Book of The Dead

Richard ran a critical eye over his zombie. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for, but he knew his teacher had extremely high standards and was careful to iron out every flaw he could find in all that he did, so Richard aspired to do the same.

The problem was… he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for.

“It looks like a zombie,” Georg said flatly. “Why are you looking at it as if it were a cow you were thinking of taking to show?”

The clerk’s son frowned.

“What do you mean, ‘take a cow to show’? Show who?”

Georg rolled his eyes.

“Richard, you aren’t so city you’ve never heard of a harvest festival.”

“Of course I have.”

Briss also looked confused, so after looking back and forth between the two of them, Georg slumped his broad shoulders and shook his head.

“I can’t believe this. Farmers hold contests at harvest festivals to see who has the best crops and animals. Some take it very seriously and breed their cattle for generations to try to get the best ones to rear and take to show. Richard was looking over his zombie as if it were a prized heifer.”

The farmhand almost seemed embarrassed having to explain something so basic and rural, but the others merely nodded thoughtfully.

“I’ve been to a harvest festival before, but I only saw the veggies on display. I saw a pumpkin so big I could have used it as a table!”

Briss giggled.

“I’ll have to take your word for it, country boys. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Getting back to the matter at hand,” Richard said, turning back to his minion. “I was trying to see if there was anything wrong with this zombie. I’m not sure if there’s anything to see, though…”

“I fixed it up about as well as I know how,” Georg said, then looked down at the book of anatomy he’d been studying, a gift from their teacher. “I still don’t understand half of this. I had no idea a person had so many muscles.”

The others weren’t sympathetic. They’d been tasked with memorising the bones of the body as well as the muscles and ligaments. To create a proper skeleton, they would need to create their own musculature, after all.

After looking over the undead a few more times, Richard eventually turned away with a sigh. There didn’t seem to be much point staring at it any longer. Tyron could probably tell him a dozen flaws with a glance, but Richard just didn’t know what he was looking for.

“You need to be more positive, Richard!” Briss tried to encourage him. “You were able to cast the Raise Dead ritual! That’s a massive step forward from where you were before.”

“This is only the basic version,” Richard downplayed his achievement, refusing to allow himself to celebrate. “The full ritual is ten times as complicated. This is only the beginning.”

“Give up, Briss,” Georg said, head back down in his book. “He’s made up his mind to never feel good about anything he achieves ever. Leave him to it.”

Briss rolled her eyes.

“He’s the first of us to manage a successful cast; even Timothy was impressed at how quickly he managed to learn.”

“I think Mage Timothy was just looking down on us,” Georg said. “He didn’t appear to be all that pleased to be helping us.”

“He’s just busy,” Richard defended the gold slayer, though not really knowing why. “Doing a favour for Tyron is probably low on his list of priorities.”

After all, to the gold ranked slayers in charge of organising the rebellion here at Woodsedge, their teacher was not some major figure. In fact, the only reason he received the attention he did was due to his family name and not any merit he possessed himself.

“How are you finding the repair flesh spell, Georg?” Richard asked, turning his attention away from his unmoving zombie. “Have you managed to level it up yet?”

The large farmhand looked up from the medical text in front of him, a frustrated expression on his face.

“It’s slow. No, I haven’t levelled it. I need more…” Georg considered his words for a moment, then decided to lean into it, “... bodies to work with.”

Both Briss and Richard grimaced at his choice of words. His two fellow students had shown reluctance to engage with the more grisly realities of their Class, and he was growing tired of watching them dance around the subject.

“The spell is called Flesh Mending,” he told Richard, “it fixes the meat on a dead person. I know we have some carcasses to work with, but I haven’t gone around working on all of them behind your backs.”

Richard looked a little green.

“Is it really necessary…” he started, but Georg cut him off.

“Yes. It is.” He pointed a finger at the motionless zombie in the room with them. “Look at that. You remember that was a person at some point, right?”

“Of course I remember,” Richard said.

“I don’t think you keep it in your head enough,” Georg stated flatly. “I’m not sure if you’re going to handle what’s coming next.”

Briss cleared her throat.

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“You don’t have to be so hard on him, Georg. This isn’t easy to get used to. Just because we became Necromancers doesn’t mean we suddenly become comfortable working with dead people.”

“You aren’t going to ‘work with them’. You’re going to butcher them with your own two hands, like stripping meat from an animal. Do you have any idea how much blood is in a living creature? How much offal and sinew? I’ve been elbow deep in cow guts, and that’s bad enough, but doing it to a human? That’s a whole new level.”

Richard shifted on his feet, uncomfortable with the conversation, but Briss fell silent, her expression more sad than anything else.

“I know about all this. We all know about this. I felt we would be able to work on it gradually. Get used to it bit by bit. I hardly think Tyron would expect us to be… removing waste from a corpse immediately.”

“Are you sure?” Georg asked, his voice tinged with humour.

If anything, he felt it was more likely their teacher would demand exactly that, as opposed to handling them with kid gloves and taking them through the process in carefully managed stages. He could tell Richard had the same thought, as he imagined Tyron standing before them, holding out a knife and wondering why they were wasting time.

“You two both need to step up,” Georg told them. “I’m here working on what I need to improve my zombies. I’ve gotten hands on with two of the corpses already, repairing them as best I can, and I’m figuring out the Raise Dead ritual bit by bit.”

His progress was slower than the other two, but he felt it wouldn’t be long until he too could cast the simple version Tyron had written for them. Once he’d mastered that, he could start learning the expanded list of words and gestures needed for the real thing.

“You two are both faster at learning magick than I am, but you haven’t started preparing for your first skeleton.”

He pointed a finger toward the cool room where the dead bodies Tyron had left them were stored.

“When are you planning to butcher and start working on your skeleton muscles?”

Briss sighed and walked over to where Georg was sitting, placing a hand on his shoulder and giving it a squeeze.

“All right,” she said. “You’ve made your point. Come on, Richard.”

“What?” Richard said. “Shouldn’t we wait for Tyron to return, so he can teach us how to do this?”

“He already showed us the basics of getting a skeleton up and moving. I know you have the same reference sheets that I do. Grab a knife and let’s do this.”

She looked a little green, but clearly she was determined to go through with it. With hard eyes, she stared at Richard, overriding his spluttered complaints with her steely gaze.

“Georg is pushing us to move faster because he understands what’s going to happen to us if we don’t learn. We’ll die, Richard. If we can’t protect ourselves, we are going to fucking die. The magisters, the priests, the soldiers, maybe even slayers, they are going to come here, and they are going to fucking kill us. We can’t afford to wait for Tyron. Who knows how long it’s going to be until he gets back? We need to start figuring this out ourselves.”

Richard listened to her speak, more words than they usually got out of the mousy girl in a day, with more anger than they usually got in a week. When she was done, he hung his head for a brief moment, then nodded.

“Alright,” he said. “Alright. Let’s… let’s do this. Come on, Georg, you’re coming too.”

“Wait, what?” the former farmhand said, looking up in confusion. “You need me to hold your hand?”

“In a sense, yes,” Richard said firmly. “I’ve never butchered anything, and neither has Briss. Who’s going to teach us so we don’t cut our own fingers off?”

Although he didn’t like it, Richard had a point. After thinking about it for a second, Georg pushed himself up to his feet with a sigh.

“Fine. I’ll help you, but only for the first one. I’m behind the two of you on casting. I need to practise.”

With varying levels of reluctance, the three students approached the cool store, sharp knives in hand.

Over the next two hours, each of them had run out in order to empty their stomachs, though Georg had only had to do so once. By the end, Richard had been on his hands and knees, dry heaving into the grass. When they were done, the three students emerged from the storeroom, blood up to their elbows and spattered over their clothes. Each of the three was pale, though the former farmhand had fared much better than the others in this respect as well.

Richard was again, by far, the worst. White as fresh linen and trembling, he had struggled throughout the entire process, though he persisted to the end.

“I think…” he muttered, “I think… I’m going to wash up.”

“I’ll go after you,” Briss said softly as she stared into the distance.

Georg chuckled as he looked down at himself.

“That was worse than I thought it was going to be,” he admitted. “The smell…”

“No,” Richard said, holding up a hand, “stop talking.”

“I was just going to say the smell I could deal with.”

Richard turned resolutely away and began to walk toward the outside path.

“But the eyes,” Georg groaned. “I didn’t know they could pop like that.”

Richard immediately heaved, clutching at his stomach as his guts spasmed in pain.

“You… prick,” he managed to get out before staggering away, trying to control himself.

“That was evil,” she said.

Georg scratched the back of his head, then remembered the state of his hands and grimaced.

“You’re right, I’ll tell him I’m sorry when he gets back.”

Briss nodded before she looked down at herself. For a moment, he thought she might run off to be sick again, but she only sighed and looked up at the sky.

“That was awful,” she admitted. “I absolutely hated it. But I’m glad you made us do it. Thanks for pushing us, Georg.”

He shrugged a little awkwardly.

“It’s fine. You two are going to be much better than I am at this, you just need to… be more serious about it.”

Briss shook her head in silent disagreement.

“You have a much better temperament than us. You’ve taken the most difficult aspects of Necromancy in stride. I feel like your attitude toward life and death is much more closely aligned to where it should be for this kind of work. I envy that about you.”

“It’s nothin’ special,” he said. “When you grow up on a cattle farm, things are dying all the time. You get used to it.”

She looked straight at him then, and for a moment, he felt as if she were looking through him.

“Richard and I will get used to it,” she corrected him. “We’ve never been around death, not like this, but we will get accustomed to it. You, on the other hand, you never had to get used to it, this is what life has always been like for you. It might not seem like much of a difference, but I think it’s profound. The more we grow, the more I think you’ll see.”

He still didn’t think it was that big of a deal, but he didn’t have a way to articulate well what he thought on the matter, so he only shrugged again.

“Richard will be done soon. You go next and wash up.”

“Thanks.”

She left, and not long after, Richard returned, looking much better for having a chance to wash himself down.

“Get the taste of sick out of your mouth?” Georg asked him.

Richard grimaced.

“Barely.”

He was still shirtless and dripping from the well water he’d used to clean himself. He wandered over to his pack and pulled out something clean to wear and pulled it on to stop himself from shivering.

Georg stuck a thumb behind him.

“Richard… when are you going to let that poor zombie die?”

“Oh shit!”

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