M.J. Markgraf
patreon
Norman the Necromancer Chapter 110
🕑 Added 2023-06-12 12:00:07 +0000 UTCIt was a very exciting day for Norman. Why you might ask? He was going to create his very first spell. Now you might be thinking, ‘Wait, doesn’t Norman have a bunch of spells?’ And you would be right. Except, none of those were created from scratch. All of them were put together or modified from existing spells he had come across before.
But now that Norman had significantly more knowledge of what the symbols did, at least a small selection of them, he decided he wanted to try making his very own spell. Something that would be wholly unique to him. He quickly ran through his mental inventory of symbols that he knew.
There were the mana control, linking, focus, barrier, energy retention, energy transfer, siphon, activation, soul trap, and vessel construct symbols.
It didn’t seem like a lot at first, but there were multiple symbols in some of the categories. And just those few symbols made up some of Norman’s most impressive spells.
One thing Norman hadn’t come across during his testing was a symbol that represented damage type. So he wasn’t sure exactly what determined that portion of the spell. It could be something as simple as the mana used to power the spell, but he doubted that. If that were the case, spellcasting, and design would be simple and easy for everyone. You could just grab any existing spell form and push your mana into it creating a new effect. But that would mean it would also change the spell for anyone who cast it if their mana was not the same as the person who created the spell originally.
He knew that wasn’t the case based on his study of jorik magic, his use of differing types of blood, and gron magitech. You needed a catalyzing agent for mana not associated with your type. Norman couldn’t just go and cast fire spells without having flame mana present or a spark that produced flame mana. While it was true anyone with mana could cast any spell, there were limitations. One of those limitations was the years of practice required to draw mana not affiliated with your core mana. It’s why Norman had only learned one jorik spell, the box. It used abundant air mana and just condensed it into a semi-solid plane. And even that he wouldn’t have been able to do if he hadn’t had the staff to augment him.
But he was getting off track. No, Norman thought the type of damage was determined by either the order of symbols or how they were linked together. Maybe even a bit of both. But figuring out if that was the case was likely to be a whole lot of work. Norman smiled at that and jotted it down for when he finally finished going through all his symbols.
He turned toward his desk, but before putting any idea to paper, Norman thought about what he wished to accomplish with this first spell. He didn’t really have any pressing needs for a spell at the moment, so maybe just a simple proof of concept would be a good start.
With that in mind, Norman jotted down several possibilities. He quickly got lost in his work, only to be interrupted by an impatient Princess when she rubbed up against him.
He reached down to pet the hellhound, but she grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the door to his workshop.
“Ok, ok! Sheesh.” Seeing as she finally got her way, she let go of Norman’s hand.
He sighed and opened the door. As soon as it was open, the creature bounded into the throne room and tackled another hellhound. A third soon joined the melee.
The first time Norman had witnessed the creatures ‘playing’ he had been terrified. He thought they were trying to tear each other apart or kill one another. But that turned out not to be the case. Not that it mattered as Princess would win every time anyway. Not because she was bigger, but because she was smarter. Norman chalked her intelligence up to the numerous times he had used her as a test subject in his spells. It had changed her.
The play session soon ended and all three hellhounds were happily panting as they bled from several large gashes on their bodies. But like with the splitting skin along Princess’ back, the blood eventually hardened to form more scale-like plates along their bodies. In the week since Norman had created the three, they had almost been completely covered in these plates. Some even sported ridges from where the blood hardened over old plates.
It was a very strange, yet fascinating development. Too bad Norman couldn’t figure out why the blood of the hellhounds acted this way.
Taking a sample of blood from the creatures just left Norman with a vial of normal undead blood. Norman suspected he had inadvertently created a magical creature. Thankfully, they were extremely loyal… a bit too loyal.
Norman had wanted to give the other two, who he had named Dante and Lucifer, to Eugene for the guard to use. But the two refused to leave the castle unless Norman was with them. They even broke out of the cages that Eugene had placed them in and tore through a stone wall to return to the castle. It's why he didn’t lock Princess out of his workroom. Thankfully, Princess growled at them when they got too pushy and so long as Norman was nearby, the two were fine hanging out in the throne room, much to his assistants’ consternations.
It was likely some sort of bond based on who cast the spell. But Norman hadn’t delved too deeply into that yet. But he would soon. Eugene had asked about creating mounts for the guard. The only real subjects he had that might make decent mounts were the ostrich-sized dinos. But they were too small to carry a human. At least they were in their current configuration. If they grew as much as his hellhounds did after the spell, they would be a terrifying mount. Made even more terrifying if a Death Knight was riding on their back.
That could wait though. Norman fed the animals. He also gave them each a small dose of the potion to keep their undead bodies in pristine condition. Norman downed the rest of the bottle, healing the puncture wounds caused by Princess’ bite, and headed back to his workroom with Princess right on his tail.
She set herself down facing the door and rested her head, her beady black eyes never once turning away from the opening.
Norman shook his head and turned back toward his notes. He looked over the spells he had come up with for his initial tests. The first used the focus symbol, oriented so it produced an AOE effect. This he encapsulated inside a barrier with a timer linked to it. Simple, easy, and his intuition said it would work.
The next spell used two linked mana control symbols, an energy transfer, and a siphon. Norman wanted to see if he could siphon mana using the spell. If it worked the way he suspected, he wasn’t exactly sure what the spell would do with the stored mana, but that’s what testing was designed to find out.
The third spell was a bit unique. Norman wanted to see what would happen if he turned the focus inward on a barrier spell.
Norman memorized each spell circle before inserting the notes into the magical incinerator that Grobert had made for him. Norman wasn’t sure how the device worked, only that it left nothing behind. Seeing as Grobert had made it, Norman figured it had something to do with his calling. The only thing he did know is that it didn’t teleport the pages. It destroyed them, completely. Norman made sure to keep his body parts well away from the device's opening.
With the notes destroyed, Norman opened the door and headed toward the testing chamber.
He quickly set up a test in the damaged corner of the room. He didn’t want to damage his permanent spell circle with these unknown spells. And a test wouldn’t be complete without some subjects to test it on. Norman had a couple of different potted plants as well as more caged critters like what Princess had come from.
Thankfully Princess seemed to not care about the tiny creatures.
“Alright, Princess, go stand inside that circle,” Norman pointed toward a circle twenty feet away.
Princess trotted over and sat on her haunches inside the barrier circle while Norman activated the spell. Then he quickly hoofed it to the safety of his barrier circle and activated that.
He was a bit slow but he still got to witness the end of the new spell activating. An orb of pitch black seemed to rise from the spell circle. Once it got a few feet off the ground, it just seemed to bob there. It remained nearly motionless for about fifteen seconds before it popped like a soap bubble.
Have you ever seen what happens when you drop dry ice inside a pool? It looked something like that. The black smoke contained within the orb dropped to the ground and spread out in a wide circle, even covering the bottom of the barrier Norman and Princess hid within.
He was likely immune to the spell’s effects since he was the one that cast it. And Princess was probably immune as well due to her undead status but he didn’t want to take that chance. As the black smoke finally faded away, Norman got to see the effects of the spell.
The plants and animals left behind were all desiccated and mummified. It was almost like a less concentrated version of his Orb of Decay. Still quite deadly though.
He waited for the barrier to finally flicker and die before he removed all the dead test subjects and replaced them with new ones. He would revive the animals later like he always did. It’s how he justified these live tests.
The next test probably didn’t need any live subjects, but he put them around it just to be thorough. Then he repeated the steps and joined Princess back behind the barrier.
Norman wasn’t sure what he expected to happen, but the sucking sound that seemed to permeate the room wasn’t it. He got a bit worried when his barrier started to flicker, so he poured more mana into it to keep it going.
A ball of condensed… wind mana? Seemed to form in the center of the spell circle. But it wasn’t pure wind Mana. Norman noticed a bit of red, likely from his blood magic, and brown mixed in with the violently swirling ball of wind. Norman suspected the brown was earth mana. He was glad there wasn’t a flame source nearby or that may have added fire mana to this construct.
All of a sudden, all sound simply stopped. It took Norman a moment to figure out what happened. The spell had sucked all of the air out of the room. It wasn’t supposed to do that, it was only supposed to absorb mana. Was air all mana? He didn’t get an answer to that question as the spell came to a sudden and violent end. There was a massive blast that threw everything across the room.
If it wasn’t for the barrier, Norman would have probably died from the concussive force of the blast alone. The damage the spell had done was astounding and it wasn’t even designed to do damage. All of that was accomplished by the release of stored energy. He made a mental note to improve upon this spell. He could easily see a spell that sucked away his enemy's mana as being a worthwhile addition to his arsenal. He would have to find a less explosive form of the spell though.
Nobody came to check on the noise. That wasn’t surprising. Norman had added a sound-deadening array, similar to how his workroom and Eugene’s office were set up. And even if it was detected outside, people knew well enough not to come in here while he was testing unless he asked them to. Besides, Norman had his phylactery as well as the array that prevented him from dying in town. Unless he accidentally trapped his soul, there wasn’t anything that could permanently kill him at the moment.
Norman would be sure to have someone on standby when he experimented with the soul trap symbol though. He could easily imagine that going very badly.
The last spell went a bit differently. Norman cast it, but nothing seemed to happen. After a bit, he let the barrier drop and walked around the area where the spell should be. At first, he couldn’t see anything, but then he caught a slight distortion in the air. Curious, he cast Plague Ray toward the area.
As soon as the spell got near the distortion, it curved, almost like it was hitting an intense gravity field. The energy of the spell swirled around the invisible orb for a bit before being sucked inside, lending the orb a slightly grey cast that made it much easier to see. Norman cast a few more ranged spells and they were all absorbed into his orb.
Not wanting to experience a repeat of the last spell, Norman stopped his testing and reactivated his barrier. After thirty seconds, the once invisible orb dissipated, allowing all the stored energy within to escape. But it didn’t escape explosively as with the other spell. The ray shot off in a random direction and the other spells he fired within did the same thing. An invisible orb that attracted and locked away spells cast toward it?
It wasn’t quite useful in its current configuration but if Norman could figure out how to get it to absorb or dissipate the spells it swallowed while ignoring his own, it would become a bane against any mage.
Norman wanted to continue his testing but he heard the bell ring. The bell had been installed to alert him that someone was outside the room and needed his attention.
He let out a frustrated sigh. “Well, Princess, looks like playtime is over. Time to go run a country.”
The hellhound covered her eyes with her paws and mewled plaintively, causing Norman to chuckle at her antics. She didn’t much like the boring part of his day either.
----------------------------------
MORE SPELLS!
