Necromancy is a Stage of Grief

==Credits==
Necromancy is a Stage of Grief is a short fanfiction written by Siren, with partial credit for the main character, Will O' Wisp, going to Colorchanger and Jaguar, and partial credit for the general plot and title going once again to Colorchanger and Jaguar.
== Part One: Anger ==
I stand in the rain before the mound of fresh dirt with the roughly-hewn headstone, feeling the water pour over me in my scales and somewhere in the back of my mind, but since most of me is filled with brightly-burning, all-consuming fire, I am warm despite the cold. I wish that I could give my newfound heat to the one below me, the body buried under the hard earth, the one that should not be dead.
She had years and years of joyous life in front of her. It just isn’t fair.
“Come on, Wisp,” my mother says behind me from the dryness of the archway to Mantis Hive’s cramped SilkWing graveyard. “You’re getting soaked. Let’s go home.” She steps forward into the rain with me and puts a talon on my shoulder. I can feel her shivering all through my heated bones.
So what if I’m getting soaked? I think. Acadia’s getting soaked too, and dirty, and she’s all alone. 
	I rip Mother’s talon from my shoulder and storm away into the rain, flying to my special tree which just so happens to have a perfect view of my little sister’s new grave. I curl up between the two large branches that form the shape of an almost-perfect Y, ignoring the little bits and pieces that poke at me while I watch my mother.
She’s the one standing in the rain now, but instead of trying to figure out how to find Acadia’s murderer and kill them as painfully as possible like I was, and still am, she’s just crying, and not even tortured, shaking, painful sobs. The kind of crying you would do if an insignificant but rather cute monkey died in a book you were reading; a few tears but not too sad.
The old Wisp wouldn’t be judging her pathetic mother’s pathetic mourning in the midst of the pathetic graveyard, but going over and comforting her. 
But the old Wisp is dead and gone, has been since that knife sliced open her sister’s stomach and left her to die in agony two weeks ago.
I adjust my position in the tree, keeping my narrowed gaze locked on the betrayal of my own flesh-and-blood. She throws a bundle full of chrysanthemums onto the lump of dirt that used to be Acadia, then with one more fake-looking sniff, turns and walks back into the glorified cage known as our “home”.
I scoff. Flowers. What a useless gesture. By tomorrow, if the winds haven’t destroyed them or swept them away, they will already be starting to brown, and in a week they’ll be nothing but a rotting mess for someone to clean up. Plus, Acadia hated chrysanthemums. So I guess you didn’t know your daughter that well after all, did you?
And it isn’t just the flowers that are a waste now. Almost four years of going to cheap plays that still managed to have that spark, of drying up tears caused by ruthless HiveWings and their insults, of saving scale after scale to get her that sugar model of her for the fourth birthday that would never ever come, gone, down the drain, all pointless.
I twist around and dig my claws deep into the tree behind me. I’ve clawed this particular spot on my tree many times, but never this deep, never into the core of the tree where the heartwood lies, gouging some of it out into the curves of my claws. I shake it off.
That is how I feel. No, that’s not right. 
That is how whoever killed my sister is going to feel once I’m through with them, just before I deliver the final blow.
== Part Two: Bargaining ==
A wordless shriek erupts from the throat and I throw the useless book I was reading aside and punch one that I haven’t got to yet. The only other dragon in the skimpy, dimly lit SilkWing library glares at me, but I ignore her. She’s unimportant in the grand scheme of my revenge, as is the book I just hurled across the room.
In all of Mantis Hive, there isn’t even one book on sorcery? 
Finding the identity of the piece of filth that killed my sister had turned out to be infuriatingly impossible. There had been no witnesses, and none of the officials even cared! If one of their precious HiveWings had been the victim, every stone in the entire Hive would’ve been turned over. 
And then I remembered a little nursery rhyme from when I was just a little wingless dragonet: “the gods came when the world was new, and demons and monsters did too.” It was meant to frighten dragonets into obeying their parents, and it worked.
But if it was true, then that meant that the gods existed, and, more importantly, magic.
And maybe magic would be enough to set the wrongs right and show me how to annihilate my sister’s murderer. All I needed was a book or maybe an ancient scroll to tell me how to use it. After all, I was in Mantis Hive, the newly-built and awe-inspiring center of knowledge. It couldn’t possibly be that hard to find one lousy book on magic, right?
I was absolutely wrong.
I had snuck into every HiveWing library in the Hive, which was an impressive task, as SilkWings weren’t supposed to be allowed in the HiveWing libraries, lest they dirty up the sacred knowledge with their grubby talons and ignorant ways and whatever else rubbish they spout. 
But since they had turned up nothing but bruises from being literally thrown out and a whole continent full of rage, now I was here, in the library dedicated to us poor SilkWorms to help enlighten us with the power of beautiful knowledge, but not too much, of course, because an ignorant population is easy to control.
And if this pathetic library was truly the sum of my tribe’s intelligence, then yeah, I would agree that SilkWings are an uneducated tribe that doesn’t deserve what the HiveWings do.    
But since my tribe actually seems to have some morals and sense of right and wrong, I’d say that the HiveWings are the worms and we’re the better ones.
“If you’re not going to read, then you’re going to have to get out,” the SilkWing librarian I angered says.                                                                                   
I realize that I’ve just been standing at the table, glaring at absolutely nothing and absolutely everything, for at least a good while. I huff and sit down, muttering “sorry,” but not actually meaning it.
I skim through a few more books, suppressing the urge to scream and toss quite a few of them when the newer ones will not shut up about the glory of the HiveWings and their amazingness and strength and graciousness and all that.
I’m coming to the last few books and losing hope while the anger flares up again in me. Maybe I should just destroy all the HiveWings. At least then I can be sure that my sister’s killer is gone from this planet forever.
I pick up one of the last of the books in this whole moons-forsaken Hive, and a sheaf of old papers tied together falls out, probably something that was used as a bookmark and forgotten. I’m about to dump it in the small trash bin near the desk when I notice the title. It’s in the old language, but I learned quite a bit in school so I can puzzle it out. Rituals and Sorcery from the First Age.
My eyes grow wide and a smile starts creeping across my face. I open the little book. The first page seems to consist of some sort of summoning ritual for the demon of goat cheese. Useless. The next page is pointless too; how to grow flowers under the ocean. As is the next, create a perfect map with just the snap of your talons.
I flip through the pages, slowly at first, then more rapidly, ripping the pages as I go. A million scales, no, true love, no, solve a global crisis, no, no, no!
This is pointless. Maybe I’m destined to have power right at my clawtips, but not at all what I need.
The next page. Necromancy. Bringing back the dead. I pause at it. I could bring Acadia back to life! I could have my sister back again!
Would she be the same, though? a small voice in my mind whispers. What if you bring her back, and she’s someone totally different? Then there’s no more Acadia at all, here, or in the underworld.
The underworld probably doesn’t even exist, I argue back, but I flip the page. It isn’t worth the risk, and besides, then her murderer would get off scot-free, and that is unacceptable.
The next page is useless, a spell to become a cockroach, but the page after that is something. 
My smile emerges in full force. In big letters at the top of the page, spilling across in unfaded red ink: A Spell to Summon Nemesis, the Demon of Revenge.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
== Part Three: Necromancy ==
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Fanon)
Category:Fanfictions (Incomplete)
Category:Mature Content
Category:Content (DragonSiren22)
Category:Content (Colorchanger the Mindreader)
Category:Genre (Short Story)