Mort wished his body wasn’t torn to shreds already by the time he was 35. He made things difficult for him to get out of bed and arrive on campus, until he’d fastened the last of the buckles that held his frail body together to a more acceptable, human state.

  He came late, as he usually did too in the world of Necromancy, and he struggled to find his way along even after Ms Wynne had given him a tour of the campus several times already. A part of him considered asking the faculty he crossed the way, but he pulled away from it. He sensed subtle fear as he made his way to the old wyvern room, almost like they considered him to be a Banshee who moved through the university undeterred by others.

  Mort did not like it when others feared him. To see someone unnerved in his presence made him feel a bit under the weather himself. At times he would try and make himself appear as nonthreatening as possible, but there was only so much you could do when you were a heavily inked man with the lean, slender facial features of a devouring snake, dressed in dark robes and lifesaving buckles which left others with the impression that you were a dark figure in the Magi underworld. He’d made sure to keep his senses as softly attuned as they were when he was still a small child. So many Necromancers became lost in their work that they lost parts of themselves as they sorted through the messes others had made. Mort had promised himself he would be not reduced to that, keeping a childish whimsical sense of his past with him at all times.

  The old wyvern room was far away from the rest of the academic rooms, deep below the ground and not far away from where the old Dwarven expeditions archives were kept. Mort has asked for something more spacious so he could move bits and bodies around with more ease, and Ms Wynne had obliged, not wanting to hear anymore details about bits or bodies or whatever manner of gruesome details that might stretch their way into her office.

  Perhaps Mort’s friends were right - Necromancy had a stigma to it which would never go away no matter how hard he tried.

  “Good Afternoon.”

  The breadth of living conversation came to a crashing halt when Mort’s shadow appeared through the classroom doors. He knew that YBM University was largely female dominated, but he did not expect it to be so lopsided that he was the only man within the room, surrounded by 15 or so young women curious about their new professor and the strange, dark magic he practised. The plump sized blondes at the front eyed him with a slight caution - still an improvement over the terror he’d inflicted on his wide eyed fellow professors when their noses weren’t deep in the covers of a book. He took a deep breath, uncertain of where to start or where to begin. Lecturing was not something that came easy to him, but Ms Wynne had reminded him, after much procrastinating on her part, that it was mandatory for all faculty to lead a few classes here or there. In fact Mort had never strayed into a classroom like this before, nor gotten credentials in a higher education setting. He was as clueless about this class as they were about him.

  “Welcome to an introduction to Necromancy,” he said, repeating the words he chalked down on the blackboard, “I am Mort Cavendish, practitioner of Necromancy, and your professor for this course.” Solemn words, but it was all that Mort could come up with in the middle of this silence. He preferred silence, which was the usual response he got when he worked with the undead, but it stung a little that the girls might still consider a dark creature they were wary to interact with. "Now, what is Necromancy?" He asked, "Could anyone begin to share what they know about it with the rest of the class?" Mort smiled hoping it would out their shells, but his lips were far too thin for it to be anything but a wide eyes grin. He had noticed a young girl in the back row deep in the middle of writing since he begun his lecture. She was Pendaline, her swarthy skin a dead giveaway, and her was name was probably Kimia, which was the only Pendaline-esque name from the list of names Wynne had left on her desk. A part of him felt compelled to bring her out of daze, but decided he would let it go for the time being. There was still silence, so Mort continued on with chalking down what he wanted to say.

  "Necromancy is," He took him time as he wrote, "The study of the tiny sliver of life which differs the dead from the undead.” His students would find this contradictory, but Mort knew it was a beginners mistake. Necromancy was a field where life was the oasis from which studies sprang, everything else - dead bodies, funeral rites, reassembling a victim was - were things it simply brushed against as a Necromancer worked with it.

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  “Turn to page 2564.” He commanded. He wanted to get into the thick of it already, and not fall behind wasting valuable time studying more basic rudimentary spells that were of little use for a Necromancer in today’s harsher world. The textbook they had had been one that was first compiled several decades ago, and a Necromancer’s rogue gallery had already come to learn how to counter and prevent being entangled in those spells and curses. He wanted them to learn advanced material immediately, which meant learning all sorts of intricate designs off by heart. It was the only way a Necromancer could call upon magic after all. He reached for the chalk and began to draw a a pattern of spirals and snakes colliding and coalescing against one another. He drew by hand, and not the invisible strings magic brought, which he felt was the best way to learn something in his experience. Too much dependency on magic could leave someone unable to depend even on themselves when it mattered. Just like that young Pendaline woman in the background, who still hadn’t noticed they were starting to scribble.

  “Ms Kalpur?” His voice was barely above a whisper, but she straightened up almost immediately when he came calling.

  “Yes?” She said spooked. He had taken a guess, and he turned out to be correct.

  "I'm coming up to something really important here," he continued, "Would you care to keep up and follow?"

  She reddened, and Mort knew he had her on her toes for the rest of the class, possibly even the rest of the semester. That subtle power between professor and student lingered as he watched her hastily write down the design in her notebook uneasily but content to catch up. It was power he could not always will to his heart’s content, and felt a stab of pity as some of the girls remarked disparagingly about her as they left the class, knowing they were unable to keep up as the lacked the artistic spirit needed for pattern magic. Mort’s class was whittled down to just 8 potential Necromancers.

  "Could anyone explain to me what the concept of Rigor Mortis means?" Mort asked candidly. A few of the survivors were now starting to get a bit squeamish. The overstuffed blondes in the front were starting to turn a little bit green. Kimia’s hand dashed upwards from the corner of Mort’s scarred eyelid.

  “Yes, Ms Kalpur?”

  “When a body begins to stiffen and…”

  “And?”

  She smiled, struggling to find the proper words. “And? That’s all there is to it, professor Cavendish.”

  “If you were a secular thinker, that’s where it would end,” Mort countered, “but it’s also when the souls departs this muddy earth of ours.” He was now suddenly getting the hang of the teaching thing, but only it seemed, when he had someone to bounce words back with.

  “Let’s have an experiment,” Mort spoke softly, “has anyone here even seen a dead body before?” Out came a few low pitched acknowledgements of finding dead pets and birds on the ground, but never one was flesh and blood just like them. Witches, it seemed, lacked a great exploration of death, even when they moved through the mists of magic.

  He reached for the brown sack he’d carried with him, and pulled out the carcass of a dark wyvern like another magician would pull a rabbit from a black hat. Mort heard stomachs begin to churn, and suddenly there was a rush of students reaching for the door and enlisting in majors that were less hands on and didn’t focus on guts and entails and that entailed. There was only one student left in his classroom, which offered Mort some comfort. He would not have to worry about making some embarrassing gaff in front of a group of young women now. “Ms Kalpur?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you like to come to the front of the class?” Mort quizzed, “I feel like it’ll be easier for you to understand that way.” Momentarily, she grimaced, but moved to the front to be with him. He already felt this was not her first time seeing a dead body - man or beast. Perhaps she had a much harder life than her plump sized peers, timidity around him, but also with an unfulfilled confidence which made Mort feel her as though she could be crafted into an ideal Necromancer. “Are you ready?” He asked. He’d laid his tools needed for Necromancy, a large collection of scalpels and stabbing knives blessed to put down any unruly spirit who’d been infected with a demon. He held out to her a pair of tweezers needed to give the wyvern a glow up. “I am,” She smiled, “Those patterns you drew, they’re very strange.” “Strange, in what way?”

  Just strange,” Kimia replied, “it’s pattern magic, but there are no words to accompany them in the textbook.”

  “When you need to use them, you won’t have time to speak words,” Mort explained, “Or being able to speak at all.