The sick woman before me was far beyond the stage at which my spells could save her, the flesh rotting on her skin as the disease had ravaged the entire body.

“Tell me, mage, how important is it for you that this woman remains alive, for my method of keeping her that way will be more agonizing than death could ever be, at least at first.”

I turned, staring into his eyes as I began to channel to purify and clean, before going over to sacrifice and sip miasma, trying not to scream as my own life force and hers began to entwine.

“She is my sister, and if she doesn’t survive, the deal is off.”

He explained, his gaze threatening me enough to no longer question his conviction.

“Do not say I haven’t warned you.”

I answer, stopping the sacrifice skill as I took the orb I had created at the gate and laid it on top of her forehead.

“She might mutate a bit and awaken a necros affinity, if that is not a problem for you, I am sure we can work with this.”

I promise, the death and decay of the entire village, channeled into my form.

“That’s a devil deal!” The pyromancer complained, my voice turning raspy and the light dimming as my eyes radiated purple, my unnaturally pale form seeming much more dangerous than I actually was.

“I’ve met devils, their deals are far better, this is merely an old necromancer trying to keep a promise.”

At that, he simply nodded, and I proceeded on my path, casting ‘pour necros’ on her as a necros spell, and fueling every bit of death and decay I could channel into the woman before me.

At first, nothing happened, her body had been mostly restored thanks to the sacrifice spell, but I would not go until I had made sure she could defend herself.

“What is her normal affinity?”

I asked as something finally popped inside her, and her regenerating body turned just a bit harder to look at.

“You know what you have to choose, young one. The darkness will not hurt you, it was the thing to save your life, after all.”

My words probably sounded hollow as I whispered them to her, but when I finally felt close to passing out, and the Pale one brought me a corpse I couldn’t quite pinpoint, I made sure to eat it, barely holding me back as a splitting headache bloomed, only these corpses liquids enough to keep me from complaining too much, as the flowing blood calmed my emotions.

Finally, she awoke, almost jumping her brother before I held the corpse in her way, having him watch her devour it like a madwoman and slowly regenerating as she did so.

Stolen story; please report.

“She will return to normal soon, and if you can give her enough food and keep her away from death too much, she will probably be fine.”

Finally, he took a breath and plunged a knife into my heart, which I considered quite annoying as I grabbed a safety hare from my backpack and sucked it dry before the wound could get serious.

“I have walked her path once, and she will have a hard time containing the power.” At this, he nodded and suppressed a single tear.

“She was a geos mage, why are you asking?”

I sighed as I looked at the woman coming to her bearings.

“Hello there, unliving one, I am sorry for saving you in this particular way, but I do not think any healing could have been good enough to save whatever hit you.”

Then, we simply went to the other two sick people, one of them an old man with a cold, and the other a particularly feverish newborn, both much easier cases than his sister had been, which I then followed by having his sister sit through a single training session with me, in which I overwhelmed her with death and sliced her with any weapon I could find, before she finally had an understanding of necros, which she then used to understand the geos she had used for so long, a process I listened closely to, until I actually understood it.

To her, Geos was immobility, while it would probably be more along the lines of indomitability for me. Which I did not expand on, as she finally underwent the first refinement, which was followed by me falling asleep.

The following day, I visited the tailor early, Ember, which was the title my former teacher had told me was used to name every fire caster worth the title, stood behind me with a gaze of burning hatred as we were given our new clothes.

“It was your choice, you could have let her die or hoped for some vitality guy or another to come by.” What happened next was immediate, his hand coming to slap me across the face, and a few spells activating the moment he did so, freezing his hand in place.

“You do not want to do that, once was ok, with all the emotions and everything, but unless you want to end up a shambling mound, I recommend you do not touch me until I specifically allow it, or it seems appropriate, got it?” I ask, casting diarrhea on him so he would be busy doing just about anything except for annoying me, his silence following the encounter told just how much he resented me for what I had done, though I was sure he’d come around, it was after all his choice to offer me his companionship, probably even thinking himself subtle in his attempt to learn from my casting, which was the worst was to learn.

Pale stood behind me menacingly most of the time, the position simply comfortable for her as she could easily look above me and still, none would force her to be the talking one.

As we were given a pair of gray robes and masks of wood, we quickly used them to cover ourselves and went to get away from the village we had spent that day in, Ember following us as we left for the hunt once more, ready to pursue footsteps of doom and, to this point, one of my biggest mistakes.

I would have loved observing the development of the newly mutated and regenerating pseudo undead, which, of course, would not have been necessary to create. But I knew that for this option to come forth again, I would need to work with a baby or a plague infested area, both situations I quite disliked, I just hoped that Ember would never find out about it.

Over the next few days, we got to know our new companion and his talent in anything fire related. Pale praising his skills at grilling while I remained busy with the animals intestines, which seemed to be a surprisingly efficient way of getting the beast into a good situation for grilling if I remembered to not damage the soft tissue that was not the inner organs, Pale working with the bones to create necklaces, rings and daggers for emergencies, all of which looked nice. Sometimes I would join the fire, playing with Ember by using my own magic and forcing forms in the flames.

“How would you say fire behaves?” I ask, curious about his answer, as it was probably very different from my own approach to it.

“Fire is a living being, it just feeds really fast and dies the moment it can’t eat anymore, which is one of the reasons many people fear pyromancers, not the way they fear you corpse bangers, but still.”

My eyebrows were raised at his poorly chosen insult, and I was up for his challenge.

“First of all, your mother is the only one I fornicate with, and second, I do not have to listen to such insults from someone whose biggest achievement to date is lighting a campfire.”

I tease, suppressing a grin as he raised his own eyebrows.

“So you are a corpse fucker, huh? I wondered why you seemed so familiar, I thought you were my uncles naked corpse shambling through the graveyard.”

At the third day of our travels, our evenly banter was joined by Pale, her offhanded comment catching both of us unprepared.

“You guys rely on funny words and Arcana to do just about anything, you probably couldn’t even wash yourselves without those fancy tricks of yours.”

It shut us up for that evening, only to become more common during the evenings after, with Ember and me learning to counter hers.

That kind of banter became more and more common, until I would even call that overconfident candle lighter a friend of mine, if we stretch the definition a bit.

Thus, the mountains came closer, if we walked for a month straight, we could possibly reach them, maybe even doing, so before our target was there. We would need an army to fight it when it reached them.