A World Within your Skull

Theophani retched, uncontrollably, as she slid the knife between bone and sinew. Her hands shook from the strain of holding the hilt despite the gore that slicked her arms to the elbow.

Why the Skull has her practice on hogs, she would never understand. Hogs were not easy to come by down here....

It hung behind her, floating in the air. Terrified , well traveled adventurers might assume it was a demilich, or a flameskull, a terrifying undead seeking to consume or burn.

The skull of an elven woman, without any aura of magic, without any terrible displays of power or flame. Just a sardonic voice and a patient demeanor. Floating with inscrutable purpose around the ways and buildings of Skullport.

It was one of many. And it was Theophani’s teacher.

“Mind the fascia, dear. You want to keep the hide intact. All flesh can be eaten, or burned or cast aside for all we care. But leather and bone...that is your goal here”

The Skull’s patient word helped steady her hand as she made the last cut. The carcass of the pig, already gutted, slipped free in a single wet and horrid mass from the skeleton. Ligaments were intact, binding bone together, without the Skull’s gift of her knives, Theophani could not have done such a task as this.

The pig was twice her size, after all.

The little gore-slicked gnome used the back of one hand to rub a stray white hair from her face, leaving a small smear of blood. She put the knives down carefully, but only after washing the sharpened bone blades in the bucket of water close at hand. She then staggered as she lifted the skin free of the pile of meat and offal, carrying it over to the racks for the tanner to dry and clean later.

The Skull sang a sweet sweet little song in Draconic, one Theophani only half heard, until the second time it repeated, when she recognized the rhythm and syntax of a spell...

Damnit. This was the lesson. As always, the Skulls acted on their own whims, seemingly random, without any apparent reason but a great deal of hidden intent. Theophani managed to scribe the verbal component into her arm with one of the bone knives, hissing at the pain. Her mind worked feverishly as she realized that it was the missing part of the final spell she had bargained for...twenty years of apprenticeship finally complete.

She looked up at the Skull in confusion and wonder. Was this really it? The Skull , as always, was expressionless, but something in the way it nodded at her before floating away, left a chill in Theophani’s heart.

She was a Necromancer now....and the Lord of Bones did not share Skullport with other Necromancers. The Skull was telling her...

Time to go.

She cleaned herself with the bucket and packed away her bone knives, gathered what meager possessions she had managed to keep in this dark and awful place. She wrapped fine gauze around the bloody runes on her arm. She would find inks at some point and indelibly scribe the spell into her own flesh. Her body would be her spellbook.

With a last look around the little hole she had lived in for decades, she headed for the goblin market. Someone there would take her to the surface again. She gathered up what food she could, but her hands wavered as she looked at the cask of salt pork....

No.

Theophani would not eat flesh again.

She had had enough of that for any lifespan....