I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 131: A Dark King’s Marriage Proposal (1)

Ebony stepped back before she’d decided to.

Her body moved on its own, retreating from the figure on the path, and the pressure rolled over her exactly as it had that night long ago — that suffocating, soul-deep weight that wasn’t life and wasn’t death and wasn’t even the empty zero between them. Her stomach lurched. Her knees wanted to fold.

And yet — it wasn’t the same. It pressed on her like before, but it didn’t crush her like before. "(It’s lighter. Or I’m heavier. A year of this world between then and now, and the thing that nearly broke me on that porch is only... very bad, instead of the end of the world. When did that happen?)"

The necromancer-king studied them, hands folded, his cloudy white eyes drifting.

"Now what," he said, in that calm, courteous, almost noble voice, "would a pair of foreigners be doing in my country?"

"Just passing through, Majesty." Hrazfel stepped forward smoothly, all his earlier savagery folded away into the manner of a man who knew this court.

"No harm meant, no trouble intended. I’ve leave to cross — for life." He tugged his ruined collar aside, baring a patch of skin over his heart, and there, tattooed into the flesh, was a small horned skull flanked by bat’s wings. "See? Granted and sealed."

The king stroked his chin.

"Let me see, let me see... no, I don’t recall granting any dwarf a lifelong pass." He tilted his head. "Only old Herifol."

"Hrazfel!" the dwarf barked, stabbing a finger at his own chest. "It’s Hrazfel, you ungrateful child — I didn’t haul your sorry hide out of the fire all those years ago just for you to forget my name!"

Ebony’s blood turned to ice. Beside her the red dragon’s jaw dropped open, and her own breath stopped — "(He just yelled at the death-king. He just called the necromancer an ungrateful child. We’re dead. We are so spectacularly dead—)"

The king’s pale face lit up like a lantern.

"Hrazfel!" He spread his arms. "By the dark, so it is! It’s good to see you, you old terror — and look at you, not a day changed in, what, five hundred years? It’s uncanny." And the two of them fell on each other laughing, the dwarf and the lord of the dead, embracing like a man greeting a grandfather he hadn’t seen in too long.

Ebony stood frozen, mouth slightly open, and very slowly closed it.

They walked off down the path side by side, catching up, paying her no mind at all.

How’s that daughter of yours, the fierce one? — Grown and gone, breaking hearts in the south, last I heard; how are those children of yours holding the borders? And Ebony and the red dragon trailed after them, because there was nothing else to do.

But the path was bending. Away from the edge of the territory. Away from the barrier she’d planned to hug.

Away from the plan entirely, deeper into the red-skied dead land, and her unease climbed with every step — "(This is wrong, we’re going the wrong way, but if I bolt now I die, or it feels like I die, and feeling like it is enough.)" — until the two old friends reached a great black tree and stepped into it, vanishing as though the bark were a curtain.

Ebony stopped.

"(I could run. Right now. I could turn around and run for the barrier and I’d probably make it out — he can’t follow me past it, can he? This whole place runs on different rules, the red sky, no sun. Something here can’t bear the light. He wouldn’t chase me into it—)"

The red dragon shoved her from behind with its snout, hard, insistent. Go in. Better than going it alone.

She swallowed, and stepped into the tree.

It gave like jelly, cold and clinging, and then she was through — into a palace of black stone. Behind her hung a mirror in a frame of the same black wood she’d just passed through, and in its glass she could see, perfectly clear, the withered forest she’d left. She turned.

The hall was full of mirrors, dozens of them, each showing somewhere else — and one of them she recognized at once, with a fresh chill: that lonely plain under the night sky, the very field where she’d first met the necromancer, where an idiot zombie had knocked on a door that should never have been knocked.

"(So that’s how he moves. Portals. Every mirror a door. He really does sit at the center of every hostel he owns. And now I know — every one of those roadside inns opens here.)"

She followed the king and the dwarf, the dragon at her heel.

Several minutes of black corridors brought them to a dining hall — an elegant table running its length, heaped with an abundance that made no sense in a kingdom of the dead. Roast chickens. Whole pigs. Ducks glazed in orange. Bowls of bright fruit, fresh as if just picked.

Ebony’s stomach reminded her how long it had been since she’d eaten. She reached, almost without thinking, for a piece of fruit—

The red dragon’s head snapped across and blocked her hand, eyes wide with warning.

She froze. "(Don’t eat the dead king’s food. Right. Of course. Every story ever told, don’t eat the food.)" She drew her hand back slowly.

A small mercy that Stor was still asleep, coiled warm around her neck, because the hatchling would have dived headfirst into the spread without a second’s thought.

The king snapped his fingers.

Every chair at the table slid back on its own and then lunged, scooping its occupant off their feet and into place — Ebony landed in hers with a graceless thump, the dwarf in his, the dragon nudged up to the table’s edge, the king settling at the head with the ease of long habit.

Still not looking at Ebony, the necromancer turned to Hrazfel.

"And the rest of the old company? Where’ve they got to — Borin, Dural, that mad fellow with the iron jaw, what was his name—" He rattled off a string of names Ebony had never heard, every one of them unmistakably dwarvish.

Hrazfel sighed, and some of the laughter went out of him.

"Scattered, Majesty. Every man to his own road, in the end." He reached for a cup. "Me, I took up dragon-rearing. Honest trade, mostly. Well — honest enough, kept clear of the moralizing kingdoms and their precious laws."

The word dragon-rearing sat in Ebony’s chest like a stone. She thought of horns sawed off living beasts, of cages too small to turn around in, and her jaw tightened — but she said nothing.

The king, at last, looked at her.

"And who is this," he said. "Why does she want to cross my land?"

Hrazfel coughed to clear his throat. "Ah. That. The two of us — we’ve each got people worth saving, snatched up by that wretched Eclipse lot."

The king’s face soured, and beneath the distaste was something almost like worry. "The Eclipse." He set down his cup.

"Bad business, that. If they’ve taken your people, friend, my honest counsel is to let them go. Forget them. Get on with your lives." He waved a pale hand. "Some things aren’t worth the dying."

Ebony’s palm hit the table.

The sound cracked through the hall. Hrazfel went rigid; the dwarf actually swallowed.

The king turned his cloudy eyes back to her, unhurried. "Something to say?"

Sweat stood on Ebony’s forehead, but she met the white gaze. "Life is worth too much to throw away like that," she said. "Especially someone else’s. Every one of those lives is — it can’t be repeated. Can’t be weighed, can’t be measured, can’t be priced. It’s beyond any of that."

The king stopped smiling.

The temperature in the hall dropped, and a cold, alien magic spread out from him across the room — thick, smothering, the same drowning pressure as the porch all those nights ago. Ebony’s gorge rose. Every instinct screamed at her to vomit, to scream, to crumple the way she had then.

"(Not this time. Lose composure here and I never leave. Hold. Hold.)"

"I’m a Visitor," she said, forcing the words out level. "I’ve been through death. It’s not simple. It’s not the way they tell it. And above all — it isn’t fair, to die when there was something you could have done."

The necromancer spoke, calm and very cold.

"A human life," he said, "is a meaningless tangle of choices and whims. Even the immortal are born, and swell, and vanish in time — all their precious caprices with them. To cling to other lives is only to beg the world to murder you slowly, for they too will die, every one. So what is the point?"

The dark energy thickened with each word, pressing down, filling her lungs like cold water. "What is it you imagine you’re proving? What, precisely, is one supposed to do about it?"

Ebony’s vision narrowed. The weight on her chest was crushing.

She lit the fire.

{{Life Magic × Warrior’s Art: Purifying Fire Fists}}

Green flame roared up around her, white at the edges, and she turned it not outward but on the air itself — burning the king’s dark magic before it could sink past her skin, carving herself a pocket of clean air in the drowning dark.

"Improve!" she shouted, on her feet now without remembering standing.

"That’s what we do about it. That’s what we have to do about it! If we’re all going to die anyway — then isn’t it better to die as the best version of ourselves? Isn’t it better to live chasing a dream than to die for a painful reality?"

The king rose from his chair.

And he walked toward her — not around the table, but along it, stepping onto its surface, and where his bare feet passed the feast rotted.

Roast meat blackened and shriveled, fruit caved in and browned, the whole abundant spread collapsing into gray dust in the wake of his stride, until he stood over her at the table’s edge.

"If I killed you now," he asked softly, "and raised you up to serve me as my slave for all eternity — would that be living for a dream? Or dying for a reality?"

The dark pressed down so hard Ebony’s legs shook under it. It would have been so easy to stay sitting.

She stood anyway.

She dragged herself up against a weight that wanted to flatten her into the floor, and she looked the lord of the dead in his swirling white eyes, and she said:

"It’d be a shit job with a garbage boss. Where they fire you the day the boss leaves this world — by somebody else’s hand, or maybe his own. Because in the end—" she held the gaze "—not even the immortal are spared being forgotten. Isn’t that right?"

The necromancer’s expression flickered. For one instant — surprise, real and undisguised.

He raised his hand.

"(So this is it.)" Ebony didn’t look away. "(At least this time I was honest. With the world, and with myself. That’s not the worst way to go.)"

And then the king of the dead threw back his head and laughed.

The pressure burst like a held breath, gone all at once, the cold rushing out of the hall. He dropped back down to sit on the edge of the table, still chuckling, and looked at Ebony with a wide, delighted, genuinely fond grin.

"You’re funny, you brat from another world. I like you." He wiped at one cloudy eye. "I knew I would, that night on the porch — knew it the moment you wouldn’t quite knock." He leaned forward, the grin sharpening into something playful and dangerous in equal measure.

"So. How about we play a little game, you and I?"

Ebony, still wreathed in guttering green fire, did not relax.

"If you win," the king said, "you walk out of here with an army at your back." He spread his hands wide. "And if you lose — you’ll be my bride."