Page 12 of Lich's Bride

What is happening to me? What is this place, this being, doing to me?

Malachar rises abruptly, his cloak swirling around him like captured night. "Enough. It is past time we resumed your training. You must learn to master your gifts, to bend the currents of magic to your will. Only then will you be safe beyond these walls."

And so we do. The days blur into a ceaseless round of study and practice, Malachar driving me to the very limits of my nascent abilities. He is a harsh taskmaster, his methods ranging from silkenly cajoling to brutally uncompromising... but I cannot deny the results. Slowly, painfully, I feel my control solidifying, my reserves deepening. The power that once stuttered fitfully at my fingertips now rises swift and sure, a cresting wave of eldritch force.

But for all my rapid progress, Malachar remains unsatisfied. He watches me with hooded eyes as I work my clumsy cantrips, his aura crackling with a restless energy.

"You need a familiar," he declares one gray morning, appearing without warning at the door of the library where I have buried myself in moldering grimoires. "A companion spirit, to channel and augment your magic. It is past time."

I look up, blinking away the cobwebs of concentration. "A familiar? Like a cat, or a raven or something?"

His lip curls in an expression too sardonic to be called a smile. "Nothing so prosaic. The familiar of a true adept is a being of pure magic, an extension of your own psyche given external form. It will be a reflection of your innermost nature, your most fundamental Self."

A trickle of some obscure emotion chases down my spine - anticipation, or apprehension, I can't tell. The thought of giving form to the secret core of me, of laying that hidden heart bare to the world... It is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.

But I rise gamely enough when he beckons, following him out into the mist-shrouded bailey. The chill air pricks at my skin, heavy with the petrichor scent of impending rain. Malachar leads me to a bare expanse of swept flagstones, ringed by lichen-crusted statues of leering gargoyles.

"This is a place of power," he intones, his voice echoing oddly in the pregnant hush. "A nexus point, where the veils between worlds run thin. It is here that you will call your familiar, here that you will forge your bond."

Under his direction, I sink to my knees in the center of the circle, the damp seeping coldly through my robes. Breathing deep, I center myself, reaching for that now-familiar core of power that coils behind my breastbone. At Malachar's signal, I cast my awareness outwards, my psyche unfurling like a dark bloom.

"By blood and bone, by breath and stone, I call to thee," I rasp, the words tearing at my throat like fishhooks. "By warp and weft, by wing and cleft, come to me."

The power shudders through me, a rippling wave of invisible force. It pulses out across the flagstones, the statues, the very air... and dissipates, fading away to nothing. No flare of spectral light, no eerie whispering of unseen wings. Nothing.

I sag, my nails biting into my palms, bitter disappointment welling in my throat. Malachar makes a low sound, circling me like a great carrion bird. "Again," he snaps, his tone brooking no argument. "Reach deeper. Offer more. You are holding back, hiding your true face. A familiar will only answer to utter honesty, complete surrender."

I grit my teeth, tears of frustration pricking behind my eyelids. Again and again, I cast the summoning, each time flaying myself a little more raw, exposing a little more of my secret marrow. But no matter how I plead and abase myself, the result is the same. Silence. Emptiness. Failure.

As the pale sun reaches its zenith, Malachar calls a halt, his aura seething with a frustration to match my own. "Enough," he growls, turning away in a swirl of dark robes. "We will try again on the morrow. For now, meditate on the nature of your block. Delve deep, excavate your shadows. Only when you know yourself utterly will your familiar answer your call."

And with that he is gone, striding away into the keep's cyclopean silhouette. I remain kneeling in the center of the circle, my body aching, my mind spinning, my heart a leaden weight in my chest.

What is wrong with me? Why can't I do this simplest, most fundamental of workings? Malachar's disappointment, his thinly veiled disdain, cuts me like a flensing knife. I want so badly to please him, to prove myself worthy of his regard, his tutelage. To be the dark apprentice he desires.

But how can I, when I cannot even master this most basic tenant of the craft? When the true shape of my soul remains stubbornly shrouded, even from myself?

Stiffly, I unfold myself from the flagstones, my sodden robes clinging clammily to my legs. I feel the weight of the gargoyles' stone eyes on my back as I trudge towards the keep, silent guardians to my shame.

In my chambers, I shed my damp clothing like an ill-fitting skin, crawling into the cavernous expanse of my bed. The events of the day replay endlessly behind my eyelids - Malachar's searing scorn, the yawning emptiness where my familiar should have been, the sick swoop of failure in my gut.

What if I'm simply not meant for this world, for the dark glory Malachar promises? What if the power slumbering in my veins is nothing more than a cosmic mistake, a hiccup of fate? Perhaps it would be better for everyone if I simply stepped off the battlements, offered myself up to the feasting shadows beyond the walls...

"Stop."

The word cracks through the spiraling murk of my thoughts like a whip. I jerk upright, my heart pounding against my ribs. That voice...

Malachar steps from the shadows pooled in the corner of my chamber, his eyes gleaming like banked coals. He glides towards the bed, his aura unfurling before him in tenebrous coils. With a gesture, he stills my instinctive recoil, pinning me in place with a web of unseen force.

"I can taste your despair," he says, his voice low and sonorous. "It screams in the aether, a cancer, a poison. You must excise it, or it will consume you whole and entire."

He looms over me, a pillar of living midnight. His hand comes up to cradle my jaw, his touch searing against my clammy flesh. "You are my apprentice," he hisses, each word falling like a blood-dark ruby. "My chosen, my... investment. There is greatness in you, a potential that could reshape the very foundations of reality. I will not see it squandered in a welter of mortal frailty."

His grip tightens, his talons pressing dimples into my skin. "You will rise above this... this weakness. You will rend the veil of your psyche and drag your true Self into the light, kicking and screaming if you must. And you will secure your familiar, that outward badge of your dark ascension. I command it."

I shudder in his grasp, transfixed by the infernal fire of his gaze. There is something there, in the depthless abyss of his eyes... something more than the usual cold calculation. A fierce, almost feral intensity, as if my struggles have engaged some predatory instinct deep within his undead psyche.

He releases me as suddenly as he gripped me, receding into the wavering shadows. "Remember what I have said," his disembodied voice whispers, echoing inside my skull. "Remember... and obey."

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