So this is something I wrote while we were in Europe. The challenge will of course come later but I hope you guys enjoy these couple pages I think I wrote on a train.... Not exactly sure.
Magister Colefax stirred with a practiced relaxed motion. A brazier burned hot beneath what could only be described as his cauldron. The long handle of a metal cut the soupy liquid with slow langurous strokes. Before the magister were a collection of six more cauldrons each tended by a nervous acolyte in the cumin robes of their order, desperately mimicking the magister's gentle wrist movements.
Colefax peered down his think sallow noes into the white gelatinous mess his ladle was stroking. Large eyes with heavy bags beneath noted the color texture and consistency. The magister was a severe, exacting man suggested even more so by his skeletal hands and head. The skin stretched taut over his skull, the ears pulled back by the same winching force that seemed to pull all his facial features. His skin itself the color of the bleached bones barely hidden beneath. This same severity manifested too in his sharp, thin nose which pointed contemptuously at underlings and superiors alike. This was why the Council of High Magicians had chosen him for his current teaching position. And specifically for instructing on the delicate process of crafting a mageye.
"Thorpe." He spoke in quick clipped utterances wasting no words. "Your mixture needs more teafly."
"Delagra. Stir in a figure eight motion."
Colefax himself reached into a bell jar by his side and took a measured handful of white meal, tossing it into his cauldron. His mixture changing colour by a nearly imperceptible degree. White as a thigh bone in red desert sun.
The room was small and stuffy. Low ceilings, the braziers and the shelves of bell jars full of carious herbs and powders trapped the heat in a globe around the seven working magisters. The belljars ranged barely the size of a closed fists to one that three men could scarecely lift. Each filled with a different manner of strange solvent or reagent. Colefax was not one for grand concepts but sometimes the complexity of his work did strike him. A proper mageye was difficult to create and a dependable one even more so.
His own personal mageye stood behind him. Standing taller by a head than the himself its ghost pale gelatinous flesh reflected the light of the fires across its thin chest and down its knee length arms. its head drooped below a pair of sharp shoulders. Its only facial feature the bleeding eye of the Magisterium. Inside its translucent body was an ornately wrought brass skeleton. Heavily runed by Colefax himself. The bones were not those of a human but were crafted specifically for his mageye. The humerus nearly half again as long as a man's and the femur half a man's length. There was no need for a skull or ribs or even a pelvis. The mageye had no organs, no nerves, no sex and no sentience.
Colefax looked down at the carefully drawn cirles before each acolyte's cauldron, chalked black into the freshly cleaned flagstones. Complex instructions ringed the circles. Twisting in arcane knots carefully detailing the commands the mageye would obey, its intelligence, its abilities and its body. Eight small bronze triangles, the size of arrowheads were artfully arranged within the middle circle, the circle that would bind the mageye to its creator and by extension to the Magisterium. In the circle's center was that omnipresent symbol, an inky black eye with seven long spikes jutting down from the bottom like a demon's eye lashes. Each tapering spike representing one of the seven honored branches of magic.
"We are ready." Colefax said sharply eliminating all solemnity and grandiosity from his voice. he extracted his ladle from the cauldron, slowly demonstrating the technique for Delagra's benefit. he tipped the bowl of the ladle in a slashing motion. Covering a swath of his own binding circle with the milky potion. The motion was professional, practiced with the careful economy of motion of a calligrapher if not for the steely cold gaze the magister wore, devoid of all artistic inspiration.
Trinfic slopped the mixture outside the confines of his outer circle. Delagra's stroke was promising despite his ineptitude for the brewing process.
Colefax drew another ladleful and painted another line, crossing with his first over the magisterium's eye, forming an x. His students imitated with trepidation.
The third was poured directly into the center of the circle. And one more poured atop the last.
As the thick slop began to ooze from the center it rippled, then bubbled and finally it began to shake violently as the syrupy liquid became defiantly solid. The slightest upward curl touched Colefax's lip as he watched Trinfic, Thorpe and another acolyte step back from the quickly growing mass. The eight bronze triangles were sucked up into the now mounding slop. And an indistinct humming filled the room as the instructions were read and processed by the mageye's new born consciousness.
Delagra's was nearly formed, the symbol traveling up through the domed body and embossing itself on the front of the creature. The bronze nibs, glittering and sharp, had already moved down to form a hand of claws at the end of tentacular claws. He watched as his own mageye and most of the students' precisely written symbols caused the same.
The mass of potion that Trinfic had created was edging toward him with a strange cellular grace. The copper had become a set of gnashing mandibles that clicked fitfully at their creator. Trinfic took a weary step back hypnotized by the animation of the ooze. In a lightning quick lurch the translucent milky gel had hooked his ankle.
A grin flickered momentarily across the magister's face and malice brimmed in his hard grey eyes. Neither he nor the students made any move. Each was either too absorbed by their own mageye;s transformation or transfixed as only spectators can be by Trinfic's performance.
It took only a matter of seconds. One of the clacking teeth extruded from the thing's maw, reached up with inhuman economy of motion and with emotinless strength cut Trinfic from clavicle to groin. the acolyte strugged briefly, felt the long cut down his body, screamed and died, holding his spilt innards in his hands. Crashing into his cauldrom as he fell, his yellow robes igniting on the coals and spilling the embers behind him.
Colefax looked from the fresh corpse to Delagra. The acolytes mouth was open, dead words of warning on his lips.
Its creator destroyed the spirit departed, leaving behind only the only a mass of cooling gelatin on the boy's sandal. Its purpose accomplished and its revenge exacted.
The magister sent a set of mental instructions to his mageye and the beast shambled forward. Its metallic bones moving to protrude from its skin, one of the runes began to glow and hum softly as it began to disintegrated the bloody mess slowly into ash.
"By Trinfic's example we are all reminded of the danger inherent in binding a spirit to an earthly body. Creating a mageye is dangerous and even a small construct can kill if the mixture is not properly contained inside the binding circle."
Colefax's nostrils flaired as the septic smell of opened guts and the acrid smell of burning flesh mingled in the room.
"The mageye is a delicate and powerful creature. But most of you have succeeded in creating one." His eye's scanned over the six newly assembled creatures. Delagra's straining to hold its shape. Farabun's noticeably dripping. His own textbook. A knee high pile of obedient ooze with two four clawed hands. The eye of the magisterium emblazoned on its trunk.
His personal mageye shuffled back to its place behind him. All evidence of the unfortunate acolyte removed.
"You will all improve in time. Class dismissed." The acolytes scurried out of the room. Colefax ran a hand over his forehead. A habit termed a sign of weakness by himself and so hidden from the rest of the world.
"Only half will survive to receive their tattoos." he though sending another message to his mageye to tidy the classroom. He ran a hand over his immaculately hairless scalp, stopping to stroke that ubiquitous eye inked into his forehead.
I'm thinking of doing something along these lines for NaNoWriMo. Thoughts?
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