Khargrad was a middling town whose moderate fortune was entirely owed to the great, ever-glowing rifts in the sky where the world of the dead bled into the world of the living. It was from this Khargrad earned its nickname: The Town of Twilight, so named because in a ten-mile radius around the town there was a strange and unexplainable stasis. The sun was forever an inch below the horizon, the sky a purple-and-orange ombré with clouds like stained putty and trees poised in eternal autumn, their leaves forever one day from being shed. Though people still died, there was a ambience to the place that made it feel as though death—that final end—was forever looming but never truly arrived. As one traveling bard colorfully put it in a limerick which all Khargradians loathed:

  There once was a mage necromantic,

  Whose love for cold bodies was frantic.

  So he want to Khargrad,

  but his enthusiasm thawed,

  When the corpses were still quite organic.

  None had more reason to hate this infamous verse than the Smertsky clan, whose family trade for thousands of years of recorded history was commercial necromancy. They were, in fact, the only magical family in the kingdom permitted to employ necromancy and only for a single purpose which everyone from the loftiest king to the dirtiest peasant sought them for: Speaking with the departed. What won the Smertsky clan their royal monopoly and permitted them to keep it for a thousand years were the strict standards to which they held their ancestral practice. Most famous was the family’s vow of secrecy regarding what occurred between their patrons and their deceased family members. Stories and legends abounded of Smertsky necromancers withstanding the most heinous of tortures in order to protect their client’s confidentiality. Dead men—as many an unscrupulous person realized—could tell not only interesting tales, but dangerous and compromising ones.

  In addition to their famous vow of secrecy, the Smertsky clan had a litany of other, less lurid restrictions no less important for preserving their reputation. These included stringent investigations of family lineage to prevent fraud, bans on certain types of questions concerning the afterlife, and a rigorous training regimen including healing magic should the words of the deceased cause unfavorable reactions in the living, up to and including cardiac arrest.

  Least interesting of all to outsiders were the standards the clan held themselves to as a matter of professionalism, family tranquility, or upholding the clan's reputation. Among these prohibitions was the one forbidding members of the Smertsky family from participating in the communion of living and dead as anything other than necromantic interlocutor. Nor could they become professional necromancers until their 30th birthday after a long and arduous apprenticeship, at which point they could conduct the ritual as primary interlocutor only with the oversight of a master necromancer, a path which took yet another ten years to complete. It was no wonder, then, that all the patriarchs of the Smertsky households were forever on the lookout for their progeny misusing necromantic powers. All of the patriarchs, that is, save Vladimir Smertsky, father of Ivan and Peter Smertsky, who could not do so because he was dead.

  “Brain bleeding,” the doctor from the church told the family.

  Upon announcing the cause of death to the necromancer family seated around the parlor, the good doctor proceeded to explain in scientific detail the latest theories from the Royal Medical Academy about how a brain might spontaneously bleed from the inside-out. Ivan Smertsky, a boy 15 years old, who had undergone the vows and initiation of an apprentice necromancer not a month prior under a very lively, very healthy father, did not care to hear about these brain bleeding theories and fled his family’s parlor. With a flick of her eye, Ivan's mother, Katerina, an accomplished sorceress herself in the magic of protecting social reputation, charged Ivan’s elder brother Peter with bringing Ivan back. Peter hastened to do so at once.

  He caught up to his brother at the front door.

  “He’s an insensitive bastard, Ivan. I understand. But you can’t get up and— you shouldn’t run from dad’s— from the…”

  Peter wasn’t able to articulate what the social occasion exactly was. It was not a funeral or a wake, but nor was it the horrifying moment when the two brothers were practicing the sacred words by their father when he suddenly shuddered and announced he thought the sun might finally set in Khargrad before collapsing into a pathetic, father-shaped heap, never to regain its rigidity. The occasion of the doctor’s explanation of death was therefore a strange thing. Something which did not provide closure but merely signaled a liminal transition between life and death, like the last day of autumn. A lingering thing.

  Ivan remained silent in the face of his brother’s admonition and Peter put up no resistance when Ivan led them both out the front door and onto the brick path leading away from the manor. Above them, red and yellow leaves waved as they walked, refusing to fall. Both felt disdain for the tactless doctor and that Peter was only chastising Ivan at the behest of their mother. Ivan cared little for his mother. She was, in his estimation, cold, stiff, and far more interested in matters of social reputation and etiquette than in the warmth of familial intimacy. The only difference between her and the corpses their family made a living reanimating was that the undead were, on the whole, more gregarious.

  More like his father had been.

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  In his life, Vladimir Smertsky—or ‘Vladi’ to all but the tax collectors—had been the exact opposite of the kind of man one imagines to make a living speaking with the dead. He possessed a loud, booming voice which reminded the listener of a blasting tuba, though his words were never anything but jovial and kind. His cheeks were ruddy and whiskered with a big red nose which had a habit of flaring right before he broke into one of his notorious belly laughs. He loved food and drink perhaps a bit more than most, giving him a larger than normal belly from which to laugh from. Nonetheless, he was the first to make sure others ate their fill. All who knew him loved him and for the fifteen years fate had allotted Ivan to get to know his father, he’d never known anyone to have an unkind word to say about him. Best of all were his stories and tales which he could tell with such aplomb that a professional bard might hang his head in shame. In short, Vladi Smertsky was everything Ivan wished to be when he grew up aside from, as of three days prior, dead.

  What had most rattled Ivan was learning firsthand how the word ‘dead’ had a way of consuming all other descriptors until it was all that remained. ‘Kind’ and ‘loud’ were the first to go in the moments after his father collapsed followed swiftly by ‘upright.’ Over the past several days it had consumed ‘ruddy’ and ‘warm,’ and Ivan was all too aware he could count on his hands how many more days his father could be described as ‘dry’ and ‘solid’ if he was not cremated first. Off in the future there would come a day when ‘dead’ would be his father’s sole remaining attribute, to the exclusion of even 'remembered.'

  The two brothers stopped at the gate of their family’s manor. Ivan, filled with anger, made it all the way to the wrought-iron bars before succumbing to the need to dry heave. The term ‘brain bleeding’ sloshed in his head as though it were the relevant fluid itself. Peter pressed his hand against his brother’s back while he heaved, transferring as much of the heat from their house’s hearth to his brother as he could in Khargrad’s perpetual autumn chill.

  “I’m sorry…” Ivan moaned.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” Peter said softly, his voice imbued with a hint of his father’s sonorousness yet with the scratchiness of youth.

  “Not to—” Ivan wiped his lips in spite of their dryness, “—not to you. I mean… to our clients…”

  “What do you mean?” Peter asked.

  “I didn’t know… I didn’t know it was like this…”

  Peter knew what his brother meant. Their family’s business, the business of temporarily resurrecting the dead so their family members could speak with them one last time, was just that: a business. Through sheer routine, the act of crossing the threshold between life and death was robbed of its horror and majesty until one began to find the outpouring of emotion from the living family members distasteful, embarrassing, and pitiful. Peter could recall a time not long after his twelfth birthday when, called upon by his father to assist with a ritual for King Jermaine III to speak with his dead mother, Peter was treated to the revolting sight of the most powerful man in the kingdom wailing like a newborn. This was especially so considering how frank and unemotional the ghosts were. Every time he conducted it, the ritual felt to Peter like some kind of awful joke rather than a somber ceremony, though he dared not say so to any of his family members.

  “Once you’ve gathered yourself, I think we ought to head back inside,” Peter said, withdrawing his hand from his brother’s back. “The medical examination should only last another half an hour or so. You can put up with that.”

  “I won’t,” Ivan said. “And you haven’t the force to make me.”

  This was certainly true. Though Peter inherited his father’s voice and dark eyes, he owed his slight build and cool temperament to his mother. His younger brother Ivan, though his junior by five years, was already beginning to develop his father’s barrel chest and firm limbs. Should it come to a tussle, Ivan would emerge the victor.

  “What can I say to convince you?” Peter asked.

  “Nothing. I will not sit through that smarmy doctor describing our father like so much meat! Let the other houses tut at us as the townsfolk do, but I won’t go back. If mother cares more about our reputation than about respecting our father’s memory, let her follow him,” Ivan said, turning away from the house and preparing to march off into the woods.

  Peter grabbed his brother’s thick wrist. “You don’t mean that, Ivan.”

  “I do! Let me go!”

  Peter felt closer to his mother than to his late and somewhat demanding father and thus felt he understood her better. What Ivan believed to be their mother’s coldness was precisely the means by which she was respecting his memory. Their father, forever the carouser, was not the one who ensured bottles of wine and suckling pigs were purchased for the feasts he so loved to host. It was Katerina Smertsky who coordinated the servants and managed the family’s coffers and comforted their often distraught clients. All of this was necessary for keeping in the good graces of the town of Khargrad which forever suspected they were up to no good. Her domestic diligence left little time for the affection and warmth their father had possessed in abundance, yet Peter could not help but see his mother and father as a single unit acting in harmony.

  In light of that, Peter viewed his mother’s continued assiduity in the face of death as nothing less than a promise to their late father to continue serving family and clan to the best of her ability. And the more Peter considered this, the more imperative it became to assuage her concerns and ensure Ivan returned to finish the proclamation of death. Ivan attempted to yank his wrist from his brother’s grasp, but a peculiar strength filled Peter and he kept hold of Ivan. Peter was not confident, however, that he could repeat this feat. What he needed was something to offer his brother in exchange for returning to the house.

  Peter knew what he planned to propose, but the enormity of it filled him with dread and buried the words in his throat. “What if…”

  “What!? Out with it!” Ivan said. “Speak now or I shall be off.”

  “Suppose… if you were to come back, I could conduct the communion ritual for you.”

  The rebellion drained from Ivan’s eyes at the allusion to something no member of the Smertsky clan was permitted to even consider, let alone act upon.

  “That is a poor joke, Peter,” Ivan said.

  “I am not being funny. I will do the ritual between you and—” he must say it aloud now or lose his courage, “—father. I’ll do it if you come back with me.”

  Ivan’s mouth twitched. He wanted to say no and to call his brother insane for suggesting they break one of the clan’s most important covenants. But even more than that, he wanted to speak with his father again. One final time during which he could ask his father to tell the old the memories and tales he had not had time to bequeath.

  “Very well,” Ivan said, turning back towards the manor house. “As mother wishes.”