathroom,” and rushed off.

Okay, Lorcan thought as he took care of business. He just had some kind of attack. A panic attack, anxiety. Something dissociative, maybe. (God fucking damn was he wishing he’d listened to his brother explaining the difference.) And over what? One necromancer being a drunk idiot? Lorcan could handle necromancers–he’d been doing it all night, hadn’t he?–and he could handle being around people drinking. He could.

Lorcan knew he had issues. He ignored them most days. But he really had thought he’d been getting better about this one. That part of his life was years past, in a lot of ways more distant than his past with necromancy. Gravelord’s drinking, the bartender…none of them should be reminding Lorcan of anything.

Especially since he didn’t remember–

He jolted out of that thought, fingernails scratching against the ceramic sink as the bathroom door swung open and Gravelord himself strode shakily in.

“There you are,” he said. “Hope the crew didn’t come on too strong, you know how it is on guys’ night.” He finished his words with a broad smile.

Really, Lorcan thought, forcing a smile back. Smalltalk, now?

“You said you were interested in chemistry?” Gravelord prompted. “Is that part of your magic?”

“Ah, not really,” he admitted. “I dabbled a bit back in college. Alchemy, really, but there was a lot of overlap.”

The man was silent for a second. Lorcan wondered if he’d lost the train of thought, but he said, “College kid. Figuring out alchemy.” Then, in a knowing tone, “Oh. You used it to make alcohol, didn’t you? Partied a little, got yourself hooked. That’s why you’ve been so jumpy since you got here.” He turned his head to see the necromancer had taken off his shades, bloodshot eyes meeting Lorcan’s for the first time that night. “Coming here must have been like walking into the lion’s den. I think we’ve got something you really want.”

He swallowed, taking an instinctive step back. “Putting away the dumb drunk act, then?” he asked. It was all he could think to say.

Gravelord snorted. “I’m a cleverer drunk than you’ll ever be sober. Why act, when the real thing’s more fun?” He moved forward, and Lorcan could smell the ethanol on his breath. “It’s not my fault if you only see what you want.”

“I don’t want to be seeing any of this.”

The other man leaned in close, and asked “You sure?”

Lorcan pushed against the sink, trying to get some room. It gave him a clear view of his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. His disguise was impeccable, the elaborate eyeliner still in good shape even after the long night. But he looked haggard, worn to the bone.

It didn’t make him look less like a necromancer.

No, he definitely didn’t want to see that. He hadn’t wanted to see himself fitting in with Belial’s coven, either, or in the way Eva mourned a friend lost to Osiris’s gestalt. He didn’t want to see a time when he’d lost control of everything–his life, his mind, even his own body–mirrored in Gravelord’s drinking habit. That’s all tonight had been: seeing things he didn’t want, in people he didn’t want to know.

What did Gravelord see when he looked in the mirror, Lorcan wondered. What did Gravelord see when he looked at him?

“You’ve been doing this on purpose,” he told the man. It finally clicked into place, why his behavior earlier had felt off. He doubted he’d have noticed if he wasn’t a time wizard, but Gravelord took a drink once every five minutes. Almost like clockwork. People without time magic weren’t that precise by accident. “You’re getting drunk as you can, as fast as possible.”

“Well,” Gravelord said, tilting his head in a nod. “Looks like we’re both clever.”

The phone call hadn’t been a fluke. Gravelord was restrained. Gravelord was deliberate. But the purpose he was using it for–“Why?”

“That’s really not your business, now is it?”

His voice nearly broke on the next question, but he had to ask. “Is it because of Osiris?” Everything else was Osiris’s fault. Wasn’t that the lesson he’d learned tonight?

The necromancer paused at that. “It is and it isn’t,” he said. “That’s a difficult question to answer, one way or another. Interesting one, too. Thought you were new in town?”

And Lorcan–he didn’t know what to say. If Gravelord really was clever as he claimed, his cover wasn’t going to last much longer anyways. There was nothing else he could do that would actually make an impact.

“Look,” he tried anyways, “you’re only hurting yourself here, and you know it. Osiris isn’t worth that. You really want to give yourself liver damage over them?”

“Please,” the man shrugged, “liver damage is easy. You just–”

“Do not say ‘revivify your organs’,” Lorcan told him.

“Revivify your organs!” Gravelord announced, far too loudly. Ow.

He threw up his hands. “Okay, sure. But what about the other problems? There’s plenty of ways for a person to fuck themselves up when they get drunk.”

“Got that handled. Why’d you think we come here on Wednesdays?” he asked. “Less crowd. Less pressure. And my friends are here. They keep me out of trouble.”

Belial’s crew were hir followers. Eva’s tried and failed to reign her in. Gravelord…thought his were helping him. “There’s a point I’d say real friends should be helping you cut back.”

“You have a unique way of offering advice,” Gravelord noted. “Did you have friends to help you cut back?”

Lorcan sucked in a breath. His nails scraped again on the sink. “No,” he said. Sharp. Final. It even seemed to take Gravelord aback.

When he spoke next, his voice had something like real emotion in it. “Maybe you just need better friends. Not mine, though,” he added. “I don’t think you fit with our scene. Also, I really do have to piss, so.”

He pushed past Lorcan, the conversation ended, and went into one of the stalls.

Lorcan spared a moment to be thankful this particular bar didn’t have urinals. It was hard enough to brood while you could hear another man peeing just behind you. Yeah, he thought. That was distracting. He finished washing his hands, careful not to meet his own eyes in the mirror, and headed out.

He might be a sour misanthrope, but Lorcan did know that people couldn’t do everything alone. Addiction, especially, took a lot of help to kick. Lorcan never would have managed, that was for sure. People like his family, who were always there no matter how big his problems, were what had kept him going. His kids, who needed him to not be a total fuckup in at least one area of his life.

And there were people like Kryptonia and her circle, willing to help out a fellow magic-user in a bind. Or strangers like that bartender who helped just because.

Lorcan’s friends, though… His friends had only ever hurt him. He’d learned his lesson about trust back in college, eight years ago. He could have acquaintances. He couldn’t have friends.

He stuck around at the bar–where else did he have to go, really? His apartment, which had always been his fortress, felt so far away. Time passed, Lorcan painfully aware of every lonely second, and then Gravelord’s minions had left to settle the bill.

Gravelord reached for his last drink of the night.

“Are you sure you want to finish that?” Lorcan asked, because. Well. He had to try.

“You sure you want to stop me?” the necromancer shot back. “If I black out it means I don’t remember anything from tonight. Even a, quote, ‘new guy’ asking nosy questions about me and my crew I should probably report to the Crown Osiris.”

“Fine. Okay. You’re your own damn person.” It wasn’t going to make a difference anyway. Might as well get what he came here for. “You were right, Gravelord. I did have something I wanted tonight.”

“I knew it.” His voice was childish in victory.

“Yeah yeah. So hypothetically. If you had a chance to get revenge on the Crown Osiris by stealing the crown that holds their souls, would you?”

“Fuck yes!”

“Follow-up: have you tried?”

“Can you keep a secret?” Gravelord asked, in a whisper. Lorcan readied his bracelet, but leaned in. “No. They are very strong and scary. I’m not stupid, even this drunk.”

That was probably as close to the certain truth as Lorcan was going to get. There was a reason so many cultures had some equivalent of the phrase ‘in vino veritas’. A disappointing end to the night. “Well,” he said. “Thanks for the help, Gravelord. We’re done here.”

“Yeah, the brew’s hitting hard,” the man remarked. “Shit, wait, have to tip while I can still do math.”

He tried, and failed, to stand from his seat. The near-empty glass of mojito tipped over, splashing the last of its contents on Lorcan’s hand. He hissed in pain as the skin where it hit suddenly stung like sunburn. That didn’t make sense, alcohol didn’t–wait, Gravelord worked with photoreactive chemicals. And the lime in the mojito would be reactive with UV light, like a margarita burn. Fuck.

Lorcan’s hand, with its scorpion curse bracelet, reared up. He could strike back now. Gravelord would get back exactly what he’d thrown at Lorcan, the timing was perfect, he was pathetic and alone and his friends weren’t here to help him–

The spite drained out in an instant. He let the spell fizzle.

Gravelord hadn’t noticed anything, too busy mopping up the spill. When he glanced up to Lorcan, shades slipping down, his eyes were filled with what seemed to be genuine regret.

“Sorry, sometimes the magic does that,” he said. “Can’t always control it when I’m this buzzed.”

Lorcan grunted, because: “I know the feeling.”

The others were coming back, so he said, “Here, I’ve got this,” and handed one of them the rest of the change left in his pocket–there was still a lot left. “Tip the bartender and get him home. I’ve got to wash this off before I get a rash.”

“Fun night?” the Uber driver asked when he picked Lorcan up. The question made sense: it was a quarter after two, Lorcan had a concert stamp on his hand, and thanks to the Marquis of Shadows he’d come out of a bar smelling like alcohol.

“No.” He got in the car and shut up.

He really hoped Gravelord wasn’t the secret mastermind behind everything. Imagine getting outwitted by someone who hexed you with a mojito. Lorcan could only handle that embarrassment once in a lifetime, thank you very much.

He was pushing his way through a red mist. It was loud, loud enough that he couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying, but Lorcan couldn’t pin down what the noise actually was.

A man stood next to him, with a vivid sleeve of tattoos running down his arm. He was leaning in close, breath tickling his cheek. It sent a thrill of both excitement and apprehension down Lorcan’s spine, though he couldn’t remember why.

There were snacks on the table next to them, soft pretzels and Goldfish and a huge jar of brown…just brown, the color. Lorcan took a sip of his drink as he looked at his options. He was met with the taste of lime and the bitter sting of alcohol. A mojito. This was definitely a mojito.

The apprehension turned to outright dread. He didn’t drink. Not for years. This had to be–this was a dream.

The noise crescendoed, Lorcan finally making out a low, steadily rising guitar beat. Then he woke up.

Four-eighteen, he thought through the adrenaline rush. Between the late night and all the caffeine, he’d probably only been in REM a few minutes. He turned on a non-sentient lamp, reached into his nightstand, and pulled out a spiral notebook to jot down the details he remembered.

(Lorcan’s dreams were probably just dreams, but with magic you could never be totally sure. He did technically have a family history of prophecies, that was a risk factor. A condition of preexistence, if you will. Hence, dream journals.)

He noted that most of the dream elements were things that had actually happened earlier that night. In all likelihood, this was just his own subconscious trying to shake him into a revelation. He looked at his notebook and ran through the night again.

Oh no, he thought. That guy Ray from Belial’s place had been flirting with him. Lorcan threw himself backwards onto his bed.

He was too gay for this. …Too gay, for gay flirting. That had to be a thing, right?

He’d never really had a love life to speak of, much as his kids tried to push it. As a necromancer, Lorcan had just been too busy doing magic to care about boys. And all time-wizard-Lorcan could think about was–mummy brown paint. It was necromancy in a nutshell.

Osiris acted like it was all black and white. Life and death. Work and magic. Clear lines between one and the other until you deliberately broke them.

Lorcan wasn’t good at thinking that way. Life was messy. Death was messy. But there was meaning in the mess sometimes. Beauty, too. Like a painting started with nothing but splotches on a palette. There weren’t any lines to cross, no boundaries to break when a painter put their brush to canvas. Just blending everything together until it made sense.

But then, he thought, there were lines that could be crossed, weren’t there? One of the pre-Raphaelites was supposed to have symbolically buried his tube of mummy brown paint, when he learned how literal the name was. Some messes, no matter how much beauty you found in them, would always be tainted by how they’d come to be.

And necromancy was every kind of mess at once. After a while, all the mess started to bleed together. Like brown flesh tones in a pre-Raphaelite painting. (Like hazy memories of being blackout drunk, over and over again.)

Some people approached necromancy with the intention and purpose of an artist putting brush to canvas. Others were fingerpainting with human corpses.

Goddamn necromancers. Even the dreams he had about them were messy.

Could’ve just focused on one suspect, he thought, but no, the dream had a little of everyone. It looked like subconscious Lorcan was as lost as regular flavor. All three of his suspects had motive, that was for sure. And none needed much prompting to say so.

Eva the Inevitable…she didn’t like how the gestalt had allegedly changed the original Opal. Could she think that destroying the crown would bring her friend back? Would she think that was a good idea? Who was Lorcan kidding, of course she fucking would. And her magic was musical, which could fuck with a multimedia light show experience. It made her the most likely suspect, really.

Gravelord the Marquis of Shadows, for all that he was clever, was easy to dismiss. Almost too easy. Wasn’t that how mystery stories worked? It was always the ones you least suspected. Lorcan should ask his sister how often that actually happened in real life.

Belial was just competent overall, and frightening to Lorcan for his own introverted reasons. He could definitely buy that ze had a scheme running, but he didn’t think ze was responsible for this particular scheme. He had no proof towards it, nothing conclusive.

Osiris wouldn’t care. Lorcan did.

It hit him that he hadn’t noted the most important detail of his dream: the red haze. He sat back up, grabbed his pen again. But instead of crisp black lines a splash of red fell from his palm. He dropped the pen.

“What the fuck,” he mumbled, heading out to grab the first aid kit.

His children, being furniture, were always awake no matter what time of night it was. It didn’t take them long to spot him, and the red running down his hand.

Terry, who’d been nearest to the short hallway between his bedroom and bathroom, asked slowly, “Are you dying?”

“No.” He used the brighter light of the hall to study the red drips. They weren’t actually blood. He’d washed off his makeup but not the drawing on his palm or the stamp from the concert, and both were now running with ink.

Red again, he thought. But which one was the source of the curse, and which was just being affected by it? Lorcan stared for so long at the two that when he blinked it came with a green afterimage.

“I need my camera,” he finally said. “Some purifying salt, nail polish remover, and Febreze. And I need someone to watch me while I dunk my arm in a cleansing bath so I don’t fall asleep and drown.”

He’d gone out of his comfort zone tonight, and it looked like it’d be a while before the night was truly over. But now, in his own apartment, there was nothing to drag Lorcan back into a past he’d left behind. He could tackle this his way, with the people he cared about the most. The curse could try, but here Lorcan was safe.

“If I watch will you give me extra TV time tomorrow?” Vulk asked, waving his power cord around in the same haphazard way as always.

“Someone who can’t electrocute me by accident,” he amended, ignoring his eldest child’s offended gasp. He was safe unless that happened.

#writing #original fiction #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #necromancy #alcohol use/abuse cw #dissociation cw #a dying art #hello all #we are back #sorry for the delay #unavoidable life things happened #but the blog is back

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

Greg, Identity, and an Archnemesis

Greg’s a crafter. Of some kind. He’s working on it. But growing up with magic doesn’t solve all (or any) of your problems. Being a crafter cannot be your entire identity. Sometimes, you have to face the facts that who you are is complicated, and scary, and not what you expected.

Note: As an Ace person who’s earliest memory of learning about sex was telling my mother ‘you’re lying who would want to ever do that’ at the age of eight, this is based on my experience growing up, looking at my peers, and wondering if I missed a handbook. Also, enjoy the introduction to Greg, the logical crafter in an illogical world.

Word count: 3,087

Content warnings: This is a pretty frank look at untangling internalized ace/arophobia, and includes other specific tropes under that umbrella which could be triggering. If that could be an issue for you, proceed with caution.

Greg’s identity, since he was old enough to remember, was ‘crafter’. For as long as he can remember, he’s known his mother crafts through knitting, and his father crafts through knots. His Uncle Gwydion was the best story teller because his stories came alive, and wrapping himself in his grandmother’s quilts on a hot day was a great way to cool down, and on a cold day a great way to stay warm. His earliest memories were trying to do magic using one of the family methods. And many explosive mistakes. But as he grew up, he knew he needed to hone in on what type of crafter he was. It took a lot longer than expected.

As a middle schooler, Greg was very focused. He had to learn whatever the public education system was trying to teach him, and he had to try to figure out what was the best medium for him to use for magic, preferably before all his younger cousins figured out their magic. Often people discovered it pretty young, or it was something that ran in families. Sometimes it took people awhile to realize that they were using magic, but that was mostly for people whose families weren’t already involved in crafting.

Greg could use magic, that wasn’t ever a question. His parents had plenty of stories of magical accidents he had as a kid, and he was just abnormally bad with the family magics. Like, set yarn on fire when knitting bad. Unable to tie knots that wouldn’t untie at the slightest breeze bad. The one successful knot he made started a fire instead of releasing wind when unknotted. RIP door 35.

But his friend from school, and fellow after school magic learner, Melody, had decided to invite him to go watch a movie with her, to take his mind off his troubles with magic, and his slight jealousy that she had figured out her magic and was managing to get consistent outcomes whereas Greg was only ever consistently inconsistent. It was a good distraction. And they did it again the next week on Friday after their shared lesson on how not to use magic.

And on Monday, another classmate sat next to him at lunch and said ‘so, you’re dating Melody?’

And Greg, who was far more concerned with the fact that his most recent attempt at knitting magic had resulted in an exploding door (37) over the weekend and a stern lecture about knitting without supervision, stared at him.

“What?”

“You went to the movies with her,”

“Isn’t that what you do with friends?”

“Alone?”

“Well, not all of my friends are friends with my other friends, and I’m not friends with all of Melody’s friends.”

“You had dinner together. At a restaurant.”

Greg did not notice the hurt look turning into anger on Melody’s face. “Well, I’m not allowed to eat candy for dinner and movie theater food is worse than restaurant food. We’re friends.”

“I can’t believe you!” Melody yelled at him, and the next thing anybody knew was that there was flying food, Melody was strumming away at air and having it make noise, and Greg had pulled out a piece of rope while hiding under a table.

“Are we not friends?” Greg asked, still very confused as he tried to make a knot to stop the food from flying. “And you aren’t supposed to play air guitar at school!”

“I asked you to see a movie with me! We went twice! I was wearing nice clothes! I kissed your cheek!”

Luckily the music teacher was supervising lunch, so he managed to stop the food fight, deal with the table that now had a lovely hole burned through it courtesy Greg’s failed knotwork, make sure there was a reasonable explanation for those who weren’t aware of magic for everything, and separate the two children from each other.

When his mom was driving him home, and asked him why he destroyed a table fighting with Melody, Greg explained that it wasn’t his fault, Melody had gone insane and decided they weren’t friends so therefore must have been archenemies and he had been trying to stop her from making the food fly, not destroy anything.

“Does this have anything to do with the two of you going to the movies?”

“Apparently that’s how Melody decides to declare archenemyship,” Greg shrugged. “Am I banned from unsupervised knot work too?”

When he got home, he had to sit through a lecture on not fighting in school, using magic or otherwise even if someone else starts it. And for some reason his parents decided to tell him about bodies.

“What’s your take away from this?” His father asked him after explaining some changes his body would go through soon.

“That air guitar magic shouldn’t exist. How can she even make it make noise? There’s nothing there!” Greg said, because really, that was the important thing. Melody’s magic was stupid and she was stupid and he had an archnemesis before any of his cousins.

“Well, that’s not how magic works…” his dad started.

“Well, it should. I’m going to figure out how magic works, and find my craft, and become the best crafter ever, and everyone will agree that air guitars are stupid,” Greg stomped his way upstairs, already trying to come up with another art to try.

“…Well, hopefully he processed some of what I said,” his dad said, looking at his mom. His mom sighed.

“We’ll just keep an eye on him, and when it seems like he realizes what happened, or seems interested in dating, we’ll sit him down to talk about it again.”

“Well, having a kid not interested in this right now isn’t too bad,” Greg’s dad looked on the bright side, before they both winced at the sound of an explosion from Greg’s room.

“Well, hopefully our next child’s magic doesn’t tend towards explosions,” Greg’s mom said before going up the stairs to deal with it. Greg’s dad nodded until he parsed her words.

“What do you mean our next child?”

Middle school continued, mostly unchanged for Greg. Melody had become his Archnemesis, and besides the two getting into supervised magical duels every few months, Greg was still focusing on magic and school work. And helping to fix the room in the Arts Center that he and Melody had accidentally damaged in their first and only unsupervised after school magic fight. Oh, and his mother had his little sister. High School was a little different.

In high school, Greg spent a lot of time singed. And watched in chemistry. And in any of his art classes. He may have been responsible for a few fire alarms, although everyone had to agree that they were clearly never intentional, just accidental. High school is when you should really understand and explore your magic, but Greg was still trying to discover what medium worked best for him, since he had a long list of things that didn’t work. He didn’t have an explanation for the fires in chemistry. So he could be excused for being far more focused on magic than interacting with people his age. When prom came around, or dances, or anything where high school culture generally expected people to attend with a partner, Greg was oblivious. Oh, he heard the talks, everyone saying ‘so and so would be cute together’ and ‘such and such just had a breakup because such was cheating on such with someone else’ and ‘did you hear? Person asked dude to the prom but everyone thought person was going to ask guy’, but he discarded this talk as unimportant.

Who cared who was dating who? Or who was going with who? It was information that was just useless, especially when it seemed to change daily. People kept trying to pair him up with his Melody, but she routinely informed everyone that it was never happening, ever. At all. Well, honestly, Greg didn’t even notice those attempts, but he did notice when Melody got snappy. Mostly he noticed because she would sit down next to him at lunch and complain about people and their unwanted meddling. Greg would shrug and proceed to inform her why her air guitar magic made no sense whatsoever. There was nothing to vibrate and cause sound.

Greg was the only person who never laughed in health class. Most everyone else would give a nervous laugh, or turn red when the reproductive system was discussed. But it was just...knowledge. Knowledge he didn’t need right now. That was for later in life. When he was old enough to be an adult. When he had this magic stuff down.

Except that people in his classes seemed to...actually be interested in it? It seemed like dating and relationships and sex were almost always being discussed. Even when he wasn’t trying to listen, he could still over hear things. And people would make references to him wanting to date or sleep with people and he would just make a face and shrug. He didn’t understand why people cared so much. He also didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to have sex with anyone. It just...didn’t seem fun. Or to make sense. He hadn’t believed his parents when they talked to him about it before high school, because who would ever want to do that? It just...ick.

So he pushed it back, said to himself that it was just a phase and he’d understand when he was older.

But...older never really came. College was better, in the sense Greg had found a stable magic to use, was taking fun classes, and Kitty was fun. Well, as fun as a sister under ten could be. But it was also more awkward.

Greg found that people were a lot more open about sex things. Maybe he just had the kind of face that people didn’t notice, or he was just giving off some kind of vibe of being unthreatening. Or maybe Kitty switched his hat with an invisibility hat. But he could sit at the student center, and people would just talk about various things in front of him that he would have thought were private conversations. (Most everyone else would call it gossip). It was...disconcerting.

If everyone, including cousins, and his few friends, and his parents, and the random people he overheard, were interested and talking about this, did it mean there was something wrong with him? He decided to reread about the reproductive system, wondering if this time the magic switch that seemed to have flipped in everyone else would have flipped for him. It hadn’t.

Melody had found him at the local craft store, looking at stickers and trying to figure out what he needed to fix himself. She took one look at some of the stickers in his hands, and dragged him out of the store. She pushed him to Tea and Charmalade to grab some nice warm drinks and pulled him out again so they could go sit down by the port and watch the ships. Greg didn’t even say anything when she strummed her air guitar to set up some kind of privacy ward.

“You were not seriously going to try and do some kind of sketchy permanent mind alterations on yourself, right?” Melody asked, sipping her drink while Greg just stared at his.

“I’m broken. I’ve been broken since high school. I need to be fixed,” Greg shrugged.

“You may have been annoying, very good at setting things on fire accidentally, and obnoxious, but you aren’t broken,” she said. “A killjoy and a wet blanket sometimes, but not broken.”

“Yes I am. Everyone else seems to understand this...this thing that I don’t understand at all. And they understood in high school. And I thought it would happen later, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know when later is going to be, and if everyone understands it, shouldn’t I?” Greg asked.

“Just because you aren’t normal, doesn’t mean you’re broken. You aren’t broken because you can do magic, right? Not everyone can do that,” Melody pointed out, leaning back against the bench and looking out at the ships.

“That’s not the same thing, this is...about reproduction. It’s...a biological need, desire, right? I mean, it’s an imperative, right? Keeps the species going. Shouldn’t I feel that?” Greg took a sip of his drink, also staring out at the ocean.

“Why do I always end up with the hard conversations?” Melody looked to the sky, before looking back at Greg. “I’m only doing this so you can go back to your obnoxiously annoying know-it-all self with your structured imagination that crushes my soul. My parents sat me down during the Incident back in middle school. At the time, they told me that people mature at different ages, that all the signals I gave you that were in my opinion obvious weren’t something you were looking for yet. And then they signed me up for a health class outside of school because ‘if I was old enough to attempt to date, I was old enough to learn about my body more’.”

“If this is the ‘if I feel like I’m in the wrong body’ talk, I’ve had that. I mean, my body is mostly functional, and aside from my hair, it’s not too bad to be stuck in,” Greg said, giving Melody an annoyed glance.

“Are people who feel like that broken?”

“No, of course not,” Greg said, glaring at her.

“And you aren’t broken. You’ve clearly gotten the ‘gender is not binary’ talk. Sexuality,” Melody paused as Greg winced. “Is also not binary.”

“I know, people can like men, women, and men and women. People can like to be with multiple people, or in committed relationships, or committed relationships with multiple people. But…” Greg interrupted before Melody did a little twirl on her air guitar, causing Greg to be muted.

“Or they can not be interested. They could be asexual. As in not interested in sex. People who for various reasons do not feel any desire to have sex. Some of them are sex-repulsed, refuse to have sex because the idea of it is something they just can’t understand. And none of those people are broken,” Melody waited a bit, seeming to want a response from Greg, before remembering that she had muted him.

“You can’t prove a negative,” Greg began as soon as Melody unmuted him.

“I swear to god if you decide to approach this using the scientific method,” Melody began, and when Greg made a face at the experiment he would have to run she pointed at it. “See, right there. That. That is how you feel. You don’t want to. You have never wanted to. And you aren’t broken.”

“How do you know? What if later on the switch flips? How am I supposed to know what something’s supposed to feel like if I’ve never felt it before? What if I have felt it but ignored it?” Greg asked.

Melody sighed, running her hand through her hair. “Sometimes, I really hate you. You’re being deliberately obtuse. Look, Greg, archnemesis of mine, I don’t know what you feel. I don’t know what you think, I wouldn’t want to know how you think since you have no imagination and this insane desire to logic magic, when everyone knows magic can’t really be logicked. You can only really decide things based on how you are feeling. Or aren’t feeling. And I can’t exactly tell you what all those feelings are like. It’s really subjective. I felt butterflies in my stomach thinking about a crush, but a different friend describes it as floaty, and a third like getting surprise math tests. We’re still not sure if he meant that in a positive or negative way,” Melody got a little distracted before shaking her head and refocusing on Greg. ”Regardless! You are allowed to not have those feelings. You still aren’t broken. You don’t have to make a decision and be forced to live with it until you die. If your feelings change, your labels can. I mean, don’t you have a friend who’s gender fluid? You never have a problem with their pronouns,” she pointed out.

“This seemed...different,” Greg scratched the back of his head, sheepish.

“Because it was you and not someone else? You aren’t broken, Greg. Your attempts to apply logic to magic is obnoxious, your imagination is lacking, you are a walking fire safety hazard, but you are not broken. If the topic doesn’t interest you, or repulses you like I’m pretty sure we’ve demonstrated, what does it matter what anyone else says you should feel? You have never cared before, so starting now seems like it would be bad timing. Now, you good?”

Greg sighed and shrugged. “I won’t go and do dubious magic to fix something about me that you think isn’t broken.”

“Great. In that case, there’s a suspicious cloud forming in the general vicinity of your sister’s after school location and it’s been a week since her last incident,” Melody pointed to the very suspicious cloud of pink, orange, and purple beginning to form where Kitty spent her afternoon doing after school arts.

Greg gave the cloud an apprehensive stare. “Kitty probably wouldn’t actually make it rain cotton candy and hail candy apples, right? Especially after I explained why that would be a really bad idea? I mean, maybe it’s just a weird cloud that’ll do absolutely nothing but look pretty?”

“Your sister’s imagination is both inspiring and terrifying. Remind me to get a steel reinforced umbrella,” Melody said, making no move to get any closer to the cloud.

Greg sighed, and stood up. “Just because you had a good point this time, doesn’t mean that your air guitar magic makes sense.”

“That’s the Greg I love to annoy. Go stop Kitty from unleashing her imagination on the unsuspecting city.”

Greg was a sticker mage. He had a bad habit of exploding his door, causing unexpected fires and starting fights with an air guitar mage over whether or not her magic obeyed the laws of physics and the arbitrary laws of magic he tried to develop. He loved his little sister most of the time when she wasn’t accidentally sending him to Paris with no passport or causing a magical accident. He was uninterested in dating, and asexual.

He wasn’t broken.

He was, however, swearing off cotton candy and candy apples forever.

#original fiction #writing #queer themes #self acceptance #dark arts and crafts #greg cartwright #internalized acephobia #frenemies #identity #semi autobiographical

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

Lore Post: Demons

(So this is a lore post that’s been in the drafts for a while, we pulled this one out and decided to post it. Hopefully, we’ll be able to post some other lore snippets like this in between the main stories!)

There's an oft-repeated saying among the magical: Demons are like corporations. Not in the sense that they hire millenials to run their social media accounts--rather, demons are like corporations in that they may say nice things to you every now and then, and they may do some things that end up serving your best interests, but at the end of the day they're only interested in the bottom line (of the contract where you sell them your soul).

Also, they hire millenials to run their social media accounts. It's a living.

There’s an obvious question when we’re talking about demons: are they, like, literally *demons*? You know, from symbolism? And the answer, painstakingly uncovered by magical theologians from across the ages, is: not really, no.

There’s a lot of overlap, sure--the deal-making, the soul-selling--but at the end of the day these demons are just another magical species with a good sense for marketing. The word ‘demon’ sells well, there’s brand recognition, they snatched the trademark early. But nobody’s found any evidence that the species calling themselves demons are in any way working for or against a higher power.

Demons are rather mysterious, and elusive enough there’s no firm understanding of the limits to their power. They are known to be shapeshifters, with one preferred human shape and an animal form. A strange quirk exists with their human form--like eldritch abominations, the humanoid forms of demons lie somewhat outside of human comprehension. The effect is mild enough that the human mind can “fill in the gaps”, so to speak. It does this by perceiving the demon as the nearest human it can think of with vaguely similar features to the demon’s. This tends to be a celebrity or some other person of public interest, and is consistent across observers. If you run into someone that every single person you’ve met describes as looking like “a young Robert Redford”, it’s a demon. Or a very good celebrity impersonator.

Fun facts:

Crafters who trade with demons for power are known as “sell-outs”.

It’s not uncommon for crafters to assume celebrity impersonators are demons, which leads to...issues. In their defense, making the mistake the other way around has much worse consequences.

Sometimes drink blood, but not in a vampire way.

Demon lawyers like to force the souls of bigwigs and CEOs to work for them after they die as demonic paralegals. All of the work and none of the prestige, for all eternity.

Here at Hellco., we know a mismatched demon/summoner relationship hinders workplace efficiency at stealing your soul, which is why the demons you summon are perfectly tailored to your temptation needs by one of our very scientific infernal personality assessment tests!

Infernal personality tests include but are not limited to: Myers-Briggs, four-color theory, love languages, and enneagrams (official test costs $40, price of testing not included with the summon)!

#lore post #original fiction #fantasy #worldbuilding #dark arts and crafts #magical species #demons #blood mention #dusting off the lore #canonize every shitpost

4 notes · View notes

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

Hello! Another update post on works-in-progress for those curious:

Chapter 10 of A Dying Art has a full draft, it may need some tweaks before/after the beta reading process but is much closer to done than I thought it would be.

There are also a few shorter pieces in the works introducing a new protagonist, Greg Cartwright, and his little sister Kitty. One is a shenanigans-type adventure about the dangers of siblings, sticker magic, and sticky hand toys, while the other is more serious story of self-discovery and labels in line with Pride month. A longer Greg and Kitty adventure is in the rough sketch phase (teaser: it features mystery, hard boiled eggs, and a landlady seeking seven dozen cookies in rent).

We’ve also (maybe) got some lore posts? Originally, the blog was going to trade off between worldbuilding/lore stuff and longform fiction, but that required more coordination between authors than we could maintain early on. Some of the drafted posts are very near completion, though, so if that’s something anyone’s interested in or if you have specific questions about the world and characters, our asks are open!

#updates #thanks for reading!

1 note · View note

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

A Dying Art (Chapter 9)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is not a necromancer. Anymore. But when the leader of the local necro coven comes to him with a request he really, really can’t refuse, he finds himself back in a world he’d tried to leave behind. Someone is trying to steal a powerful magical artifact, one whose destruction could unleash chaos upon the city. Or save it from an even greater danger. Or do nothing at all. Who knows. See, this is exactly why Lorcan stopped messing with the stuff.

Previous | Table of Contents | Next

Chapter 9: Opal’s Obols

Word count: 3,623

Content warning: surprisingly, no major content warnings

Eva the Inevitable's band, Lorcan figured out on the bus using his phone's very slow internet browser, was a non-entity. The only review he could find was on a website called ‘Zeen Zine’. It wasn’t terribly flattering. The reviewer thought that “the fake bass backing was distracting, just hire a real bass player” and that “the set would be better if it didn’t have so many breakup songs”.

Lorcan was surprised the writer hadn’t been cursed for that–nope, there we go, memorial post about their mysterious death shortly after the review. Necromancers held grudges, after all. Looks like Eva a little more than most. He’d have to watch himself here.

Tonight, the band was playing for a small outdoor venue, the kind that had a cheap set-up and probably spent most of its profits paying off noise violations. A rocker’s voice–Eva, he assumed–snaked its way from the stage. “There’s a stranger in your skin, and it’s killing me,” it crooned. “Don’t know where you’ve been, I missed the autopsy.”

The words were accompanied by a disconcertingly sinuous guitar riff Lorcan could feel, deep in his gut. Literally, it was probably some kind of intestine curse.

Necromancy. And people paid money for this?

(Despite his bitching, the door fee wasn’t actually that much. He gave the bouncer some change and got a nice stamp on the back of his hand for the trouble.)

He spent the next five songs nursing a soda awkwardly, just another face in the crowd. That suited Lorcan just fine–he didn’t want to put himself on anyone’s radar if he didn’t have to. He was pretty peopled out already. And here, eavesdropping might actually work. Because Eva talked. She bounced from conversation to conversation in the brief breaks between sets. And when she wasn’t talking, she was singing.

It was probably too much to hope she’d have a song called My Plan To Get Revenge On The Crown Osiris (Ask Me How), but what he’d heard so far was promising. The review was right–there were a suspicious number of breakup songs.

Intermission came, and Lorcan had to shield his soda with a hand from groupie-minions shoving past him to the outdoor bar. He was debating whether or not to toss the drink anyways, when he felt an arm sling over his shoulder.

“Hey there,” a voice, husky and rough from singing, whispered into his ear. Lorcan turned to see Eva the Inevitable pressing uncomfortably close to his side.

Her denim jacket was cut in a punk style with black fur along the edges. A dyed rabbit’s foot swung from each ear. Makeup streaked across her face wildly, enough that it didn’t matter the sweat from her performance was making it run. If Belial was aiming for a commanding look, Eva went for fierce. And unlike Belial, he’d somehow earned her attention before he even did anything.

Lorcan found his eyes drawn to the guitar slung across her back. It was nice. Very nice. A shiny white that sparkled in the light. Well-kept. But the part that stood out was the two hand’s worth of fingerbones set into the neck, like a skeleton was strumming the thing from behind. They glittered like gemstones, not a clean white but covered in shimmering iridescence.

Using opalized fossils to channel the dead was Osiris’s signature style of necromancy. But, of course, they’d inherited that ability from Eva’s old friend Opal.

“Sorry, do I know you?” he asked.

“I’d hope so, seeing as you’re at my concert.”

“Oh, I’m just here for the opener,” he drawled. “I think Blood and the Blood-tones are doing some really innovative things with polyphonic sound.”

“You wanna meet them? I can take you backstage,” Eva told him.

What–no. This wasn’t how the banter was supposed to work. Lorcan had no idea how Eva had zeroed in on him. He wasn’t letting himself get sucked into another social situation so soon–not while the conversation had spiraled this far out of control. “I’m, uh. Shy,” he said.

“Don’t let the name fool you, they’re sweethearts.” Eva pushed him forward–it turned out ‘backstage’ in this place was a smaller, fenced off area that was barely blocked off from the rest of the venue. Eva shoved him towards the others sitting there, who must be either her bandmates or various Blood-tones, and headed towards an open, beat-up guitar case.

“Groupies, Eva?” one asked. “He doesn’t exactly look like your type.”

She set the guitar into the case, and said, “Hardly. This is a little necromantic apostate–” Eva punctuated her speech with the snaps of latches shutting tight. “--who wandered into our neck of the woods for some reason. I’m curious why.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lorcan said, trying to keep his face blank. Necromancy? Who’s she?

“You can play dumb,” she told him, “but I never forget a face. I have seen yours at the Halloween parties. You’re that Baker witch’s kid,” she said, and Lorcan winced. “Last name starts with a V. Used to run with Dexter Young’s crew.”

“And what,” he snapped, “that means I can’t appreciate music?”

“Name one band.”

Fuck. “My Chemical Romance?” Eva raised an unimpressed eyebrow. Yeah, even Lorcan didn’t buy that. He tried a different lie: “Fine. I was looking for a little help.” He gave an irritated scoff (he was pretty good at those) and added, “Osiris sure wasn’t any.”

“Oh?” Eva asked.

“I’ve been trying to get back into necromancy, but I’m rusty. I didn’t expect a handout or anything,” he told her. “Just a few tips, maybe put me in touch with someone who could help refresh my memory. Apparently that’s too much to ask from the great Crown Osiris the Second.”

She laughed at that. “Yeah, the Crown sure is an ungrateful set of bastards.”

“Eva,” one of her bandmates said, like a warning.

She glared back, then added, louder, “Who do they think got them in a position to become a gestalt soul entity, or whatever? They owe us a little consideration, don’t you think?”

Impulsive, he thought. In a way that her crew disagreed with. Lorcan didn’t want to be interrogated by so many necromancers all at once. One-on-one, though–he might be able to handle that. Maybe even build a positive rapport. If Eva was the saboteur, he’d need that when he had to…make a decision what to do next.

And he thought he had an angle he could try. “I don’t know if they really owe me anything in particular,” he said, trying to look casual. “But we were friends once. I thought that might count for something.”

Eva seemed to come to a decision then. “I need a smoke,” she announced to her band, then to Lorcan, “We’ve got twenty minutes before my next set. Let’s talk.”

“Is that a good idea?” another bandmate asked, looking close enough at Lorcan’s face he really had to work to hide the smug feeling of a plan working out.

“It’s whatever I say it is. Don’t forget your place,” Eva said, in a tone that made Lorcan suddenly understand why she called herself ‘the Inevitable’. The guy shut up.

“The band gets overprotective sometimes,” she told Lorcan as she walked them into an empty alley outside the venue. He made sure to stay near the entrance. “Worried some spy’s going to carry my words back to Osiris. Which is stupid, I’ve said all this to their face before.”

“Mouthing off to Osiris rarely goes well,” he noted.

She pulled a cigarette from her pocket. “See, I think you know that from experience, which is interesting. Puts you and me in a very small group.” She lit the thing up and raised it to her lips.

“Isn’t that bad for your voice?” Lorcan asked.

She snorted. “Guy, my lungs have been dead for years. Highly recommend revivifying your organs once you train back up a bit. I can fill these babies with whatever I want.”

“Right,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“Hey, you wanted tips. But you’ve gotta quid some pro, too.” She took a long drag of the cigarette. “Not many people can say they were close to any of the old coven leaders, and Dexter Young wasn’t close to anyone. Not since you.”

Lorcan blinked. He hadn’t cared to keep up with Dexter’s social life, but he’d always assumed he found someone to replace him as the token sort-of-friend. “I quit the coven ten years ago, we didn’t stay in touch. Anything I could tell you about his abilities is going to be outdated.”

And even then, his knowledge was limited. Dexter never trusted Lorcan with important secrets. He’d let him help bury an early prototype of his death curse once. It hadn’t been able to unleash the radioactive blight Dex had truly wanted, which meant it was basically harmless for Lorcan to know about. But that was the furthest his trust went.

“Relax. Young just always seemed like an ass to me, I’m curious about your take. Figured you’d like the chance to vent. Is there a song in your heart that’s been dying to get out?”

Right. Bonding. The rapport. He shifted in place. Death trivia, one-upsmanship, Lorcan could handle that. Those were well-worn tools in his angsty edgelord self’s arsenal. Discussing feelings was not. He couldn’t fake a big outpouring of emotions. Not over Dexter.

“There’s not much to vent about,” he admitted. “Dex was an ass, but the same way every necromancer teen is. Angry, chip on his shoulder, always something to prove.”

“So why be friends with him?”

Because Lorcan was angry, and had a chip on his shoulder, and something to prove. He and Dexter had fit, for all it hurt to think about. “I don’t know. It just happened, I guess.” He didn’t mean to let nostalgia slip into his words, but even he could hear the way his voice cracked at that.

“I get that,” Eva said. “I was in a bad way when I met Opal, and we just–fell together. She bought me a guitar when I said I wanted to learn, put a lot of trust in me to keep her safe.” Her voice grew wistful as she added, “When she took out the other coven leaders, she was going to give us anything we wanted. Riches, power. We wouldn’t need anything ever again.”

Lorcan remembered Osiris dismissing trust as a human weakness. His soda started to slush uncomfortably in his stomach.

“Of course,” she continued, lips curling downwards, “then that little gestalt ritual went down. And she came back…like that. Not herself. Not even a thank you to the ones who put everything on the line to keep her breathing. It’s like–”

There was a stranger in her skin, he thought. Now that was a motive.

He turned the situation over in his head. Eva seemed to think Opal would have honored their agreement once she was in charge. Doubtful, in his opinion, but all that mattered was Eva believed it. Could she also think destroying Osiris’s crown would bring her friend back?

Love went farther than fear sometimes, Belial had said.

“That’s friendship for you, isn’t it?” Lorcan asked, almost more to himself than to her. “Everyone either turns on you or dies.”

Eva was silent a moment. Then she chuckled. “Wow. Who hurt you, kid?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Somebody had to fuck you up real bad for you to still be talking like that.” She smiled around the cigarette. “It'd be too sad, otherwise.”

Lorcan pushed off from the wall. “Maybe I just like sad songs,” he said. He needed to get out of here. “Enjoy your smoke break.”

It wasn't a total waste, he told himself as he headed back to the main venue. He knew Eva had motive, and was maybe reckless enough to try and pursue it. Habitually, he raised his soda can to his lips while he thought, then stopped.

Instead, he tossed it in the nearest trashcan with a splashy thunk. In the end, he hadn’t drunk much at all.

He needed to get his mind back to safer topics. Like this investigation. Motive was only one piece of the puzzle. Eva was a musician, wasn’t she? How did that create the red haze that had trapped Lorcan? Or help her break into Osiris's mansion?

The guitar, he thought. That thing had to be magical, probably even haunted. If it did something that matched what Lorcan knew about the saboteur, he’d have his proof. He’d need a closer look. And he had ten and a half minutes left in Eva’s smoke break.

He snuck behind one of the bigger amps that was being stored backstage and used that rubber lubricant and his time magic to fuck with the wiring a bit. It didn’t hit him until after he’d finished casting that he could have just messed with it physically, but honestly the magic ended up working just as fast. Less time than killing Kryptonia’s laser rig took–the amp was pretty old already for such an important piece of equipment.

Lorcan did feel bad about that, especially once the thing started giving off smoke, but eight fully conscious rockers could handle one small fire and he needed a distraction. If Eva really was the one who’d cursed him he could write it off as ironic payback.

The case was covered in enchanted custom decals, and as Lorcan shined his keychain light on the latches he could see they were engraved with something vaguely runic. Lorcan’s defensive bracelet wouldn’t work against whatever was warding the case. It was fueled by an attacker’s ill intent and a box didn’t have ill-anything. But the decals were exploitable.

Most protective enchantments also protected themselves from damage, because that would otherwise leave a very obvious hole in your sticker-based security system. At the same time, magic was only as permanent as the material used to cast it. Eva’s guitar case was covered in the edges of torn-off stickers where she’d had to renew and replace the magic over the years. They might resist tampering, but they were just as vulnerable to natural decay as anything else.

The fact that Lorcan’s magic was an un-naturally natural decay made him a perfect counter here.

He’d brought the thin ultraviolet penlight in case it helped him against Belial’s tattoo magic. Between that and a small bottle of lacquer thinner Lorcan was able to wreck the stickers. Then he just had to rip open the guitar case. The outermost layer was stiffened leather–Lorcan had rubbing alcohol and sandpaper, just enough to tear open the seam along the top.

It worked quick. Disturbingly so. If Lorcan thought the amp was easy to age, this one barely took any magic at all. He lifted the top panel off the rest of the case and all the padding came with it. He cringed a little at what he saw inside.

The guitar was beautiful. There was no questioning that. The body was a perfect off-white and made of some material that threw off subtle glittering reflections. The buttons and dials gleamed, numbers painted on them in gold. And, of course, the opal inlays in the neck. For all that Lorcan couldn’t ignore they were actual literal fingerbones, they were artful.

No, it was the full picture that upset his aesthetic sensibilities. When you distressed an object, you went for a unified look. A thing wasn’t believably aged if one piece of it still looked fresh. Here, the guitar was shiny and well-kept, with polish that made it look brand new. But it sat inside a case of faded velvet so sun-bleached there was a tan line, fraying at the edges and missing huge patches. It had probably been secondhand when Eva first bought it.

It just didn’t fit. The opal guitar was a diamond in the rough, and it itched at Lorcan.

He tried to push the feeling aside. He wasn’t here to analyze what the guitar symbolized–he just needed to know what this thing could do, if it matched the saboteur’s M.O. He reached out to the guitar and very, very carefully, plucked a string.

Lorcan didn’t hear anything. But the opals shone, and a chilly wave swept down his spine. His heart pounded faster and for a second it seemed certain that Eva was going to find him, right now, he should run–

No, he thought. That had to be the music talking. He used his palm to stop the string’s vibrations, and the feeling vanished.

Inaudible noise, and fear effects. Using the ghost inside this definitely-haunted guitar to generate infrasound, maybe. The sound was like a very low bass outside the range of human hearing, and the vibrations were supposed to stimulate a sense of inexplicable dread and terror. The funny thing was (necromancer-funny, at least), infrasound was rumored to be responsible for at least a few famous ghost sightings.

Had Lorcan felt this when the curse hit him back at Kryptonia’s? Sort of. Dread and terror? Yes. Inexplicable? No. His son had been in danger, it made perfect sense to be afraid of that. And the red haze itself had felt–hazy. The fear hadn’t come until after he’d been broken out.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he heard from somewhere in front of and above him, and this time the fear was real.

He looked up to see Eva perched on one of the amps he’d been using to hide his subterfuge, glaring daggers down at him. She was back earlier than expected. Her singer’s voice had been tight with a barely-restrained fury.

“That guitar,” Eva told him. “Was a gift. A gift from the friend I just explained to you that I miss very dearly.”

Yeah, Lorcan thought. There was nothing he could say to that.

“I’m going to give you one chance to explain why I came back to find my band panicking over a busted amp and you doing something to the only gift I have to remember her by?”

“What I’m hearing is, Opal only gave you one gift.”

The words snapped out of Lorcan’s mouth without his conscious approval. Really, he hadn’t meant to say that. The look of incandescent rage growing on Eva’s face was enough to prove that saying things was a bad fucking call.

Why did Lorcan do this? What was so wrong with his brain that it took any good thing and twisted it into its most suspicious outcome? No one ever appreciated it, because they all trusted and liked people.

Including, apparently, other necromancers. Lorcan was still always the outlier.

The worst part was, he didn’t even think he was wrong. Yes, he was making a snap judgment without knowing the whole situation. Yes, it was unfair. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t right. Lorcan had been hired as a detective. Well, here was some detecting:

Eva had been loyal to Opal for years. Now, she was a musician working cheap gigs at cheap places. Opal lived in a vast, sprawling mansion purchased with black market gem money, and that was long before Osiris was around to betray anyone. However expensive this guitar was, he’d bet it was pocket change for Opal. Was it really all she had ever given Eva?

He didn’t want to burn this bridge. He might need it later. But god, he couldn’t shake the frustration that she wasn’t seeing this.

“Did she ever pay you for your work? Get you guitar lessons, hype the band, anything?” he asked. He gestured down at the guitar, adding, “Who buys someone a guitar this fancy and doesn’t even shell out for a decent case? Go on. Tell me I’m wrong!”

That seemed to give her pause a second. “When she beat the others–”

“I know, riches, power,” he cut in. “But she had those already. You’ve seen her mansion. Why wait to pay you back? You say Osiris owes you consideration–what about Opal? What did she owe you?”

“Opal was being hounded by the other coven leaders,” Eva said. “She couldn’t let them know–” She stopped, then squinted at Lorcan. “She couldn’t repay us until after we won.”

“Convenient.”

“Fuck you. You didn’t know her like I did. Opal never would have betrayed us if the Crown hadn’t interfered.”

It was a tempting story, he thought. That there was honor among necromancers and your old boss definitely would have given you everything you deserved. The person who hurt you was the horrible Osiris and their nasty souls, not your boss, not your friend. There was just one problem with that.

“Opal chose to become the Crown,” he said. “So did Dexter, so did every last one of them.” He wasn’t going to pretend like that didn’t matter.

Lorcan knew Dex. If Dexter had been the one to win the murdergame, and Osiris turned on his old followers–that wouldn’t be Dex becoming a worse person. It would just be Osiris finally getting to do what Dex had always wanted.

She could believe Opal was different. Lorcan didn’t.

Eva’s breath came out in a huff from revivified lungs. She jumped off the amp, and then there was pain as she used her height to drive her boot into his stomach. “Show up at one of my concerts again and I’ll use your guts for guitar strings,” she told him, reaching down to retrieve her instrument. “Your friend is dead. And as far as I’m concerned Opal died with the rest of them.”

As Lorcan clutched his stomach, trying to breathe, he decided that the worst part wasn’t that he might be right about Opal. It was that he’d thought saying so might actually help.

#original fiction #writing #fantasy #mystery #dark arts and crafts #lorcan #necromancy #a dying art

2 notes · View notes

dark-arts-and-crafts-universe · 2 years

Text

Farina is Not Her Mother (One-Shot)

Farina is Not Her Mother

(This story is set fifteen years before the canon’s present day, in the main Dark Arts and Crafts universe.)

Farina Baker doesn’t want to be like her mother. She’s known that since she was old enough to see other, happier families. Farina Baker’s youngest child is a girl. That one comes as a bit of a surprise. She wants to do right by her children, so she looks for answers. But when the people most eager to help have sinister intentions, Farina will have to decide for herself what being a good mother really means.

Or, a cis woman tries to learn about trans people for the sake of her transgender daughter. Other cis people do not help.

Word count: 1,612

Content warnings: Hi, all. If you’re new to this universe, it’s usually a lot lighter and funnier than this particular story, we promise. This one discusses a fair number of Real Life Issues, isn’t especially comedic, and might be a hard read for trans readers in particular.

To be clear, I am a transgender author, and while this story is not exactly about my own experiences, it draws from things I dealt with growing up and the way trans issues were talked about in the media at the time. It does have a happy ending, I promise. But I can’t guarantee it’s going to be a perfect story that lands for every trans person--there is a more detailed content warning under the read-more so you can decide if this story is right for you. If not, that’s fine. We understand. For those who do read further, we hope you enjoy.

Longer content warning: this is a story about a cis character, Farina Baker, first learning that her daughter Rosedaisy is transgender. She starts out with a somewhat transphobic perspective on the matter, and is briefly in touch with Mumsnet-type bigots about the topic. Even in the worst moments, Farina is motivated by genuine love for her daughter, she does not take any actions within the story to impede Rose’s transition or harm her mental health, and by the end of the story she is a firm ally. But that does not change the fact that some elements of this story might be upsetting to trans readers, and I hope this warning lets you make an informed decision about whether you will continue.

Other specific warnings include references to the idea that transition is “mutilation”, references to the demonization of trans-affirming parents, references to bad faith actors weaponizing intersex issues against trans people, Mumsnet-style groupthink, mentions of magical non-consensual body modification, minor dissociative symptoms.

I would also like to note that, though the story is told through Farina’s perspective at the time she had just learned Rose is a trans girl, the narrative will not be misgendering or deadnaming Rosedaisy in this story. It is a creative conceit and we stand by it.

When Farina tells people she is a professional chef raising four children, their immediate reaction tends to be sympathy.

“Kids are so picky,” they opine. “I bet you spend a lot of time making them try new foods.”

Farina doesn’t understand it at all. As a chef, she knows that children’s taste buds work differently from adults’ and adjusts her recipes accordingly. And as a mother (and former child), she knows that force is the absolute worst way to build a loving, safe relationship with one’s children.

When her kids don’t want to try a new food, Farina sits down and asks if they can try it, just once, for her. Sometimes they say yes, and like it. Farina thanks them for being brave, but doesn’t make a fuss over how they thought they wouldn’t like it. Sometimes they say yes, and hate it. Farina thanks them for being brave, and doesn’t make them try it again. Sometimes they just say no. Farina thanks them for telling her, and doesn’t ask them again.

Farina’s kids are smart. They know what they like, and are willing to give things a chance when they know she won’t make them do anything they truly hate. And when she doesn’t push, she finds that her kids usually come around on their own. Farina trusts her kids. She doesn’t understand why other parents won’t.

When Farina’s youngest told her she was a girl, Farina wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t know much about this sort of thing, and it seemed like an awfully big decision for a six-year-old to be making. Farina put on her adult face, and said she would have to get back to her about that, sweetie, and didn’t let on that inside she was in a panic.

The first few internet searches didn’t do much to soothe her worry. There was information about mental diagnoses, and sexual perversion (Rosedaisy was six, what the fuck?). But what scared her most were the stories about mothers mutilating their children. That was what it was, one forum informed her. Mothers wanted their children to be girls like them, so they forced children to mutilate their bodies for their own sick amusement.

Farina wasn’t quite sure how long she spent staring at the screen after that. Because. Because though what her mother did to her wasn’t ‘mutilation’, exactly--she did decide that Farina had to grow up a very certain way. She did warp Farina’s body, magically, to fit that exact mold. Technically, Farina didn’t even know if she was supposed to have been born a boy, and she wasn’t sure how she’d ever find out.

Farina didn’t want to be her mother.

She didn’t have to be, the forum assured her. She could protect her child from these feelings, from this urge. Both would pass, in time, if Farina was just firm. And at first, this seemed like a good idea. Being a parent did mean laying down the law sometimes. Whether or not they wanted to, kids still had to take baths, go to sleep on time, take their medicine. Farina could be firm on this. She just needed to explain to Rose why this was good for her, and Rose would accept it the same way she accepted the need for baths, bed, and cough syrup.

Except–

See, if that had been all these people told her, Farina might really have fallen for it. For a week or so, she did. The sick sense of relief that Farina was doing the right thing, that she wasn’t the monster her mother was, drowned out everything else. She listened with unquestioning trust when these strangers told her that transitioning would just earn Rosedaisy scorn and confusion from other children who could never understand. When they said she would regret it when she got older and couldn’t undo it. When they said the idea of “transgenderism” was caused by gender stereotypes, and that children just needed to be taught that you could be a boy and still like pink.

But then they tried to tell her about her own children.

It started with an innocent question from Farina, wondering what she should say to explain to Rose why trying to be a boy would be better, really. Rose was very certain of this, after all, and when she got this certain Farina had always needed clear and detailed reasoning to reach her.

They told her she didn’t have to explain. Farina just needed to stop the behavior. It didn’t matter if Rose understood. How could she understand? She was six. Six-year-olds didn’t understand anything, much less their own gender.

Farina was a professional chef who raised four kids. She chose to trust her kids when it came to the food they ate, and that trust had always been rewarded.

Vaughn used to refuse any food with tomato sauces. When Farina sat down with him, he explained that he hate-hate-hated the crunch he felt when he chewed the tomato chunks. They blended the sauces into a fine puree the next time, and now red sauce dishes were his favorite. Aislin told Farina she didn’t like curries because they made her mouth itchy. Farina scheduled a doctor’s appointment and it turned out Aislin was allergic to mustard. It had been a mild allergy, thank goodness, but what if it wasn’t? What if Farina forced Aislin to keep eating food that made her mouth itch, because she decided Aislin’s word wasn’t enough?

Farina went to Rosedaisy that night. She asked if being a boy was something Rose was able to try just once. And Rose, who had been asked this question a hundred times before about carrots, about new spices, about rice, thought about it and said, “No, Mom. I can’t. I don’t like it.”

And that was that. Farina called her husband home. She’d been putting it off while she tried to figure things out, but now she had no choice.

“I love you, Heliodor,” she told him when he got there. “I love you more than almost anything, but you need to stand with me on this a hundred percent, because this is about our kids and their happiness.” She explained what Rosedaisy had told her, and that she and Heliodor were going to help Rose live her life like a girl, even if it seemed strange or scary to him. The conversation wasn’t as bad as she’d been fearing. Heliodor also wasn’t an expert on this issue, but he got on board a lot faster than she had.

That just left the other kids.

Farina was firm. She laid down the law. Rosedaisy was a girl, and her siblings had to treat her like one. She was willing to explain why, but there would be no arguing with this rule. There hadn’t been arguing. Farina really shouldn’t have been surprised that the forum was wrong about that, too.

“You could’ve just asked me, Mom,” Vaughn (who was fifteen at the time) said. “I do a bunch of stuff with the LGBT club at school, they know tons about transgender people.”

Aislin (thirteen) was thrilled to have a sister. “It’s about time we fixed the gender imbalance in this house. You’re invited to Girls’ Night from now on, by the way.”

Lorcan (ten, nearly eleven) was quiet as always, but when Farina asked what he thought he just shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I kind of always figured she was a girl? It makes sense.”

It all went so much better than Farina had expected. And as she watched her kids on their weekly Girls’ Night, it hit her just how ridiculous she had been to entertain any part of what that forum had been saying.

They’d told her Rosedaisy must believe she was a girl because of regressive gender stereotypes. But Aislin had invented Girls’ Night back when she thought she was the only daughter in the family, and since it was no fun having a Girls’ Night with just one person, the others got to come anyways. There were makeovers and pillow fights, sure, but also poetry readings and camping with their dad in the backyard. Talking about science and history and whatever else interested them.

As for the boys--Vaughn’s two favorite things in the world were flowers and love, for goodness’ sake. He didn’t like makeup normally, but he also never complained about even the glitteriest, most pastel blushes Aislin put on him. Lorcan dragged his feet anytime someone asked him to be sociable, but on Girls’ Night, he spent the most time out of anyone in front of the mirror getting his eyeshadow exactly right.

(A few years later, when Lorcan asked her for permission to get his ears pierced, Farina had cautiously reminded him that if he was a girl like Rosedaisy or if he was nonbinary, that was fine with her. He had fixed her with the most exasperated look and said he knew that, mom, he was a guy who just wanted his ears pierced.)

No, Farina thought. Rosedaisy didn’t grow up in this house, in this family, and decide that she must be a girl because only girls could like pink. She didn’t even like pink all that much, or makeup. Despite that, her entire face lit up when Aislin turned to her newfound sister and announced she was going to give her “the princess look”.

It turned out, the only difference between the Rosedaisy that Farina thought was her youngest son, and the Rosedaisy who is her youngest daughter, is that her smile is so much brighter now. Farina can live with that.

Farina is not her mother.

#original fiction #writing #queer themes #short fiction #dark arts and crafts #rough ride but it ends happy #this is set in a fantasy universe technically #transphobia depictions cw #terf depictions cw #other cws in the readmore #farina #rosedaisy #lorcan's family #one-shots

2 notes · View notes