Two years before I enrolled in Angitia, I brought a dog back to life.
Two years before I enrolled in Angitia, my life stopped being my own.
The day had started like any other, waking up in the bed I shared with my brothers, Matt and Alfie. Like every morning, Matt got up first and shook me awake. Like every morning, I ate breakfast with Mum and Da and my brothers. Five of us, sitting around that old wooden table before the sun was even up. Chunks of dark bread, maybe with a piece of boiled egg if the hens were laying still and if we'd hit quotas for harvest.
Then we'd tidied up the wooden plates we ate off of and went off to our tasks for the day. Matt, Da, and I went to the fields to handle the sheep. Mum and my little brother Alfie stayed closer to home to feed the chickens and to work in the small garden we were allowed to keep to supplement our allotted rations for the month.
There was a tree next to that garden Da made us stop at every day to say a little prayer at. I had other brothers and sisters buried beneath that tree. Stillbirths and sick children too young to be allowed in the null cemetery by the small church we were allowed to attended every Sunday. So we buried my dead siblings there instead. I remembered a humming in my ears when I stood there that day.
Da whistled to call our dog Lolly. Big old monster of a herder who preferred to sleep outside with the sheep no matter how old she got. Lolly didn't come, and I thought that was queer, but I didn't really think much of it. Old girl was probably down in the south field, chasing sheep around, so I told Da and Matt I'd go there today.
So I picked out my crook, and I set off towards the south field.
Lolly was already dead when I found her. She was lying in a clump of grass with her eyes half open. I thought she was asleep at first, and when she didn't turn her head to my calls, I walked toward her and patted her soft fur. I brushed a few stray twigs away as I patted her silky head.
"Lolly-girl," I said. "Time to wake up."
And she didn't.
Some part of me knew, knew even before I touched her, that she'd be dead. I just crouched there for a bit, next to my dead dog, and I couldn't help but think about how unfair it all was. Lolly was alive the day before, moving around with that cheerful wag of the tail she'd had my entire life, and she was dead. Lying on the ground and waiting for the worms. It was so unfair. I cried and I couldn't stop thinking about how I'd grown up with that dog, how she was older than me and had always been there and then—
And then my chest itched.
It itched like ants crawling under my skin, digging little tunnels spiraling out from right above my heart, and there was power there. Electric and tingling, hot as fire. And there were words.
Come back. Come back to me.This is my compulsion. My order. My demand. Come back. Come back. Come back to me.
I've heard people, Lord Woodman mostly, talk about the "moment." That instant when you first felt magic and first cast a Working into the world. They talked about how wonderful it was, how it felt like sweet honey on your tongue and you felt like dancing.
My gums bled when I cast my first spell. My mouth tasted like iron and salt. My nose filled with the smell of sweet sickening rot.
But the feeling of mana…
The first touch of it caressed my heart, my channels opening like flowers turning toward the sun… It was no lie to say the first time you used magic was an unforgettable feeling of pure, unadulterated bliss.
Mine just happened to be punctuated by a dead dog climbing up to her feet.
Lolly, or the thing that used to be Lolly, stared at me with a pair of glassy, glazed over eyes. She opened her mouth and made a kind of hacking, wheezing bark that sounded like it was coming from some far off distance.
Then Lolly broke into a run, stiff legged and lopping. She ran back toward the house.
I followed in some sort of daze; I felt exhausted and sweat slicked down my back in a river. My crook fell from limp fingers, and through the roaring in my head I couldn't even bother to care about the sheep. I just walked behind Lolly, as she started and stopped out of a strange sprint towards the cottage.
When I reached our house, Lolly ran around it, still making that odd wheezing barking. Da and my brothers were gone, Matt and Da to their own parts of the flock and Alfie to the chicken coop, but Mum was out front calling to Lolly.
"Lolly girl?" she yelled. "Lolly girl, do you want your breakfast or not?"
At that moment, something snapped.
I fell to the ground, vision spinning and going bruise colored, and I could hear Mum screaming and something making a booming noise.
I'd later learn that was the sound of Lolly exploding into a cloud of bone and maggots as Lord Woodman drove a spell into her reanimated corpse.
***
I'd woken up with my face on the cold ground of a stone cell. My hands were tied behind my back and my vision swam.
I looked up, and I saw him sitting outside the iron bars of my cell in a leather chair, looking for all the world like a cat who'd gotten into the cream.
Lord Woodman.
I'd known him on sight, of course. Mages did not prize us nulls for our intelligence or awareness, but from an early age, we learned how to identify them. Nice clothes, smiles that never really reached their eyes, an air of self-assurance none of us could ever muster. Well, in all fairness, I hadn't known for sure if it was actually Lord Woodman himself. A long string of proxy lords and ladies who'd kept things running for the family actually in charge of the region had managed the lands my family had lived and worked on since Walpurgis 1888. But it wasn't hard to tell who the man before me was and what it meant.
I'd known him as a wizard from the first moment I'd laid eyes on him, and I knew that could only mean trouble.
"Young man," he'd said. "Young… Theodore was it? Do you know why you are here?"
I'd tried to get as far away from him as I could the minute I saw him, pushing my face into the ground and backing away as quickly as I could. Fear and submission were survival traits bred into nulls and reinforced with a lifetime of hard lessons.
"No, my Lord Mage," I said as submissively as I could. My heart hammered out of my chest and I still hadn't worked out what had happened. "If this one has done anything to offend you, then he is deeply sorry and will repent in any way you deem necessary."
I'd been scared enough to piss myself. There weren't any stories about mages taking interest in nulls that end well. Most ended with several dozens of dead people and one mage standing above the bodies.
"None of that now," he said, and he pressed a long slender cane against my chin to raise my face. "Look me in the eye when you speak to me."
The mage's eyes had been like a pair of flat green stones even then, as the rest of his face had twisted into a look of utter fascination.
"You're the one who brought that dog back, aren't you? I felt the shivers in the Narrative even from my sitting room."
I didn't know what the man was talking about, but I didn't like how cold his eyes were. I didn't like how he tilted his head in raptor-like fascination. Stay out of the way of the big important people, our parents had always said. Nothing good ever comes from getting involved in the business of wizards.
"Necromancy is largely thought to be something one must learn, not something someone has a natural born affinity for, you know," the mage continued. He'd lowered his cane away from my chin and tapped it at the ground in absent thought. "Could it be some sort of random mutation, I wonder?"
"My lord," I said, trying to resist the urge to cast my eyes back to the ground in deference. "I do not know what this one has done to—" I wasn't sure what the right word was, but I was increasingly certain it was likely the point in our interaction where I threw myself at the wizard's tender mercies and prayed I'd survive whatever happened next, "inconvenience you, but I assure you it was not my intentions to do so."
"Inconvenience?" the man repeated. "My dear boy, do you have any idea what you did to that dog?"
"I—"
"No," the man said, not waiting for me to finish. "Do you not realize what you are?"
He almost seemed to step through the bars of the cell, bleeding in like light through a windowpane. I heard a whispering in that brief second before the mage was in the cell with me and had thrust his cane directly into my chest.
I looked down and spotted the spiraling triskelion of raised markings in red, blue, and green. I hadn't known what it was at first. The mage traced the lines of the marking with his cane.
"It is fascinating, isn't it?" he said. "Those born into mage families do not exhibit such outward signs of their abilities on their persons, even if they are not fully human, but Irregulars born to nulls always have a mark, just like this one, somewhere on their flesh."
Irregular.
The word had floated outside my mind, like I hadn't heard him properly. I stared at the mage, the noble in front of me and I realized then that it must be some sort of terrible dream. Irregular magicians were more a ghost story than anything else to most of the people I'd grown up around. Irregulars were the monsters who popped up among hard-working folks and set off chain reactions of uncontrolled magic that made the worst abuses by normal mages seem tame by comparison.
A mage might summon a devil to make a bargain with, but an Irregular would tear open the very gates of hell just to watch the land around them burn. Those were the stories told to nulls by the ruling class, ever since the first Irregulars emerged after the Unification Wars.
Some of that was presumably mage propaganda to curb any null rebellions formed around any Irregulars that might crop up among our population. It had happened once or twice in the past, but such uprisings had been crushed so thoroughly, brutally, and quickly it made the basic line of the stories all true. Irregulars only invited disaster and pain, especially to those who loved them.
That horror must have showed on my face, because the mage in front of me leaned in close and smiled ever wider.
"Young Theodore, my name is Fitzwilliam Woodman, and I rather think the two of us will make quite the team." He'd caressed my face, laying a gloved hand on my cheek and rubbing a thumb under my eyes. Then he left without another word.
Lord Woodman left me alone in the cells underneath the estate for a few days, alone and in the dark, with no food or water. By the time he returned, I was delirious and willing to do just about anything to leave.
Lord Woodman asked me if I'd do anything he asked of me, and I agreed. Then he told me in no uncertain terms what would happen if I failed him. If I didn't complete a task to its fullest, he'd punish me to a degree he found corresponding to the level of my failure. It had seemed almost fair at the time, and it had certainly been my only option that led to my survival.
So I agreed.
They whisked me off to another manor owned by a friend of Lord Woodman and I trained for my enrollment in Angitia in two years' time. Everything from my tutors to my rooms were prearranged, like they'd expected me for months. It had… it had been unexpectedly nice at times. I wouldn't lie about that. A change in circumstances like that where I felt well-fed and slept in a warm room every night for the first time in my life was a comfort I didn't realize I'd like. I missed my family, and I worried about them without me, but I almost wondered if it would be for the best that I'd never see them again. That they'd never have to deal with the pain of producing an Irregular.
It wasn't until later that I realized they'd become collateral against me. A piece of leverage to always remind me I wasn't really a mage and that my position was tenuous at best.
I used to beg to go home and visit them, but I'd stopped after a while. That wretched enchantment from that wretched amulet Lord Woodman had me wear "for my own protection" had made it impossible for my parents and brothers to recognize me for long.
What made it worse was that whenever I was at the estate, Lord Woodman would punish them and not me whenever I made a mistake. I was… I'd grown used to the slaps and shocks. The nights without sleep and the days locked inside a tomb to learn how to hear the voices of the dead. I made many mistakes, subtle errors that made it clear I was not born a noble and hadn't been coached on etiquette from the cradle.
Whenever I'd slip, spit out food in the middle of a dinner party as my necromancy informed me exactly how the beef Wellington had died in a slaughterhouse, or confused the proper addresses for an earl and a viscount. Lord Woodman would take me aside to a small room in the estate's cellar and have my mum, da, or one of my brothers brought there to be whipped, made to see horrible illusions, or dozens of other cruelties right in front of me.
I can still hear the sound of Alfie screaming as maggots were compelled to eat away at his flesh, only for Lord Woodman to heal him with a wave of a hand and not so much as a scar. Alfie staring up at me with tear streaked cheeks, and unfocused eyes unable to recognize me.
That and a dozen other horrors still haunt my dreams.
They never knew why they were there or why they were being covered in honey and poured with heaps of biting red ants. They never knew who I was, only ever seeing me as just another noble, but they knew… Lord Woodman made sure they knew their suffering was my fault.
I wanted to die.
I still wanted to die. Just to make it all end. But I couldn't. Because some part of me knew there had to be a way out, that's why I wanted to bargain away my magic, purge it from my body. If I was no longer useful to Lord Woodman, then perhaps he'd leave me alone. Perhaps this long nightmare will finally end.
But…
But deep down, I knew it wouldn't. The moment I rid myself of my magic. The instant I stop being useful, Lord Woodman will kill us all.
I'd been lying to myself for the better part of two years.
I was in a cage, and the only way I'd leave it was as a corpse.