While some destined to change society through the weight of their words might be born into those positions, belligerent and bloody minded misfits like myself are usually made. Accelerated Necromancer’s tend to be driven to work within the realms of the dead due to personal loss or trauma, and those who stand within the loosely defined boundaries of the chaos magick movement simply want to be free to be themselves. Both of these are true of my motivations, as is my love for the dark goddess Lilith in her rebellious aspect. Demonolatry as reconciliation of the anima and animus, shadow work through pain.

You see it was the contents of my own psyche which first drove me to seek solace in the unreal. Plagued by the most horrific of reoccurring nightmares throughout my teens the hellish crescendo soon reached the point where I would do anything, take any short sighted action available to avoid the sweet oblivion that others desired so strongly. For when I shut my eyes and gave in to the urging of my exhaustion ridden frame it was not to some fae infested field that I retreated. No midnight sun shone on my face, nor did angels note my passing beneath technicolour skies. Mine was never a peaceful sleep.

Instead I watched worlds ending in rabid carnage and woke up screaming almost every night. Forced to stand helpless by the wayside as both loved ones and complete strangers were eaten in front of me by an army of the newly animated dead, a shambling rabble of risen corpses that I could neither fight nor flee from. Paralysed by fear, driven to overburdened inaction by quickly building insanity. Witness to a disorganised fleshy militia that alternated between attempts to dismember me and pleas to join them in their screaming meal through barricaded doors. Then the last man on a crimson Earth. Sheer terror.

In hindsight it is easy to understand what eventually drew me to necromancy, and also why I do not work directly with human remains, fresh or otherwise. As can be seen in my recent book, The Accelerated Necromancer, no dried skin nor ground bone need be gathered to excel within the boundaries that the death current marks out within human society, nor does sinew and gristle need to be heaped at places of power to achieve results. Sacrifice and desecration are the preserve of those who lack the skill to serve the Veil in a respectful way, as there is always another option to achieve the desired outcome.

Personal bias perhaps. But there are only so many times you can smell the rancid odour of necrotic flesh and feel warm blood slicking under your fingernails, even in your dreams, before you develop a phobia of anything related to the processes of decomposition in the real world. Thus this psyche shredding rhythm drove itself like a blunt coffin nail through what should have been the best decade of my life. I was left reeling by the strain of it all. And when my sanity fled it took my natural clairvoyance with it too. The price paid for a failed initiation into the death current’s many mysteries, one that I regret above all else.

The nightmares, lack of sleep and torturous exhaustion built up over many years until my over reliance on caffeine to create artificial insomnia began having health effects of its own. Perhaps that is why I did not dream at all for a long time, any memory of my nocturnal wanderings around that much darker gore soaked London erased upon waking by a mind taken to the very edge of the abyss because of what it was seeing. College counsellors, antidepressants, sleeping pills, nothing could give me back my dreamworld. It was just gone, forever altering how I experienced waking consciousness too.

Every time I slept during this period it was like dying, blinking out of existence and being reborn when the alarm rang in the morning. Suddenly life seemed strangely mechanical, mundane, a circadian shell shock which drove me into some very esoteric territory to compensate. And experiments in the more mind altering, though drug free, aspects of chaos magick around my late twenties finally broke through whatever mental block had been keeping me from remembering the bizarre event that really caused it all, and surprisingly the nightmares would return shortly after that without the slightest fanfare.

That is one of the reasons why I am so good at this stuff, so stubborn and clever in my dealings with spirits that others would be too scared to approach. My tenacity stems directly from those years of horror, insanity and enforced altered states. I was thrown in the forge and given the choice of either tempering or being consumed. My life is very different now than it was then. The Reaper has became my friend, demonesses my guides, and the shunned places my refuge. I may have lost much through my failure to carry the death current when too young to recognise what it was offering me, but I am stronger now.

As an accelerated necromancer I am now working with what once terrified me the most. While I am happy to admit that sleep still holds a primal fear for me to this day, I cope with that neurosis as best as I can. It would be dishonest to ignore the role that my nightmares played in putting me on the cemetery path, nor would it be fair to keep that sour motivation from the few explorers of the unseen who read my words. Perhaps that failed cthonic initiation was for the best in the end, because my tortured subconscious has gifted me both a unique view of the world and the strength of will to share what I have learned.