By Adan Jerreat-Poole
1
The first ring came to me in the night, carried by servants of the Undead King, iron masks concealing their faces.
The bird was dying when I found it. When I stroked its soft head, I felt its life—a fierce little thing, bright as a candle flame. I was young and didn’t understand the metaphysical properties of our world, but slowing the heartbeat with a single word, Rest, and releasing the spirit felt right, even kind.
I watched the ghostly wings take flight as the spirit cleaved from the body. I hoped I had helped. I gave the bird a proper funeral, with salt crystals and prayers and flecks of quartz arranged in the symbol of a gibbous moon.
Later, they slid the thin, gold band over my thumb and wrapped a silver chain around my throat. They told me if I earned the six rings of death, I would reach the status of Necromancer—our nation’s sacred priests, the knights of the Undead King. Six rites. Six weights. Six choices. Mercy. Sacrifice. Duty. Domination. Justice. Obedience.
My parents cried, and I didn’t know if the tears were from relief or fear. I didn’t understand what the masks said to me, or where we were going, but I liked the way the gold dripped from their bodies like honey.
I liked having a full stomach and I loved excelling at my studies, praised with a nod or head pat or rare smile. I revelled in the decaying floral scent of the dead, their spirits bathing me in a rich perfume. I wasn’t homesick, and I buried my guilt about leaving my family as easily as I buried the bodies of the dead.
All apprentices began as grave diggers; the King wanted us to dirty our hands. Even with soil under my fingernails, I’d never felt cleaner. I was a lost child in a fairytale, enthralled by a skeleton prince. He beckoned with a finger that gleamed like alabaster and titanium, and I followed him into the dark.
I would stop a thousand hearts for him.
2
The second ring I crafted with my own hands. The process left scars, a reminder that power had a cost, and to serve the King was to welcome pain.
The teachers pitted us against each other, forcing us to battle with spirits, magic, and teeth. The girl I killed was just like me, pulled from the slums and draped in silver. When I had first come to the capitol, she helped me study, taught me how to shovel dirt without splitting my nails, and how to avoid choking on corpse dust.
In the end, I was better than her, or perhaps just more desperate. I cried when it was over. The teachers punished me for that.
The ring glittered on my index finger as if my skin were turning gold. I told myself that I was an ornamented statue, a monument to the King’s will and the eternal forces of life and death.
Statues didn’t bleed. Statues didn’t feel.
3
The third ring was my mother’s. I hadn’t seen her in years, but when she was dying, she asked for me. My master allowed me to go. He thought it would help me to shed my former life like a snake moulting its skin.
She was feverish, but her hands gripped mine with the shreds of strength she’d scavenged alongside scraps of food and fabric. She was always good at saving, at making something out of nothing.
She felt light and fragile—a bird with hollow bones.
Rest.
Her ring perfectly nestled in the indent below my knucklebone. Even though the metalworkers had smoothed away the inscription—Love beyond reason—I could still feel the words tattooed onto my soul.
4
The fourth ring pinched. I’d made it too tight.
I’d known he was part of the rebels when I kissed him and tasted gunpowder, but I kept my mouth shut, like the corpses sewn into silence so they wouldn’t reveal the King’s secrets. I had spent many nights stitching their decaying lips closed, wrestling with angry spirits that abhorred being trapped in the catacombs.
The court made a public spectacle of it. Me, in the gold mask of the necromantic order, him, stained in treasonous red, standing before a hungry congregation. I tore the soul from his body while he still breathed, and when the ghost emerged, it looked at me. We stared at each other for a long moment, and he murmured—Choose. I bound the ghost to his corpse with iron chains crusted with salt.
I didn’t cry this time.
I melted down one of his funerary rings and mixed it with copper to give it a bloody hue. The ring slid over the knucklebone of the finger the commoners used for their wedding rings, and I felt like I had married him in death. When it clacked against my mother’s ring, I wondered if she would have liked him. When he spoke to the dead, they crossed over willingly, soothed by his voice.
When he was gone, I forgot how to speak softly.
5
The fifth ring belonged to my master. The battle raged, vicious and bloody, but he was no match for me. He was old by then, frail, his command of the spirits fading. I took his place, ascending the obsidian steps of the Steel Cathedral. When I killed him, I saw the resignation in his eyes. We both knew I would have to step over his corpse to make my way to the King. The red band clinked against my mother’s silver as I studied his brutalized soul.
A smile knifed across my face.
I was so close now.
6
The last ring I shaped from the Undead King’s bones. I carved a single word into the yellowed arc of his spine: Restless. The necromantic order bowed before me, their hands trembling.
They were right to be afraid.
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