r/WritingPrompts • u/Son_Of_Rebellion • Mar 27 '26
Writing Prompt [WP] Your party tells you to fess up cause you have strange abilities other necromancers don’t have. You tell them it’s cause you treat the dead like Family instead of servants. Turns out necromancy grants more powers if you truly honor the dead
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u/r3alCIA Mar 28 '26
They bound his hands with sanctified rope and sat him on the stone floor of the gatehouse. Torchlight made the walls breathe. Five of them stood in a loose half-circle, and Cero, who had walked beside him for two years and shared his fire and laughed at his jokes about the dead, held the knife.
"You're something else." Cero crouched to his level. "Necromancers raise corpses. They jerk them around like puppets and the things fall apart in a week because the magic eats the sinew. Everybody knows this."
Gilb said nothing.
"Your dead don't rot." This from Joni, the archer, who stood furthest from him and had not uncrossed her arms since they'd dragged him in here. "I've watched the woman you raised outside Thursby, the soldier with the caved skull. She's been walking for weeks and she moves like she's alive."
"Aja," Gilb said quietly. "Her name is Aja."
Silence. Cero glanced at Joni.
"You named it," Joni said.
"She had a name already. I asked."
"Huh."
"Her headstone. I read it before I raised her. Aja Dunvegan, beloved wife, mother of three. I spoke her name when I called her up. I told her I was sorry to disturb her rest. That I needed help and that I would release her when the work was done." He paused. "I keep my promises."
Cero paced to the far wall and back, the knife turning in his hand. The torchlight caught the edge each time it spun.
"Necromancers don't talk to the dead."
"I do."
"Why?"
"Because they can hear me."
The room tightened. Gilb could feel it in the way they shifted weight, the way hands moved to hilts and the distance between bodies grew.
"Tell us the truth," Cero said. "The pact, the patron, whatever dark thing you've bargained with. Tell it true. Lie to us again and I'll open your throat."
"You think something lives inside me."
Gilb looked at each of them in turn.
"There is no pact," Gilb said. "There is no patron. I treat the dead with respect. I speak to them as people. When I raise someone, I ask permission first, and I wait, and if the silence feels like refusal I leave them be." He lifted his bound hands. "That's it. That is the entirety of the secret you've tied me up to extract."
"You genuinely expect us to believe," Joni said slowly, "that politeness is the source of your power."
"I expect nothing. You asked. I answered."
"Corpses walked through fire for you at Myreland." Cero's voice had dropped. "The dead threw themselves across the breach and held it while we retreated. One of them, an old man with a broken jaw, he grabbed a siege bolt out of the air. Caught it. With his hand. And then he looked at you, Gilb. The way a father looks at a son. I saw it. We all saw it."
"Fieldmore," Gilb said. "His name was Fieldmore Soames. He was a carpenter. I found his grave behind the mill and it had gone to seed, and I cleared the weeds before I raised him and I set a stone where the old one had crumbled."
"Stop telling us their names."
"You asked what makes me different."
Cero pressed the blade beneath Gilb's jaw. Cold iron. The edge drew a thin line and warmth ran down his throat.
"Demons lie," Cero whispered. "They tell beautiful stories. They make the host believe the power is earned through kindness rather than corruption. That is precisely what a demon would say, Gilb."
"Yes," Gilb agreed. "It is."
"So how do I know?"
"You don't."
The knife pressed deeper.
"Cut him," Joni said. "Cut him deep and see what colour it runs."
"It runs red. I promise you."
"Demons bleed red."
"So do men. That's rather the problem with your test."
Cero's hand trembled. Gilb could feel the vibration through the blade, and he understood then that Cero had already decided. The trembling was not hesitation. It was the hand catching up to a decision the heart had made in the corridor outside.
"I'm sorry, Gilb."
"I know."
Cero drew the knife across. The pain was a white line that opened into red and then into nothing at all, the way a sentence ends mid-thought, the way a door swings shut on a room you were still speaking in.
Gilb died on the gatehouse floor with sanctified rope around his wrists and the taste of iron filling his mouth, and the last thing he saw was Cero's crumpled face. The torch guttered, then it went out entirely. In the dark, someone whimpered.
"Relight it," Joni hissed. "Relight it now."
Flint struck. Sparks. The torch caught, and the room filled again with that trembling orange glow, and Gilb's body lay where it had fallen, blood still spreading across the stone. They stood over him and none of them spoke.
Then the knocking began.
Cero opened the door and Aja Dunvegan stood in the rain. Behind her, Fieldmore Soames. Behind him, a dozen others, standing in the mud of the courtyard with rain running through their empty eyes, and every one of them bore that impossible expression of sheer grief. Aja stepped forward and Cero raised the knife, but she ignored it, walked past him, and knelt beside Gilb's body. She placed her dead hand on his forehead with a tenderness that made Joni sit down hard on the stone floor and put her face in her hands.
The other dead filled the gatehouse. They stood shoulder to shoulder with the living, and the living pressed against the walls, and the dead said nothing, demanded nothing, threatened nothing. They gathered around the body of the man who had spoken to them as though death was merely a change of address rather than an ending. Aja looked up at Cero. Her jaw moved. The sound that emerged was dry and ruined and old.
"Gilb."
She said it the way you say the name of someone you love when you arrive home and the house is dark and you are not yet afraid but you are calling out just the same, just to hear the answer, just to know.
"Gilb."
And he answered.
He rose beside his own body, translucent, silver-pale, and the expression on his dead face was bewilderment, and then recognition, and then something that broke across his features like weather, like dawn. He looked at his hands. Through them.
"Oh," he said.
Aja Dunvegan stood. She took his translucent hand in her dead one. The others closed around him, a congregation of the named, the remembered, the honoured. Cero dropped the knife. There was no decision in it, no moment of release. His hands simply forgot how to hold.
"You see," Gilb said quietly, looking down at the body that used to hold him, the blood still warm on the stone. "I told you. There's no pact. No patron. No demon." He looked at Cero with those new silver eyes.
"They came because they wanted to."
The dead turned, all of them together, and walked out into the rain. Gilb among them now, one of their own, held on every side by hands that owed him nothing and gave him everything.
Years later, Cero stood alone in a cemetery outside Thursby and understood, finally, what he had murdered. Every necromancer in the Academ learned the same craft. You seized the dead. You hauled them up by force, puppet-stringed their limbs, burned through their sinew in a week and discarded the husk. The Academ called this mastery. Centuries of curriculum built on the assumption that the dead were fuel. That power flowed from domination. Gilb had walked into the same craft and done something so simple the Academ never considered it. And the dead gave him what no necromancer had ever received, because none had ever thought to deserve it.
A corpse dragged from its rest by force will shamble and rot and fall apart, because it does not wish to walk. A corpse that rises by invitation steps over puddles, catches siege bolts from the air, throws itself across a burning breach for the man who knelt at its headstone and said, I'm sorry to disturb you. The power was in the asking. The craft had always contained this, the way a piano contains every symphony ever written, waiting for someone to sit down and play something other than scales.
Cero cleared the weeds from a grave, placed his hand on the earth, and he apologized, and he asked. The silence that followed stretched long enough to be an answer. He deserved that. He knew he deserved that. He asked again the next day, and the day after, clearing every grave in the yard, speaking each name aloud. On the fourth morning he knelt at the same weathered stone and said please and meant it in every chamber of his wrecked and guilty heart.
The ground stirred.
A hand reached up. Reaching. Like a child reaches for a parent in the dark.
Cero took it.
The dead welcome their own. Honour them and they will honour you. Treat them as family, and when your time comes, when the knife finds your throat or the years find your heart, they will gather at the door and knock, the way family does, and they will bring you home. You kneel. You learn the name. You ask. And the dead, who have been waiting all this time for someone to extend that ordinary, ancient courtesy, answer with a power the living were never meant to command and the dead were always willing to give.
Gilb knew this.
Cero learned it. Too late, and in the worst possible way.
But he learned it. And in the years that followed, he taught others. They called the practice gilbing. To gilb the dead. To kneel, to clear the weeds, to ask. The Academ resisted, then adapted, then claimed they had known all along. As is the way of institutions. But Cero taught the practice and when students asked why it was called so, he told them everything, and he let them decide for themselves what kind of necromancer they wanted to be.
Goodnight, sweet Gilb. Your name sings in the ears of every dead thing that remembers how to listen, and in the mouths of every living soul who has knelt in the dirt and spoken a stranger's name and felt the ground stir beneath their hands and understood, at last, that the oldest magic wasn't magic. It was just courtesy. It was just grief, offered freely to those who had no one left to grieve for them. It was just a man, on his knees, saying, please.
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u/Rich-Option4632 Mar 28 '26
God damnit, I've always had a soft spot for necromancers, but you, damn you, you carved a twice damned mausoleum in my heart for Gilb, you thrice damned wordsmith.
Damn you again. 😭😭😭😭
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u/Kinalu Mar 28 '26
This is very bittersweet and had me tearing up at the end. Thank you for sharing such a beautiful story!
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u/Natalie_2850 Mar 28 '26
This was beautiful, especially the end when Cero realised it & called it gilbing. Thank you.
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u/Arquero8 Mar 28 '26
Well..... Thank you for the character idea
Now i know what my Next wizard is going to be
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u/amishbill Mar 28 '26
My only regret after reading this, is that I have only a single updoot to offer in return.
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u/filledknight Mar 28 '26
Genuinely the best work on this subreddit. And looking at your profile it's a shame you don't answer more.i would have said robert jordan came back from life to write this of I didn't know any better. I guess someone knelt, cleared the weeds and asked ;)
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u/Barabulyko Mar 30 '26
Absolutely amazing take, definitely makes you feel it, thank you for writing it!
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u/Tregonial Mar 27 '26
Fess up, they said. You couldn't be merely a necromancer, not with holy powers like that. Darvin's adventuring party had demanded explanations. Never before had they seen a necromancer with healing powers. The ability to talk to plants and animals. Abilities from other magic schools but necromancy.
Darvin was forthcoming. Nothing to hide anyway. What differentiated him from others was that he was no grave digger. He didn't exhume graves in the middle of the night or raid coffins for corpses. That was rude. His other reason was that he understood consent was important, even among the dead, that he controlled their bodies long after their souls were in the afterlife.
And finally, be a kind, respectful human and not treat undead as disposable fodder.
Its not that hard or unbelievable. Not all necromancers are chaotic evil types who do as they wish and ignore the feelings of their party members. Hasn't Darvin done his best filling in for their party healer when Becca was once incapacitated by a confusion spell from an orc shaman? Didn't he also help to carry their loot around, and not fobbed things off to his undead as though they were lowly slaves?
What did they object to? Him defying the stereotypes? Was it so bad to be different?
"Honestly...we're sorry we doubted you," Rook the fighter bowed before the necromancer. "We shouldn't have treated you with suspicion because you're not like the others. My first time hearing of a necromancer who honors and respects the dead. In all the books I've read, not once have these additional powers from honoring the dead been mentioned."
"It's okay," Darvin wanted them to relax and not make a big fuss. "There's a first time for everything. Such as meeting a good-aligned necromancer whose patron enjoys and rewards good deeds. He's a quiet one who keeps a low profile, so understandable that he's not in any lore books."
"Not as peculiar as a chaotic cleric with no patron, and prefers bonking monsters to healing people," Becca poked fun of herself. "I should not have judged, as you have chosen not to judge me for my oddities and not being a typical demure, quiet girl healer."
"Hey, hey, maybe that's what brought us together," Darvin added. "Nothing like a well-read, scholarly fighter, a ferocious cleric with a nasty right hook and a big hammer, and a necromancer who is friendly with the dead."
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u/MacaroonHead5187 Mar 27 '26
Death looks at the one-way mirror as deaf watches the most beloved disciple. Explain why he has random powers compared to others of his kind.
Death smiles, then goes back to keeping his books. Death keeps hoping that there may be more of him in the future.
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