Excerpt 3 from the Third Diary of Terrahex the Dwarf
Two weeks after I saw Talvi, I had a breakthrough decoding my first necromancer tome. Necromancers are a paranoid lot and they painstakingly encode their tomes, and to get a spell from a tome, you have to speak aloud a phrase in an ancient language. To get the phrase though, you have to pick it out from pages upon pages upon pages written in that ancient language. These passages can be anything from Brakespear [
]to what a man wishes to do with a girl from the local pub, and after months of poring over nonsensical limericks and fairy tales, I finally found the right answer to the problem. When I uttered that answer, not entirely believing it to be the true one, a mark appeared where I wanted it to on my arm.
Dumb founded, I stared at it for a minute then jumped for joy. I’ve spent hours just sitting in my room looking for the right words and now I finally get to enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Before this spell, called ‘Echo Map,’ I spent sixteen total hours pouring over a spell that gave me the ability to put out torches, and I’ve since learned that the level of difficulty to decipher the spell directly correlates (word of the day!) with how useful the spell actually is. I got so frustrated at times that I flung my notes across the room. It was nothing really compared to how difficult ‘Echo Map’ was. For ‘Echo Map’ I gave up a lot, going to work on other spells instead or maybe to tune my automatic crossbow so it would stop jamming so much.
The spell was always in the back of my mind though. I was determined to decipher it if I’d have to say each word in the book out of stubborn pride.
But after getting the rune on my arm comes the actual fun part: the part where I have to figure out how to use it. The spells in the tome have very little given information about them. In the universal language it’ll say the spell’s name and a short set if instructions. The first spell I learned was called ‘To Dust.’ What the tome said in explanation was: “To Dust: Sand foes with palm.”
I had to learn pretty much everything about the spell through experimentation. I eventually learned by practice that I could turn any living organism into sand by simply touching it with my palm and activating the rune. Whatever was the target would turn to dust and the rune inside the circle on my arm would turn grey while the circle slowly turned grey clockwise, indicating the amount of time left before the spell wore off. The rune turns black again in about a day and I can use it again. Hopefully the target wouldn’t mind being naked when the spell wore off.
For ‘Snuff,’ I learned that I had to use my perspective to close my fist around a small fire such as a torch and it would go out. The circle turns grey with the rest of the rune, but the spell only has a cool-down of about ten seconds.
The last one, ‘Circuit,’ gives me the ability to create small lightning between my fingers and thumb that can leave substantial burns on something. The rune doesn’t turn grey. Instead the circle around it runs out and refills quickly in about two or three minutes. I can deactivated the spell at any time and reactivate it as long as there’s still part of the circle left.
Sometimes I think back on how much work it was just to get those three spells. I get really discouraged, and I wonder to myself whether it’s worth it. Yet, I still do it as a little hobby when I’m not out doing recon or delivering messages or shooting my crossbow or snooping around. I simply cannot explain how much of a sense of belonging being twenty feet from a torch and being able to put it out by closing my fist brings me. I feel like I can make a difference.
Soon after getting the rune on my arm, I was on the move, eager to test what the book meant by “Echo Map: See lots of stuff.” I was hoping for a really good spell. After all, if I spent sixteen hours on a spell that put out torches what would I get for a spell I spent months working on?
I got more than I could’ve ever hoped to get.
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Topic: [34.11] Spearbreakers - It shudders and begins to move (Read 2281977 times)