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Prompts and motivation to create something out of nothing
r/WritingPrompts
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“I want you to know that you are speaking before the highest panel. It is a matter of absolute urgency that our defense force leadership learns of what happened as soon as possible.”
“Yeah. Okay, “ the being on the viewscreen said with a faltering voice. If it was caused by the prospect of speaking before people that important or the recent happenings, it was hard to tell.
The room for the highest panel wasn’t opulent. It was actually rather small and not really befitting the wide-reaching decisions being made there. But its use had grown from history and was deeply imbedded in tradition, so the twelve beings of five different species sitting therein had to cram themselves at one end of the table for all of them to see the antique 2D viewscreen.
One of the twelve, the same who had spoken before, addressed the being on the other end of the screen, “Please verify, your are responsible for a scientific outpost, population circa one thousand?”
“That’s correct,” the base commander replied.
“You said there were no casualties?”
“Yes, there were none.”
“That never happened before. How did you do it?”
“It … it wasn’t us. We asked <humans> for help.”
“<Humans>?” the speaker repeated the unfamiliar word.
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Thank you to u/LubbockGuy95 for the original prompt!
They originally called us the Corpse Walkers, the Deadguard. It was a ceremonial role mostly. Back in the day, we would guard the corpse by day and the ghost by night in our dreams, helping send the soul to their final rest and return the body to the earth from which it came.
There was always the potential for misuse, and always those who would raise and walk corpses for their own personal goals. But how is that new? What ability or skill or tool can’t be used for ill intent in the wrong hands?
But then there were a few Corpse Walkers with far too much power and not enough conscience, and the surface of the world crawled with corpses and screams of the living, and then suddenly it wasn’t the benevolent Corpse Walkers anymore, it was the foul-hearted necromancers.
Necromancer sounds so much worse, so much eviler than Corpse Walker, doesn’t it? And evil… Well, evil you had to kill, evil you had to destroy down to the last cell of its body, ensuring that the vengeful ghost couldn’t exert its “unnatural” influence over the dead and reattach to its former vessel.
So we were killed and we died and we hid, and by the time history realized its mistake, the Corpse Walkers—no, we were necromancers now—had dwindled to only fragments living in the dark, forgotten corners of society.
It was possible to be a necromancer by the light of day again, but it was hard. You needed a license and updated certificates, and to even make the pinky finger of a corpse twitch, you needed at least four basic forms, not including the laundry list of medical and consent paperwork involved with making the dead move.
In fact, being a legal necromancer was so difficult, it was far easier to not be a legal necromancer at all. So most necromancers stayed in the shadows, operating in dingy alleys, lurking in the backrooms of fortune telling shops in rundown strip malls.
And the few necromancers willing to deal with the difficulties for the sake of living in the light? Either they were a lawyer or had tumbled unknowingly, irrevocably into the daylight, and the paperwork was the only thing shading hastily constructed waxen wings from the prying eyes of the sun.
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