“I’m Sarah,” the brunette says as she walks me over to the far-right side of the room.

“Ian,” I say, even though I’ve already been introduced by Professor Durning.

“What year are you?” she asks.

“Fourth year,” I say.

“I’m a third year.” She looks at me appraisingly. “You don’t look like a fourth year.”

I chuckle “I get that a lot.”

“You look at least twenty-five.”

“I took a gap year before school.”

“Oh,” she murmurs. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

She scowls. “Shouldn’t you be twenty-three?”

“I got held back in kindergarten.”

She coughs to conceal a laugh.

“Anyways,” I say, clasping my fingers together. “What am I going to learn for my first real lesson?”

She puts a hand on her hips. “How squeamish are you?”

I deadpan. “Do your worst.”

“Fine. We can start with carnimancy, then.”

I grimace internally. Personally, I hate carnimancy. Under the harsh Menocht Bay sun, flesh rots and putrefies in hours. Flesh as a whole is messy and spreads disease, particularly dead flesh. On the other hand, bone remains relatively constant over time. Bone is clean, doesn’t smell...

I hear a thud and realize that Sarah’s placed a chest onto the table in front of us. “Here.” She’s breathing a little heavier from the exertion. I realize that I can’t sense the vitality of whatever is in the chest; my guess is that it’s been warded.

She opens the chest and I have to take a step back. Seriously, why carnimancy? My eyes dart to her face. Is she trying to scare me off?

“See this? It’s rotten flesh. That means it’s great for manipulation.”

Well, it is oozing Death energy, but I’d prefer to get energy from un-rotted corpses. I can’t even tell what animal the meat is from.

“What is this good for?” I ask. “I can’t see this being useful for anything.” It’s literally just a rotten slab of meat. Maybe you could make a poison out of it?

“It’s good for practice,” she says, smiling. “Getting squeamish?”

Not squeamish...just...annoyed.

I crack my knuckles. “Tell me what to do.”

“I want you to try to gather as much of the Death energy up as you can,” she says while pulling out a flask from a nearby cabinet. “Then I want you to put it in here. It’s specially made to hold energy.”

“Just like when I pulled ambient energy from the room?”

“Just like that. But be careful, the energy from this kind of meat is a little...strong.”

I’ll say. “Ok, here goes nothing.” I hold my right hand out over the meat and begin to circulate energy. Soon, I have a small orb of black energy writhing like a flame in my hand.

“Put it in the flask, then do it again.”

I bring my hand toward the flask...and the energy is vacuumed right out from my palm. I hold the flask out and note that its interior has taken on a black-gray color.

I repeat the energy-siphoning a few more times until the meat’s aura has been significantly reduced. Sarah grabs the flask from my hand and inspects it.

“Great, you got that quicker than I expected. Now that we’ve extracted all the energy that we can, it’s time to practice on the meat itself.” She holds out her index finger and hovers it about two inches over the meat’s mushy surface. “You want to make the meat move. That’s it. It’s easier the first few times if you inject a bit of Death energy into a certain area, and try to move that.”

I step forward and hold out my index finger next to hers. “Good,” she says. “Now draw a bit of energy out of this flask.” She holds it out to me and I drain a little bit of the energy out.

“Now,” she continues. “Point, and shoot.”

I point my finger at the chest, expel a sliver of energy, and wait for it to sink into the meat. Then, I curl my fingers up and watch as the death-darkened patch writhes as though infested by maggots.

“Wow, great job!” Sarah cheers. “I think you must be a natural at carnimancy. Maybe it’s even your specialty.”

I give her a questioning look. “Specialty?”

“Let me explain. Most people who have any affinity will have a specialty. That’s why not everyone who has Sun affinity can manipulate both plants and fire.”

I nod slowly. The grimoire didn’t mention any “specialties” or divisions. The distributed network held little information either: Most articles on the Dark Art spiraled into occultism.

“It’s much more expedient for a person to pursue their specialty than the entire affinity as a whole. With a subject like decemancy, where there are so many different paths to choose, it’s particularly important.”

I look off to the side. “What about bone manipulation?”

“You mean osteomancy?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you ask?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t it be cool to make a bone construct and use it to fly around?”

She laughs. “Those are banned unless you have a license.”

License?

“How hard is it to get a license?”

She stops laughing. “I was just joking. Nobody here practices osteomancy. Most of the existing research was done hundreds of years ago on human captives and doesn’t scale well with animal bones.”

What research is she talking about?

“Besides, making a bone construct is supposed to be prohibitively difficult. You’d never be able to make one, even if you raise your affinity to 50%.”

“Still, is there anything else I can try? I don’t really like carnimancy.”

“Hah; I knew you were squeamish.”

I give her a look. “Not squeamish. I just don’t like working with pieces of rotting meat.”

“Fine, let me ask the professor if she can help us out. I don’t really know anything about osteomancy.”

—

“Osteomancy?” Professor Durning exclaims. “There’s no money to be made in it.”

Isn’t this a school of higher learning? Since when do professors care if there’s money to be made?

“I’m not going to pursue the Dark Art as my career. My affinity is low, and I’m almost done with my glossY programmatics major. After I graduate, I’m going to focus on that.” Everything out of my mouth is a blatant lie, but in truth I have no idea what I’m going to do after leaving Academia Hector.

“While it isn’t as lucrative as elementalism,” the professor argues, “the Dark Art has many specializations that will easily net you more money than a glossprog degree.”

She’s right: there’s a reason why so many people are desperate to receive some kind of affinity.

”I really like programming,” I retort. “I’d rather do that than mess around with rotting meat all day.”

The professor sighs and looks at me sadly. “That’s not what carnimancers do, you know.”

“What kinds of specializations are there, anyways? I only know about carnimancy and osteomancy.”

“Sarah, care to explain?”

She nods. “Right, um, aside from those two, there’s animancy, thralling–though that’s just as unpopular as osteomancy–and one more...” She looks at the professor for help.

“You missed diagnosty,” Professor Durning admonishes. “To give you a quick run down, carnimancy, animancy, and diagnosty are all the most popular specializations. Carnimancers usually work in the agricultural industry. A single carnimancer can replace an entire factory’s worth of labor and machines.”

So, not rotting meat then.

“They also can work in the medical industry performing autopsies and even helping to conduct certain delicate surgeries.”

I suppose I can see why carnimancy might be popular.

“Animancers generally work in the exterminator industry,” she adds. “They snuff out the lives of small, invasive insects. Moreover, they can collect Death energy and create soul gems. These can be used for a plethora of purposes and are as valuable as they are hard to make.

“Finally, diagnosticians are usually employed as spies and guards. Diagnosticians focus on developing their ability to scope out environments on the basis of perceived vitality.”

She smiles at me. “Do any of those sound appealing?”

None of them sound particularly appealing. I’m disappointed that these aspects of decemancy have been separated off from each other; the way I learned didn’t make any distinctions between the categories. Why limit yourself to one area when you could pursue them all?

If I had to choose from the provided options, I’d have to pick animancy for utility's sake: It would be useful to “learn” how to make soul gems. I sold them a few times in Menocht Bay, though only after decomposing larger gems into the small, low-grade variety.

“How much do soul gems sell for?”

Sarah rolls her eyes and shoots me a lazy grin. “If you can make one, they normally sell for upwards of ဢ5k.”

5k? “As in, five-thousand auris?”

She nods. “Right.”

“I want to do animancy, then.”

Professor Durning looks at Sarah. “Why don’t you bring Justin over here?”

“Sure.”

The professor turns toward me to speak. “Justin’s specializing in animancy, so I’ll let him take over showing you the basics.”

Justin is a well-built guy with sandy hair and a baby face. He comes over with a grin. “So, you wanna learn animancy?”

Professor Durning walks away, leaving me alone with Justin. I note that Sarah has gone back to the right side of the room and is currently unlocking a different, heavier chest than she showed me.

“Animancy sounds pretty useful,” I observe.

“Come over to my work station,” he says. I see that his desk is filled with jars of insects and a few white, quartz-like rocks. “See these rocks? They’re foci to help concentrate Death energy into a soulstone. Even then,” he adds, seeing my conflicted expression, “forming a soulstone is really difficult. I’ve only ever formed one, and that was a fluke.” He then gestures to the jars of insects. There must be at least seven jars covering the desk. “I usually spend my time working on drawing the energy out of these guys. By the time I graduate, I should be able to drop them all dead with a wave of my hand.” He sounds smug about it.

“What year are you now?”

“I’m a second year.”

I nod. So this guy has been working on sucking the life out of bugs for the past year? I don’t envy him.

“What’s your primary affinity?” I ask, curious. Honestly, I’m not surprised that he–and the rest of the people here–haven’t progressed too far. This is only an elective for them.

He grins. “Sun.”

“Huh. Fire elementalist?”

“Correct!”

“Why even bother with this, then?” I ask.

He laughs. “I hate bugs,” he admits. “If I can keep my future house bug-free, this is all effort very well spent.”

Way to aim high. “Makes sense. So, what’s the first step of animancy?”

He spends the next twenty minutes lecturing me about the regulations regarding the internationally-accepted intelligence and size quotient for what decemancers can, and can’t, kill. I was already familiar with said regulations, but it’s helpful to hear them stated clearly.

All insects are fair game, along with anything the size of a rat or smaller. Anything larger, like raccoons, are off limits. Smaller things with higher intelligence, such as a few kinds of rare birds, are also banned, though Justin assures me that I’ll never run into one unless I go to Ho’ostar or Kester.

I personally believe that the laws are far too limiting, given the fact that any elementalist can go off and kill whatever animals they’d like with a crush of earth or a tongue of fire. Not to mention any regular can kill using conventional methods.

“Of course, there are always exceptions,” Justin adds. “Most carnimancers in the meat industry obtain special permits that allow them to slaughter livestock.”

I nod slowly. “Any others?”

He pauses, taking in a deep breath as he mulls the question over. “Well, the other major exception is in war. But I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

My chest constricts, a sense of foreboding coming over me. I hope you’re right, Justin. I’ve had enough conflict for a lifetime.

—

After class ends, I find myself by the ocean again, though this time I didn’t bother taking the bus, electing to fly the whole way there under the cover of darkness. It’s freezing, but at least this time I’m in my waterproof jacket and boots.

Germaine would like it here, I think to myself, suddenly missing my sister’s presence. I haven’t seen her in years, so why haven’t I yet reached out?

I gaze out over the empty water, wondering if Germaine sees her clean canvases as I see the Death-dappled dunes beneath the waves: latent potential, like a slab of marble whose true form has yet-to-be revealed by the sculptor. With a sigh of exultation, I let loose: Death energy surges around me like a tide, easing away the ache of abstinence, its oily tendrils mine to manipulate and mold.

I send myself out over the waves and flex my fingers, once more reanimating the bones I left the day before. Instead of forming a whale and an entourage of other sea life, I form them all into a wyrm. There are plenty of bird skeletons underwater, so finding an undamaged flight focus doesn’t take me more than a few minutes. Of course, killing a seagull for a fresh focus would be easier, but now that I’m outside the loop...I’d prefer to use the bones of the already dead.

There’s also the fact that using decemancy to kill a seagull is probably illegal.

For the soulstones, I swipe out with my right hand, prompting two fish to come flying out of the water and hover before me. I extract their Death energy and distill it down into two diminutive, violet soul gems. While I doubt soul gems made from these fish are very powerful, they should function fine for a construct.

It takes me longer to make the bone construct this time, probably because the majority of the bones I’m using come from smaller animals than humans. Binding them together takes more effort on my part, but the end result is better than I could have hoped for: The smaller bones have resulted in a more sinuous, life-like wyrm. I step up onto the skull crest and insert the soul gems into the eye sockets. Then, before I know it, I’m off and flying over the ocean.