Killing myself was going to be harder than I thought.

I looked at the knife in my hand, poised against the flesh of my arm. Six inches long, single edge, ivory hilt. The blade was razor sharp, the evidence running down my arm in warm rivulets from the shallow wound. I steeled myself, and the blade bit further. For several long moments I held the pose, before lifting the knife and hurling it across the room. It clanged against the wall and fell to the floor, but I ignored it. Again I had failed. The scratch on my arm would join the other scars that marked past attempts.

It wasn’t as though I was afraid of death. Far from it, I was intimately familiar with the afterlife, having discovered the ability to speak with the spirits more than two years ago. No, it was the pain that scared me, shamed as I was to admit it. It was the one final hurdle that stood between myself and the brief moments of complete freedom before eternal oblivion.

I slumped against the wall of the small hut I called home. Giving up on suicide attempts for the evening, I turned to the next best thing: the spirit world.

Ever since my parents had died – I say ‘died’ because it’s easier than saying ‘my father killed my mother and then himself’ – I found myself with the unusual ability to speak with the dead. Imagine coming home one evening and finding your father sobbing over the body of your mother, a bloody knife in his hand. Before you can process the scene, he takes the knife and thrusts it into his own neck, falling to the ground to join her.

Bad enough, right?

Now imagine that you can see their spirits floating above their bodies, misty, hazy representations of the most important people in your life. Within moments, the mist dissipates, leaving you wondering whether you were hallucinating.

It gets worse.

After the law enforcement has gone, after the bodies have been cleared away, after the shock has worn off, and you’ve convinced yourself that you were seeing things, after you’ve passed through all the stages of grief, you decide to do some research. And you discover you’re a Necromancer.

You flip through the pages of the book, and the words hit you like a brick. It says: “Necromancers can bring the dead back to life.” You could have saved them, if only you had known.

No wonder I’m so screwed up.

I tipped my head back against the wall, preparing to enter the realm of the dead. I had learned so much since my revelation. Most of all, I had learned to be careful. After all, Necromancers are Madmen, and subject to the same risks that all Madmen are. If we draw too much power from the Madness, we risk letting it take over our minds. No human mind can handle that, and it leaves the affected Madman mindless, a shell of a human being. They become a Ratan. A fate worse than death.

Carefully, I reached out and touched the vast source of power. It was a conscious act now, where it used to be instinctive. As always, it reached back. Once the connection was made, it was a struggle to keep the power from flooding the connection. But it was worth it, because now I could enter the spirit world.

I slowed my breathing, closed my eyes, and allowed my spirit to separate from my body. It only took a moment before the familiar feeling of weightlessness came over me. Opening my eyes again, I looked down at myself, sitting on the floor. My body, my anchor, the only thing holding me back from sailing through the skies without limits.

I sighed – in as much as spirits can sigh – and moved my spirit away from my body, intending to get as far as I could before my body called me back. Moving in this form as easy as thought. I merely had to think of moving in a direction, and I was. I passed through the walls of my hut as though they were made of fog,and indeed, they looked the part. Anything that was not in the realm of the dead was blurred and indistinct, difficult to make out. Structures were more substantial than living things, which were little more than a wisp of smoke.

For nearly ten minutes I roamed the spirit world. It was empty, which wasn’t unusual. There isn’t as much death around as you might think, and most spirits return to nature within minutes of death anyway, unless a Necromancer is around to bind them.

The emptiness, the silence, the solitude – I loved it. Nothing could bother me here.

A flash of light to the right caught my attention. As bright as it was, there could only be one source: someone else had entered the realm of the dead. I knew I didn’t have much time left, and curiosity briefly overcame my desire for solitude. Who had died? I had to know.

As quick as thought, I shot towards where the light had come from. Oddly, it led toward the graveyard. I soared high, and dropped down near the beacon of light.

It was a man, mid-thirties by the look of him, glowing clear and bright in this otherwise murky place. I stared at him for a few moments; he stared back. I was waiting for his spirit to disappear, to fade back into the essence of this place, feed back into the world to be born again.

However, I realized with a growing sense of dread, he was waiting for the same thing.

This was no recently deceased spirit. This man knew his way around the spirit world. The question was, was he free, like me, or bound to the Asylum?

His eyes narrowed. “So,” he said. It wasn’t so much speaking as it was a voice that resonated with my spirit. “You are a Necromancer, then, am I correct?”

I froze. If he was with the Asylum, he’d be with his Qui. If he was with his Qui, they’d have to come after me, bring me with them, to chain me to a Qui myself. I said nothing.

“I don’t recognize you from the Asylum,” he continued. “So I’ll assume you’re on your own.”

My mind screamed at me to flee, but my spirit stood rooted to the spot. This was worse than becoming a Ratan. This was a lifetime of being chained to another person. Worse, it was a merging of minds. No more freedom. Ever.