expanded history

[crowedthedead]

Quick Timeline
Birth ☠ Childhood ☠ Adolescence ☠ Young Adulthood ☠ Now

QUICK TIMELINE

• Ellen Halloway has an affair with Nicodemus Theodore Crowe.


• Soeki Halloway is born on a Friday, October 13th, to Calvin and Ellen Halloway, and doesn't resemble Calvin at all.


• Ellen Halloway dies when Soeki is 3, in a car accident.


• As a small child, Soeki interacts with the spirits of the dead, but this is brushed off as him making up imaginary friends.


• Older brother Adam becomes his closest family member, essentially acting like another parent.


• Soeki grows up strange and 'off', is bullied often at school and retaliates by verbally tearing down his classmates.


• When Soeki is 12, Adam goes off to college, leaving him alone with Calvin.


• Soeki is 15 when Adam calls and tells him he won't be home for the summer; Adam has obtained a lucrative internship.


• Soeki lashes out at Adam over the phone, then steals the spare car to go for a joyride.


• He meets Ryelle Katsaros, a necromancer his own age, and they slay a vampire together and become best friends.


• At 16, Ryelle summons Soeki's mother's spirit as a birthday gift, and she confesses that Calvin is not his real father.


• Soeki meets Nicodemus, his biological father, and learns of his necromancer heritage. He begins studying necromancy and witchcraft with Nicodemus and Ryelle.


• At 17, Calvin signs his parental rights over to Nicodemus. Soeki moves in with his bio dad and half-sister.


• At 19, Ryelle dies in an exorcism gone wrong.


• Soeki summons a demon to bring her back, and fucks it all up. He becomes stuck with the demon after binding it to his soul in order to protect himself and others.


• Some months later, Soeki makes a deal with Rista to save Ryelle's soul from Hell, in exchange for promising not to banish Rista. Unfortunately, this fails, and Ryelle remains damned to Hell. While angry, Soeki's anger turns on himself, because it's his fault for leaving another open loophole.


• A year later, Soeki's father is kidnapped by vampires. Rista, the demon, helps him destroy the nest and save Nicodemus and the vampires' other prisoners.


• At 23, Soeki and Rista have grown close. Rista lets slip a loophole to the contract in order to clear up the tension in Soeki's family and Nicodemus banishes him to Hell.


• Soeki moves out with his sister and goes into private investigation, while keeping up his exorcisms and ridding the community of dangerous supernaturals.


• For five years, he learns to live on his own, and grows more independent while also strengthening his magic and growing his knowledge.


• At 29, some teenagers steal Soeki's summoning book and summon Rista back from Hell. He kills most of them.


• Soeki finds Rista again that night, and with his help, covers up the kids' deaths and magically muddles the memories of the only surviving teen.


• They re-cast the soul bond, fully consensually this time.


• Soeki spends three more years with Rista, continuing his work and strengthening their strange relationship. Unfortunately, Rista seems to grow weaker and more fatigued as time passes.


• They figure out that the soul bond is parasitic, and Soeki is now the one benefitting. The bond has to be broken.


• After deliberation, they agree to break the bond and allow Rista to go back to Hell. They know they'll meet again when Soeki's life ends, and Rista promises to carve out a little corner of Hell for them both to rule over together.


• With the bond broken, he disappears from the mortal plane, and Soeki is left alone.


• At 32, he moves to a new city by himself to grow his list of contacts and expand his magical repertoire, growing stronger in preparation for his eventual demise.

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BIRTH
Soeki Halloway was born on October 13th, a Friday that year, as the Halloway family's worst-kept secret. He was the product of an affair between Mrs. Ellen Halloway, and Nicodemus Theodore Crowe, a young doctor finishing up his residency at the local hospital. Ellen had long been unhappy in her marriage to Calvin Halloway, and unsettled in her role as stay at home mother to their then 7 year old son, Adam. She longed for something more exciting, something more special than days of cleaning up messes and attending PTA meetings for Adam's elementary. She was still searching for her own identity, and her eccentric interests often became the center of her world. One day she brought her son in to the emergency room after he'd shoved a rock up his nose, and she and Nicodemus, who was unbeknownst to her an actual necromancer and witch, hit it off immediately. Her younger, handsome boyfriend became the exciting thing in her life that made her different.

Their affair lasted for a whirlwind six months. While Nicodemus fell hard and was preparing his life and home to receive Ellen and Adam into it, Ellen was making up with her husband. The shine had worn off. She never planned to leave him for Nicodemus. Instead, she broke things off with her beau, leaving him heart-broken while her flights of fancy carried her somewhere else. She never informed Nicodemus that she was pregnant, and she never told him that her youngest son was biologically his.

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CHILDHOOD
With necromancer blood inherited from his biological father's line, there was something always a little off about Soeki Halloway (whose name was chosen by his mother, to his step-father's utter dismay). He looked nothing like the rest of the family, with their auburn-to-strawberry red hair and green or blue eyes. Instead, Soeki was black haired and brown eyed. Calvin knew almost from the beginning that Soeki was not actually his, he just didn't know what to do with the child.

As a baby, his eyes would intently track the empty corners of the room. When he got a little older, he played with imaginary friends. His first words were spoken to an empty room, his first steps propelled him toward nothing at all. Ellen died when Soeki was only 3, in a car accident, leaving Calvin to raise his sons alone, and no matter how much he loved Soeki, the boy just wasn't right.

He never knew that necromancer infants require warded nurseries and homes to protect them from wandering spirits that may use them as vessels or try to cause them harm. In the worst cases, spirits have taken up residence in adopted necromancer children, whose homes were not properly warded, and lived entire, new lives, forcing the child's soul into dormancy instead. It's a minor miracle that Soeki survived infancy, with both parents clueless about his heritage.

As he got older, Soeki worried the hell out of Calvin when he refused to grow out of his imaginary friend phase. In reality, he was seeing, talking to, and interacting with the souls of the deceased. He couldn't make friends at school because no one believed that he wasn't making things up, and he was teased and bullied as creepy and weird. His own surly, defiant attitude didn't help matters any, and he grew up isolated, lonely, and strange, with mostly books for company. Eventually, around age 6 or 7, Soeki's ability to see the dead diminished, his magic gone dormant like a flower kept out of the sunlight, and it became easy to simply brush it off as an extra-long phase. Still, Calvin was often a distant figure in his life, one who was frankly out of his depth, no matter how hard he tried. Adam tried his best to help raise his baby brother right, and was often the one picking him up from school, making sure he was fed, helping him with his homework, and keeping him company.

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ADOLESCENCE
He grew into an ill-tempered, sarcastic, defiant teenager. Soeki embraced his loner status to try to keep from feeling so isolated, and much like his mother, he dreamed of more exciting things. He never felt special, stunted in his perfect older brother's shadow, and so he daydreamed up thrilling fantasies like the stories he read in books. Adam got most of the attention from their father; Adam had perfect grades, was a football star, was popular with his peers, had a high school sweetheart he would eventually go on to marry. He went to college several hours away, to a good school, for architecture and design. Soeki, constantly feeling inadequate and now stuck by himself in the house with their father, resented him for leaving.

Since Calvin had a demanding job with long hours, without Adam around, he had little supervision and felt more alone, and more spiteful, than ever. He still had no friends at school, but now he lashed out at anybody who tried to get too close instead, to protect his own feelings. He used his wide vocabulary to tear down the kids at school that thought he was a freak, and he embraced his identity, dressing in black and listening to emo, goth and punk music. He painted his nails, he wore eyeliner, he had a terrible Myspace hairstyle. He loved horror movies and books, he wore band t-shirts and hoodies and generally looked like a delinquent. He kept up halfway decent grades, but he was a right little shit to nearly everyone.

One night, when he was 15, almost 16, Adam called Soeki from his dorm while Soeki waited for their father to get home from work. He informed his little brother that he wouldn't make it home for the summer this year because he'd scored a lucrative internship. He didn't take the news well. They got into a screaming match over the phone, and then in a fit of teenage angst, Soeki yelled that maybe he would just go die in a wreck like their mother had. He took the keys to the spare car and went for a joyride, not because he was suicidal, but because he wanted to hurt his brother in return for hurting him. He only had a learner's permit, but he wasn't a bad driver, even at this age.

He went to the old cemetery like he usually did when he was feeling low, but the night turned crazy when a ghastly pale figure flew out into the road, and he hit it head on with the old Buick. Following behind the creature was a girl about his age dressed in black, carrying a sharp chunk of wood. Their eyes met through the driver's side window and metaphoric sparks flew. This was the night his entire life changed - the figure he hit with his car was a real live vampire, and the girl was Ryelle Katsaros, a young necromancer who would quickly grow to be his best, and only, friend in the world.

Soeki and Ryelle hit it off immediately. He helped her carry the limp vampire's body into a wide open field where the sun would hit it when the morning came, and she, just as lonely and impulsive, opened up immediately to him about the supernatural world she lived in: vampires, ghosts, her own magic. They both got into unbelievable amounts of trouble that night when they returned to their respective homes, but after that day, they were inseparable. He developed a crush on the vivacious necromancer straight away, and carried that love with him for the rest of his life.

To fifteen year old Soeki, his new best friend may as well have hung the moon and stars. Ryelle was just as goth as him, and she had real magic. He hung on her every word and she loved the attention and admiration, because she didn't have any friends her own age in the small necromancer community. For Soeki's sixteenth birthday, she offered him the best present she could think of - the chance to talk to his long-dead mother again. She gathered up her kit and, in the middle of the night, they went out to the cemetery where Ellen Halloway was buried. Around her grave, Ryelle put down the traditional salt circle to anchor her spirit to the earth, arranged the finger bones of a human hand, and lit six candles at the points of the pentacle. With a personal item of Ellen's, Ryelle brought her spirit through from the afterlife.

The first words out of her spectral mouth, when she saw her son, were, "You have so much of your father in you." In a terse conversation that grew more painful for Ellen's spirit as she remained forcibly anchored to the earth, the truth finally came out: the affair, her pregnancy, leaving her lover to go back to her husband. Soeki learned that he was not crazy for feeling out of place - his father was not biologically his father, a man named Nicodemus Crowe was.

In a stroke of luck, they determined that Ryelle knew of this Dr. Crowe; he was a necromancer too, and their community wasn't exactly large.

Meeting Dr. Nicodemus Theodore Crowe was a life-changing moment for him. Soeki felt immediately embraced and accepted by this gregarious, caring man, who knew almost at once from physical resemblance that this was his son. He understood Soeki in a way that no one in his life had before then. Finally he had the answers for what made him different from everyone else. Soeki Halloway was really Soeki Crowe, a necromancer with dormant, untapped magical ability. He didn't even mind having to share his newfound father; he was thrilled to have a younger half-sister, Eira Weston-Crowe. She even gave him the idea to change his name, though he wouldn't be able to do so legally for a few more years: Soeki Halloway-Crowe.

Part of him was angry that this entire aspect of his life was kept from him, but he had no real target for the anger, so it only simmered. Instead of feeling sorry for himself for once, he threw himself into bonding with his real family, and his best friend, who he now knew had even more in common with him than they originally thought.

At Nicodemus' behest, Soeki maintained his grades through high school, but his true love became clear after his abilities were explained to him and his training began. It was magic that ignited a new passion for life. His father spent hours teaching him things he should have learned from early childhood, reawakening his dormant ability, providing context for all his stranger childhood memories. Though Soeki was behind other necromancers his age, he spent hours studying and practicing with his father, and quickly caught up. It was their bonding time as well as studying time. Soeki talked openly and honestly with Nicodemus about everything and nothing, over anatomy text books and spell books, skeleton reanimates and seances. Even as he grew closer to his bio dad, he pulled away from his step-father almost completely, and stopped calling his brother. At 17, Calvin realized that he couldn't force things with his youngest, and signed over his parental rights to Nicodemus so that Soeki would finally be happy. Soeki moved in with Nicodemus almost immediately, and finished high school while under the doctor's roof.

As he learned more necromancy and started his witchcraft studies, trying to catch up to Ryelle, they started to go out and perform their duties in the community together: exorcisms, helping or forcing spirits trapped in the Between to move on, and using their gifts to root out rogue supernatural beings that killed humans. Eira came from a clan of demon hunters, and they often went with her to kill demons that had slipped through the barrier between Hell and the mortal world. He and Ryelle were still inseparable, and she helped propel him through his studies to catch up, until he was just as strong a necromancer as she was.

At 18, Soeki lost his virginity to Ryelle, in her bedroom during a late night spell-writing session. It lasted a whole three minutes, and ended in awkward silence, the both of them laying on her bed staring up at the ceiling, carefully not touching under the sheets. She confessed that she knew how he felt and she thought she could give him what he wanted. Their first, and last time, had shown her that she couldn't. She loved Soeki, just not romantically, and she didn't think she'd like sex with anyone now that she'd experienced it. Soeki was upset, and a little heartbroken, but he buried it inside, and they mutually agreed to go back to the way they were, as best friends and exorcism partners.

He was 19 when his life turned upside down again.

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YOUNG ADULTHOOD
It was supposed to be a routine exorcism. A poltergeist was wreaking havoc in the home of a local couple with a small child, and had grown too dangerous for the house to be inhabitable. Soeki and Ryelle took the job without a second thought, and they performed the ritual to force the spirit through the Between into the Afterlife just as they'd done dozens of times before. Everything was going well up until it went badly.

It was a complete fluke when it happened, there was nothing in particular to blame. As it was being forced out, the poltergeist lodged itself into Ryelle, blocking off her airways and stealing the breath from her lungs. Before a panicked Soeki could draw the runes to force it back out of her, she died, face gone blue, gasping for air. He got rid of the malevolent spirit, but it was too late for his best friend. Hours later, when they didn't return home, his father and sister found him curled on the hardwood floor, cradling Ryelle's limp body, sobbing and nonsensical.

She had been the center of his world, and he took it hard, locking himself in the attic for hours on end without eating or sleeping, poring through his father's massive collection of tomes and grimoires. His father tried his best to support Soeki and give him comfort, but for the first time since they'd met, he refused to accept it and isolated himself instead. Nicodemus tried to give him space, not knowing what kind of obsessive spiral his son would throw himself into.

Soeki discovered a particular slim, leather-bound book buried in boxes of old books and he latched onto it immediately. It was a journal, written by one of his ancestors, all about the theory of true resurrection and how it must have been possible for the very first necromancer to bring someone back from the dead without ample sacrifice. In his wild-eyed, half-starved, sleepless state, he swept into action. He stole Ryelle's body and took her to an old field where he wouldn't be disturbed. At the book's instruction, he formed a circle of salt and drew the array inside with paint, he lit six candles, he arranged finger bones over her chest into a pattern.

He summoned a demon from Hell, a golden-eyed figure who called himself Rista, and was surprised to be there, summoned as he was by such a young necromancer. The more human a demon looks, the more powerful they are, and Rista was no minor imp. He exuded power. They made a contract - Rista would remain on Earth, and in exchange, he would bring Ryelle back to life. He did so, with a drop of his blood on her lips, and then in the confine of the salt circle, as she gasped her first breath, he tore her to pieces with teeth and claws. Everything had gone wrong. Panicking, screaming, Soeki hurriedly bound the demon to his own soul to keep the demon from killing him too, as the salt circle threatened to give out and he witnessed what he had freed from Hell.

With demon blood on Ryelle's lips when she died for a second time, and with a demon tied irrevocably to his own essence, they were both damned.

Soeki could not break the terms of their agreement by sending him back to Hell. The contract was still intact; Rista had used a technical loophole to do as he pleased, as demons are wont to do. He never promised he had to keep Ryelle alive. If Soeki had been in a better state of mind, he could have ironed out the terms before they agreed, but he had been desperate. Now he was stuck.

He tried to take control of the situation again, but this strong a demon was too much for him to deal with. Still, Soeki worked limiting spells into the soul bond, to keep Rista from leaving his side and to keep him from physically harming humans. His father was furious when Soeki returned home, shellshocked from how the night went, but he loved his son and tried to help him as much as possible. His sister tried as well, but the demon could not be killed without killing Soeki too. Rista was Soeki's problem to deal with.

Months passed with Rista and Soeki mutually antagonizing each other, learning how to hurt each other. College was off the table for the young necromancer, to Nicodemus's disappointment. Demon and necromancer walked a precipice between order and chaos, until the soul bond began to grow familiar and settle in. Those sorts of magic seep in, after all, and they taint and twist. He learned that first hand as he studied and tried to find a way to save Ryelle's damned soul. Eventually, he found the answer in Rista. The demon negotiated with an angel to return her to Heaven in exchange for Soeki's promise never to banish him, should he find a way. Neither of them really wanted the bond, but the demon was too dangerous to leave on Earth without it, and so it stayed, as did Rista.

After that, though, the antagonism began to fade and he started to deal with his grief. Soeki felt a misplaced sense of gratitude toward Rista for saving Ryelle for him, despite the fact that it was Rista who damned them both, and Rista enjoyed being out of Hell. He even tagged along with Soeki and Eira (to Eira's utter disdain) when they got back to their usual work performing exorcisms and banishments - he enjoyed tearing up stray imps escaped from Hell or the occasional vampire giving them trouble. Soeki and Rista even struck up a sexual relationship out of mutual convenience - dating wasn't exactly on the table for Soeki, with the soul bond keeping Rista to within twenty feet of him at all times. He found out that it was also a good way to control the demon without layering more spells and limiters onto the bond; Rista was more agreeable when he was getting laid.

What they had transformed into something new when Nicodemus was taken by a nest of vampires, led by a former necromancer who had been turned a couple hundred years ago and believed vampires to be the master species. A few cities over, they were taking humans captive to use as a ready source of food and experimenting with magic. Rista helped Soeki and Eira find the nest and free their father and the other captives, but was caught in a trap circle laid by the leader. He made Soeki release the distance limiter and leave rather than stay to help him get free, but after his father was safe, Soeki risked himself to go back for Rista. He freed him from the trap circle with some high level magic, and they wiped out the nest together.

From there, demon and necromancer grew closer, to everyone else's dismay and disdain. He got used to Rista's presence in his life, and the two of them changed over the years. Where the demon became more human and empathetic, even developing something almost like morals, Soeki grew more reckless and distant from humanity, a little more unhinged. Nicodemus worried for his only son. When Soeki was 23, Rista, having seen the tension his presence caused in Soeki's family and the way Soeki was torn between Rista and the world, let it slip to Nicodemus that the banishment contract only applied to Soeki. It was a loophole he'd held close to his chest for four years. Nicodemus banished him back to Hell the next day.

With the bond broken, it left a hole in Soeki's heart and a quiet stillness in his mind. He forgave his father for sending Rista back to Hell, which was a significant step in his emotional growth. He finally tried to understand someone instead of taking it as a personal slight and holding a grudge. Soeki lost someone for the second time in his life, but this time, he worked through the pain instead of spiralling, with his father's and sister's support. Their family had grown even closer.

After another few months, Soeki and Eira moved out of their father's home together, got a shabby apartment above a bakery, and took some sketchy night classes in private investigation. They took on cases, usually adultery related and boring, as PIs to pay the bills, in between doing exorcism work and killing minor demons that had slipped through to Earth. Soeki tried online dating every few months, but it never worked out for anything more than one night stands. He grew more independent and dived deeper into his studies: necromancy, demonology, witchcraft. He began to write his own spells, and tracked down more rare books to start his own collection. He also put together his own knowledge of what he'd learned from Rista, how he had arrayed the soul bond, and put his experiences to paper.

Rista never mentioned to Soeki, when he allowed his family to banish him, that he couldn't return to Earth on his own during Soeki's lifetime. For a demon as strong as him, it takes a while to get past the barrier that separates Hell from Earth. One day, when Soeki was 28, they met again much sooner than either had expected. A group of teenagers visited his and Eira's office as a prank, and one of them stole a book from Soeki's display. They took it out to the cemetery that night and put together the same spell Soeki had 8 years ago: they summoned Rista, but their circle of salt was shabby and broken in places, and he was completely unrestrained. He killed two of them before they could react.

Soeki had been on his way, having discovered his book gone; a tracking spell pointed him in the right direction, and while he hoped he got to them before they did anything, he was too late to save any of the teenagers but one, who had been frightened into mute silence. When Rista sensed him coming from the fragments of their broken bond, their reunion took precedence over slaughtering the last teenager. It was testament to how Aristadas the demon had affected him during their time together; Soeki covered up the deaths of the slaughtered teens with Rista's help, pushing their bodies in their car over a cliff and setting the whole thing ablaze, and he used a spell to muddle the memories of the survivor.

Soeki and Rista went home together, and recast the soul bond, this time fully consensually, and not under duress.

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NOW
Soeki and Rista remained together for another two years, slipping back into their own twisted little form of domestic bliss. Eira and Nicodemus still disapproved, but they could do little about it this time. Rista's continued presence in their lives wasn't Soeki's fault this time, and he had a point that he had to keep the bond on, to make sure the demon wouldn't go on a rampage and slaughter humans. With a teleporting demon at his side, it became so much easier to track down and acquire rare spellbooks thought lost to the elements, or magical artifacts, or creatures thought to be extinct. He continued his work with a demon's power at his back.

Before long, Soeki was a formidable necromancer and witch both, with wide knowledge of Hell, some of its inhabitants and its inner workings. It seemed, though, that the stronger Soeki got, the weaker Rista became. He came down with some kind of persistent fatigue that could not be cured by magic or rest. It was after Soeki's 30th birthday that they found the answer buried in an old journal by a demonologist long dead.

A soul bond is inherently parasitic by nature, and not designed to last long-term. Before, the leeching was being done by Rista, the stronger entity at the time, because the bond was cast under duress and not desired by either party. Now, though, the bond was completely consensual, and Soeki had grown into his magic by leaps and bounds in the last 7 years. Rista would continue to weaken, because even if the bond was broken, fragments would remain and continue to leech power from him.

They had a long conversation that night without words, the bond singing between them. Saving Rista would mean destroying that intimate connection. Since his summoner was dead, as well, his tie to the Earth was gone; the only thing keeping him there was Soeki. It was a difficult decision to come to, but eventually, Soeki and Rista agreed: the bond had to be broken, and Rista had to go back. Damned to Hell all those years ago, they knew they'd meet again when Soeki's lifetime ended, and Rista promised that while he waited, he would stage a coup and carve out their own little kingdom in Hell.

The next day, Soeki gave Rista the best send-off he could think of. They did everything Rista had grown to love and spent every second of it together. That night, sweaty and sated beneath the sheets, they kissed slow and sweet as Soeki broke the bond between them, and Rista was pulled back to where he'd come from.

He didn't cry this time. He felt numb, empty. Truly on his own again. But he had learned to live without Rista, and this was not goodbye, only 'see you later'.

Over the next year, Soeki moved out of the apartment he shared with his sister, moved a few cities over to an even bigger hub of supernatural activity, and began to widen his circle of connections and grow his power in preparation to survive Hell. He's also living the rest of his life to the fullest, as much as he can.

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