Chapter 2: The Language of the Dead
The hunger was a patient tutor.
In the week that followed my awakening, I learned its curriculum. It taught me to see the world not in color and light, but in layers of essence and decay. The orphanage, a place I had once seen as merely grim, revealed itself as a banquet of faint, residual energies. The lingering frustration in a worn floorboard where a child had stomped. The ghost of grief in a corner where a new arrival had wept silently. Tiny, flavorless morsels, but I consumed them all.
I practiced in stolen moments. A dead mouse behind the larder yielded a slightly richer pulse of cold energy, easing the persistent ache of malnutrition in my bones. A sparrow felled by a barn cat in the yard gave me a fleeting sense of expansion, as if the space inside my ribs had grown marginally larger, darker.
The power responded not to force, but to will—a focused intent, like directing a limb I'd never known I had. My shadow, Kaelan's shadow, was its conduit. It was no longer a passive absence of light. It was a pool, a gateway. I named it, in the silence of my mind, Shadow Extraction. It was a fundamental pull, drawing the residual essence of the recently deceased into my own burgeoning reservoir.
But the shadow could do more. One afternoon, tasked with fetching water from the deep well in the courtyard, I let my focus deepen. I poured a trickle of the cold power into my shadow, willing it to change. The pool of darkness at my feet quivered, then stretched. It elongated up the rough stone wall beside me like spilled ink climbing against gravity, forming a crude, hand-like shape. Shadow Manipulation. I willed the darkness-hand to curl around the well's bucket handle. It was insubstantial, a phantom limb. It could not lift. But for a single, thrilling second, I felt the grain of the wood, the chill of the iron band.
The handle slipped through the shadow-grasp. The bucket clattered back down the well shaft, the sound echoing like a failure.
"Clumsy oaf!"
A rock struck my shoulder, a sharp, petty pain. It was Garret, the oldest and cruelest of the orphans, flanked by his two usual sycophants. "Daydreaming again, Witch-Boy?" he sneered, using the old taunt born from Kaelan's strange, distant demeanor. "You'll be fetching that in the dark now."
In my second life, I would have measured the distance, set my stance, and broken his nose. Kaelan's body, however, was still weak, all ribs and sharp angles. Garret was seventeen, broad from stolen food and casual brutality.
Anger, hot and familiar, flared. But beneath it, the cold well of power stirred with a different impulse. Not rage. Not defense. Acquisition.
As Garret stepped closer, his own shadow, thrown long by the setting sun, merged with the deep gloom at the base of the well housing. I didn't think. I acted.
I pushed.
Not with my hands. With the shadow.
A tendril of concentrated darkness, unseen by any of them, lashed out from the pooled blackness at my feet. It didn't strike Garret. It struck his shadow, where it touched the ground near the well's low wall.
Shadow Bind.
The effect was instantaneous and bizarre. Garret's foot, which had been moving forward to shove me, froze mid-step. He didn't trip; it was as if the foot itself had become impossibly heavy, nailed to the ground by his own darkness. He yelped, more in surprise than pain, and flailed his arms for balance. His confused friends grabbed his arms, hauling him back.
"What in the hells?" Garret spat, staring at his boot as if it had betrayed him. He shook his foot, then stamped it. It was free. He looked at me, suspicion warring with bewilderment. The shadows around him were normal now. I had released the bind, the tiny expenditure of power a cool whisper leaving my veins.
"Slipped," I said, my voice flat, Kaelan's old monotone now a perfect mask for the icy calculation beneath.
He glared, but the strange moment had stolen his momentum. The supernatural had brushed against his mundane cruelty, and it left him unsettled. "Freak," he muttered, the insult lacking its usual conviction, and he and his pack slunk away.
I stood by the well, my heart not racing with adrenaline, but beating a slow, steady rhythm. A profound understanding settled over me. This was not knightly combat. This was not about crossing blades. This was asymmetrical warfare. This was influence, control, fear. I could target the unseen, the ignored—the very darkness they cast without thought.
That night, in the silent dormitory, I made a decision. The orphanage's scraps of death were sustenance, but they would not build an army. They would only keep the hunger quiet. I needed a true source. A place where death was not a mouse or a sparrow, but a presence.
I remembered from Kaelan's memories. The Potter's Field. A half-acre plot beyond the town's western wall, where the poor, the unidentified, and the friendless were buried in shallow, unmarked graves. A place of quiet, concentrated loss.
It called to the hunger like a beacon.
Two nights later, when the moon was a sliver behind thick clouds, I slipped from my cot. Moving with a silence that felt innate, a gift from the shadows that seemed to cling to me helpfully, I passed the sleeping forms and slipped out a loose window in the storage cellar.
Valen's streets at night were empty and thick with darkness. I moved through them not as a boy, but as a fragment of the night itself. My shadow, stretched by the infrequent lantern light, felt like a loyal hound at my heels. The town wall was low here, crumbling. I scaled it with a ease that surprised me, the cold energy within lending strength to Kaelan's thin limbs.
The Potter's Field lay under a vast, open sky, a sea of rough mounds and leaning, nameless markers. The air was cold and still, heavy with a silence that was more than absence of sound. It was the silence of finished stories.
The hunger within me awoke fully, not as a gnaw, but as a deep, resonant pull.
I walked to the center of the field and knelt on the cold earth. I placed my palms flat on the soil. Closing my eyes, I reached down, not with my hands, but with my essence. I pushed my awareness through the shadow that pooled around me, into the earth, seeking the echoes below.
And I heard them.
Not voices. Not ghosts. But impressions. The final emotions, the frozen sparks of will, the residual pain or peace of those who lay here. A kaleidoscope of silent endings: a beggar's resignation, a soldier's forgotten pride, a mother's enduring sorrow.
This was not about extracting tiny motes. This was about connection. About hearing the chorus of the dead.
I focused on one impression—a sharp, jagged one. A pain cut short. A footpad, perhaps, killed in a alley brawl, buried here with the coins still on him. His echo was anger and sudden, shocking cold.
I called to it. Not with my voice, but with the authority the Monarch's power had instilled in me. A command, whispered on the channel of shadow.
Rise.
The earth before me trembled. A hand, skeletal and clad in the tattered remnants of cloth and leather, burst from the soil. Dirt rained down as the figure hauled itself free. It was a human skeleton, but its empty eye sockets glowed with two pinpricks of cold, violet light—the color of the power that animated it. It stood, unsteady, awaiting a command.
My first soldier. A Skeleton Warrior.
The cost was immediate. A significant portion of my inner reservoir drained, leaving a hollow, cold fatigue. Maintaining its existence was a constant, gentle siphon. But the feeling… the feeling was triumph. It was creation from ending. It was sovereignty.
I looked at the silent, loyal undead thing, then at the dozens of mounds around me. A slow, cold fire kindled in my chest, reflected in the Skeleton's violet gaze.
The orphanage had been a cradle. This field was a recruiting ground.
I had learned to speak the language of the dead. Now, it was time to build a vocabulary.