I patted the dead kobolds ass. “Sit down, you’ve more to learn,” I said. Her brows lifted above her bloodshot eyes and her face said ‘can’t it fucking wait asshole?’ but she complied.

“We need to strengthen our cores before the mana from their deaths disperses,” I told her.

I reached out grabbing the canteen hanging around the kobold’s neck and took a deep swig. Then I poured some out onto my brow before offering it to her.

“Mages low on mana can use their power to focus on drawing much more mana from the air than usual, that’s a process known as meditation. That’s pretty much what I taught you earlier except your mana was already full. When you do it with full mana, it’s similar but different, that’s called condensation.” I explained.

“We’ll meditate now, being surrounded by dead corpses filling the air with rich mana allows us to condense our cores without the normal downside of becoming exhausted.” I continued.

I inhaled deeply and watched her do the same before carrying on.

“If a mage is low on mana, they draw it from the outside to fill themselves. If they are full, they bring mana from the extremities to fill the lungs instead and use that pressure to condense their core. It works similar to muscles, you push mana into your expanded lungs, then hold the pressure to create a rich atmosphere and force that against your core to compress it. Getting it condensed is easy, you just keep releasing it until you can feel the strain is too much to hold and as a new mage that is all you need to do. it is draining though, you must breathe at some point and when you do, you’ll release the concentrated mana forcing you to have to rest or meditate after a while. After you condense it you have to move it to the heart. For you, it’s enough to build the pressure and it’ll migrate to your core with enough force to make you grow stronger.”

I exhaled slowly and took another breath, then closed my eyes before continuing.

“For stronger mages, It‘ll be necessary to guide it. Once you reach that strength you’ll condense your lungs and then tear a small hole in just the right spot while also lessening the containment there so you send mana streaming towards your heart. The pressure will force your core to condense.”

I exhaled again. Mentally I checked the amount of mana leaving and compared it to how much had come in giving me some indication of how much I kept. This was how mages measured themselves and sized up another mage. Seeing a mage releasing little mana with the breath on an exhale told you he was very skilled.

“Sometimes budding young mages learn this and think they’ll do that early to grow quickly. That’s like thinking you’ll learn how to run before you walk.”

My voice took on a lecturing tone as I continued.

“If you try to do that but you release too big a hole in your containment it’ll open the hole in your lung too wide and you’ll die choking on your own blood."

“If you try to contain more than you can manage. Your containment will fail and it’ll put all that pent-up pressure onto your lungs directly and when that happens you won’t even be able to gurgle for help because your lungs will explode inside your chest.”

“If you don’t align the hole in your lungs with the hole in your containment, it will come out against your lungs instead and either tear them open or fill them with pressure first and then tear them open.”

I eyed her seriously.

“Do you understand the importance of what I am telling you?”

She nodded.

“There is an infinite number of ways to fuck that kind of thing up and only one VEEEERRY tiny way to get it right. I need you to make your mistakes now when I can still put you back together. If you wait till later, I’ll need a mop and bucket to gather up the remains first.” I smiled as I finished, picturing a rain of blood and guts exploding from someone.

Actually, could I do that somehow? That bore investigating later.

We sat there silently on the kobold for several hours until the sun was high in the sky. I wasn’t too worried about being found again. It was too hot now, everything would try to stay cool. Luckily the rations of a dozen kobolds meant I wasn’t too worried about it. I’d released stumpy and her hands but raised up the two fresh victims while the air was still saturated bringing me back up to four. I had sent them around collecting up everything of value and loading it as best they could.

I opened my eyes as I finished and saw her shaking the last few drops of water out of the canteen onto her tongue. The cloud of mana had dispersed an hour ago but we continued training until we’d spent our reserves.

“Time to get back,” I said.

We trudged back to camp but I saw her eyeing me as we walked.

“Yes?” I said.

“What were the kobolds doing out here?” she replied.

“Our raiding party skirmished with a group of them several days ago, they likely see us as having moved in on their turf, raiding the same things they do.” I said.

“How did they find us though? We left the bodies a day ago and a long way off.”

I thought for a moment. “They have keen noses, so they probably smelled the scent of blood covering you. I know I enjoyed it.”

She looked like she couldn‘t decide if she should take it as an insult or a compliment and after a moment she simply nodded.

We reached the camp after an hour.

“I don’t like the amount of water it’ll use up but we have to shower,” I told her.

“We?” She said clearly a little nervous about my intention.

I grabbed two of the canteens of water from a skeleton and a piece of cloth from the supplies then walked off a short distance and stripped off my clothes. I would deal with them in a minute.

I wrapped sand up in the cloth and tied it tight before pouring one canteen out over myself. I scrubbed the blood and grime off with the cloth, bits of the sand working their way through the cloth slowly and helping to scrape at my skin.

I heard water splash onto the ground and glanced behind me. I saw a section of the tent, disassembled and pinned to the shoulders of two skeletons to form a curtain. With a thought, one skeleton reached up and tugged lightly on the corner pulling it loose. The impromptu curtain wall fell and I eyed appreciatively her pert pale ass. She turned around having noticed the change and screamed grabbing at the tent piece. As she did, I got an excellent view of her topless form though sadly she hadn‘t turned enough to expose everything before covering with her hands. I traced the curve of her body as they widened at her hips and ass and then narrowed around her waist. Her smooth taut tummy was exposed and for a moment I got to enjoy her breasts, just a little larger than a handful and too big to point straight out they hung gently, swaying as she moved. Her pink nipples were large for her small frame and poking out towards me.

“Must have come loose.” I said, “Let me help.”

Both skeletons grabbed the sheet and held it up with their hands now instead of shoved between bones.

She eyed me accusingly for a moment before noticing I too was completely naked. I caught a glance of surprise in her eyes just before she looked away.

I placed clothing one at a time over the face of my shield and then scrubbed them, using a small amount of water at each of the worst spots.

You know that feeling of knowing someone is looking at you. I could feel her stare. I turned to look and I could see the shock on her face. A shock that sadly was not caused by a ten-inch dick and balls like cannon shot.

She stared for a moment and then looked…. was that sad? For just a moment I was sure it was.

I didn’t need her pity.

“Seen enough yet?” I scowled.

“How?” She whispered.

A necromancer does not hide his scars, he embraces them.

“Earned,” I replied simply.

She looked away and said nothing more.

I could feel the irregularities as I scrubbed at my back.

My mind went back, back to practicing sealing wounds and grafting skin patches on. He had tied me face down to a bench, and a skeleton lightly brushed my back with a branch of leaves.

I remembered the feel of the branch and a few tiny thorns lightly scraping me. I also recalled the surprise I felt at first. What was even the point of this?

Then the itching started.

I could reach every scar because I’d made each and every one of them, fingernails gouging my skin until I found nerve ending, blood pooling in the center of my back and overflowing onto the floor. The real agony was where I couldn’t reach. Contorting and hyper-extending my arms to reach the unreachable. My master came in every hour or so and asked if I was ready to learn. Then he’d walk me through melding and even grafting skin with some larger bits I’d scraped off in particularly excruciating moments.

Promising that if I did a session perfectly, we could stop.

He’d always let me get to the last few ones, knowing as I got closer and closer my desperation to finish would increase. Then he’d ‘tsk tsk’ and shake his head before getting up to leave. I’d missed closing a cut or failed to graft the skin properly at the edges. Shortly after I’d spend the next hour under the brush, scraping off my fresh patches.

I walked naked into the half tent and laid down. I was dozing off when I heard her voice singing softly at first then just humming.

“The warriors bleed,

The forests burn…

hmmm hmmm, hmmmm hmmm, hmmmmhmmmm”

She sounded… beautiful. I hadn’t heard someone sing in… ever I think. I mean I knew what singing was so I must have heard it but I honestly couldn’t remember when. Perhaps when I was a child?

I listened to her hums and pondered their meaning.

She hung the side back on then poked her head in and I woke from my daze.

I pointed at the same spot as last night. “Lay down,” then a little less harshly I said, “I have questions”.

After she’d laid down within a couple inches of where I had pointed I said, “What were you singing?”.

She’d been facing away from me and turned towards me with defiance in her eyes.

“Nothing” she replied.

“Nothing doesn’t sound like that, that sounded like something” I countered.

“I thought you had no interest in poetry,” she told me.

I glared at her.

“It was the Ballad of the Wastes,” she said finally.

“What’s that?”

she huffed. “It’s an Elven song ok.”

“How do you even know an Elven song?”

She clammed up saying nothing.

“What are you?” I said pointedly.

“I’m half human”

“And the other half?” I prodded.

“Drow,” she said curtly.

I frowned and she tensed

“Drow are elves, so that makes sense, your ears though, why aren’t they pointy?” I said.

I don’t know what she was expecting but that obviously wasn’t it. She looked at me for a moment confused before replying haphazardly “I’m..... my ears were... they were snipped when I was a little girl ok.”

I continued to stare at her, waiting.

she glared some more. “I wandered too far into the forest, some elves found me and told me that if the filthy Drow wanted to live out there with the humans, they deserved to look like them. They held me down and cut off the tips.”

My eyebrows cocked up.

“Your own people did that to you? You elves are some fucking weirdos.”

“My people!?” she shouted. “Drow are not elves!”

“At least” She spat, “not if you ask the elves.”

“Why?” I asked.

She stared at me incredulously for several seconds.

she finally said, “You’re a necromancer, how is it you do not know the story of Arminius?”

“I mean I’ve heard of him, vaguely, why?”

Once again she stared at me a long moment before apparently coming to a decision.

“Arminius was the first great Necromancer, he was the first one to reach enough power to become a Lich. As you know all mana exists as a variant of pure mana. But only the Gods themselves know the secret of creating pure mana. Arminius though got it into his head that the Elven people knew the secret of making the pure mana of creation. He demanded they hand it over to him and when they refused and told him they didn’t have that knowledge and would never share the secrets of creation with a heretic, he declared war.”

Her story intrigued me, taken as a young boy, I knew few of the histories of the world.

“Necromancy isn’t real magic. I’m not entirely clear why but-“

I interrupted her.

“Necromantic mota are corrupted versions of other ‘true’ mana”

I said. “There are two ways that mana can be corrupted. When it decomposes, it can get stuck halfway between the mana it was and pure mana, that’s what we call necrotic mana. The other way is to fail to form properly. This is what’s known as waste. Many people think it’s the raising of the dead or blood magic that makes necromancers ‘evil’. Perhaps that’s true, but all the branches of magic are capable of evil. What makes necromancy special is the link between it and waste. It’s because of this link that even the Gods have condemned our existence, labeling us as heretics.”

She seemed surprised “For someone who knows so little about what has happened in the world, you can easily explain why.”

I nodded before continuing. “Normally when different mana interacts the stronger will cause the other to decompose into pure mana, but pure mana is unstable and will always transform into the nearest variant. Which is generally the one that caused it to decompose into pure to begin with. This will continue until the two types of mana reach equilibrium and exchange mana slowly and at an equal rate.”

She seemed genuinely engaged in what I was saying; I didn’t know how I felt about that.

Everyone else I’d taught couldn’t wait to get to the part where I explained to you how you could kill everything. The killing was just the climax for me. It was everything that went into it that I enjoyed and perhaps, just maybe, her too.

“Different mana is weaker and stronger at ripping apart the bonds of another. So life can absorb a lot of water for example before being overwhelmed but not a lot of fire. A flood will kill plants but a soaking rain will do little. The result of all this is that mana is constantly in flux, ever-changing into one another as they interact. But if you use mage sight to watch, you’ll notice problems. Occasionally when mana decomposes into pure mana, it’ll fail and become corrupted, this is particularly common with life mana. Expose a bunch of life mana by bleeding a man till he’s dead and you’ll release it to the air which will quickly overwhelm it, This will cause a mass transforming of life mana into pure mana and a resulting surge of necrotic as some of it fails to decompose properly.” I explained.

“So that’s why I can only really see it after a kill,” she stated.

I nodded. “It can happen in other ways but that’s the most common one.”

“But what does that have to do with waste?” She asked.

“When pure mana forms into a nearby variant a small portion of it will fail to form properly and become waste. No one is sure why. Though some faiths teach that when the Goddess of Demons Cancere was banished from the Earth along with all her minions as a punishment for nearly wiping out humanity. Her final act before being cast down into the abyss was to curse the world with waste.”

She nodded, no doubt she had heard the story before and I continued.

“Waste is the anthesis of pure, where pure can become anything and does so readily, waste can become nothing, it does nothing, it doesn’t even interact with any other mana except pure. Pure mana will get corrupted and become waste when exposed to it. Surrounded by other mana though waste always stays intact and at the edge of a mass of waste where it touches other mana, the others stay stable. Where mana might normally change type every day, near a waste’s edge it can stay constant, sometimes for years at a time.”

“How do you get rid of it?” She asked.

“All you can do is wait, after months or sometimes even years in areas of concentrated waste, it’ll spontaneously decompose into pure again. Of course, if it’s surrounded by waste the pure mana will just become waste again, only receding slowly around the edges where it decomposes and turns into nearby mana that isn’t waste. Waste won’t naturally grow. Mana close enough to decompose and be converted never decomposes because there is nothing to make it do so. It therefore always shrinks, but slowly.” I finished.

she looked puzzled. “That still doesn’t explain the link between it and necromancy?”

“When necrotic mana interacts with others, it decomposes them into pure as normal, but then the pure will try to become necrotic. It doesn‘t work well though since necrotic isn’t a true form of mana. Because of this, it fails at a much higher rate than normal, creating large quantities of waste. That is why everyone including the Gods hates necromancers. Every time necrotic energy is used large amounts of waste is generated.”

“That actually explains why then, I assumed the effects of the Lich resulted from a great evil spell or something, not just as a result of his existence.” She said.

She continued her story.

“When the first great Necromancer, Lich Arminius marched on Lustria some Elves wanted to fight, some to flee and some even to negotiate peace. Peace negotiations never happened, but some elves left, those that did so were banished from ever returning after the war ended as punishment. They branded them with the elven word for false, Drow.”

I knew a Drow was a different kind of Elf but I‘d spent too much time studying Necromancy and not enough time on anything else to learn why exactly.

Her voice became thoughtful as she continued.

“The Lich marched through the sacred Elven forest humans call the Deep Wood and as he marched, he left a blight upon the land. Elves fought and died bitterly for every inch of ground attempting first to stop him and then just to stall for time, protecting the capital of Lustria until Human and Dwarven armies could arrive. They succeeded and after the Humans arrived they and the remaining Elven warriors destroyed most of the undead before the Dwarves even got there. The arrival of the Dwarves gave enough strength to push through to Arminius and end him. The Deep Wood, however, was lost. Already scarred from the march it could not handle what must have been the necrotic energy released from the killing of Lich Arminius. It‘s called The Wastelands now.” She finished.

I had heard of that.

“Ah yes, they say the concentration of waste is so great at its center no spell can be cast, for there is nothing to cast it with. And that’s assuming you could make it there. Too long spent in the wasteland will fill your lungs with nothing but waste killing you if you stay for more than a few hours.

She nodded understanding and spoke further.

“Some had hoped that with his death, the great races of the alliance would come together and usher in a new age. Instead, Elves raged at the races of Man and Dwarf. They blamed them for taking too long to realize the threat of Arminius and allowing his corruption on their sacred groves. Dwarves are naturally short-tempered and view all elves as nothing more than a race of uppity squirrels. They were completely unapologetic. Humans were, if anything, worse. They’d expected to be hailed as heroes, arriving just in time to strike down the Lich’s armies like avenging angels. Instead, Elven history books refer to the other Allied Forces as the Armies of Ever and Never Coming after an Elven song. And that is the Ballad of the Wastes.” She finished.

“Sing,” I said.

she stared at me saying nothing.

“Please,” I whispered.

The shock showed on her face.

softly I heard her voice rising.

The warriors bleed,

the forests burn,

and Lustria lies alone forlorn.

But worry not Great Lustria, your friends are marching toward.

The Dwarves with speed of glacial ice,

and humans faster still by twice,

Yes, worry not Great Lustria they’re ever marching toward.

The city sallies from the gate,

The women stand in warriors plate,

The children weep and all we wait,

But worry not Great Lustria they‘re ever marching toward.

At last, the humans join the fray,

The dwarves will be but one more day,

Just one more day Great Lustria they’re ever marching toward.

The Sacred Groves are wastelands now,

The Lives of warriors wasted now,

the battle is won but the war is lost,

the lich is dead but at what cost.

Why did you listen Lustria?

Were they ever marched toward?

No, they were never marching toward...

“That was… not as bad as I expected it to be.” I said.

The truth was… the truth was weakness, I buried it deep inside.

“Goodnight”

“Goodnight Ryzen,” She said.