True Love and Necromancy

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?

I'll imagine you just said, "No, I don't mind at all," with an expression of accommodating

indulgence, and wind this story back a few decades so that we might, as they say,

begin at the beginning...