Chương 37: Book 2 Chapter 18: History Lessons

Jim was once again sitting inside professor Quatzel's shack as the lich paced back and forth in front of the blackboard with his bare bones clacking on the wooden floor.

"We were interrupted last time, but I think I have time today," the skeleton muttered quietly.

"The eyes on me have significantly lessened this semester, so we have at least two hours."

"I actually have a question about banned magic," Jim said.

"Who am I to stop an inquiring mind?" the lich replied.

"I talked to an Ezengerdian marble recently," Jim started, the lich merely nodding and uttering a single word.

"Fascinating."

"It told me about the golden flame. How it was a banned magic created to combat the last calamity, meant to extinguish all life in Mitelos and hit the Hrust mountain chain and destroy everything within it for the rest of eternity," Jim paused with furrowed brows.

"Is that... is that true?" The lich suddenly stilled, looking into a far-off distance above Jim's head.

"It is true, I know of it despite it having happened a hundred years or so before my time," the man eventually said.

"The first wielder of the golden flame, a noble from Riche, extremely talented at magic, was at first convinced that any amount of sacrifice was worth it to defeat the calamity forever. Then he was brought in front of the mass of people that were collected to spark the initial fire. It was mostly those who could be dragged away easily, after all, this was a secret operation." He paused.

"Legend says he looked into the eyes of the starving children, destitute women and crippled men the kingdom had brought before him and changed his mind. He took the flame and disappeared, leaving the kingdom to pay a heavy toll to defeat the calamity."

"How many died?" Jim asked.

"About half a million, this number also included soldiers, mages and nobles," the lich replied.

"As you can probably guess it was about the same amount of people who would have been sacrificed had the original plan not fallen through. One might wonder at this point which option was truly better. To sacrifice people at the altar of the future, or to let them die in a battle for their survival. At its core this is a question of human dignity."

"The calamity still exists, he shouldn't have ran," Jim said brusquely, not feeling all too charitable towards this first wielder of the Golden Flame.

"Who knows what would have happened," the lich said with a sigh.

"I wouldn't have been alive for one, or rather, unalive, I guess. The thing is that Rotto exists as a sovereign state because the real empires to the south don't want the risk of having their armies distracted by the calamity. They prefer we do it, and buy the metal we mine at a cheap price to secure good diplomatic relations."

"You're not offended I said they should have done it?" Jim asked curiously, knowing that some people of lower breeding occasionally took him as a bit abrasive in his brutal intellectual honesty.

"You aren't much more than a product of your surroundings," the lich said.

"Those from Riche have always disdained those from Mitelos. After all, they have to disdain us, or else they would be consumed by a guilt more terrible than any death. In the end we are both humans, but why is one part of the kingdom doomed to toil away in the deep mines and die from lung diseases from the smoke that clogs the air, while the other part frolics in fields of flowers and grows fat from trading the end product?"

"Mitelosians are too uneducated to manage themselves," Jim argued.

"They need a guiding hand, someone to show them how life should be lived."

"And yet there are, to my knowledge, still no public schools that teach even basic writing or mathematics anywhere in the region," the lich replied.

"How curious it is that when a group of people relies on the other group to be uneducated and thus requiring management, they never try to educate that group."

"If they were all frolicking in schools instead of working the economy would collapse."

"An economy that only benefits half the population has no fundamental right to exist," the professor replied.

"Is that why you led your revolution?" Jim asked with a sneer.

"A disagreement on economic principles?" The lich shrugged, before shaking his head.

"Not really, I only attained the knowledge to understand the political situation leading to those tensions that swept away my life like a mudslide does to a ramshackle village later in life. I led the revolution because the central government and Riche killed my daughters, that's all." Stolen story; please report. Jim stared at the creature.

"What?" he asked, not understanding. Had the entire revolution been caused by a misconception of some peasant?

"It was the smoke you see, I was but a simple hedge wizard at the time. After all, there was no calamity on the horizon so there was no need for the academy to teach even the basic cantrips they teach these days. I knew how to mend simple wounds and brew a good herbal tea. But everything changed when a new row of smelting works was installed close to the mining town I lived in.

The idea was to simply smelt the metal ores and extract the pure black iron so special to our part of the world on location so as to save on transportation costs," the lich started, eyesockets far away, reminiscing about the past.

"Thick black smoke belched and fell on our town, making it hard to breathe on days when the wind failed to blow. The worst were the cloudy days. The smog had nowhere to go. I now understand that it instead went into our lungs. My daughters were very young at the time, babies, really. They stayed inside, but alongside other children at the time, they were the first to succumb to a rattling cough that even magic could not heal. There is no real narrative arc.

They died within the week and my wife soon followed, from grief, mostly, although the pneumonia certainly didn't help."

"And then you started killing people," Jim said accusingly.

"Instead of informing the king, or the governor about the problem." The lich shook his head.

"People wrote letters, went personally, protested, went on strike. A quick food blockade resolved the issue and a new reality was created. The smelting works remained, the town moved a mile or so away and the miners simply commuted to work everyday. Unfortunately, my wife and my girls remained dead." He paused.

"It was still ten years before I was to kill my first person if I remember correctly." Jim crossed his arms to signal that he was so far unimpressed by the story, but the lich simply kept rambling on.

"I researched magic more fully then, going on a journey and collecting as many books as I could while learning to read. I had nothing more to lose so I treated my life as secondary, my advancement as a mage was the primary goal. At some point my skin fell off and I found a way to keep going. My flesh rotted next, in the swamps in the south when I sought the witches of the bog. I found a way to keep going. My eyes were plucked out by the crows of the atronachs, yet I found a way to keep going.

After a ten year journey I was a walking skeleton, but I had found a way to resurrect a corpse. The only problem was, I had learned about banned magic and knew I could only save one of my daughters before the gods took away this opportunity. I returned to the place I used to call home, hiding under a frayed brown robe and dug up their tiny bodies. That is when I made my most fatal mistake. I deliberated too long." Another long pause.

"The townsfolk had seen glimpses of a skeleton sneaking around. While I was still deliberating between which one of my daughters to save, the authorities found me and easily subdued me. I had only studied healing magic all those years, never touching combat applications. There was a mage in the enforcement squad, he understood my notes. He didn't hesitate to use the magic to resurrect a son of his who had died in a hunting accident and thus the magic was lost forever."

"They let you live though, didn't they?" Jim asked.

"That was their folly perhaps, they'd grown greedy when they saw I had the capacity to create banned magic. The mage pretended to kill me, but locked me up in the dungeons of his manor in Mitelos. He force fed me books on magic I had never had access to in hopes of me creating another powerful magic with which he could curry favour with one of the powerful factions in Sredina, I forget which. Naturally, I did create a magic, a magic that killed him and then his entire family."

"You're a monster," Jim said simply.

"Perhaps, but I used to have a certain amount of empathy. I wanted to save Mitelos from its oppression, throw off the shackles. Make a world in which cute little babies did not die of a rasping cough before they even reached the first year of their life. As you know, I failed, and here I am. Last I heard people are still dying in the mines and children are still coming down with mysterious lung diseases that seem to primarily affect Mitelosians."

"They hardly wash," Jim pointed out.

"The rivers close to the mountains are darker than my soul and soap is as rare as an empathic merchant," the lich waxed poetically.

"Greed will always divide people and the cycle of hatred shall continue."

"We will create a better future as quickly as time allows," Jim said decisively.

"The conditions of the lower class are always improving."

"Your empty promises are balm to my ears, alas I do not have any. Let us continue with the lesson," the lich said before walking to his desk and pulling out a large tome.

"I wrote this yesterday, it explains the theory behind extracting someone's memories, storing them and then letting them re-experience them," the lich explained.

"I've yet to create the spell itself, but it will be done soon." Jim warily looked at the large tome which looked to be at least a thousand pages long.

"What is your perspective on military strategy? I always get some first-hand information from a former leader, even if they were a failed rebel," he suddenly asked. The lich threw his skull back and laughed.

"You're a funny boy, Jimothy, a bit broken, but aren't we all. I'm sad to say you're not going to get any out of this one. I created an entire encryption model to change lived experiences into numbers for easier storage and a decryption model for reversing the trend. It wasn't very fun and I'd loath to not have anyone to suffer with," he said, then clapped open the book on the first page.

Jim stared at the dizzying array of numbers, some which he didn't even recognise and some which were, for some inexplicable reason, letters instead. He gulped slowly as the lich started explaining, uncaring about Jim's sudden migraine. Two hours later, Jim left the shack a changed man, a tortured man, a man with a migraine so severe he was almost willing to drive a nail into his head to see if it would relieve some of the pressure.

-/- Things settled into a routine after that, weeks upon weeks of classes interspersed with personal instruction from the lich. He was learning at a pace he'd never even thought possible before, getting closer and closer to the memory spell designed by Quatzel, which, upon mastery, would be the most complex spell he'd ever learned. Fundamentally however, Jim primarily just wanted to know when his days of leisure would finally return.

He was starting to feel like he actually had a job with how much he was working these days.