Chapter Text
Intermediate Spirit Invocation is among Professor Emmrich Volkarin's very favorite classes to teach. Oh, he loves every class he teaches; he wouldn’t be teaching if he didn’t hold a particular passion for it or consider it his life’s calling, but the Intermediate level of coursework is thrilling to witness. To watch a class full of students, still freshly emerging from novicehood, gain confidence in their spellwork and hone the unrefined edges of their magic into something not only efficient but precise…
It is one of the greatest joys of his life, and Emmrich finds joy in life most days. And it can be such a lively class to teach, just as the students are beginning to grow confident enough in their spellcraft to take risks on new approaches - and, of course, with Manfred ever helpful in his capacity as teacher’s aid, there is never a shortage of interesting questions to pose and to answer.
The floor of the seminar room is crowded with paired-off students surrounded by scattered papers and textbooks and chalk diagrams, the room abuzz with conversation and questions as each set of seminar partners puzzle through the translation of that morning’s theoretical lecture into practice. Emmrich himself is in the middle of shepherding Velka Reiterlehn to the most efficient way of aligning summoning matrices - poor girl, the unlucky thirteenth student left without a seminar partner - when the lively chatter in the room takes on a decidedly different pitch. A sudden chorus of gasps and whispers. Fragments of conjured magic slip away into the ether, a maelstrom of green smoke as Emmrich's students abandon their spellcraft, turning as one to stare at the opening door.
Lucanis Dellamorte is staggering into Emmrich’s classroom.
“Spite!” Manfred exclaims with a jubilant hiss, the first to recover from the shock. Emmrich rises from his crouch on the flagstones, a million new questions on the tip of his tongue -
And then Spite, still firmly in control of Lucanis' body, fixes Emmrich with all the intensity of his violet gaze. It is as if the thirteen other people in the room don't exist, the world narrowing between staggering spirit and shocked man. There’s a small, neat cut on Lucanis' left cheek, blood pouring from his mouth. A fresh wave of it drips down his front to already-stained leathers when he parts his lips.
“Help. Us.”
And then his form, cloaked in midnight leathers, slumps against the wall. A crimson smear trails behind him on the stonework as he slides down, looking for all the world like a marionette with its strings cut. Chaos erupts in the classroom, outbursts of shock and horror, Manfred nearly tripping on a stack of books in his haste to rush to Spite’s side. Emmrich only barely catches him in time to prevent him from shattering his right patella on the flagstones, holding him firmly upright as he attempts to wrangle the seminar back under control. He has to shout to be heard above the din, something he does not enjoy, but a necessary measure in this instance.
“Class - remain calm, if you please!”
The class does not remain calm. Emmrich claps, and only manages to draw the attention of the handful of students nearest to him.
“Everyone! Please! Gather your things and -”
“Spite’s hurt!” Manfred cries, utterly dismayed. “Help him!”
“I’m trying, Manfred,” Emmrich says, feeling uncharacteristically out of sorts. It was the abruptness of it all, he thinks – going from not having heard from Lucanis Dellamorte in six months to suddenly having the man, for all intents and purposes, bleeding to death at the back of his classroom. Time is of the essence, he thinks, and with an inward sigh takes up his staff. If his voice isn’t enough to quell the panic, then the shower of green sparks and the loud crack of the staff’s end hitting stone with a bell-like resonance will be.
“Class! Please gather your things - calmly! - and leave as quickly as you can. You are all dismissed early. I will handle things from here, just -”
There is a long, poignant pause. Emmrich watches as thirteen pairs of eyes slide from him back to the man currently keeling over on the floor at the back of the class. He is very armed, Emmrich realizes. He was always heavily armed, just absolutely dripping with knives in all manner of unexpected places, but Emmrich doesn't think he's ever truly appreciated what a chillingly lethal image a fully outfitted Crow on the hunt presents.
A thought strikes him, then. One that is chilling for very different reasons.
If Lucanis Dellamorte is suddenly in the back of his classroom, bleeding profusely beneath his Crow's plumage…who had he been hunting? Surely none of Emmrich’s fellow Mourn Watchers?
But Spite had asked for help, and help Emmrich would. Unfortunately, only a few of Emmrich’s students have evacuated the seminar room in the meantime, practically bolting out the door. The rest linger, the oddity of a bleeding stranger to gawk at being vastly preferable to minding their own business.
“You all may go,” Emmrich adds loudly, hoping the power of suggestion will hasten their exit. “We will - ah - we will reconvene at our usual time on Tuesday next -”
“Do the reading!” Manfred adds helpfully, filling the awkward gap of silence as, back against the wall, Lucanis Dellamorte gives a wet-sounding cough. With great reluctance the remainder of Emmrich’s students scoop up handfuls of notes and stacks of books, far slower than Emmrich would like. Clearly they must be hoping to stick around as long as possible to see what he might do while they're on their way out the door, which rather complicates the issue of saving Lucanis’ life. With another sigh, Emmrich begins to roll up his sleeves. Truly desperate measures, indeed.
“I will give a perfect score to the next paper of any student who leaves this room within the next ten seconds.”
From the corner of his eye he can see Manfred's skull turning to look at him, an accusatory light in his emeralds. It’s fair, he supposes. Part of Manfred's moral instruction has been on bribery, and why bribery in an academic setting is very bad. Emmrich has just provided a firsthand lesson in hypocrisy, a concept which Manfred is familiar with. He'll remedy it, just as soon as Lucanis is stable. The most important thing is that the bribery works, and within moments the last student is shutting the door behind them with one last curious backwards glance at the Antivan Crow lying crumpled on the floor. There is no more time to lose.
“Manfred,” he instructs. “Please hurry to my office and fetch my medical kit, and whatever supplies are most readily available. And I do mean hurry.”
His clever ward does not hesitate. Just as well, because he narrowly avoids stepping in the slowly-spreading pool of blood growing in radius beneath Lucanis on his way out the door, and the last thing they need in the Grand Necropolis is a set of bloody footprints winding through the halls. Emmrich ignores both the blood and the faint groan that Lucanis makes when Emmrich kneels and begins to fight with his armor. Stopping the bleeding is the most pressing matter. Emmrich had enough battlefield experience treating Satina Mercar and her complete disregard for allowing a full examination that he can manage with stripping the outermost layers of Lucanis’ armor, leaving the padded under layers and inner garments. They, too, are soaked with blood.
“Spite? I’m here to help,” he says, and winces at the sight of a clean, deep cut that cleaved through Lucanis’ breastplate, all the way down to the under layers and the flesh beneath. It is one of many, but it is the largest. Lucanis was incredibly lucky it wasn’t further up. A cut like that to the throat would have been lethal; a few inches up and he would have bled out in moments. As it is, it’s incredible - borderline miraculous - that Spite and Lucanis had gotten all the way to his seminar room in the Grand Necropolis from…wherever they had been. “What happened? Where are you hurt?”
“Every. Where.” The ragged edge to Spite’s voice is deeply troubling, and the lack of further answers he provides when Emmrich questions further is even more so. With a rush of panic Emmrich begins to pour every ounce of healing magic he has into closing the largest wound, heart in his throat. What if he was too late to stop the bleeding? What if there was no blood left, and Emmrich was simply prolonging the inevitable?
What had happened?
He watches, a metallic taste coating his tongue, as the laceration slowly begins to pull back together. The sight is enough to make Emmrich shake himself out of the mire of fear sucking at his ankles. He cannot do an amateurish job of healing someone this badly off. This requires his focus. His expertise, his intimate knowledge of muscle groups and the maps of veins beneath layers of skin. If he succumbs to his fear, if he gives anything less than his precise focus, something may heal badly and then Lucanis will be even worse off.
Emmrich breathes and, hand by hand, attempts to pull Lucanis back from the brink of death. It takes several long minutes but eventually the bleeding from the largest wound abates, a flood to a stream and then a trickle. The possibility of poison worries him greatly - any possible reagents that would prevent the bleeding from slowing and clotting or else cause continual internal bleeding, but whatever had caused the flesh injuries did not appear to utilize such contaminants.
A relief to be certain, but Emmrich supposes that when one is on the verge of dying one must accept even the coldest comforts.
“Right,” he murmurs, mostly to himself, wondering if he should move on to the next largest laceration. Once the worst of the bleeding is stopped he’ll have to ascertain the extent of any other injuries, anything internal, unseen to him. He needs Lucanis awake for that. “Spite, is Lucanis -”
“Can’t. Talk,” the demon grits out, tight and clipped. “I. Got. Us. Here.”
The door opens again, and almost instantly Manfred is at Emmrich’s side, holding his medical kit aloft. “Here!”
“Very good, Manfred,” Emmrich says, wishing he’d had more in the way of emergency remedies stocked. “I should have a bottle of distilled Amrita Vein, if you would?”
It’s no potion of life warding, but it will do in a pinch to get Lucanis stabilized. That is, if he can manage to get the man to take it without causing him to choke or aspirate. Manfred lifts Lucanis’ head up from the floor in his gloved hands, gentle and careful as when one of the novices had shown Manfred the litter of kittens he’d found in the Memorial Gardens. With his assistance Emmrich tips the distillation past Lucanis’ lips, hoping Spite has enough control and energy left to swallow.
“Drink,” Manfred bids Spite in an urgent hiss. “Potions’ll help!”
“Potions will help,” Emmrich corrects automatically, though he can’t find it within himself to be too terribly peeved at Manfred’s diction when Spite stirs, the violet light in his eyes flaring, just long enough to swallow the distillation. Lucanis’ entire form shudders, and the panic doubles back to dropkick Emmrich’s heart up his esophagus until he hears Spite grumbling.
“Ugh.”
The tone of irritable revulsion, feeble though it may be, is comfortingly familiar. Emmrich pats Lucanis’ forearm under the guise of checking for further injuries, and hears Spite griping wordlessly again.
“Bear with us, Spite,” Emmrich says. “We’ve got you. You and Lucanis are safe here.”
As the Amrita Vein takes effect Emmrich feels Lucanis’ pulse strengthen, though it is still much slower than he would like. When the rest of the healing is done and he’s stable, Emmrich suspects Lucanis won’t be going anywhere or doing much in the way of moving for weeks. Months, more likely. Not with the broken wrist Emmrich now notices, or the way his breathing comes shallow in a way that suggests fractured ribs, let alone regaining his strength after losing so very much blood.
Minutes pass into what feels like hours. Spite stills as Emmrich brings his attention to another bleeding laceration, another wound that will need to be healed enough to close before Lucanis can be moved somewhere to recover. And then another, and another. The list of injuries Emmrich notes grows longer with each new wound he focuses on closing - a sprained ankle, really the least of Lucanis’ worries, joins the fractured ribs and broken wrist. Bruises litter his skin, livid patches of red up and down his side that promise to be tender and sore for weeks. And that’s nothing to say of what had caused him to bleed so profusely from the mouth, likely a blow to the face that knocked teeth loose or else caused him to bite his tongue. But the smaller injuries aren’t life-threatening, so Emmrich shifts them down his list of priorities.
The rise and fall of Lucanis’ chest is slight but steady, and Emmrich watches it as he heals. He doesn’t dare let himself feel relief. Not yet. Superstition doesn’t come easily to Emmrich, but something about this situation feels like he mustn’t tempt fate. Not until Lucanis is out of the proverbial woods. Emmrich will simply have to hold his breath, work his hardest, and hope for the best until then. He must continue to draw from the Fade, to channel the torrent of raw magic and refine it into health, into life, in his guiding hands.
“Gonna be okay?” Manfred asks. He’s still holding Lucanis’ head, keeping it up off of the floor and out of the pool of blood. Emmrich exhales, continuing to draw energy from the Fade, up and through and from within himself as a spinner might draw wool from the distaff to the wheel.
“It is my hope that he’s going to be all right, Manfred. I’m doing everything I can.”
Manfred is silent, emeralds alight with what Emmrich understands to be concern. It is remarkable, how vividly Manfred can emote without muscle or skin. It is the quality of the light shining through his jeweled eyes, somehow, but Emmrich has long suspected not everyone has the ability to read the subtleties in how the emeralds shine.
At last Manfred says, “Bad.”
“I agree.” Emmrich sighs. Over the past two years Manfred’s vocabulary and mastery of language have grown by leaps and bounds, but often the simplest words convey the weightiest meaning. “It is very bad indeed, Manfred. We’ll watch over them, and help them to recover, but they can’t stay here in the seminar room. I’ll need help moving them.”
“Myrna?”
“And Vorgoth,” Emmrich confirms. Even if Emmrich did not trust them implicitly, they were the two Watchers most familiar with Lucanis and the rest of the team. Whatever trouble had befallen Lucanis, Emmrich knows he can count on Myrna and Vorgoth’s discretion. His students….he imagines he may have to buy their silence with more favorable exam scores, but they are Watchers through and through. Despite their youth and inexperience, they are trustworthy.
But you once trusted Johanna, a small, traitorous voice - one that sounds remarkably like Johanna herself - whispers at the back of his mind. Do you really want to be tied into whatever this Crow has brought to your door? Assassins and intrigue? Still trying to play the hero? At your age?
Emmrich shakes himself out of it as the door closes behind Manfred once more. His attention needs to be on Lucanis, on closing wounds and reuniting broken flesh. Most of the lacerations appear to be blade wounds, but while following the pools of blood seeping through the black undershirt Emmrich discovers a small protrusion. Something small and hard sticking out of Lucanis’ skin where right arm meets right shoulder.
When Emmrich lightly runs his fingertip along the line, trying to discern what it is, a razor's edge of pain radiates up from his finger. With a hiss of surprise he snatches his hand back, almost surprised to find that he’s bleeding. A thin line neatly parting his own skin, drops of crimson seeping out to drip down his finger. Emmrich dispenses with formality and pulls the shears from his medical kit to cut away the fabric of Lucanis’ shirt.
The tip of a crossbow bolt’s barbed head glints wickedly in the light of Emmrich’s seminar room. Someone had shot him from behind, and with great force. Enough to pierce through the layers of his armor, nearly running him through. The bolt stopped and is now firmly lodged in Lucanis’ pectoralis major.
Aside from his own skill utilizing necromancy in battle with the team, Emmrich is no expert on matters of combat and warfare. Weapons, armor…he bears broad knowledge, but little expertise. But even he can see that this is a bolt designed to maim, if not to kill.
What's more, it is firmly stuck. There’ll be no trying to pull the arrow back out the direction it came from; the barbed shape of the arrowhead will tear Lucanis’ shoulder apart internally. It’ll have to be pushed through to be extracted. An unpleasant prospect, and one Emmrich would prefer to have assistance with. Alone as he is now, Emmrich can only watch the subtle shift in the light on the arrowhead as Lucanis’ chest rises and falls in shallow breaths. At least the bleeding has slowed, in Emmrich’s estimation. Thank the Maker for small mercies.
Emmrich is no fool. He is not naive, nor is he willfully ignorant of Lucanis’ line of work. Clearly Lucanis was in Nevarra for a job, but…why? He won't pretend he knows all the secrets of the Antivan Crows, or what all of the duties of the rank of First Talon entails, but nevertheless he suspects that hiring the First Talon of the Antivan Crows for a routine assassination is much like calling a senior ranking Mourn Watcher, if not a lich lord, to deal with a harmless infestation of wisps.
It bodes ill.
It bodes very ill, but Emmrich could no sooner turn away a friend in need than he could relinquish Manfred to be lost forever. Life is short, and infinitely precious. Whatever went awry, whatever the job was, Emmrich is merely grateful that Spite had the capacity to come seeking his and Manfred's aid. Lucanis will survive, and heal. It will be a long and arduous process, but they have been through far worse facing down the Evanuris. They’d emerged from that unscathed, and the odds were stacked so much higher against them. But…
But what is most alarming, even more than the wickedly well-made crossbow bolt, is the whisper-thin haze just barely visible around Lucanis’ form.
It floats there like a cloak of gossamer, so faint that Emmrich would miss it if the man were to move abruptly. He hadn’t been able to discern its presence when Lucanis had been standing across the room. The subtle weave of it is masterfully done, with a deftness of hand that implies an expert’s touch. It nearly strains Emmrich’s eyes to see it - he finds he needs to look almost beyond Lucanis’ body to catch it, like trying to see something from one’s peripheral vision. But if he lets his gaze fall to the flagstones and go softly unfocused, it is there. A net woven of shimmering green, lighter than spider's silk, never more than an inch or two from Lucanis’ body. It ebbs and flows with each of his breaths, silent and intangible.
Emmrich is familiar with the magical hallmarks of each of his fellow Watchers. The finger prints, so to speak, of each mage on each working. Myrna’s works were woven with an exacting preciseness that bordered on elegance. Vorgoth layered an incomprehensible arcane flourish into theirs. Even Johanna’s spellwork, intimately known after years and years of working alongside her, had her characteristic bullheaded flair and unquestionable fondness for making an impression. But the magic laid over the body of Lucanis Dellamorte…he is unfamiliar with. It would be impossible to untangle whose working this was for certain under the leftover magical detritus of thirteen students all performing practical magic, but regardless: Emmrich knows the work of a supremely talented death mage when he sees it.