Grave Magic by D. D. Miers & Graceley Knox

Author:D. D. Miers & Graceley Knox [Miers, D. D. & Knox, Graceley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07FZRQFX9
Publisher: Chaotic Press LLC
Published: 2018-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Sitting naked in a dark pine forest, Cole is maybe fourteen, with pine needles jabbing into his bare skin. Through his eyes, the forest is so dark that I can barely see the trees beyond the little circle of light produced by the candle in front of him. He is afraid and doing his best not to show it. He squashes it under anger. He's always angry lately. At his parents, at himself, at his school and the world. But not at the thing sitting across from him in the dark.

Gaap is more terrifying than the scrubby pine woods behind his parent's house. I remembered Cole's warning not to look directly at the demon for too long. He was too much to take in all at once. He wasn't like the King of the Dwarves, who was a thousand different things at once, or Titania, who was a thin veneer of human over flickering insect wings and glowing furnace heat. He's solid, stable . . . too much.

My attention slipped from one tiny part of him to another: a black claw, a single scale, and a glittering eye, one among thousands hidden in the evershifting impossible geometry of his unnumbered wings. Yet I was certain, or Cole was certain, that he was beautiful. Cole, in a trembling, nascent way, loved him. In the way a moth loves the moon and seeing it in the flames, heedlessly hurls itself into it. In the way an ant drowning in spilled soda loves sweetness. In the way we love anything that consumes us, and which we know will inevitably destroy us. Cole was more afraid of the feeling than he was of the darkness around him, and in my opinion, that made him already a lot smarter than most fourteen-year-olds I'd ever met.

"Necromancy has three purposes," Gaap spoke, and Cole hung on his every word, forgetting his discomfort, his anger, his fear, and even his love. All that mattered was absorbing as much knowledge as possible. "To divine the future, to know the hidden past, and to raise the dead. The necromancers of this age have forgotten the first two thirds of this and attempt the third only in halting half measures. I will not teach you the first because it is a waste. The dead know the future no more than the living. I should not teach you the second, or you may call up some ghost to teach you rather than me—"

"Never," Cole said at once, and I winced under a wave of the kind of crippling embarrassment only a fourteen can feel. "I mean, I've already paid you. Why waste it?"

"And what a bargain you made," Gaap replied, a smile in his voice that sent a shiver up my spine. "Of the third purpose, I will teach you as much as I am able, and this will put you in a league ahead of any necromancer in the last hundred years. But of the pinnacle, True Resurrection, I can teach you nothing, for that knowledge is forbidden even to one such as me.

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