Cohost writing prompt: @ImpressionsOfDetail — Necromancy worked in strange new ways on things that were never literally alive
The sea has never been Zirconia's favourite place, she reflects, fiddling with the buttons on the cuff of a borrowed jacket. It's a rough thing, a fisherman's coat, over a mismatched outfit of things scraped together from pitying hands, all her own effects currently residing at the bottom of the bay.
When she'd woken suddenly to find the little yacht's cabin already ankle-deep in water, her only thought had been to rouse Iris and scramble, barefoot and benightgowned, into the boat's trailing tender. In the time it had taken to shiveringly scull across the moon-frosted chop from anchorage to the small fishing town's slipway, the boat had wallowed entirely beneath the water.
The proprietress of the waterfront boarding-house has kindly opened a single off-season room for them, and Iris has sent a telegram to her lawyer to arrange for money and practicalities; and then Zirconia's friend settled into a numb silence. She says nothing of it, as ever, but the trim teak-decked twenty-eight footer is one of the few things remaining of her family before the childhood house fire, a receptacle of memory, of innocence and carefree girlhood, of love.
The sea has never been Zirconia's favourite; it's no friend to the necromantic trade. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change— when the entire art is to take that which doth fade, as it is, arrest and reverse it. The metamorphosed things of the seas are thefts from the necromancer's purview.
Time is of the essence.
She bends over the oars a final time, pulling deep before swinging them up to rest, dripping blades jutting over the dinghy's transom; arranging her scant, scavenged supplies on the rower's seat amidships. Candle. Graveyard herbs. Knife. Most importantly: iron determination.
Two matches gutter in the salt breeze before the candle lights. She shields it with her body, crushes aromatic leaves to ring it, carefully nicks her arm and extends it over the gunwale. Her own salt drips into the water, a metronomic connection, and she bends her will and begins to chant.
A lesser necromancer would spurn even the attempt. A slightly lesser would try, and concede defeat. The ship never lived, strictly speaking, no matter how much its sinking is a metaphorical death. Iris might be grieving it, but grief is not a natomy, grief is not the soul; what is there for Zirconia's art to seize? And Zirconia's answer is to sink her awareness in the cool, life-teeming brine, close the uncompromising talons of her will around the yacht's wreck, dig in her heels, and declare: AN I WILL IT: ANYTHING.
This is madness. To pull on the ropes of those things lost as if they were kite-strings and declare that something will move, is only to guarantee that something, on one of the ends of the rope, indeed will. This is the siren call of hubris, that bleeds out the lives and liveliness of scores of the finest necromancers every year.
Seething with occult power, the cut in her arm unclotting, the candle burning down to a guttering wick in a thumbprint-sized puddle of molten wax in a halo of resolidified dribbles, Zirconia hauls until her heart is rabbit-quick and her vision tunneled, her hearing only a seashell counterfeit of the sea. The moon slides across the sky.
When something finally gives, her first thought is that death has, ridiculously for one of her trade, taken her unawares. And then the water breaks around the rising masthead; and the little yacht, its canvases disheveled, bobs up like a cork, water jetting from portholes with more than natural force as the boat is dragged back, actively rejecting its foundering.
The oars have the weight of planets as she unships them, dips them, rows for the boat. The transom feels a mountain, as she shakily climbs its ladder to tie off the dinghy's line, and she all but collapses on the deck before closing her fingers on the tiller; sparks of sensation leaping up her arm and bursting behind her eyes, she swoons.
She wakes several times, a little, beneath the drowsy weight of bedclothes, and drifts back to sleep each time. Finally true wakefulness can't be put off, and she opens her eyes to a sunlight room, Iris by her bedside, and fingers tightly wrapping her own.
She squeezes Iris' hand a little, and her friend, slumped in a chair with her chin propped on her other hand, starts violently, stares, and bursts into tears. New tears, Zirconia notices, old salt tracks already on her cheeks.
"I'm quite all right," she begins to say, and manages only a dry-throated croak, ending in a cough.
Still sobbing, Iris gently supports her head and presses a glass of water to her lips, until her throat is sufficiently soothed to protest that she can sit up and drink normally.
"You stay exactly there," Iris says stormily, so Zirconia huffs and acquiesces — with some privately telling measure of relief at not testing, right now, whether she can in fact sit up — and dozes once again.
"All the locals are terrified of you, now," Iris tells her, several days of rest later, as she sits neatly on a seafront bench with a brand-new shawl wrapped around her shoulders. It's trimmed with black lace and obsidian beads; she half wishes it were, instead, made of some warmer fabric.
"As they should be," she replies airily.
"She started taking on water in the first place because some kind of bung below the waterline decayed away or worked loose," Iris says, looking down the waterfront towards the moorings at which the yacht had been discovered, neatly bobbing in perfect unroped alignment with a mooring spot, Zirconia fainted dead away at the helm with her arm still sluggishly bleeding. There's a sad pile of water-damaged belongings heaped alongside. "They showed me; you can see right out of it. You seem to have permanently terrified the water into staying outside of it."
"I haven't done anything at all to the water," Zirconia says, not without a trifle of smugness. "Necromancy and the sea don't at all mix."
"Zirconia." Her friend's lips are compressed into a lately familiar, unamused line.
"Iris," she imitates. "Do you know how few of my craft could even have attempted such a thing? I shall have monographs written about me."
"You nearly had epitaphs written about you," Iris says sharply, and Zirconia reaches out to squeeze her hand.
"Fatigue," she says blithely.
"You bled yourself nearly to death," Iris says, looking determinedly away, in the direction of the boat. "Zirconia—"
"All right," Zirconia says, not much chastened. "I shan't do it again."
Words buzz around them, hanging like an unspoken threat: that Iris is perfectly well aware, as is the world, of Zirconia's social life: of the private sapphic gentlewomens' clubs of the City, of the constant edge of scandal that neatly manages never to entirely catch the wind, of the endless turnover of women of repute — of some kind or another — she is seen in the company of; none of whom she'd spill a single drop of her blood for, let alone unasked.
Why never me? wonders the unvoiced question. Why never me, when, it seems—
Zirconia straightens the seams of her long gloves, and waits, unsurprised, for the question she'll never have to answer unless it's asked, to remain unspoken. And, faintly bitter on the tongue, wonders if Iris too can simply infer the answer from the fact of her own silence.