#i will stop making excuses. necromancer remus

[sometimes-love-is-enough]

it's my birthday! another year gone. another year wiser.

i had originally planned to start posting the Locked Tomb AU today, as a treat to myself, but a series of depressing real-life events have made it so I haven't had time to even think about editing it, let alone actually put it out into the world. which is sad, because the thing I want to do most is share it with people. it's one of the most fun things i've ever worked on.

so I've decided to compromise, and share the first little chunk of the first chapter here. it's not much but it's here. enjoy it, and hopefully the rest will be on its way to an AO3 account near you, soon enough.

***

In the myriadic year of our Lord – the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the Emperor Unsleeping, Gracious Savior Of Us All! – Remus Tetradrachmus raised his hand high to the hallowed marbled ceilings of the Fourth, and prepared once more to murder his brother.

The fool himself was sitting out on the palace’s gilded balcony, completely unaware of any coming danger or trouble. His rapier was thoroughly sheathed, and more than that, he was half-sitting on it; the shining polished gleam of the scabbard crushed into the couch cushions as he sprawled out upon them. A new shipment of his dreadful romance fiction had arrived only the day before, and Roman was – as always – hooked like a dead-eyed fish on tales of swashbuckling heroism and cavaliers spouting lengthy, flowery, disgustingly soppy love confessions to their swooning necromancers.

Holding his breath, Remus rotated theorems in his head and thought about teeth and nails as he crept closer to the gleaming glass doors overlooking the city. An optimal position was the most important thing before he got started, here. Too close and he might only succeed in an embarrassing overshoot when he did burst out the double-doors, too far away and Roman might have time to actually make it to his rapier in time. Neither seemed optimal! Timing was everything. Fortunately, Remus wasn’t on a schedule or anything, pfft, no, nothing so boring. He could start this caper at any which time he pleased, right now or in an hour, or tomorrow, or never! But also he was absolutely going to start this right motherfucking now, because why wait?

Jittery with nervous delight, Remus wiggled his still-outstretched fingers in a frenetic flutter, realized that wasn’t nearly enough wiggling, and danced a little in place – a nearly-silent tip-tap-slide of boots on the floor. He wondered briefly if he should think over the consequences of his imminent murder attempt, and then dismissed doing so as entirely too boring. Fratricide with forethought was the most boring sort of fratricide, any idiot would be able to tell you that. Even Roman, dumb idiot baby brother that he was, might even agree.

Enough pondering! To work! To murder!

Remus flexed his fingers, laid them stiff and flat in the air, and got on with it.

He’d been working on this trick for a good few weeks now, and had managed to bite his tongue from bragging about it to his brother, which he’d considered to be very impressive considering just how absolutely bitching of a trick it was. Trick wasn’t the right word for it, it was a downright innovation and a marvel of necromancy he’d been developing. It wasn’t that redirecting a living subject’s thalergy was that difficult or unresearched of a discipline, oh no – Remus had read all the lore, he knew all the dirty deets, he’d been building off that research.

No, the real trick was forcing the thalergy of a living body down and through the fingers without the subject noticing.

Out on the terrace, Roman hummed a sweet little snatch of nothing-music to himself as he reached out to turn the page of a brand-new copy of the Nine-House classic, Just Like Seven. Remus was now close enough to see the little colored tabs of flimsy scattered all throughout the pages of the novel, and the little pad of scribbled nonsense laid out on the couch right next to it. Probably planning some soppy recursive fiction about Mark Septalo and his stupid sexy ghost-cavalier. God knew their bedroom was half-full of the damn stuff – the other half being filled with his own, obviously superior erotica of the same source material.

They were each others’ copy editors, and each hated the job with a fierce professional passion.

Remus squinted his eyes, and flipped the logistics of flesh and bone back and forth in his head like a child playfully batting around a soft ball, and his brother’s fingernails began to grow. Slowly at first, as the thalergy flow pushed an establishing pathway through to the destination keratin, but then exponentially, and Remus watched with no small delight. He’d practiced on himself, of course, but there was just something incredibly magical about seeing new theories come to life on someone else. Roman was, as always, his favorite necromantic test subject, now and forever and ever and ever.

At one inch long, Roman frowned and bit his lip and pressed his forehead closer to the page, as if in bullheaded insistence that nothing was going on and he just needed to read his book a little bit harder to make absolutely certain of it. This was a dumb idiot move from a dumb idiot man whose brain was smoother and shinier than the hilt of his ruby-embedded sword, and Remus loved him all the more fiercely for it.

At two inches long, Roman frowned deeper, and reached up to scratch the nape of his neck. His too-long nails made contact, and he froze and the frown got deeper, like a deep-sea trench caving under pressure. He whipped his hands out in front of them, stared at them and then glared. “Remus!”

Drat and blast; Emperor’s tits, he’d been blown! But not really, it wasn’t the hardest mystery to crack even if your brain had been worn thin by too many Cohort romance novels, and anyway Remus wasn’t even halfway done yet. The nails kept on growing, despite Roman’s hurried frantic attempts to buff them into stillness against the couch cushions, and subsequent even more frantic attempts to bite them off with his teeth, and now they were sprouting at a truly ridiculous rate, curling and creaking all over the place, looking more like long strands of extruded stone than actual bits of human body.

Three inches; four. Remus was delighted. His brother was less delighted. He couldn’t possibly imagine why.

“Remus!” Roman exclaimed again, horror mixing with fury in an exciting cocktail of emotions that Remus decided on the spot to term ‘horrifury’, just for shits and giggles. “For the love of the Emperor, stop messing with my natural bodily functions! Face me on equal footing, brother mine, and stop being a dick about it!”

Remus did not stop messing with his twin’s natural bodily functions, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to stop being a dick about it. Being a dick was his natural state and divine right as Duke of Onnuria and radiant heir to the Fourth House’s necromantic throne, as he so frequently proclaimed at important council meetings (much to everyone’s eternal exasperation). Instead, he increased the rate of growth, and waited for the inevitable to happen.

At six full inches long, the inevitable did happen. Roman went for his sword, and couldn’t manage to get his fingers around the hilt, his fingernails being long and curled and unwieldy and really stupid-looking. Remus took a moment to laugh and point at him, before pelting forward at a dead sprint and launching himself right at the sparkling shining glass that separated them. It didn’t shatter, because it was very well-made glass and they had spent good money on it, but upon his impact the doors burst outwards and he whirled like a dervish into the pale starlight of a muted Fourth morning.