This head that I watched, whose jaw agonized moans out from its mummified flesh, belonged to a legislative slug who in life garnered fame for outlawing necromancy in Rehleia. Now he caused great mirth, pleading with us users of the black arts to only return him to death. Our gleeful responses made the dear thing weep dust for tears. While the world gazed upon his tomb, mistaking that he rested in peace, he would be suffering long after even Do-Gooder’s Row was one day complete.

My amusement having been temporarily fondled, I was brought back to the day’s ugliness when a jar of my great-uncle’s Ghorlaxium went to the warlock who sat beside me. Blossoming only one day per year, its purple petals were unparalleled in their ability to hold an apparition in thrall. An assortment of torture devices, books, scrolls, and various other clutter went to smiling new owners.

But the mob soon joined me in my outrage.

—

Rumors that Maecidion Ordrid was dying had caused great unease. When he died, or so went the most common thread of gossip from the bawling, typical, average, flinching Rehleian, demons would erupt from the earth and take my great-uncle “back”—a charitable act as they could ever have hoped for, except that the demons were reportedly going to grab all the innocent souls they could before scampering back to Hell.

Those less inclined to listen to the holy dribble of Chapwyn priests were more worried that our land—only a decade removed from total warfare—would re-splinter. The Metropolitan Ward—dumb faces in even dumber uniforms charged with policing Rehleia and its three cities—they wouldn’t be able to hold back this chaotic tide. Haggling farmers in the market tossed speculations of inevitable doom as hearty as heads of lettuce and copper coin. An Ordrid civil war was a top contender, how my aunts and cousins would send the world to cinders by pulling in various secular powers.

Perhaps more reasonably feared: if the powers who built roads instead of weaved magic became convinced that my house, the mighty House of Ordrid, had weakened to a critical point. Our annihilation had usually just been furtive Chapwyn church talk, or so I had always been told. But trying to eliminate our entire tribe—the same tribe that once rose legions of skeletons with the wiggle of an onyx-ringed finger—the people feared it would merely provoke us into summoning more unearthly allies.

No, a good sheep of the new land would prefer if incorrigibles would just die in jail, or maybe unclog their plumbing, and then vanish until needed again. Though I was from a lower branch, it boiled me that some referred to my kinsmen with the blissful condescension of one who’s never had a knife to their neck. But it gave me some reprieve too, knowing their wishful thinking was different than actually taking up arms against us, the most notorious lot in all Rehleia.