Now, in my autumn years, there was need. I walked behind my creation, and his bones gleamed with soft magic, lighting my path in the dark. The skeleton was made to fight for me. I robbed bones from a warrior’s grave to create him. He would have been stronger had the corpse been fresh, but my people were offended at the violation of their dead.
My skeleton was beautiful. Glowing a muted azure, his bones lit my way into the mine shaft and we penetrated the darkness side by side, searching for the old enemy of my kind, the darklings.
My grandfather fought darklings in his younger days. As a child I sat at his knee and listened to stories of the monsters that defended the violated Earth. The Earth Goddess, Tellus, was jealous of her treasures. Tellus hated the mine, but it was how we lived.
The darklings were demons of the earth. With each kill they fed on the bodies of their victims, growing stronger. Grandfather said they represented decay. When he was a young man, he found their weakness, and exploited it. He used the mysteries of life and death to raise up warriors from the grave, unnatural creatures which Tellus could not control. When our created skeletons died, their bones crumbled into dust, leaving the darklings nothing to feed on.
This skeleton and I were bonded, with one purpose. We would cleanse the copper mine of the foulness that endangered my kinsmen. If we failed my village would starve. My grandchildren would die. This was not acceptable.
I thought of those two, my little ones; Messia with her dark hair and gypsy eyes, Rasce the bold and aggressive. I was sixty summers old when my grandchildren found me. I hid myself away from the world. My hut was next to the graveyard, where children loved to scamper, telling stories to frighten one another. How surprised Messia and Rasce were to find out I was their grandfather.
Love was something I had forgotten. My wife was lost to me in the birthing of our second child. My son, Kaisie, blamed me for the death of his mother. I mourned in darkness, burying myself in the trappings of my deadly art, and Kaisie hated me. He kept his light from my eyes.
Kaisie never talked of me. To his children, I was just the crazy old fool they played pranks on with their friends.
Only seventeen summers between them and already they were wiser than their Grandpa. They knew to let the sun shine on their hair as they scampered through the fields. Messia and my brave Rasce gave me love, fresh and new, like the wild grapes they brought me. They were my treasures.
I would kill for my little ones. Save for anointing my dead wife and child in their tomb, I had not used the old art since Messia ran away, crying at the site of my necromantic tools. Now I returned to the magic of my grandfather.
