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I vomit. Hey. It's a perfectly normal reaction for someone who's never seen a corpse before. I don't expect to suddenly see a pile of bloody mutilated bodies. I also don't expect them to start squirming and moaning.Torlikoff said:
When I've emptied my stomach of the burger I got in Jacksonville, I look up again. The pile is larger.
Is that what is happening out there? So many people dying. I didn't...
Humans are sight oriented creatures. Things aren't real until we see them: Seeing is believing, after all. History illustrates it. Oh, sure, Allied governments hears reports of Allied death camps in World War, but that was a far cry from when the first troops actually saw the imprisoned Jews as they liberated the camps. And by the same token, if you don't see something happening, it isn't as real. You can hear reports of tradegies, but they don't hit you the way they would if you were standing there.
I had heard the bullets. Seen the buildings fall. But I hadn't seen the true cost. The human cost.
If I could help and I ran away from this, I would never be able to live with myself.
The ghosts scream louder. They're angry. Angry with the one that killed them, their rage feeding on each other's to grow stronger. Magic and ideas flicker in my mind and I smile. I walk towards the screaming mass, and I let their rage fill me, burning itself into my mind like dozens of red hot needles. Anger and hate and pain all swarming into me, and I join their cries with a feral, barely human roar of my own. And then when I can bear it no longer, I take that rage and I turn it into my magic, and I call upon Hellfire, and I feed it all back into those angry ghosts.
In its most poetic form, the fourth law of magic forbids a wizard from crossing the boundary of life and death. More technically, it forbids the art of necromancy upon a human corpse. The raising of the dead is enough to earn one silver sword from the Wardens, straight to your neck.
But I'm not raising or binding these ghosts.
I'm giving them the power the raise themselves.
On the other side of the veil, in the physical world, reality shivers.
And then the veil tears, and dozens of ghosts charge through, spectral bodies half forged of Hellfire, shaping their material bodies from the rock and dust and twisted metal of Washington's ruins until they look like nightmarish beings of jet-black smoke and molten metal and ravenous hatred, and they charge the orange eyed figure to literally drag him down to hell.
Meanwhile, I fall to the ground, managing to angle myself so I fall through the tear in the veil and back to reality so I don't get trapped in the Nevernever for whatever creature with long claws and fangs and a taste for human flesh to nibble on, and black out.
