Tantrics Of Old Read Free

Isn’t that what the government was all about anyway? Protecting the people from magic. With magic. No one was complaining.
    Adri wasn’t one to complain aloud either. All these years he had kept a low profile, living among the everyday people—people scared of magic and of the supernatural. One look at his apartment, and anyone would’ve known that he, Adri Sen, was a Tantric. It was a one-room flat with an attached bathroom, crammed with all kinds of oddities. Books fought for space everywhere—not just the old leather-bound volumes holding myriad secrets, but also bestsellers, cookbooks, and medical journals. In the middle of the room lay a shelf, crudely dividing the space into two parts, stacked with vials and vessels and bottles. Some had old, tired-looking plants growing within them, some were filled to the brim with strange powders and liquids, and odd vapours swirled inside some. A lamp made out of human skulls conjoined together hung surprisingly low, casting light out of the eye sockets and open mouths. On the free space available on the stone floor, etched with a sharp object, was a pentacle, and a few hundred candles, now put out, littered the area around it. Snakeskin dried along the windowsill of the single window in the room, and next to it was a small bed. Two figures currently occupied this bed—one half prostrate, and the other sitting on the edge, watching the first, intently.
    The one half-prostrate on the bed was Adri Sen, having just woken up from one nightmare to another. He would’ve sighed if he was older—having known the life of a Necromancer better by then—but he was just twenty-three and he could find no casual remark to throw at the creature in front of him. No, Adri was shaken, and visibly so.
    Death was facing him. Smell. Decay. Little girls singing sadly. Old men gazing beyond the horizon in long, lingering, final looks. Shackles binding dreams. Death knells. Feasting crows. Piles of corpses. Stories and warnings. The mask of rust. The cloak of chains.
    Adri was overwhelmed. An aura was penetrating him. Killing his thoughts, leaving none save dread. Trance.
    Adri looked at the mask. Rusted metal held together with punched bolts. Grates for the mouth and dark holes for the eyes. Ugly. Heavy. Consuming. Eternal. A deformed skull. A tomb. Adri looked for the eyes within, but could not see them. Something moved in the hollow. Liquid. He could not take his eyes off the mask. It drew his gaze, forced him to look at what it was. Decay. The mask stood for everything that had given way to the marches of time, everything that was no more, everything that had been. Broken apart, torn down to the bones, until life itself was swallowed, devoured by the rusted skull that sat before him. Adri tore his eyes away from the mask. A shawl covered the upper body, tattered, dry. Black. More metal over dark robes. Leggings, rusted. Gauntlets, rusted. Bloodstains, dry. Chains trailing down the body, twisting, turning, running along like hair, spreading on the floor, trailing across it. Thin darkness, slithering around its body. Like fluid. A snake. A shadow. Dark and viscous. Death.
    Adri’s mind began to slowly recover from the aura. This wasn’t a spirit, he realised. It was a Horseman, one of the four. Death, to be more exact—an old being, spoken about in stories and lore, an entity beyond anything he had ever witnessed.
    ‘Forgive me, this is the only place I could find to sit,’ Death spoke slowly. His voice carried a grated, cold, dry edge. Like a razor. It was the eeriest voice he had ever heard, and he had heard many—Demons used many voices to frighten and impress.
    ‘You’re a Horseman, aren’t you?’ Adri asked slowly, sitting up.
    The creature nodded slowly. ‘I am Death,’ it said.
    Adri wondered—not with the lazy air of a stargazer, he wondered, and wondered fast—why Death was here. The only answer that presented itself was not a reassuring one. Of course people died all the