Norman the Necromancer

For the most part, Norman avoided Anna after their little chat. What did he have to say to her? Honestly, he hadn’t thought about her hardly at all in the year before the Brotherhood attacked, and now she was here. He didn’t need the distraction or the headache at a time like now when he had more important things to focus on. And she was a distraction since he was alive again.

Norman had been forced to once again restore himself to life. He had a lot of work ahead of him and didn’t need the added complication of figuring out how to get his blood magic to work the same way with undead blood. And while Anna was under an oath that prevented her from using her powers, she was still super hot thanks to her little transformation. And now that she wasn’t a teenager, it made it hard for Norman to concentrate when she was around. It also made it super awkward since he still pictured her as the geeky little girl he first met.

To avoid that issue, Norman simply locked himself in his workshop. Could he be out in the city helping the people rebuild, sure? But even if Anna wasn’t here, Norman would not be doing that. After some thought, Norman decided to play to his strengths. He realized he couldn’t be everywhere at once and his ability to revive the dead was more important than his ability to stack bricks or hammer nails.

He had already revived as many citizens as he could for the day. The ones capable of being revived that is. This left him with a bit of mana to work with on his own experiments.

Still, he felt bad about not being able to do more. There were still quite a few people who hadn’t been revived since the initial attack on the city eight years ago. There just hadn’t been enough time or resources to make it happen before the attack on the Brotherhood. But there was plenty of time now. Another two or three weeks and everyone that could be revived would be. Norman hoped to have his spell modified by then so he could finish resurrecting the ones whose bodies were too far gone to resurrect normally.

That hope was quickly dwindling as each day passed.

Getting started on the spell was proving harder than he had initially thought. While Norman could remember all of the spells he had cast with relative ease, he wasn’t having that same luck remembering the broken bits and bobs he used to make his spells, the leftover scraps if you will. And why would he, those were cast-off bits he never got around to studying.

This fact would have annoyed Norman when he first got started on his magical journey, but now not so much. Norman realized quite some time ago that he had been relying too heavily on those broken pieces. He should have been spending more time building from scratch. But deadlines forced him to use the most expedient methods available to him.

Using those chunks of spells was like building a chair from the broken parts of a table. Sure it would work, but it would look like a Frankenstein monstrosity. It was much better to start from scratch and hand-cut or carve the pieces exactly how you wanted. In the end, you would be left with a much nicer chair and one that exactly fits your needs. Or in this case a much more efficient spell. At least that was what he hoped.

Norman’s theory was that magic carried intent, at least somewhat. He came up with this theory way back when he created his second potion. And while he hadn’t forgotten about this idea, it seemed less important than simply getting a spell to work. He also wasn’t sure how much intent applied to the magic circle symbols. Or maybe intent was only the initial building block to new magic, and once it was set, you were forced to constrain to the intent of whoever created it in the first place.

While it was an interesting question to ponder, it wasn’t immediately relevant to what he was working on. He needed a base understanding of what he was working with to push forward. When he had more time, he could ponder the mysteries of magic.

After he first arrived in the deadlands, there hadn’t been any great urge or need to push his magic ahead. He had improved a few things, sure. But most of that time he had wasted trying to figure out his control issue. Then the Brotherhood attacked, and the need was so great to create new spells that he didn’t have time to contemplate the laws behind them. He simply needed shit to work as quickly as possible back then.

Now, Norman had some time, and he had a need that was driving him but wasn’t immediately pressing. With other necromancers out there, there was only so long before they caught wind of his little empire and wanted it for themselves. Why build your own undead empire when you can take it from someone else? It's what Norman would have done if he was an evil bastard or just his old lazy self.

He cracked his knuckles and began writing down every symbol he knew. It took him two days to get them all down on paper. It was far more than he realized. When he counted them up, he found six hundred and eighty-five different symbols. It seemed like an absurd number. And those were just the ones that he recalled from his spells.

He was surprised he could remember that many in detail. It didn’t seem that there were that many when he drew out his spells. It was probably due to how Norman memorized his spells. He focused more on the muscle movements of drawing them out rather than focusing on each individual symbol. Norman first started doing that figuring it was a lot like riding a bike. You may be rough at it after not doing it for a long time but it would come back quickly with a little practice.

Still, the feat of recalling all those movements was mind-boggling. Norman figured his improved mental faculties had something to do with his calling or just being rid of the drug-induced haze he had been under for so many years. Because he knew for sure there was no way he would have been able to recall this information prior to reaching Grothlosburg.

With those thoughts out of the way, Norman began the exhaustive experimentation on each individual symbol. Much like the regular symbols used to create his Bone Armor and spell anchors, the ones used in his magic circles could be oriented in multiple ways to produce differing effects. He had figured that out when he screwed up a few spells due to exhaustion. But he hadn’t dove very deeply at the time due to the pending attacks from the Brotherhood.

Norman picked one of his simpler spells as his initial test, which happened to be Plague Ray. His simplest spell circle was actually Conversion Bolt, but he needed something more consistent.

He set about drawing three hundred and fifty-nine spell circles on paper, changing only the orientation of one symbol that he was pretty sure acted as the focus of the spell. Norman didn’t need to do this, but he wanted to mark which ones worked and which ones didn’t.

Surprisingly enough, his magical intuition didn’t chime in to help him. He wasn’t sure why exactly. Maybe because Norman already knew the spell worked? Or maybe because he had dozens of instances of the same spell and his intuition was confused. It was hard to say. But that didn’t stop him from proceeding.

Once he had all the circles drawn up, he began casting them using the abundance of small animal bones his people had collected for him.

The testing chamber came in handy for this. It wasn’t just good at being a fallback point for his citizens when they fled Anna’s goons.

After five tests and five successes, it became clear to Norman why his insight wasn’t chiming in. All of the spells were viable. At least for this specific spell.

He wasn’t certain until he cast the fifth spell, but after that one, he noticed the tiny change to the spell. Instead of a tight beam of black energy, the black energy was starting to fan out. If Norman had to guess, it would be in relation to the orientation of the symbol.

The tests continued. He got to the ten-degree rotation, then the twenty, then the thirty. When Norman hit the forty-degree rotation, he finally saw another change in the way the spell functioned. The energy was no longer reaching the far wall in his testing chamber. But it was coving a wide swath of area inside. Norman had to stop there for the day as he was exhausted from casting and his mana was nearly depleted.

A year ago – in time spent alive – there would have been no way Norman could have cast this many spells without draining himself dry. It was clear his mana pool was growing. Which was a good thing. He would have to see how his blood compared to the jorik blood – mana density-wise – now. He wondered if his mana pool worked like a muscle, the more you used it the faster it grew. It was a question for another day.

Norman packed up the remaining spells, making sure to keep them in order before heading up and storing them in his workshop. Gone was the old wooden door that once enclosed the room.

The people left behind in the city had replaced it with a thick stone door. The stone door had a built-in magical lock now, as well as a few other enchantments, thanks to Grobert. The materials from the temple had come in clutch for building the security feature, linked specifically to Norman’s soul. It wasn’t completely secure, but it would keep most people out unless they were extremely determined to get inside.

After securing the room, Norman wandered into the kitchen looking for something to eat. A plate filled with some local fruits, dried bread, and smoked meat greeted him. Norman sighed. He wished the chef was around to cook his delicious meals for them but the man was one of the dead who couldn’t be revived at the moment. Grobert would have been a fine second choice for making food, but the man was busy working with the local crafters to try and rebuild the teleporter. He didn’t have time to muck about making meals.

And Grobert was going to be busy with his project for quite some time. Who knew it was so difficult to create complex mechanical parts without modern-day machinery… oh wait, that was everyone, everyone that knew that.

Norman didn’t envy the hassle Grobert was going to have to go through to recreate one of the devices, let alone a pair.

Even Eugene was busy with his own stuff. The man had been rather upset over the three people that were caught breaking the rules during the fighting. Norman was pretty sure he thought the non-guardsmen rather lacking as well and wanted to change that. Norman was more than happy to give him free rein to do what he needed to do. Last Norman heard Eugene was holding mandatory reserve training for anyone that wished to ever serve in a combat capacity in the future. Anyone that refused training would be denied access to military equipment or priority revival in case of another attack.

It was good that Eugene was taking charge to establish the standards for the army. If Norman was honest, that whole fight in Beskara had been more of a complete cluster fuck than anything resembling an actual battle, with strategy and tactics. The only reason they won was due to a few lucky circumstances.

Having the nomads join in at the last minute, as well as the element of surprise was certainly one of the major contributors. It prevented the enemy from gathering and bringing their siege weapons to bear. Which had probably been the deciding factor for the battle inside the city. But even so, the battle still cost hundreds of lives and there were no tactics involved, just a vague plan and a rush to deal as much damage as possible before the enemy could counter.

The attack plan was left simple because the greykin weren’t fighters. Most were artisans or just normal people before they died. Even the ones that were fighters weren’t used to fighting in large groups. But it had worked out.

Setting those thoughts aside, Norman finished the bland food and went to sleep on the grass mattress someone had been kind enough to weave together for him. While the mattress was infinitely better than sleeping on the floor, Norman never thought he would miss his old worn, and stained mattress from back in Colorado.

The next day started much the same for him. A thin oat porridge, made of wild oats, then straight into the testing room.

Norman should have gone to the resurrection center and helped out, but there were enough people there that he felt his time was better spent figuring out these spells.

By the end of the day, Norman had made some progress. It was certainly not as much as he had hoped to make, but it was progress nonetheless. He had managed to figure out what each of the three hundred and fifty-nine variants of the spell did. Half had the same effect, being clocked at a similar angle, but only in the opposite direction. As the angle increased, the beam just continued to widen and shorten. It started to take on a cone-like shape as well. The symbol that faced directly away from the circle created the strangest effect. An orb of blackness engulfed Norman before fading away entirely. He couldn’t tell how far the orb extended from inside the spell, but he could estimate based on his previous tests. Norman estimated the energy only traveled about fifteen feet before dissipating.

He decided to keep that in mind, an AOE ‘Plague Sphere?’ may come in handy in the future. The other variants probably wouldn’t be as useful, but they might offer some use. He also suspected that the spell’s effects might be reduced with the beams spread. He could test that assumption later though.

With that symbol verified, he immediately started on the next one, running through a similar amount of tests. While the first symbol clearly controlled spell focus, the second was a bit more nebulous.

It forced Norman to skip to the last spell in the series to figure out what was happening. As it turns out, it was the symbol that controlled the amount of mana used in the spell. Unlike the first symbol, this one only seemed to change at every tenth-degree increment. So it had some wiggle room to be correctly oriented.

What Norman also learned was he wasn’t even close to having the symbol oriented properly in his spell. He was at least forty degrees off from the optimal orientation of that symbol. Once he oriented it for the optimal mana flow, it cut down on the mana requirements of the spell by almost half. He cursed himself for not starting with that symbol first. If he had, he could have gotten so much more work done with his limited mana pool.

It took Norman three more days to go through the rest of the symbols on his Plague Ray spell and optimize them. Which turned out to be not so optimal. There appeared to be some sort of interconnect between the symbols to get some of them to work properly or at least do what he expected them to do. It was something he hadn’t discovered until he was almost done testing all of the symbols. The spell still worked, but it didn’t work how it used to.

Instead of a ray of black corrupting energy, Norman created an invisible ray that as far as he could tell didn’t do shit. He couldn’t tell because even when he cast it on a caged animal from point-blank range, there was no sign that the magic had even hit the creature inside. But at least the spell used hardly any mana so that was something.

It seemed that perfect optimization of spells was out of the question, at least for now. He did set the caged creature aside just in case it was some weird delayed effect.

Norman tweaked the spell symbol orientations until he got an optimal Plague Ray instead of an invisible beam that did unknown things. Now that Norman had proof that he could change his spells, he moved directly to working on his resurrection spell circle and phylactery circle. Being a three-dimensional spell, it was going to take a fair bit more time to work out. But he was looking forward to the challenge.