He stared at the pot-bellied crocodile idol that guarded his potion chest, reviewed the hex signs he’d painted on the door when he was thirteen and the constant updates he’d had to paint overtop of them. “Will both our powers even be up to it?” He opened the case of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and fingered the fifty cubits of papyrus made up of protective spells against just some of the evil creatures out there, “And for sure I’ll need better protection for a Grand Master of this place than is needed for any mere Pharaoh-Priest of Thebes! Ha! Egyptian powers that Egyptians only work up from silly self-abuse!”

The factor stubbornly remained the same in all death rituals, – murder that no one cared about! ‘The life was in the blood’, but what did that harbinge about his own? By this point his all-consuming doubts had grown into a burning dread, so that he hardly slept. He hoped this was not the same dead-end path of madness at work in all the others! But where was any assurance that it wasn’t!

No student knew when they would be tapped for the initiations into dying, the choosing was up to their instructors and the Master when the student was deemed strong enough. After they’d entered in, only wholehearted commitment remained.

Once that was done Hamar knew his schooling would speed into something else, no more chance of turnaround or escape, Death Arts accelerated the rise. It would only be left for him to go on to be formally presented to the Master in the fabled ceremony where he’d be apprenticed for a lifetime and where the flow in their spirits would forever be the same!

He blanked out his thinkings as much as he could. Still, the unsettled issues dragged on him without end, he re-experienced night attacks from the Academy’s demons who fed on his turmoil, and he was heavied in his classes. He was indeed beginning to darken into unearthly oddness. Some of his teachers noted it as but a higher stage in his weaning from the holds of earthly life. But for Hamar, acquiring hundreds of majicks for their own sake now meant nothing at all as he faced an imminent dark hole.

Time, Aktiarh noted, for the young man to party.

Episode Twelve: Amongst The gods

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