Jess lanai

‘Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.’

Thomas Pynchon

Norman the necromancer is the last fiction I wrote. I free wrote it in 2024 in my unicorn notebook that I got in Paris at the Sainte Chapelle gift shop.

Then I typed my hand written words into a word document. I got to about forty thousand words of a very rough and messy draft.

It has most of the same mistakes I made in Simon’s theory. It started on the path of flying off into a lot tangents that just eventually dissolve any sense of plot or story.

I loved Norman the Necromancer and I loved writing it but I had developed a fear of my writing patterns. That I was stuck in an endless loop that would never find a straight line.

So I put Norman away and turned my focus into study and into nonfiction.

I’m not sure I’ve escaped my loop. Maybe I can’t escape my loop but I at the very least do feel a bit more comfortable and a wee bit more confident in sharing my fiction.

Finishing my fiction is however more the issue.

But I’m currently on summer vacation. So no matter what loop I’m trapped in I’m going to pause any escape attempts and instead follow my whims. Even if they go in a circle.

And I feel like returning to Norman. That’s where my efforts will go this summer. Into Norman the Necromancer.

In these modern days, hunting Necromancers has become an obscure field that can provide little more than a supplemental income. But some hundred or so years ago when I was a lad, hunting necromancers could provide the entirety of one’s life.

It was a good life. A life with purpose and more comforts than most of that time could even hope to experience. Therefore it was a very competitive field. 

Many attempted to be accepted into the church for training and it was few of us that succeeded. I came across Norman very shortly into my acceptance. I was not even yet ten years old and Norman himself was no more than a particularly ancient looking beggar haunting the cobbled alleys that connected the church to the town’s center. It wasn’t the church that kept Norman hanging around, it was the other wall of the alley. 

The baker’s shop.

He’d lurch out from a dark corner and cling to the robes of women or children exiting the bakery to whimper for food. 

Most of them beat him upside the head. But three or so out of ten times they relinquished a coin or a bit of the bread only to distract his long boney hands so they could disentangle their garments.

As it did to all beggars, the church offered Norman work in exchange for bread. Norman was always armed with an abundance of excuses. He blamed the crook in his back, the limp in his right leg and sometimes the limp in his left. 

It was difficult to tell how many ailments Norman managed to endure and how many ailments he was only feigning to gain sympathy. But sympathy was in short supply in that town. We had few beggars for it was very few that could hope to sustain themselves. 

People’s nerves were occupied and worn, they had too little left over to concern themselves with Norman and he very well could have become another beggar that died in the streets without a soul noticing. 

But it wasn’t Norman’s begging that earned him coin and bread. 

It was his peculiar way of charming people. 

Norman was a man of good misfortune. 

Terrible things always seemed to happen to him at the most opportune times. I for one once saw him slip on a loose stone and fall into a mound of snow that kept him perfectly hidden right as law enforcement rounded the corner. 

The baker’s daughter claimed she saw him catch a rock to the side of the head that knocked him out of the path of loose cart. 

Nearly everyone that had come across Norman had such a story of him, which stories were true and which were entirely invented could not be told apart. But that old beggar made a folklore of himself and none could say if he was a swift and clever act or only so dumb and clumsy even luck itself pitied him. 

No one noticed when Norman disappeared but the stories of him stayed in circulation. He became more of a fictional character than a real person. No one wondered where he went, where he’d come from or even if he’d really existed at all.  

And most didn’t connect him as that infamous beggar when he came back. 

I did. I recognized Norman straight away. I noticed him before I even saw him. Norman had a thick presence, a kind of prickling on the back of the neck. Or a strange heaviness to the air like it tapped you on the shoulder and told you to look in his direction. 

It was an evil that hung around Norman. An ever brewing catastrophe. 

I noticed the change in him straight away. 

The hunch in his old back had straightened itself out. The deep indents in his face from age looked less pitiable, they looked more like marks of experience and even wisdom. That grey tinge to his skin didn’t any longer give the impression of just poor nourishment, it gave the impression of a dabbling in the dark arts. 

Like the grey skin of the necromancers that got their complexion from diving too deep into the underworld. 

When Norman returned to that town fifteen years later I’d established myself as one of the more talented Necromancer hunters. 

There were many more famous than I, say the great Wall Walker, whom is rumored to have had the ability to enter the underworld. The great Shadow Breaker that rumors say also purchased the black and gold coins as I did. 

But long before I went down such a desperate route as purchasing the accursed coins (I may go into that later. It’s a gruesome story) I was still very accomplished. I’d seen a good portion of the world and a great deal of gold had been paid to the church for my services. I had no famed stories written about me and my name wouldn’t be recognized in history but I did excel at my job. 

All this to say that I had a good sense for Necromancers. So when Norman returned, I recognized him as a Necromancer straight away.

More than that, I recognized straight away, the height of his power. I knew he was to take over everything in the blink of an eye. That’s how I came to escape the fate of that town. 

I knew the practices for becoming a Necromancer very well. Hunting and destroying necromancers was my profession and a profession I rather enjoyed.

The study of how a Necromancer becomes a Necromancer is something only those that hunt Necromancers dive deeply into, but I think most would find it a fascinating subject and I think many might even read it at their leisure for entertainment alone. 

What type of human being aspires to be a Necromancer? These are the questions my peers in the church did not ask. When I posed questions like this in conversation, they said things like, evil people. Soulless people. Disgusting people or even lazy people. 

I didn’t think that way. I acknowledged the many practical reasons one might aspire to be a necromancer. 

One such practical reason was the rotting of the soul. Rotting souls were much less desirable to the demons out in the world, which obviously was an alluring benefit.  

Another very practical reason was the churches themselves. Have you ever seen a Necromancy church? They’re beautifully built, as luxurious as the Holy churches and like the Holy Churches, they need not fear being nearer the forests. 

Another practical reason for wanting to be a Necromancer was simple, for many there was few other options. For many born in the warmer climates their options were terrible. 

One could join the armies and face the demon hordes every summer. It took a very brave and rare soul to entertain that. The demons faced in the warm climates were often not even uncomplicated enough to kill people. They did all sorts of things with people but the last thing they wanted to do was kill them. 

One could join the summer farming projects. Slightly more desirable than joining the armies. Goblins loved to eat farmers but being eaten was much more desirable to what the other Demons wanted to do. 

One could join the Holy church. Much more brutal than the necromancy church. Not many children lived through the holy church and the ones that did weren’t very thrilled about it. 

The more practical children that valued long quiet lives wanted to be Necromancers. It’s a good business. Necromancy and the hunting of Necromancers. 

The first rumor I must put to rest, because it greatly irked me to see it spread around, was the speculation that Norman became a Necromancer in his old age. That isn’t possible. Even for the anomaly that is Norman. No human is capable of learning Necromancy in their old age. 

It is a practice that takes too much time to learn and too much flexibility of the mind. All Necromancers must start learning when they are children. This was true for Norman as well, he began his training at the typical age of eight years old.  He simply failed. 

And rather than accepting the fate imposed by the necromancy churches for failure, Norman fled. I learned this through the many I interviewed on my hunt into Norman’s past. 

The first person I interviewed on Norman was his first teacher. The great Master Edtwitch. 

I found Edtwitch in an alarming state.  Norman had left him in the ruins of his own church with his soul trapped in his corpse. Which at the time, I’d never seen before.

I don’t recommend ever letting your own eyes view a corpse with the soul trapped inside. But if you’re curious what it looks like, I’d say it resembles a mouse that’s been swallowed by a snake and is still trying to move inside the snake’s body. 

Or perhaps more like a mouse that’s trapped inside a dead snake. A dead snake that’s taken some time to rot. And, where you honestly can’t tell if the mouse is attempting to escape the snake corpse or doing its best to stay inside.

Master Edtwitch’s soul was very eager to give the interview.

I merely mentioned my mission to defeat Norman and the corpse twitched its rotting hand and kicked its melting leg, tried its best to talk through its bloated face, it struggled so hard to find operation of the body again when it had obviously already given up long ago. 

I’d arrived in the early morning and by the time I left the sun was setting on the slushy grounds of a fast approaching spring. Dangerous time to be out, I hunted Necromancers, I was not adept with the wild demons. But I was determined to find another string to follow into Norman’s past and Master Edtwitch’s soul was willing to give it to me. 

He did manage some words before I released him. Words that led me, through many complications that I will explain later, to Master Elma. A woman that was able to paint a much better picture of Norman’s childhood. 

My fascination with Norman at the time was like everyone’s. Norman turned the world upside down and inside out. Every law that had governed the functioning of the world for centuries Norman broke and rewrote.

But Norman’s story does not start with Norman. The laws he broke were already breaking. They’d been breaking over many eons of time, of all that was building and brewing and bubbling beneath these laws. 

The collective consequences accruing, Norman just happened to have that stroke of luck to be the one to trigger it all. 

That is what I hope to prove to you.