M.J. Markgraf
patreon
Norman the Necromancer Chapter 95
🕑 Added 2023-04-26 12:01:00 +0000 UTCAfter the discussion with Grobert and Eugene, Norman threw himself back into his work. Was he being a bit selfish? Yeah, probably. But Norman was picturing the worst-case scenario on the horizon. What he pictured wasn’t an immediate threat, even if it was a threat. But if it turned out to be a threat, he wanted to be ready.
A week went by with Norman making essentially zero progress on decoding the symbols for his phylactery. Broken clay balls littered the testing chamber as a monument to his failure. Norman hurled another one away, frustration growing at his continued failed attempts to deduce their output.
Realizing he was getting angry and that it wasn’t helping him, he paused. “Ok, take a step back, relax. Breathe. What am I doing wrong?”
Norman looked at the carved representation of a phylactery in front of him. It was made much like the real thing, only the pathways weren’t hidden behind a cover. It was also three times as large so he could examine it easier. But the changes didn’t affect its function. When he touched it his soul linked to the item like normal. That was the weird buzzing feeling that accompanied touching the phylacteries.
The magic circle twisted along the sphere much like the stripes on a baseball would. Only in a much more complex pattern. Next to the sphere was a charcoal rubbing of the lines. Norman didn’t feel like redrawing the blueprint from scratch. When he first came up with the idea for the phylactery, the drawing alone had taken him three days. Most of that was figuring out how the lines needed to warp so they remained in the correct orientation once applied to the orb.
Thankfully the stone masons were able to provide the clay balls with only the circles etched into their surface. This allowed Norman to draw whatever symbols he wanted to.
Only none of his attempts were working. Well, that wasn’t technically true. All of his attempts worked, just the same way the original did. Norman placed his hand back on the display sphere to reset his phylactery again.
He knew the problem, there was no real up or down, left or right. The sphere was a sphere. It was the same issue he had encountered with the barrier symbol. But the symbols should still show some change based on their orientation to the magic circle.
He didn’t want to admit it but it seemed all of the symbols were linked in some way. He didn’t think it was possible to have all of the symbols linked together. None of his other spells were like this. At most, they had a few linked symbols. But he could still change their function by maintaining the correct links. That wasn’t the case with the orb, changing one to be completely backward seemed to have no effect.
After a bit of thought, Norman decided to start over from scratch. Instead of building the entire orb, symbols and all, then changing only one. He decided to just select one symbol at random and exclusively populate the orb with that.
It took another three mind-numbing days and two trips to a grumbling stone mage before Norman finally got something. He found one of the life siphon symbols. The only reason Norman realized he had hit a breakthrough was that all of the caged animals he had in the test chamber dropped dead instantly. If the ball hadn’t been linked to him through mana, it would have certainly killed him as well.
Norman examined the ball and the symbols he had carved into it. Then he looked over the original to find where the symbol was in relation to the others. Norman came to a strange realization. What if this was the first symbol in a series? It was hard to tell because the symbols repeated themselves around the orb. But it was a place to start.
If a flat spell circle was like a message written in single characters, perhaps the symbols on the orb were more like a sentence. It wasn’t a very apt simile but it was close enough.
Setting the orb down, Norman drew out a large circle. It was roughly fifteen feet across. The distance the orbs should be drawing energy in from. He added marker lines every foot after that until he hit the far wall. Which was about forty feet from the center of the first circle. It also happened to be where he had a chair, tools, and a workbench setup.
Not wanting to contaminate the next test, Norman broke the orb he had been working on by tossing it across the room like so many others. In hindsight, not a good idea to break a spell circle that contained active energy.
The resulting blast threw Norman across the space and into the wall. He woke up to someone slapping him lightly across the face.
“Sir! Are you okay?”
“Wha-” He was having a hard time focusing with his head spinning and his vision being blurry. Norman tried to shake away his confusion, which only seemed to exacerbate the issue. He groaned and held his head in his hands as the world around him tried to spin him off. Eventually, the person who woke him shoved a potion into his mouth and forced him to drink. The spinning soon subsided and his vision started to return. As his eyes focused, Norman realized Nolix was the one slapping him, he also saw Lohr standing nearby with his spear at the ready.
Dammit, he had done it again, hadn’t he? In his urge to move forward, he had taken magic for granted.
“Thanks, Nolix. I’m fine now. Can you help me up?” Nolix reached down and helped Norman off the ground.
“What happened here?”
Norman dusted himself off. “One of my experiments exploded. It was my fault, I wasn’t being as careful as I should have been.” Then Norman spotted the broken phylactery, the one that he had been linked to.
Definitely not as safe as he should have been.
Lohr took that opportunity to speak up. “Sir, perhaps we should get you an assistant?”
Norman shook his head. “Perhaps later. But I can’t afford any added distractions at the moment.”
Lohr took one last look around the ruined room. “If you’re sure. Please be careful, Sir. We will return to our post unless you need anything else.”
“I am sure. And thank you again for checking on me.”
Both men nodded and returned to their post.
After his guards left, Norman spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess he made. It was his penance and a reminder to not get so caught up in his magic that he disregarded safety. He was working with much stronger spells now and a lapse in judgment next time may end up with him dead or worse. Speaking of safety. Norman headed to his bedroom and bound himself to his old phylactery.
It wasn’t all that safe to keep his phylactery in such an easily accessible place. But it was safer than being in the same room as him in case of another explosion. With the orb being pre-charged, if Norman died, he would be rebuilt in just over a minute. Considering the magical protections now in place on his room, it would take significantly longer than a minute to get at the orb.
Of course, that meant he would be trapped if someone meant him ill. But if someone was able to get through, the city, his guards, the wards, and him. There probably wasn’t much Norman could do to stop them from killing him at that point. Working on a permanent solution to that was next up on his list.
By the time Norman got back down to the testing chamber, he had a fresh box of orbs for experiments. He smiled at that and got to work.
He quickly found that he could indeed change the spell by turning that first symbol. After a few tests, Norman found the maximum range of the symbol was around twenty feet.
The next symbol turned out to be the one that controlled touch activation. Norman tried swapping the symbols around. Instead of having the siphon symbol being first, he added the touch activation one first. The way the spell worked changed, which gave more proof to the fact that the symbols were linked. After swapping the symbols, instead of the spell working all the time after being initially touched, it simply shut off as soon as he released it.
That wasn’t ideal for a phylactery, but Norman was sure he could figure out some use for that function. The symbol had four states, and those states could only be changed if that symbol was the first in the series. It also forced the second symbol to default to the fifteen-foot radius. Why could only the first symbols effect be changed? Norman wasn’t sure if this was some quirk of three-dimensional spell circles or him missing something. But from what he knew so far, it was probably him missing something.
As for the four states of the activation symbol. It was on, off, delay, and timer. There was probably a way to change it from using touch as the activation method as well, but Norman didn’t know what that was. He also couldn’t figure out how to change the delay or timer duration of the symbol. Or why the default state was always on if the symbol was second in the chain.
It was much more confusing than the simple flat-spell circles. But he knew it was going to be difficult when he started so he simply pushed on.
Soon he figured out the mana control symbols, then the barrier symbol. Which looked nothing like the simple one on the flat spell circles. After that came energy retention, energy transfer, soul trap, then finally the symbols for designating how to rebuild the body.
That was where he hit a brick wall and finally broke the spell. Setting that symbol as the first in the order caused the entire construct to crumble to dust. It was like a series of switches. You needed to activate them all in a certain order before you could throw that switch or the system would get confused.
Norman tried moving the symbol to each position but it only worked in its original spot in the circle.
So how did he know it was the one in charge of constructing the body? It was the only symbol left he hadn’t figured out. He had skipped ahead and decoded the remainder of the symbols after previously getting stuck on this one. That left it as the only possible culprit. But nothing he did to it would change its state. Not that he thought it would after what he had learned so far.
Despite this setback, Norman wasn’t deterred. He knew the symbol had multiple states. How did he know this? Well, the construct only disintegrated when the spell worked. And it only worked when Norman turned that symbol to one of six directions. So it had six states. He just needed to figure out how to get the damn spell to let him change it.
His magical intuition was also completely useless to him at the moment. It said the spell would work when the body symbol was placed first. Which it technically did. The damn feeling was sometimes so frustratingly vague as to be useless.
Because of this, he spent another two very frustrating weeks trying to figure it out.
Like with most great discoveries over the years, Norman’s came by way of accident. Only his was born through frustration instead of a fluke.
In a pique of anger, Norman stabbed his carving tool deep through the center of the symbol he was working on.
What did that do to the spell you might ask? Not a thing. Except for getting Norman to realize he had been completely overlooking an entire axis of orientation this entire time. What was it called? Oh right, X, Y, and Z. And Norman had been plodding along in two-dimensional orientation this entire time, completely forgetting the third.
To be fair, Norman thought the spherical shape added that third dimension. Apparently, he had been wrong.
His discovery wasn’t without issue, however. It wasn’t like Norman could carve the symbols vertically into the clay. Or could he?
Norman grabbed some sheets of paper and began sketching out a spell even more complex than the phylactery. The reason for this complexity was that the phylactery’s spell matrix needed to be contained within this new spell’s boundary.
After spending days finishing that, Norman set one of the unfinished phylacteries in front of himself. It had to be oriented just right to line up with the construct within his spell. Which turned out to be annoying and time-consuming. It would have been easier if he just had a blank orb, but he worked with what he had on hand.
When he thought he had it just right, he took a step back and began the arduous task of air-casting this new spell. He hadn’t ever tried to air-cast something so complex, and it showed.
He failed at the task over and over and over again. It was exceedingly more difficult to air-cast a three-dimensional circle than it was just a two-dimensional one.
It took Norman over a hundred tries before he finally succeeded in casting his new spell. Only to find his orb wasn't oriented exactly right. Instead of wasting another day trying to get it to work on these half-started orbs, Norman had the Stone mages craft him some blank ones. He should have done that from the start instead of wasting an entire day.
After another forty attempts at air casting – he was improving – he had the first successful casting of his new spell. Norman didn’t have a name for this spell. It was also weirdly non-necromantic. What Norman had done was created a spell that caused the matter that corresponded with the internal schematic to be torn away from the target.
It was essentially just a simple transfer spell in theory, but so much more complicated in practice.
It could be cast as a regular spell circle, but the effect would be two-dimensional. This is why Norman had to air-cast it in three dimensions.
He inspected the orb, making sure not to touch it. It looked… odd. Definitely not like his old phylacteries. He could see the voids where the tops sides or bottom of certain symbols poked through the hard clay. But his magical intuition told him the spell would work.
To prove that, he grabbed a cage and pulled out the small animal from within. It tried to bite him, of course, but Norman was used to handling wild animals by now. Instead of biting into his hand, the critter bit down on Norman’s armor. Norman ignored the creature and forced it to touch the orb.
There was no outward appearance that anything had happened so Norman broke the creature's neck. Then he fed the orb a few more caged animals until it flashed and disintegrated, leaving a stunned and confused rodent in its place a minute later.
Norman smiled and scooped up the creature, waving it about in celebration before stuffing it back into a cage. The modified spell worked. Now it was time to see what changes the last symbol produced.
---------------------------------------------------------
Big brain moves!
