For the next few weeks, Kimia felt time beginning to slip away from underneath her feet as she found herself become fully immersed under the tutorship of Mort. She did mean time and not free time, as that would imply it was work and that she did not enjoy spending time with him or learning about the strange, whimsical magic he practised.

  The coursework involved in learning Necromancy was staggering. In fact, it was so incredibly intensive that Kimia wondered to if it was designed to intrude into her personal life as much as possible. She had to take electives in advanced anthropology and archaeology, the history of Necromancy and it’s foundations, it's troubled past as a fringe, dark art to it’s recent gradual acceptance as a serious school of magic within the last 100 years or so.

  There was also the readings she had to do - so much reading, and the essays that were to come with it. Books on anatomy, books on funeral customs from the past, present and future, archaic works on seemingly unrelated subjects that she read through just to discover a small morsel of Necromancy history to add as the final part ot her weekly essay - it never truly seemed to end.

  Mort, who had walked through the same ring of fire when he first started learning Necromancy, would slyly describe her herculean efforts as cataloguing a cadaver one body part at a time. Perhaps that was so in Mort’s undergraduate days, but Kimia felt it made more sense to describe her workload as one skin molecule at a time.

  Overworked and a head stuffed with Necromancy terms in several different Mylean languages, her temper would eventually come come between them. When it had happened last week it concerned a questionable essay he’d assigned to her on the subject of bats. She liked bats, and had already learnt of the structure in her earlier anatomy classes but the essay he’d requested of her was ridiculous.

  “Master, why I need to know what it is like to be a bat?” She sighed from the sole student desk in the room. Once it had become apparent no one else was willing to sign up for Necromancy lessons, Mort had done away with the other tables, and brought in more treasures and knickknacks he’d gathered on his journeys to add a personal touch to it. The Necromancy 101’s classroom was quickly morphing into a strange cross between a morbid museum and a ferryman’s workshop.

  “It’ll make things easier for you.” He answered near the blackboard. He was lost too, absentminded as he studied some early attempts at Zantzar pattern magic that he’d noted down with chalk. He was always at chalk like this. Sometimes Kimia would arrive much early to her morning classes, and find him staring into the corner like a dullard, the walls of which had been marked with intricate patterns once he’d run out of space on the main blackboards nearby. She had not yet developed such an enthusiasm for pattern magic, and preferably hoped she never would.

  “How is thinking of myself as a bat going to make things easy for me?”

  “Because when you picture yourself as a bat, you’ll take more care when embalming them.”

  “But, that’s only going to make things easy for the bats, not me.”

  “I know, that’s the point.” He mumbled out, his body starting to shift aimlessly, a sure sign in Mort’s body language that he’d made a breakthrough.

  “But the bat will be dead.” Kimia snapped, tired of cutting down Mort’s nonsensical points. “How is a bat going to know if I embalm him well or not?”

  “It’s not whether or not he knows, it’s so you take good care of him regardless.” Mort explained, the snappy exchange breaking his concentration away from the spirals. “Who knows, maybe you might come back as a bat, and I think you would enjoy a proper funeral

  She did not want to repeat her point, this time that as a bat she would also likely be dead, and not able to tell the difference between shoddy mummification and mummification that was a few steps away from shoddy. Nor, as a wild furry creature who lived in caves, was she likely to get a royal sendoff like that, unless she happened to be the personal bat of the archaic kings who lived in Venada some several hundred years ago. Nonreligious as she was, she doubted that whatever deity spun the the thread of lives was going to send back her in time as a bat so she could enjoy some delightful funerary practices after her death.

  The exchange left Kimia exasperated, and she slunk further back into her chair. Writing down a few illustrations of herself and Mort as bats to keep herself sane, Kimia realised, with her own luck, that she would probably come back as a Wyvern mother, a role she was already preparing for when she fed Wesley what leftover barley stew she had in the morning.

  One night, when her eyelids had heavily set felt she was on death’s door as she pried through one chapter or another on the subtle nuances that archaic Necromancers had to juggle through when working in early Zantzar, Kimia decided she had enough.

  The clock would soon strike midnight, always a bad sign when someones pries her head into the dark arts, and Kimia groggily realised she might soon be dragged by hellspawn if she kept up with this timid pace of hers. She could let the darkness of sleep take her, but she still had a few fleeting moments where she could devote to her leisure.

  The choices were either to read through the YBM University newsletter, or compose a letter back home, something she had not been spared the time to do ever since the world of Necromancy had gobbled up her up. She peered down at the headlines on the heavy papyrus - Queen Cressia of the Zantzar Kingdom renews ties with the Elven Conclave. Noteworthy, but nothing that was going to impact Kimia or Yan Bon Mor for the time being.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  She pushed the papyrus aside on her desk, and started to write. Kimia was someone who always struggled with coming up with the right words as she wrote, be it essays or creative writing, but something about writing letters back home made those troubles fade out in the distance. She could even smell the distinct aroma of beetroot sandwiches lofting in, something her mothers would force feed her when she couldn’t take

  Dear mothers, she began, never able to address one before the other as she loved both as dearly, Ms Hastings, my potions professor died several weeks ago, and I am now enrolled in a Necromancy degree, where I am the only student.

  Kimia felt she should be honest from the beginning with her mothers, as lying, as much it might settle their nerves around her and her magical pursuits, would never lead to anywhere good.

  Willow, the elder mother, had been a farmhand all her life before taking over her own parents farm by the time she was Kimia’s age. She was a Yanian, which meant she could trace her ancestry back to the Yanian tribe that first inhabited the alps on Yan Bon Mor.

  Claudia, the younger mother, was not of farmhand stock, nor a Yanian. She was a Bonbon, another of the three tribes that had lived in Yan Bon Mor in the archaic times, and the most prosperous, a trait which had stretched into the present day.

  Kimia’s knowledge of history had been shaky, but the three tribes had lived together in a constant cycle of conflict, compassion and commiserations for as long as they’d been around. Most natives of Yan Bon Mor could trace their lineages back to the first two tribes, and still a sense of tribal identity lingered between them.

  The Mordians, the least numerous of the three, only existed in some of the more remote and rural parts of Yan Bon Mor, where they had not truly integrated with the other two camps. Kimia could count the amount of times she’d encountered a Mordian on one hand, despite living in Yan Bon Mor her whole life.

  The cycle between the three tribes continued, until a great expulsion of witchcraft was to happen at the end of the Archaic times. Wise King Vitali, the ruler of Archaic Zantzar and then de facto leader of Mylea, had grown tired of witches plotting against him as he threw his support behind the new Dominion Sect religion that was beginning to emerge. An exodus emerged as witches were driven out in their droves, and soon they by and large arrived in Yan Bon Mor, the one place where Vitali didn’t have his gaze set upon, as he was terribly afraid of dragons.

  Magic was, of course, prevalent in Yan Bon Mor before witches came in their droves. In fact, the Soothsayer, a much older women imbued with magic, was often of the highest positions a person could aspire to hold in those times. But such rapid growth made tensions rise as both groups settled into a suspicious coexistence with the other.

  That changed when Drekovic, the greatest of the Yan Bon Mor dragons and who the three tribes worshipped like a god, grew ill. Whatever home remedies and dire medicines the tribes came up with, it wasn’t enough to cure Drekovic of whatever had malaise he’d come down with.

  Soon, after listening to the agonising cries of their Dragon God, the three leaders pleaded for help from the Witches of Yan Bon Mor, who were now already in the middle of conjuring up plans for a university, which would also double as a refuge for any witch fleeing the rest of the Mylean continent. The witches, sensing a chance to foster goodwill, agreed, and soon set upon Drekovic while being carried on several thousand different broomsticks.

  It was not malaise or even a bug that was torturing Drekovic, but rather a large splinter that been dug deep beneath one of his sombre talons. After sating him with strong potent magic, the witches and the tribes people were able to carefully remove it from him, and now that same large splinter sits in the centre of the garden of YBM University.

  Kimia’s first memories involved Willow and Claudia recounting this story to her over candlelight, along with many more folklore tales which were now a bit of a fussy mess in her own mind. It was also when her mothers first discovered that Kimia was magically imbued too.

  Once, when they’d gotten a little too wine within them, and started telling Kimia all about how they’d first met and how Willow, with dirt in her nails, had seduced Claudia when she was just passing by and needed a place to stay at her farm, the candle flickered out. Before either mother could reach to alight it again, Kimia had huffed out a breath of air, and suddenly a florescent glow filled their kitchen once again. Not only was it enough to bring a candle back to life, but also enough to send the mothers scurrying across to the other side of the house in fear. They did not expect their surrogate daughter, for whom neither could trace even the tiniest bit of magic within their bloodlines, to have turned out to be a witch in training.

  The idyllic farm life Kimia had until then came to a crashing end, and suddenly her mothers were besotted with worries for her future. She did not like thinking too hard on this part of her life, of the shame and terrible strain she caused on them as they realised she was to have her own tutor to guide her through the pains that were to come with developing magic in adolescence and the high price that was to come for paying for all of that.

  Somehow they survived Kimia’s difficult teenage magical years, though Kimia felt they’d probably eating one too many beetroot sandwiches growing up, stunting her growth until she came here to university and feasted on leftover lamb the chefs had given her out of pity, which she had not devoured in almost a decade at that point.

  Kimia felt her mind beginning to wander as she closed out the final few words of her letter. She did not like the way she had ended it, explaining that Necromancy was a serious art and that Mort, her new professor, wasn’t going to cause her any harm as they worked together, but Kimia felt she might lose the battle of a parents worry if she did not reassure them at every opportunity.

  Just as she reached to stamp it down, Wesley started nibbling at the ends of her feet, leaving her to suppress a yelp of pain. It always happened, like clockwork, just as her own clock was about to strike midnight. It was time for bed, but not until she first put every together, with the same care her mothers did went they sent leftover beetroots for sandwiches in the lean, winter months that were now behind her.