Silenos had gotten used to travelling with improvised Fleshcraftings. Sluggish, inefficient things that lacked the native speed and power borne into House Shaiagrazni’s more traditional transportation by millennia of refinement and improvement. He considered himself unfortunate to have had to do so, considered the circumstances that had forced his hand bothersome and unacceptable. He had not realised how much worse things could get.

The Dark Lord’s land was not simply ugly to look at, and was not a region of mere discoloured soils or grim weather as he had mistakenly believed when glancing down upon it from the skies above. The entire place was, for want of a better word, simply cursed.

Below the diffuse, black sands that seemed to cover every inch of it, Silenos had been carefully probing the terrain with every rest they took, letting threads of nerve bundles permeate to the greatest depths he could manage, branching off into tree-like structures that sifted through dozens of cubic metres at a time. Despite it all, he found nearly nothing.

No free elemental matter that might be consumed for his Fleshcrafting, no abundance of microbiological life that might be forcibly converted. Not even the skeletal remains of creatures which had once been made from the same materials he now sought to do his work with. It was, for the first time in Silenos’ life, a total and absolute scarcity of biological material.

Clean water was yet another absence they’d had to contend with, though Silenos had found means around that simple problem. Water was fortunately made of far more rudimentary molecules than other substances, and he had been able to generate it within his own body by simply utilising photosynthetic principles. He might have found other ways to do so, too, the air was far more humid than it was occupied by life, and the same went for the ground.

A water mage would have been quite at home, as would an earth mage, or any one of a dozen other kinds of caster. Just not one who relied upon living and dead flesh. Silenos was beginning to suspect the circumstances of his travels had somehow been arranged by the Entity.

Starvation was more of an issue than thirst, however. The landscape around them was predictably barren for a place with such a laughable scarcity of biomatter to be found within it, and neither Silenos nor any of his situationally-convenient travelling companions caught sight of another living thing as they moved.

Save for the Necromancer, of course. Sphera was her name, they’d gotten that much from the woman, and little else. Save that she was rather determined to be anywhere but under their custody.

Within the first half hour of emerging from the wreckage, Silenos’ new group had been pressed with two issues, only one of which had been related to her. The other had stemmed from their unlikely saviour. The sky captain Swick the Swift.

He was a tall man of dark skin, darker even than Silenos’. His hair was bound in thick, long dreadlocks which reached down to the man’s broad shoulders, and his body, though scarcely armoured in loose leathers, was well built and scarred from numerous altercations left in his past. By the patterns and make of their damaged tissues, it was clear that the man’s body healed unaturally well. Silenos had seen such things already in the new world, apparently those gifted with Vigour and innate superhumanity tended to recover more quickly, too.

Well, all present had benefitted from Ensharia’s healing too. Even Falls, whose body was no tougher or more enduring than any other sedentary scholar’s. Silenos had benefited most of all, despite not requiring her aid to physically repair his body. He’d gotten to see it work at last.

As far as Silenos could tell, the Paladin’s healing was certainly magical, but of a curious kind. Rather than physically alter the flesh directly, simply reshaping and rearranging it as his own powers would have, it rather infused the target with energies that allowed the body to repair itself, enhancing physical processes in much the same way it enhanced the muscular strength or durability of its user.

That had been his first observation, and, disastrously, Silenos had almost left it there. Upon closer inspection however, he realised that the Paladin’s healing actually targeted the magic within their patient, not their body. Just as Ensharia gained immense superhuman prowess through arcane energies naturally built within her body, so too did even the most mundane of humans have lower levels of magic lurking within them. Typically these amounts were too limited to do anything of note, but at her touch, Ensharia had enhanced them in all present. The results had been explosive, impressive, and revolutionary.

Silenos could think of many uses for magic that affected other magic. It only increased his irritation to be stranded so far from his laboratory.

“I think I’ll need to rest soon.” Falls breathed, sounding almost embarrassed. Even using the wind to help lift part of his body weight and move himself along, he lacked the stamina that came so naturally to those whose bodies were reshaped or augmented by magic. His words drew a harsh glare from the lumbering King Galukar, who eyed him over one shoulder whilst the Necromancer remained strewn across the other.

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“We’re in the Borderlands.” The King growled. “Ten, maybe fifteen miles in. There’s a town ahead, I know it, just a few more miles away.”

“I can’t walk a few more miles.” Falls insisted. “You’re asking me to push on for another half hour.”

“I’m asking everyone to.” Galukar replied, coolly. “You’re the only one complaining.”

Silenos cut in at that, finding the stupidity too much for him to tolerate.

“And he is telling you he physically cannot, you can tantrum against reality itself, if you’d like, but that will not change anything about this situation. The world is not going to conform to your will no matter how long you’ve grown used to wearing a crown.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.” The King fired back. Silenos frowned.

“What in the world does that even mean?”

“It means that out of us all, you’re by far the most prone to insisting that everything be just how you want it. Or are you too delusional to have noticed even that?”

Silenos was just about to explain the finer differences between impotently whining about things and factually vocalising plans to change them when it was within one’s power when the pirate began his own contribution to their debate.

“For one, I’d quite like to know what’s waiting for us in whatever town we’re heading towards.” He declared. “Because, and pardon me rightly if this is a bit too blunt, but I’m not so sure I won’t have my head chopped off if I’m recognised.”

It was his turn, now, to weather the glare of King Galukar, and he did so with an admirable lack of fear.

“Perhaps you should have thought about such things before deciding to make your life’s work stealing, pilfering and raping.” The King replied, his eyes like lances, his words like a charging warhorse. Both bounced right off the pirate .

“We all have to do what we have to do.” He shrugged. “You should know all about that, considering your choice of company.”

He glanced towards Silenos at that, ridiculously. It was clear enough what he was referencing. Early after the crash Silenos had suggested they all head back to the wreckage and reanimate the slain crew of Swick the Swift’s skyship. They had been left onboard when he made his assault on the castle, and thus killed instantly when the entire structure struck the earth. Apparently, their being mindless, lifeless blocks of useless meat was not justification to actually do something with their remains.

Silenos had to take a moment to swallow his fury. It was getting harder, the emotion strengthening each time he was afflicted once more by its cause. How long would he spend trapped in this land of cavemen? He’d already been here for months, would years more pass before he escaped? Decades?

Would it possibly even be centuries? Silenos couldn’t know, and that uncertainty gnawed at him.

Minutes passed by quickly, then a few more passed more slowly as Falls’ complaints picked up. Finally Galukar caved in and permitted the group to stop without more of his incessant urges onwards, and they all seated themselves to make camp.

Silenos did not feel the lack of any fire, his body had been insulated to keep heat in just as it had to keep it out, but he could see Falls and the Necromancer were not quite so fortunate. The latter seemed to be doing a good job of hiding her displeasure, having it betrayed only as Silenos grazed her shoulder to scan the woman’s vital signs, while the magus was taking rather a different approach to handling his issue.

“We ought to huddle together, for warmth.” He suggested to Ensharia, who looked no less disgusted by the proposal- or proposition- as might have been expected.

“You ought to keep yourself distracted from the cold.” Silenos cut in. “With your studies.”

The look of fear, of horror, sprawling across the face of an apprentice when they were called to practise was a joy he had never quite grown beyond appreciating, not after rewiring his brain for pure logic and mnemonics, and not after spending decades becoming used to it. It was particularly amusing on the features of Falls himself. The more pampered and privileged a student, the more they could truly bask in the misery of his methods.

Reluctantly, the boy shuffled over to sit before Silenos, head lowered.

“I thank you for this opportunity, Master Silenos.” He said, mechanically, “And I look forward to growing ever mightier from it.”

The official, proper terms of opening for their sessions had not taken him long to memorise at least. His mind was nearly as impressive as his magic, after all.

“We will be starting with the practicum.” Silenos told him. They had had only one session before, and it had not been a long one. Exhaustion had kept Falls from dedicating much time to it, though with the rate at which he assimilated information it had almost been introduction enough. The boy was somewhere beyond genius, and not entirely far from Silenos’ own gift of nature. Three, maybe four Shaiagrazni had surpassed his raw talent that Silenos knew of. All of which had been far in excess of his own idiot apprentices.

Save for Adonis.

“Am I going to learn reanimation?” Falls asked, interrupting Silenos before his temper could implode on itself once more.

“No.” He replied, quickly, “That would be an inefficient use of our time, it would take years for you to learn enough to reanimate corpses in amounts that would meaningfully add to the multitudes I can already bring forth.”

“-Of course, don’t desecrate the dead because it would be inefficient.” The King snarled. Silenos ignored him, just as he ignored the pungent odour reaching his nostrils from the wind.

“-I will be selecting lessons more suited to leveraging your pre-existing strengths.” He concluded. Falls considered that.

It was not impossible to learn more than one form of magic, but it was rare. Each new field a caster dedicated himself to mastering was longer, harder than the one before. Silenos was a rarity even among House Shaiagrazni to have come close to mastering two before his second century, and even with the new world’s pathetic standards of mastery, the general principles remained in place and ensured that most magi used only one kind.

Which meant the prospect of gaining a second would have given Falls quite a lot to consider. He landed on the obvious conclusion quickly enough.

“Wait, my strength of wind magic, right? So you mean…”

“Yes.” Silenos smiled. “You will be learning how to conjure shadestuff. That ought to improve your destructive potential a touch.”