Chapter 1: The Last Day of Winter
The boy in the corner bed was counting his breaths again.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The hospice of Saint Willow stood on the edge of the world—or so it felt to the seventeen souls housed within its crumbling walls. It sat atop a windswept hill in the kingdom of Valdris, surrounded by fields that had gone fallow years ago and forests that whispered secrets no one lived long enough to understand. The building itself was ancient, its stones softened by centuries of rain, its roof patched and re-patched until it resembled a quilt more than a shelter.
Inside, the air smelled of herbs and sickness and the particular sweetness that preceded death.
Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.
His name was Finn, and he had been counting his breaths for three months now. Not because he feared stopping—he'd made peace with that possibility before winter arrived—but because the act of counting gave him something to do. Something to anchor himself to when the pain in his chest spread like cracks in ice and the world threatened to dissolve into grey static.
Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.
"Finn."
The voice came from his left. He turned his head—slowly, because everything required slowness now—and found Sister Margarete standing beside his cot. She was the youngest of the hospice's three caretakers, barely twenty-five, with straw-colored hair pulled back so tight it stretched her eyes into permanent surprise. She held a clay bowl steaming with something that smelled like boiled roots and desperation.
"Soup," she said, though they both knew it wasn't. "You need to eat."
Finn smiled at her. He smiled often, even when his body screamed, because Sister Margarete had kind eyes and she tried so hard to pretend he wasn't dying. The other sisters had stopped pretending months ago. They changed his bedding, adjusted his pillows, murmured prayers over his still form—but they didn't offer him soup anymore. They knew.
But Margarete still brought soup every evening at dusk, and Finn always smiled and drank every drop, because refusing would break something in her, and he had no right to break anything else.
"Thank you," he said, pushing himself up on one elbow. The movement sent fire through his ribs, and he counted through it—thirty-four, thirty-five—until the worst passed.
Margarete pretended not to notice. She arranged his thin blanket, plumped his pillow, adjusted the small wooden table beside his cot until it sat at exactly the right angle. These small rituals of care filled the spaces where hope used to live.
"The fever's down today," she observed, pressing a cool hand to his forehead. "That's good."
Finn nodded, though they both knew the fever would return. It always returned, like the tide, like winter, like the cough that rattled his chest each morning and left flecks of red on his handkerchief.
Forty-two. Forty-three.
"Tell me about the village," he said, because Margarete liked to talk and Finn liked to listen, and between the two of them they could almost pretend this was a normal conversation between normal people in a normal place.
She settled onto the three-legged stool beside his cot, her soup forgotten on the table. "Old Man Hemlock's goat gave birth to twins. One's black with white spots. He's calling it Stormcloud." She smiled. "He brought cheese yesterday. Said it was for you."
Finn blinked. "For me?"
"Mm. Said you reminded him of his grandson. The one who died in the plague year." She said it without flinching—death was not a stranger here, and they had long ago stopped treating it like one. "He said you had the same eyes. Kind eyes. Eyes that listen."
Something warm flickered in Finn's chest that had nothing to do with fever. He'd never met Old Man Hemlock. He'd never seen the man's goat or tasted his cheese. But somewhere in the village below this hill, an old man had thought of him—had made cheese and said this is for the boy with the kind eyes—and that meant something.
That meant everything.
"I'd like to thank him," Finn said. "When I'm better."
The lie hung between them, gentle and familiar as an old blanket. Margarete's smile didn't waver, but her eyes went soft in a way that made Finn look away.
"When you're better," she agreed.
---
Night fell slowly at Saint Willow's.
The other patients—sixteen souls in various stages of departure—sank into their separate darknesses. Old Marta, who had outlived three husbands and seven children, hummed tunelessly in the corner bed. Young Thomas, whose lungs had filled with water after a winter fever, coughed in rhythm with the wind. The dying woman whose name Finn had never learned—she'd arrived unconscious and never woken—breathed in shallow gasps that Sister Agnes had declared "any day now" for two weeks running.
Finn lay awake, counting.
One hundred twelve. One hundred thirteen.
His body hurt in ways he'd stopped trying to catalog. The sharp pain in his ribs. The dull ache in his joints. The burning in his chest when he breathed too deep. The cold that lived in his fingers and toes regardless of how many blankets Margarete piled on him. He'd been dying for so long that dying felt less like an event and more like a slow, endless process—a river he'd fallen into years ago that had been carrying him toward a waterfall ever since.
He couldn't remember when he'd stopped being afraid.
Maybe it was the night young Thomas arrived, blue-lipped and gasping, and Finn had held his hand while Sister Margarete ran for the physician. Thomas had survived that night—was still surviving, his cough a counterpoint to Finn's own—and in the moment of holding that small, terrified hand, Finn had realized something.
Fear was a luxury for people who had something to lose.
He had nothing. No family—his mother had died bringing him into the world, and his father had followed five years later when a wagon wheel broke and crushed him against a wall. No home—the hospice had been his only constant for as long as he could remember. No future—the physicians who visited twice a year always left with the same pitying expressions and the same whispered word: consumption.
The disease was eating him from inside. Slowly, inexorably, like rust claiming iron.
Two hundred eight. Two hundred nine.
The wind picked up outside, rattling the shutters and sending drafts across the ward. Finn pulled his blanket tighter and thought about Old Man Hemlock's cheese. He thought about the goat named Stormcloud. He thought about kindness—how strange it was, how precious, how it appeared in the most unexpected places like flowers blooming through snow.
He was thinking about kindness when the door opened.
---
The man who entered was not real.
That was Finn's first thought, his only thought, as the figure stepped through the doorway and into the ward. He was not real because real men did not move like that—silent as smoke, fluid as water.He was not real because real men did not wear robes of deepest midnight, robes that seemed to absorb the candlelight rather than reflect it, robes that left darkness pooling in their folds like liquid shadow.
He was not real because real men did not glow with the faint blue light of dying stars.
The man walked past Old Marta's bed. Marta didn't stir. He walked past young Thomas's bed. Thomas's coughing continued uninterrupted. He walked past the dying woman whose name Finn didn't know, and her shallow gasps didn't change.
No one else saw him.
No one else could see him.
Finn knew this with the same certainty he knew his own name. The man was here for him—only for him—and the rest of the ward existed in a different layer of reality, one where this visitor simply did not appear.
The man stopped at the foot of Finn's cot.
He was ancient. Not old in the way of weathered faces and white hair, but ancient in the way of mountains and oceans and things that had existed since before memory began. His face was young—startlingly young, smooth as marble, with high cheekbones and full lips and eyes the color of rusted iron. But something behind those eyes, something deep, spoke of centuries upon centuries upon centuries.
His robes shifted in a wind that didn't exist, and Finn caught glimpses of what lay beneath: not flesh, but void—darkness so complete it seemed to drink the light around it.
"You're dying," the man said.
His voice was quiet, almost gentle, and it resonated somewhere in Finn's chest that had nothing to do with his ears.
Finn stared at him for a long moment. Then, because he had spent sixteen years learning to accept the unacceptable, he said: "Yes."
The man's lips curved slightly—not quite a smile, but the memory of one. "You don't ask who I am."
"You're not real," Finn said. "Or you're real in a way that doesn't matter. Either way, asking feels pointless."
"Pointless." The man savored the word. "An interesting perspective. Most people, when faced with the impossible, fill the silence with questions. They demand explanations. They seek to understand."
"I stopped seeking to understand things a long time ago." Finn shifted on his cot, wincing as pain flared through his ribs. "Understanding doesn't change anything. It doesn't stop the pain. It doesn't bring back the dead. It doesn't make the coughing stop at night when you're alone and afraid and the darkness feels like it's swallowing you whole."
The man's rust-colored eyes flickered—something that might have been surprise, or recognition, or something else entirely.
"You're angry," he observed.
"I'm tired." Finn met those ancient eyes without flinching. "There's a difference."
Silence stretched between them. Outside, the wind howled. Inside, sixteen dying souls breathed in their separate rhythms, oblivious to the presence in their midst.
The man reached into his robes and withdrew something small and dark—a stone, perhaps, or a piece of obsidian, shaped roughly like a human heart. It pulsed with the same faint blue light that edged his form.
"My name," he said, "is Ash. I am the last necromancer."
Finn blinked.
"I have lived for three thousand years," Ash continued. "I have seen empires rise and fall. I have spoken with gods and demons and things that exist in the spaces between. I have raised armies from graveyards and brought kings back from the dead to rule their kingdoms for centuries beyond their natural span." He paused. "And I am dying."
The word hung in the air between them.
"I am dying," Ash repeated, "and I have no heir. No student. No one to carry what I know into the darkness that follows." His grip tightened on the black heart-stone. "I have searched for three hundred years for someone worthy. Someone with the right heart. Someone who understands what it means to face death and not look away."
His rust-colored eyes locked onto Finn's.
"I found you."
Finn's breath caught—two hundred ninety-three, two hundred ninety-four—and for a moment the pain in his chest was eclipsed by something else. Something that felt almost like hope.
"You're offering to teach me," he whispered. "To make me a necromancer."
"I'm offering you a choice." Ash held up the black heart-stone. "This contains the last of my power. If you accept it, you will become my heir. You will inherit my knowledge, my sanctuary, my enemies, and my curse. You will be hunted by those who fear what we are. You will walk through the world marked by death, and most who see you will flinch away."
"And in exchange?"
Ash's lips curved again—this time into something that might, on a different face, have been called a smile. "In exchange, you will not die in this bed, in this hospice, forgotten by everyone except a kind young woman who brings you soup she knows you won't eat."
Finn's chest tightened. "How do you know about the soup?"
"I know many things." Ash leaned closer, and Finn caught a whiff of something ancient—dust and incense and the faint, sweet smell of flowers left too long in a crypt. "I know you have three months left, at most. I know the cough will worsen, and the fever will climb, and one night you will simply stop breathing while Sister Margarete sleeps in the next room, unaware that her favorite patient has slipped away."
Finn's hands clenched in the blanket.
"I know," Ash continued, "that you are kind. That you smile when you're in pain because you don't want to worry others. That you listen to old men talk about their goats and call it enough. That you've spent sixteen years dying and never once thought to curse the world for it."
"How do you know all this?"
"Because I've been watching." Ash straightened, and for a moment the blue light around him flared bright enough to cast shadows. "For three months, I've watched. I've seen you at your worst and your weakest. I've heard you cry out in the night when you thought no one was listening. I've seen you hold young Thomas's hand when the coughing fits threatened to drown him. I've seen you give your bread to Old Marta when she forgot to eat hers."
His voice softened.
"I've seen your kindness, Finn. It's the only thing in this world that still makes me believe it might be worth saving."
Finn's eyes burned. He blinked rapidly, refusing to let the moisture fall, refusing to show weakness in front of this impossible being who had somehow seen the deepest parts of him.
"You said there's a curse," he managed. "What curse?"
Ash's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes went darker. "Necromancy draws from the caster's life force. Every spell you cast will shorten your existence. The more powerful the magic, the greater the cost. You will watch years drain from your body with each soul you raise, each bargain you strike with death."
"So I'll die faster."
"Perhaps." Ash tilted his head. "Or perhaps you'll live long enough to find ways to extend your time. Lichdom. Soul-binding. Theft from the living. There are paths—dark paths—that necromancers have walked since the beginning. Some lead to immortality. Some lead to damnation. Most lead to both."
Finn was quiet for a long moment.
Then: "Why me?"
Ash's rust-colored eyes held his. "Because you're dying anyway. Because you have nothing to lose. Because you're kind, and kindness in a necromancer is rarer than dragon's teeth and twice as precious." He held out the black heart-stone. "Because I've waited three thousand years for someone like you, and I have three days left before my own life ends."
Three days.
Finn looked at the stone. It pulsed gently, rhythmically, like a second heart.
He thought about Old Man Hemlock's cheese, uneaten in the kitchen. He thought about Sister Margarete's soup, cooling on the table. He thought about young Thomas's cough and Old Marta's humming and the dying woman who would never wake.
He thought about three months of slow, agonizing decline, ending in a bed in a hospice on a hill, forgotten by everyone except one kind young woman who would grieve and move on.
Then he reached out and took the stone.
---
The moment his fingers closed around it, the world ended.
That was the only way Finn could describe it later, in the rare moments when he tried to put words to what happened. The world ended—not with a bang or a whimper, but with a folding, as if reality itself had decided to turn inside out.
The hospice vanished. The cot vanished. The sixteen dying souls vanished. Even Ash vanished, though Finn could still feel his presence somewhere nearby, watching, waiting.
Finn floated in darkness.
Not the darkness of night, which held hidden shapes and distant stars. Not the darkness of closed eyes, which flickered with afterimages and phantom light. This was darkness absolute—darkness so complete it felt solid, pressing against him from all sides, holding him suspended in nothing.
And then the voices began.
Finn.
A woman's voice, ancient and exhausted, echoing from everywhere and nowhere.
Finn, can you hear me?
He tried to speak, but he had no mouth. Tried to move, but he had no body. He was consciousness without form, floating in an ocean of void, and the voice was the only thing that kept him from dissolving entirely.
My name is Morwen, the voice said. You know me by another name. The Final Witness. The Last Face. The one they call Death.
Finn's consciousness—if it could be called that—screamed.
Hush. I'm not here to claim you. I'm here because you've touched something that belongs to me. The Covenant. The power my children stole when they forgot their place.
Images flashed through the void: ancient beings, human-shaped but vast, tearing something from a goddess who wept stars. A fragment of divinity, stolen and shaped into a tool. Generations of necromancers wielding power they never truly understood.
The Covenant chose you, Morwen continued. Not Ash. The Covenant itself. It felt your kindness and reached for you like a flower reaching for sun.
Finn found his voice—or something like it. I don't understand.
You will. In time. The Covenant will teach you, test you, break you and remake you. It will show you wonders and horrors beyond imagining. It will give you power beyond your wildest dreams—and take everything in return.
A pause. A sigh that echoed through eternity.
But you already know about taking, don't you, Finn? You've had everything taken your whole life. Your parents. Your health. Your future. You're an expert in loss.
Something that might have been approval colored the voice.
Perhaps that's why it chose you. Those who have nothing fear nothing. And those who fear nothing can change everything.
The darkness began to lighten—not to brightness, but to a deep, velvety grey shot through with threads of silver.
One last thing, little one. Ash doesn't know the whole truth. He thinks he chose you. He thinks the Covenant is his to give. But the Covenant has been waiting for you for two thousand years, ever since the first time you died.
The first time? Finn's consciousness reeled.
You'll remember. When you're ready. When you need to. For now, sleep. Let the Covenant settle into your bones. Let it become part of you.
And Finn?
Welcome home.
---
Finn opened his eyes.
He was in the hospice. In his cot. The same thin blanket covered him, the same pillow supported his head, the same candle flickered on the table where Sister Margarete had left her forgotten soup.
But everything was different.
He could feel things now—things he'd never felt before. The life force of the candle flame, bright and brief, burning toward extinction. The slower, deeper pulse of the wooden cot, once a tree, still dreaming of sunlight. The tangled threads of the sixteen dying souls around him, their life forces flickering like candles in a storm.
And beneath all of it, woven through everything like veins through marble, the vast, slow pulse of death itself—patient, waiting, eternal.
Ash stood at the foot of the cot, watching him. The blue light around him had faded to almost nothing, and for the first time Finn could see how truly ancient he was—how thin, how worn, how close to final dissolution.
"It's done," Ash said. His voice was barely a whisper. "The Covenant has accepted you. You are my heir."
Finn sat up—and for the first time in months, the movement didn't send fire through his ribs. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see the same thin, pale fingers that had wasted away over winter. They were still thin. Still pale. But something moved beneath the skin now, something that glittered faintly silver when the candlelight caught it.
"The disease," he breathed. "Is it—"
"Still there." Ash's lips curved in that almost-smile. "The Covenant doesn't heal. It merely... postpones. You'll still feel the pain, still cough blood, still grow weaker with time. But you'll have longer. Months instead of weeks. Years instead of months. And if you're clever, if you're ruthless, if you're willing to pay the price—decades."
Decades.
The word was so vast, so impossible, that Finn couldn't fit it inside his head. He'd spent sixteen years measuring his life in days, in hours, in breaths counted one by one. Decades was a foreign country, a language he didn't speak, a future he'd never allowed himself to imagine.
"There's one more thing," Ash said. He reached into his robes—slower now, his movements heavy with exhaustion—and withdrew a small leather-bound book. "My journal. Three thousand years of research, discovery, failure, and regret. It will teach you what I cannot."
He held it out. Finn took it, feeling the weight of centuries in his hands.
"And this." Ash's fingers brushed against Finn's forehead, cold as grave dirt. An image flashed through Finn's mind: a door, old and weathered, half-hidden in the roots of a massive oak in a cemetery he'd never seen. "My sanctuary. Hidden from the world, accessible only to those who carry the Covenant. Go there when you're ready. Everything I have is yours."
Ash's form was flickering now, the edges growing transparent.
"Master." Finn reached for him, but his hand passed through empty air. "What do I do? How do I—"
"You survive." Ash's voice was barely audible, a whisper on the edge of hearing. "You learn. You grow. You become something the world has never seen—a necromancer with a kind heart." His rust-colored eyes, the last solid thing about him, held Finn's gaze. "And when the darkness comes—and it will come—you remember that kindness is not weakness. It's the only thing that makes power worth having."
He smiled—a real smile, warm and sad and infinitely tired.
"Goodbye, Finn. Make me proud."
And then he was gone, leaving nothing behind but a faint scent of incense and dust and flowers left too long in a crypt.
---
Finn sat in his cot, holding the journal, feeling the Covenant pulse beneath his skin like a second heartbeat.
Around him, the hospice slept. Old Marta hummed in her dreams. Young Thomas coughed and fell silent. The dying woman breathed her shallow breaths.
And Finn, for the first time in sixteen years, allowed himself to imagine a future.
It would be hard. It would be dangerous. He would be hunted, hated, feared. He would face darkness beyond anything he'd ever known, and the power thrumming through his veins would demand prices he couldn't yet imagine paying.
But he would live.
He would live, and he would learn, and he would become something new—something the world had never seen.
A necromancer with a kind heart.
Finn looked down at his hands, at the faint silver shimmer beneath his skin, and smiled.
"Thank you," he whispered to the empty air. "I won't forget."
Somewhere—in the spaces between life and death, in the darkness where gods and mortals rarely met—Morwen, the Final Witness, smiled.
And the story began.
---
END OF CHAPTER 1