When it was over, she cracked open what passed for her mouth and did her best to scream. All that came out was a rattling whisper, like stale air escaping from a tomb.
The music was gone, but still his beloved voice echoed in her mind, crying out in desperation as she was ripped from his arms. She tried to open her eyes, but she had no eyes to open. She groped for any sort of clue, but her reaching hands clattered uselessly against the hard surface beneath her, feeling nothing. A rattling inhale brought no smells to her. Her teeth clacked dryly together, with neither tongue nor palate between her jaws.
She could hear.
For the first time in thousands of years, someone stood beside her and breathed.
They had not summoned her–not properly. If they had, then they could have conducted this interview without ripping her from all she loved. If they had, she would not be blind. She would not be solid. She would not be truly here.
She tapped her fingertips on the ground beneath her, and heard the familiar clack of bone against stone.
No. No, they couldn’t have. They mustn’t.
How dare they.
“What have you done.” Her voice scraped, dust-dry, between ancient teeth. It was not a question, for she did not need to ask. She could feel what they had done, her soul lashed roughly to a long-buried skeleton. She ran the tip of her phalanx down the length of her ulna, and felt it rattle across the sigil work scrimshawed into the the bone. She could not see or feel, but she could hear the gaping, uneven spaces between each symbol, carved into her arm with an unpracticed hand.
Oh, how it hurt. The ancient echoes of herself were still caught within the bones, withered by time until they barely remembered how the body was supposed to move, and now–now the whole of her self was crammed haphazardly into a space made for wisps of hints of ghosts of memory, and bound in place as if with ragged, uneven stitches.
No wonder she couldn’t see. It was a miracle she had any sense of herself at all.
“It’s not the best, I admit.” The voice was young, barely old enough not to crack. “For what it’s worth, it’s my first time.”
“And your last,” she hissed. “Put me back, and never repeat this folly.”
The novice sighed. “Of course I’m going to repeat it. How am I supposed to get better if I don’t practice?”
She tried to lunge at them, but without a sense of touch, she had no notion of where her body’s disparate parts were. The sound of clattering bones rang in the space where her ears had rotted away in ages past, mocking her helplessness.
“This hurts, you foolish child,” she snarled.
“I said it’s my first time, didn’t I? I’m sorry if it’s a little uncomfortable, but I had to prove I could actually do it. And I did! Also, for what it’s worth, I’m entirely self-taught. I figured out the sigil array all on my own, so considering that you’re here at all, you have control over your body, and you can hear and speak without ears or a tongue, I think I deserve at least a little credit.”
“Put me back.” She clawed at the bones of her arm, hoping to scratch out the sigils binding her to this pile of rocks.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you–aren’t you supposed to be an expert? Scratch out the wrong sigil and you’ll lose control of what’s left of your joints. Or your hearing.”
That might not be such a bad thing, she thought. Perhaps if she went limp to the floor, a useless blind-and-deaf pile of bones, they would give up and let her go home.
Or perhaps they would leave her like that.
She went still, taking stock of herself as much as she could. Without eyes, she could not see the sigil work binding her. Without touch, she could not guess at their shape and placement. But she could feel her soul, and through tentative movements and careful listening for the clack of this bone or that joint on the floor, she could guess. If she put herself in the mindset of a raw novice, self-taught and full of arrogance, she could think of how the fool version of her might have done this.
It did not speak of good things for her soul, if she stayed this way much longer.
She wished her husband were here, though the thought of her beloved torn asunder by this wrenching pain made her tremble. Still, he would know what to say. If he had come with her, with all his charm and gentleness, her captor would have wept and set them free at once.
“Very well,” she said, her voice a soft hiss. “You have called me and bound me, and here I am. What do you want?”
“To prove I’m on the right track,” they replied, brightening audibly at her cooperation. “I wish I’d done your eyes right so I could show you my notes, but maybe next time. There’s so little written on this kind of necromancy, but if–if I can just get it perfect…” Their voice trailed off.
Another lost and grieving soul, then. Had she a heart within her empty ribcage, it would have filled with sympathy. If only her dearest had come. He would know what to say far better than her. “Oh, foolish child, there must not be a next time,” she replied. “You were clever to get this far, but there is a reason you could not find a teacher. This way only pain and madness lie.” She bowed her head. “Please. Let me go, and do not try again. It will not heal you.”
A pause. Then–
“Heal me?”
“I know what loss is,” she said. “I have stood on both sides. You will find neither solace nor answers–”
“I think you might be misunderstanding a few things,” they interrupted. “I don’t need solace, and I’m already finding answers. It’s why I’m here. It’s why you’re here–so I can find the answers to questions no one else is brave enough to ask.”
She felt the twisting in the marrow-hollows of her bones. Her bone fingertips dug into the hard floor beneath her. “You did this–for what?” she hissed. “Curiosity? Pride?”
“Knowledge,” they replied.
“This isn’t worth knowing, you arrogant shit!”
“Really?” They huffed, frustrated with her. “You were the greatest necromancer in the world thousands of years ago–why are you of all people shackled by the same close-minded, pearl-clutching–” They broke off, sighing in irritation.
“You dragged me from my rest,” she spat. Her fingers twitched, scoring into the floor. “Shoved me into these dusty rocks. And you thought I would thank you for it? Help you?”
“Have you ever for once considered that the process is a mess because no one’s bothered to figure out how to do it better?” they asked.
“Who does it help?” she demanded. “How is the world made better by dragging the souls of the dead back into what’s left of their bodies?”
“Who wouldn’t benefit from knowing how to restore the dead to true life?” they retorted. “And it’s not just about helping, it’s about the discovery. There are so many mysteries in this world, and this is the one I’ve chosen to solve.”
The curse she spat at him was an old one, powerless from her dead, dry jaws. Her finger bones, previously sharp at the tips, blunted themselves against the floor.
“It’s like–have you heard of Robert J. White?” they asked. “No, you probably haven’t. See, there’s an experimental surgery–a full body transplant. Essentially, grafting a head onto another body. And Dr. White–brilliant neurosurgeon–he got close. Managed it with a few monkeys. They survived up to three days after the transplant. And you know what they did? Tore him down, called him a butcher. And he never got any further.”
Their voice sounded closer to her ear. “Can you imagine what we’d know by now, if it weren’t for a bunch of bleeding-hearts worrying more about a few dead animals, than knowledge that could save lives?”
She wished she had her eyes, if only so she could properly gape at him.
“You of all people should agree,” they pointed out. “If your husband had that kind of knowledge, he wouldn’t have failed.”
Her silence turned from disgust to shock in an instant. Then, she began to laugh. It rattled out of her, teetering between hoarse barks and voiceless wheezing.
“What happened?” they asked, heedless of her display. “Did he get squeamish at the last minute? Start worrying about the wrath of gods? Or was it more like in the story–he didn’t trust what he was doing and fucked it up being too cautious? If you help me, I’ll do what he couldn’t–I’ll restore you, and him, and you can have another shot at a life together.”
“You really are a fool,” she cackled. “By Hades, I’ve never met such an empty-headed cocksleeve.” That, at least, shut them up for a few blissful seconds. “You think he didn’t have the knowledge? Pah. He had my writings, and that was all the knowledge he needed. My writings and clever hands and a beautiful voice and so much love in his heart that he charmed the lord and lady beneath. He wasn’t squeamish when he walked the path of the dead and dying to find me. He didn’t need to fear the wrath of gods, because he was easy to love, and they could not help but love him as I did. And he did trust, with all his heart. He trusted me.”
She clawed her way upright, dragging her rattling bones across the floor. “He trusted me when I told him to look at me, to go home alone. To wait. And our reward has been thousands of years of bliss in the Fields, that you have dared to interrupt.”
Beneath her ill-fitting skeleton, she scored the last few lines into the drawing on the floor, previously hidden by her angry fidgeting. She could not see the sigils written in bone dust, but she could feel the array snap into place.
“What are you doing–”
Calling upon a psychopomp was the simplest thing in the world. So simple she could do it blind.
She expected the beating of wings that heralded Lord Thanatos’s arrival, but what she heard instead was music. A familiar melody, achingly beautiful, written for her–for the sole purpose of calling her home.
The fool swore. She lunged for them again, but a blind pile of bones so imperfectly lashed together could do little against the strength of the living. She thought her blunted finger-bones might have caught on fabric, but the almost-feeling was gone in the next moment. Running footsteps faded away. A door slammed somewhere above.
“Eurydike?” There it was: his beloved voice, as sweet as the lyre in his skillful hands. “Oh no–who did this to you?”
“Let me out,” she rasped.
In the next moment, she felt: hands in hers, fingers interlacing, pulling her free of the crude bindings. Her ancient bones clattered to the floor, and she rushed into her husband’s warmth and light and music. She could see now the dingy cellar around her, the sigils traced in bone dust beneath her skeleton, the steps up to the door where her captor must have fled. But she only had eyes for her husband’s ethereal smiling face. It was like in the story, she thought giddily. As soon as he laid eyes upon her, she was released back to the peace of death.
“Lord Hades granted me a boon,” he murmured, as their souls entwined once more. “I am a psychopomp with only one soul to lead. Are you alright?”
She looked back to her bones. “I will be if someone casts those things into the sea,” she replied. “They talked as if they might try again.”
“It will be done.” A bloom of light, the impression of a kiss. “By someone else. Let’s go home, my love.”
She did not take her eyes off of him until they had left the world of the living far behind.
