Caladin’s Climb—Part 33 (Patreon)

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          As it turned out, there wasn’t nearly as much Caladin could learn from the Magi as he initially thought. Her lessons on rune form grammar and stroke order were a waste of time as Caladin knew everything instinctively already. If he hadn’t, he never would have been able to inscribe spells the way he did. The first useful knowledge she gave him was a massive expansion of his vocabulary in the language of magic. Despite her claims, Andrea could not combine as many harmonics as Caladin could with his special inscriptions. She didn’t want to admit it, but when he showed her the crazy spell he’d designed to punch through the wards at the wizard tower of King Philipus’ he’d attacked, he could tell she was impressed.

          Caladin was currently out in the woods outside of town with little Jenny’s body. Andrea had promised to teach him some of the tricks of necromancy that Brorn never had. He had even come up with a special oneiromancy spell that allowed him to Sleep Walk while she hung out in his dream and talked to him. He’d created a custom spell that projected her image to him psychically as a hallucination only he could see, then projected an illusion to her of what he was seeing in the real world. She actually really loved that spell combination, as it allowed her to see the outside world more than she ever had before.

          “So, you have been using Repair to keep the bodies fresh?” Andrea’s projection asked. She had settled her shifting form today on that of a skinny blonde human that didn’t appear obviously male or female and wore pants like a man. Caladin wasn’t entirely sure if he should start calling her a man or not, or whether evanesors even thought about those sorts of things the same way, but so far she hadn’t corrected him.

          “Repair works fine,” Caladin said. “It’s a chronomancy spell though, so every time I use it on an undead it wipes their memories.”

          “I can’t believe you’re using Repair on living beings,” Andrea groaned. “It’s supposed to repair inanimate objects! The mana cost alone would probably kill an eldrin child.”

          “It is rather expensive,” Caladin admitted. He shrugged. “Humans seem to be able to handle more mana than most races. We’ve got a lot of disadvantages, so it only seems fair.”

          “It’s possible to expand your soul’s mana capacity, but that’s dangerous. You’re right. You do have an advantage there, and it seems like you must’ve been stressing your mana capacity some already, because the amount you’re carrying on those two belts you use would kill most wizards. You know that, right?” She shook her head. “Don’t answer that. Of course you don’t know. I’m not even sure how to handle you. Self-taught talents like you just don’t happen in Tel’Andrid. Take this Repair spell, for instance. It’s expensive because it’s literally rebuilding the missing matter. I’ve got a better spell you could try that pulls matter out of a focus instead of creating it from scratch. The cost would be a fraction of what you’ve been spending.”

          “Are you going to teach it to me?” Caladin asked. “Or were you just bragging. Again.”

          Andrea rolled her eyes at him. “It’s not bragging to illustrate your shortcomings. Hmm…” She frowned. “You wouldn’t happen to have any gold on you, do you? The version I know uses a gold focus.”

          “Oh? I’ve never heard of using a focus.”

          “You can’t be serious. Tuan! You are!” Andrea tsked at him. “Just get me some gold. I’ll show you how it works.”

          “Do I look like I have gold on me?” Caladin asked, gesturing down at his dirty clothes. “Do I look like I even own any gold at all?”

          “Outsiders,” Andrea scoffed. Caladin didn’t much care for the way she wielded that word almost like an insult. He liked even less that it wasn’t even enough for him to call her on it. “You’re a lithomancy genius,” she continued. “I’m sure you can just replace the gold focus in the spell with something else. I think if you go back far enough the original spell used a specific type of air, but our air is limited in Tel’Andrid so we’re only allowed to use the gold version.”

          “You have limited air but not limited gold?” Caladin asked.

          “You mean you don’t know? Are aurai really extinct on the Outside?” Andrea asked. “Fayse told us they were, but I don’t really trust her.”

          “What are aurai?” Caladin asked. “Some type of animal?”

          “You said my etymological lessons were a waste of time because you, and I quote: ‘Already knew everything’. Well. Maybe you don’t. Figure out what an aurai is yourself, genius.”

          “I don’t know what you keep calling me that,” Caladin said. “I never referred to myself as a genius.”

          “Implicitly, you did,” Andrea accused.

          Caladin blew out a breath tinged with frustration. “Fine,” he said. “Aurai… Au… rai… Gold… being of? A being of gold? People? Are they people? Do you have people that… wait, that doesn’t make sense. Can a person be made of gold?”

          “They can with an unrestricted wish from the Conflux,” Andrea said. “Good work. Yes. We have a race of people with gold skin and the ability to convert mana to gold at an incredibly efficient rate.”

          “So they make gold from thin air?” Caladin asked. “Can I do that?” He could think of a lot of problems creating gold could solve for him. And Philipus would certainly appreciate an innovation like that. Even with magical assistance to mine it, finding gold was the hard part when it came to generating it. Creating it out of pure mana? That might help King Philipus fund his war.

          “Just focus on one thing at a time,” Andrea advised. “We were working necromancy, remember? Do you want to go off on a tangent about gold? Is that really the most important thing you have going on?”

          “Right. You’re right,” Caladin agreed. “We were Repairing Jenny’s body, I believe. Should I use my Repair spell or yours? You still haven’t shown me how yours actually works.”

          “Just use yours for now,” Andrea said. She waved a hand, encouraging him to continue.

          Caladin inscribed his familiar Repair spell and little Jenny’s body was restored to perfect condition. Still dead, but her body looked as alive as ever.

          “Okay,” Andrea said. “As you can see, the body is still dead. That spell you used doesn’t work on people. Even though you can’t tell, the process of rotting has already started.”

          “I’m aware,” Caladin said. “I trained under Necro-King Brorn, remember?”

          “I remember, but I also said I wasn’t going to assume you’d been trained properly. Brorn is many things, but traditional isn’t one of them.”

          “There is traditional necromancy in Tel’Andrid?” Caladin asked.

          “It has its uses,” Andrea said. “We don’t use it on dead bodies. More like brooms enchanted to clean up on their own. Binding souls to inanimate objects had its drawbacks, like anything else, but it’s the more common use for necromancy in Tel’Andrid. Bodies are much easier to work with, of course, since they were made to have a soul. Novices still use them to practice on sometimes.”

          “As interesting as all that is,” Caladin said, “you still haven’t told me how I’m going to bring this girl back to life differently than I did before.”

          “I was getting to that,” Andrea continued. “But before we do this, I need you to understand something. That little girl is dead. Dead, Cally. There is nothing either of us can do to change that. Her soul has already moved on to the afterlife. What I am going to show you how to do is a closer equivalent to creating a golem that thinks it is her. It won’t introduce that morality error your previous iteration caused, but it’s still not resurrection.”

          “I don’t want a golem,” Caladin objected. “I told my family I’d find a way to really bring them back.”

          “Well, too bad. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep. Once a soul moves on, it would take a wish to recreate it. Did Brorn not tell you that?”

          “He… sort of warned me off trying to resurrect people.”

          “So he isn’t a buffoon. Look, do you want to create a better undead than you did before or not? I can’t teach you true resurrection. I think at one point Brorn claimed to have figured that spell out, but if he refused to teach it to you, that was probably for good reason.”

          Caladin sighed. “Fine. Just teach me your version.”

          “Okay, good. We’ve got to work quickly then. Do you remember that fulgramancy spell I taught you earlier? Use it on her.”

          “That Repeating Shock spell?” Caladin asked. “What does that have to do with resurrection?”

          “Just do as I say,” Andrea ordered. She leaned in close to the body and pointed to two different spots on the chest. “Put one hand here, the other over here. Send the lightning, just like I explained, from one hand to the other.”

          It was a fulgramancy spell with tedious specifications, but Caladin was able to recreate it exactly as he’d been shown earlier on a scroll in his pocket. He placed his hands as directed and released the spell. The girl’s body clenched as it was shocked, then relaxed. There was a pause, then the spell repeated. It was set to loop that convulsion sequence either a thousand times, or until Caladin dismissed the spell. “Is this actually accomplishing anything?” Caladin asked.

          “You don’t have to understand the underlying theory,” Andrea explained, “but on a fresh undead this spell will force the heart to start beating again, and the clenching of the muscles will force air into the lungs.”

          “Restart the heart? I thought you said she wouldn’t live again.”

          “Her body will, and with her body, her mind as well. But that is not all a person is. You should know that more than most, Cally. You saw what happened last time you brought the dead back. Unexpected murders from zombie servants is exactly why you need special permits to make them in Tel’Andrid, and they’re almost impossible to get.”

          “Well, here in Eldira you have to be a notorious Necro-King before anyone will let you use them,” Caladin said. He kept his hand pressed firmly over the girl’s body as it continued to convulse.

          “The primary benefit of restarting the heart,” Andrea explained, “is you won’t have to do constant maintenance. The body won’t rot if it isn’t dead.”

          “So we’re making a… living undead?”

          “That’s one way to think about it,” Andrea agreed. “Now, we need to move on to the next step while the body is close to living again. Once you give it a new soul, it should be able to take over beating its own heart and all the other bodily functions. What we need next is to create that soul and the enchantments that bind it. This is really more of a three person job, but I think you can manage it. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

          “I’ve created my own souls before,” Caladin told her. “I used mosquitoes. They aren’t very big, but enough of them blended together still works. Plus, they’re mosquitoes, so I don’t have to feel bad about killing tens of thousands of them.”

          “You can’t be serious! No wonder you had problems last time. Did Brorn tell you to do that?”

          “No, but he thought it was clever. He had his own method, but he never told me what it was. He wanted me to just use living people, but I wasn’t comfortable with that.”

          “He’s right that it’s clever,” Andrea agreed, “but that doesn’t always mean it’s the best choice. Bugs are simple creatures with no impulse control. They want something, they take it. Usually food. That instinct doesn’t go away just because you shoved them in a little girl. Do you know how to make a blank soul from mana?”

          “If I knew how, why would I use mosquitoes? Is making blank souls the secret method Brorn was using?”

          “How would I know that?” Andrea asked, her brow creased in annoyance. “I would be surprised if he did. It’s a very basic technique with no frills. Just gather a mass of unformed necromancy mana. Here is the spell.” She waved her arm and a scroll of text appeared in the air in front of her. She wasn’t wrong about the spell being basic. If Caladin had ever even considered that raw necromancy mana could function as a substitute soul he never would have wasted his time slaughtering mosquitoes by the millions to build Philipus’ zombie army. The rune form for the spell Andrea showed him was a single line. He felt like an idiot for even needing to have it given to him. “Wait.” Andrea held up her hand. “Don’t use it just yet. Souls have a tendency to dissolve when they aren’t bound to something. Use the soul binding enchantments on the body first. I assume you already know how to do that?”

          “I do,” Caladin confirmed. “But you should know, those enchantments were already on her bones before we started. If you’d told me I was going to do this from the start, I could have excluded them from the Repair and skipped this step.”

          “Irrelevant,” Andrea said. “This won’t work with the binding on her bones. She’s going to be alive this time, not a zombie. If the binding doesn’t contain the soul to her flesh, the heart won’t beat like it’s supposed to.”

          “Huh, I suppose her skin won’t be rotting this time, but if the binding is on her skin wouldn’t a simple knife cut cause the binding to unravel?”

          “Only if you don’t have redundant rune forms,” Andrea replied.

          Caladin sighed. “I guess she’s got enough skin to repeat everything three times. I was hoping to keep the markings more discrete though.” He didn’t see that he had a choice, so he did his best. He inked necromantic runes into her skin with his lithomancy. It should have only taken a second, as he knew the forms well, but he spent some extra time burying the runes as deep in the skin as he could to create more permanent tattoos and then covering them with skin tones as he went so they wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. Her skin would have been nothing but markings otherwise. With three copies of the enchantments spread out across her body at random, he thought it was extremely unlikely that the same spots on all three would be damaged at the same time. It wasn’t as resilient as Brorn’s version, which somehow put the runes directly on the soul, but it was still an improvement over his first iteration.

          “You covered them up, good idea,” Andrea said when she saw the way runes disappeared when Caladin was done. “I didn’t even think of doing that. We’ve got some lithomancers in Tel’Andrid that could probably do that and keep the spell from breaking down, but… you figured that out pretty damn fast.”

          Jenny’s body was still jumping periodically under Caladin’s hands. He thought maybe some more color was coming to her sickly-pale skin. “It’s for a good cause,” he said. What he didn’t say was that he was the one responsible for her death in the first place. “I don’t know if I’ll be willing to go to the extra effort for everyone, but the children don’t deserve to be traumatized any more than they have to be.”

          “She did die already, but it’s a nice sentiment. Okay. Add the soul now.”

          A simple step. Caladin inscribed the spell from Andrea’s hallucinatory scroll. Jenny’s body flashed with green light briefly before the enchantments went to work soaking in the necromantic soul like a sponge. As soon as the soul landed, she took a shuddering breath.

          “There you go,” Andrea said proudly. “Life. Without your unthinking insect souls, it might not try to kill anyone this time, but no guarantees. Regular maintenance will be a thing of the past, though. A word of warning. She can now ‘die’, though it won’t be quite the same as for a real living person. If her body dies from something like a stabbing or starvation, she won’t actually stop functioning. All that will change is she’ll start rotting like a normal zombie. I’ve never tested this spell for any serious length of time, but from what I’ve heard they can last several years before they die on their own. They’ll need regular infusions of mana to keep everything functioning, but I assume that’s not a problem.”

          “What about her memories?” Caladin asked. “Will she remember everything from when she was alive?” He didn’t even ask about whether she’d remember her experiences from the last time she was undead. That was something he was glad would be erased.

          “That Repair spell can only restore her to the moment she died at the latest,” Andrea said. “So that is how far back her memories can reach. She might remember dying, might not.”

          “What can I do to prevent her from killing someone again?” Caladin asked.

          “You mean like giving her a working conscience? Forget it; you’d need the soul of an intelligent being to give her that. I thought you didn’t want to do that. You shouldn’t either, that’s exactly the sort of thing Brorn started poking around with during his youth.”

          “What about tweaking that placeholder soul you had me make with mana?” Caladin asked. “Surely that should be possible, right?”

          “Maybe it is, but I don’t know how, and I wouldn’t teach you if I did. There aren’t many magical experiments that are banned in Tel’Andrid, but modifying souls is one of them. If you’ve got an hour, I could give you a dozen case studies on how that always leads to disasters many times worse than merely dying. Do you even realize that making a change to someone’s soul will persist after they die? Do I need to explain to you why something like that would be forbidden?”

          “I know it’s possible,” Caladin said. “Brorn did that kind of necromancy all the time. That’s how he was binding his necromancy. Not to the skin, or bones, but to the soul. He told me he did it to himself. I think that’s somehow required to become a lich like him.”

          “Explaining that probably the most notorious heretical wizard of all time did this thing you want to do, isn’t as convincing as you think it is, Cally. If that’s the kind of magic you want to do, I suggest you go back and see if he’ll let you apprentice under him again.”

          “No. That’s not my point. My point is only that I know it must be possible. I don’t need to do it with soul magic, I just want to actually prevent another tragedy from happening. If I can’t do that, then all this effort has been wasted, because I’ll just have to unmake her again until I can figure it out.”

          Andrea shrugged. “If you want my personal recommendation, I would use Conscience on her. It’s a handy one. Kind of lazy, but it would probably get the job done if all you care about is that she behave. It won’t actually change how she thinks or what she cares about, but with enough conditioning it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.”

          “I’m not familiar with that spell,” Caladin admitted. “What harmonic is it? Do you know the rune forms?”

          “Sure,” Andrea said. “It’s a cerebromancy spell we sometimes use on people that have committed minor crimes in Tel’Andrid. It uses a standard rule set of morality to intermittently remind the target when they’re thinking about—or actively doing—something considered morally wrong. It sort of creates a voice that they’re supposed to think is their own subconscious talking to them, so it can be ignored. If they don’t care about right and wrong, it can usually work to just annoy them into behaving right so they don’t get nagged by the voice in their head. Sometimes adults can learn to ignore it, but usually kids are… well, to be honest, I don’t think it’s ever been used on a zombie child. What do you think?”

          “A nagging voice in their head?” Caladin asked as he thought it through. “Isn’t that basically what parents do to you when you’re a kid?”

          “I think that’s where the idea came from, yeah. Only lazy parents use it on their kids, though, and you can always tell when an adult was raised on Conscience.” She rolled her eyes. “Little goodie two-shoes. All of them. It’s annoying.”

          “I’ll take extra-moral over murdering your parents any day,” Caladin said. “Show me the rune form.”

          “Here,” Andrea said, waving a lazy hand.

          What formed in the air in front of her was a small cluster of some of the most insanely complex runes Caladin had ever seen. They didn’t overlap, like some of the ones he made himself did, but that was only a small comfort. He leaned in, squinting at the floating image. “Is that—What? I have hairs on my head thicker than some of these lines! How do you expect me to copy that?”

          “I thought you knew cerebromancy. Sorry, it’s one of my harmonics, so I forget how hard it is for some people to read. If you think that’s bad, you should see the hoops we’ve been jumping through trying to get a spell that can tell when you’re lying. That’s been the cerebromancy-white-whale for centuries. I can’t tell you how many problems it would solve if you could just use a spell like that to verify someone’s truthfulness without having to read their minds. Most people have valid reservations about opening themselves up to something like that.”

          Caladin wasn’t really paying close attention to what Andrea was saying, still studying the rune for the Conscience spell closely. “You said this is standard?” he asked. “So can I just copy it exactly? I… I’m not sure I can read this. I mean, I could, but it might just take me a couple hours.”

          “Don’t worry about it. An exact copy is fine. Umm, this is set for Tel’Andridian culture, so I’m not sure if it will clash with yours.”

          “Do you guys think murder is bad?”

          “Obviously.”

          “Well, that’s the main one I’m worried about. Sound like it’ll be fine.”

          Andrea nodded. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you if she starts thinking certain things are wrong that you don’t agree with. You won’t be able to talk her into changing her mind. Anyway, it works best embedded on the skin under the hair, which is lucky for us, since that’s basically as far from the necromancy enchantments she already has, so they’re unlikely to clash. Cerebromancy is pretty good anyway about staying confined to a limited space, but it’s always nice to have that extra comfort of physical—” She halted mid-speech and looked sharply to the left. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize anyone else would be in this section so late. What? No, just chatting with a friend. I’d use a sonamancy spell, but it’s outside my comfort—You would?” She smiled. “Thanks so much. And, again, so sorry.” She looked back at Caladin. “Whoopsie. I guess I was being too loud for the library.”

          “You’re in a library? I thought you were sleeping right now! Are you Sleep Walking?”

          Andrea chuckled. “Okay, you caught me. I’m not actually that much of a genius at cerebromancy. I had to look up Conscience in the library. How do you think I could get all the detail exactly right?” She laughed again, this time giggling so much she had to cover her face with her hands. “The look on your face when I finally stumped you was golden! I knew you had limits!”

          “You mean you didn’t have it memorized?” Caladin asked. He was actually a little disappointed to find the most impressive spell he’s seen out of her yet wasn’t even her own.

          “That mess of microscopic thread lines? You have to be kidding me! I’m pretty sure even Master Liseevin would have to look up the rune signs for that one if anyone asked him for them, and he can cast at-will adjustments to it with a thought.”

          “What? How could you possibly cast a spell without knowing the rune signs?”

          Andrea shook her head. “Because you don’t need the runes to cast? All you need is the correctly shaped mana, the intentions, and whatever stabilizing medium you use. It can be runes, sure, but it’s so much easier to use your mind for the harmonics you’ve mastered.” She scoffed. “Memorizing rune signs? That’s something that might impress at parties, but it has very little practical application unless your job is enchanting. Which, by the way, is… uh, I’m not sure what the equivalent on the Outside would be. Ditch digging? Do you still dig ditches over there?”

          Caladin waved away her question. “Well, I memorize all my spells. I’m a little disappointed that even in the great City of Magi your best wizards can’t be bothered to do that.”

          “You memorize your spells?” Andrea repeated. She craned her head back, one eyebrow rising. “You’re not just pulling my leg? Trying to get me back for the cerebromancy spell?”

          “Why would I make that up? It’s not like it’s that hard when I’m casting spells like that all the time. I don’t memorize every spell I see, just the ones I want to be able to cast later. If I don’t have a baseline memorized, I’m forced to improvise on the fly, and that can be extremely dangerous. I’ve probably almost killed myself a dozen times with improvised spells.”

          Andrea put her hands on her hips and looked Caladin up and down again. “Huh. You know what? After what I’ve seen, I think I actually believe you. That’s crazy, maybe you really are a genius. I’ve never even heard of someone memorizing hundreds of spells in rune form before. Don’t you have to get every line exactly right for those to work? If you misremember a tiny swirl or slash line, you’d end up casting a completely different spell!”

          “Well, sure, sometimes that’s the point. Most of the time I don’t actually cast the memorized spell, but a modified version. Tweaking the targeting parameters or the mana source is a standard change I make. I usually try to make sure to change the target to the lithomancy concept of ‘enemy’ in my mind, and the draw source to my mana belt. Other changes can get more finicky.”

          “That’s… yeah, I’m not much of a lithomancer, so I have no idea if that’s impressive or not. Maybe I should talk to someone. But, listen, I’ve got to go. A librarian just saw how many books I pulled from the stacks without checking them out. I think I’m going to get an earful. Good luck with your zombie thing! Chat later.”

          Without another word, Andrea’s projection disappeared. Caladin felt a little lonelier with her gone, but he had plenty of new knowledge to chew on for a while. The more he learned about all the massive gaps in his education, the more distraught he was at the thought of how much work it would be to fix them. Years. Decades. It would probably make more sense to just go all-in on rune forms and lithomancy, even if that meant his ability to learn from the work of others was limited.

          Jenny was still under him. Breathing now. He copied the Conscience spell on her head. Beneath her hair, you couldn’t even tell it was there. When he was sure everything was working as intended, he fed more mana into her enchantments to wake her up. Her eyes fluttered open. They… didn’t glow green. Or rather, they did, but it was much less pronounced than before. In full daylight, you almost couldn’t tell. That was a surprise. And the rune forms he had covered up on her skin were very hard to notice.

          “Uncle Cally?” Jenny asked. “Where are we?”

          “Nowhere important,” Caladin said. “You had a little accident. I’ve been helping you get better.”

          “I feel funny,” Jenny said. She looked down at herself, then rubbed her arm where one of the covered-up runes was.

          Caladin realized he had a decision to make between being honest with Jenny about her situation or giving her a comforting lie. That was an easy decision for him to make, considering he didn’t even want to admit the truth to himself. “You had a little accident,” Caladin told her. “I used some magic to make you all better.” That was as close to the truth as he was willing to get. He would have to talk to the others later and make sure they believed she was back for real this time so they wouldn’t treat her any differently.

          Jenny’s mouth dropped open. “Where are my mommy and daddy?” she demanded.

          “Uh, let me go get them,” he promised her. “Just stay right here. You can play with the flowers until I get back. And that butterfly.” He conjured an illusion of a butterfly and some flowers behind her and bound the butterfly to fly in a slow circle through the clearing in the woods they were standing in.

          Jenny forgot all about Caladin when she saw the butterfly. She ran towards it with her arms out. “Come here little butterfly,” she said. “I want to hold you… gentle. I want to hold you gentle. I don’t want to hurt you. Hurting you is bad.”

          Caladin chuckled to himself as he retreated from the clearing. “Almost too easy.” She had barely noticed he was gone. Now he would just have to rebuild her parents before she got bored with the fake butterfly. He’d stashed the other bodies nearby, behind a row of bushes. They had magic keeping them cool so they wouldn’t rot, and more magic keeping the smell from permeating the air. Recreating the steps he’d used on Jenny to make both her parents more of these new “living” undead was easy. Explaining to them the truth of what they were and how they were living on borrowed time was much, much harder. Jenny’s father didn’t remember the horrible things he’d done the last time he was alive, but his wife was going to remember living with them both before as zombies. Caladin took her aside to explain that neither of them were going to remember anything that happened before and that she shouldn’t ask him how she ended up dead unless she was ready to hear the answer. She did not. All she wanted was to cry and hug Caladin—thank him all he’d done for her family.

          All he’d done…

          Letting her live with monsters…

          Letting her become one of them…

          He tried insisting she didn’t need to thank him, that she didn’t owe him anything. It turned his stomach when she clearly thought he was just being modest. Watching the family reunite was bittersweet. Would they all be this hard? Two dozen more to go. Lenny. Lenny would be hard.

          It was a blessing, Caladin decided, that none of them would remember anything that had come before. The rest of the village, though. They would remember. He’d hoped fixing this would make it easier to leave the meager tent he allowed himself as a living space, to get back out there and spend time with the family he’d fought so hard to defend. It didn’t. It was only going to make that harder.

          As he got to work, Caladin realized he was looking forward to the next crazy mission King Philipus would set for him. He was almost finished with an artifact that could draw ambient mana from the air to create small-scale pyroclastic explosions. When it was done, he’d go to the king and tell him he was ready to fight the dwarf champion. At least in the heat of battle it was easy to know what the right decision was.

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