A necromancer’s magic is strongest on the anniversary of their death.
This bit of Izaani lore cannot be twisted to benefit the lightless scrawlers and is thus unproven by their standards. So, it surprises me to find you, after a childhood of rejecting your heritage, preparing for a spell this frigid evening.
It has been nine years to the day since my soul and body were parted.
• • • •
You are born with a headful of brownish-red wisps. It is the most remarkable thing about you, so we name you Sanguine. This obvious likeness to your father seems to encourage you to regard me, more often than not, as an uninvited guest. I suspect you wean yourself at eight months just to spend more time with him.
The little fish who swam inside me all those months is becoming her own, separate person…it tastes of unripe winter berries, this feeling.
• • • •
You are in a night-cloaked meadow, wearing my old ritual dress. Another Izaani tradition I never thought to see you embrace. Though you have your father’s dusty-brown skin and his striking hair, I am reminded of myself at your age: tall—too tall some said—wide hips and soft belly shaping the shift dress, small, high breasts, dark nipples apparent through the sheer white fabric.
Spine stiff, feet planted, red curls exploding in all directions, you stand in the center of a circle formed by the linked hands of eight other Izaani. They wear sheer dresses like yours or shorts with chests bared, open to Moon’s energy. If any of you are cold, you don’t show it.
You drag the plain dagger across one cheek. You wince but do not hesitate before opening a second line across the other. You place the dagger on a square of leather and pick up a clay pot.
• • • •
I buy you a charm bracelet when you turn five. I add a charm on special occasions. As you grow, I have to add links as well. Even when you aren’t speaking to me, the tinkling of that bracelet as you move around the house says enough.
• • • •
While you rub an herbal paste into your wounds, I look around at your circle.
The two necromancers bear dozens of white dermal piercings from ring-finger to elbow, the beads of bone forming roiling patterns. It’s a shortcut for solid spellwork, but at least they’re proud to wear their heritage. The rest don’t display their affinities, but I can sense them. One is a conjurer, another a diviner. Three are animancers and whatever you have planned, Little Fish, I hope it’s got nothing to do with combining your affinity with theirs—I’ve been gone too long to be reanimated. To be sure, I reach for any dead nearby and am relieved to find only small animals like insects and rodents.
The last of your circle is Eerie. Her frizzy afro puffs have transformed into back-length braids twined with thin copper wire. I ripple with amusement. She is still following you everywhere.
Suddenly, you fling your arms wide and your circle hums, a melody of struck ore and summer heat.
The scrawlers chant. They need words and pictographs and our very souls to make their magic. We need only our inner light, our voices, and our connection to Universe, Sky, Earth, and—especially for necromantic purposes—Moon.
You close your eyes and sway back and forth. Your circle hums louder. Eerie brings her hands together, bridging two of the animancers’ hands, careful not to let go until they are joined. She steps into the unbroken circle and reaches for the dagger at your feet. When she has cut her own cheeks and sealed the wounds with the herbs, she takes your hand.
I am wrenched into the space between planes.
• • • •
You are seven—“and-a-half,” as you are fond of adding—when you come home from school, crying, and lock yourself in your room. You won’t talk to me, so I send in your father and go to the kitchen to chop vegetables. He finds me putting a tray of rainbow squash and carromatoes into the woodstove.
Your father gently rubs my back while I am still bent over. “Some kids found out she’s taking remedial spellworking. They’ve been picking on her for weeks.”
I straighten and wait. I can tell from his crossed arms and tight lips that there is more.
“They tease her about her clothes and her accent. And one of them hexed her desk to jumble her pictographs during a practical—the teacher put it down to her shoddy work and failed her.”
I have to consciously unclench my teeth to speak. “Which teacher? Which kids?”
“She won’t tell me.”
I slam the stove shut and turn to my quick-bread batter. “We should never have left.”
He sighs. This isn’t a new argument.
“She deserves a normal childhood,” I say, stirring too vigorously. The bread will be tough.
“There were no jobs back home, the opportunities here—”
“Aren’t worth it if they teach her there’s something wrong with her, with her magic, if she becomes just another scrawler, if—”
“They’re called scribes,” says your stony voice from the hallway.
I don’t look up from my batter. “It’s not real magic.”
“It works just like yours does,” you say. Yours. Not ours.
I point my wooden spoon at you. “Because they use the souls of our people to power their little scribbles.”
“They aren’t souls, Mama. They are excess mystical energy.” You articulate each word carefully, as if they have been drilled into you.
I am horrified into silence. What have they been teaching you at that school?
• • • •
The space between is darkness and silence so dense, so suffocating, it makes me wish I could die again. The trip is usually swift, as it was when I was initially drawn to you this evening, because only one or two of my senses are engaged in your stratum of reality. This time, though, I am to become something close to flesh, so I am suspended in darkness for eternity.
Then—
BRIGHT GRINDING SEARING
I squeeze my eyes shut and slam my hands over my ears to adjust to—
The feeling of grass between my toes, the evening breeze tickling the flyaways at my neck, the pepper scent of your herbal mixture. I lower my hands, drawing in a shuddering breath, and open my eyes. You are close enough to touch.
The magic you have worked is strong. I know, without looking, that I appear not as I was when I was sick or when I was put on the pyre, but as you remember me.
Half of your circle forgets themselves in surprise at my apparition and there is a break in the humming. The deep-sea calls me across mountains and valleys, a twinge in my chest, but the humming resumes and I am grounded.
Your eyes fly open. Your swaying stops. You stare.
“Mama?”
“Sanguine,” I say, almost too quietly to be heard over your circle’s steady humming. I press my hand to your cheek. It’s like brushing silk. “You’ve gotten so…you’re so grown up.”
When Eerie lets go of your hand and steps to the side, you barely notice and say, “Everybody says I look like you.”
I hold my breath—I can breathe—waiting for the denial, the distancing.
But a wry smile quirks your lips. “I can see it.”
Not only can I breathe, I can cry, apparently.
“When Papa couldn’t locate your soul,” you say, brushing away a red curl that strays near your eye, “he thought something must have happened. He’d hoped you’d found a way to Life After. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d sensed you over the years.”
Even with those visits, I know I’ve missed so much. I want to ask you about your life. Who are these friends of yours? Did you land that warding job or has your father convinced you to join the family business? How did your necromancy get so good? What made you decide it wasn’t beneath you? Is Eerie your girlfriend? Finally? Is roast lamb and root soup still your favorite? Did your father give you my recipe? Did you ask for it?
But I don’t voice any of this. Your light cannot burn all night.
• • • •
On your ninth birthday, I decide it’s time you receive your first serious lesson. We sit out in the garden, legs crossed, hands joined. The evening grass is chill beneath us, but the air is warm and thick with magic.
“Can you feel them?” I ask, already brushing the souls in the nearby rose bushes with tendrils of my necromancy.
You fidget, shaking your head, no doubt wondering how soon you can get back to your new toys.
“Try,” I say. “Close your eyes.”
“I could probably do it with a conduit. I’ve practiced with the ones at school and—”
“You…What? Why? You have your own magic!”
You tear your hands free of mine. “It’s just practice! And it’s easier—”
“Because you’re manipulating the power and control those souls earned over a lifetime. Give me your hands.”
There are tears in your eyes now. You glance longingly back at the house.
I repeat, “Give me your hands,” in the tone that tells you the only choice is obedience.
You obey, but refuse to look at me.
I rebuild the magic while I speak.
“Herbs, song, willing souls like the ones in our garden, even blood…all of those have their uses, depending on the spell. But conduits are for scrawlers—”
“Scribes.”
I reach out to the souls flitting around the green roses and ask their permission to borrow energy and commune. “Call them whatever you like, their power is stolen.”
“That’s just superstitious—”
I jerk your hand to get your attention. “They are souls, Sanguine.” We have let this go on too long. “I know because our work sometimes involves conduits. We come across them or people bring them to us, and if the soul within wishes it, we free them.”
I funnel my magic into yours, linking you to the spell I am working. Your eyes widen when you feel the touch of the Izaani in our garden. They are transformed but undiminished by death. “Some of them make a home here because they were trapped for so long, they are barred from Life After.”
You yank your hands away and get to your feet. You stare down at me, jaw tight, tears streaming. Your expression reminds me of the time you were five or six, back from a trip to your grandparents, and I broke the news to you that your turtle had died. Disbelief, blame, even a touch of hope that I could fix it somehow.
Now, as then, you run to your father, who is better at reassuring you with hugs than sharing terrible knowledge.
• • • •
I let go of your cheek. “Why am I here?” Disapproval bleeds into my tone. You have removed me from my reality so wholly that it will be a long time, perhaps longer than I would have risked, before I will see you again.
You huff, hands on hips.
Before you can snip at me, I say, “I want to spend hours, days with you, but you know it will bind me tighter if I don’t return on my own. And even Lace family magic has its limits.”
• • • •
Sometime around eleven or twelve, you stop volunteering to tend the garden and I stop asking. The last few times, you fouled the magic so badly it took me hours to clean the taint. We finally lost the dinzen bushes. The souls that had fertilized the touchy plant fled for roots with less concentrated resentment.
• • • •
“I have it under control,” you say, but you drop your arms. “I brought you here because…I want to release you if you’ll let me.”
Oh. Those bitter winter berries again.
“What if I don’t want to be released?”
“Mama,” you say, “you can’t stay forever.”
“What if I want to?”
You sigh. “I don’t want you to.”
I press a palm to my chest, as if it can suppress the ache. I manage to ask, “Can you even do this?” It is difficult magic.
“I wouldn’t offer if I couldn’t,” you snap.
• • • •
“I hate you!”
The bracelet I gave you almost a decade ago flies across the hearth room, marking the wall with a tiny indent.
You stomp down the hall to your room and I sigh, too tired to follow you. Instead, I walk over and scoop the bracelet from the floor. Later, I wait for you to ask after the crowded piece of jewelry, but you never do.
• • • •
“Look, can we not?” you say. “I wish you could stay. I wish—” You swallow. “You were always trying to get me to accept our way of doing magic, but I’d thought that was just you being you, you know?
“Then I joined this Izaani group at school and I started to realize maybe you were right. About some of it. The stuff they could do without scribing, without sacrifice, was beyond. Better than what I was learning in most of my classes. So I asked some of them for lessons, I studied the family archives and your journals, and Papa even showed me how to release two souls from conduits.” You frown. “One had to stay in the garden.”
“What changed? All those years I tried to—” I shake my head in dismissal. I don’t want to ruin this.
But you know what I was going to say. “I wanted to help you.” You look down and when you meet my eyes, yours are shimmering. “And I missed you and it was a way for me to feel close to you, for the first time really. I’m sorry for being so condescending, sorry I wasted all those years, sorry I didn’t come sooner, I—” Your voice breaks.
My arms are around you before the first tear falls.
• • • •
“Please?” you ask. “Just a few things?”
“What’s wrong with the clothes you have?”
“I just want to look normal. Please, it's my last year.”
I start to tell you that ‘normal’ is overrated and expensive, but these days, you’re as remote as any sixteen-year-old and this is the first time you’ve wanted to do anything with me in months…so, we head into town.
Tucked in my satchel is the money I’ve been saving for my new ritual dress, the one I will need when I hand my old one down to you.
When we get home, my leg aches strangely. From all the walking, I suppose. I ask your father to handle the day's gardening and you offer to help him. Before the familiar jealousy can flare in my heart, you hug me so hard I lose my balance.
“Thanks for today,” you say, steadying me, and leave a kiss on my cheek.
I sit in bed that afternoon, an ice bundle on my leg. The swelling is going down, but the pain is bone-deep.
Through the open window, I listen to you two work, chatting all the while. The envy creeps up on me again, but I swat it away and open my satchel. I take out the charm I bought while you were in the changing room and add it to the bracelet I carry with me everywhere.
• • • •
“I should have…come sooner,” you repeat, speaking between sobs. “I was just so…scared.”
“Scared?”
“That one of us would…say the wrong thing and…we would fight and then…then that would be the last time we spoke.”
I pet your hair. “Shh, it’s okay.”
I don’t know how long we stand there, embracing, your tears a whisper against my neck, but I become increasingly aware of the summons from my resting place: a bracelet tangled in seaweed, charms shifting with the currents.
You must sense it too because you pull away, eyes wide and frantic.
• • • •
Every first-born Lace for four generations has donned this ritual dress for important spellwork, for momentous occasions.
But no, you have to wear the school tunic for your graduation practicum. A thick, high-collared affair paired with long pants. You might as well erect a ward between yourself and your true power.
I am still simmering over the lost argument as your father pushes my wheelchair close to the patch of grass you’ve been assigned for your test. I notice that most of the Izaani students, including your friend, Eerie, wear light robes or dresses—proper ritual attire.
You kneel on a large, wooden platform and dip a pen into a mixture of goat’s blood and rare thorned tulips to draw a circle. You fill the circle with inscrutable letters and symbols.
While you and the other Izaani power spells with your own magic, your lightless classmates use pocket-watches, broaches, coins, and other trinkets, shunting the trapped souls’ magic into their circles. Cords of my necromancy escape, drawn to the conduits, tempted to crack them open like seeds and release the spirits.
Your father threads his hand in mine. “She’s doing very well.”
I clamp down on my instincts. “You understand what she’s doing?”
“A little.”
I know he’s been helping you with homework. I hadn’t considered some of that might involve scrawling. I shake his hand loose, disgusted, but I watch you closer and wonder how much I’ve missed.
• • • •
“Please let me do this for you,” you say. “You always talked about Life After as a right, because everyone deserves respite, but you’ve been stuck here all these years.”
I swallow a bitter laugh. We’re finally seeing things with the same eyes and now it’s time for me to go?
“I’m okay,” you say, reassuringly. “I have a great partner”—you glance back at Eerie—“and good friends. I help Papa with the garden and the business is doing better.”
I try—fail—to fight the waves of rightness. My chin quivers. “Will you promise me something?”
“What?” You sound suspicious.
“Promise you’ll do what makes you happy. I caused us both so much grief—”
You shake your head. “No, Mama, I should have—”
“I should have appreciated who you were. Yes, I wish you would have found your magic sooner; yes, it hurt seeing you embrace the scrawlers and their conduits. But you would have come around sooner if I had been less stubborn and more patient.”
You laugh. “Maybe, maybe not. I’m just as stubborn.”
• • • •
You are wrapped up in your float year, a carefree eighteen-year-old traveling with friends, sampling local food and local magic, living rough and loving it.
I know your father has begged you, more than once, to come visit.
You promise you will, then extend your trip a few days. Those few days pass and you make another promise.
When I reassure him I don’t blame you, I can’t admit it is because I blame myself. For pushing you all these years. Pushing you too hard. Pushing you away.
Meanwhile, I’m too sick to tend the plants let alone the spirits that enhance them, too weak to even bottle the tonics. At this rate, we can’t afford the next phase of your education. Though I can’t envision any child of mine in such a stuffy institution, you deserve the same opportunities as your classmates.
I put a plan into motion to secure your future. It goes against my deepest beliefs, but it is my last chance to apologize and to tell you, I love you.
• • • •
“Just promise me you’ll find your own path.”
“Okay, okay. I promise.” Your smile fades. “You trust me? You’re not scared?”
“Of the spell?”
You nod.
“I trust you. But I am scared of leaving you.” I look up to Moon, amused, helpless, supplicating. “I can’t help it. I’m your mother.”
The conduit gives a sharp tug and I gasp.
• • • •
Your poor father. I’m snippy, even for me. Constantly asking after the post, trying to get out of bed at each knock on our door, being short with family and friends who come to say goodbye. Part of it is pain, the other part is worry. If they don’t show soon, it’ll be too late and you and your father will only receive the deposit.
But the scrawlers, the ones who make conduits, turn up eventually. I know it’s them at the door because I can hear the shouting from our bedroom. Your father demands they leave with a vibrant assemblage of curses.
When they show him the contract—my “mystical energy” in exchange for more money than we’ve seen in six harvests put together—your father storms into our room. He glares at me, wound up with rage I didn’t think he possessed. I stare back, serenely. We have traded roles at the edge of my death.
• • • •
You grit your teeth, tears flowing silently over the stiff blood and herbs, awakening them like rainfall on desert soil. Your circle hums louder, the notes morph, each Izaani finding a new melody that complements the whole. A forest of music, as distinct and harmonious as the joining of birdsong, wind whistling through trees, mammals scurrying, insects chittering.
Still, the conduit pulls and soon, I will be essence again, trapped in the sea until the bindings slacken enough for me to break loose. I take you in for the last time in this world. You aren’t singing with your circle.
“It’s now, or wait until the next ebb,” I tell you.
• • • •
Your father can’t change my mind, but he insists on doing the transfer himself. The conduit makers allow it, happy to cut costs and escape his rage.
• • • •
You wipe away your tears and straighten. Eerie steps up and puts a steadying hand on your shoulder.
You lift your gaze and trill, tremulous at first then resolute. Your voice is the ceaseless chord the forest was missing, a waterfall cascading over a timeworn outcropping. My heart aches for all the magic I never taught you, all the music we never made.
• • • •
Your father carries me, naked and shivering, out to the garden under Moon and his children’s light and lays me on my favorite patch of grass, near the green roses. He places the piece of jewelry over my heart. Before I can protest, he splits the air with the wordless melody of a song about the changing colors of autumn leaves, how they drift to the ground and are trodden to mulch.
He is supposed to shackle me to the silver necklace provided by the scrawlers. Instead, he tethers my soul to your charm bracelet. He hopes it will give me solace in the lifetime to come.
• • • •
I cry out in fresh agony. Tiny rips appear along the seam joining the luminescence of your magic to my soul, my soul to the conduit. I focus my energy and interweave it with yours, fighting the pull. Through the pain, I say, “Tell your father I love him.”
You rush to raise your dagger and I grab your wrist. “Stay calm.”
When I let go, there’s a phantom sheen of water on your skin that smells faintly of brine.
With a shaking hand, you pull the blade along your arm. In the dim light, the rivulets of blood are black.
“Stay calm,” I repeat. But my words are whispers and you aren’t listening.
You drag the blade up your other arm. Your singing falters. Blood surges from the wound, flowing too fast.
The strands of magic connecting us begin to unravel. The night darkens.
Despite the seriousness of your injury, you resume your singing. I try to shake you, to tell you to stop and let someone heal you, but I’m barely here anymore.
You sway and drop to your knees.
• • • •
Your father delays the conduit makers, making excuses and dodging their visits.
The bracelet doesn't fit around his wrist, so he carries me from room to room, task to task, setting me down only when he needs both hands. I’m not inside the bracelet so much as leashed to it. Your father can’t see me, but he can feel me and talks to me throughout the day. Occasionally he voices the possibility of not fulfilling the contract, of releasing me. I cannot speak to him with words, but I make my feelings known with a churning of energy that makes the conduit too hot to hold.
At night, when he lies awake in our quiet home, I send pulsing waves of warmth through the bracelet, timing the rhythm with his heartbeat until he falls asleep.
The third day after my transfer, you finally come home, too late to say goodbye face to face. You find out what I’ve done and, despite my silence, you and I have our worst fight yet.
• • • •
One of the Izaani breaks your circle, rushing toward you. I am hauled, hair’s breadth by hair’s breadth, into the space between.
I lose the salt taste of my tears.
I lose the metallic smell of your blood.
I lose the feeling of grass between my toes.
I lose the murmur of worried voices.
When I am greeted by familiar, suffocating black, I can still see the afterimage of you, blood-soaked and unconscious in Eerie’s arms.
• • • •
The little girl who receives my soul complains that it isn’t the necklace she picked out, but her parents insist she make do; she needs a conduit for school and the mistake has gotten them a steep discount. Besides, “the bracelet isn’t THAT ugly.”
On a family sailing trip, the bracelet ‘slips’ off her wrist and into the water, dragging me down with it.
• • • •
A swirl of rainbow shatters the darkness. It reminds me of colorful motes behind closed eyelids.
For a change, I have form here, a body not of flesh but so conceptually similar as to make little difference. The motes brush against me, lamb’s ear soft. They turn my attention toward a line of light. It’s nearly impossible to see, so thin that if I look away I’m sure it will vanish like an illusion.
The path to Life After.
You did it. Your spell worked. I’m free of the conduit and—
My gaze snaps toward you.
You are here, in the space between, and that can only mean…
• • • •
The first time I manage to break away from my underwater prison, I am overwhelmed with gratitude, though you obviously don’t know I’m here.
It has been a year since my death. If I couldn’t sense this, I would know because you are scattering my ashes under the green rose bush in our garden.
Your father kneels down next to you, with some effort, and invokes Moon with a short prayer. When the invocation is finished, neither of you moves. You stay on your knees until I am impatient—you shouldn’t be outside for so long without coats.
You glance my way, as if you sense me and my irritation. But you close your eyes again and put an arm around your father.
I watch the tears crystallize on your cheeks until the conduit reasserts itself.
• • • •
I cannot give voice to my grief and horror in this void. They expand to fill me, then the black nothingness until they reach you, until I reach you. Our bodies, only as real as we need them to be, disintegrate until we are only magic and souls.
Stripped of our barriers, there is no beginning and no end to either of us. I am you and you are me. We wonder at the miracle of knowing one another, drowning in our euphoria, our fear, our heartbreak, our love.
We sense its magic before the glowing ember net descends and trawls the plane. My experience with animancers prepares you such that you are not shocked when the spell takes hold and begins disentangling our essences.
• • • •
I am able to visit you from time to time—often in moments of pensiveness or when you are doing something I believe reminds you of me, like cooking or gardening with your father.
The time between each visit lengthens, like the conduit is getting stronger. Or you’re forgetting me. For an endless stretch, my anchor holds firm against all my attempts to leave and I try to accept that I will never see you again.
Then one evening, across mountains and valleys, from a night-cloaked meadow, you reach out to me.
• • • •
The last thing we share as you are dragged back to the living world is relief. There is also regret, but it is yours alone.
When I am by myself again, the cloud of dust nudges me toward the glowing border, dancing sapphire and gold, teal and coral. I know I shouldn’t want you to miss me, but I clutch your regret like a talisman. No, like a charm. Like that small, bronze fish I gave you when you were a little girl, when I longed to be close to you in any way you would allow. I slip into my next life, secure in knowing it meant as much to you as it did to me.
Kel Coleman is a mom, editor, and Ignyte-nominated author. Their fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in FIYAH, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, Apparition Lit, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, and others. Though Kel is a Marylander at heart, they currently live in Pennsylvania with their husband, tiny human, and a stuffed dragon named Pen. They can be found at kelcoleman.com.