Suggested Listening

Elruin was hard at work over the alchemy pot when Calenda returned, so much so that she failed to notice her elder sister had arrived until Lemia spoke.

"How'd your interrogation, I mean interview, go?" Lemia wasn't paying too close attention to Cali, being far more concerned with the chemical paste they had made for the purposes of bolstering the undead. Try as she might, she couldn't comprehend why anyone would develop such magic, but it existed and they were going to use it as best they could.

"I spent the whole time remembering one time I was having dinner with... acquaintances... and one of them expressed a concern that I'd get myself killed outside the walls." Cali slumped down next to their nest-hole. "I can't remember my exact words, but I said something about being immortal because dying requires too much paperwork. Proving once again that the universe is a joke, and I'm the punchline."

"Well, the universe better stop right now," Elruins said with a huff. She continued working, for now was the proof of concept. She dipped the spider chitin into the white paste, which blackened with necromantic energies as she hummed her necromantic song, converting the complexities of alchemy and weaponized magic into a structured, patterned magic.

Through Calenda's sense, it felt as it had when she was controlled by Scratch, for those brief moments she could. Echoes of death, and things deeper still, rippled outward like waves crashing against Elruin's. Each new pulse outward, pushed back until it was held like a pond in the space of a mud puddle.

Lemia's eyes saw something quite different, as the formula of Elruin's math twisted, folded folded inward, and 'solved' itself one step at a time until it was locked into the simplest possible expression. She had seen such work, done better, as part of her enchantment courses, but it was interesting to watch Elruin fumble around with the basics and using raw power to compensate where she lacked finesse.

Soon, she held up the shimmering black tar-soaked shell. Black electricity danced from it to her skin, seeking a place to discharge itself and finding Elruin's skin contained more power than it did. "This is my gift!"

"Oh." Cali reached out, as if to pick up a dead mouse offered to her by a cat. She'd never owned a cat, in fact the closest thing she'd ever had to a pet was Lyra, whose idea of a gift was turning her house into an indoor jungle. "Woah!" Once she had grip on the strip of material, the energy pulsed outward into the lower, shallower 'pool' that was Calenda's energy pool. Once in the larger pool of a human woman, it wasn't quite the significant power that it appeared to be when concentrated into a strip of tissue, but it did serve to restore some of her limited power before the remnants of chitin crumpled to the ground as black dust.

Elruin sighed in disappointment. "I thought it would last longer."

Lemia put a comforting hand on the girl's shoulder. "That's what test runs are for. We knew what we were creating was just the 'potion' phase, and with what we learned we can move on to enchantment."

Cali blinked. "Are you telling me you could turn that into an enchantment?"

"Uh huh," Elruin smiled up in pride at her elder sister. "I can do it with any of my spells."

"Don't get too excited," Lemia said. "There is a significant gap between the power you got there, and what enchantment can do. What you experienced there was, for all intents and purposes, the same as you'd get from a potion. The permanent version might generate that much energy every six hours, and that's if we do everything perfect and have quality attuned sarite to work with. But without a lab, a trained enchanter, and the perfect set of supplies, you'll be lucky to one that can restore that much every twelve to fourteen hours."

What Lemia left out is that no other enchanter could do the work they were doing. It normally took a creation mage to set the groundwork of permanent magic items, or so her scholastic experience had taught her. That negation magic could accomplish the same in its own odd way was nothing she had ever considered before. To her, negation was always a means to eliminate other magic, not add more.

"At this point, I'll take it. Good work, little sister." Cali rested her hand on Elruin's head. "So, what do we need for the permanent version?"

"A lot of things, but Lemia can explain better than me." Elruin was barely at the point of producing potions that didn't explode or decay in mere minutes, let along long-term enchantment work.

"To leave Sonhome, for starters," Lemia said. "We need fresh untreated leather of the highest quality possible. Which we can turn into... I suppose you could call it Necromantic Mageleather. We'll want a supply of sarite to grind for dust, the closer to pure negation we can make the powder, the better."

"But I thought there was no such thing as pure negation sarite?"

"So you see our dilemma," Lemia said. "The best we can hope for is 'close'. Scourge aspect would probably be the ideal, not that I know where you'd find shards like that. But once we pull together all those supplies, it should take no more than a day or two to craft a basic magic armor for you. The best part is, if you're near full strength, the bleedoff could even be used to hurt whatever you hit. I was thinking spiked gloves."

"Not a weapon, or boots?" Cali considered herself much better with her feet than her hands, and thrown knives were her preferred backup option.

"You want as much surface contact as possible, and the ability to take them off fast. This sort of thing will be visible to mages who know how to look, and once they start looking-"

"Hush!" Cali hissed, then focused her eyes on the shadow in the distance.

"Hey, outsiders," a dwarf shouted from the clearing. He, or she as the case might be, began the slow bipedal gait toward them. It was a show of respect, shouting from a distance before approaching. "My name's Ketak, heard some rumors about you. I'm here to o'er my blade to your cause. And since it matters to you humans, I am a 'emale."

Knowing she was a woman did matter, social norms being what they were. Now Calenda crossed her arms, ready to tell her to get lost without feeling awkward in the process. "Ours, specifically?"

"Anyone going out to bash goblin skulls is a cause I can get behind," the dwarf said. "And i' you wanna get on 'e good side o' our leaders, the easiest way is to haul back a mountain o' goblin corpses."

Cali kept her eyes locked on the dwarf's, unwilling to look at Lemia or Elruin for fear they might react to the idea of corpse piles. "We haven't decided we want Sonhome's help, save sending the message they already sent. It's possible we're about to double back into human territory, or march further north, straight into the Enge mountains. We have a number of concerns."

"Like your hidden stash of centaur gold? It ain't quite goblin hunting, but it's a close second i' I get a share."

"One thing I love about dwarves, they don't waste time," Cali said. "We're not going treasure hunting, not any time soon, and we're going to be dealing with human concerns, not dwarven interests."

"So long as 'ese lead-scaled cowards remain hidden here, I 'ear no'ing will be dwar'en business. No matter how many o' our sons and daughters die out there, we hide. Sooner or later, some'ing's gonna come 'at our walls cannot save us 'rom. Sonhome will die as Helmar and Leteka died be'ore 'em. I' I'm to die, I'd ra'er bring an army the size o' 'e mountains wi' me. I' I can 'ind no reliable allies in Sonhome, then I seek them wi' humans. Take me to one o' your cities, and I'll do 'e rest."

"I'll keep that in mind," Lemia said.

"I can see you need to talk to your people. I' you make a decision, come 'ind me at 'e trading 'orges. I'll be 'eir, i' nobody else has taken my o'er by 'en." Ketak turned and began her lumbering back to wherever it was in the city that she called home.

"So, in my expert opinion, she's either greedy, insane, or a spy," Lemia said once she felt they were outside hearing range even for a dwarf. "And I seem to recall you saying something about dwarves not being known for such things."

"There are exceptions to every rule," Cali said. "But a spy- even a dwarven spy- would at least have given us a better lie."

"Or she read up on Ecrosian literature," Lemia countered. "That speech was right up there with your 'die on my feet' line."

"I detected no deception from her. So she believes herself enough to beat a Truthsayer."

"You're not a mind mage!" Lemia stepped closer to Cali, not that she had any hope of intimidating the undead warrior who was two inches and at least fifty pounds heavier than her, all of it muscle. "I may not have that skill, but I know that if you're not reading minds, you're reading magic flow in the body. Does that work on things that aren't at least close to human? Besides, even if she's sincere, how long does that last when she meets Scratch?"

"We can deal with that later," Calenda said. "But I think it's clear we're not going to see eye to eye on this. We should see what Rin thinks."

"Did... did you just hand a tie-breaking vote to a twelve year old?"

Cali gave perhaps the smuggest smile that any of them had ever witnessed in their lives.