Two men go in to a pub. One of them says
"Fancy a pint"
The other guys says "hey, it's my round".
The first guys says "fair enough, I'll have a pint of mild please."

The second guy orders two pints of lager. They drink them in silence, leave, and never speak to each other again.

A magician took up three ornaments, one by one, and breathed life into them. It was to impress his host, a lady who giggled with joy as she watched the porcelain figurines dance about her mantlepiece. It was a trio of cats he had brought to life. They pounced upon one another, clinking gently, chasing their china tails and mewing at the towering figures who watched them. Sneaking a glance at his host, the magician saw her eyes shine with delight. Sensing her interest growing, both in him and his craft, he looked for something more impressive to whisper sentience into.

Casting his eyes around the busy living room, full of rustic furniture and crowded with miscellany, his eyes landed upon a grandfather clock. The magician placed his wine on the table and slid his fingers down the front of the dusty wood, inspecting the patterns of gilded silver that adorned it. He noticed the creature sat above the clock. A smile tweaked his lips and he sighed. It was perfect. He beckoned the lady over and stood on his tip toes, breathing life into the clockwork owl that stood atop the grandfather clock. He stepped back and waited. The lady wriggled up against him, all bright and giddy.

The owl cocked its head and shivered its wings. Light glinted off them in the candlelight. It was made of brass and steel, with layered plates for wings, dulled from years without care. Its eyes were mismatched; one a black opal, the other a miniature clock that kept time with the grandfather clock itself. It had been a family heirloom and curio since the lady could remember, though she had not looked closely upon it for many years. The owl leapt from the clock and flapped its wings hard, shaking off dust. They sounded like knives being sharpened, plates sliding fiercely against one another. It soared about the room before returning to its perch.

The lady’s laugh rang like windchimes and she leapt upon the magician, his cantrips soon forgotten in a fog of lust. The combined magics of wine and the late hour took them.

The cats continued to play upon their mantlepiece until exhaustion, and their chiming noises eventually stopped. They curled up together, the trio entwined. The magic would leave them by morning and they would become a new ornament, a memento of the lady’s night of wonder. She would find them in the morning and smile. The magician would be gone by then, as he always was, never to be seen again. He changed his face often.

Time slipped past. The grandfather clock chimed out a late hour. The lady and her lover stirred, but did not wake.
The clockwork owl had sat, motionless and forgotten, observing them with its ever turning eye. It pondered questions, something bewitched things never did. In his excitement, the magician had breathed too much of himself into it. He had breathed a desire into the owl that he did not intend; one he had kept buried deep within himself.

The owl needed an answer to a question it did not understand. It cast itself from the grandfather clock and flew from the window. It was searching for something, though it was not quite sure why.
Rain glanced across its wings and head as it flew, curiously watching the monsters below. They charged in file, eyes beaming with light, and screamed at one another from time to time. Some slept outside houses, rain crashing over their backs.

The owl did not recognise these things. However, it soon saw something it did know. Landing on the rooftop of a terraced housing block, it turned its opal eye to the night sky. The moon hung bright. This, it recognised. It did not know how, or why, but the name of this vast white symbol in the sky was known to her.

Her?

With a flare of awareness, she knew that’s what she was. Staring up at its lunar magnificence, she felt a sudden rush of personality. A burning desire for identity. This felt important, though she did not know the words to place what this was, nor how to make it concrete. Yet she felt that if she found the thing she sought she would know herself.

She took to the air again. Etheric ribbons pulled at her, drawing her north. A thaumaturgic connection, accidentally gifted in the magician’s breath, tugged at the owl like a leash. The magician woke with a start. Something deep within him felt empty. He rose from the bed and quietly dressed, taking care not to wake his sleeping host. He did not look back as he slipped from the bedroom.

He paced the apartment, deep in thought. Patting at his pockets, he found his wallet was missing. Thinking back through the haze of wine, he remembered he had placed it upon the mantlepiece. He found it beside the newly formed ornament, a trio of cats entwined. Looking at his watch, he saw it was almost four.

The magician crept to the kitchen and ran a glass of water. This feeling in him was like a thirst. Deep and wrenching and a necessity. He sipped at the tepid liquid, half-smiling as he thought about his host.

The grandfather clock chimed.

A memory sparked in the magician’s mind. He finished his water and crept to the grandfather clock.

His eyes grew wide when he saw the absent space above the clockface and he rushed to grab his jacket. He felt what he had lost. Through the sky the owl cut, rain now lashing down through the streets of London. Bright lights twinkled all around. She flew lower until she was barely above the street lamps, where she could inspect the staggering few who bustled and blundered their way past King’s Cross station.

Landing on a sign to get a more considered look, she peered at the passersby through her timepiece eye. Since she had been gifted life, the hands had steadily grown faster.

The people below blurred before her. Their faces were at once young and fresh, smooth skinned and haggard, wrinkled, like crumpled paper. At once babes and ancients. Some held one age more than another, some only fleetingly old, others only occasionally young. All of them were marked by the rainfall and blurred at least somewhat by time. The owl saw them as their manifest selves and through her timepiece eye. The magician, she recalled, had often looked old and strained, particularly when compared to his youthful host.

The owl cocked her head with a delicate clinking sound and watched the passersby, perched with one leg slightly bent. A group of women, gaudy and painted, staggered past, lips full red and eyes near the same. Their most common aspect was young, infantile, with faces smooth as plastic. They were whooping and wailing and deliriously shrieking to one another. All but one. The owl watched her closely. She stood behind the rest, joining in the revelry, but perhaps not so keenly. Her face was not young often. It was mostly ancient and her hair shone silver in the rain. Her eyes were as dull as her friends’ were bright. As one of her compatriots stumbled to the kerb, and the gang shrieked with laughter, this woman shook her head, just slightly.

Cocking her head back, the owl watched the group disappear into the distance. Through her opal eye, they had all seemed alike. Young and happy. The final one, aged beyond her surface years, old and wise and cynical in her heart, recalled something in the owl. The owl felt close to her, somehow.

She decided to follow and prepared to leap from her perch, metal wings stretched wide and ready, when she shuddered. Her wings felt taut and slow, and she hesitated. The magic breathed into her was more great than the magician had intended, yet it ebbed away with each passing moment.

Her timepiece eye span ever faster. Then it spied something that struck the owl as peculiar.

A man in a hooded top, jeans, and white trainers up to the ankle. He was walking through a gate at the end of the road, arms held close to his body, lightly shivering. The owl stared at him through both eyes; he did not blur, not as the others did. There was a shimmer to him, a youthful essence that glistened, but he never aged further than his present self.
This held the owl’s attention. The man closed the gate behind him and walked onward. The owl spread her stiffening wings and followed. It was the same route she was being drawn to, anyway.

She glanced at the other people she flew over. They all blurred from fresh infants to taut-skinned revenants, with their closest aspects shining clearest and most constant. Not a single person matched the hooded man who had disappeared through the gates. Not a single person was without the withered face of death. Even those who would die young, she saw their skin decay and rot, as it would once they were in the ground.

The owl flew over the gate and followed. She felt the etheric string pulling her onward.

She was close. The magician hurried through the rain and followed the path of the owl. He had whispered arcane words of finding to the grandfather clock and he could now see the trail the owl had left behind, hanging in the air like multicoloured pigment.

The hollowness inside him, he understood now. It had taken him some time to shake off the haze of sleep and alcohol, but he could tell already where the owl’s path was headed.

As he rounded the corner and saw the graveyard, tears mingled with the raindrops that ran down his face.

The hooded man stood over a tombstone, scratching his beard. The owl landed in the branches of a tree behind and turned her eyes on him, all curious and intrigued by his lack of aging. The thaumaturgic string that had drawn her here was still present, but no longer pulling.

This man was a magician also, an artist who held sway over life and death. He did not age before the owl’s eye, because he would never age again. Not since he had grown into his craft 100 years earlier had he aged a day. He leant forward, hands planted on the wet grass, and whispered to the grave before him. He breathed life through the soil and into the corpse below.

“Hey!” cried the owl’s maker. He was standing a few dozen feet away. Lightning forked high above.

The necromancer scrambled to his feet and ran without a glance, kicking a bunch of flowers to one side and racing off between the graves and into the gloom of the graveyard. He knew, given his dark craft, it was best to simply disappear when caught. No words would do as an explanation. The magician followed for a dozen steps, waving a fist, then gave up his pursuit. He returned to the grave.

Standing above it, he felt nothing. He had wept en route, once he realised where he was headed, but this was more through anger at his own blundering more than any great sorrow. Rain continued to hammer all around and lightning spat across the sky, illuminating the graveyard bright, if only for a moment.

The owl watched him. Her wings were increasingly stiff and she knew she would fly no more, the magic inside her was leaking away too fast. She leapt from foot to foot and leant forward.

The magician looked around and found the pigment trail leading up into the tree. He looked up to see the owl perched, head cocked. He whispered arcane words.

The owl juddered and felt her life, born of his hidden desire, ebb towards the magician.

As this desire returned to him and the emotions that lived within it, the magician sank to his knees. Leaning forward, he took the sodden flowers and placed them back against the tombstone. Adjusted them so they sat as she would have liked. It must have been her mother, he thought. She had always come here often, to sit with her daughter. She always brought flowers. She must have continued to do so, even after all these years.

“Melissa,” he whispered. The desire was almost completely returned now and emotions rioted through him. His voice cracked as he spoke. He took several deep breathes, fighting back sobs. It had been many years since he had been here. He had tried his best to forget.

The owl’s vision dimmed as she watched through her timepiece eye. Before her, the magician aged rapidly. A hundred faces, aging in an instant. Where earlier that night his many faces had been handsome, if aged, they were now grey and shrivelled; the ashes of a burnt out hearth, once alight with passion, now long dead.

The magician wiped the rainfall and tears from his face and stared in the direction the necromancer had ran. He had not recognised him. A rogue thaumaturge from the far side of London, perhaps, or even further afield? He knew everyone in these parts. They knew him and his tragedy also; none of them would have come here. He wondered how it was the necromancer had decided on Melissa’s grave as a plaything. Was it just chance?

He looked down at the earth below and tried to picture his wife. It had been so many years since she passed and he had done his best to forget. There was a time he had visited her grave daily, but the pain had been too much.
He had done his best to forget. Wine helped dull the guilt of his indiscretions.

The magician pounded the ground with fists and wailed. He sobbed and spluttered apologies. How he should have done more. How he should have changed things. How he was sorry for his life since her passing.

The owl stood still, an ornament once more, protected from the rain by a cover of leaves.

There was a scratching noise, deep within the ground, just barely audible over the rain.

Five white worms pushed through the wet soil. They wriggled alive. More scratching followed, and another five pushed through the ground.

The magician stepped back, jaw slack.

More white erupted from the earth. A skeleton dragged itself out of the ground, inch by inch. Covered in groundmuck and with worms dangling, the skeleton stood before him. Staring straight at him. The necromancer had performed an art few can. He had brought a life back from the dead, a skill the magician had long wished for.

Though not like this.

The magician looked upon the bones of his wife and he cried. Half of her skull was missing, as were most of her teeth. A skeleton fractured. A skeleton covered in filth. Her skull was half full with soil and tufts of grass sat upon her shoulders and head. It was his wife, Melissa.

She approached him with wavering, clumsy footsteps, and lay a skeletal hand upon his shoulder. He fiercely shrugged it off and, head in hands, continued to sob. She took a step back and waited. His face may have changed, but she still knew him, somehow.

Some minutes passed.

The magician’s eyes were red and sore. He had not wept like this since that night they had found her in the middle of a road, body broken. It has been a night like this, with hammering rainfall and howling winds. She had been out with friends and a young man made a poor decision, thinking himself safe to drive despite a night of drink.
He had buried the image of her on the ground, limbs stretched out, deep inside him, but it came flashing back now. Stark and red.

Melissa’s skeleton waited. The magician forced himself to look at it. At her.

The skeleton was stood, one leg slightly bent, as was her way. It was her, certainly. The magician shook his head and tried to think.

He was a powerful man with great skill in the art. True, he did not command life and death, the dark path only few dare to take, but he had many talents. The necromancer had returned his wife to the world, an unwitting favour. The rest? He could do the rest, surely?

All she needed was a vessel, something greater than this ghastly white figure before him. One that had recently possessed spirit. The magician cast his eyes around the graveyard, but shook his head. A broken monster of a risen corpse, no-matter how new and fresh, would not do. Not for his wife. Not for Melissa.

His eyes landed upon the owl. Lying dormant in the wet grass, face down, hard and cold and lifeless. The desire for his wife that had given it temporary life now returned to the magician. Though the owl was a mere ornament once more, something puissant still lingered within it.

The magician blew his nose, beckoned the skeleton closer, and began to whisper once more. A stream of abstract words, so similar to those he had used the night before, those used to breath something of himself into something inanimate. Yet these words contained so much more.

As he finished the words, the skeleton fell in a heap on the wet grass. The magician let loose a hacking sob and laid a hand on an ivory wrist.

The owl shivered. It stood, cocked its head and stretched its wings. Light glinted off them in the moonlight. She spread her wings wide, scattering droplets of water, and took flight. She swooped in a wide circle, then back to the magician’s shoulder. She looked into him through her timepiece eye and he looked at her. She stretched out a wing and patted the magician on the cheek.

His face was young once more. No longer ancient, no longer grey and haggard. But youthful and happy, as it had been, all those years ago.

Just as she remembered it.

A magician took up three ornaments, one by one, and breathed life into them. It was to impress his host, a lady who giggled with joy as she watched the porcelain figurines dance about her mantlepiece. It was a trio of cats he had brought to life. They pounced upon one another, clinking gently, chasing their china tails and mewing at the towering figures who watched them. Sneaking a glance at his host, the magician saw her eyes shine with delight. Sensing her interest growing, both in him and his craft, he looked for something more impressive to whisper sentience into.

Casting his eyes around the busy living room, full of rustic furniture and crowded with miscellany, his eyes landed upon a grandfather clock. The magician placed his wine on the table and slid his fingers down the front of the dusty wood, inspecting the patterns of gilded silver that adorned it. He noticed the creature sat above the clock. A smile tweaked his lips and he sighed. It was perfect. He beckoned the lady over and stood on his tip toes, breathing life into the clockwork owl that stood atop the grandfather clock. He stepped back and waited. The lady wriggled up against him, all bright and giddy.

The owl cocked its head and shivered its wings. Light glinted off them in the candlelight. It was made of brass and steel, with layered plates for wings, dulled from years without care. Its eyes were mismatched; one a black opal, the other a miniature clock that kept time with the grandfather clock itself. It had been a family heirloom and curio since the lady could remember, though she had not looked closely upon it for many years. The owl leapt from the clock and flapped its wings hard, shaking off dust. They sounded like knives being sharpened, plates sliding fiercely against one another. It soared about the room before returning to its perch.

The lady’s laugh rang like windchimes and she leapt upon the magician, his cantrips soon forgotten in a fog of lust. The combined magics of wine and the late hour took them.

The cats continued to play upon their mantlepiece until exhaustion, and their chiming noises eventually stopped. They curled up together, the trio entwined. The magic would leave them by morning and they would become a new ornament, a memento of the lady’s night of wonder. She would find them in the morning and smile. The magician would be gone by then, as he always was, never to be seen again. He changed his face often.

Time slipped past. The grandfather clock chimed out a late hour. The lady and her lover stirred, but did not wake.

The clockwork owl had sat, motionless and forgotten, observing them with its ever turning eye. It pondered questions, something bewitched things never did. In his excitement, the magician had breathed too much of himself into it. He had breathed a desire into the owl that he did not intend; one he had kept buried deep within himself and weighed down with debauchery.

The owl needed an answer to a question it did not understand. It cast itself from the grandfather clock and flew from the window. It was searching for something, though it was not quite sure why.


*

Rain glanced across its wings and head as it flew, curiously watching the monsters below. They charged in file, eyes beaming with light, and screamed at one another from time to time. Some slept outside houses, rain crashing over their backs.

The owl did not recognise these things. However, it soon saw something it did know. Landing on the rooftop of a terraced housing block, it turned its opal eye to the night sky. The moon hung bright. This, it recognised. It did not know how, or why, but the name of this vast white symbol in the sky was known to her.

Her?

With a flare of awareness, she knew that’s what she was. Staring up at its lunar magnificence, she felt a sudden rush of personality. A burning desire for identity. This felt important, though she did not know the words to place what this was, nor how to make it concrete. Yet she felt that if she found the thing she sought she would know herself.

She took to the air again. Etheric ribbons pulled at her, drawing her north. A thaumaturgic connection, accidentally gifted in the magician’s breath, tugged at the owl like a leash.

*

The magician woke with a start. Something deep within him felt empty. He rose from the bed and quietly dressed, taking care not to wake his sleeping host. He did not look back as he slipped from the bedroom.

He paced the apartment, deep in thought. Patting at his pockets, he found his wallet was missing. Thinking back through the haze of wine, he remembered he had placed it upon the mantlepiece. He found it beside the newly formed ornament, a trio of cats entwined. Looking at his watch, he saw it was almost four.

The magician crept to the kitchen and ran a glass of water. This feeling in him was like a thirst. Deep and wrenching and a necessity. He sipped at the tepid liquid, half-smiling as he thought about his host.

The grandfather clock chimed.

A memory sparked in the magician’s mind. He finished his water and crept to the grandfather clock.

His eyes grew wide when he saw the absent space above the clockface and he rushed to grab his jacket. He felt what he had lost.

*

Through the sky the owl cut, rain now lashing down through the streets of London. Bright lights twinkled all around. She flew lower until she was barely above the street lamps, where she could inspect the staggering few who bustled and blundered their way past King’s Cross station.

Landing on a sign to get a more considered look, she peered at the passersby through her timepiece eye. Since she had been gifted life, the hands had steadily grown faster.

The people below blurred before her. Their faces were at once young and fresh, smooth skinned and haggard, wrinkled, like crumpled paper. At once babes and ancients. Some held one age more than another, some only fleetingly old, others only occasionally young. All of them were marked by the rainfall and blurred at least somewhat by time. The owl saw them as their manifest selves and through her timepiece eye. The magician, she recalled, had often looked old and strained, particularly when compared to his youthful host.

The owl cocked her head with a delicate clinking sound and watched the passersby, perched with one leg slightly bent. A group of women, gaudy and painted, staggered past, lips full red and eyes near the same. Their most common aspect was young, infantile, with faces smooth as plastic. They were whooping and wailing and deliriously shrieking to one another. All but one. The owl watched her closely. She stood behind the rest, joining in the revelry, but perhaps not so keenly. Her face was not young often. It was mostly ancient and her hair shone silver in the rain. Her eyes were as dull as her friends’ were bright. As one of her compatriots stumbled to the kerb, and the gang shrieked with laughter, this woman shook her head, just slightly.

Cocking her head back, the owl watched the group disappear into the distance. Through her opal eye, they had all seemed alike. Young and happy. The final one, aged beyond her surface years, old and wise and cynical in her heart, recalled something in the owl. The owl felt close to her, somehow.

She decided to follow and prepared to leap from her perch, metal wings stretched wide and ready, when she shuddered. Her wings felt taut and slow, and she hesitated. The magic breathed into her was more great than the magician had intended, yet it ebbed away with each passing moment.

Her timepiece eye span ever faster. Then it spied something that struck the owl as peculiar.

A man in a hooded top, jeans, and white trainers up to the ankle. He was walking through a gate at the end of the road, arms held close to his body, lightly shivering. The owl stared at him through both eyes; he did not blur, not as the others did. There was a shimmer to him, a youthful essence that glistened, but he never aged further than his present self.

This held the owl’s attention. The man closed the gate behind him and walked onward. The owl spread her stiffening wings and followed. It was the same route she was being drawn to, anyway.

She glanced at the other people she flew over. They all blurred from fresh infants to taut-skinned revenants, with their closest aspects shining clearest and most constant. Not a single person matched the hooded man who had disappeared through the gates. Not a single person was without the withered face of death. Even those who would die young, she saw their skin decay and rot, as it would once they were in the ground.

The owl flew over the gate and followed. She felt the etheric string pulling her onward.

She was close.

*

The magician hurried through the rain and followed the path of the owl. He had whispered arcane words of finding to the grandfather clock and he could now see the trail the owl had left behind, hanging in the air like multicoloured pigment.

The hollowness inside him, he understood now. It had taken him some time to shake off the haze of sleep and alcohol, but he could tell already where the owl’s path was headed.

As he rounded the corner and saw the graveyard, tears mingled with the raindrops that ran down his face.


*


The hooded man stood over a tombstone, scratching his beard. The owl landed in the branches of a tree behind and turned her eyes on him, all curious and intrigued by his lack of aging. The thaumaturgic string that had drawn her here was still present, but no longer pulling.

This man was a magician also, an artist who held sway over life and death. He did not age before the owl’s eye, because he would never age again. Not since he had grown into his craft 100 years earlier had he aged a day. He leant forward, hands planted on the wet grass, and whispered to the grave before him. He breathed life through the soil and into the corpse below.

“Hey!” cried the owl’s maker. He was standing a few dozen feet away. Lightning forked high above.

The necromancer scrambled to his feet and ran without a glance, kicking a bunch of flowers to one side and racing off between the graves and into the gloom of the graveyard. He knew, given his dark craft, it was best to simply disappear when caught. No words would do as an explanation. The magician followed for a dozen steps, waving a fist, then gave up his pursuit. He returned to the grave.

Standing above it, he felt nothing. He had wept en route, once he realised where he was headed, but this was more through anger at his own blundering more than any great sorrow. Rain continued to hammer all around and lightning spat across the sky, illuminating the graveyard bright, if only for a moment.

The owl watched him. Her wings were increasingly stiff and she knew she would fly no more, the magic inside her was leaking away too fast. She leapt from foot to foot and leant forward.

The magician looked around and found the pigment trail leading up into the tree. He looked up to see the owl perched, head cocked. He whispered arcane words.

The owl juddered and felt her life, born of his hidden desire, ebb towards the magician.

As this desire returned to him and the emotions that lived within it, the magician sank to his knees. Leaning forward, he took the sodden flowers and placed them back against the tombstone. Adjusted them so they sat as she would have liked. It must have been her mother, he thought. She had always come here often, to sit with her daughter. She always brought flowers. She must have continued to do so, even after all these years.

“Melissa,” he whispered. The desire was almost completely returned now and emotions rioted through him. His voice cracked as he spoke. He took several deep breathes, fighting back sobs. It had been many years since he had been here. He had tried his best to forget.

The owl’s vision dimmed as she watched through her timepiece eye. Before her, the magician aged rapidly. A hundred faces, aging in an instant. Where earlier that night his many faces had been handsome, if aged, they were now grey and shrivelled; the ashes of a burnt out hearth, once alight with passion, now long dead.

The magician wiped the rainfall and tears from his face and stared in the direction the necromancer had ran. He had not recognised him. A rogue thaumaturge from the far side of London, perhaps, or even further afield? He knew everyone in these parts. They knew him and his tragedy also; none of them would have come here. He wondered how it was the necromancer had decided on Melissa’s grave as a plaything. Was it just chance?

He looked down at the earth below and tried to picture his wife. It had been so many years since she passed and he had done his best to forget. There was a time he had visited her grave daily, but the pain had been too much.

He had done his best to forget. Wine helped dull the guilt of his indiscretions.

The magician pounded the ground with fists and wailed. He sobbed and spluttered apologies. How he should have done more. How he should have changed things. How he was sorry for his life since her passing.

The owl stood still, an ornament once more, protected from the rain by a cover of leaves.

There was a scratching noise, deep within the ground, just barely audible over the rain.

Five white worms pushed through the wet soil. They wriggled alive. More scratching followed, and another five pushed through the ground.

The magician stepped back, jaw slack.

More white erupted from the earth. A skeleton dragged itself out of the ground, inch by inch. Covered in groundmuck and with worms dangling, the skeleton stood before him. Staring straight at him. The necromancer had performed an art few can. He had brought a life back from the dead, a skill the magician had long wished for.

Though not like this.

The magician looked upon the bones of his wife and he cried. Half of her skull was missing, as were most of her teeth. A skeleton fractured. A skeleton covered in filth. Her skull was half full with soil and tufts of grass sat upon her shoulders and head. It was his wife, Melissa.

She approached him with wavering, clumsy footsteps, and lay a skeletal hand upon his shoulder. He fiercely shrugged it off and, head in hands, continued to sob. She took a step back and waited. His face may have changed, but she still knew him, somehow.

Some minutes passed.

The magician’s eyes were red and sore. He had not wept like this since that night they had found her in the middle of a road, body broken. It has been a night like this, with hammering rainfall and howling winds. She had been out with friends and a young man made a poor decision, thinking himself safe to drive despite a night of drink.

He had buried the image of her on the ground, limbs stretched out, deep inside him, but it came flashing back now. Stark and red. He remembered the blue lights and the yellow-jacketed officials, the broken body, that couldn’t possibly have been her. The magician had whispered a sobbing goodbye and walked away, refusing to look back.

Melissa’s skeleton waited. The magician forced himself to look at it. At her.

The skeleton was stood, one leg slightly bent, as was her way. It was her, certainly. The magician shook his head and tried to think.

He was a powerful man with great skill in the art. True, he did not command life and death, the dark path only few dared to take, but he had many talents. The necromancer had returned his wife to the world, an unwitting favour. The rest? He could do the rest, surely?

All she needed was a vessel, something greater than this ghastly white figure before him. One that had recently possessed spirit. The magician cast his eyes around the graveyard, but shook his head. A broken monster of a risen corpse, no-matter how new and fresh, would not do. Not for his wife. Not for Melissa.

His eyes landed upon the owl. Lying dormant in the wet grass, face down, hard and cold and lifeless. The desire for his wife that had given it temporary life had now returned to the magician. Though the owl was a mere ornament once more, something puissant still lingered within it.

The magician blew his nose, beckoned the skeleton closer, and began to whisper once more. A stream of abstract words, so similar to those he had used the night before, those used to breath something of himself into something inanimate. Yet these words contained so much more.

As he finished the words, the skeleton fell in a heap on the wet grass. The magician let loose a hacking sob and laid a hand on an ivory wrist.

The owl shivered. She stood, cocked her head and stretched her wings. Light glinted off them in the moonlight. She spread her wings wide, scattering droplets of water, and took flight. Clumsily swooping in a wide circle, she landed on the magician’s shoulder. She looked into him through her timepiece eye, stretched out a wing, and patted the magician on the cheek.

His face was young once more. No longer ancient, no longer grey and haggard. But youthful and happy, as it had been, all those years ago. Just as she remembered it.

The magician reached up and ran fingers down the owl’s wing. With a jolt, he pulled his hand away. Crimson was beading on his finger. One of the owl’s steel feathers had snapped when she fell, leaving a fierce edge. He studied the owl closely, looking for any more damage. Inspecting her legs, feathers, and steel breast, his eyes soon fell upon her mismatched eyes. He stared deep into them, looking for his wife.

The magician lifted an eyebrow, just slightly. His smile faltered as he wrapped his bleeding finger in his handkerchief. The owl leant in to nuzzle him and he found himself wincing as the sleek metal pressed against his face. The owl felt his hesitation and paused. She cocked her head and peered at him, inches from his face.

He was aging before the owl’s eye, wrinkles breaking on his skin like cracks appearing on an ice covered lake. His hair turned ash white and bags drooped from his eyes.

The owl pointedly stood lop-sided and nodded three times. She reached out a wing again, cautiously. The magician looked away. Raindrops trickled down his cheeks.

The magician took the owl with both hands and crouched beside his wife’s grave. He placed her on the upturned soil, a deep frown scoured his brow as she looked up at him. It wasn’t the same. It never could be. She was dead and this thing before him was nothing but a facsimile. He scooped up a handful of wet soil and moulded it into a ball, pushing in his thumb to leave an indent.

With great effort, he steadied himself. He blew out through pursed lips, took a moment to focus, and inhaled deeply, drawing the life out of the owl. He held this inside for a moment, before breathing it into the sphere of earth he had made. He smoothed over the indent quickly.

The owl sat still in front of the tombstone. The timepiece eye had stopped turning once more. As the magician stood, he crumbled the earth between his hands, scattering it over his wife’s grave.

“Goodbye,” he whispered, and for the second time his life, he walked away from his wife. Only this time, he didn’t turn back.