ONCE UPON A TIME, in a squat little cottage with a blue shingled roof at the End of the World, there lived a necromancer.

Err-perhaps this is not the best place to begin. He hadn't always been a necromancer, you see; I worry that if we skip directly to the dramatic bits of this story, we'll miss rather a lot of context. Do you-do you mind?

Let's wind this story back a few decades so that we might, as they say, begin at the beginning...