Anastacia was poking around in the blacksmith’s shop while waiting for the owner to put some finishing touches on another order he was working on. As much as she would have liked it, Anastacia wasn’t the only customer the dwarf had, nor did her projects have any kind of priority over other orders. There were a few other blacksmiths around the area, but the population being made of mostly adventurers who went through an alarming amount of equipment on their travels ensured that all of them were busy making sure Valor didn’t run out of pointy or slashy things. She didn’t feel like checking out the other ones anyway, since after making Coquelicot’s new arms, her usual one was now the leading expert on necromancer equipment – at least outside Mournvalley.

“By the way, I’m going to need a new spear.” The necromancer said while swinging around one that she had managed to pull free from the rack. Since her last visit, more of the weapons had been put in locked racks - not because the blacksmith had problems with thieves, but because someone kept swinging them around without proper training.

The dwarf looked up from his work. “What happened to the old one? It was well made and shouldn’t have even gotten dull in a week.”

“I strapped a snake on it with socks, lit it on fire and threw it through a fisher.” Anastacia recounted and accidentally hit the counter with the spear. “It did work out really well though. Maybe I should start carrying around more than one?”

“Riiiight… And the bow? Did you at least manage to get to practice before you threw it at something too?” The blacksmith asked while rubbing his brow.

“Actually, some meat attacked a town and trashed the building I had my stuff in; wasn’t able to find the bow afterwards. It’s out there somewhere, living its life as a free bow. Maybe it found a bow-wife and made a whole bunch of bowlings or something – is that the right name for baby bows?” Anastacia shrugged. “Anyway, bows are a treacherous sort. The first thing it did was lash out against me, so I don’t feel comfortable using them.”

The blacksmith sat down and took a deep breath. “You still have the daggers, right?”

“I do! The edges are chipped to shit though.” The necromancer admitted.

The dwarf lowered his head against the table. “Every time I sell something to you, it’s like sending one of my children to their death… I know you’re supposed to be a necromancer, but are you sure you’re not just the personification of headaches and property damage?” He sighed and returned to his work.

Anastacia considered adding those to her ever-growing list of titles. ‘Anastacia, Herald of Headaches and Progenitor of Property Damage’ had a nice ring to it.

She decided to give the poor craftsman some time to finish his work, so she sat into a corner and dug out her new book from her backpack. She had started to read the book whenever she was taking a break from the research and started to get invested in the story. After five chapters, she had almost forgotten that it was supposed to be a tome to learn necromancy from and not just Ivory’s diary.

The story started out more or less harmlessly: Ivory had been sent out to watch over a town by the high necromancer Alabaster and got a somewhat cold welcome from its people. He was a bit eccentric, but for a necromancer that was to be expected. Even with his slight quirks, Ivory was an exceptionally kind person and seemed to wholeheartedly want nothing more than to befriend the locals and protect them from whatever Alabaster was fighting against.

The first thing Anastacia realized was that under Alabaster’s rule, necromancers weren’t stuck in Mournvalley, but were spread all over the world. From a few side notes, she also figured out that there were still non-human necromancers around back then, even Ivory himself was only half-human. It seemed weird that the cult ruling over Mournvalley now days had the red inquisition stifle out any hints of necromancers of other races and lived in complete isolation, while still worshipping Alabaster. She wondered whether it was the ancient high necromancer that changed to worse as the time went on or if the cult was intentionally corrupt. Not that it mattered. Soon enough the days of the cult would be over and Coquelicot would establish her own brand of bullshit rule over necromancers. Anastacia couldn’t care less anyway, as long as she was allowed to not have anything to do with them.

Ivory kept coming up with ways to use necromancy to help the town, but none of them seemed to catch on with the people, partly because he had to gather materials from the town’s graveyard and partly because the ideas were just weird at times. By chapter seven, the differences between his and the townsfolk’s opinions on how to handle dead people had driven a deep wedge between them, and the necromancer had been pressured to live outside of the town and denied access to the same water source because a couple of people caught some kind of disease from somewhere. The rejection and subsequent loneliness dealt a hard blow to the already a bit unstable Ivory, but he seemed adamant to keep watch over the town and get back on their good side.

Alabaster must have considered Ivory to be a formidable necromancer though. Despite being peaceful to a fault and having constant nightmares over the lives he had to take to protect the town, Ivory was posted there alone and wasn’t able to take a single day off from his task. He never detailed what was attacking the town or why, but the fights seemed to happen at least on a weekly basis, often during nights and without the townsfolk even noticing it.

“Something wrong? You look a bit down.” The blacksmith asked and snapped Anastacia back to reality.

The necromancer wiped her eyes and closed the book. “Nah, I was just thinking about how this guy is nothing but nice and nothing ever goes his way.”

The dwarf helped Anastacia up and went to take out some drafts he had made earlier when he first heard about the prosthetic. “Well I have some time to talk to you about the project now, if that helps? I think I found a way to keep the whole thing together!” He declared proudly and placed a roll of fabric on the counter. “I bought this from a traveling elf, it’s basically fabric that’s made partly from metal – really high quality too. They use it to make armor since it can stop a slash from most swords. But that’s not the point, the point is that it gets around the durability problems of regular cloth and metal wire. I was thinking about putting a layer of this on the palm side to keep the whole hand in one piece.”

“That could work… Have you come up with anything for how to make it less boney?” Anastacia asked and fondled the fabric. It felt just like regular cloth but was somehow very slightly shiny.

“I have! I can just carve the pieces from wood and embed the bones in it, basically just replacing the meat with wood. I might have to take a look at your simulacrum friend’s hands to make sure the fingers can bend properly and everything, so can you please send him over at some point?” The blacksmith explained. He had clearly spent a lot of time and effort coming up with the plans. “I know what you are thinking though: ‘Isn’t wood a bit soft for this?’ Well yes, it is – but that’s why I got this!” He continued and slammed a plank of pure black ebony on the counter.

“Uh… Yeah, that’s totally not going to backfire at all… But it seems like a good idea, as long as it can keep the bones in place when they’re not locked.” She agreed. On the drafts, there was a bracelet-looking ring around the wrist of the prosthetic that seemed to be connected to the capitate bone. “Is this the locking mechanism?”

“That would be it, yes. Just like you explained. It rotates this little bit here that does something magical and then the bones stop moving for some reason.” The blacksmith shrugged.

“It’s not magic!” The necromancer protested and went over the plans for one last time. “This might actually work, but it also seems like it could be expensive… How much do I owe you for the materials and work so far? I need to know if I need to get more money for it.”

“Nothing, think of it as a welcome gift to the lass… and as a preemptive apology for any idiotic stunt my brother will pull on her. Besides, someone left a whole lot of dragon bones on my doorstep and I made a bit of a fortune selling them. Dragons are getting rare these days, especially dead ones.” The blacksmith laughed and started working on the next order.

Anastacia felt like she shouldn’t bother him anymore and silently slipped outside. She skipped through the square and picked up a few snacks from the stands on the way. She didn’t know exactly what they were, but she figured that a stick with some kind of dough wrapped around it was a relatively safe bet and bought eight of them. The stand was just about to close, and they could barely be called freshly baked anymore. Nonetheless, they tasted decent enough and she could always get something to dip them in at the inn.

Dammar and Maximillian were supposed to return pretty late in the evening, so she still had a few hours to kill. She could hear from the outside that Rosie’s inn was full of people and didn’t feel like going in. Maybe the book had bummed her out a bit and hanging out with a bunch of merry drunkards just didn’t appeal to her at the moment. Taking a stroll through the almost empty streets felt like a decent alternative.

While aimlessly wandering around, she came by a couple of guard patrols that stopped her just to make sure King wasn’t going around the town without her since she was alone. Other than that, no one seemed to pay attention to the necromancer and to someone who had grown up under constant surveillance, being just another passerby to people was amazing. Feeding pigeons with weird dough sticks instead of sitting at a table and watch people get sentenced to death for absolutely nothing. Shoving the said sticks into the keyhole of some asshole elf’s shop door instead of spending hours by the well of corpses and watch it get filled. Finding a cat around a corner and getting clawed for trying the pet it instead of listening to some ancient fucks argue about what to do with you. There really was no contest between the two.