//------------------------------// // Chapter 15 - The Knowledge // Story: The Stereotypical Necromancer // by JinxTJL //------------------------------// Light Flow was beginning to understand. He had been reading for a long time now, though in a different way from earlier, when it had just felt like it had been a long time. He really had been reading for a very long period of time, but it was hard to know exactly how long. He slept, at some point. He wasn't sure how long he slept or even when he had fallen asleep, but he at least knew he eventually woke up. It was pretty much impossible to tell what time it was, here in the forest where the trees blotted out the sun. He ate some stale bread and drank some bottled water. He wasn't really hungry, and it all tasted like nothing on his tongue, but it was pretty much habit at this point. He continued reading. It was incredibly fascinating. He wished he could take back everything he had said and thought and screamed about the book. It was nothing short of brilliant. What he had seen before as a mess of incomprehensible garbage, he now saw as the nuanced teaching that it really was. The soft childish words were meant to bring the harsh screeching of the magical lingo down to an understandable level. They created a sort of tell-tale pattern that made it easy to analyze and absorb information quickly and efficiently. The many diagrams weren't meant to show what the words were explaining, they told a different story of their own. One would need to look at them completely separately from the words to understand what they were saying. And oh did they say so much. The sickening prose was.... Okay the writing flow was still pretty bad, but everything else was getting better; and he was learning so much. A pony's soul was sort of the coding structure for their whole being. It made up all of the small bits and pieces that comprised the thoughts and feelings and personality of a pony. This was why they all seemed so different from each other, all shining different lights with their different movements and mannerisms. They were directly tied to a pony's inner self. Apparently, the writer of this book had some sort of philosophy on what that meant. That a soul would always show a pony's true being, no matter how they acted. Like some sort of metaphorical mirror. Light didn't really know if he believed that. But other parts of the book were more based in facts, rather than the theoretical. Like the part where it went into more detail on how Necromancy was achieved. Apparently, on a pony's death, their soul was completely wiped; and sent to some place called the Underworld. The writer only knew of the Underworld through legends and myths, but that wasn't the important part anyway. The important part was knowing about what happened to a pony on the occasion of their death. A suitably prepared and skilled Necromancer could use a spell the book called 'Soul Snatching' to catch the soul before it disappeared. The book referred to Volume 3 for more information on this spell, much to his chagrin. But back to the point. If a Necromancer could catch this departed soul, they could use it for many different apparently helpful purposes. They could be used for resurrection, healing, hurting, over-writing, even eating. That last one put weird images in his head, and he tried not to think about it. But of course he thought about it anyway. WHAT DID THAT MEAN?! So Necromancers could eat souls, okay. Did it require a spell? Could he just do it? Did all Necromancers do it? Was it a common practice? How did they taste? Did they taste good? They had to taste good if all Necromancers did it, right? What was their texture? He bet they were smooth. Did the taste vary on soul? Were they hard to eat? Did you cut them into pieces, or swallow them whole? Were they even consumed through natural means? What benefits did they give? Endless questions flickered through his mind. He wanted to try it, so bad. But that could wait until later. He tried to focus on the more practical uses for souls, all the while thinking about the logistics of soul consumption in the back of his head. Souls were mainly used to resurrect corpses by filling the gap where their soul used to be. This process could apparently be very difficult depending on what kind of undead the Necromancer was intending to create. A blank soul could just be shoved into any old corpse, but that would create an inferior undead with little to no abilities. Really just a shell on strings, as it were. But a blank soul was nothing but a canvas to a Necromancer. Necromancers had the unique ability to peer into the innermost reaches of a soul's contents. Into the farthest fathoms of the unknowable depths of a pony's being. The very core of what made a pony what they were. And they could grasp the ethereal strands of the building blocks that made up their existence. Switching and changing variables. Altering and adding lines of magical and biological code to fabricate new thoughts and feelings. Introducing an entire new personality to an otherwise empty shell. That was true Necromancy. Altering souls at a molecular level to create a new form of life. He marveled at the differences between fiction and reality. His books always made Necromancy out to be as easy as just using magic on corpses, and 'flash', an undead! But there was so much more nuance than that! The dumbing down involved was similar to saying eating was as simple as putting stuff in your body. .... Okay, that was a horrible metaphor. Thinking about it, he never really had much luck with those. Any sort of apt comparison in his head didn't really make sense when spoken out loud. Like that time he had compared love to prison. Boy, that had made Applejack mad. Applejack... He licked his lips, and focused on the book again. This process of creating new life in a soul was apparently incredibly tedious and time-consuming, especially if one was trying to make a complete soul. This was usually unadvised, since complete construction like that was only necessary if one was looking to create a soul that functioned exactly as a real one would. Oh well. He couldn't say he didn't enjoy a challenge. He had pretty much drained everything immediately useful out of the first book a while ago, and he was well into the second book at this point. They were both on the main points of theory, and he guessed there wouldn't be anything on actual spellcrafting. But that was okay. He had been assured that those would come later. And what was more trustworthy than a mysterious letter from an unknown sender who pontificated on the ease of his potential assassination? Nothing was, that's what. Anyway, regular undead were apparently pretty worthless. They would follow simple commands, like 'go there' or 'do this', but that was pretty much the limit. Anything sufficiently advanced would have to be accounted for in the coding of the soul. Like the ability to use magic. Unicorn's magic was the most obvious, but pegasi and earth ponies had magic too. And if it wasn't specifically allowed for, they wouldn't be able to fly or enhance their strength or anything. That was pretty much all he had been able to figure out on the topic of soul manipulation. It was pretty complex, and he wasn't sure he had even completely understood some topics. He was glad he had the ability to re-read things. It would be pretty awful if he never got the chance to read these ever again. He smacked himself in the face. The pain brought him back to Equus from where he had apparently been vacationing in Stupidville, and he immediately began to regret what he had just thought. He was extremely familiar with tropes in literature, and saying something like that was bound to bring nothing but misery. He would have to make sure to defend his books with great aplomb, just in case reality decided to throw a 'buck-you' bomb at him. He shifted uncomfortably on his soft moss bed, and glanced over at his Timberwolf friend. He was sure that nothing would bother him while his wooden protector was here, but that didn't stop him from feeling uneasy. He bit his lip, before busying himself with a quick review of information from an earlier part of the book in a transparent attempt at taking his mind off of it. The storage of souls was easy, somewhat impossibly. Any regular jar could be enchanted to do the job just fine, though apparently there was some sort of Necromantic spell for storing mass amounts of souls easily and handily. Again, the book referred him to a different volume, though it didn't specify. Which was really weird. There was just a footnote that said 'See: other volume.' in tiny letters. What kind of a reference did that? It was obviously vague, but it was also just dumb. Really though! It was just about as helpful as writing 'look somewhere else, stupid', except that would have at least made him laugh a little. This was just unhelpful, and somehow more insultingly, it was boring. He was getting distracted again. The book was frighteningly unhelpful on how one actually went about enchanting a jar for storing a soul. Again, he would guess that the topic was covered in a future volume. He was getting really sick of the roadblocks, but he supposed everypony had to start somewhere. And if he had to start somewhere, basic theory and method was as good a place as any. He dimly realized that it was strange that he wasn't weirded out about anything he had read. Normally, the idea of literally grasping a pony's soul in his hooves and metaphorically shaking it like a cocktail would render him feeling both queasy and ashamed. But he really only felt a strange sort of fulfillment, shadowed by a dull throbbing sadness. One of those feelings was weighing on him heavily, and it wasn't the one he got from fulfilling his dreams. He had gone through nearly all of the information available to him now. He would give the books more attention later, he supposed. Some things were bound to become clearer if he just spent enough time deliberating on them. He closed Volume 2 with an air of finality, the 'thump' of the closing pages sounding like a terrible crash to his neglected ears. He levitated it away from his view and into the box behind him. He had nestled the box into a hollow in the great tree, which would help hide it from anypony who would manage the impossible task of finding this place. Just in case, he stuffed some nearby leaves into the cleft. He had really made himself paranoid. He sighed, and put his legs underneath him in preparation of the laborious task of standing up. His bones creaked noisily and he felt a deep pain in his body as his unused joints desperately tried to keep up with his sudden relocation. He hadn't really moved in who-knows how long, so the pain wasn't really surprising. It was almost refreshing, in a way. Sort of mind cleansing, really. Listening to his muscles snap and his bones creak as he stretched reminded him of his wooden friend, and he looked over at it. The unliving creature was staring at him with those solid green eyes, and he took a moment to stare back. He quickly busied himself with preparations to leave, however. He simply didn't have the time to have any sort of emotional moment with the creature he knew wouldn't reciprocate. There weren't really many preparations to make, though. He finished off the really stale bread, since he didn't want it sitting around molding. He left the water bottle in the box with his books, since it's not like it was going to go bad or anything. He hadn't really brought anything else. Just the box and some bread. 'Preparations' was pretty much his way of fooling himself into wasting time. He knew he couldn't sit around here in the isolated forest forever. He had to face what lay in wait eventually. He had to go home.