Death Never Dies

by Milton Garby

  Right after a nap.

  Sara

  BOOM!

  The sky split open with another bolt of thunder, shaking Sara to her bones and prompting her to give an airy giggle. It wasn't going to be the highlight of her day like dueling would be, but it was amazing. Rain poured down, but none touched her because of her iridescent green magical shield. Everywhere around her the grass was watered and the streets slicked with rain under the dark, angry sky. All the same she jogged at a decent pace to the Wizard's Sanctum alongside many other mages and warlocks seeking to get out of the rain, magical shield or no. She ran up the spiral ramp and, once inside, she dismissed her shadowy barrier.

  The inside of the Wizard's Sanctum was deliciously labyrinthine, but after having spent six years taking classes and getting lost in its various locations Sara knew it like the back of her hand. She took a moment to chuckle in her head at the people who hadn't been able to shield themselves from the storm's downpour and were now wringing out their robes, before heading off into a passage to the left. Several other students crowded around her, but the raging thunderstorm had left Sara in too good of a mood for their presence to bring her down.

  Her skin prickled since the classroom she was in was far underground, and the feeling of being so far under the earth was absolutely constricting. It didn't help that the only way there was by way of a punishing stairwell.

  The room was mostly a rectangle, however it sloped downwards so those in the back could see, and it ended with a semicircle upon which the instructors stood. The room itself was filled with benches and desks for students to sit at. Sara, with a few pencils in her robe's pockets, shuffled inwards at the second row from the top. Some people were already there, and more were filing in behind her to prepare for the class. All in all, about fifty people could fit in the chamber.

  Once in her chosen seat, Sara took out her writing utensil and tried to still her mind. This was important. All the exams were. There was a tremendous amount of material on the coming written exam, and while she'd put her tremendous memory to work she still wasn't entirely sure she understood all the information.

  As more people filed in, Sara's eyes were drawn to the instructor's semicircle. All sorts of vials, flasks, and magical crystals hovered on two desks, steaming and glowing. Her inspection was suddenly interrupted when Archmage Amera Netherhowl, teleported in with a flash of arcane light. "Greetings class!" she said to the sea of people in red or blue robes, throwing back her blueish hair. "Most of you are here yes? Yes yes yes, then let us begin. Now." She blinked over to one of the desks and reached under it, pulling out a hefty stack of papers. "Here are your exams, you will have five hours to fill it out. These ones with the blue lining are for mages, please pass them around. No two tests are identical, so you can't cheat." She reached back under and pulled out more papers. "These ones with purple lining are for..." Her lips pursed for just a moment. "... warlocks. Same rules apply, please pass these around."

  The papers came around. At one point the stack of mage questions fell in Sara's hands, and she handed them off to the person next to her. Eventually, she got her exam - a stack of ten papers held together via paperclip - and passed the rest on. She glanced at the paper, noting the title of 'Advanced Spellcasting Exam' with a nod.

  The Archmage took out a glowing blue crystal. "This crystal will slowly fade to red. When it's done it will begin glowing brighter, and that will mean your five hours are up. Your time begins..." Her hands burst into flames, and the crystal was rocked by a fiery blast. "Now."

  Sara took her pencil to the exam and immediately locked onto the first question. It was an easy one, simply asking her to list the four major components of a spellcaster's power; mana pool, magic power, magic knowledge, and magic resistance. Easy memorization.

  The next one was a word problem: Warlock A has a mana pool 500 units deep. Warlock B has a mana pool 200 units deep. Warlock A expends 250 units on a spell. Warlock B expends 150 units on a spell. Who needs more water to replenish their mana? Also an easy one. Warlock B, since deeper mana pools also meant their bodies could more efficiently change water to magic. It was stupid to use integers, since magic wasn't quantized, but it helped get the message across.

  After that the questions - predictably - got harder, and Sara had to reach deeper and deeper into her memory to drudge up the answers. The questions went by. At first they were simple recitation problems. She just had to remember the information and regurgitate it, which with Sara's memory was trivial. Eventually, after answering that the inverse function of the rate of mana change a spell induces was directly, proportional to its nether friction, she flipped ahead to see how many questions there were.

  A good two hundred fifty. She had two hundred to go.

  Ugh.

  Sara flipped back to her questions and kept going through, one step at a time. The further she went, the more the questions pertained to shadow magic and demons, only one of which mattered to her. They also got trickier. Slowly at first, but at around question one hundred fifty, she had to perform great mental acrobatics, thinking about which of the many magical laws she knew of applied to the question, and in what order to use them.

  Blinking her eyes, she set down the pencil to look around, rubbing her eyes. Archmage Amera sat in a chair, looking out over the class like a statue. Around her, the air was filled with the scritch-scritch-scritch of pencils. Sara decided to take a quick five minute break and just let her mind go more or less blank for a little while, watching the levitating now-yellow crystal floating menacingly in the air. There was also the fact that she increasingly needed to relieve herself; it was for the best she'd not drank much at all before the exam.

  There were only a hundred questions left, so she buckled down and focused her knowledge. Six years studying at the Academy of Arcane Arts and Sciences were going to pay off, and they were going to pay off right then and there.

  Calculate the mana expenditure of a spell with such and such matrix. Done.

  Calculate the energy dissipated by being counterspelled of such a spell in the last so many seconds of its casting. Done.

  How many casters are needed at minimum to perform a ritual of such and such schematics? Harder than it looked, but done.

  The sheets of paper went by, and before Sara knew it she was answering question two hundred and fifty, a monolith of a problem concerning resonance frequencies and fel density. The crystal was glowing orange-red, so her time was nearly up. She put her wits to it, but she wasn't certain that the correct answer of fifty seven days was correct. Still, it was the best she could do, so she wrote down her answer. Sara used her remaining time to go over her previous answers, checking them for errors. Out of fifty, she found three errors to fix, and then...

  Flash!

  The crystal floating down at the front of the chamber pulsed brilliant crimson, and the Archmage stood from her seat. "Time! Alright class, hand down your tests immediately. As of this moment you have two hours before your magic signature readings, so I suggest you take this time to hydrate."

  Sara handed down her sheet and, as best she could while fifty other people were trying to do the same, bolted from the room with her pencil in tow. It was a long, uphill climb to get back to the main chamber of the Wizard's Sanctum that left her legs sore, especially after sitting in one place for five hours. Once there she walked outside - raising her green barrier - into the ongoing summer thunderstorm.

  The rain had let up, but the lightning was getting stronger. Brilliant bolts flickered in every direction, as much as ten per minute, and the air shook with thunder. Sara sighed as the dark weather continued to rage around her as she walked down the slippery ramp of the Sanctum. Once down she made her way to the nearest clocktower, focusing intently on it through the rain.

  "Two thirty," she muttered. "Still got some time."

  She turned around and marched towards the road leading to her apartment with Maria. With half an hour left until her client showed up, she could get there in fif
teen minutes and still have as much time to rest after her grueling exam.

  Her feet, complete with shoes soaked with water, brought her to the warm apartment. She entered and marched up to the third floor before entering the apartment she had lived in with Maria for the past six years.

  The room had taken on a lived-in look over the time they'd spent living in it. Maria's sketches of various creatures and beasts littered the floor like snow. A chair with a green cushion rested next to one of the desks, where Sara had piled notebooks filled with magical equations and strewn writing utensils around haphazardly. The lower bunk bed was ruffled and unmade, however the higher one where Sara slept was... even more messed up. On the other side from the beds was a dresser, open and with clothes half spilling out of it.

  Maria was currently sitting on her bed with her back to Sara, a notebook open. She appeared to be drawing a summoning ritual diagram. Imp, if she saw correctly. She glanced back at her when Sara opened the door. "Hey, how was the exam."

  "I think I aced it," she said as she closed the door. "By the way, I have a client coming over in about fifteen. Think you can finish that somewhere else?"

  Maria shivered when Sara mentioned 'client'. "Yeah, sure. Thanks for the heads up. Seriously, you should get your magic checked out. There's gotta be something wrong with it."

  "Well, that's what the signature readings are for." Well, that wasn't their purpose but Sara suspected that some of the nuances of her shadow magic would be cleared up. "Anyway, I gotta get ready." She moved past Maria towards the chair.

  "Right, see you later." Maria swung herself out of her bed and, materials still in hand, left their room. That left Sara to stand around, bored, for until her client showed up.

  She sighed, and decided to take out her flask and drink some water in the meantime.

  At least she was on the fast track to becoming a spellcaster. Just a few more days, and she would officially be a Magister - she couldn't summon demons, so technically she wasn't a warlock. In just six years, too, instead of eight. Not the quickest anyone had ever done it, but still quick. Her job at the inscription shop Prescription Inscriptions was stable, and she made a nice bit of gold on the side by...

  Knock knock knock!

  "Come in," she said.

  The door opened and admitted a man maybe... four years younger than her. He wore the bluish silver robes of mage initiates, but it was as unkempt as his orange hair, and as wild as his blue eyes were nervous. His face was gaunt and seemed almost... tall. "Hello, are you Sara?"

  She stood. "Yes, and I assume you're Marin? Please, come in, close the door and take a seat." She gestured to the green cushioned chair. He moved to it - leaving her to close the door, what an imbecile - and sat facing her. "Now, before we start do you have any questions about the procedure?"

  "Well, um, how long is this going to take? And how are you going to do it?"

  "As for how long, it varies depending on what causes your procrastination, however a good rule of thumb is twenty minutes. As for how..." She held up her hand and let her shadow magic flare. "My shadow magic is unique in that I taught myself mental manipulation. I'll be changing the pathways in your brain, so that the mechanisms that make you procrastinate cease to exist. I will not be able to read your thoughts, I will not be able to change your memories, nor will I be able to change your personality." Those were lies. She'd been reading minds since she was twelve. As for memory and personality, she could easily change those. Not with any degree of accuracy, memory and personality were too complicated for her to figure out, but she could change them. "Anything else?"

  "Um, no. Actually, one thing. What if I'm ever dispelled?"

  Ugh, this question again. "Nothing will come of it. You can cast fireballs, yes?"

  He shrugged and nervously rubbed an arm. "Kind of, but not well."

  "Right," Sara said. "Well, imagine you take a piece of parchment, and fireball it into ashes. Then someone comes along, looks at the ashes, and magically dispels them. Will they 'dispel' the fireball so they're paper again? No, because the fireball has already done its effects and the magic is long gone. Same here. My magic will change the way your mind works, and the 'burn marks' will remain without the aid of magic." She blinked owlishly. "That makes it sound much more harmful than it actually is, but you understand," she said with a light humorous grin. "Anyway, are you ready to begin?"

  He took a deep breath, then let it out. "Yes."

  Sara walked over until she was behind him, and placed one hand next to each of his ears. "Alright, close your eyes." He did so, and she lit up her hands with shadow magic. She pushed her power into his mind - he shivered - and she could suddenly see the crisscrossing purple lines that made up the young man's mind.

  There were so many more lines than in an animal's mind, and they flickered and flashed just as intensely. There were so many the brain was practically one giant orb of violet energy, but Sara focused. The orbs of magic in her hands shifted to thick purple light, and she isolated everything in Marin's brain except for the frontal part, near his forehead. There were a lot of lines, but she had a way of finding what she needed.

  "Alright, now I want you to think about the following scenario. Your instructor has just finished a lesson, and has instructed you all to go practice casting fireballs on training dummies. You are to attain a temperature of five hundred degrees three times in a row. Proof of this is required in two weeks from today." From what she heard, five hundred degrees was the most trivial of tasks when it came to fire magic.

  She finished describing the situation, and watched as a handful of interconnecting lines suddenly flared at the expense of all the others. "Next scenario. You are studying for an exam about the rate of arcane current flows in the Twisting Nether and how they relate to the strength of ley lines. You need to get at least a ninety percent on this test, or you will have to spend an extra year before you are a Magister. But the test is looming, and there's just too much material to cover, so you're certain you will fail no matter how hard you try."

  This time a few new lines lit up. Some of the previous ones flared again, though.

  "I'm sorry," Marin interrupted. "But what is the point of this?"

  Shut up shut up. "Procrastination does more or less the same thing to everyone," she explained. "But it has a variety of different causes. I need to see what causes your procrastination. Now. You just picked up an incredible book from the library. It's high fantasy, about a world devoid of magic and with but one intelligent race. It's held your attention rapturously, but you also have to go out to buy supplies for your room. You know that you need those supplies, but on the other hand you could simply stay in your bed, reading the book." Other lines lit up, but not as strongly.

  She continued to inspect his mind, taking note of a few dozen lines in particular, as she rattled off scenarios for another fifteen minutes. Before too long, she had what she needed. "Alright, I have everything I need." The purple energy in her hands glowed a little brighter, and she began rearranging the problematic lines into more proper arrangements. Marin's procrastination was born of the fear of failure, of despair in the face of difficult tasks, and some perfectionism. His risk/reward was intact, so it wasn't a case of him prioritizing immediate reward over future reward. Simple. Sara snipped some of the lines, grew some new ones, changed others, and within three minutes Marin's procrastination was cured.

  Ending her flow of magic, Sara stepped back. "Alright, that's it. Your problem should be gone."

  Marin stood up and blinked his eyes. Some shadows still stubbornly clung to his head and hair. "I... huh. I don't feel any different."

  "You shouldn't," Sara explained. "Your everyday experiences aren't impacted by putting things off, usually you live in the - what are you going to do?!" she asked suddenly, to take him off guard and get an honest answer.

  "I'm going to go practice my frostbolts on a dummy," he said without thinking. Then Marin blinked, and his face was split by a wide smile. "Oh wow, wow, it
really works doesn't it?"

  "You can still put things off if you really try to," Sara explained. "But you won't feel as compelled to do so anymore."

  "Thank you, thank you so much. Here." He reached into his robes and, after some fishing around, pulled out twelve gold. "Keep the extra two," he said as he gave the money to her. He ruffled his hair, cleaning out the shadow magic in it. "You really earned it. Thank you, um, enjoy your day Sara."

  "You too," she said with false honesty as he left. "Enjoy. Your. Day," she said to the closed door as she moved the gold around in her right hand.

  That was that done with. Her next client was tomorrow, which meant the only thing truly important left for the day was her magical signature reading. After that she could go to the dueling club for a few hours and relax. Stretching, Sara walked back out of the building in short order

  The storm was clearing up, to her disappointment. The rain was gone, the lightning was no more, and while it was still cloudy more and more sunlight broke through the gray cover. She sighed. Oh well. The good things in life were fleeting.

  Instead of heading to the Wizard's Sanctum for her magical reading, Sara headed to the Shadow Magic division, formerly a pub known as the Slaughtered Lamb. She walked inside the brownish building the same way she had hundreds of times before, and she took the staircase down amidst several other warlocks and nervous mages. The staircase spiraled down, and down, and down. The air grew damp and musky, the walls turned from wood to black brick. Within moments she arrived in a large cellar, with a central bonfire whose smoke billowed upwards into a small vent. It cast flickering lights on the bookshelves that were pushed into alcoves, and at the edges of the circular room were warlocks at desks, busy writing.

  Across from Sara was a ramp that ran even further underground. She went over to it and descended into the catacombs, taking turn after turn through the labyrinth. The halls down here were lined with various magical protections, and as she came closer and closer to her destination they only get stronger. She passed a passage to her left that she knew led to one of the demon summoning areas, one of the more heavily warded areas. But Sara wasn't going to go summon demons.