[sup][color=a9a9a9]The sky is devoid of clouds on the night Ulysses performs his first evocation. Behind the overflow of Old Heart Falls, a line of young students dressed in black robes exit the dark oak doors of the Arcane Academy, led single-file down a cobblestone pathway and escorted from behind by two similarly-dressed, faceless men. Emerging from beneath the spill of the waterfall, the students are painted in the glow of the full moon, a necessary celestial element on this, the night of their graduation. Starting tomorrow, they will branch out from the general magics into specialized schools, building upon their knowledge to become full-fledged experts in their field, but before they can do that, they must first pass the initiation.

Anxiety is heavy in the mind of Ulysses as he follows the others down the path, squeezing against the uneven walls of the cliffside to keep from plunging into the sea below. The path curves around the wall, then descends with a steep decline until it spreads into a wider walkway, pushing away from the cliffs and into a small forest somewhere to the west of the Academy. The students disappear into the trees one by one, no longer bathed in the ivory light of the moon unobscured. They travel for a little while longer, turning and twisting through the forest at the behest of the faceless man in front of them, who navigates through the trees as if they were a purposely-constructed labyrinth. At points, Ulysses can swear he sees the same trees over and over, that is until he suddenly finds himself in a clearing with the others, staring at a set of ruins.

In the middle of those ruins stands Lady Minerva Balmain, headmistress of the Arcane Academy. The initiation is always overseen by the presiding leader of the school, and Lady Balmain takes great care to guide the students in initiation, more so than any other headmaster or mistress ever has. She is a rather tall woman, wearing a black lace dress with numerous veils that conceal her face. Around her neck is a thick silver chain from which hangs a dark ruby, and her otherworldly pale skin gleams in the moonlight, but the most interesting features about her are her multiple arms; four in total, each as deft and dextrous as the next. When she speaks, her otherwise dulcet voice is almost immediately rendered dissonant by a second, hollow voice of a higher pitch. The way she moves is odd in and of itself, as she glides across the ground like she sports a pair of wings. The students of the Academy took to calling her a ghost behind her back, though Ulysses hasn’t seen neither hair nor hide of her outside of this one moment.

As the students approach, a ring of light appears on the ground around Lady Balmain, her arms splayed out and away from her sides, beholding the night as if it were a gift from the divine. In her signature and unmistakable voice, she greets the students and welcomes them to the most hallowed grounds in all of the Arcane Academy: Pask’s Ring. She gestures to the ground, where the ring has evolved in detail to include a second concentric ring a few inches inward. In the space between the two circles, twelve unique seals appear in clockwise order, finishing with the final seal appearing in the direction of true north as Minerva glides outside of the ring. She motions to each seal and explains that Pask’s Ring is a sacred magical circle conjured by Lord Aldous Pask, the Founder and First Head of the Arcane Academy. Every leader of the school has, at some point, made the trek to these ruins to test their worth against the powers invoked by those that came before. Those who found themselves worthy would gain purchase in the Ring, granted the admission to forge their seal within it to sit beside those who had already proven their eminence. She laughs dryly, the students vaguely unnerved as she explains that they won’t be testing their skill in such a way tonight, but rather in completing a simple test of initiation. To become worthy enough to pursue the school of magic of their choosing, they must first be able to conjure a familiar, a lifelong mystical entity whose bond is forged in both sentiment and blood.

Lady Balmain directs the students to stand around the Ring, which has expanded of its own volition to cover most of the cracked stone floor. Cicadas and crickets chirp their way through the night as Ulysses joins his classmates at the Ring’s edge, separated from each other by a foot of space on either end. The headmistress then instructs the students to produce a possession of theirs they consider to carry the most sentimental value, another necessary element for the initiation. As each student pulls an object from their robes, Minerva glides behind them around the circle, explaining that the objects are to be offered to the Ring — along with a submission of blood — in order to evoke a familiar. If the ritual is successful, a student will be bonded with their familiar for life. It’s an unbreakable contract.

Her speech finishes as she stops behind a young girl named Kaya, who stands to the left of Ulysses. Towering over her like the shadow of death, Lady Balmain leans down and orders Kaya to lay her object — an engraved scroll case containing several heartfelt letters written to her by her family over the years she’s spent in the Academy — in the Ring, then hold out her hand, palm up. The girl nervously obliges, setting her scroll case inside the Ring, then holding out her palm. Minerva kneels at the girl’s side and produces a curved dagger from somewhere within her dress, laying its sharp edge upon the inside of Kaya’s hand. Shortly after she informs the young girl that what’s about to follow will sting, the headmistress swiftly slices Kaya’s palm open, then forces the student’s hand into a fist, dripping blood onto the cracks of the stone floor on the inside of the Ring. As soon as the blood hits the floor, it immediately shifts color to a grayish silver and expands instantaneously to cover the center of the Ring, rippling across its surface like a pool of water. The scroll case begins to float towards the center before disappearing beneath the silvery fluid. Several moments later, the pool flashes with a bright light, then starts glowing as something resembling a small animal starts to form from the liquid, which itself is drawn away from the edges to fill the invisible mold. As the familiar takes shape, the silver fluid fades, revealing first the fur and then the body of a pale rabbit that immediately bounds across the Ring, electricity sparking with each hop.

Minerva covers Kaya’s hand with her own for a few seconds, then removes it, Kaya’s palm now completely healed. The rabbit leaps from the ground and into Kaya’s arms, and the young girl catches the animal effortlessly, giggling as the familiar nuzzles against her face, its electric properties causing her red hair to begin partially floating.

One by one, Ulysses watches the headmistress hover between students, witnessing the same ritual play out over and over again. He sees each student lay their chosen object on the ground, give their blood to the Ring, and evoke their familiars — a nearly-invisible stag, a serpent capable of traveling great distances through the use of portals, two frogs of complimentary colors whose supernatural abilities would never be discovered. Then, it finally came to his turn. The colossus that was Lady Minerva Balmain, headmistress of the Arcane Academy, loomed behind him, pale hands clutching his shoulders. As she instructs Ulysses to produce the object he is to give to the Ring, the young man stares down at his empty hands.

Sentiment has never been a quality in Ulysses’ life. Orphaned at a young age after the slaughter of his home village by the soldiers of a king who wished to rule over all with absolute dominion, Ulysses found himself in the care of an old and brittle woman on the outskirts of the region that would eventually become the bustling hub of Highborn Elven society known as Gemshale. For less than a year, Ulysses would live with this woman at her lakeside hut, eventually coming to find out that she was once a witch that practiced occult magic, but had given up a life of potential malevolence in favor of a more peaceful, altruistic path. Eventually, the old woman would stumble upon Ulysses studying her tomes of dark magic, and an argument would ensue. Ulysses would be orphaned once more, pushed into the wilderness by the former witch, who would die under unknown circumstances a month later. Her books, conveniently, would go missing.

Wandering from village to village, Ulysses adopted a nomadic lifestyle, never staying in one place for too long. In his journeys, he would seek out adept mages and learn all he could about the arcane arts until one such user would reveal to him the existence of the Arcane Academy. Its location fresh in his mind, Ulysses would eventually find himself at Old Heart Falls, staring at the dark oak doors of the school. His acceptance was shaky at best — the board of teachers were convinced of his desire to learn all he could about magic, but his intentions seemed misaligned. However, the head of the board, Lady Minerva Balmain, sensed potential in the young man, and was persuaded to grant him apprenticeship in the Academy, intent to see such aptitude flourish.

Ulysses began his work in earnest, nose firmly stuck in his books as he studied everything he could about the power of sorcery, much to the displeasure of the other students. He was constantly referred to as the teacher’s pet, although he never seemed to put himself in the teachers’ line of sight. Sure, he volunteered every chance he could get, but it was only to further his own means of understanding. He didn’t gain admission to the school to make friends in any capacity, instructor or otherwise. All he appeared to care for was the acquisition of knowledge. After all, knowledge is power.

Lady Balmain stares down at Ulysses and croons to him, asking where his sentimental object is, to which he replies that he doesn’t have one. Sympathetic to his plight, she posits that not all sentimental objects are physical in nature, and that it might purely be something he simply remembers or knows. Ulysses hesitantly nods, unsure of what she means before the headmistress instructs him to enter the Ring himself. Ulysses freezes, remembering what happened to the sentimental objects others tossed inside the Ring. Minerva assures him that everything will be fine before her multiple arms gently nudge him forward into the Ring; into the judgmental gazes of his peers.

Ulysses spins in place, now in the center of the Ring, meeting the eyes of the other students before hearing a clattering of metal at his feet. Peering down upon the curved dagger that lay before him, the headmistress calls on him to pick it up and cut open his palm. Apprehensively, the young man bends down and picks up the dagger, placing its razor-sharp edge against the skin of his open hand and looking around at those who have already completed their initiation. From his newfound position, his eyes then fall upon the veils obscuring Lady Minerva’s face, except the light of the moon reveals a detail he isn’t sure the other students see: her smile. Her lips curve in a pointed grin, fangs bared in a wild display. The expression is off-putting, to say the least, but Ulysses swallows his unease, grips the dagger’s obsidian handle tightly, and rips the blade violently through the air, parting open the flesh of his palm. He winces and watches through watery eyes and gnashing teeth as the wound falls agape and then fills with blood, which overflows and pours through the gaps in his fingers, cascading toward the ground below. As with every other student, the blood turns a grayish silver the moment it hits the ground, pushing outward in all directions until it reaches the edge of the inner concentric circle of the Ring.

Ulysses now stands in the silver pool, feeling the vibrations of power beneath his feet. His nostrils fill with the scent of potpourri, the same scent that came from each pool created by the others, but as the seconds tick on and he waits for his familiar to reveal itself, the potpourri begins to turn sour, and then rancid. The other students start to notice and speak amongst themselves, remarking within earshot of Ulysses that the student obviously failed his initiation. Upon hearing those words, he begins to panic, his mind racing with a million thoughts per second. How could he have failed? He studied everything he could, performed as perfectly as he possibly could have, and yet now the powers of the Great Mages before him have deemed him unworthy of pursuing the art any further. Pupils wide and body frozen, Ulysses shakes in place, beads of cold sweat forming on his forehead. He can’t believe he’s done anything wrong.

And then, it happens.

The murmurs of the students grow into cries of concern as the silver pool beneath Ulysses’ feet turns into a murky brown fluid, then dark red, then pitch black. The smell of rotting meat fills the air, causing several students to double over, and the event forces Ulysses out of his paralyzing fear and into a whirlwind of confusion. He looks at the liquid beneath him and then to the wound on his palm, which has already healed. Contrary to the perfect heal the other students experienced, his palm was marked with a hideous, jagged, grotesque scar, the tissue making it tough to close his hand. As he stares at the scar, he notices in the blur past his hand that the pool of liquid on the ground has now filled with maggots that squirm in place, the sound of slimy, writhing flesh now filling his ears. The students all around him begin to yell at him, admonishing him for having failed such an easy task and subsequently producing the worst result in all of the initiation’s history, but the words fall on deaf ears.

His eyes are glued to the veils of Lady Minerva Balmain. She stopped moving the moment he cut his palm open, hands folded together in pensive vigil. Her grin, however, grew even wider, and he doesn’t know why, but before he can even start to ask himself that question, the situation currently unfolding gets even worse.

Dozens of decomposing, skeletal arms emerge from the pool, accompanying screams startling the students around Ulysses, whose attention has been encompassingly captured by the unwavering stare of Lady Balmain. Several of the arms clutch at the young man’s legs, while dozens more swing at the students outside the Ring. The fluid becomes so disturbed and uncontainable that it spills outside the edges of the inner circle, rapidly covering the ground, where even more arms erupt from its surface. One by one, the students are assailed and dragged into the stygian waters, fighting with all their might both physically and magically, aided by their familiars and the two faceless men, but to no avail. They are swallowed by the darkness, vanishing beneath the now-turbulent waves until none but Ulysses and Lady Balmain are left.

Minerva, grin still viciously displayed, glides across the ground, unfazed by the numerous decaying limbs clutching at her mysterious form. She kneels down in front of Ulysses and holds the sides of his face with her ivory hands, staring into his eyes. She speaks to him in her signature and unmistakable voice, but the young man can hardly make out her words. The hands that grab at his legs begin to climb up his body, bringing with them the corpses to which they are attached, who groan with ragged breaths and exposed vocal cords. As his heartbeat slows and the blood pulsing in his ears falls away, Ulysses hears the closing statement from the headmistress, who speaks into the air a name that would embed itself in the young man’s mind for the rest of time.

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Akhaav stands at the edge of a cliff, staring over the flaming ruins of Timberdale as he watches the warriors of the Daemon Empire fish out and slaughter the last of the survivors who refused to escape. His expression is one of discernment, what little remaining of his brows furrowing as the rusting cogs of his mind turn slowly, churning out an analysis of the day’s events. At the current rate, the conquest of the continent would be finished in just a few weeks’ time. He knows Gemshale will be a hard capture; the Highborn, despite being insufferable and dainty, train their soldiers well in the art of ranged and magical combat. The Daemons are largely close-range in their brutality; the Elves will have an upper hand. Even if the Marrowitches were to learn ranged spells, their druidic energies require an intense concentration, rooting them to the spot as their focus solidifies. They’d have to rely on the strength of the Brutes to carry them forward into the fray and keep them safe as they channeled their essence into bolts of harm.

The lich grumbles, freeing a trapped fly from the tangle of fibers in his throat and allowing it to escape into the air. If all else fails, he can simply raise the warriors from death and keep them moving, much to the dismay of the still-living, who fear death like no other. Naturally, they’ll accept it. There is a deeply-rooted belief in Daemon culture that the undead are changed people, and yet still soulbound. Perhaps, they feel, the dead arise through sheer anger, able to continue walking the earth on pure rage alone. Akhaav thinks them foolish and gullible, and while the thought of being able to weaponize their own beliefs against them brings him scarce amounts of amusement, he tucks the idea away in favor of continuing on course as planned. His head turns, and his eyes meet the palanquin behind him, his gaze piercing through the sheer red curtain to observe the shadow within. Hand to his chin, he mulls over the strict command of which he found himself obeying. Were it anyone else, he’d simply kill them and reanimate them for a humiliating parade through the streets, but this isn’t just the queen of the Daemon Empire. It’s his queen, and he will do anything for his queen.

His concentration is broken in the moment by the protestations of an old woman being dragged towards him by two Daemon Brutes. Once stopped, she’s held captive and made to kneel before the lich, being forced to look up to him by a blade to her throat. She stares him down through clenched teeth, and the Lord of Rot burrows through her soul with his beady, black, empty eyes. For a moment, he sees a piece of jewelry dangling from her neck and reaches down to rip it away. His bony fingers open up, revealing a small necklace upon which hangs a ring with the engraving of a lion. His mind wanders briefly, feeling a strange familiarity upon looking at the ring, but the thought disappears as his plans return to the forefront. Stepping to the side and looking over the legions of Daemon warriors down below, he gestures nonchalantly at the Brutes and the old woman proceeds to curse and shout in protest about how her grandson will kill him, shortly before her throat is carelessly slit open.

As the old woman drops to the ground, clutching the gaping wound and choking on her own blood, the shadow inside the palanquin giggles quietly to herself, a high-pitched voice dissonantly mixing with low, dulcet tones. Her pale fingers play with the thick silver chain around her neck, gently caressing the dark ruby resting just above her chest.[/color][/sup]