Authors Note:

Apologies for the long wait. It's been a busy couple of weeks.

Also, please forgive my seriously lousy drawing skills.

***

I woke up to the sounds of voices talking in a language I didn't understand. I sat up on my bedroll, and saw Hilde, Melissa and Jared sitting in front of the nearly dead fire and eating a breakfast of hard bread and jerked beef. In the light of the morning, Hilde looked subtly different from the previous evening. Her previously pale skin took on a slight coppery tinge, and her teeth were slightly pointed. Melissa was visibly calmer and less tired than last night, and even Jared was less stressed and sounded like a halfway human being.

Hilde turned to me when she saw me stir, and handed me a piece of the bread and some jerky, saying something that might have been "good morning".

"I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're saying" I told her after accepting the food, and she turned and spoke quickly to Melissa, after which Melissa cast a quick spell on me.

"I'm sorry," she said. "The translation spell I cast on you yesterday burned out during the night."

"I wondered how it was that I understood the three of you yesterday." I answered her, and turned to Hilde. "Good morning, and thanks for the food."

"Good morning to you too, and thanks again for the skeleton bones."

"I'm glad I could help." I said between bites of breakfast. "Melissa told me a little about the Curse last night, and it sounds like something I wouldn't wish on anyone."

"Aye. The Curse of Blood is the worse to succumb to, they say, since it is the one where the cursed keeps most of his self." Having finished their breakfast, Hilde started to pack her equipment back into her backpack. "It is, however, good fortune for you that I was Cursed, and managed to Subvert it. You'll want to head to Aegis to look for someone who can send you back home, and I'll be headed there myself now."

"You'll be what?" yelled Jared from the other side of the campfire, which he was busy putting out. "We need to head back to Port Aurore to report on the vampire's death and get our reward."

"I'm a Dragon now, Jared," She answered. "You know that anyone who enters the First Circle has to register with the garrison at Aegis."

"We nearly died on this mission, Hilde. Death and the Moon, you nearly became a vampire. We earned that gold."

"We can go back to Aurore and report after I've registered."

"By the time we get back from Aegis, we'll miss the deadline and lose the gold."

"I'm as fond of gold as any other dwarf, Jared, but I have an obligation to my King, and therefore to the Alliance." Hilde said, adamantly. "If it's that important to you…"

"You are both forgetting something." Interrupted Melissa. "A vampire and a skeleton in the same region means there's a good chance that there's a full Necromancer here, and you," she turned to Hilde, "can't ignore your duty to deal with him, while you, Jared, have to know that the reward you'll get for a Necromancer's head in Aegis is a lot more than the bounty for a vampire."

"Scales of the First, you're right. And we've passed a village an hour's walk from here. We can't leave them to the mercy of a Necromancer!"

"You want the three of us to hunt a full Necromancer?" Yelled Jared, "Death and the Moon! Are you both out of your minds?"

"Then who else, Jared?" Asked Hilde quietly, "there's no major city less than a week's journey from here, and nobody in Port Aurore who can deal with a Necro."

"To the Forsaken Lands with it!" Cried Jared and lifted his backpack to his shoulders, "if you're set on suicide, you can do it without me." And he turned and started walking towards the direction the three entered the clearing from the previous evening.

"Jared, wait!" Began Hilde, but Melissa shook her head at her.

"He's a bounty hunter, Hilde. He deals with outlaws and bandits. We could barely get him to aid us with the vampire. And with us tied up with a possible Necro and traveling to Aegis, he can get the full reward for our mission."

"You're probably right," sighed Hilde. "But it leaves us without a scout. I'm not sure how we'd find the Necromancer without his help."

"We still have most of the bones from the skeleton. I can try to cast a seeking spell on them."

And with that, she took one of the bones from the pile, and started casting a spell on them. It wasn't nearly as complicated as the spell Hilde used to Subvert the Curse, but still took a while to cast, and my vision did the now familiar shift into seeing magic, so that I could see her spell being woven, and lighting up thin, nearly invisible threads linking the bone to the rest of the pile, and another one leading off into the forest. Melissa finished casting the spell, and turned in a circle, the bone pointed before her. She completed the circle, and shook her head. "I can't feel anything. If there's a Necromancer in the vicinity, he's too far for me to locate."

"We'll have to go back to the village then," Hilde answered her. "Maybe someone there will know of a likely place for a Necromancer to hole up in."

"Excuse me," I hesitantly joined the conversation, "I think I can help you. When Melissa cast her spell, I could see a thread of magic leading from the bone."

"That's a really useful ability you have, Antoine." Said Melissa.

"But we can't possibly take you to face a Necromancer," Hilde shook her head. "You're unarmed, and untrained. We'll have to go back to the village. You can show us the general direction, and we'll ask the villagers if there's anything of note there."

"And you'll leave me with people I can't talk to, once Melissa's translation spell burns out again?" I asked her, "I'd rather take my chances with the two of you."

"He's got a point there, Hilde. And it'll be a lot easier to locate our target with him around."

"I don't like this," Hilde said, "but we can't stand here and argue all day. Antoine, you'll have to promise me to stay behind the two of us and out of harm's way, if I agree to take you with us."

"I promise."

"Let's go then." And she kicked sand over the campfire and led us into the forest in the direction I pointed towards.

It was slow going, following the faint trace of magic. It's far too easy to get turned around when traveling inside a forest, and at first, we had to stop every few minutes so that Melissa could cast her location spell and make my vision switch to magic so we could be certain we were still in the right direction. By the end of that day, however, I've learned that if I closed my eyes and concentrated just right, I could make my vision switch into seeing magic at will. Our progress sped up somewhat after that, but I couldn't maintain the magic vision for more than a few minutes at a time, so we were still rather slow. Towards evening, we located another clearing to make camp in, and I asked Hilde and Melissa to teach me about magic.

I learned really quickly that neither of my companions could see magic the way I did. In fact, they've never heard of anyone being able to do it, and my descriptions of the weaves and magic circuits I could see made no sense to either of them. It was fairly easy for me to see, however, that there was a certain connection between the chants and motions Melissa did and the way the magic wove itself when she was casting, and since Melissa knew what her chants meant, I could connect the symbols on the magic circuits to magical effects.

It turned out that while my ability to see magic made it a lot easier to understand what I was doing, my inherent magical power, or mana, was extremely low, and I could barely manage to cast even the weakest spells Melissa knew, not to mention Hilde's healing magics, which even most human mages would have had problems with. The most I could manage to do with actual spells was to maintain Melissa's translation spell. I couldn't cast it from scratch, but I could prevent it from burning out.

Over the next few days, however, we learned what I could do. I remembered, from my "fight" with the skeleton, that I could touch the lines of magic, and move them around. It took a lot of experimentation until I could consciously do it, but eventually I discovered that by concentrating in the same way I did to shift my vision, I could coat my hands with a thing film of magic, which let me touch and move the lines. With that, and the knowledge of what the circuits meant, I could try to replicate what I did to the skeleton, and disrupt magical spells while they were being cast, and even ongoing magical effects.

As an experiment, Melissa cast one of the basic attack spells taught to mages, the fireball. Conjure up a ball of flames, and throw it at the enemy. Fairly simple spell, composed of four symbols:

The symbol on the bottom is "Source" and is the beginning of every spell ever cast, as it is the point where the mage connects to the circuit and feeds it with magical power. "Source" leads to "Orb" which is one of a standard set of symbols used to shape a spell. In this case, into an orb, or a ball. The third symbol is, naturally, "Fire" and will fill the shape created by "Orb" with flames, and the last symbol is potentially the most complex, and controls the path the fireball takes. For our experiments, Melissa used the symbol for "Forward" which causes the fireball to move away from the mage until it hits something. Each of the symbols on the circuit can have several modifiers, or "accents", which control details of the spell. For example, "Orb" has to come with an accent that controls diameter, and "Fire" with an accent for the flames' strength.

To cast the spell, the mage first chants the circuit into existence, and then starts to feed it power. The power flows from "Source" and hits "Orb". As soon as "Orb" starts to receive power, the orb appears (at least to my vision). It appears as a small dot, and grows as it absorbs more power. When it reaches the designated size, the magic starts to spill over the "Orb" symbol and reaches "Fire", at which point the orb starts to fill with flames and becomes visible to normal vision. When the fire reaches the desired heat, the magic spills over "Fire" and reaches "Forward" and the fireball flies away. Building the circuit takes her about half a minute, and filling it takes another half. A stronger mage can push magic faster into the circuit, and a stronger fireball (bigger and/or hotter) will take longer.

What I've learned to do is disrupt specific symbols, which can really screw with the caster. Disrupting "Source" will spoil the spell. Can't push magic into it, spell won't have an effect. Disrupting "Forward" will cause the fireball to just sit in front of the caster until it burns out. Disrupting "Fire" will cause a ball of nothing to be thrown at the target. Disrupting "Orb" is the nastiest. Disrupt it at the beginning of the spell, and the caster summons a small flame in front of him. Disrupt it near the end, and the already formed fireball will blow up in the caster's face. Lucky for Melissa, I insisted the experiments will take place with a very weak fire, and she only got slightly singed, but in a real fight this would be a very potent skill. Especially after I learned how to use magic lines as sort of whips and do it at a distance.

By the end of a week of traveling, I felt at least slightly better about heading into combat with a hostile Necromancer. And just in time, since we found ourselves in front of a ruined fort, and my magic vision told me our target was inside.