Book of The Dead

Willhem stuttered awake, his dream overlapping reality for a dizzying moment until the pounding anvil resolved itself into a knocking on his door. A quick glance at his shutters revealed a distinct lack of light flowing through the cracks.

What time was it?

Muttering to himself, he threw back the sheets and forced his feet into his slippers before he stood, fetching his robe from the stand beside the bed and tying it around his waist.

“This had better be good,” he warned in his thin, crotchety voice as he shuffled to the door, drawing it open to reveal a nervous, sweating servant.

“I’m very sorry to disturb your rest, Master Willhem, and, of course, I wouldn’t unless the matter needed your direct attention -”

“Spit it out, man,” the Arcanist demanded and the servant cringed back from him.

“Th-there was a light spotted in the upstairs work area. A man was apprehended, but…”

“But what? Clap him in chains, knock his teeth out and throw him to the Marshals. I’ll take an inventory in the morning.”

He moved to close the door, but the servant interrupted before he moved it more than a few inches.

“It’s one of the apprentices, sir! One of the new ones… I thought you would want to see them for yourself before they were… taken away.”

“An apprentice?” Willhem muttered.

He had taken on two new students not three days prior. They’d moved into the dorm two days ago and started lessons and bitwork just that morning. And one of them had the gall to try and steal from him already? Appalling! Not to mention the scandal it would cause, and the damage to his reputation…. It may be better if this wayward ‘prentice vanished quietly rather than call the authorities.

“Step back, you brat,” Willhem snapped and the servant took a hasty step back from the door, allowing the old master to swing it shut.

A few minutes later, he emerged once more, looking regal(ish) in his somewhat rumpled Arcanist’s robes and a little dishevelled, his hair not properly combed nor his beard fully groomed. Nevertheless, thunder sparked in his eyes, and as the servant fell in on the master’s heels, he thanked the heavens some other poor bastard in Kenmor would receive the old man’s wrath.

When he arrived at the workshop, Willhem’s temper had only worsened. The cold night air had chilled him to the bone, even through his robes, and his damned knees ached something fierce. When he saw this thief, he may just bash his head in with his Arcanist pliance and be done with it!

He stomped through the ground floor, where his senior apprentices worked, and made his way upstairs to find a small crowd gathered around one of the cramped and basic stations the juniors used. He recognised two of the men, guards he’d hired to protect his property, and who were about to be fired.

Another face he knew far better.

“Mrs Crottan,” he snapped, “what in the name of the divines is going on here?”

In the centre of the three figures sat a slight, sandy-blond haired young man hunched over the table scraping at a core using his pliance.

“Master Willhem,” the stout old woman gasped when she saw him walk in, as if he were a ghost. “What are you doing here so late at night?”

He boggled at her.

“I’m here to discipline this thieving apprentice and have him fed to the crabs!” he barked, jabbing a gnarled accusatory finger at the young man, who continued his work, not bothering to look up.

The dorm mistress stared back.

“What thief? Lukas here? He isn’t stealing, he’s trying to work! I told him to wait until morning, but he refused to listen. Spooked the guards something fierce. They spotted the light in the upstairs window and jumped to conclusions, came to get me when they realised it wasn’t no thief. When he wouldn’t go back to bed, I told young Jeremy to get your word, since Lukas said he’d stop working if you said so. Didn’t expect you to show up looking like my grandfather’s ghost! Near scared me half to death.”

Willhem blinked through the nattering. Jeremy had been the young servant? And he hadn’t needed to trek here in the cold?

That boy is fired! the Arcanist thought viciously.

“What do you think you’re doing, boy, causing all this fuss?” he finally snapped at Lukas.

Beneath his fierce, bushy eyebrows, the old master could muster quite the glare when he wanted to, and he unleashed the full fury of those brows now.

Cool as a winter cabbage, young Lukas turned to his master and held out the core he’d been working on.

“You wanted it like this, didn’t you, Master Willhem?”

After nearly four decades in the enchanting trade, Willhem found his eyes irresistibly drawn to the core, taking in every detail of the lad’s work at a glance.

“Your Fah rune is misshapen,” he snapped.

Lukas took the core back and placed it under the glass once more, magnifying it in his eyes.

“Fuck,” the young man cursed, causing Mrs Crottan to gasp.

A few scrapes and the apprentice turned and handed it back to Willhem, who again assessed it almost against his will.

“Better,” he begrudgingly admitted.

Lukas nodded, then placed the core to one side in a waiting receptacle, before he opened a drawer to his left and withdrew a new, unmarked one. Without hesitating, he held it beneath the glass and began to scrape away with his pliance.

“What are you doing, boy?” Willhem screeched, coming back to his senses.

“Working.”

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

This lad has a steady pair of hands, Willhem noticed, then shook himself.

“Why in the blazes are you working now?”

“Nobody told me I wasn’t allowed to,” Lukas replied matter-of-factly. “I work better at night and I don’t tend to sleep much. Being apprenticed to a renowned and successful Arcanist such as you, Master Willhem, I thought it would be foolish to waste any time. You asked Hunt and I to finish a hundred of these light enchantments before we reported back to you. I’d hoped to finish them tomorrow.”

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

“Tomorrow?” Willhem stared. He looked down at the workstation and saw there were already four cores sitting in the receptacle, carefully nestled in their cups, protected from chipping or scratching. “Let me see those.”

Lukas immediately put down what he was working on before he passed the three uninspected cores to his master.

“I suspect the Fah rune will be off on each of them,” he said, “I’d intended to fix them after having another clean attempt.”

The boy was right, each of them lacked the proper curl at the end of the rune. They’d work, but the error would reduce the efficacy of the enchantment by five to ten percent.

Willhem blinked.

He’d taught this apprentice how to do this enchantment that afternoon. A basic bit of busywork for new students to chew on, get used to the equipment, the routine of the place, and generally settle in. Something else the young man had said finally registered with him.

“I… also used to prefer working at night.”

Such a long time ago, but he could remember those days. As an apprentice, and then after he’d been promoted and started his own shop, he would work through the night multiple times a week, scraping away at cores, honing his craft and preparing items for sale. When everything was quiet and still, it had been so much easier to focus.

“Night Owl,” Lukas said, a slight smile on his face, and Willhem nodded.

“Night Owl,” he echoed.

A very underrated feat.

He turned to the guards.

“In the future, apprentice Lukas will inform you before he begins work. Is that clear?” He raised his voice at the end, to get the boy’s attention.

“It is, sir. I apologise for the trouble, Master Willhem. I didn’t realise I’d broken any rules.”

The Arcanist nodded before he spoke to the dorm mistress. “Mrs Crottan, please inform Jeremy he is fired the next time you see him. Insist that young Lukas gets at least three full nights’ sleep each week, or he will answer to me, otherwise, let him work.”

“I will, sir, not to worry.”

With that, he left the workshop, the lad still scraping away, head down, face to the glass as he went.

For whatever reason, Master Willhem didn’t mind so much as he braced himself against the cold for the return journey, and he didn’t notice the slight bounce in his step as he alighted the stairs and returned to his room.

“Night Owl,” he chuckled to himself as he wormed his thin frame back under the blankets.

That boy is going places.

~~~~

“Are you sure you aren’t an Arcanist by Class?”

“Vic, how many times do I have to say it? I’m not an Arcanist. If you bribe the staff, you can probably get a look at my status when I signed up. Curse Mage is my main Class and I picked Enchanter as a secondary.”

The young man who leaned over Lukas’ table shook his head, his eyes pinched shut in mock pain.

“Then how are you so good? Every time Master Willhem walks past your bench, he leaves with a turgid pliance. I swear by the goddess!”

Lukas had raised his brows slightly at his fellow apprentice’s words, but he didn’t take his eyes away from the glass and the core he was working on beneath it.

“I’m just glad I don’t have to work on lights and pocket warmers anymore, and we get a little time for our own projects,” Lukas muttered as he continued to scrape runes into the small gem.

Vic squinted as he leaned closer, inspecting the work.

“What in the realm are you working on here? I don’t even recognise some of these runes.”

“It’s nothing,” Lukas said.

The other apprentice drew himself up.

“I’m your senior apprentice by six months, remember,” he puffed himself up, a self mocking smile on his face, “so be a dear and explain to your senior what you’re doing so when the Master walks by in a few minutes, I don’t make a fool of myself.”

Lukas rolled his eyes.

“Fine.”

He leaned back and brought the core closer to the glass, enlarging the image so they could examine the runes more easily.

“I suppose you can think of this as a… Repository. It will draw in magick, hold it, then make it available to another spell or enchantment. It’s intended to act as a… power reservoir of sorts.”

“Isn’t that just a Power core? We have those already.”

The younger apprentice shrugged his shoulders.

“We do, and I’m not likely to improve on a thousands of years old design. This is something different. I don’t intend this to be a reserve source of magick for mages to draw on, but to provide energy to already active spells.”

“Like a summon or golem?”

“Exactly like that,” Lukas smiled. “I want them to be modular as well, so I can network them together if needed.”

Victor rubbed his chin as he examined the runic script carved ever so finely into the surface of the core.

“I may not know exactly what’s going on here,” he pointed, “but isn’t this going to be pretty ineffective? You’ll get a tiny trickle of power out of the thing, at best.”

“That’s the challenge. I don’t want this design to require large and expensive cores. Instead, I want to maximise the effect I can get from smaller ones. Efficiency is the key.”

“Well said, lad,” Master Willhem harrumphed as he wandered down the line of worktables.

After being promoted from the upstairs area the previous week, Lukas had been making himself at home amongst the more experienced apprentices working under the Master. It had taken him six months of diligent effort, but that was half the time it normally took to earn promotion from the demanding owner of Willhem’s Arcanist Emporium.

“There’s no appreciation for good, tight script these days. Need more power? Get a bigger core! Pshah!”

The old man nearly spat on his own workshop floor in disgust.

“In my day, we’d be beaten with a stick if we couldn’t squeeze every ounce of power from a core. And conduit magick as well! Linking weaker cores is a much cheaper solution than purchasing larger ones, but it’s harder. Half of the workers on this floor still have conduits leakier than a drunk roofer’s shingles!”

A few of the others rolled their shoulders uncomfortably as they continued to work at their benches.

“Lukas is working on a runic repository,” Victor said sagely, “trying to power active spellforms. We were just discussing the efficiency issue, Master Willhem.”

“A repository?” muttered the old man as he shuffled closer and peered into the glass. A frown creased his features almost immediately as he muttered to himself.

“These are some odd choices, young man. Where did you find these runes?”

“In the apprentice library, Master Willhem,” Lukas replied promptly. “I spent many hours examining the texts and found this combination in ‘Magick storage and transference’ by Baksin.”

“Baksin? That lunatic? Still, it will work. It’s just….”

The old man waggled his thick brows.

“I try not to give too much advice to my apprentices when it comes to their own projects. Especially the good ones. You’ll have to puzzle through on your own.”

He nodded sagely before he leaned down and patted Lukas on the shoulder.

“Consider the configuration of runes,” he whispered, before he glanced around the room to see if anyone caught the move and then shuffled off, snapping at another apprentice.

Victor shook his head.

“Look at how much he favours you,” he sighed, “and turn, look at him walk. See that hunched posture? He’s stiff as a board.”

“I think he’s just old,” Lukas remarked, “and doesn’t giving the advice just mean he thinks I’m bad?”

Regardless, it had been a hint, and the young Enchanter considered the arrangement of runes on the core for a moment before he sighed.

He’d have to experiment through trial and error to find the correct configuration, which would take time, and more importantly, use up the few cores he was given to work on his own projects….

“There’s no money in it, you know,” Vic remarked looking down on the core once more.

Lukas frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“What Willhem was talking about. There’s a reason all of us are poor at working with small cores and efficient conduits, and it’s because that sort of work doesn’t make much money. There are many two-bit Arcanists out there who fumble about with the little stuff. You think Willhem got rich selling trinkets like that? No. It’s the showstoppers, the high-end work that really pays. Everyone in here is aiming for that market.”

The more junior ‘prentice just shrugged his shoulders, an indifferent look on his face.

“Not me,” he said. “I’ve got something else entirely in mind.”