The smell of burned flesh filled everything when I placed the cauldron. I focused on the sound of the boiling water and the crackling of the flames. The foreign herbs had dyed them an opaque, intense red, as if it were blood.

I detested that part of the process, but I was not willing to forgive them, not after that night.

Entering the cemetery had always been simple. The spirits of the dead accepted me immediately, so they did not alert the sentries. Being a necromancer, an ally of Death, was complicated, but it certainly offered its advantages.

My son was still burning in the Mayor Plaza, in the center of town. They had put a price on his head many years before, when he began to rob the rich to give to the poor, slaves, exiled and heretics. Those who were like us.

Many lost the gold that belonged to their descendants because of mine, and although they tried to find his family to extort him, we were both careful as was necessary so that they never knew.

While he was helping the living, I attended to the dead, helping them in their last hours to leave in peace. The other peasants avoided talking to me more than through letters, but they always came to me when one of their relatives went into agony.

I facilitated the journey, helped them cross the threshold between the worlds, and when the need was genuine or the danger imminent, I brought them back for a couple of hours to be next to their relatives.

Almost all were in debt to me, more than one thanked me for helping them avoid the agony, and almost always helped my boy when he looted the golden vaults of those who robbed the people by means of taxes and extortion.

With my own eyes I had seen the king's guards incinerate the huts of those who could not pay them when they demanded the gold that, they claimed, belonged to the crown. More than once the streets were filled with the smell of smoke and death, while I hid among the crowds and shadows to guide whole families to rest.

That night, however, I was not there when the fire burned, when my only family, under the orders of an insane king thirsting for blood and power, left this world. I was not there because it was not necessary. It was my son who received me in the cemetery, along with all those I had helped to cross.

I recognized them all. The old blacksmith who worked near the entrance of the kingdom, the prostitute murdered in the alleys of the east of the capital, the scholar and his son who fed the sick, the shaman who cured many and was abandoned by her family when she was girl... Everyone knew why I was there.

It was them who stifled my screams with their breath when I cut my arm, who stopped the blood and closed my wounds with their icy touch, and it was them who carved the bone with their own hands.

Now, I just have to wait for the meat to separate completely. Legends there is no wand capable of commanding the dead, of dominating the souls, but the wise ones of antiquity did not know the deceased could forge such a weapon.

I am a heretic, a pagan, an infidel and an enemy of the faith. The priests of the churches say we all have a guardian angel, except for me, and they are right. I have an army of the dead.