The grounds of ItherBeau Mage College were thick with rain that hung in the air like a cold sweat. Dampness clung to Merijest's face and legs, gluing hair to cheek and skirt to thigh. She walked without looking down, steps landing unperturbed in puddles and mud. A thick sweater ambiguated the shape of her torso.
The bag on her shoulders buckled with every step. Again and again, its weight resisting each change in momentum before committing to yet another temporary trajectory.
[Greater Message] was not a suspicious spell in itself, she reminded herself. Nobody would question her about it. Although she still worried what to say if they did. Contacting Beautuk’s Realm was perhaps the only taboo consistent across every schism.
At an apartment just off campus, the most stable place she'd ever lived, Merijest greeted her cat. She placed the heavy bag on the floor with a squelching thwap and stripped away her clingy, wet clothing.
Casting [Greater Message] required just a few components, although hard to come by: A ten-foot spool of copper wire, hair of a Skin Goose, a glass sphere.
She bathed in a warm tub, holding her cold feet as close to the enchanted runes as she could without getting burned. From a mug, she sipped the warm, gender-affirming potion that kept her body consistent with her mind. She was any other human woman.
The last component was the least expected. [Greater Message] required a few phrases of the Dead Tongue. It seemed that according to the System, or whatever magic it governed, anything in another plain of reality was as good as dead regardless of what people called it.
Her bag, dripping on the outside, had kept most of the wetness from the heavy tome within. An introductory text on the Dead Tongue. The language was closely guarded by practicing Necromancers, but the most basic parts were out there for anyone who knew where to look. Merijest always knew where to look.
The dense book, for all its gravitas, contained very little direct information. For one thing, the legal precarity of necromancy demanded a careful hand of anyone wishing to avoid violent retribution. On top of that, the volatile nature of the language meant that copying it down could have corporeal consequences. Instead, the book required her to jump through hoops, mentally connecting words and diagrams which had been carefully portioned into inert pieces.
Merijest spent the week's end inside, puzzling over the jigsawed information. The weather stayed the same so that the sun never clearly rose or set in the cloudy sky. One could only tell by the degrees of ambient light leaking through that anything changed between high noon and the dead of night. Merijest noticed none of it.
The Dead Tongue was ensnaring. The magical capacity in even phrases was incredible, and the necromantic perspective on magic made more sense of the world around her than any bare platitudes from [Clerics] and [Paladins] ever had. For hours at a time she forgot her larger goal, only consumed in the gaping maw of excitement. She let it swallow her whole and on the third day she was something new but something sick.
The pairing of great interest with the great restraints imposed by law and by custom… the dissonance was dizzying.
“Is this school even the right place for this?” Merijest asked her cat.
The cat, a long-haired domestic Magpion, opened its beak and chirped in reply. It understood nothing and the chirps were unrelated, but Merijest appreciated the rhythm such faux conversations could give her racing thoughts.
“Not only is the school named after Beautuk, but even the country is,” she continued. “but transferring would be so difficult and I don’t have the money. So maybe I’ll study something else…” But she knew that wouldn’t happen.
Beautuk’s followers seemed to splinter and dispute over doctrine and practice every decade or so. But then, why did the opposing, sometimes violent, [Clerics] and [Paladins] continue to receive magical aid from their [Deity]? She was stuck on this question and she needed answers.
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Merijest looked out the front window of her apartment. The view was small, foggy, and speckled with rain. She raised a sheet of black cloth over the glass and did the same to each of the other windows in her apartment.
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Later, the glass sphere rested in the semi-coiled nest of copper wire. From that dense center, the wire continued into a larger spiral. The other end of copper, furthest from the center, was wrapped carefully around the single strand of Skin Goose hair.
“No, you cannot step all over my spell components,” Merijest said to her cat. “Please wait outside of the spiral.”
The cat ruffled its feathers and although it did not understand Merijest’s words, it eventually got the hint after the tenth-or-so time it had to be picked up and moved away from the copper.
Enchanted lamps glowed dimly about the room, making up for what little outside light might be waiting at the rainy, covered windows. Merijest knew not the time nor the day, but she knew the spell was at hand. She knew it was time to cast.
With another warm potion, she warmed her lips and tongue. To practice the Dead Tongue was to invoke it. Without a mentor more-versed in its usage, there was no room for error.
After banishing her cat (aka locking it in her room for a few minutes), Merijest sat beside the spell components and worked her hands through the air in the practiced patterns of a [Wizard] with more free time and obsession than friends or obligations.
Merijest began, “Virsrikziot, ithliinthik virvir, ithzberliinthik virvir, ithkevvithikik virvir.” Between each word, Merijest breathed heavily. She felt exhaustion sweeping her muscles in swelling waves.
Under the light of now-flickering enchanted lamps, each component looked as if surrounded by a visual haze that resembled the experience of viewing something under water.
Merijest continued speaking. Any fear of error which she harbored was swiftly overtaken. Each illicit word increased the momentum of her casting. Just as the study of the same had done in the days prior, the experience of speaking the Dead Tongue had captured her now. The insides of her cheeks buzzed with numbness as her lips and tongue fluttered through magical utterances. Now she was the maw and the thing to be devoured was of little consequence.
Fog and light swirled together and for a moment Merijest felt for a moment that her communication faculties existed nowhere. Some part of her was at the top of a parabola, half-way through a journey in some medium beyond all else.
As her senses completed the journey to Beautuk’s Realm, she heard screams. She saw a realm oversaturated with light. She smelled blistering meat.
Her mouth and mind, so worn by the Dead Tongue, staggered to process it all.
The nearest figure, abscessed and bubbling but perhaps the Prophet Merijest had called to, spoke through racking sobs. “Someone has to stop him,” the Prophet said.
What could she say? Her physical body should be safe in her apartment, but the memory of this place alone was sure to bring endless nausea. Her thoughts riffled through the now-scattered memories of her spell. Ending the spell now was the safest choice.
From a distance both endless and finite in the alternate realm of light, a golden figure took a single step across the vast narrow and just as Merijest began uttering the reverse incantation a searing hand reached for her wrist.
The realm before her blurred and again she found herself momentarily nowhere. Again she spoke almost automatically, whatever she had struggled to remember in a moment of shock had not mattered because something, be it her mind or body or something altogether separate from her, propelled her enchanted speech.
But as everything that had traveled returned to her body, Merijest discovered with horror that the being of blazing light had not been reaching for some illusory avatar which represented her in Beautuk’s Realm. Instead, this being, who was Beautuk himself, had reached across to Merijest’s physical body. Air rushed toward a vacuous pillar of light and the skin around her wrist was charring and bubbling.
The word ‘Devil!’ struck Merijest as if in the very maw she had opened when speaking the Dead Tongue. It throbbed like a migraine as Beautuk’s glowing hand wrenched her from the floor on which she sat and threw her across the room with a clatter. The enchanted lamps in Merijest’s apartment were now painfully bright and the windows had shattered, glass shredding gaps in the cloth coverings. The rain outside was replaced in an instant by a miracle of blue sky and harsh sunlight. The walls, too, were shaking apart.
From her bedroom, Merijest heard her cat cawing and flapping its wings. Its cries became further away but no less pronounced and Merijest had to assume the broken windows had offered a chance to escape. Without time to comprehend the way her body was now blistering and twisting, she charged out the front door. Unevenly, her limbs lengthened. First her forearms and shins extended as her skin burned away to reveal flesh raw, wet, and blue. As her upper arms and femurs began to stretch, feathers and scales sprouted through her new skin with tiny bursts of blood. Everything was burning and stretching and twisting. She stumbled like a newborn calf through the blazing light of the day before taking flight with wings she hadn’t yet noticed.
Even in the air, her limbs buckled and wobbled. She tasted blood and vomit in the back of her throat. No matter how much distance she put between herself and the miracle behind her, the heat continued to pummel her.
She needed to get away from the heat and the light and the day. She needed a dungeon.