VII
The weeks at the College passed by, and I was soon promoted to adept title, as were Marcus and Shelivah, being forced to migrate our belongings from the Hall of Attainment to the Hall of Countenance, wherein more advanced mages dwelt. As time went on, I could often take short glimpses at Marcus' book while he was adding more and more pages in frantic scribbling to it every day. This book however, would one day become known by a different name, being most prominent among practitioners of black magic and Daedric incantations. For now however, I could only hazard a vague guess as to its true contents but wouldn't mind it, as I regarded it to be Marcus' private research and thought to myself that, if he wanted to share his findings with me, he'd surely do so. And in time, he did.
On the fateful day of Morndas, 22nd of Hearthfire, 4E138, after having spent about a year at the College and being one week past my 20th birthday to which Shelivah congratulated me, celebrating the festivity by spending some private magic practicing sessions with me on the evening of said birthday.
Marcus approached me later that evening and inquired in a hushed voice, for no one else ought to hear such blasphemy, if I truly was of the opinion that necromancy, outlawed and forbidden it may be, could be researched and used as a force for good regardless, pertaining to not only reanimating dead bodies but bringing back true live beings. He had overheard my conversation with Urag a few months prior and, if I could with certainty tell him that I would indulge in such pursuits, that he required my help in that regard.
This day marks the point in time at which I made a grave mistake, unbeknownst to me at the time. In retrospect, I've taken to calling it "The Beginning of the End", as both our time at the College henceforth would prove to be comparatively short-lived. And in making my non renounceable error, I agreed to his solicitation after which he told me he needed me to see something awesome and queer, first.
At once, Marcus gestured me to follow him, silently as to not arouse any unwanted attention, out of the College building on a forebodingly moonless night and onto the courtyard. Out in the open, gust-stricken area, looking at Shalidor's stony likeness, we took a sharp right and Marcus, shoving away a surprisingly brittle layer of snow and ice, revealed a hidden trap door right next to the institution's main structure itself.
He closely and carefully surveyed our immediate surroundings with utmost precision for potentially prying eyes and, upon pronouncing the area vacant, flung open the hatch with a little force, exposing a descending ladder that led to the caverns below. Marcus went in first, after which he motioned me to trail his steps, remarking I close the hatch upon entering and lock it with a locking spell.
I did as I have been told, descending the ladder into dubious darkness and the mysterious depths below, unknowing whence it would guide me. As it turned out, it was a longer than expected trip to the abyss below, the small quarry housing the iron ladder, mounted to the cold, moist stone walls, growing ever more gelid and frigid the further we went. So much so that my stout Nord hands, at the lack of proper hypothermia protection, started burning in greyish color, seemingly all blood vanishing from my gripping fingers, desperate to hold on to the ice-infused metal.
Climbing downward, Marcus being ahead several meters, I came to note an increasingly putrid odor, a thin mist of foul and foetid quality appearing near the base of the iron construct.
Just what kind of place have we marched into? When I finally reached the ladder's base, my feet connecting with the filthy stone floor, and thank the Divines I wore sturdier than normal boots complimenting my magical garb that felt stained by my mere presence in such a forebodingly abhorrent place, I was met with an increasingly mouldy smell coming from either the all-engulfing mist, being given off by the walls, or both.
As I took the time studying my freshly discovered surroundings, I noticed an aura of a particular and horrible rottenness to the cracked floor and mossy, anthracite walls on which I observed quaint streams of semi-opaque liquid running through the fractals and indentations of the dark brickwork which I fancied to be a queer type of either dungeon, crypt or forgotten prison.
Furthermore, the nauseating, greenish mist undulating about, hinting at something quite sinister from a dark, long forgotten past, within these remarkably antediluvian halls with its cyclopean architecture, appeared to burn my eyes slightly and beyond question stained my enchanted robe with malodorous portent, adding to my already injured hands, which I quickly appeased by my healing light I let protrude from the pores of my skin.
Notwithstanding the repeated assault on my nostrils by olfactory putrefaction and the decaying, malefic feel of it all, I consented to further delve into the pestilential and utterly repulsive vaults and corridors, that by their very existence should have deterred me with great force, of what Marcus referred to as "The Midden".
The Midden, Marcus explained to me as we wandered further into the dank, damp hallways and maze-like tunnels of this place, no doubt long fallen to oblivion of the dwellers above it, allegedly used to be some form of dungeon in which enemies to the College in its earlier days were imprisoned, tortured, executed or left to rot, as seemed to be evident by the rusted, partly locked, partly crumbled cell doors leading to small, confined spaces with grim contents.
Marcus went on, detailing to me the College Magistrate's deliberate actions in respect to hiding the entrance to the Midden and, by extension, the Midden Dark, an area under these decomposition-infested walls, running even deeper in cavernous darkness and abyssal depths. At that moment I, for the first time, started to firmly question the actual righteousness of our oncoming joint venture. Nevertheless I continued to follow Marcus through the tightly packed, humid air filling my lungs with rot on every breath, ignoring that this place, by history and moist, repellent odor alone, dissuaded me greatly as to cause several fits of suppressed gagging along the way. Surely, a soul of more somber countenance than I would have sought the ad-hoc discontinuation of the proposed cooperation.
At last, we arrived in the central chamber of these utterly despicable vaults. Behind an old, rustic wooden door with oxidised steel supports and iron barred window lay a room casting a strange and alien radiance through the slits and cracks in the slippery, brown wooden entryway, hailing from an abundance of lit, white candles on the other side. Marcus shoved the heavy portal open, revealing the contents of the room before us and spilling a grand stream of warm light out of the brick seamed ingress and into the umbral voids behind, casting weirdly dancing shadows onto the ancient walls and floor leading to the corridor whence we came.
He has, in an effort to study the dark arts undisturbed and in surgical meticulosity, transformed this presumably once empty chamber into an incantation room, a laboratory and a small library. I gasped in awe as to what Marcus had fastidiously constructed here and suddenly, it dawned on me where he had gone all this time. Over the course of a few months he must have been setting up this place in secret! In its center he built the heart piece of his operations - an altar of charred rock, ornately chiselled hieroglyphics on its sides and rims I could not decipher, much less having seen them in any of the books from the Arcaneum, with a purple carpet carefully laid out on the top and, as such, "working space" of the altar. On its four corners, slightly protruding outward to give an impression of a rectangular fortress with four outwardly placed watchtowers at the keep's outer precipice, stood four candlesticks of silver, one for each of the four corners, with white, burning candles embedded within. Those candles, and the abundance circumjacent to the rocky construct, served to soothe my assailed nostrils by killing most of the unpleasant stench I hitherto experienced.
Behind the actual altar stood a lectern holding Marcus' book, ready to be cast open and read. Shifting my gaze to the left there were several old, battered and partly rotting bookshelves he indubitably found around the Midden somewhere, taking their rustic, foul brokenness into account.
Therein were contained numerous volumes of varying topics such as all the different schools of magic and hypotheses on the nature of magic itself, books on enchanting, knowledge about souls and soul gems, scriptures pertaining to herbalism and alchemy as well as some volumes of more historic value, respecting the rise and fall of the legendarily fabled necromancer and Wormking Mannimarco as well as books about Aedra, Daedra and the planes of Oblivion, among other more miscellaneous items such as The Lusty Argonian Maid, Ahzirr Trajijazeri and Capn's Guide to the Fishy Stick.
Filling out this literature inclined space was a small writing desk Marcus said to contain ritualistic scrolls and magical spell books in its storage compartments.
Glancing to the right, the laboratory he, without a doubt great difficulty, assembled was situated. Sporting an enchanting table with runes unheard of, casting a sickly blueish light onto its stony surface. Alchemical appliances such as a mortar, a retort and vials of various lengths and sizes being assembled around a scientific working table glowing with green, fluorescent and hideously bubbling liquids, there also were shelves mounted on top of said table filled to the brim with various alchemical ingredients and components ranging from simple to gather herbs and common plants to more uncommon roots all the way up to devilishly dangerous and difficult to acquire salts or body parts from various creatures found all throughout Tamriel.
I could make out bone meal, astral essences, ectoplasm, mountain flowers, elve's ear, barnacles, atronach salts, fish scales among other, more bestial things I care not to mention. And it was within these depraved, forgotten and utterly debauched halls that we would soon conduct our experiments in secret, knowing that the Midden, and by extension the Midden Dark, was the only place not too far away from the College we could, and would, hone our knowledge of the dark arts in without being ridiculed, arrested or executed.
Not making any further inquiries as to where he procured all this equipment from, Marcus and I discussed our actions from this point forward, appertaining to the oncoming experiments at hand. In due time, we settled on surveying the area for leftover corpses. We had to start somewhere, after all.
VIII
After a prodigious amount of planning our actions we, on the following day, started to act. Although I was determined to research the dark arts in secret for the greater good, I didn't sleep well the night I discovered the hideous working space I would henceforth submit myself to. Although the great number of candles at least helped with the smell in burning the olid mists wherever the light shone and disperse the puant savour by seemingly sucking it out of the air. I didn't quite know what was setting me off then, albeit I harbored a sneaking suspicion that the amount of dedication and secrecy to this project was ultimately ill-fated.
Notwithstanding my worries I initially entertained, that next day would be the day I actually started working on cadavers. Marcus and I met in the Midden by sunrise, taking the utmost precautions not to be either caught or missed, closely surveying the College schedules in an effort to always be present when required and always be absent when possible. I went as far as to tell Shelivah that there's a high chance I may be a little preoccupied in the days to come but appeased her growing concerns by taking her into my arms. I told her that there was nothing to worry about and that I would only research the nature of restorational power on behalf of all non-healers, her included.
Before I went to see Marcus that morning, she gave me a tender kiss on my lips that day, imploring me to be careful, wherever I would stride and wherever my path would take me, for she noticed the odd smell the day before and suspected an unsavoury place to be its origin. I told her that I'm fine and that I'll be back soon enough, hugging her a last time before I went to see Marcus. On arrival in our horrible laboratory of death and ruin, me and Marcus set out to search the upper part of the Midden for corpses, or remnants thereof, first, for we needed some kind of specimen to work on in the first place.
We collected dust, gathered rotten flesh pieces and meticulously carried entire skeletons, carefully rearranging their bones as to not confuse one skeleton with the other. Doing this fetching and gathering work for hours, we only stopped when it was time to either lecture a couple of fresh apprentices and novices, or be lectured by the masters of the College. How we went undetected for so long still eludes my fancy to this day, since we always reeked of foulness and decay, even earning strange remarks about our hygiene at times.
However the only one to show true worry remains Shelivah, who sometimes tried to keep me situated in the College proper when I intended to hurriedly leave the lectures in an effort to keep on working on mine and Marcus' research. In time, I've spent less and less time with her, my ominous studies becoming all-consuming. At a certain point in time, not sure when, I even stopped noticing her ever more feeble attempts at conversation or intimateness, she gradually leaving me be in hopes of my work finishing some day.
However, once Marcus and I gathered all that we could uncover in those tenebrous halls of the upper Midden, we witnessed a singular collection of a very special kind. A total of sixteen and a half skeletons, a festering flesh pile of about half my own height and two small bowls of bone meal, among a few other things such as leftover, rusted weaponry and a few dried herbs. We put all these ingredients into the neighbouring cells for later retrieval and started to read books on the basics of necromancy and the dark arts in general.
Marcus, having already acquired a good deal of knowledge, even of a kind not described in commonly acquirable books, introduced me to the process of raising the dead, hinting at his black book he wrote, containing most of the knowledge we were going to need. That day, we let the bones of the deceased rest and only dwelt on the topic of necromancy hypothetically and theoretically so that I might be prepared for actually reanimating the dusty bones of the dead in that murky and reclusive place we called the our second home.
The following day, always keeping a keen eye to the relevant appointments we had to be present at to avoid suspicion, we actually committed the forbidden, black act known as necromancy.
It pains me greatly to speak of this, to even remember this, for I've at that time set aside all respect for the dead I previously had always employed and threw away all moral and empathy I could once muster, for the act of reanimating those that passed kills off a part of your soul that is hard to retrieve later on, in weaker individuals permanently disrupting or outright destroying one's conscience. I wish I had acted differently, for it was quite the arduous process to reclaim that part of me which died that day. As for Marcus, I suspect he never was able to make that step.
Thenceforth, we initiated our experiments by raising the inanimate remains of those who expired within the confines of this enigmatic crypt. The first time of doing it felt as wrong as something could possibly feel. The blood froze in my veins and my cardiac activity slowed down to a snail's pace. I felt a growing indifference tightening its grasp around my heart as time went on and in the end, I thought it not problematical to work with such vile specimens.
Don't misapprehend; I was a fool to have not properly scrutinized our unhallowed practices! There is a reason for outlawing the art.
When my first otherworldly creation, a brittle, unstable, headless skeleton materialized itself before me, I felt a surge of ice flowing like a tidal wave through my body, as if my bloodstream congealed, crystallizing, ready to burst any minute.
I could smell the conspicuous decomposition radiating off of it but it ceased bothering me all of a sudden. I watched as my skin went pallid the more I continued my ill opus. My outside started to look ever more sicklish, the cold embrace of the void rushing through me as if some unknown force from beyond sapped all life from my body while time seemed to be nonexistent, leaving only an animate husk, a shell of a man once inclined to be a renowned healer, proprietor of a benign chapel some time in the future perhaps. In an instant, all this vanished, leaving only my broken conscience and my magical powers among dark under-eye circles, a testimony of my depleted buoyancy.
Being relieved of commonly established sensitivity, I suddenly ignored all the red flags that popped up along the way, being entirely unbothered as to what we've taken to do on a regular basis. For the first three days down there in the dark, we practiced raising corpses in preparation for our next big project we called "Rematerialization".
Make no mistake though, for we may have practiced, but it didn't come without the price of a few summons backfiring. I remember one particular instance in which Marcus didn't attune the spell correctly and ended up reanimating the skeleton of a powerful mage who hurled a thunderstorm of destruction magic at us, only my magical barrier that I've learned about the day I've been admitted to the College separating me from instant death. In the end, we were able to put it down for good by immolating it together with a lot of fire casts until it fell to ashes. These ashes we then quickly dispersed, never to make that mistake again.
Pertaining to the aforementioned Rematerialization, Marcus hypothesized that, if we both focused necromancy on a bareboned skeleton we prepared to lie in a pile of flesh, and restoration magic at the same time, by usage of carefully selected spells and formulae of his own making, it should be possible to reconstruct an at least partly humanoid looking being. I didn't argue with that, in fact agreed with Marcus, remarking that he surely had a point.
And so we went to prepare the ghastly and abhorrently forbidden ritual which would later be known as "The Ritual of Fleshbinding".
We started to arrange the bloody rite by covering the entire surface of the altar in the central chamber with the maggoty flesh from the pile that we gathered a couple of days ago. We needed to be swift however, for our meaty supply was naturally dwindling due to the putrescent insects that had taken up residence within. Not to mention the indigenous rats that, in part due to intoxication from mouldy entrails, sported interesting deformities.
We proceeded to align all the skeleton's bones in their exact, anatomically correct position, filling it and all gaps in between with the aforementioned flesh, after which we completely coated the osseous silhouette in fastidious fashion so as to not leave any interstices to ensure success so that the procession worked as we intended.
Marcus then instructed me to cast my long range mending spell on the ghoulish mountain of gore in an effort to constitute an aura of restoration for the soon-to-be animated thing. I did as had been requested of me but for now, nothing happened.
I continuously held the spell until Marcus animated the lifeless ossature. And as we experimented and invoked whatever it is the creature would present itself to be, we could see that the experiment actually seemed to work somewhat.
I have seen things down there. Things that ought to be erased from existence and all records telling of their former presence cast down into the abysmal pits of Oblivion itself.
Things I was responsible for. And the ensuing abomination was one such thing.
When the pile of corrupted and pestilential meat and bones was struck by both my mending spell and Marcus' raising spell, tinting the whole room in a flurry of pale blue and warm yellow light scintillating off the moist, surrounding walls. The creature began to levitate, floating in mid-air, when the crude lumps of flesh coarsely stuck to the bones and reconstructed themselves in unnatural and undulating fashion, with audible smacks and drips, blood clots forming and spilling, the sanguine liquid running down its freshly created vessel, forming a large, viscous pool beneath the horribly deformed figure.
It appeared as if it worked, when we noticed that we haven't thought of concerning ourselves with the topic of where the flesh used originated from, thusly not included in the formula, so that instead of the expected humanoid result, something else entirely claimed itself unduly to be alive in the mortal plane of existence.
During the mending process, the abomination was covered with skinless, hairless, malformed, dripping flesh exposing several viscose and unbelievably nasty, opaque fluids. Out of the various clumps different, crudely healed, crooked limbs started to appear, moving and kicking and groping the air and sick mist around it. On its surfaces, many mouths and orifices developed and albeit mute from a lack of vocal cords they appeared to try and scream at their horrible fate, hellbent on biting and munching anything readily available notwithstanding the lack of a stomach to digest the food they so desperately appeared to crave.
Hither and thither a tail, some teeth, weird scales and queer spare bone plates developed in the flesh and partly rose up rending the bloodsoaked meat of the thing we just created.
When the deed had been completed, there was presented to us a detestable abomination, an otherworldly creature made from the very fabric of terror itself. So shocking a revelation it was, I felt unsound in an instant, throwing up the breakfast I had previously eaten onto the floor beneath my feet in disgustingly splashing billows, an audible retching reverberating off the stony surfaces. For the bells of conscience still rang from time to time and I wasn't prepared for a horror this real, yet this abnormal and anomalous in nature.
It is impossible to be ready for such unheard of beings from the deepest fathoms of gruesome creation. When I recovered from the initial shock and rose back to my feet after having been subject to kneeling at the power of my sickness, Marcus and I both concluded, albeit the experiment having proven itself to be successful, that this monstrous, shuffling nightmare doesn't belong in the realm of Mundus.
It had no eyes with which to see and no nose with which to smell but still, it knew where we were in relation to it. Its face wasn't so much a face as it was an amalgamation of corrugating, pulsating, bending, seeping flesh, featuring two partly rotten Argonian tails and five mouths on its featureless visage. The tails writhing and all the mouths over the entirety of its unholy body opening and closing at various intervals. That's when it started to quickly shamble towards us in a feral demeanour. In preparation of the oncoming fight against this hideous, nature-defying terror, I grabbed both my staff and dagger, hands shaking with palms drenched in sick, cold sweat at the very premise this creature presented.
Before I could even muster the courage to engage this being from beyond the veil, it charged at me, it's countless limbs groping with ferocious fury and insatiable hunger. Paralyzed in surprise, it grabbed me with its wet, blood soaked claws, lifting me off the ground, pulling me closer intent on feasting on my flesh. Mind shattering horror dazed me and my consciousness slipped for a moment before I found myself on the ground, lying in a pool of various liquids of unmentionable quality that no doubt the creature left behind, as well as my own vomit.
Dazed and reeling, I watched as Marcus valiantly fought the thing, observing him casting at last the forbidden Soul Siphon spell to forever eradicate this mistake from existence. The assault stunned the creature briefly, after which it was destroyed by Marcus' secret black magic. I witnessed it fall apart, the loose bonds amidst the clumps of flesh disassembling, one by one falling to the floor with a nasty and repulsive splashing, its bones audibly bending and breaking, echoing through the vaults, until only a lump of decaying, wet, foul matter was left. It yielded no soul after death which didn't surprise us but if it had, there would've been no limit to the terrible implications it would have caused.
After the battle, Marcus helped me onto my feet and we decided in unison to take a break from the dark arts for the day. Back in the living quarters, I cleansed myself from all the soot, blood and other liquids, discarding my robe for it was stained beyond cleansing, never noticing how Shelivah gazed at me worriedly from across the room, averting her eyes in despair and sadness.
I made up an elaborate excuse as to the disappearance of my garment, explaining to the Magistrate at the College that I've been on an outward venture pertaining to the acquisition of an item of great importance. Failing to retrieve aforementioned artifact, I went on, I instead found myself battling a crazed necromancer near Korvanjund, his subordinates and summoned undead circling me, rending my robe in the process, hence my plea for a new one. The Magistrate bought my blatant lie, but not without queer looks directed at me, and agreed to provide a fresh, enchanted adept's robe to me.
An event such as this wherein I bluntly had to construct a lie to keep me from being discovered, I resolved, must not happen again, lest I be expelled or worse. On that still frightful and perturbing evening, the sun setting forebodingly behind the towering, snowy mountain tops in the distance, Marcus and I stood in the courtyard, catching some fresh air and discussed the recent events and by what kind of strategy we were going to proceed.
Marcus argued that the experiment only took such a grim and jeopardizing turn because we didn't use the "correct" flesh in the ritual and proposed gathering and aligning other flesh to try it again. I objected, stating that, even if we were to do that, we could just as well take the corpse of someone who had just recently passed. This remark of mine, however, should determine the course of our actions henceforth, since it convinced Marcus that indeed, all we managed to accomplish with our previous experiment was to create a horror that defied and defiled the premise of the Mundus itself and that, if we were to try his heretofore proposed, altered method, we'd probably achieve a result very close to actually raising a zombie, as it were.
Marcus wrote down the results of this experiment in his shadowy book of horrors regardless, notwithstanding the outcome we previously witnessed. On that evening, we parted ways at midnight, me going to sleep in an effort to recover from what has so recently taken place and Marcus heading out into the winds on a mission with a grievous purpose as I should observe on the following day. Drifting gently off to sleep on a moonless night above Winterhold, increasingly intense doubts crawled up my spine, poisoning my thoughts and dreams for the night.
What if all this wasn't right? What if, in truth, we could never discover anything non-evil about necromancy, it turning out to be an entirely unsanctified art beyond saving and turning around? What if all arduousness I subjected myself to was for nought, only serving to turn me into a mad worshipper of undeath? Such were the thoughts racing through my brain as I craved for sound sleep, feeling protected under the heavy and warm silken blanket of the bed I lay in, dreaming strange dreams, in one of which I thought I heard Shelivah call out to me.
Hitherto I've told lies, raised the dead, created an otherworldly horror, studied the black arts and neglected the one closest to me. But soon, I would take actions against the last vestiges of human compassion.
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