| Present day Ortal's home, The Spires The hands moved almost on their own after the writer had sat himself down. He had just returned from acquiring some items for his work. The ink well was uncorked and the quill was placed on the writer's block. The hands worked on a third item, trying to open it. His old and bony hands were applying pressure on the item until finally the cork was pulled off from it. Shaking slightly, the right hand poured the new ink into the well, refilling it. Once the well was full again, the right hand picked up the familiar quill and dipped it into the new ink before placing it on the parchment. The left hand made sure the parchment remained in place, resting on a corner of it as the writer began his job. |
| Summer, 87th, Year 464 After a certain amount of time spent in a new place, people will start to accept new things as being normal. If you see something every day, no matter how exotic it was at first, it will turn into something normal in your eyes. What had started as a rarity in the lab, a pulser, a living person as an apprentice to master Taren Alter, had become normal. The pulser had become an often seen sight in and around the lab of the master and blended in quite well. If the others didn't know better they would think him an advanced golem. A certain amount of instructions which he completed to the letter, day in day out, barely any change. But even the people that saw him every day didn't know that this seemingly puddle deep personality was in fact an entire ocean hidden beneath the surface. A side effect of becoming normal was that the nuit apprentices, those that did not share master Taren Alter's extreme views and in turn also caused them to have less of a reputation with their master, seemed to open up towards him. Not that they become more talkative, but they showed him more of their work and even explained a thing or two to him. Time had passed, days came and went. The Undrykas went through the motions, testing malediction items, cleaning the lab and tables, cleaning the tools, keeping the bins empty. All tasks golems could do or could be taught to do, but not in master Taren Alter's laboratory. No, he left it up to his last pulser apprentice. Over the past two apprentice cicles, about eighty days now, give or take a few, the pulser apprentices to master Taren Alter had given up, died or turned into nuits themselves, giving up on life. All but one. Once more the exception, although in a positive way for once, the Undrykas remained alive, remained unbroken under master Taren Alter's dictatorship. Every single minute he had time off, the Undrykas spent practicing, carving into bones and wood alike, honing his skills. While he was working, his eyes never stopped watching the apprentices as they worked. He learned a lot of things this way, but still felt like he lacked more knowledge. His one attempt at having his master allow him access to the library and the books there had ended up with a beating and a test of a malediction item that was supposed to hurt the wearer. It hadn't been a very good day that day. Through his observing and learning, the Undrykas saw that not only bones could be used to create malediction items but other parts of the bodies as well. He was looking at one of the apprentices, sweeping around his table, slowly, to keep working in case the master decided to look around. The nuit apprentice was working with the skin and pelt of a monkey, or a creature that looked a lot like it, painting the circle on it. It was near impossible to carve anything into it, as it would require the skin to be thick enough. But the apprentice was painting on it, the brush dipping into the ink over and over as he applied line after line to the circle being painted. The Undrykas checked the bin and continued to sweep around the table, passing several times over the same spot as he watched. The circle was quickly finished and the apprentice started on the images in the middle of the circle. With only a certain amount of time that can be spent on sweeping one area of the floor, the Undrykas put his broom down and picked up the bin to empty it out outside. When he got back, the circle was half filled with an image of the monkey and branches. From his own experience and imagination, he could see where this malediction was going. The apprentice was most likely trying to project the monkey's ability to jump from branch to branch, being very light, into the wearer of the malediction item. The image was very well painted, much better than the Undrykas could ever manage with his almost non-existant painting skills. But the painting was not what interested him in this malediction. It was the lack of any bones, skulls or cartelage in the creation of it that interested him. It had always been bones for the Undrykas so seeing this piece of information unfold in front of him was an eye opener. Malediction was far from the limit that he had imagined. He moved away from the table, sweeping himself a way to the next table, cleaning around it. He always did his best to not disturb the apprentices that were working but sometimes he had to get close enough if he wanted to learn something. Later in the day, the Undrykas was standing in the middle of the room. A space had been created there, over the passing of days since his arrival, to allow for more room to test malediction items. The Undrykas stood in the open space, the pelt of the monkey on his back, it's arms wrapped around his neck, holding it in place. He didn't feel different at the moment. He remembered the monkey jumping from branch to branch and seemingly knelt down before jumping up. His feet passed the point where his waist had been and continued to move upwards. It was only his hands pushing against the ceiling of the lab that kept him from reaching even higher with his jump. He landed softly and gracefully on his feet and looked around. Although, nuit never had any emotions or never showed them, the apprentice seemed to be happy with the result as he collected the monkey pelt from around the Undrykas' neck. The Undrykas had managed to get his hands on a not-bone item to practice on, a claw of some creature. This latest information bit on malediction had opened new ways of practicing for him. Every time in the past, he had kept the bones of animals if he could but anything else had tossed away. Remembering all the claws and pelts and flesh the apprentices hadn't used, the Undrykas felt like he had missed countless opportunities. The claw he was holding had three long finger like extensions and a lot of hair on it. As usual, most of his training happened when the master and apprentices were not around. Every few days, they all left their work for some unknown reason. Perhaps they prayed or went for a beer or they simply wanted to do something else, the Undrykas didn't know. But it gave him precious time to practice, without getting a guaranteed beating, if not get outright killed. The brush dipped into the black paint. With quick and long strokes, he painted a circle on the back of the claw, a big one that would allow him a lot of space to work in. The circle was, as usual, rough and without any specific detail, simply made to practice on. He continued to paint, creating images in the circle, trying to draw out something from the now dead creature. He painted an image of the claw, a sort of blod as the claw itself, with three thin lines coming from it as the fingers. It was crude, as his painting skills were not better than those of a child. He worked on the finger, bending them slightly, trying to get them to look as real as possible. Where the claws stopped, he painted, with even thinner, broken lines wounds, like the claws were scratching at something, leaving deep gashes in them. The paint didn't dry quickly, so he could often make changes after having already applied some of the paint. To give it at least some semblence of detail, the Undrykas dipped the thinest brush he had on the table into the paint and added an endless amount of small lines to the hand and fingers, creating the hairy fur that covered the entire claw. He stepped back from the claw, looking at it. The image on it looked ridiculous and it seemed a total failure to the Undrykas. He realized that he couldn't be good at everything when it came to malediction. He would have to get his hands on brushes and paint so he could practice in his room, paint something in those circles on his bed. But he would have to make sure nobody caught him doing that. If the master found out, that would be the end of the Undrykas. A sound from the door of the lab had the Undrykas running through the room, as far away from the table as possible. He knelt down as the door opened and an apprentice came in. He hoped that it would look like he had been working with the bin as he stood up again. There was no reaction, no seeming recognition between the two. The Undrykas simply continued with his work, picking up the next bin and the one after that, slipping past the apprentice to clear them out. His work had him spend a lot more time in the lab than most of the apprentices and he was often seen in the lab when nobody else was there, doing most of his work during that time. With the two empty bins in hand, he returned and saw the apprentice standing at the working table he had been at before, looking at the claw as he held it in his hand. He couldn't tell if the apprentice realized what he had been doing or not, or if he was simply checking the item out. Careful to not draw attention, he set to work, sweeping around the tables furthest away from the apprentice and clearing them up, dusting off the bone dust and chips and scraping off the dried up paint from the table. The carving knives and brushes were dipped into a cup of hot water before he attempted to clean them as best he could, rubbing them off with a piece of cloth that hung from his belt, something he had picked up somewhere during his life. As he was scrubbing away at the dried up paint on one knife, he watched the apprentice, who had set to work on the claw. He cut through the middle finger and pulled a small strip of leather through it. The Undrykas did his best not to stare to see what he was doing. With the leather strip pulled through, the apprentice placed the item on the back of his hand and with his free hand measured how much leather he would need to create a ring around his own middle finger. This malediction item would be worn like a very big and oversized ring, covering the entirety of the wearer's hand. The Undrykas put the knife down and picked up a brush, washing it off in the hot water, trying to get as much paint out of it as possible. He was pressing the brush against the water filled inside of the cup, holding it with his other hand. His eyes were still on the apprentice. The leather strip was quickly finished as the apprentice added a sort of clasp or closing device to it, to keep the item in place. He continued to test it out on his own hand, constantly trying to wear it making adjustments to it until he was finally happy with the end result. What happened after resulted in another revelation for the Undrykas, combined with another immense beating from master Taren Alter. The nuit apprentice pricked his own finger with one of the knives, obviously on purpose, and squeezed out a little bit of goo or something out of his finger. The Undrykas assumed it was nuit blood, since that was what would come out if he had been a normal human, blood. IT was a strange thing to see for the Undrykas. The drop of blood landed on the circle on the back of the malediction ring. The intended effect had been completely different from what the Undrykas had hoped to achieve. As soon as the blood dripped onto the circle, the nuit's hand grew hair everywhere, sprouting in seconds and creating a thick fur all over it. And it didn't stop there, as the hair spread out along his arm, growing hair over his lower arm towards his elbow and on and on, further up to his shoulder. The Undrykas had never before heard a nuit scream in panic like that. It seemed oddly alive while it was panicking. The door flew open as the master rushed in, followed by most of the apprentices. The screaming apprentice waved the claw around, tried to pull it off, but nothing would stop it from growing more hair. The master was quicker of mind and reacted properly. The knife flashed in his hand and planted itself into the back of the claw, where the circle was painted, all the way through it and slipping out of the other side, embedding itself somewhat in the hand of the apprentice. As soon as the circle was broken, the hair on the nuit's arm started to fall of, dying on the spot. Except for a lot of dead hair in his clothes and on his body, all fallen off, the nuit didn't have any lasting effects from the malediction item. It was then that the Undrykas realized that malediction items required blood to be activated. His mind flashed back in time, seeing how the master's beating had caused him to spit blood onto the bone in his hand and how the cut in his thumb had activated the skull. He was quickly pulled back into the present as a fist planted itself into his stomach, causing him to double over and collapse on the ground, gasping for air, trying to breathe. What had caused this? The kick in his ribs told him that master Taren Alter was once again taking his frustration out. Or he blamed the Undrykas, like everybody else always had. It didn't matter. The beating was short but intense, as the master aimed his kicks and blows towards painful points. The ribs would hurt for a while longer with every breath he took. Lying in his bed, gasping every time he tried to breathe in more than a little bit of air, the Undrykas went over the things he had learned. Firstly, Malediction was not limited to bones, unlike what he had believed at first. This opened up a whole lot of new things for him to try out. Secondly, blood was needed to activate a malediction item. Knowing this now, he realized that he had often seen it happen but had never truly paid attention to it. He had always gathered the nuit as pricking their fingers for fun or to see if they were still working, but never had he linked it to malediction. Now he knew better. And lastly, the knife that the master had planted through the claw. Malediction items only worked as long as the circle was intact. So malediction had a big weakness. Items made with malediction needed to remain in perfect shape to work. Broken circles or broken malediction items would not work anymore, losing all their properties and once more turning into lifeless remains of some monster or creature somewhere. |
| Present day Ortal's home, The Spires The quill stopped at the last letter, resting on it for a while as the writer tried to remember more of the story, tried to pull out more memories to write down. As nothing else came to mind, the writer put the quill down on the writer's block and hooked his finger into the ear of his tea cup. He sipped slowly from it, taking his time to enjoy it. With his right hand he sprinkled some of the wood and sand on the parchment, drying up the ink. The words would seem bleak and with a brown tint to them but it was better to dry them this way than to wait a few hours for the ink to dry on its own. The writer took another sip from his tea. |
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