I was still a little shaky when Ahn’Khareen gave me a tour of the rest of its lair. And I was increasingly sure that it was in fact a lair or a dungeon, which gave me some pause when I considered whom I had gotten in bed with, so to speak. Dungeons were never good things, filled with monsters like talking skeletons and now... me?
I had never really seen a dead person before. Oh, I had seen people laid out at funerals before to be sure, but they were always somewhat… clinical. Sterile. They had been given a false appearance of life by the funeral homes and were all too quickly hidden in their caskets. The skeleton in the bed however, that image was forever burned into my mind. How long had it taken him to die? Would I turn out like him, just another corpse in Ahn’Khareen’s lair? What had I even agreed to when I had taken Ahn’Khareen hand? The questions kept flying through my mind, and the skeleton walking next to me wasn’t providing any answers.
That didn’t mean that it wasn’t talking, however. As we walked through its home, Ahn’Khareen pointed out different rooms and features, almost like a college tour guide highlighting the most impressive parts of the campus. Most of the rooms had been forbidden to me from entering, at least until I had “gained the necessary experience,” whatever that meant.
I really should have been paying more attention, but my thoughts kept wandering back to the skeleton in the room and the deal I had made. I wasn’t even sure if it was an actual deal or contract or what, but I shivered whenever I remembered the icy cold bones of Ahn’Khareen hand. A jolt had shocked me, a spark of something that crossed the distance between us just before it had helped me up. Almost like the little shocks of static electricity when you grab a doorknob in winter, but it had reached deep within to stir something inside me.
“And this, dear William Amsel, is my Great Hall.” Ahn’Khareen said as we entered a new room.
It was enough to drag me out of my reverie, and I gazed around in awe. The room was truly massive, and I had doubts on how it could have fit underneath the hill I had entered a couple of days before. It was almost the size of a church, and it honestly resembled one in several ways. We entered the room through a door, and where a pulpit would have been in a church, instead a magnificent throne sat upon a raised dais. At least it was magnificent until I looked closer and saw that it was made entirely out of bone, which sent shivers of revulsion down my spine.
The rest of the room stretched outwards away from the throne, with thick columns spaced regularly to help keep the ceiling up, and although I couldn’t see clearly from where I was standing, I could at least tell that they were each carved with intricate details. Thick tapestries hung from every wall like stained glass windows in a church, embroidered with scenes of rolling hills and dancing figures. Ahn’Khareen noticed me eying the tapestries and let out a weary sigh.
“A reminder of what I left behind.” I looked at the skeleton curiously, but it’s gaze was off in the far distance. “I was not always like this you know. I was… young. Once.”
A heavy silence followed as I waited for it to continue, but evidently Ahn’Khareen decided that the time for memory was over.
“It appears that my home has fallen into disrepair.” It announced. “This is wholly unacceptable, not to mention unsanitary. For your first task I command you thusly – clean my fortress. Do not fear for your safety, the traps in the entryways have apparently long been disabled or else you might never have made it into this, my inner sanctum, in the first place.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Two green eyes focused on me, and I took several steps back at their intensity. “I seldom joke, young William Amsel.”
“This place is massive!”
“Indeed it is. I suspect it shall take you several days, or perhaps longer. That is acceptable, I am in no particular rush to entertain further visitors.”
“But what about me?”
“Is there something I should be made aware of? Are you not capable of carrying out this quite simple task? If you cannot, I might be forced to reconsider your usefulness to my goals and your place here.”
My mind flashed back to the dead man in the bed, and my mouth went dry.
“No that’s not what I meant!” I hurriedly said, scrambling for something better to say. “I just meant… uh, what about food and water?”
It wasn’t anywhere close to my smoothest cover-up, but it was important and did give Ahn’Khareen pause, and the points of light in its eye sockets narrowed.
“Hm. I see the point of your arrow. That certainly is a valid concern, I apologize for my insensitivity.” It gestured at its body. “I have not needed such sustenance in the same way that mortals do for many years, and it shames me that I did not consider the point.”
As if to punctuate its words, my stomach growled and my knees felt weak, for an entirely different reason that fearing for my safety. It had been at least a day since I had eaten, and I had been running for quite a while before I stumbled my way into… whatever situation I currently found myself in. Was I this skeleton’s minion now?
“I believe… yes. Follow.”
Ahn’Khareen turned and made its way back the way we had come, and I hurriedly followed it. Pushing open a slightly rotten wooden door, the skeleton waved a hand, and spoke in a soft, melodic language. By the time I got to see what was in the room itself, whatever Ahn’Khareen had done was finished, and I was left looking at a primitive and dusty kitchen.
“The runes of preservation are still functioning.” The skeleton said smugly. “You shall find everything necessary for basic consumption in here.”
I gazed about the room, a sinking feeling in my stomach. It too was covered with cobwebs and thick layers of dust, and before I could even get started on the rest of the lair, I would have to clean this first.
“What about water?” I said, the words feeling a bit hollow.
The reality of my situation was beginning to sink in, and I wanted to laugh at its ridiculousness. I had been saved from almost certain death to be what? A housekeeper for a skeleton?
The skeleton in question gestured at a small spigot set into a wall and muttered another melodic phrase, and the small lever turned. Something below the ground gurgled and moaned, but a small stream of water started sputtering out of the spigot. The water was brown and filthy at first, but soon clean water began pouring into a bucket set just below the faucet. Another word and gesture, and the lever closed itself.
“How are you doing that?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
"Magic, dear William Amsel. A simple kinetic spell, meant for moving small objects.”
My mind jumped for joy, despite the situation. I always loved stories about magic and even though I knew magic in this world existed, considering the lich in the room with me, actually seeing it made me almost giddy with excitement. I wondered if it was possible for me to learn magic, even a little would more than satisfy me.
“And that language you keep speaking? Is it some kind of magical words? Is there a language where if you speak the words, the thing you want occurs?”
Two glowing green orbs of fire turned towards me. “I had an inkling when you began to understand the manacles of force, but you truly are perceptive. I approve. No, there is no such language. I speak my native tongue, as when I was a young woman that was the language in which I was taught magic.”
“You’re a woman?”
Ahn’Khareen made a dry, rasping noise that sounded like sandpaper on wood. The sound sent shivers down my spine, and it took me a second to realize that the skeleton was laughing, which was almost scarier than anything I had seen yet.
“Forgive my lapse in decorum.” The skeleton said, straightening slightly. “But yes, I was once an elvish woman, before I shed the trappings of flesh for this much more elegant form.”
That… wasn’t the word I would have used to describe a skeleton.
“But do not trouble your mind on thoughts of magic, young William Amsel. You have much to do to make my home presentable once again. Go, eat, drink, and recover your strength. You will find whichever ingredients you might need in the cabinets; they are all labeled accordingly.”
I took a few careful steps into kitchen to look at the cabinets Ahn’Khareen had pointed out. They were all labeled as it, no she, had mentioned, but instead of English I could only see scribbles on the wooden doors. It was mostly an elegant flowing script, except for a few jagged points scattered throughout the characters.
“Wait!” I said, and Ahn’Khareen stopped and turned back. “I can’t read any of this!”
The skeleton looked at me, and it’s glowing green eyes dimmed as it let out a soft sigh.
--##--
Over the next several days I settled into a strange kind of rhythm. In the mornings I would get up and make myself a simple breakfast, which normally consisted a few pieces of bread and some hard cheese. It would have been hard to tell exactly when in the day it was, except for the fact that Ahn’Khareen had used her magic to make the sound of a bell tolling on the hour whenever we were awake. Which really meant the bells rang every single hour, considering she never actually slept. As it turns out, it wasn’t nearly as difficult to sleep through the sound of bells as I thought it would, due to how tired I was every night.
After breakfast came the longest and most excruciating part of my day, cleaning Ahn’Khareen’s lair. The skeleton had never imagined needing runes of preservation on the storeroom where she kept the cleaning supplies, so by the time I had finally gotten some food in me and remembered where the storeroom was, all I found were rotting pieces of wood and cloth. At the end of the first day, I had managed to clean the kitchen and my own bedroom at the cost of my knees, since I had to kneel to scrub the floors with the best bit of cloth I could find. The second day I decided to work smarter, not harder, and found a decent bit of wood that I tied the cloth to, making an impromptu mop. Along with a couple buckets of water, I managed to get a lot more done by the time the afternoon came along, including all the guest bedrooms and storerooms.
Ahn’Khareen had forbade me from cleaning her laboratory however, claiming that the alchemical ingredients and magical foci were too potentially dangerous for me to be around. I wasn’t particularly upset about that, since everything she said sounded terrible and I really didn’t want my face to be melted off because of some weird potion. One of the most disturbing things that I found on the second day as I was cleaning the guest quarters was that the skeleton that had made me throw up the day before was missing, nowhere to be found. When I asked Ahn’Khareen about it that night, she had simply told me not to worry about it, and that the bones were being taken care of as we spoke. Which did not reassure me at all.
The last part of my day, after I had stopped scrubbing filthy stone floors and pulling down cobwebs with long sticks, was to go back to school. Ahn’Khareen had been quite critical of my lack of education, at least until I reassured her that while I could read and write a language, just not her language. To demonstrate she had me transcribe a speech she gave, to see if it could compare to any tongues she knew.
“It is the right and the responsibility of the mage to know and understand the limits of their power.” She said, strutting back and forth in front of me as I hurriedly tried to copy down her words. “To fail in this understanding is to court death and devastation. Placed upon the shoulders of every mage is the weight of responsibility, not just to oneself, but to the greater world. The ability to alter the shape of reality, even only as slightly as we mages are capable of, comes with a great cost. If a mage is not careful in their understanding of their own limits, they might not end just their own lives by a cavalier use of magic, but the lives of countless others.”
Ahn’Khareen stopped and looked at the paper I had scribbled her words down upon. “Sloppy.”
“I don’t know how to use this.” I cringed, waving the quill in my hand.
It was strange, using an actual bird’s quill to dip into ink and write onto parchment. For one I had to dip the quill into the ink pot a lot more than I thought you had to, and there was sand next to the paper for some reason. I had thought that was just something that movies had made up because it looked good on film, but apparently not. It didn’t have any feathers unfortunately, but here I was using a quill to write.
I supposed the fact that I was writing down the words of a talking skeleton should really have tipped me off to the fact that this was like a fantasy story, and not using a quill, but perspective could be weird sometimes.
“Still, despite your wretched penmanship I suppose you are not completely illiterate at least.”
“Can you read that?” I asked, honestly curious.
“Not at all.”
“Then how can you be sure I can actually read and write?”
“Because although I cannot understand the words themselves, I can still see that they have meaning. You repeat letters and symbols in often the same way, and not simply scribble ink down. What do you make of the speech?”
Caught off guard by the sudden change in subject, I blurted out the first thing that had come to my mind while listening and writing. “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Ahn’Khareen cocked her head and nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose that is one way of putting it. Those are the words of Archmage Valtersin, one of the first true mages who moved beyond shamanic beliefs and the rituals of hedge-witches. They are often the first lesson taught to any young prospective mage, to temper their desire to cast fireballs immediately after learning how to channel their mana. Of course, it is also a good speech to learn how to write.”
I cautiously held up my hand, which received a strange look from Ahn’Khareen.
"What are you doing?”
“Oh, uh, this is how we show that we have a question to ask where I come from.”
“I see. Not the most ridiculous way of doing such that I have seen. The Dusk Elves of Tuathaon used to prostrate themselves before the teacher until called upon. Very well, what is your question?”
“What language are we speaking right now?”
“What a curious question. Why do you ask?”
“Because to me it sounds like we’re speaking English. Uh, that’s the language of where I came from, at least in my country. Other people speak other languages, but I can only speak English. And a little bit of French I suppose.”
“Ah, I understand. You wish to know how you are able to understand me if I am not able to read this ‘English’ you mention.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“I applaud your curiosity young William Amsel. If you had to guess, what would you theorize is the cause of this phenomenon?”
I frowned, thinking. I hadn’t much thought about it until recently, since the first couple of days here I had spent trying to come to terms with being whisked away from my home. That still hurt, but I was quickly coming to understand that I needed to know more, a lot more, if I was to get back home. My mom would probably be in so much pain the longer I was gone, but she survived when my dad passed, and if I wanted to get back at all I had to be able to take care of myself. It wouldn’t help anybody if I died from eating the wrong thing before I had the chance to get myself back home.
“I suppose, if I had to guess, that who or what brought me here would make it possible for me to understand the local language and vice versa. If I couldn’t, then it would be much more difficult to talk and figure out what was going on.”
“A decent hypothesis and observation, one that aligns with what I have noticed. To answer your question, we are speaking the tongue of the northern human nations, Somarisian. It is somewhat different than what I remember speaking in my youth, but close enough to be understandable.”
Well, that explained why she talked so stiffly and formally.
“Try to speak this ‘English’ of yours.”
The question caught me off guard, and I blinked dumbly up at her. “What do you mean? I’m speaking English right now?”
“No, you are not. As I have just said, you are speaking Somarisian. You have been since you stumbled into my home and collapsed before my throne, begging me for help.”
My mind went a little fuzzy around the edges. I had been speaking English, hadn’t I? I could have sworn… but if I thought hard about it, something was different. I was speaking naturally, but it wasn’t English, my mouth hadn’t quite been moving exactly as I was thinking it should.
Slowly I began to speak. It was so much more difficult than I had expected it to be. The language I had spent my entire life kept trying to slip from my grasp as I spoke, and only with great focus was I able to speak it out loud.
“Remarkable.” Ahn’Khareen said, and I started, jolted out of my reverie. “I truly have heard nothing like it. Interesting that it was no difficulty for you to write in your native tongue, but I could see the struggle as you tried to speak it. What did you say?”
“A line from one of my favorite plays.” It was almost a relief to speak Somarisian, which made my head feel even fuzzier as I grappled with the idea that English was practically no longer my first language. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
A soft sigh escaped Ahn’Khareen. “How very poignant, and beautiful, in its own way. Still, while you were talking, I believe I have identified the root cause of your language dysphoria. A remarkably intricate spell matrix has been woven with the portions of your brain which govern memory and language. It has imparted the information required to speak this version of Somarisian and replaced your brain’s instinct to speak English with the new language.”
I slowly closed my jaw. “You know that much about how brains work?”
“My dear William Amsel,” Ahn’Khareen shook her head. “I am, before all else, a necromancer. My magic involves manipulating the flesh and bones of beings to serve my will after they have perished. I would be a poor necromancer indeed if I did not know how the body worked.”
“So can you get rid of the spell in my brain?”
“Whyever would I want that?”
“Because it’s a spell in my brain!” I thought the reason was self-explanatory, I didn’t want anything in my brain at all.
Ahn’Khareen sighed again. “It is a spell in your brain, and I can indeed understand why that would trouble you, but it is a spell that makes communication possible between the two of us. If there was no spell, there would be no way for us to understand each other as we, as of the current moment, do not speak any shared language besides Somarisian. That does not suit my purposes.”
I grumbled a little more about the spell in my head but didn’t push the point. It was a very good reason I supposed, even if the idea of something in my brain didn’t make me feel comfortable.
“Now that we have a baseline of your ability to read and write.” Ahn’Khareen said and set a tall stack of books down next to me. “Your studies can officially begin.”
