Fantasy Legend: The Apprentice

[The Great Sage]

Apprentice's Spells (list is not exhaustive):

Call Ancestor Spirit: The spirit of a deceased ancestor is called into the material plane for a moment. Ancestor spirits are sacred beings, but while they can influence the fortunes of the living, they have few other useful powers.

Spirit Curse: The Apprentice summons a malign spirit from the underworld and coerces it to curse an enemy. In return, the spirit is set free to wreak havoc among the living. The spirit cannot do battle with mortals.

Dark Knowledge: The Apprentice summons a spirit from the underworld and coerces it to reveal knowledge. The more common the knowledge, the more likely the spirit is to know the answer.

Ghost Grip: The Apprentice summons energies from beyond the grave to infect a target. The affected creature will become exhausted.

Hand of Dust: The Apprentice's left hand becomes deadly, able to turn anything it touches to dust. The spell is limited in power, but completely ignores armour.

Weakness: The Apprentice damages the life force of the target, making it permanently weaker.

Animate Dead: The Apprentice can animate a lifeless corpse in unholy service. The resulting soulless automaton will fall apart if left alone. (note: this spell will not work on skeletons unless the bones have been pinned together and reinforced)

Dust to Dust: The Apprentice destroys undead beings by unraveling the magic that holds them together. The spell affects all undead in a small area and neither magic resistance nor armour offers any protection.

Decay: This spell makes the victim age, wither and die at an incredibly fast rate. Victims with magic resistance or many years left to live might be able to survive the effect of this spell.

Frighten: This spell fills the target with fear.

Invulnerability: The flesh of the Apprentice is made almost invulnerable from normal weapons. Only magic or strikes from the very mighty will be able to do any harm.

Drain Life: The Apprentice drains life force from any living target, adding it to their own or transferring it into another.

Rigor Mortis: The Apprentice causes the joints of anyone nearby to stiffen as their bodies suffer the fate of the newly dead. There is no cure for the spell, but it ends after a while with no permanent injury.

Bone Grinding: With a horrible grinding noise, all living creatures nearby fall to the ground as their bones crack and break. Strong victims may escape with merely a cracked bone, more unfortunate ones will become crippled for life.


Diagram of the Apprentice's quarters:

 

[The Great Sage]

Act One​

It’s been this way ever since you can remember. Your home is a series of isolations and tests. Closed boxes and lessons. You are ten years old and your name is Apprentice because that’s all you’ve ever been called.

You, however, can call things by many names. If ever there were a child prodigy it would be you. It’s your ability to learn and understand the master values in you. He makes you learn things all the time.

Ad vitae gratis.

To give life. To take life. To transfer it between one thing and another. To draw heat. To impart silence. Important things.

For the past three days you’ve been studying a ritual. The master gave you a thick tome and told you to read it and then shut you in your quarters; a half-circle section of the tower divided into three separate rooms. You are currently sitting in the middle of these rooms - a personal study. Comfy for one but cramped for any more. There is a window in this room that exposes a ashen gray night sky dominated by a full moon. Some days you've hoisted yourself up onto the window’s ledge and peered downward into the impossible infinity below. Nothing but sky most of the time, but sometimes you catch glimpses of wide countryside or dense forests. Once you even saw a sea of sand reaching out to the horizon in all directions, featureless and dead.

A small lit fireplace built into the curved wall of the study pops and dances. The stone of the tower is well-masoned and the warmth of the fire seems to soak into it like water into a sponge. You’re on a firm sofa with the ritual tome open before you. Thick candles that grow like flowers adorn a brass trellis that curves overhead. You’ve lit some of the candles and although they lean in on you, they drip no wax - burning clean with a faint aroma of smoldering wood.

The text is simple enough. It’s a summoning ritual. Well… a summoning and binding ritual all wrapped up in one. You’ve read the whole thing through twice and are now looking at the glyph. It’s complex. It’s vaguely circular like most of them are, but this one branches off in several places and runs tangents like wisps of hair defying a knot. The sigils that adorn these wisps are not elder or draconic or infernal. They’re sort of quazi-familiar and yet nothing like you’ve ever seen. Each one a work of art and very subtle with the way the lines taper and bold. Copying it all out in an appropriate size is going to suck. Especially since the master is ignoring you and you’re locked in your room. Where will you write the glyph? Where will you get the ink? And perhaps most problematically, you need to decide what to summon.

The ritual is not about summoning a physical creature, which apart from demons is supposed to be impossible. It’s more about summoning the aspect of the subject animal and merging your essence with it. No... maybe not merging. It’s more like you’re fraying a small part of your essence and using it as a leash to tie the animal aspect to you… anyway…. It explains one thing - why the master gave you a trunk filled with dead animals.

The ritual calls for a part of the creature you intend to summon… hair, a feather, blood, skin… something like that.

What to do….

---

It is nighttime.
Exits are west to your bedroom and east to the bathroom.
There is a door to the south that leads out into the main stairwell of the tower, but it is locked.

You must find a way to write the glyph to continue.