The clothing options Velinaer had found amongst the late burgon's possessions had not been particularly exciting or useful. They had been of similar heights, at least, but most of the clothing had been robes of a flimsy or gauzy nature which looked ridiculous on him and would almost certainly fall apart if he had to go outdoors. He could enchant them to stay together, he supposed, but that seemed like a tremendously wasteful use of his energy; he'd rather just find something sturdy and concealing. He poked about and found a nice thick, plush scarf of a lovely black color he quite liked -- he supposed he should look for dark colors to accent his new look. He also found a pair of sturdy pants and boots which looked like they'd been used for hunting, but his skeletal feet were too small to fill them out -- he had to put on two pairs of thick socks before they would stop falling off. However, the final look was quite nice -- the thick pants draped over his bony legs pleasingly, and the boots looked quite satisfactorily human-y with the pants draped over the tops. He picked through the remaining robes, but none of them had hoods, and the burgon had not been a fan of hats. Giving up, he threw on a plush bathrobe and started hunting around for anything else of use. Ideally, he'd like to disguise his zombies and skeletons too if he was going to be traveling, but he didn't so much have a plan in mind as "a list of possibilities for which to prepare". He was about to start throwing bathrobes on his skeletons when he noticed the open window through which Galar had escaped. That's right, he thought, that cool ninja guy with the staff ran this way. Looking outwards, he noticed a cabin not far off -- maybe that guy had a house nearby?

In truth, Velinaer was driven more by curiosity than anything else; he certainly had no specific goal or reason for investigating such things. But nevertheless, when he let himself into the cabin that Galar and Linduin had shared, he was entranced. He marveled over the scuffed practice staves and well-scrubbed cooking supplies; he leafed through Linduin's books and wasted almost an hour looking at the pictures in his storybooks, which he was a little ashamed by (but not much, because some of the illustrations had been pretty cool). He dug through Galar's closet and found a trio of thick, rugged white shirts; discarding the bathrobe, he put them all on one after another, which bulked his chest up to almost people-esque proportions. He was further enthused to discover a long, tan-colored coat and matching broad-brimmed hat; putting them on and wrapping the plush scarf around his neck and face, he checked his appearance again.

Well. He looked a bit like a scarecrow, but also rather mysterious and shadowy. In fact, he looked a lot like the bad guy from Creepy Crawlies, which had been a terrible show but the costume design had been pretty interesting. He spent another half-hour poking around in the house's other rooms, and was quite taken with the painting of sweet ninja staff guy and the girl he was hugging -- his girlfriend, maybe? She was really pretty. He dug through a few boxes and lucked out, finding a pair of thick black gloves which had been padded for some reason (actually Galar's practice gloves for staff work, back before his calluses had been up to the task). He slipped them on and felt much more confident. Now he could probably pass for an ordinary, non-undead person; he still wouldn't be able to talk to anybody unless he found someone who spoke his language (or learned theirs, but that probably wasn't happening), but at least now he could hopefully avoid any more accidental mayhem and panic.

Okay. He'd spent more than enough time here; now he needed to figure out what to do next. He pondered trying to find a larger population center -- maybe he could follow a river downstream? -- but eventually discarded the idea; chances were pretty good that it would go sideways when someone accidentally knocked his hat off or something. He couldn't make contact with any communication nodes under his own power, but if he set up a signal booster or something, maybe he could stretch his transmission radius far enough to get an uplink to someone who could receive his desperate pleas for help.

He liked that idea. It had minimal risks -- no need to go find other humans who might attack him or get eaten by his minions -- and didn't require him to go anywhere; the manor he'd been camping out in could probably be converted with some work into a signal tower. Best of all, it let him solve the problem by fiddling with network stuff, which was pretty much his whole thing. He felt cheerful and optimistic, which only continued as his investigations uncovered a drafting table (and some paper and pencils!) that he could use to create and refine his design before actually expending mana on it. Now all he needed was the physical materials and a little help putting them together.

Although Velinaer had reconfigured, squelched, or otherwise controlled most of the weird lich powers that had caused him trouble up to this point, there was one that he had not taken steps to mitigate, because he was thoroughly unaware of it. The animating aura which maintained and expanded his pack of undead minions was invisible to him (because it was everywhere he looked and thus he thought it was just background energy) and he had not had the good fortune to discover anything about it in his investigations of his own magical structure. The explanatory pamphlet would have given him highly useful technical details and allowed him to turn it off and on with a command thought (as well as averting many of his other misfortunes), and there was actually a copy of it in the source code, but he had not discovered that yet either. And so when his thoughts drifted to ideas regarding the physical labor required to assemble the tower's solid-state components, the aura responded to his will and sent out snaking, invisible tendrils questing for suitable host forms. When Velinaer walked out the cabin's front door to find a long-haired, shockingly well-preserved zombie digging itself out from under a tree in the front yard, he recognized her instantly from the painting and felt a powerful wave of embarrassment. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now; hopefully he wouldn't run into that guy again anytime soon.

***

Linduin awoke early on the final day of his tests and preparations. He ate some eggs (which he had made for himself the previous evening), drank some milk (which he had kept chilled in Cheis's magic ice-box that kept things cold, somehow), and dressed in his finest jacket and pants (which Cheis had not so much "made herself" as "unpacked a skeleton from a box and handed it some cloth and thread"). He didn't exactly know what he'd be doing today, but Cheis had been extremely ominous and very pointed about it being some sort of "final test". He was pretty sure she wasn't about to kill him, but he supposed he couldn't rule it out. But Linduin was sixteen (almost seventeen, now), extremely high on his own putative epic destiny, and he looked pretty great in these clothes. If he failed the test and got killed or whatever, then that was that. He wasn't about to stop now.

He came upstairs and sat at the dinner table, where Cheis was waiting. She had arranged a bowl, a funnel, and a big jug of water on the table, and had gotten some wire from somewhere. Also in front of her was his chalk writing slate and some kind of wooden box, as well as two pieces of paper, face-down. She scowled at him, as usual.

"This test," began Cheis, "is the final test before I actually teach you usable magic. If you fail it, you will die, and I mean like actually die, for real." Linduin did not even blink. "Up until this point I've basically treated you like a scholar; I've taught you math, logic, science, and the like -- all good, solid, non-magical areas of expertise. If you walk away now, you could enroll in any school or college, master any trade you like, or do anything else you want with your life, so this is absolutely your last -- damn it, kid, pay attention!" She thwacked Linduin with the bowl; his attention had started to drift. "I'm trying to give you the big important speech here!"

Linduin gave a guilty, sheepish grin. "Sorry. It's just really exciting."

Cheis sighed. "As I was saying, this is your most final chance to back out, which you won't do because you're a complete idiot, but I am contractually obligated in my role as the Only Sane Person Here to offer it to you, so just decline so you can take this test and probably die." Linduin shook his head vigorously. "Great. Now for the part you're so eager to get killed for." She shoved the box forward, and flipped over the two pieces of paper. "Inside this box is an evil thing which will kill us both if it escapes, which it will do when the water fills this bowl." She tapped the two pieces of paper; one contained a simple circular rune with a triangle and some sub-runes, while the other contained a fantastically complex series of runes and overlapping geometrical shapes. "Copy one of these two runes onto your tablet, then touch your tablet to the box. If you use the simple rune, you'll seal the box, but you will die. If you use the complex rune, you'll live, but the thing inside the box will die." Cheis formed the wire into a tripod with a loop at the top, stuck the funnel on top of the jug, and upended the whole thing over the tripod; the water began to trickle out of the jug. "You probably have about three minutes. If you make a single mistake with either rune, we'll both die."

Linduin's throat closed. This was intense. "But you probably won't actually die. Right?"

Cheis shrugged. "Probably not, no. There's a decent chance I'll be able to kill it myself or at least survive. But if you fail to inscribe the complex rune, you'll definitely die, and if you don't at least seal it with the simple rune, I might; and you will certainly die, and very painfully, if the water fills the bowl before you finish one of the two runes." She sat back and laced her fingers before her. "You should probably stop wasting time."

Linduin looked back and forth between the two runes, sweating already. He could probably form the simple rune in less than ten seconds, but he wasn't particularly keen on killing himself. He wasted about six more seconds agonizing over whether or not this was another one of Cheis's no-win fuck-you puzzles, but something told him that it wasn't; he could definitely feel something hungry, evil, and dark inside the box, and Cheis had that same cold, mechanical manner about her she'd had during her fight with Tebes. With a shock, he realized that he was absolutely, positively going to die in the next few minutes if he didn't buckle down and stop screwing around.

Linduin started to trace the more complex rune. His hands were shaky, and he had to stop and erase the board and start over several times. At roughly the two-minute mark, he made a serious error inscribing the sixteenth sub-rune in the set; he frantically pondered just trying to fix that rune, but wasn't sure he could pull it off. He glanced up at Cheis for support, and what he saw there stopped him cold.

Cheis was intent; her fingers were white-knuckled and her lips were bloodless. In her eyes, he saw concern, fear, sadness, resignation, and a certain hard steel that he would later come to understand was Cheis's personal do-or-die resolve. A bolt of cold lightning ran up his spine, and all the comforting illusions of youth fell away; this was life or death.

Everything in his field of view seemed to sharpen, and adrenaline flooded through him. He looked down at the slate and understood; Cheis was testing not only his resolve, but his ethics. If he failed to inscribe the complex rune and was too cowardly to inscribe the simple rune, he couldn't be trusted with real power; and deep inside Linduin's heart, something rebelled against that idea. He wasn't a mouse to be killed if the experiment failed. He was awesome, and he was going to do this.

He made a quick calculation; he had just enough time to make a final attempt at the complex rune. If he failed, he'd inscribe the simple rune in the remaining few seconds; he'd die, but he'd die proving he wasn't a chicken. And, like all too many teenage boys before him, Linduin considered that both a cause worth dying for and a pretty epic way to go out. His chalk inscribed a perfect circle, quickly dashed through all of the inner geometry, and sketched out all the sub-runes with rapid, confident strokes. When he finished the last line and touched the writing slate to the box, he felt the flare of power and knew that he had been successful.

Cheis watched him impassively. The final few dribbles of water ran into the bowl, trickling noisily, then the room fell completely silent. Linduin put down his writing slate, folded his arms on the table in front of him, and concentrated very hard on not throwing up.

"You cut it a little close," Cheis finally muttered.

Linduin gulped air. "I didn't want to die. But I wasn't going to wimp out. I had enough time."

Cheis sighed. She seemed to be doing that a lot. "Okay. Well, you passed. I hope maybe now you'll fuck around a little bit less now that you know what's at stake."

Linduin, looking a little green, nodded meekly. "My desire to fuck around has indeed been greatly reduced, I assure you."

"All right. Blah blah, big fancy speech, whatever." Cheis poured the water out of the bowl, disposed of the box, and cleared the rest of the things away. "You're ready to cast some spells. The last theoretical thing you need to know is the basic fundamental principle of magic, which is--"

At that exact moment, a loud knock sounded at the cottage's front door. The visitor outside, who was already dreading this conversation, was understandably startled by Linduin's frustrated scream of "For fuck's sake!"