The Certified Necromantic Mages

Hawke & Johnson, C.N.M.

Season One “Setting Up Shop"

Episode 1.1 - The Case of the Curious Ghost
Em and Theo are asked to investigate a simple haunting, but nothing is ever simple. The ‘ghost’ is alive and trapped in the underworld.

Episode 1.2 - The Painted Man
A tattoo artist uses blood magic in his inks to enslave his customers, but his gruesome ritual murders to acquire the blood leave some unhappy corpses.

Episode 1.3 - Death Takes a Taxi
A young female necromancer specializes in creating "taxis" for spirits (animate dead for them to ride in) and gets snookered by a spirit who rents a body for nefarious purposes.

Episode 1.4 - Witness For the Defense
Em has to testify at a murder trial, serving as a medium to a spirit, but they have a lot of explaining to do when the spirit turns its accusations on Theo.

Episode 1.5 - Ghost Hunters
The boys are having a hard time making rent and accept the highly publicized challenge of staying in a ‘very haunted’ mansion for 24 hours. Should they reveal the chicanery of the owners of this very not haunted house, or just take the prize money and run?

Episode 1.6 - When Banshees Cry
Theo has been having nightmares about a woman crying next to a stream. He realizes that people in the dreams keep turning up dead - and last night he saw Theo there.

Episode 1.7 - Lost Soul
Sometimes the hardest cases aren’t the gruesome ones. It can be as simple as convincing a little girl that she is dead and needs to journey to the underworld.

Episode 1.8 - Specter vs. Inspector
The Chief Inspector of Kryss has a problem. Either he's losing his mind or his shadow has started talking. And it's insight into a connected series of cases is disturbing.

Episode 1.9 - The Phantom Client
The boys are finally well known enough in Kryss that an investigator comes to them for help - an elf by the name Fedoras, who suspects that her latest client isn’t quite what he seems. Sure enough, he’s about 100 percent more dead.

Episode 1.10 - False Revenant
Fedoras is back with another problem and the boys get in over their heads with the lingering spirit of an elven mage.

Maybe I Did Make a Grave Mistake? Immortal and Vampires

Hi, Jennifer Graves here, photographer and vampire hunter. Since my chronicler Sue London loved the book Immortal so much I thought I'd check it out. Having been in the supernatural hunting business for almost twenty years I was fascinated by Adam's description of vampires. Honestly, it leaves me feeling a bit guilty. One of the first things he said about vampires was "the percentage of vampires that are also evil killers is about the same as the percentage of normal people who area also evil killers." The first vampire I ever met was one of those evil killers and I haven't really revised my opinion. I guess it would be like an alien landing on Earth and the first person they meet is a psychopath. They would report back that Earth was nice but we need to exterminate all those humans. But the original incident where I met the vampire (you might remember this) has a different context based on one of Adam's recollections:

I remember a long conversation I had once with a vampire named Bordick, some time in the late seventeenth century. He was one of the oldest I’d ever met, meaning we had a good deal in common with one another, because how often does one get to compare two-hundred-year-old war stories with someone else? We got onto the subject of the somewhat unfair public perception of vampires—a perception that was actually worse in the seventeenth century than now. It was Bordick’s theory that people, in overreacting to vampires, tend to create their own monsters. He meant this rather literally.

As he told it, some time around his first century the villagers of a small Latvian hamlet figured out what he was and decided to do something about it. So one afternoon they sealed up the crypt where he was spending his daylight hours. Without elaborating on why they did this—he wasn’t bothering anybody and had restricted his nightly drinking mainly to livestock—he pointed out that this is just about the stupidest thing you can possibly do to a vampire, because they don’t starve to death like people. They just get hungrier.
Hang out with a vampire who drinks a small allotment of blood two or three times a week and you’ll swear there’s hardly any difference between him and your average human. But one who hasn’t drunk in two or three weeks isn’t the best company around. The hungry ones tend to fixate on your neck a lot, which can be very uncomfortable, and it becomes obvious somewhat quickly that they aren’t listening to what you’re saying because they’re too preoccupied listening to your heart pumping. It’s like conversing with somebody who’s wearing a Walkman, only much more disturbing.

According to Bordick, anything longer than thirty days is utter agony. Two months and this constant pain spawns dementia. Longer than that and you’ve got a vampire who is, mentally, entirely too far gone to listen to any sort of reason whatsoever. So after a full calendar year sealed up in that crypt, Bordick was utterly out of his mind.

"Dark Waters" Teaser

Cassidy Lynch startled the world by turning her back on a life of glamor to dive for artifacts in the Caribbean. But after her father's death she was driven to prove his theories had been right so that his legacy wouldn't suffer the ridicule that he had endured while living.

Kian "Kee" Murphy left the world behind long ago. For the last thirty years he has been a resistance fighter in the ever-increasing friction between humans and the Darkworld. Just as the stakes are going up and his kind are considering coming out of the shadows he discovers Cass. And he's not going to give her up, come hell or high water.

Here Sidhe Comes

The Rock Rag
(Cover Article)
by Sue London

This interviewer had a chance to sit down with the rock band “Sidhe Walks In Beauty” before the kick-off of the North American tour for their album “Unseelie Court”. In case you’ve been living under a mushroom cap while this British sensation has taken off, Sidhe is pronounced “Shee” and is the Gaelic word for fey or fairy.

I met the three guy, one girl band at New York’s swank Casablanca Hotel. Leanan looked amazing in a little flowing blue number, while the boys Pooka, Spriggan and Boggie were all decked out in black grunge finery. The first thing I asked was, of course, “Why Sidhe?”

Spriggan replied, “Why the [expletive] do you [expletive] think, you [expletive]? We’re [expletive] fey!”

Leanan broke in with her usual charm, “And the band name is a reference to a Lord Byron poem. Since Byron is a personal friend it seemed like a nice tribute.” (When I mentioned that Byron had been dead for some time the band reassured me that he was in fact enjoying time with some friends at a fairie ring in Northern Ireland where time passes slowly and was in quite good health.)

Pooka, who had been glowering at me, spoke up. “We looked at those rock bands tearing up their hotel rooms, luring young people away from their homes to follow them, having sex with everyone within five feet of them, and we thought, what a rip-off! We’ve been acting like that for thousands of years and now some mortal brats are going to come along and make money at it? [Expletive]!”

Of course, over the years there has been the odd fairy to gain popularity in entertainment. Bryan Ferry, the son of a dryad, was a 1980s pop sensation and right now Tina Fey, a nymph, is quite successful.

When I asked her about this, Leanan mused, “Tina has done a good job of toning down her natural allure even though you can see it shine through by accident from time to time. There is a real pressure as a sidhe where you wonder if you can make it without your glamour – if you can just succeed on your own hard work.”

Well, it’s certain that this great band is making it on their own hard work. Check out Sidhe Walks in Beauty coming soon to a town near you!

Blood Will Tell

   It’s in the blood, they say. Landel blood. This obsessive drive towards perfection, with fourteen generations supported by patrons and moving ever closer to the ultimate masterpiece. That was how I came to be here, hunched over my workbench with sweat beading at my brow and running in rivulets down my back. I was now the last of the Landel line. A puny female of average countenance, and the most sought after weaponsmith in all the Provinces of Beleir T’an on the eve of the Tenth War.

   Throughout the last thousand years the dark mage Isthair and his unholy minions have ravaged our people and lands. The mystics say that the approaching turn of the millennium bodes ill, that as Ithsair came upon us at the beginning of this millennium, so his power will grow in the beginning of the next. That soon he will have no need to retreat into his lair for a hundred years between wars. Mystics, with their ragged, soiled clothes and bedazzled eyes, clutching talismans as they wander our streets, call doom down upon us all. And who can say nay? Who can look upon our broken, filthy streets, look at our dirty starving children, and not think that the end approaches? Who among us would not almost welcome death, an end to our worthless toil of wars, and eking out an existence in the bare scrub of land still protected from the warlock’s hellfire? So what is left to the people of the Provinces besides a life of going to war with empty bellies?

   At one time the Provinces flourished. Before Ithsair, before wars and plagues and city burnings, there were rich farmlands stretching farther than the eye could see, clear flowing rivers and streams unpolluted by the grime and blood of war. Walking through my city Verlan you can see a shadow of that former age. Look here at a crafted arch that bespeaks wealth and artistry. Look there at a finely laid section of road, created when work was a source of pride and not something that had to be rushed because the worker was needed for strengthening the walls.

   The mystics rave that if Ithsair chose, he could pluck the sun from the sky and leave us in eternal darkness. That on certain nights he pulls the moon from her path and wears her as a ring on his finger. It could be the ravening of mad men, or the sad foretelling of our destiny. But I can tell you what is known. That Ithsair is stirring from his slumber. Thus for the last hundred years my family has worked to create swords of such superior craftsmanship that many say they are charmed. Tonight I am preparing my last sword before battle. The huge blood ruby set in the pommel glows with its own inner light and when I touch the blade I can feel the steel writhe with life under my thumb. The balance, which feels so light in my own palm, will seem to a warrior as light and natural as a reed dancing in the wind. This sword is my best work, and I could no more give my life to my Province if I died on the battlefield. The exhaustion that steals upon me reminds me why I am the last. The flame of inspiration which had burned brighter and brighter in our family has left only myself as its last bright flicker. With that thought I lower myself to the stone floor and lay my head on the bench near the sword. My fingers curl possessively on the handle as I take a few hours rest before I present the sword to Lord Braenall and he takes it to the battlefield.

   I awaken to the sound of scuffing feet. My eyes open, but I cannot see. I move my arms to wipe my face, but I cannot seem to touch my own skin. It is an odd sensation to move my arms, like trying to fight rushing water.
   “There is the wee lass,” I hear Alain, the castellan, say. “She’s worked herself into a slumber.”
   “So long as she’s finished the sword.” That was the voice of Braenall, the young and snide lord that had decreed a Landel sword as being the only one worthy of his carrying into battle. Suddenly I feel myself grasped fully about the waist and I’m being bodily moved. I hear a scraping sound and once I have light to see, I shudder. My first sight is my own face, composed in sleep with dark lashes swept down on my cheeks and red tendrils of hair loose, and I am being lifted up and away from myself. I try to reach my arms out again towards myself and feel that strange resistance. I see Alain kneel next to my body.
   “Come now, love, wake up.” He shakes my shoulder and my body slumps down towards the floor. Alain acts quickly to check my breath and my pulse. He sits back on his heels and shakes his head.
   “The Landel curse has claimed her,” he announces.
   “That is… unfortunate,” Braenall says. “Prepare a burial for her in my family grounds. A stone must mark that this is the last of the Landel line.”
   “Aye, milord.”
   I try to see Braenall but cannot see above his thigh. I feel strangely disoriented and cannot move my head. Not wanting to see myself on the floor anymore, I begin to look around the room at my tools. How I long to touch them. I feel myself shifting again, then I am eye to eye with Braenall. But he is looking over my gaze.
   “The weight is good and the blade is true,” Braenall is saying. “The balance seems a bit off, though. It almost feels like the blade is fighting me.”
   With that I feel myself swept through the air, dancing a figure eight. And with it I must accept the impossible. That somehow I have not put only my talent into this sword, but myself as well.

This is an entry in the Life Fantastic Blog Hop.
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