“Do better, Tamlin.” The dragon’s tone was relaxed, but the boy could hear the disapproval in it all the same.
“I’m trying my best,” he said, and he was. It wasn’t his fault that the candle refused to light. He was a necromancer, not a bloody pyromancer. He brought back the dead and bent their spirits to his will—starting fires was not something he was supposed to be able to do, let alone excel at.
“No you’re not,” Typh said. “You seem to think that screwing your eyes shut and willing the candle to burn will get you anywhere. It won’t, and now you’re trying to blame your failure on your class.”
“I’m not,” Tamlin lied, “Besides, how many times have you told me that magic is all about willing things to happen?”
“Plenty, but it seems like you’ve forgotten the other part. Visualisation is important, especially for fledgling mages like yourself. You can’t just will it to appear, you have to see the flame, to feel its warmth on your skin, and hear the quiet crackle as it consumes the wick leaving nought but ash behind. The better you can visualise that, the less will and mana the spell will require.”
“But I’m not a mage. I’m a necromancer,” he grumbled.
“You have an arcana skill. That makes you a mage in all the ways that count. If you want to be nothing more than your class tag, then we can end these lessons and you can get back to playing with dead things, but if you want to be great someday then light the fucking candle so we can move on from these beginner lessons.”
Tamlin didn’t bother responding as he knew that there was no point. Typh only swore when she was frustrated and now that he’d wound her up he wouldn’t be getting any more hints out of her until he made another attempt. This whole exercise was frustrating to him as well, for no matter how much the dragon insisted that he could, Tamlin couldn’t light the candle—at least not without a match.
He’d failed so many times before that failure was practically ingrained in his soul. Typh might as well have asked him to tear down the palace’s walls and hand over the Queen’s severed head on a silver platter—or to walk up a flight of steps without a handrail. It couldn’t be done, not by him.
Despite her best intentions, the dragon was an infuriatingly bad teacher who relied too much on repetition to build mastery. She took so much for granted when it came to magecraft that it was actually ridiculous. She had a tendency to oversimplify extremely complex concepts with ludicrously simple explanations that skipped over years’ worth of underlying theory.
Since he’d been living in the estate claimed by the dragon, Tamlin had taken to spending his free time in the library to escape the pains that his body routinely inflicted on him. In the months that had passed, he’d arguably learnt far more about magical theory from the estate’s musty books than he had from her one-to-one lessons. But the snippets of arcane lore that slipped out from between her perfect lips now and again were beyond fascinating. Those few odd comments that were more likely to be delivered with derision than impetus had the habit of calling into question everything he’d read about the fundamental limits of magic and the very nature of Creation. They made the candle worthwhile, or at least that’s what he told himself.
So despite everything he had ever read telling him that it was impossible for him to light the candle, Tamlin still tried. He closed his eyes to aid his concentration and reached for his mana. He smiled wide when his deep well of power quickly responded to his call and a thin tendril of invigorating magic rose up from within his core. Tamlin visualised it as a bright green thread that smoothly moved through his body along channels scarred by his earlier misuse of goblin alchemy. When it reached his hand, it made its way from his outstretched palm and towards the candle sitting inert at the centre of the table.
The mixture of hard fats that made up the tallow resonated strongly with his mana while the wick remained a complete void to his arcane senses. The flax fibres had never lived in the same way that animals did and so there was nothing for his death aspected mana to cling to.
The echoes of the creatures whose fats were in the candle whispered to him, begging for release even though the tallow was a poor vessel for their souls. Their insistent urgings made it hard to focus on his goal. A single spark to light a small self-sustaining flame. Ignoring their whispers, he tried to feel for the wick, but it was like trying to grasp at air. No matter how hard he tried, there was nothing there.
Nonetheless, he willed for that nothing to burn. He imagined the warm glow of the fire against his palm, the smell of the melting fats, the smoke of the oily fire. The endless hunger of the flame.
None of these sensations assailed his senses and knowing that the dragon was staring at him intently, likely with disappointment clouding her gold-flecked eyes, Tamlin felt more than a little bit silly. He was supposed to be a prodigy, but he still couldn’t do it. Unwilling to give up, he pushed harder on his arcana skill and with his mana as his voice, the necromancer demanded that the wick he couldn’t sense burn.
And then all of a sudden, he felt it.
The wall of resistance that accompanied that sensation was so high that it momentarily took him aback. This was supposed to be a beginners exercise? Exactly how unsuited was his aspected mana for starting fires? If the obstacle in his path were a mountain then it would take him a thousand years to scale it. But this was also the furthest he had gotten in the exercise since Typh had tried to ‘round out his magical education’ and he refused to stop now. He couldn’t fail her—wouldn’t—not when she was all that he had.
He slammed his will into the insurmountable obstacle increasing the flow of his mana several-fold only to be rebuffed. The trickle of power from his reserves became a raging river that was almost eagerly eaten up by the candle. Nothing happened, the resistance remained unyielding so he pushed harder, pouring even more of his mana into the wick. A part of him knew that he should stop, that he was getting carried away, but just as the idea of restraint started to become quite compelling something started to grow in his senses. An encouraging warmth emanated from the candle that suggested he was on the right track, so when he felt his awareness shift and his other class skills activate, Tamlin thought nothing of it.
“Stop!” The dragon commanded sharply.
Tamlin opened his eyes to see Typh looking down at the table between them with a look of naked disgust on her otherwise beautiful face. The candle was on fire, so that was progress at least, but it was undoubtedly another failure.
[Tallow Homunculus level 50].
In a word the creature was grotesque. At six inches tall, the homunculus was an abomination of twisted wax given some semblance of a chimeric shape. Like a dirty yellow sculpture crafted by too many hands, it couldn’t quite decide what creature it wanted to be. It had the horns of a bull, the head of a horse, a torso that was neither sheep nor dog, and perhaps most concerningly of all, a definitively goblin arm. It was neither bipedal nor quadrupedal in form. With mismatched limbs made of wax, it stumbled forwards, green fires burning brightly in the sockets of its miniature horse-shaped head.
It tried to talk or perhaps scream, and thankfully failed.
“Well this is a first,” Typh commented.
“I’m sorry—I tried,” Tamlin began, his explanation cut short by the wave of exhaustion that fell on him. He didn’t need to check his status to realise that he’d all but depleted his mana.
“It’s fine. We’ll try again when you get back. For now you should rest, and decide what to do with… that… before you go and meet the others,” she said, gesturing disdainfully at Tamlin’s homunculus which had begun scurrying towards him with an awkward lopsided gait.
“I don’t need to rest. I’m fine,” he argued, doing his best to ignore the new pinprick of awareness that stemmed from his newest creation.
“Are you sure?” the dragon asked.
“Yes.”
She stared at him intently while he tried to hide his fatigue behind a confident smile. It would have been harder to feign wellness, but Tamlin was always fatigued these days and the lie had become much easier with practice.
“Fine. Let's go introduce you to your new party,” Typh finally assented.
***
Descending the stairs was another trial made harder by his lie. Tamlin knew that Typh would have helped him in an instant had he asked, and he had enough minions secreted around the estate that he would only have had to wait for a few moments for a supporting arm to lean on, but his pride wouldn’t allow it. Tamlin strongly suspected that the dragon knew of his struggle and that she wholeheartedly approved of his stubbornness in the face of his infirmity.
As he hobbled down the final steps leading down to the ground floor, Tamlin leaned heavily on the carved bone staff that he’d long ago traded his cane for. While he caught his breath and tried to stop the room from spinning, he looked down disapprovingly at the homunculus on his shoulder. The creature had left oily hand, hoof, and paw prints along the fine fabric of his robe on its perilous journey to reach its chosen perch. He hadn’t told it to do that, but the added weight was hardly an inconvenience so he quickly decided to let the matter rest for now. Instinctively, he knew that he would need to feed it soon, but that could wait until after.
For the first time in a long while, Tamlin felt a nervous knot of anxiety form in his stomach. He was finally going to meet his party. He’d been stuck at level 50 since the fall of Helion, and no matter how much he’d pleaded with Typh for permission to venture to one of the dungeons deep beneath the city, he’d been told to wait. Apparently, it was too dangerous for him to go alone and too unhealthy for him to leave his body unattended for so long.
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How things changed now that he wanted to use his own power for himself.
The chain of expansive dungeons used by Terythia’s Kings to train Alchemic Knights and honour guards was now being repurposed to raise the levels of anyone willing to face the hardship. It was not exactly a pleasant journey to reach them, nor were the dungeons considered to be remotely safe, but Tamlin didn’t care about the danger. He needed to level again. If dragging along a squad of ratling soldiers was the price he had to pay to get Typh to say yes, then he’d find a way to do it even if he had to physically carry them all with his own feeble arms.
Slowly, Tamlin limped forwards through the marble halls of the manor, falling into a repetitive step, step, thump, rhythm while he lost himself in his thoughts. He hated that he needed his staff for more than just empowering his spells, but he remained hopeful that a sufficiently high rank would allow him to push past his disability. Fortunately for now, it wasn’t a long walk to the courtyard from the stairs and Typh had set a relatively leisurely pace—for his benefit he was sure.
When he finally arrived, standing tall amidst the usual assortment of soldiers training in the dirt were four classers. Instead of the ratlings he’d been prepared to command, Tamlin was surprised to see three humans and a solitary woodling. All four of them were waiting expectantly in silence and when their eyes fell on Typh, they immediately dilated with near-palpable awe. Tamlin knew that look well. The dragon’s triple-digit charisma score was probably the most terrifying thing about Typh, the way it effortlessly enthralled those significantly below her level whom she came into contact with. Even now, he wondered how much of how his eyes were drawn to the cut of her dress was due to her stats rather than her actual figure.
When she stepped forwards from the doorway revealing Tamlin standing behind her, he saw the classer's gazes darken with what he assumed was disgust. Charisma scores aside, a necromancer was hardly as inspiring as a dragon.
“Tamlin, I’d like to introduce you to your new adventuring party. Arbor,” she said gesturing towards the tall woodling covered in thick plates of petrified wood. “Ilvane, Drusus, and Almira,” she continued, pointing towards the ranger, warrior, and rogue in turn. “Children, this Tamlin. As you can clearly see he’s a necromancer, but he’ll be your mage support and leader from now on.”
Tamlin’s eyes quickly swept over the four’s tags, and while the woodling seemed perfectly agreeable, the three humans made him uneasy. To start with, they all had a considerably lower level than him, sitting at exactly level 20, something which he strongly doubted was a coincidence. The larger issue however, was that the familiar looks of disdain and mistrust had yet to fade from their eyes. He had no desire to suffer the presence of those who couldn’t see past his class tag and his prior experiences with humans—especially those his age—made him extremely reluctant to entrust his life to their expertise.
“Typh… I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Tamlin began.
“Well, I am. They’re about your age and like you, they all have a formerly forbidden class that would have eventually gotten them killed had I not taken the city,” the dragon said. “You can trust them not to hate you for who you are.”
“They do?” he asked, surprised that such normal looking classers could have secrets of their own similar to his.
“Why don’t you ask them yourself rather than acting like they’re not standing in front of you?” Typh suggested.
“Sorry…” he said, this time addressing the low-pewter classers who were to be his teammates.
“It’s okay, I was as surprised as you are now when I first learned that there were so many of us with less-than-legal options at the academy,” Almira replied, the pale-faced teenager offering Tamlin an earnest smile.
“You’re all from the academy?” he asked and received three nods in response.
“With respect, Lord Sovereign, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I was told there would be a reward for completing the challenge. While I don’t think he should be killed, I’m not exactly keen on working with a necromancer—it's nothing personal, but my senses are good and corpses stink,” Ilvane offered.
“I’m not keen either, and it’s not about the corpses,” said Drusus. When Almira shot him a scathing glare, the warrior wasn’t shy in confronting it. “What? You’re thinking it too ‘Mira. We’ve been busting our arses in the vilest dungeons beneath Helion for months just to get to 20 the fastest and now that we’ve succeeded we’re supposed to follow his orders? What kind of reward is this? I thought there would at least be gold! Look at him, he may be low-bronze, but he can barely stand. How is he supposed to even get to a dungeon, let alone ‘lead us’ in conquering it?”
The warrior’s words hung in the air like a challenge, for that’s what it was. Tamlin looked to Typh for support following the youth’s outburst, but the dragon only shrugged.
“He has got a point, Tamlin. Of all the candidates, Drusus excelled in just about every task I set, including leading his peers in group combat exercises,” the dragon began. “Drusus, would you like to lead instead?”
“Of course, Lord Sovereign,” the warrior said, bowing somewhat awkwardly before Typh.
“Tamlin, do you object?”
“Vehemently.”
The starkness of his own refusal startled him. Drusus’s challenge had come before he’d even decided that he wanted to be a part of the group, let alone the leader of it. It chafed Tamlin to follow Typh’s orders, but he did so because she was the master he'd chosen and in the months that had passed she’d also become his only friend. Sometimes he even dreamed of her being more than just a teacher, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think that those fantasies could ever become a reality. The idea of lowering himself to someone as mundane as a low-pewter warrior—forbidden class or not—galled him, and Drusus’s attitude was arrogant enough that Tamlin already wanted to make the other boy bleed.
“Well, why don’t you show Drusus here what you can do?” Typh suggested.
“A duel then? I think there’s a ring—”
Without a word or even a formalised command, Tamlin’s homunculus leapt from his shoulder crossing the distance between the two boys in an instant. Drusus’s eyes widened in panic, but he got no further in reacting before the creature made from tallow latched onto his face and melted against it. With a yellow layer of rapidly hardening wax smothering the warrior’s head, the boy clawed ineffectually at the tallow covering his eyes and mouth, desperately trying to breathe as he staggered about in an irregular circle.
Tamlin felt himself smile, and because Typh didn’t interfere neither did the other two. In silence, they all watched Drusus struggle until he finally collapsed unconscious onto the ground. A few moments passed and the dragon coughed politely, reminding the necromancer to send his first command to his homunculus which promptly melted off the warrior’s face. It reformed as a different chimeric abomination—sheep headed this time—and with its lopsided gait, the undead abomination quickly returned to Tamlin’s shoulder.
“Arbor, heal Drusus please,” Tamlin ordered, finding the act of issuing commands to the living to already feel quite familiar. The silent woodling proceeded to do just that, and the necromancer wasn’t even surprised that he’d intuited that the creature had a healer class in addition to its displayed species one.
“Well, I’m glad that’s been settled without any bloodshed. When Drusus wakes up, Tamlin can arrange for the three of you to be housed inside the manor—Arbor has their own residence, but they will report in an hour after dawn. The rest of you should take some time to get to know one another first—do some human bonding. But when Tamlin says that you’re ready, you’re free to go dungeon diving with only a few conditions,” Typh said.
“I feel like I’m not going to like these conditions,” Tamlin commented.
“No. You’re really not,” the dragon grinned.
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