”To properly utilize temporal magic, one must first understand time in a more useful manner and not how it often appears. To those untrained in this way of thinking, time tends to be an ever flowing, unstoppable stream that carries onwards everything there is, but this way of thinking inhibits one from affecting it through arcane means. After all, how could you possibly alter such a grand force that slowly erodes even the mountains? No, time is a property of all things, no different from mass or size – a simple attribute. To succeed as a temporal mage, you must trick yourself into thinking differently, or be naturally born with such a perspective, like I was.”
Anastacia lifted her gaze from Solaria’s tablet and frowned. “That just makes it sound like I might as well not bother. What are the chances of becoming any good at it if I wasn’t born with the ‘right perspective’?”
The mage pondered a moment to perhaps find kinder words than what initially came to him, but eventually was forced to give an answer that didn’t please the necromancer in the slightest. “Non-zero… Most folk are limited to petty tricks if not intentionally raised to be a temporal mage, or otherwise born with the ability. All great masters of temporal magic were born into cultures that natively had the correct perception of time, myself included – but there have been a number of notable individuals who learned about it later in life. You, however rude this might sound, do not show much potential to begin with.”
Gilbert let out an unintended chuckle and tried to cover it with a couple of coughs.
“What?... How can you possibly know that?” The necromancer doubted the assessment she saw as hasty and unjust.
Solaria spend a while writing, erasing and rewriting something to again soften the blow. “Even in the past two days we have been traveling, you’ve shown yourself to be headstrong. While virtue elsewhere, with the arcane it’s often the opposite. To understand and work with the arcane in greater detail, one’s mind needs to remain malleable to countless new ideas, perspectives and paths. Even just your understanding of your mechanical companions shows that your mind operates through hard and fast rules, able to comprehend great and complex designs, seeks to understand the how and the why – but some things are nebulous to a fault, and would only cause misery to someone like you.”
It was hard to deny that even when it came to necromancy, most of her knowledge of it was focused on the control patterns instead of the more abstract sides of the art. It was also undeniable that it was a case of her simply being gifted at it rather than the result of tireless studying, so as painful as it was to admit it, there may have been some truth to the mage’s words. Anastacia let out a frustrated groan and tossed herself across King’s lap to sulk.
Not wishing to demoralize one of the people who were out to help him, the mage scribbled out another hasty message. “Don’t fret, all is not lost. There are aspects of the arcane more befit of your personality. The elements come to mind – and as I hear it, you have some experience regarding them. All types of classical elemental magic – fire, ice, water, air, earth, lightning – are each based on a single rule that must be followed. For example, to usher forth fire, the energy for it must be converted from movement. Talented mages are able to amplify their spells and make them more precise. Where some must toss their balls of flame, a flick of a finger will do for an archmagi – but even for them, that flick is a must.”
Though it did feel like a consolation prize compared to control over space and time, Anastacia definitely wasn’t above accepting those when it came to expanding her knowledge on anything that wasn’t necromancy. “And can you teach me anything about those?” She asked and perked up slightly when she received a nod for an answer.
“Don’t you think you already hold enough cataclysmic powers for one person?” Gilbert sighed. “At least wait until you’ve actually mastered some of what you already know.”
“A cataclysm can hardly get any more cataclysmic, so what’s the harm even if I figure out something like lightning? It’s not like I’ll use any of it on the field before I know I can reliably do it.” The necromancer sidestepped the old adventurer’s worries.
“I’m not worried about you using them on quests, what I’m worried about is you using them unsupervised. Simple or not, magic is always magic and it can end its user just as fast as it can end the target.” Gilbert explained, not willing to actually come between the necromancer and whatever she desired to do, but wanting his council to be heard. He wasn’t exactly against magic, and certainly not against those that wielded it, but had a healthy distrust of it since it often only complicated things in his eyes.
Anastacia scoffed at the warnings. “What are you even saying? Of course, I’ll be responsible when training – I always am.”
“Do you even own clothes that don’t have charred sleeves? Not to mention that whole scar thing on your arm. I’m not going to make you tell us what it is, but it’s hard to see it as anything but irresponsible as things are.” Gilbert calmly pointed out, again, not about to argue with the necromancer. However, he did seem a bit smug when the mage pointed at him in approval of his warnings.
Whatever point Anastacia was about to bring up in response was interrupted by the coach suddenly slowing down and coming to a halt. The adventurers peered outside only to see vast swaths of unsettled nature on both sides of the road they were following. They had passed the first couple of towns near Valor without stopping in them, and planned to go on for a couple more days before reaching the next one, where they could look into their supply situation for the rest of the trip, but before they got there, they had several kilometers of wilderness to traverse. They weren’t the only people on the road, but not far from it either, so the only signs of civilization so far had been the two other carriages they had passed along the way. The terrain had changed from the vast flats around Valor into a more mountainous one. Despite that, they hadn’t gone uphill much at all, and apparently didn’t need to, as they could follow a path between two moderately sized mountains to get where they were going.
The coach tilted slightly as one of the guards hopped off his seat and knocked on the window before barely cracking the door open enough to be heard inside. “We’re at Woetarn. It’ll take a bit before we can continue.” He reported and closed the door.
“What’s ‘Woetarn’?” Anastacia asked and peered at the treeline that seemed to arbitrarily and abruptly end instead of thinning out. Usually this meant that they were on the edge of a field or a lake, both of which would have looked identical with a thick layer of snow on them.
“A small lake. During the winter it’s faster to go over the ice rather than follow the shore around it.” Gilbert explained while observing the guard barely dodge a small crate that the other one dropped from the roof of the coach.
“So why did we have to stop?” She pondered out loud, knowing full well that nonsense was afoot – as it always was.
Gilbert lit up his pipe, expecting the stop to last for a while. “It’s cursed.”
Not even bothering to say anything, Anastacia threw her hands up and laid back down on Kings lap. Having to pass over a cursed lake was just one of those things that obviously were going to be a thing. If anything, it was a surprise that it was the first one they came across on the journey. No doubt there were hundreds of such lakes just waiting to be on her way, just to briefly inconvenience her whenever she dared to leave Valor.
“Is it at least a cool curse?” She asked, now being cursed herself made her somewhat of an expert on the matter, even if she didn’t quite know the nature of her curse yet. “Don’t tell me it’s something lame like bad luck for anyone crossing it.”
The old adventurer chewed on his pipe for a bit to scrape together the details of the story from the depths of his memory. “I think it’s interesting. To begin with, the whole lake is unfathomably deep despite being only a couple of hundred meters across – and by unfathomably, I mean they don’t make rope long enough to reach the bottom… or anywhere close as far as we can tell. The locals say that it’s a chasm that goes all the way down to ‘a worse place’. Where the actual curse comes in is that this mountain range was once the border between two warring nations, and almost every winter when the lake would freeze over, some kind of skirmishes would happen on the ice. What was curious that once the battle was over and bodies littered the snow, the ice would melt within minutes and the remains would sink into the depths before anyone had the chance to take them anywhere. Nothing of them would ever be seen again, no gear or bones washed downstream, no nothing.”
Anastacia frowned. “So it’s just a spooky lake then? And if it’s so deep then, couldn’t it just have a bunch of hot water randomly flow into it from deep below, melting the ice? Emilia says it’s very hot deep underground. So far it really isn’t that cursed sounding.”
“That’s because I haven’t mentioned the absolute mess of upottajas it has.” Gilbert said and pointed down with his pipe, giving the necromancer a chance to comment, but continued as he seemed have gotten his point across. “No one really knows what they are, but some suspect they’re the spirits of the drowned, but I’m of the opinion that they’re just another natural creature inhabiting this world – and hardly even the strangest ones at that, but them only appearing in the select few places in the world and the fact that they melt into water if taken out of their home makes them very hard to study. What makes them dangerous is that they like to swim below the ice, reach through it and grab onto ankles to pull anyone walking above through it, somehow without so much as breaking the ice. So you’re just left to drown without an opening to even try and climb up from. During the summer they sometimes try to tip over boats too, but that’s rarer.”
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“How are you even supposed to combat something like that?!” The necromancer exclaimed. “Do you just run and hope they don’t get a grip on you?”
“That can work, but they’re able to grab onto horses in full gallop so I wouldn’t bet on it.” Gilbert shrugged. “What you do is burn a boat.”
“Burn.. a boat?” Repeated Anastacia.
“You build a boat out of any of the kinds of trees in the area they live in, burn it to ash and rub that ash on your ankles – or in this case, the ankles of the animals pulling the coach. That’s usually enough, but since we have a lot of supplies and people on board, we’ll also have Engel over there walk ahead of us and sprinkle the ashes on our path.” The old adventurer said and pointed at the guild guard who had hopped off his seat, currently applying ash onto his ankles from the crate they had taken from the roof.
Anastacia watched the poor man cheerily converse with his partner while preparing for something that seemed absolutely insane to her. “This seems hardly fair.”
“It’s fine, he’s from around these parts – hardly his first time. You tell some young lads in the area about something like this and you know they’re screwing around on the ice on a weekly basis.” Gilbert dismissed the necromancer’s worries.
By the looks of it, the guard indeed seemed the least troubled by the situation out of anyone there, as he cheerily joked with the other guard and started spreading the ash on the animal’s ankles. Peering into the treeless patch of snow ahead, there was indeed a path there, one which had been used somewhat recently too – only having a light layer of freshly fallen snow to hide the ashes left behind the last people to cross. Closing her eyes and focusing for a moment, Anastacia could tell that the lake was barren from all life. Her powers easily reached the opposite shore, and covered most of the narrow but somewhat long lake, but not a single fish or other creature resonated with them. The trees around the lake had the usual number of birds and the land housed plenty of small animals hidden in their burrows, so it was just the lake that was afflicted by the curse. The upottajas must have then been some manner of spirits, untouchable by necromancy, or at the time were so deep in the water Anastacia couldn’t reach them.
While the two were conversing, Solaria took a moment to pick out seven copper coins from a pouch on his belt. He laid them on the bench and quickly drew a small sigil on each one with the chalk he used to write his messages with and scattered them out into the snow from a small hatch above one of the windows, meant for letting smoke out. Anastacia didn’t really pay attention to this, but noticed what he was doing and thought it curious, and by the looks of it, the mage thought her actions equally mysterious.
“She’s checking our surroundings; it’s a necromancer thing.” Gilbert suddenly stated, answering a wordless inquiry from Solaria.
The mage quickly scribbled down a question and showed his tablet to Anastacia. “Would you mind giving me a short explanation of necromancy? I’m shamefully unfamiliar with it.”
“I guess I don’t mind.” She shrugged and fixed her posture to make sure Solaria could see her speak. “Necromancy is both a sense and a force, kind of. An aspect of it works more or less like hearing or seeing, but it works only on certain materials and is entirely blind to everything else. For example, you can bury a bone underground and a necromancer will be able to sense it just as well as if they saw it, or you can hide in another room and I’d still be able to tell how many fingers you’re holding up. The sensation itself is harder to describe, but that doesn’t really matter. The other aspect of necromancy is the ability to force our will on those same materials, reignite the will it once had to reanimate it, or just overrule it with our own. We don’t really know how exactly it works, but we know it isn’t magic and that it would anger a lot of people who study physics.”
The mage nodded a few times while working out what was being said, and after pondering for a moment, he came up with a follow up question. “And how precise is this ‘sense’ exactly? Can it differentiate between different tissues?”
“Oh yeah, easily. It depends entirely on how talented the necromancer is, but even as someone who doesn’t specialize in that, I can tell when something is sore and stuff like that. I have a… friend who knows way more about how people work. She’d be able to tell a lot more.” Anastacia said, still hesitating to call another necromancer a friend, even if Iris had well earned the title.
Solaria put down his tablet, took out a small notebook from his bag and wrote something into it, often stopping to think for a while before finishing his notes and setting the book aside to write on his tablet again. “Interesting! I suspect there is great many things a necromancer could tell us of the world – teach us about physiology and biology. As a tool for research your powers seem groundbreaking.”
Anastacia was so used to necromancy causing nothing but fear in people that it almost left her speechless when someone’s initial reaction was to think of it as a tool for research. She herself was among the first to condemn the art as nothing but evil and say that nothing good could come from it after all. “I… I guess that’s true.”
The mage didn’t even notice the reaction and delightedly scribbled something into his own notes on the matter.
Suddenly the coach nudged onwards in the snow and started the slow and careful journey over the lake. The ice let out an uncomfortable crunch when the full heft of the animals and the coach with its passengers moved onto it, but Gilbert didn’t seem to be alarmed by it, so Anastacia figured it wasn’t out of the ordinary. As soon as they moved to a point where the ice didn’t reach all the way to the bottom, the necromancer could feel a congregation of strange string-like entities gather below them. Impossibly thin and not the easiest of things to exert ones will over, they were nothing like any other animal or creature she had ever seen – but were still unquestionably just normal creatures instead of spirits or something unnatural. Their swarming made it impossible to tell how long one individual was, or even their exact shape. It was entirely possible that what seemed like a mass of dozens or hundreds of thin individuals were in reality just a few of these creatures and they possessed several tentacles. Anywhere Engel or one of the animals stepped, a mass of these creatures slammed against the bottom of the ice, but did not attempt to reach through it, demonstrating the effectiveness of the ashes.
“You can feel them?” Gilbert asked, having watched the necromancer do her thing for a while.
Anastacia nodded.
That was as far as the conversation went, as he had simply asked to add to his already impressive amount of knowledge on the beasts and creatures of the world. Solaria also added a note on the matter to his book. All three of them individually mused on the fact that it was perhaps the first time a necromancer had ran into upottajas, and simply for that, the creatures became ever so slightly less mysterious.
It didn’t take long at all for them to reach the middle part of the narrow mountain lake, the stringy creatures kept following them relentlessly for the entire time, but even Anastacia was slowly getting used to their presence, and noticed hardly any signs of nervousness in her companions – least of all the poor guard leading the way, who had happily conversed with his partner the entire time. To be fair, knowing that there was something in a lake that really wished to drown them was a luxury adventurers rarely had, usually it was something they learned the hard way, so weirdly enough, that made things easier for her.
Suddenly, as soon as she had gotten comfortable enough to not focus entirely on keeping an ‘eye’ on the creatures, they scattered as quickly as they had first amassed below them. At first Anastacia figured they gave up, but that didn’t really make sense based on how persistent they had been right until then. The idea that they were running away from something was slow to creep up on her, but as soon as it did, she felt something at the very edge of her reach – directly downwards, hundreds of meters into the depths of the lake. Before she even had the chance to figure out anything more than that, that something reached up.
In mere seconds, almost touching the bottom of the ice below them, was perhaps the most horrifying thing Anastacia had ever felt with her powers. What was most easily described as a hand with twelve fingers, all of which had five joints to them and were at least five meters long – most of them more than that. The palm of this ‘hand’ was wide enough for it to grab the entire coach and get a good grip on it, but was also filled with hundreds of strange pustules of varying sizes, which felt similar to eyes in structure, ranging from about the size of a fist to a larger than a person’s head. As if this wasn’t enough of a worry, this ‘hand’ was attached to an arm, one that had two elbow-like joints on it and reached all the way down into the depths – well out of the necromancer’s reach. Whatever the monstrosity was, it made no further sudden movements, merely following the coach from below the ice, just like the smaller critters before. As if crawling along, it gently touched the ice with the tips of its fingers and simply watched the travelers. Being able to sense it meant that Anastacia should have been at least somewhat able to combat it, if needed, but its will was as immense as its size and the necromancer honestly didn’t know if that was truly the case.
Before she was able to compose herself enough to inform anyone of the new horrors besetting them, Gilbert noticed that the notoriously pasty necromancer was somehow even paler than usual, hauntingly so. “Anna?...” He inquired in a hushed voice.
“Big… thing…” Was all she could utter while pointing down.
Gilbert glanced at the snow outside but was unable to see anything odd, nor did the creature cause tremors in the thick ice even when it touched to bottom. “Is it attacking us?”
Anastacia shook her head. “Just… watching? I think.” She whispered and instinctively grabbed the hands of the two simulacra by her side.
Though he must not have been able to see what was being said, the mage was quick to pick up on something being amiss and expected a briefing, which he received in the form of Gilbert quickly gesturing something with his hands, somehow getting the message through. Solaria wasted little time grabbing the chalk he used to write his messages with, drew a small symbol on the knees of the simulacra before doing the same on the necromancer as well as Gilbert.
“Anything new, Anna?” The old adventurer asked, still calm in his demeanor but not taking his eyes off the snow.
“No. It’s still just… watching.” Anastacia reported, clutching the simulacra’s hands even tighter. “What do we do?”
Gilbert pondered the question for a time before answering with a question of his own. “How big are we talking about? A fisher?”
“I… I don’t know.”
Gilbert knew exactly what that implied. “We do nothing. We are in its territory, and if it doesn’t attack, neither will we. It’s best to not even let it know we’re aware of it. The lake is known for upottajas, not whatever it is, so there’s a good chance it’s harmless.”
And so they waited. Slowly making their way across the ice, still spreading ash on their path as if nothing was different. Gilbert kept asking for updates from the terrified necromancer, but at no point did anything change. The massive creature simply followed them without moving closer or farther away at any point, almost all the way to the other shore, where the water was no longer deep enough for it to be able to do so. Just as quickly and silently as it had appeared, it retreated back into the chasm, outside of Anastacia’s reach. The upottajas immediately seized their opportunity again, and returned to swarm below the ice, but just as before, the ash kept them away until the party was well and truly safe on solid ground again.
As the guards decided that the shore was a decent enough place to rest the animals for the day and began to make the arrangements for a camp, Anastacia rushed out into the snow to have a small and understandable nervous breakdown before being able to describe the creature in more detail. Gilbert had never even heard of such a thing, which was rare enough, but even the guard who had grown up in the area had no idea something like that lurked in the lake.
