Novice Necromancer
Northern Necromancers: The Island Book 1
by Amy B. Nixon
Genre: Romantic Dark Fantasy
Novice Necromancer is a revised edition of my discontinued book Nordstrøm Necromancer. It includes new content, sprinkled throughout the story.
Intrigue, monsters and a forbidden affair. What could go wrong?
Learyn Dustrikke didn’t believe in black magic, until her aunt’s secrets forced her to flee San Francisco and seek shelter on the ominous Nordstrøm Island – an obscure Norwegian holm uprooted from the realm Vanaheim.
Ensnared by the island’s magic, Learyn finds herself in deadlier peril than ever before.
Between juggling the principles of necromancy, waltzing with intrigue and monsters, and falling for a man whose love is forbidden by the gods, can Learyn untangle the web of family secrets before it’s too late? Or will the threat she fled from catch up with her?
Hop on a ride to cinematic lands of atavistic Norse mythology in this NA Dark Fantasy series, as Learyn learns why black magic should not be taken lightly.
(Disclaimer: Every book in the series contains swearing, deaths and occasional gore. The main characters are also featured in my other series Northern Necromancers: The Dragons.)
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The excerpt features one profanity, but if you prefer to spare some language-sensitive bloggers, you can stylize it as “f-ck” (I did the same on Amazon to bypass Author Central’s restrictions, so I’m totally fine with that if you have to censor it). I also left line breaks above and below the paragraphs in Italics since they’re a scene during which the character has a vision of the future, and the Italics/ line breaks would make it less confusing for the bloggers.
“Miss Dustrikke, I’d like a word with you.”
Confused by his request, I waited for everyone to leave before I stepped onto the raised podium.
He studied me from head to toe with that pair of unnaturally light blue irises. Cold and intrusive, like an avalanche sliding across every inch of me. Hoar-frost scalded my guts. My heart dropped in my stomach with the weight of a glacier. Why did he always look so freakishly intimidating?
When his icy blues finally trailed back up, I barely prevented myself from squirming. And then the world unraveled around me.
I was standing in what was supposed to be a spacious hall, or at least it had been once before.
Erosion had struck the stony walls, demolishing them to nothing more than crumbled ruins. They laid bleak and barren in hues of fading grays. Jagged outlines of damaged columns spanned up to an open sky, devoid of stars. A pale crescent moon barely illuminated its onyx darkness, shedding light on a thinning haze.
My eyes darted down as I stepped onto something hard and uneven — a serrated piece, chipped off the marbled tiles. Disarrayed, aegean patterns covered the icy floor, like protrusive veins running under pale skin. Shudders slithered up my spine at the sight of hollow trunks and tarred roots, mere footsteps from where I stood. Those trees were dead. They shouldn’t have been able to break through the stone.
I navigated my way across the ruins carefully, diving deeper into the remains of a dead world.
Until it wasn’t dead anymore.
Eerie tones flew past my ears. A haunting rock ballad, coming from somewhere ahead. I braved the freezing temperatures and kept walking. A man and a woman, locked in a tight embrace, appeared out of the blue and spun around me. I barely caught a glimpse of their formal clothes before they disappeared. Just as I wondered if they had been some crazy mirage, another couple broke through the haze.
More and more people manifested before my shocked stare, all of whom were waltzing. Trying to tell mirages from reality, my eyes lingered on the formal suits and puffy dresses. Torn and battered, they revealed naked flesh. Rotten, flaky, decomposing flesh.
A horrified gasp ruptured my throat. The cloud of somber mist lured out my breath, robbing me of my fleeting warmth. A sinister thought rushed through my mind — the haze was sucking away my life, like it had sucked away theirs.
I panted, writhing like an aspen twig.
The haze had disappeared, as had the ruins and the waltzing corpses. I was standing back on that podium, facing Dann’s creepily intense stare.
“What the fuck was that?” I whispered, still trembling from the lingering aftertaste of what I had just experienced.
“What was what, exactly?”
“That! The ruins, corpses, music and… everything!”
His face hardened in an obscure grimace.
“You were there!” I pressed when he didn’t say anything. “You were there with me all the time!”
“I never stood from my chair, Miss Dustrikke, and you never left this room.”
My mouth fell open. I peeked over my shoulder to see nothing more than rows of tables and empty chairs, stacked neatly in their ascending formation. I could swear on the creator of the Python programming language, moments ago we had both been in that dreadful, gothic, post-apocalyptic excuse of a ruined hall.
Tearing my gaze off the empty room, I faced his stone-cold features.
Incorporeal blades raked through my spine while the waltzing corpses still glided through my head, possessing my thoughts with images of their rotten, festering flesh. Between the livid skin and the soul-sucking haze, his familiar presence had felt like the only factor that had prevented me from losing myself to the cold, ghastly darkness. Which was a paradox on its own, considering I didn’t even know him well, least of all trust him.
Still, why was he pretending nothing had happened?
“We both walked through those ruins.” Treacherous notes of desperation bled from my shaky voice. “You were right behind me.”
“As I said, neither of us left the room.”
So, I’d had… a hallucination, or something? A vision? Was it even possible? Did necromancers have visions? Omens? Predictions about the future? Past lives? What the hell was going on?
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Rampant Necromancer
Northern Necromancers: The Island Book 2
My life got freakier than a black metal music video. Ironic, since my blood runs with black magic.
Newbie necromancer Learyn Dustrikke quickly learned why leaving San Francisco and moving to a chunk of Vanaheim land nestled in Norway was a bad idea.
Nordstrøm Island is anything but the fairytale land she thought it would be. Murderers run rampant in broad daylight. Freshly deceased human flesh rots before her eyes. Wrongfully cast spells serve as a one-way ticket to a soulless eternity. And sneaking out means getting exposed to lethal forces, which are impervious even to necromancy.
The last things on Learyn’s mind are worrying about Dann’s eerie secrets or the furtive warnings of a mysterious dark elf. But in a world where reality is more terrifying than any nightmare, seeking love and friendship will cost her more than she’s prepared to lose.
And that’s just the calm before the storm…
Hop on a ride to mythical lands of ancient Norse mythology in this NA Dark Fantasy series, as Learyn learns why black magic should not be taken lightly.
(Disclaimer: Every book in the series contains swearing, deaths and occasional gore. You’ll also see some characters and events from my series Northern Necromancers: The Dragons.)
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Amy B. Nixon is a designer and columnist by day, an aspiring fiction author by night and a 24/7 caffeine addict.
When she’s not working or writing, Amy enjoys cooking, playing board games, taking roadtrips, shocking the people around her with dark humor, playing the piano and ruining group photos due to not being able to pose seriously for a proper picture.
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