"Ashkar..." Ludwig muttered, the na didn’t sound familiar.
The word left his mouth and seed to sit in the room rather than pass through it. The training chamber was sealed, stone-lined, and cold enough that breath could have been visible if the air had any kindness left in it.
It didn’t. It was dry, stale, and edged with the faint tallic bite that always clung to places where necromancy had been practiced too often. Sowhere behind Ludwig, his lantern’s glow held steady, but the light felt unwilling, like it was being forced to exist.
But it held power in it.
That was the problem with nas. So were just sounds. So were labels that people used until they forgot what the label belonged to.
And then there were nas like this, nas that didn’t care whether you understood them. Nas that behaved like keys even when you didn’t know what lock they fit.
Ludwig’s tongue felt briefly numb after speaking it, and the skin along his forearms tightened as if sothing in the air had shifted its attention.
Just simply speaking it made Ludwig feel sothing deep and dark within him resonate.
It wasn’t a clear sensation like heat or pain. It was more like a pressure in the ribs, a low hum in the marrow, the kind that made his teeth feel too present in his mouth. His heartbeat didn’t race; it changed, settling into a heavier rhythm as if his body was preparing to endure sothing without asking his mind for permission. The lantern at his side gave a faint, almost irritated flicker, one blink of dimness and then back to normal, like it had heard the na and didn’t appreciate it.
A small portion of him, seed to... greed for this finger. Wanting it for himself.
The golden jar sat where he’d placed it, too bright for this room, its surface catching the lanternlight in dull, steady glints. Inside it, the finger lay like an accusation: crooked, mummified, and stubbornly intact.
Ludwig’s eyes tracked it without him deciding to. His hand drifted half an inch forward and stopped, fingers curling slightly as if ready to snatch and crush and claim.
It wasn’t a thought he could argue with, because it didn’t arrive as a thought. It arrived as a pull, quiet and constant, like gravity deciding it liked the shape of that thing.
Without even realizing it, his eyes were turning purple, he shook his head imdiately.
He caught himself by reflex, fast enough to keep the room from noticing, if rooms could notice, and lately Ludwig didn’t like assuming they couldn’t. The purple ca and went like a bad habit trying to reassert itself.
He bit down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste copper, a sharp little reminder that his body still responded to pain like a living thing, even if most of him didn’t deserve the comfort of being called alive. He forced his stance solid, feet planted, shoulders squared, like he could anchor himself with posture alone.
"What is this?" Ludwig asked.
His voice ca out even, but the question wasn’t polite curiosity. It was the kind of question asked with a hand already hovering near a weapon.
He didn’t touch the jar. He didn’t lean closer. He kept a distance the way a sane person kept distance from a snake that hadn’t decided whether it wanted to bite yet.
"It’s all I could uncover, a re index finger from sothing far too strong. I believe that it is the only necromancer to ever achieve the ninth tier in his craft."
The words were spoken with Kaiser’s calm certainty, and that calmness made them worse. Ninth tier wasn’t just a number.
It was the kind of thing people didn’t say aloud unless they wanted the world to rember them. Ludwig’s mind flashed briefly to the Academy, to the smug certainty of scholars who talked about power like it was a chart.
Then he looked back at the finger and felt the quiet pull again, like the number "nine" had a weight all its own.
"A lich king."
"Archlich," Kaiser said.
The correction landed cleanly, precise, almost irritated. Ludwig didn’t miss it. Titles mattered to n like Kaiser. Titles were the difference between legend and insult.
"Like Algad?" Ludwig said.
The na ca out with less weight than Ashkar, but it still stirred sothing, a mory of ink, banned pages, cramped margins, and late nights where he’d read by low light and pretended he wasn’t risking his neck for words.
"You know of Algad?" Kaiser asked.
The way Kaiser said it made the question sharper than it looked. Not disbelief yet, sothing closer to asuring Ludwig and finding the asurents inconvenient.
"I do, have plenty of his books." Ludwig said.
He didn’t embellish it. He didn’t need to. The books existed. He’d bled ti into them. That was enough.
"I doubt that," Kaiser replied; you could hear the certainty of his words; he wasn’t undermining Ludwig, but he truly believed that Ludwig didn’t have them.
It wasn’t contempt. It was worse: it was a statent that didn’t consider Ludwig’s opinion relevant. Ludwig felt his annoyance rise hot and fast, a flare that would have been satisfying if it wasn’t so easily manipulated. His fingers twitched again, not toward the jar this ti, but toward the air, toward proof.
Feeling wronged, Ludwig waved his hand, presenting a couple books that held the na Hcil Algad in them.
The air rippled with mana. The books manifested with weight and presence, leather covers worn at the corners, spines cracked from use, pages slightly warped from hands that had turned them too often. They hovered between them like silent witnesses. The na Hcil Algad sat on the covers in stark lettering, not decorative, not proud, simply there like a brand.
"Ah, those are not his books; those are translations, even I have searched for his original works all my life, and I’ve only seen one of them since."
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