Jingle. Jingle.
The tall and thin Christmas spirit drug the Necromancer out of the neighborhood into the woods. At least that is what Noir guessed, considering the pile of snowdrift her touch imparted on him. Besides dragging, he could her bells jingling with each step they took deeper into the woods.
Jingle.
Then the bells stopped. Noir lifted his head from the ground, realizing that his legs were so cold and numb he didn't notice that the spirit had dropped him. He felt solid planks underneath him. They creaked as he tried to stand up.
"That's a no go." Noir muttered under his breath. His eyes, now uncovered from the snow started to adjust to his surroundings.
The 'woods' the spirit had dragged him into wasn't just woods. She'd dragged him into a abandoned building, a big one at that. She'd taken him through a broken down wall, but the structure was old and large enough he didn't think there was any risk of collapse.
He sat up instead. Through an ancient window he saw the glass fog and frost up. On the other side, bending down to look at him in the glass was the spirit. Noir blinked at her.
"This place? What is it about this place you want me to do?"
Again, no response. She just watched him. Noir sighed.
He suspected that the burden now was on him to figure out the next step. The necromancer tried to collect himself, eventually regaining enough feeling in his legs to try and walk. The building was huge, but covered in black and char.
"Burned. This used to be a place, but it burned down." Noir took in a breath, trying to get a smell of it. Old rot greeted him. Some rust. Charcoal.
He looked around. Next to the spirit's window was a fireplace, just as big as the spirit had been. Most of the mantel had been burned down to the bare bricks, but some items lay in pile of rot under the mantel. Noir bent down and poked at it.
"Stockings hung with care." He shook his head. A single burnt and rotten stock was under a pile of detritus, a bell hung from it. It rang quietly. It echoed throughout the building. Boards creaked as Noir stood up. "Familiar time of year."
He turned back to the spirit's window. She was gone. "I'm sure she isn't done watching me, though. But I'm curious now."
Noir let some of his senses open, trying to feel for the dead. He heard a child singing. And he heard another crying:
"In the bleak mid-winter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone,
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on Snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long Ago"
Noir tried to focus his senses, to see the ghosts or whatever still hid in this place.
Next to the fire place, a small boy sat shivering. His flesh was charred and twisted. In the ghostly images Noir saw, the boy still burned with fire. The necromancer cringed. The ghost boy would still remember the trauma of that death over and over.
Nonetheless, Noir Badarte asked his question. "How can I help you?"
The boy looked up from his half-crying, half-singing. He took his hands from his face, revealing melted skin that only had a single eye and a misshapen mouth. "Halp? Please halp!"
The boy nodded. Noir gritted his teeth and extended his necrokinesis. Noir could see dark tendrils extend from his body to the boy. Each tendril was Nothingness, stary black that neither existed nor didn't exist. Nothing and all possibilities, all tied to his own magicks.
"Gulhp! NO!"
Painful energy shocked back at Noir. Before he could stopped it, his spell had twisted. It failed to do what he intended. Instead of helping mending the ghost and give it a better true form. "What?"
A spell meant to give relief. Noir meant well, he knew that. Instead, he felt each of his nerves on fire as something ended the spell. But not without putting every nerve in his body into hyper-pain mode.
Meanwhile, the child ghost started to scream and squeal. It went berserk, becoming a manifested ephemeral being. Ectoplasm dripped with each of its steps. Then not just one, but a dozen, then a hundred tiny burning children manifested, transulecent green ectoplasm coming into being. Noir's twisted spell unleashed the dormant spirit of the house.
Each child ghost screamed absurdities. Chanting and ranting, each child-ghost tore at his clothes or flung debris at him. Covered in soot and trying to get away, Noir started to scream.
Panicking, Noir closed his eyes. Blindly he tried to find his way out of the house, tripping over a hole in the floor and falling.
Wham!
With the wind knocked out of him, Noir moaned and looked around. No more child-ghosts. Not here. "No," He told himself, "Not child-ghosts. Poltergeist. Its friggin' poltergeist hive mind."
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