The wind whistled through the minute gaps in the door at the mouth of the cave, the draughts plastered grotesque shadows in the candlelight across the stone wall. The cave was a small, dead-end clearing of rock, bored into the cliffs above the raging sea.
And that night it raged as Regius Elath sat at his desk, positioned at the furthest corner of his home. He rubbed his tired eyes as he went through his notes again, trying to find something he had missed, anything that could point to an alternative explanation.
Battlemages, like his old friend Kanick, thought spellcrafting was simply clever people coming up with new spells, that they could use to kill or destroy. The healers, in his experience, had a more nuanced grasp on the nature of magic, as far as it went, but even they were obsessed with whether the latest offering could help them fight a new contagion or repair a wound better than a previous rune.
He looked up at the sheets of light frantically flickering across the wall of his cave, reaching out to gently stroke the rune he had carved, lightly, into the stone face of the cave.
Instead, Regius thought as he gazed at that abstract of lines etched in rock, spellcrafting was the art of simultaneously inventing and decoding a language for which the rules were unknowable, like a great mansion in perpetual darkness.
There was an order and a pattern to the runes, a beauty only glanced upon in the shadowy periphery of his mind. The knowledge of the existence of that order was used to refine old marks, and even build new ones from an infinite language of characters.
That was magic to Regius. It hadn't mattered what the runes did, but he admired the contradiction of an unknowable order to them. One line could extend the duration of an effect but extend it too far and the spell would fail – or kill the caster. Another line could generate heat, and in combination with others, spark a fire, changing the angle of one could change the colour of the flames, except at a specific intercept where the combination of marks would result in a terrible sickness, instead of burning.
So, when the battlemages, and later the healers, had wanted spells to do something, Regius constantly found himself at a loss. It was a bit more complicated than that.
Of course, the actual crafting was only half of the process for the other orders. A rune must be evaluated for its effects, compared against the default – no spell used – and other effective runes. For battlemagic, that required a bonfire of structures and dummies in order to measure destructive potentials. For the healers, that grist was life – animal usually, though in desperate circumstances, a human.
Looking back at his notes, Regius counted his butcher's bill. 524 rats, it read, 5 wild dogs and, of course, the woman.
The best non-magical healers drew deeply from the Order's collection of potions and medicines. The very best employed a mage as an assistant, for without magic it was difficult to perform complex procedures such as surgery. Therefore, a competent mage, outside of the order, could make a profitable life as a healer.
With the Enclave at Woodbend being of a decidedly isolationist bent, and more traditional healers lacking mages, Regius had built up a reputation as a healer of last resort. Grateful townsfolk would gift him food, or drink, in lieu of payment and he had eaten very well from the profits. It felt good, saving people when others couldn't, or wouldn't.
But the woman.
She had been injured in a logging accident, caught in a Sawmill and half of her body had been horribly mangled. She had been carried in by a group of workmen, a cousin and brother among them, and laid out on the plain stone table that he used for treating patients. He had ordered the men to strip her, to get a better look at her wounds.
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
She was younger than he had first supposed, about eighteen or twenty, strands of blond hair matted to her cold, clammy skin, and sodden with sweat. Her wounds were numerous, but the worst was her right leg. The flesh was shredded along the margins of a deep gash and the muscle within looked frothy with damage. He could see no kneecap among the splinters of bones, only the jagged protrusion of her femur.
Apart from seepage, the wound did not bleed, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary on her clothes and her companions that the it had bled a great deal. Regius suspected there was simply no more blood left to spill.
He shooed the men away, to sit by the door. She was already dead, he thought as he went through the motions feeling for her pulse. "I'm sorry," he began but then stopped himself. He felt a weak spasm under his fingers at the woman's neck, as though her very arteries were coughing with exhaustion. He didn't wait for another.
Frantically, Regius searched through the papers on his desk, looking for the latest iteration of his rune. That had been around rat 420, and dog four. It had worked on them, but the implications of using the rune on a person, even one barely alive, gave him the briefest pause.
He found a woodcarving of the rune under sheets of paper, the spell had long since outgrown more conventional vessels, and placed it, face down on the woman's stomach. He touched the heavily varnished and treated wood – itself over a month in the making and winced slightly at the anticipation of what the spell would do to him.
He activated the mark.
The wooden block consumed itself in purple embers, the sparks from which bathed the woman's body. Regius's legs buckled underneath him and only his firm grip on the sturdy stone table kept him upright.
The sparks moved across the woman's skin, into the wounds and everywhere they travelled, the damage was that much less. After a few moments, bone was moving, and growing inside the main wound. The woman screamed as muscle stretched and skin grew together and fused. The sound was barely human but then no human had ever felt anything like this before.
Since that day, Regius had asked himself, whether the woman had been dead or not. Had the movement he felt been a death rattle? Had he felt anything at all? Had he invented it, in order to justify a course of action that he wanted to take?
Was he a necromancer?
That was his biggest question. Harvesting the dead was a forbidden art, but he had studied the marks. As always, when the question arose, he reflected on the differences. Necromancy required careful preparation of a body, either to extract the spirit of the dead, or to preserve it as a vessel for a spirit. Not to mention, additional marks tying the mind of the necromancer to the necromanced.
Even preserving the spirit of an individual and placing it back in the body of an individual resulted in aberrations of thought and will. No one survived that procedure intact and a degeneration of both body and mind rapidly followed.
No. His spell, the research demonstrated, regenerated whole and healthy. The wounds he had inflicted on the animals, decapitation, exsanguination, all manner of horrors, had been healed. The creatures subjected to repeat procedures learned to fear him, and so were revived with memory intact. So far, the only limitation he had encountered was when he had diced a rat and tried to recapitulate the whole from one of the pieces. If all the pieces were in situ, then the rat could be healed. If not, the spell simply did not work.
Side effects were minimal. In twenty rats' horrible tumours had developed, and the spell seemed to worsen their effects. Even after extensive surgery and reapplication of the spell, most of them succumbed, resistant to the few spells known to treat those conditions. He ruminated for a few moments on the nature of tumours. A complicated area of medicine, more akin to battlemagic than healing. Perhaps he could turn his hand to this disease next?
Suddenly Regius became aware that the banging of the door was out of time with the wind, and the sound was neither polite knocking nor the desperate beats of people in distress. Someone was trying to get in.
With a crack and an explosion of splinters the door gave way, wind rushing into the cave like a vengeful wraith. Two figures, cloaked in black, stood at the open mouth of the cave, purple sparks dying away in the wind. Swords were drawn.
Regius stood to face them, he had no weapons, no destructive runes to hand. He chided himself for not being more careful. His spell was too powerful to leave unguarded, and he suddenly comprehended its misuse.
He thought about trying to burn as much of his data as possible in the candlelight, or ripping up the thick papers. He had used his last block on the woman, but maybe if he preserved a mark on his person, someone might activate it at a later time? The thought that this might not be the end calmed him as the figures advanced.
The first thrust was, for Regius, the last. It pierced his heart, in a shock of pain, though his assailants had to make sure of their work.