The Necromancer's Apprentice

<sub>Once, the world had forty necromancers; there were never to be any more than that, and now there are not quite so many, but once there were forty.

The Lady is all that remains of these originals, and the professional descendants of her fellows are quite convinced she is immortal. She has taken twenty apprentices, yet all have died of old age before she relinquished her hold of her position. Some say she sold her soul to the devil in order to remain in this world as a shepherd of the dead, and that he took her eyes as a sign of their pact.

Yet her twenty-first apprentice knows none of this, for he is just an orphaned child she ushered off the streets and into a secret world of death.</sub>

Unlike others in her line of work, she wields neither sword nor bow nor gun, but rather a punter's pole, much like the one Charon used in mythology to pilot his boat across the river styx. At sixteen feet, it can seem a rather unwieldy thing, but it has served her faithfully in all her years of navigating death.