It wasn’t every day one got invited to a dead man’s party. In fact, it happened at night.
Join us, the words echoed in Danya’s dream, a wispy hand beckoning her. Join us betwixt midnight and dawn… bring pizza…
She stepped over the faces of the damned to nab a flatbread with ghost peppers from her local pizzeria. The workers looked ready to clock out, each wad of dough rolled flat bringing them closer to the end. One shambled over to the oven, withdrew the pizza, and offered it to her with a consumptive hand.
She still wasn’t quite sure why the spirit had an interest in her. Eh, must have been a mix-up in the mental mail. Either that or the fact she was the world’s sole necromancer. It was her gods-given responsibility to help the dead leave this earth, since no one else could.
#
She had expected a dilapidated manor or some cavern, but it was only an old barn. They are ghosts, she supposed, not much to work with.
The translucent line to the party stretched far. The bouncer was a vermillion oni. The spirits who weren’t allowed in were waved aside, dissipating like gas.
Another participant looked to have a bit more substance—that was to say, he was alive. He approached the bouncer, who cracked the man over his leg. His carcass fell limp, a light burgeoning from it.
“Leave your body at the door,” grumbled the bouncer.
Danya tapped her foot. The line was long enough to turn around—until a breeze flushed the ghosts away. She wrapped her cloak around herself and kept her pace slow (partly to appear menacing as a reaper of souls… her encroachment the plodding march of death… yada yada… and partly because she wasn’t keen on getting her spine snapped).
“What’s your business here?” The oni towered over her, all curly tusks and rippling abs (which themselves had abs).
“I saw it in a dream.”
“Oh, so you’re another prophet,” he snickered. “Give me one reason not to clobber you.”
“I brought pizza.”
#
Spirits eyed her hungrily as she stepped through them. To them she was just a body to feel the world through. Nearly a hundred souls infested this old place. Something keeps them tethered here. She, being the only person who could know, intended to find out why they lingered.
When she set down the flatbread (half-eaten by the bouncer) spirits slunk over. They looked at it, salivating. Gods, she did not envy the dead.
“Away, fools,” boomed the loudest whisper she had ever heard. He clanked over in shining silver armor, though his form was but a blue swirl. “Welcome, Her Lady of the Departed. I was hoping you would come.” He penetrated the flat of the, well, flatbread and withdrew a sauce-covered finger. He stuck that into his snowy-fiery core. “I appreciate the pizza, commemorating our death day. However, you missed the memo. Body at the door.”
“If you can have a body, why can’t I?”
“I have neither flesh nor blood, no organs or bones,” he offered. “Even then, it is still clear I am noncorporeal.”
“Do I look any different?” She wrapped the cloak close around herself. For all they could tell, her face was the pale moon among a plane of blood.
“Death’s not so bad…” said a spirit. “You will learn to appreciate a certain… abstractness… with the void.”
But she had seen enough of the void. What these ghosts didn’t know was that she had something of her own scraping against the mushy cage of her mind. It was that spirit which made her a necromancer, and if ever she resurrected a corpse, she had to sacrifice her bodily autonomy to it.
“I’m sorry, Mister Host, but I have seen enough of death,” she said, turning to the barn doors, propped open for a breeze to give the ghosts something to move on.
“Stay,” he commanded, and the doors slammed shut. As Danya tried to push them, she saw a red buttcheek nestled at either door and cursed the oni for blocking the exit.
“I will not kill you,” continued the host, “so long as you tend to our guests.”
She had only one condition: no resurrections.
#
At first it seemed hardly a bother to pour a drink down a ghost’s pleading gullet, but as the night droned on she grew tired weaving her way from one wailer to another.
“Just to feel the sun again,” one pondered as Danya poured punch down his throat (absorbed into the ground). “Is this spiked?”
“Even if it’s spiked,” said his spectral companion, “what would you care? You can’t feel a thing!”
“Perhaps,” said the ponderous one. “Would it hurt to die again? I can’t even recall how it happened?”
“Could you tell me how?” she asked. Knowing would help free them.
“It was a lord’s quarrel during the Wars of Linaric Succession. Your father probably fought in them.”
She informed him that it had been, in brief, over seven hundred years since the wars’ end.
“Well, I wish somebody would have told me.”
She left them there to squabble and looked over the barn’s interior. Spirits in the air made merry in hollow ways.
“Is it true?” asked the host. “Are you the one who can grant life to the lost?”
“I don’t do so idly. Only when it’s life or death—”
“Then surely you would return me to something corporeal.” An icy glove fell to her shoulder. “I may lay a hand on you, but I do not feel the fabric of your cloak. You may sense my gaze, and know our eyes to meet, but I get no satisfaction from it.”
She scrambled up to the rafters, away from the party. Why should she celebrate the dead? What was dead was dead, burned to nothing.
At least in the Linarion they were cremated. Elsewhere they buried folk. Spirits were only freed if their bodies were burned, which might have explained the attachment to this barn.
She slid down the beams and landed on some hapless soul.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, but the ghost looked indifferent. “Why’re you so close to the beam I jumped from?”
“Why are you jumping from beams?”
“You’ve got me there,” she said. “Did you enjoy the pizza?”
“It certainly looks like pizza. Perhaps with a sense of smell or touch… or taste… You wouldn’t happen to have… some sort of vacancy…?”
He erupted from the ground, sprouting a dozen hands frayed as the ends of old jackets, trying to merge with Danya.
“Occupied! Occupied!” she said. His semblance was that of cloth stretched over a face. Humanity’s aversion to the uncanny was evolved so people wouldn’t consent to such eldritch forces.
“Blast it all, your generation is too prudish,” complained the old ghost, falling to the floor.
“My generation? When do you think I was born?” To figure out when these spirits became spirits, she needed to be crafty.
“Two hundred?”
“Not bad, you’re about seven hundred years off.”
“Damn you twice.”
“You’re already damned. I hope to be rid of that.”
“To be rid of us? Have I made such a foul impression that you want me gone?”
“There are fates worse than death,” she said. “You are tethered unfeeling to this plane. It is out of respect that I want to free you.”
“And because our host would sic that bouncer on your ass if you try to leave.”
“Further encouragement.”
“If it would mean I might leave this boredom behind, then I suppose I’ll help.”
“Good. I need to know how you died. Got a clue?”
“Nope!” He hacked up dirt.
“Wait, do that again,” said Danya.
“Heck, heck,” he forced out weakly.
“Try it again. I’m serious.”
“Plaht.” A wad of dirt rolled off his tongue.
“Perfect!”
“No, it’s quite nasty.”
“I have it,” she said. Usually souls were bound to their remains, giving hints of how their corpses were kept (a drowned ghost might vomit water). She just hoped no one would notice a bit of excavation.
#
She learned, as the ghosts lobbed whispery insults at her, that a bit of excavation, for most people, was too much excavation altogether. As the sound crescendoed around her, she ripped up more dirt, channeling her overwhelm into action.
“She’s gone insane…”
“…taken on a demon…”
“…ruin the party!”
Oh yes, she would ruin the party, and put these distressed souls at peace. Their hazy hands perforated her skin, yet her resolve did not waver. If she let these people suffer in undeath, that was condemnation. She was the only one who could see them and speak to them. So she tore at the earth like a cat at a new sofa. That didn’t stop them from pawing at her back, chills passing through her.
“What are you doing? I told you to make our death day merry,” said the host, clanking over. He took Danya by the throat with his gloved hand. She broke free and reached instinctively for her daggers, a folly.
The shades hovered around her.
“May we take her?” one asked.
“Let usss…”
A few phased through her, attempting to seep into her brain, but she focused and forced them out.
“If the corporeal want to disturb our affairs so badly, then we can do the same,” said the host.
“You invited me,” Danya snapped.
“And you accepted. Don’t blame me for drawing fools in.” Translucent figures flashed, voices vibrating through her body.
“Asshole!” She concentrated and expelled the spirits from her fingers.“I bought you pizza and this is how you repay me?”
“Yes, thank you. I will enjoy its taste on your tongue.”
“Huh?” She looked to the host, too late. He drifted toward her, armor crunching to the ground. She threw back her cloak, spread full like wings, catching spirits.
The host backed away. She swept her cloak, almost getting him. She caught a few others, manifesting as swirls in the fabric.
“I just wanted to help you,” she told the host.
“A witch! She’s a witch!” cried a ghost.
“And you’re dead. You have no place being judgmental.”
She took a few more before they gathered together and sprung, swallowing her in a sea of light.
No escape. They invaded her, trying to reach her mind. She took out some, but all at once was impossible. Her focus wasn’t enough to purge them, but it could.
A tingle crept down her spine, spreading through her bones. It always started in the bones. It infected her skin, and souls poured from her dark eyes like smoke from a chimney.
“You should have known,” she said supernaturally loud, barn trembling, “there was a reason I could see all of you. Now stay away.”
“Make me your thrall.”
“Just to touch the earth…”
“You have been a terrible guest,” said the host. He clapped his hands and his oni bouncer burst through the doors. He gulped down the flatbread and bounded over the table. “Be rid of her.”
The oni grabbed at Danya but all he caught was cloak, burning with souls. He yelped and she fingered her knives. She didn’t want to do this, but if it meant self defense…
No. She was better than that.
“I am trying to help you. You died here, long ago, during the Wars of Linaric Succession. Whew—” She dodged a swipe from the oni bouncer. “I want to reunite you with the universe.”
“You mean to kill us, then?”
She was going to say no, but she felt the spirit rising in her throat.
“Yes. We will kill you.”
The oni shuddered, falling back and cracking the table in two.
Danya had to wrest back control over herself, psychic strain from the back of her neck to her scalp.
“I won’t kill you. Just… free you…” Her spirit pounded against the cage of her skull.
“On our death day?” asked the host.
The oni put his fists together, ready to crush her.
“Stop, stop. Give me a minute to think,” said the host. The oni slumped to the floor, deflated. Danya was almost sorry for him.
She took her cloak by one end and shook it out, spirits dripping out like water. Their whispery breaths were frantic once released, as if her cloak was a gag. Take them, the thing in her head repeated, though she knew better.
#
“Well,” grumbled the host, “I suppose if you won’t let us commandeer your human vessel, and if you won’t resurrect us so we might touch the earth again, then I guess you can go and burn us.”
The oni dug the rest of the pit to apologize for almost bashing Danya’s head in.
“I mean, I didn’t think I was being picky,” the host murmured to his friend. “All I wanted was to feel some warmth. Is that too much to ask?”
“Impossible,” Danya said.
“I wasn’t talking to you… but go on.”
“Even if I did resurrect you, you would just be bones.”
“Bones can sunbathe.”
“Right, but you don’t have the glands… and stuff. You’d barely feel a thing. Seems a dismal existence to me.”
At last, the oni had found where the skeletons rested en masse, a rather grim sight. At the pinnacle of the pile sat a skull with a lord’s silver circlet.
“Mass grave, huh?” the host said. “That seems familiar. There was something of a king, and a knife in my back. Knives in many backs. Then things were cold.”
“It’s as I suspected. You were a lord, betrayed in the first War of Linaric Succession, disrespected postmortem.”
“I was so young though… Do you think there’s time for a second chance?”
She shook her head. Death had no mercy.
“Ah, hell. I suppose this is for the best. I’ll be one with everything. Each second here wears on me, even if I try to ignore it.” He floated above all the others. “Goodbye, everyone! I can say that I have thoroughly tolerated most of your presences. If I knew emotion still, then I would say that I have enjoyed my time with you beloved souls.” The crowd breathily awwwwed and Danya knew it was time for fire.
She stacked dry hay over the skeletons and lit it with some magic. No, no, begged the spirit inside her, scratching at her mind. The bones blackened until they were naught but ash. She could have sworn there was something like a smile on the ghost host’s amorphous face before he and most others faded like curls of smoke. When the breeze flushed away the last stragglers, they were hardly whispers in the wind.
The oni brought miso soup to boil over the fire. It was a bit grim, but with a necromancer, what wasn’t? Once warm she supped on it, satisfied. Its vapor drifted into the air before a zephyr washed it away, too. What was gone was gone.
The Tributary 