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“Necromancers are not any different than anyone else. Yes, they can peer into the underworld and raise shades of the undead. Yes, they can command armies of the same differently living. They do also like to live underground and have a very strong community focus as central to their cultural and religious identity. The point is: Foot Kort isn’t just different from Soccer, it’s better.”
- Necromancy, the Dead Truth
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Chapter 14:
Seasons of Change
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#14.1 – Tuesday, the 17th day of the 9th month…
Whatever track Scarlet thought her life was on, her mother seemed intent on derailing it.
“Have you found someone to escort you to the school dance yet?” Ann asked.
Scarlet looked at her mother. “I’m not going.”
“Dr. Flowers—”
“I don’t care,” Scarlet said. “I’m not going.”
Roy folded his paper and looked down at Scarlet. “Child, that’s not the way you talk to your mother.”
“I do not want to go,” Scarlet said flatly.
“Well, that’s an improvement,” Roy drained the last of his coffee and stood to leave for work. “If you get stuck I’m sure I can find someone.”
Scarlet shuddered and glared at her barely eaten breakfast. For a brief moment, she fantasized about bringing Hezikah, but knew that would never happen.
With a few precious minutes before she had to set out for another excruciating school day, Scarlet cloistered herself in her bedroom and gathered her pets.
She placed a decoy book on the bed to distract Jayce, then baited Friar with some corn. Her pets now where she wanted them, Scarlet brought out the most ancient tome in her collection. The only surviving volume of the Circle of Seven*: The Book of Lore.
Said to have been written at the Breaking of the World† over fifty thousand years ago+, Scarlet’s copy had been bought at a yard sale for a wingbeat and two talonsP.
What survived for Scarlet to read had been copied down through the ages. Copies of copies updated linguistically and edited for a new audience. Translated from Ancient to Standard# to MK’Haren** to Common and back again a dozen times over, a millennias-long game of “telephone” where no two players spoke the same language. The book persisted for a simple reason: the text was by now so archaic and confusing there was no problem convincing each new generation it held strange wisdom and esoteric knowledge.
“As an historical treatise,” Scarlet said to her pets. “This book is utterly and completely useless. However, it does contain at least a small modicum of magic, and is the only reference in my collection with actual details.”
Using the eldritch knowledge from her yard sale book, Scarlet made an attempt to perform a ritual††. The most accessible form of magic, casting involved carrying out a set series of steps. One only needed precise ritual elements with highly specific actions, and you could do magic without actually being a wizard. “Real books containing spells,” Scarlet told her cat. “Are impossible to find, though every bookstore has a full isle of fakes.”
So far as Scarlet was aware, the process outlined in The Book of Lore were the only real ritual steps you could find at a yard sale.
Putting a handful of corn on her bedspread, Scarlet moved Friar over beside Jayce and prepared herself for the ritual. “As the not-very-great book says, we need three things to begin a magical quest: three individuals banded together—that’s us—a fellowship stone, which I found in the backyard, and a magical item bestowed by the benefactor. I choose this shark tooth necklace with a rune of protection carved in it, that I got as a souvenir on our last trip to Sun’s Beacon.”
Scarlet placed the stone in between the two animals. With the last piece of corn palmed, she put her right hand over it, then took Jayce’s paw and held it over her hand. Friar, ever predictable, began to kick with one of his webbed feet, trying to get at the food he knew Scarlet was hiding.
Jayce twisted onto his back and stared at her, while Friar let out a single, short, judgmental quack.
“I know what you guys are thinking,” Scarlet said. “The quest must be bestowed by a noble benefactor. Well, I chose myself. I am noble, therefore I bestow the quest upon myself, and us, as a fellowship!”
Friar quaked again.
“I am too noble!” Scarlet insisted.
“SCARLET! SCHOOL!” Ann called from across the house. “YOU’RE GONNA BE LATE!”
Scarlet blinked for a moment and glared at her pets. “Not a single word, from either of you.”
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* #14.2 (Tuesday, 17/9) *
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At school, Scarlet didn’t feel particularly purposeful or imbued with magic. She definitely didn’t feel protected by the shark-tooth necklace tucked under her shirt, and really wished she’d chosen something a little more stylish for her magical item. She’d never had occasion to test it before, but the vendor did demonstrate its reaction to an anti-magic field.
Walking through the halls, Scarlet found the whispers and hushed laughs that always seemed to follow her were unusually intense today. She’d gotten used to a certain amount of teasing and mocking, but the current volume defied expectations. Some of the kids seemed genuinely afraid of her, others disgusted, and a few just burst out laughing.
What was going on? Magical quests weren’t supposed to work like this!
Undaunted, Scarlet arrived at her locker, where someone had spray-painted ‘necrophiliac’ over the door. Well, tried to; they’d misspelled the word so badly it took Scarlet several seconds to work out what they meant to write. Much worse, though; the un-named vandal also held the nozzle up to the slats in her locker and emptied a generous dose on the contents inside, ruining her school books.
Shifting her collection of personal books to one arm, Scarlet opened the locker wide and tried to assess the damage. At that moment, a boy walking past blatantly, deliberately, knocked the stack of books out of her hands.
Scarlet glared at him.
“What are you gonna do?” the boy asked, holding his hands up. “Sick your undead army on me? Try to make a dragon eat me?”
“Go to public-parking*!” Scarlet snarled, bending over to reach for her books.
Ok, so off the cuff it wasn’t exactly the most hurtful insult, but if that kid knew half as much about history as Scarlet did, he’d sure feel burned!
A foot came down and landed on the stack of textbooks Scarlet hefted, smashing her fingers into the floor painfully. The foot belonged to a different boy entirely, and Scarlet found herself surrounded by a ring of classmates all pointing and laughing.
“Hey, Scarlet,” yet another boy called. “I heard you like dragons? Like, dragin’ deez nuts across your face!”
Scarlet felt her throat close and her face began to burn. They had her surrounded, her back literally against the wall. The logical choices were to cry, or to scream for help.
But the hallway was full of students, all of whom could see the bullies ganging up on her.
None of whom cared.
Her painfully bruised fingers closed around the largest of her red-paint stained textbooks, her history book, as she felt the tears well out of her eyes.
No one did care.
Not about her.
Not about her quest.
Not about the sword.
The sword, which had rescued a world gone mad, which had stood for the greatest civilization, which had slain the god-like evil.
The sword she was going to find.
One of the laughing, mocking boys stood over her. “You gonna cry, now?”
With a sudden burst of energy, Scarlet shot up straight, banging her head into his chin. He cried out more in surprise than pain, but was quickly silenced when Scarlet swung her massive history textbook into his skull.
The book came around, and she cracked the spine on another adversary.
A kick struck Scarlet in the side, but when she went low she was able to grab another book and throw in the direction the attack had come from.
Then someone punched her.
The rest turned into a blur. Surrounded on all sides, the rain of fists and feet came like a torrent.
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* #14.3 (Tuesday, 17/9) *
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Scarlet sat across from the school principal, arms folded over her chest, eyes dead locked with his, and a vicious scowl on her face. For his part, the principal looked genuinely concerned.
“Well,” Jenkem said in a level tone. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“My locker gets vandalized, I get attacked and bullied, and I’M the one in trouble?” Scarlet said.
Dressed in long sleeves and long pants, her attackers wisely avoided her face. She was covered in bruises from various strikes, but the only visible damage was a torn sleeve and disheveled hair. The hair wasn’t even that far off from how she’d left the house.
Her opponents, meanwhile, had fared better overall but visibly worse, with a number of black eyes, bloody noses, and one kid with no obvious injuries who sat curled in the fetal position. The total body-count came in at seven, which Scarlet figured wasn’t bad for a girl her height.
“Scarlet, in all my time as principal, I’ve never had to ask this question,” Principal Jenkem pursed his lips. “As a middle school administrator, it’s really not the sort of thing I ever expected to need to say. But: is it true that you have an army of undead?”
Scarlet looked away from him and blinked several times before answering. “Maybe a little one. It’s really more of a squad.”
“Scarlet?” Jenkem pressed.
“Look, I needed something heavy moved,” Scarlet explained. “So, I made friends with a priest at the Necromancer temple. He brought over some zombies and dragged it for me. Some other kids saw, and NOW there’s this dumb rumor going around.”
Jenkem dropped his chin and nodded, scribbling a quick note on his legal pad. Any Arindell citizen who’d lived in the city for enough years had a similar story. The necromancers loved to help.
“What about the dragons?” Jenkem asked.
“Well, I am part dragon,” Scarlet wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
“The rumor is that you somehow orchestrated the dragon landings at Briarwood Boys School,” Jenkem explained. “Do you have anything to say about that?”
Scarlet leaned forward and rested her elbows on Jenkem’s desk. “I’m thirteen,” she said flatly. “How the heck do you think I could have done that? I had an ancestor five-hundred-friggin-years ago who boffed one of them, and that’s how I ended up here. That sort of pedigree doesn’t allow me to control dragons.”
“That language is highly inappropriate, young lady,” Jenkem scolded.
“Would you prefer I said fornicated?” Scarlet shot to her feet and threw her arms out. “How do you want me to put it?! MY ANCESTORS HAD SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH DRAGONS*!”
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End:
Chapter Fourteen
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