Chapter 33 Antagonists #3
Kriqir shoved everything off his workbench, a clatter of bones and vials scattering across the floor in a wave of dust. He laid the broken Inky onto the center of the wooden table, leaning over it.
Shutting his silvery eyes, he began to chant and whisper.
Spit flew between each lisped word, and the muscles in his neck twitched.
Em lingered beside him, a full whiff of his minty presence filling her nose.
Everything in his lair rattled, glass bottles tinkering against one another. The green smoke hissed. A groan rose from within the core of the Cursed-But-Once-Uncursed-Tower.
Still, Inky lay lifeless.
Kriqir chanted on, his voice rising and projecting in a booming echo throughout the lair.
Please, Em prayed to no one in particular.
In the reverberation of Kriqir’s monotone incantation, distant, ghostly voices seemed to sing. The chorus twisted and bellowed from the trembling cauldron overhead as if the spirits of the dead were crying from the afterlife in response to the necromancer’s charms.
Beads of sweat dripped along the side of Kriqir’s mask. His face creased, and he mumbled on.
Please.
“Em?”
She gasped, whirling on her heel.
A pair of bushy gray eyebrows beneath a wide-brimmed hat shifted into view amongst the wisps of green smoke.
Her heart skipped a beat, sinking.
“Faylorn?” Em’s voice cracked.
The old wizard smiled through his transparent form. He hovered before her in the corner of the room, as stereotypical as ever in his new spirit appearance.
“I didn’t intend our reunion to be in such a grisly setting,” Faylorn said, narrowing his eyes over Em’s head toward Kriqir. “What are you doing, lass? This is no place for the Almighty Queen of Stars, Princess of the White Rose Valley, and Heir to the Cursed-But-Once-Uncursed-Tower.”
“You’re… you died,” Em exclaimed. The bitter grief she’d bottled back when he initially passed swelled up inside her again. Except, a new furious spark simmered with it; a resurrected mentor was more cliché than a dead one.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked.
Faylorn let out a chuckle, shaking his head and causing his long white beard to wag. “You never cease to amaze me, lass.”
“No, seriously, what are you doing here?” Em demanded again.
“Your old ghosts come back to haunt you whenever performing necromancy!” Kriqir shouted over his shoulder, pausing his chanting. The villain didn’t even pay the wizard-ghost a glance. “Just ignore him, and this will be over soon enough, fool.”
“The prophecy,” Faylorn said, levitating closer to her. Em took a weary step back. “It foretold both my death and my ghostly return.”
“Yes, but…” Em swallowed down her exhausted, defeated sobs. “You weren’t supposed to fucking die.”
“Don’t doubt the prophecy,” Faylorn said.
“I was trying to change it,” she argued. “You told me that you knew that in your death note. I don’t want anything to do with the shitty prophecy or questline. I just wanted to be original and unique.”
“Maybe so,” Faylorn mused, smiling past his wrinkles. “But I also reminded you in that same note that we are bound to the prophecy until the end of this story.”
“How do I change it, Faylorn?” Em begged. “I’ve tried everything. I even stole the manuscript from the Great Author. But nothing I do seems to be working!”
“Are you sure of that?” Faylorn asked.
“Yes!” Em let out a scoff. “I mean, look at you; you’re a stereotypical wizard ghost trying to guide me back into the light before my downfall! It’s like the second I get close to achieving a victory, this damn plotline throws every possible trope at me to try to prevent me from winning.”
“Are you sure of that?” Faylorn repeated.
“Sure of what?” Em demanded.
“That your story isn’t original?” the wizard ghost asked.
“It couldn’t be more cliché,” she spat. “The tropes, the love triangles, the quest, the prophecy, the sword, my literal eye color, all of the regions we’ve traveled through, the dragon, the lame-ass villain…”
“Hey now,” Kriqir interjected.
“This story is everything I’ve spent my whole life avoiding,” Em ranted on. “And if I can’t get my way to fix it, then I want nothing to do with it.”
The creased disappointment on Faylorn’s face sagged. His cheeks twitched beneath his beard, and his form sank a little closer toward the ground.
Tense silence hung between them.
The wizard’s lips parted, but he remained speechless. Faylorn surveyed her, but not because of Em herself. He was reading the words across her face that exposed her sins and failures.
Redness blurred her vision. Em let out a shriek as rage boiled over in her veins. She swatted at the green smoke swirling around Faylorn’s ghost.
The gnawing weight of grief clawed at her again.
In a hissing swish, Faylorn dissolved into the haze again, fading into nothingness.
Something snagged her hand.
Em let out a gasp, stars melting from her vision.
Gloved fingers strangled her wrist mid-swing. A pair of amber eyes glared at her from beneath a satiny maroon hood, framed with perfectly curled eyeliner. Except, unlike the ghostly transparent form Faylorn had been, she was alive.
“Why, hello there, sweetheart,” Sasha snarled.
The dryad girl twisted Em’s arm downward, yanking her forward.
With a flick of metal against leather, her knife was aimed directly at Em’s throat.
“It’s bad enough you had to kill me once, but going after Faylorn when he was already dead? That’s a new low.”