"Damn it, damn it! What the hell was that spell?!"
As a scholar, Deis rarely became this hysterical, except when researching spells frustrated him enough to claw at his hair and cheeks.
He all but kicked open the door to a dark room.
The smell of blood was overpowering, but he had long since grown accustomed to it. He could even be said to enjoy it—
This was, after all, a workshop for processing corpses.
The blood spilled when he chopped off the adventurers' legs still remained on the crude wooden table, uncleaned.
He liked the faint sweetness of blood just as much as the rancid, sour stench of rotting corpses.
Many people could not understand his tastes.
But then, he could not understand why anyone enjoyed cakes so sweet they made you sick.
Come on, scholarship was always tedious.
Surely, personal interest was what first made someone willing to endure that tedium and study the mysteries of "life and death"—
"The living are always cunning, treacherous, and unreasonable. Their minds are always turning, making you think they're treating you sincerely, until they've swindled you out of everything but a foul-smelling loincloth."
"But the dead never do that. Being with them makes you feel safe."
"Because the dead don't speak."
Even before becoming a Necromancer, the young Deis had taken many wrong turns and come to realize this.
That was why he often dug up graves.
Partly, it was to survive—
He ate the food offered to the departed, then pried open their coffins and lay down beside them.
That filled his stomach and gave him a "house" to shelter him from the wind and snow.
He even had someone to "keep him company."
Partly, it was because he could live in his own world that way, refusing to deal