Love and Undeath
If not for the loss of her lover, she would never believe pain could feel this exquisite and all-consuming. The agony of black poison surges through her veins like a curtain falling over her memories, and she pushes past it to recall ritual diagrams written in carmine on vellum pages.
One final task. A blade for her blood and a vessel for her soul.
The viciously curved obsidian dagger looks far too brittle for what she must do, but it thrums with purpose when she lays her fingertips on its intricately carved handle. It knows how to separate costal cartilage from rib bone. It looks forward to its delicate work; she can feel that.
It will make her bloom like a rose and splatter the floor with crimson petals.
She grips the blade in both hands and trembles, her mouth acrid with fear. She almost hesitates.
Then she remembers billhooks and pitchforks at midnight. Torchlight twisting familiar faces into grotesques of her friends and neighbors, with righteous victory seething off their bodies like smoke off of the charred stake where they committed their greatest sin. She remembers how the gnarled and blackened corpse of the woman they "purified" crumbled at her touch.
She steels herself. Her shaking stills. She draws in a deep breath.
She only gets one chance. You can't remove your own heart twice.
--
A woman wakes to a memory of unbearable heat, yanked from oily darkness that clings to her mind like a film. Her eyes adjust slowly to her dim surroundings.
A few persistent thick candles still burn in the alcoves. Rust-red tendrils of dried blood spread across the flagstone floor of the tomb—her tomb, she realizes—from a granite plinth. Upon that plinth, she sees a piece of parchment and an ornate gold box.
Gently, she stands. Her bare feet touch the cool floor and the memory of inferno fades a little further from her mind. Her first halting steps across the room take her to the letter and its contents.
She recognizes the familiar cursive script instantly, and the first lines make her heart pound as she reads through a sudden blur of tears.
My love,
I must trade a life for a life to bring you back, but they'd kill me for necromancy anyway. I want to apologize for this. I'm so sorry I won't be there to wake you and welcome you back.
Please don't look for me. Flee this place and never look back. I want you to remember me how you knew me, and I couldn't bear for you to see what I must become to save you.
I ask only that you carry this box with you wherever you go. Entrust it to someone to destroy upon your death, hopefully at the end of a long, long life full of the happiness you deserve.
We always wanted to go back to the sea together. Go there and live.
--
In an ancient town of pastel houses, crowded alleyways, and steep sea cliffs, a woman sits at an outdoor bistro and looks out at the sea. Her eyes bear more wrinkles now than when she awoke in that crypt all those years ago. Across from her sits the her wife, and countless days and nights of comfort hang in the silence between them as they share a bottle of white wine over crusty bread. Their fingers interlocked, they watch as the sun sets over the water and the night unfolds above them like vast, speckled velvet.
At a table nearby, over the din of the small crowd, she hears a merchant drunkenly regale his colleagues with stories from his recent travels. Kernels of truth embellished with encounters with saucy maidens, daring hijinks fueled by liquor, and heroic acts in the face of vile banditry.
As he drinks, his stories become darker, more serious, until he reaches the end of his tales.
"Years ago, we came upon village at the edge of the Greatwood, where the trees no longer bloom and the soil yields not even weeds. The townsfolk, what few of them survived, fled so quickly they left their doors unlocked and food still bubbling in their stew pots.
"We passed through quickly as we could, but something made the horses reluctant to follow the road out of town. We found out why in due time: a large crypt on the edge of town, littered with splintered bodies, where even the crows dared not feast. The freshest among the corpses bore the sigils of exorcists, the kind that burned witches in those days.
"We found new routes to avoid that town, but we saw similar scenes time and again: churchyards desecrated with the tatters of holy men. And over time, the influence of the church waned as its inquisitions met their bloody ends. Its few remaining adherents still give a wide berth to the area they call the Lichwood."
At the conclusion of his somber story, his comrades share a brief look of seriousness before bursting into bawdy laughter and disbelief. The rib him, as friends do, for trying to convince them of ridiculous backwater superstitions.
The woman, however, sees the haunted look in his eyes. She smiles, and turns back to toward the horizon, where the last of the sun's light limns the vanishing line that separates the ocean from the endless black sky.
She reaches into her satchel with her free hand, touches the one secret she will always keep to herself. Her fingertips trace the familiar inscription on the cover of an ornate gold box.
My heart goes with you, always.