Necromaster

(This is a conclusion to the previous two pastas, “Necropotence,” and “War of the Dead.” I was a mod for the old creepypasta forum, and this is the first submission I’ve sent in two years. It feels great to be writing again! Thanks for reading it, and I hope it’s good enough to conclude my unfinished trilogy on this site. Sincerely —- Violent Harvest/DW.)

I.

I started all of this at the end of round one, before I learned that there is far more power in the company of death rather than a futile struggle, day to day, clinging to the fragile coils of life. It’s a lie that rules over all of humanity as we cherish and bow down to it, obsessed with prolonging our end. I was like everyone else once, during my first chance that I pissed down the toilet over the course of seventy years. Anyone who says they’re not afraid of death — that they’re “at peace,” or that it’s “their time to go” — they’re lying.

But this is your moment, when you have the opportunity to change and open your mind to something different. There is real power to be gained, and I’ve made it very difficult for those I’ve chosen to seek out this grimoire. This will be my final message before the cogath.

There is nothing to be afraid of if you are willing to learn.

I’m only different than you because I’ve learned the truth. I’ve defected from the gruel and grievous circle of lies, and entered the deceptively sweet embrace of death. My second chance didn’t come with exercise or good diets or vitamins. Life was a monotonous letdown. The gift came to me, a very unworthy and clueless old wretch, and it’s a wonder at all that I discovered the blessings of death before I tried to off myself. But that’s not what happened.

This is about a lot of things. It’s about making all of you realize that you need to wake up. You’ve forgotten what it means to survive. You devour gluttonous value meals from drive throughs and fry your minds in front of digital displays for hours and hours at a time, and every single facet of living has been spoonfed to you from a silver bowl of shit. That’s what I call this pathetic sideshow of paychecks and miles per gallon and reform bills that inspire panic because you’re all going to lose pieces of paper from your wallets or digital ones and zeroes inside bank computers that tell you how successful you are and whether you can have a new Mercedes since your Lexus is over five years old.

Life is billioning everywhere, but the real potential of the human race has wasted away slowly. So this about a worldwide reminder. When the graveyards start erupting and soccer moms are robbing their neighbor’s house for a revolver, they will be reminded. They will know what it means to deserve life, and they will pay an instant fine for years of cheating death. They will go from being afraid of the internal revenue service to being afraid of the mean alcoholic uncle they buried four years ago when he shows up hungry at their front door. They’ll be freezing and diseased in forests and caves and fields, hunkered down and fearing sleep without another breathing partner to keep watch.

The government will call it bio-terrorism. The churches will call it the end of days. But we will call it what it truly is. The cogath.

They will cling to the lie of life. Consider yourself fortunate.

You and I will call it the cogath dar marbh. In English, it means war of the dead. It’s from the old tongue, when the Gaelic chomhairle tried in vain to do what I am about to attempt. Their druid enemies stopped them.

It’s been exactly one thousand years since my ancestor failed the ritual. I stay in contact with him on a regular basis. His favorite sacrifice is a twenty something redhead. I have sent him many, many redheads.

So this is about making him proud, and giving back to my otherworldly community that has granted me authority over life itself. It’s about returning power with power in return, quid pro quo.

Will you be one of them, or will you accept my gift?

Before you go any further, I would advise you to visit the cemetery of your family’s legacy, gather up the remains of your loved ones, and grant them peace from the impending chaos.

Cremate them. Your mother will thank you on the other side later.

II.

The first steps have been taken. Let us take a moment to mourn your old existence, because it’s only natural to have those feelings. Kiss it goodbye.

It’s been bred in to you to chase these intangible and incessantly insane things called dreams. You can do achieve anything if you work hard enough. This what you’re told when you’re young, because we only have so much time on this earth, and the people who think they have the power and the control know they have a lot of money to make off you believing this. I worked hard for over thirty years at a company I started myself, only to get backstabbed by my partner. I’m a quadruple divorcee. I was depressed and eating valium because I made seven figures instead of eight. This is what life and dreamchasing does to you.

The cost of what will be required of you is astronomical. You think I don’t know you, but I do. You care about three things. Money, sex, and power. These three motivations rule the world of the living. Some would attempt to question the big three, perhaps bringing up futile concepts like love and goodness, but those people are worthless to me. They won’t be approached or instructed like you. You are depraved like me. That’s why you’ve been given the opportunity to learn.

Lesson number one. Nothing comes without sacrifice. Absolutely nothing. This also proves true in life, but death is a much more forgiving teacher. You’ve put in hard work to get something you want out of life. Nice things, a pretty girlfriend, a manicured lawn. What’s valuable in life is not valuable in death.

There is no big three. You will prosper through asking of what is required of you in the nether. I am your instructor, but the nether itself will hold you accountable.

For now, I need you to forget about morals and right and wrong. You are going to kill people, but in the process, you will make them something bigger than they could have ever hoped to become in life. You will spill blood. You will cause suffering, and you will love it.

Order number one. You need a partner in crime, and I don’t expect you to do this alone. As I said before, death leaves you a lot of room for poetic license and creativity. You need to find yourself a living, breathing thing that’s not human. I used my house pet and turned her in to vicious hell hound, but I leave the choice to you. The first step to gaining potency in your rituals requires something to keep watch over you as you commune with the dead. As you drift about the nether, you will be protected from the raging spirits of old, but you will be vulnerable in the real world.

What is left of the Gaelic rituals can be found in the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic. Nearly all of the terms and superstitions outlined within it are inaccurate, but there are detailed instructions for creating a familiar. That is your starting place. Read it, create your circle, and bleed out the old husk of your chosen animal.

When the last drop of blood falls, you will witness the opening of the nether for the first time.

I will not be there waiting for you, but rather, you will attune yourself and converse with the first spirit drawn to the body of the animal. Do what it asks of you, no matter what the request.

Should you succeed, then I assure you that I will be aware of it.

III.

You’ve made quite an interesting choice, my little necrolyte. I saw you, screaming and covered in blood, with your circle crudely etched in the wood by a shaky hand. Fortunately, a perfect circle wasn’t required by the particular spirit who came to you. I appointed it specifically to your induction due to its chaotic tendencies. It felt the grave sense of terror in your gut with the bleeding fox on your lap, and it was grateful to consume such a strongly human emotion.

And you were grateful to have it taken away from you. How does it feel, knowing that you will never fall prey to fear again? It’s been ages for me, but I’ve never forgotten myself.

I watched the entire ordeal. I saw your face contort with tears and regret, only to shift in one glorious moment as you wrapped your clutches around the first hint of necropotence. Your open, screaming mouth became a beautifully sadistic grin when the fox rose again. From a pitiful, dying and broken thing to a stalwart guardian of your legacy. How long that legacy persists is an entirely new question altogether.

Lesson number two. The pleasures of the world are meaningless to you now. and so are the consequences. Maybe you had thoughts of changing your appearance, of sucking the life from someone you hate, only to change the circumstances of your mortal life and get a second whirl at things. I don’t blame you for these feelings at all, for I must admit I fell victim to them at first. I murdered my boss and my wife, I looked to be in my twenties, and my first inclination was to hit the town and find a nice, lovely piece of college ass. But there are things you don’t realize.

Forget about your “nether regions” and burying them in pussy, or painting the town red and impressing people who don’t matter by creating little green lights that dance on the ends of your fingertips. You have a new center of pleasure now. Remember that money and sex mean nothing, and when you bleed out your first victim and make your first offer of blood, you will be filled with such elation, with such physical pleasure, that you will forever regard humans as a snack for your brethren across the veil. They have much greater things to offer you in return for your service than a three second orgasm.

Forget about the police or any fears of worldly justice. There is nothing capable of punishing you except for what lies in the nether itself. Well …. and me, should you fail miserably and waste my time so close to the hour of our war.

Order number two. Your familiar is ready, but ninety percent of you is still pathetically human and therefore very weak. You will have to create your own pumice stone for mixing the blood of your offerings. To command the dead, they must respect you as they respect me, which means you need to become as close to your master as physically possible. Draining the blood of one will bring you a longer lifespan and restore wrinkles, but draining the blood of ten at a time, mixing them in to a grisly soup, and then offering it will allow you to learn new techniques and rituals. There’s more to being a necromancer than living forever and drawing circles. You will learn to transform blood and bone in to shockwaves that will bring buildings to rubble. You will learn how to enslave any living, breathing thing indefinitely, so that it might do your bidding for eternity. You will learn a great many things, but none of them will come to fruition without a pumice stone.

Any solid object will do. Mine was given to me by one of the last remaining chomhairle when I was a child, crafted from a piece of stonehenge itself. It’s important you understand that the object itself is simply a medium. You don’t need some special keepsake like the pocket knife your grandfather gave you before he passed away. You can use a roll of toilet paper if you’d like (although you may become the brunt of many a sideways snicker at the hands of your necromantic brothers for doing so).

When you’ve chosen your object, create a new circle (which should look much better, considering the excitement I feel in you, rather than fear and trepidation), and find your first blood offering. It would accelerate your progress if you could select someone particularly special to you, be that in a positive or negative way. Very soon, your old girlfriend or your Monday night football buddy will become fodder for the corpses, so in a way, should you slice up and bleed out someone in your social circle, you are saving them from a much more grisly fate later. You will carry them with you, and at times, you may hear their whispers and screams from the object itself.

The choice is up to you. Take them alive, and ensure that every last drop touches your pumice. It will devour the blood like a rabid beast, and you will once again open the nether.

Enjoy the flood of youth and real power. This is your first kill, and it is your first step to belonging with your prestigiously gruesome family of the macabre.

I will be watching.

IV.

How dare you. How fucking dare you.

Did you think I wouldn’t find out?

I’ve been surprised before. Once. The son of the Chomhairle primogen caught me unawares in a bathroom, when I still led a halfway human life. I must admit that on that particular night, I thought the cogath would come to fruition.

As it turns out, that miserable little power monger was already dead. I was close, you see. I was closer then I am now, except that when his blood ran like a river, the nether wouldn’t accept him. Perhaps it was a strategic move on their part, to send me a dead spirit in the empty vessel of a human body. A living, breathing Chomhairle wouldn’t dare cross my path. They know I only need one of them.

And so, you’ve chosen to betray me.

I’m not quite sure how you found out. Have I been usurped by one rogue spirit in the nether realm, or do they all conspire against me? Surely not.

So you gathered enough blood in to the pumice stone, and then destroyed it, thereby severing the link between you and your necromaster.

Rest assured that I will find you, even if I can’t watch you through the stone. You were so very good at following directions.

When we meet face to face, I will first rend the flesh from your body, until you are nothing but a framework of walking muscle on top of brittle bone, and then I will suspend you in a glistening bubble of torment.

Is it poetic? The fact that you’ve turned against me, in your own lust for power, just as I have against my Chomhairle brethren? Maybe this is the way it should be.

But still.

How dare you.

I accept your challenge.

V.

You were nothing, and you’re something now. Because of me.

I find it fitting that the world has begun its descent in to pure, unbridled chaos. I applaud you for your contributions, for you’ve somehow found a way to manipulate necromantic power as I have, without a familiar, without a pumice, without anything but your mind and your body and your spirit.

Bravo.

Surely, you’ve seen the bloodsucking fiends, spilling out on to the streets, burning alive under the sheen of a morning sun. They were never part of the grand scope of things until they decided to cross my path as you have.

What you are, necrolyte, is an abomination.

They’ll do anything for a taste of the blue goop. They smell it, they FEEL it, and it becomes them.

But even the vampires who resist the liquid blue will fall, you see.

Do you think I’m afraid of something that can’t even breathe? Do you truly think that you can manipulate the nether, and become one of them, and protect the last living Chomhairle before I find him and bring about the war of the dead?

You can not stop the cogath.

Give up now, and I might spare you, to be a dead man floating by my side.

Or you can let that pathetic Cainite embrace you, and lose your power.

The choice is up to you.

VI.

Your necropotence …… I can’t fathom how you’ve managed to hang on to it.

I found him, not an hour after he sank his incisors in to your neck.

But this is not the way the spirits told me it would transpire.

I have set out, to start a war of the dead, and instead, you seek to combat my efforts as a member of the undead, wielding MY gift and theirs at the same time. It shouldn’t be possible.

I’m close to you. I can see and feel traces of you. You’ve become powerful, but not powerful enough to hide your tracks. I know you’re heading for the Chomhairle temple. I know the druids have joined. I know about the wards at the entrance, and the hundred thousand walking constructs of bone that you have managed to resurrect with the sacrifice of the other Chomhairle.

So you will protect him from his bastard son? This is what you want?

I’m coming for you.

VII.

I’ve been such a fool. That old man who fixed my bike. IT CAN’T BE YOU.

You were my STUDENT! You faked everything …… even your own demise. How could I have forgotten you? The source of my gift ….. it’s impossible.

So, you were the necromaster before me, and now you’ve come back to reign over the living. Why protect them? They deserve the war. They deserve everything that’s coming to them.

These wards are stronger than I thought, but I will have them destroyed in a fortnight. I can feel you behind that gate, conjuring and speaking in Gaelic like a madman.

I’ve seen to it that all the druids will not only perish slowly, but they will perish at the mercy of the pathetic living trees and flowers and animals that they worship.

I have turned living flora in to walking, corrupted fauna. Even now, they lie on the ground, held at the wrists and feet by barbed and bleeding cusps of ancient oaks that have turned on them.

My father inside the temple, that you are protecting through your treachery …. he has spent his entire life trying to find a way to wipe them out, and I have destroyed them in less than day.

Do your hear their screams? I will bring them back. Once, they were worshipers of life, only to evolve, to change, to rise up from their thorned shackles and fight for the only side that can bring about the face of the new world.

I destroyed your sire, and you will not evade me by becoming vampiric. You will not protect him.

Hide in your little temple. I’ll break in there, soon enough.

VIII.

Everything burns. It is a beautiful thing. It is not the cogath, but I truly marvel at what I’ve accomplished thus far.

I’ve found the key to breaking through the wards. I sacrificed each and every druid, and mixed their blood in to a cauldron. I found the last Cainite, the ONLY one who can resist the liquid blue, and I stole his blood as well.

But the blood of the fiend, and the blood of the druids, and a single drop of blood from my own hand is not enough.

I’ve drawn every rune, every symbol, down to the last detail from the Munich manual. This is the strongest circle I’ve ever completed, and I’m still not finished.

I need the body count. The spirit in the nether who betrayed me and allowed you to rebel against my power is here now, under my control. You are alone, suspended in the eye of a storm of necropotence. How can you possibly hope to defeat me without the nether behind you?

I AM THE NETHER.

COGATH DAR MARBH.

IX.

Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty eight. Is that the magic number? One drop of blood from each of them.

I’m quite proud of my human body count.

I have them, aligned in rows. A field of dead bodies, accompanied by walking trees that bleed. Each of them has a rune, burned in to the ground by my own hand. This grove was once thriving with life, and now it has become a garden of death.

There were certain kills that were special to me, and even others that were special to Sasha. Perhaps a dozen of them stand out in my memory, screaming in agony under the green glow of fate itself. I didn’t just rend them open with a kris. I allowed them to suffer magnificently. Slowly. Beautifully.

I will channel the nether in to the earth itself. The energy in the soil will bring them back, an army of ten thousand strong, with my hellhound and my ex-wife and a few nameless bums who are very special pets, because they were some of my first kills.

Not two hours from now, I will begin the incantation to form the blast. It will begin in the depths of every decaying husk, ping ponging through the grove like green ball lightning, until it has touched all ten thousand. After they’ve risen, the circle and the runes will empower them….a mass of undeath, incinerated in a stinking cloud.

And then, I will send them for you.

I hope Margerie gets her hands around your throat, even if she can’t choke the life from you.

She only has to hold you still, so that I might exorcise your pathetic dark gift and reduce you back to a pitiful human being.

You fucked up, thinking you could be turned and still harness the power.

You are nothing.

Hunker down.

Here it comes.

X.

There have been so many very splendid moments in my lifetime. The first cut with a knife …. feeling young again,
igniting desire in the hearts of women….. and of course, taking on a student, although I must admit that I truly regret that decision now.

The explosion surely rocked you to your very core. Never have I sacrificed anything on such a grand scale.

It was painful, you see, to destroy my beautiful creation…. to sacrifice everything, so that I might meet you face to face. You, the abomination. You, with your alterior motives. You, standing before me, a sickly and pathetic leecher of life, wielding my power for the sake of mocking me.

For the sake of stopping the cogath.

Step aside, fool. I will have the blood of the last Chomhairle, even if I must destroy you.

XI.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

I had forgotten what true pain feels like. The deathfox and his teeth …. your familiar was truly a formidable opponent in the three seconds before it melted in to nothingness.

I will remember you forever, even if you disgusted me in your final hours, having become something that I never thought could have existed in the first place.

You came so far. I saw you, walking the streets, drinking your life away, because you wanted to become something more, and in this regard, you certainly have.

But you are not a necromancer. If you were, you might have defeated me.

My flesh may be singed. My hair may be gone. I may be old again, clinging to my last breath as I was before this all began. You have reduced me to my original, decrepit form of weakness, but I will never be human again.

I am nobody’s bitch, and that’s what matters.

Before our auras clashed…. before you burned away my skin with the channeled fury of the nether …. I did see my life flash before my eyes. And then you burned those away too.

But it has destroyed you.

It is very poetic, I think. I don’t have much time left, but you are vanquished, and my father is dead.

He is peeled open in front of me, and although I only have one leg left, that leg is enough to hobble over his corpse.

The true decision now, is which drop of blood to use. In this entire pool under his flayed body, there are millions to choose from. It will be my final decision, and therefore it must be a good one.

It’s a pity that I was never able to meet my father ….. that he sent his other son, a dead man walking, to challenge me. It’s a pity that my brother was not smart enough to choose the right side before I enslaved his spirit in the nether.

It would certainly bring a tear, if I were capable of crying.

And so, with my last breath of strength, I command this drop of Chomhairle blood in to the vestibule of this temple. I command the nether to become part of this world, to burn your body in the expanse of oblivion, so that you might find eternal peace in your final death. Perhaps I owe you that much for getting this far. You came so close to stopping me, and you partially have, indeed.

I will not survive to see more than a few seconds of the resurrection of the dead before my body dissolves in to the nothingness of the nether, but the ritual is done. The ritual that I have sought like a madman for a hundred years, rebelling against my own father, against my own necromantic family, against the vampires, against the druids. Who remains now, but me? Nothing.

And so it begins.

My final thought is the beauty of it all. I have drifted away from my body, to join the spirits, but not before I see the dead walking the earth.

I’ve chosen the cemetery where you fixed my Schwinn and gave me the stone in the first place. That’s where it will begin.

I can see them now.

Peeled, rotting fingers, erupting through the earth, accompanied by moans of hunger.

I underestimated you, but you have fallen, and the war of the dead has truly begun.

The only question now, is who will wage it in my place?

There is still necropotence to be found, should someone else desire to become the overlord of death…

C…C….cogath dar marbh….

CREDIT: D.A. Wilcox