M edea willed the roots to rise up and pierce the still-warm flesh. No point in transporting this body back to the graveyard—it was already near capacity and she had limited use for corpses these days. Let it replenish the soil.
She’d been reading in the forest when he’d interrupted her—that alone should be a mortal offense, but that’s not why she’d killed him. He’d been with her what, three years before initiating the challenge? Apprentices seemed to have grown more impatient these days, yet if they were going to turn on her, she preferred they get it over with. This one had been a half-rate necromancer, barely able to reanimate a squirrel, yet he fancied himself talented enough to best her. The insult still stung.
She picked up her discarded book and sat, propping her back against a tree.
What a waste. Not of his life, but of hers. Immortal she might be, but sometimes she felt like Sisyphus, forever rolling a boulder uphill only to have it slide back at the last moment.
Too many apprentices had gone this way over the last few centuries. There had always been a sizable percentage interested in so-called dark magic, but ever since the Collective’s crackdown, it seemed that’s all she got. She counted one apprentice in the last eighty years that was interested in anything else—ONE —and he’d only sought her out to learn how to combat dark magic. At least he hadn’t tried to kill her.
The rest though . . .
Bunch of devious, self-centered ingrates. Never mind that she was a grand master healer and fleshweaver. No one came to learn that anymore, or nature magic, or summoning, or any of the dozens of other specialties she’d mastered over the years. Hell, these days she spent so much time correcting bad spellwork, apprentices barely scratched the surface before they decided to turn on her. She had half a mind to stop training people.
Belatedly she realized she’d been scanning the same page for ages. She made a frustrated noise and shot a glare at the body, now wrapped in vines.
“You realize you’ve ruined my whole day.”
The glassy eyes stared vacantly at the sky. One barbed tendril snaked into the mouth, which hung open in slight surprise.
She snapped the book shut and stood. “How could you possibly fail to see this is how it would end? Do you have any idea how much I hold myself back during sparring matches? And you couldn’t even best me then .” She paced as she spoke, accelerating the decay of tissue until little more than clothes and bone remained.
That’s it—no more apprentices, not unless they wanted to learn something different. Or maybe not even then, because people would just lie to get accepted. Dark magic practitioners were always liars.
She reached out with her magic, intending to scorch the remains—couldn’t have new apprentices stumbling across dead ones—but pulled herself back, though it took far more effort than she wanted to admit. There would be no more apprentices, not this time. The skull observed her in quiet admonishment.
“None.” She nodded curtly to herself and retreated from the forest.