“No, nothing like that. As you probably saw, my hands aren’t really suitable for any type of crafting, and I don’t have a lick of magical power inside of me. I…learn these crafting techniques as more of a hobby, I guess. I don’t sell the techniques and recipes I learn, I just enjoy the knowledge,” she finally replied after she worked on getting enough moisture on her tongue.
Sandra had been practically obsessed with crafting since she was eight years old. Which was the first time that she had watched, fascinated, as a blacksmith turned a small bar of iron into a knife, which he then gave to her as a gift. Her father promptly took it away – because she was a child – but it was the gift of the knowledge that mattered to her anyway. From there, she spent the next eighteen years searching out different techniques used in the making of weapons, armor, potions, salves, and other items – all without being able to utilize them herself.
She tried repeatedly to craft, but soon realized that all but the simplest tasks were beyond her ability handle with her deformed hands. Sandra couldn’t even create things that didn’t require manual dexterity, like magical enchantments, because she didn’t have any magical power to tap inside of her. However, she learned them anyway, as she could still see how the different secret techniques were performed; she could now identify an enchantment based upon the color/shade of the magic, the intensity, and even the placement of the effect on the item it was attached to, even if she couldn’t do it herself.
The only thing she could do was make low-grade alchemical potions and salves, as they didn’t need much in the way of dexterity or strength. In fact, the low-grade healing salve that she had put on her wound earlier was crafted by her, though she had some help from her father to place it in the jars. Anything more powerful than that usually needed some sort of magical component to it, which she couldn’t supply.
Dramien made a noise that sounded like he was choking. After a moment, he made it again – though louder that time – which was quickly followed by another. Is he laughing? Soon, it was all too obvious that it was indeed what the mysterious man was doing as a full-fledged chuckle escaped his lips – and then he continued with a deep-voiced laughter that seemed to cut through the pain in Sandra’s limbs and vibrated her insides.
“You…you were looking for me because of a…a hobby?” he managed to ask in between laughs. “A…a hobby?” Dramien laughed out loud for another minute before he abruptly cut it off. Silence reigned over the room as Sandra strained herself to get a look at him, but all she could see was a dark-colored robe covering what she thought were his feet.
“Please, I didn’t mean any harm by it. Just let me go and I will forget I ever knew your name – and you can trust me not to tell anybody anything! I haven’t shared a single secret technique to—” Sandra begged and pleaded, before being interrupted by a sharp knife blade against her throat. She hadn’t even heard or seen him move; one moment he was across the room, and the next he was by her side. She didn’t dare try to get a better look at him now, though, because she had a feeling that one wrong move would end up with her slitting her own throat.
“As strange as your story sounds, I actually believe you. I have a feeling that you really wouldn’t tell anyone about me and what I do here.”
Sandra let out a long sigh of relief, though she was careful to not disturb the knife at her throat. She relaxed even more when said knife was removed…but then she heard a sword sliding free of a sheath. Her father had removed countless swords and knives from their sheathes in order to show prospective buyers over the years – the sound was unmistakable to her ears.
“What are you doing?” she asked, as the sword flashed in front of her face.
“Hmm? Oh, this? I just wanted to show you my ‘hobby’,” Dramien told her, as he placed the sword in the middle of the stone “bath” below with a gloved hand. “And, as a bonus, you’ll be able to say you’ve learned how to do my special Vampiric Siphon technique.”
Suddenly, a stream of magic flowed from his gloved hand and encircled the exquisite-looking sword, which was likely forged by a master blacksmith. It was too dim in the room to make out many details, but she almost thought she recognized the maker’s mark on the hilt…before it was swallowed up in what appeared to be the dark reddish-black of Nether energy.
Despite her situation, Sandra’s continued infatuation with crafting in any shape or form made her visually memorize the different patterns the light made over the surface of the blade. She was momentarily confused when he left a void in the enchantment on the hilt of the sword, but her confusion was short-lived as she saw another magical essence emit from Dramien and concentrate on the void.
To her astonishment, instead of more Nether energy, Holy energy flowed out from his hand and pooled near the hilt. Sandra could only stare open-mouthed as the two energies naturally fought each other, pushing each other out of the way and causing sparks of magical residue to snap off.
“As you may know, Nether energy isn’t usually very good at healing. Adding the Holy energy to the Vampiric Siphon, however, turns the blood coating the sword from your enemies into healing energy. Of course, these two elemental energies are quite resistant to working with each other, so sometimes a catalyst is needed to…bond them together.”
Quicker that she could blink, the knife was at her throat again – but this time it continued its journey and sliced completely through her neck. Blood poured out from her open neck, cascading down into the “bath” below; a few droplets splashed outside the worktable, but the majority of it stayed inside. As soon as her lifeblood spilled over the sword and the fighting opposite energies, she could see that it was slowly calming the volatile nature of the enchantment.
That was about all she saw, though, as her vision started to fade from the lack of blood and oxygen to her brain. The pain in her shoulders and hip started to fade as well, as most of her injuries weren’t even noticeable anymore from the rapid draining of blood from her body.
“Thanks for your help. It’s so hard finding good subjects to power this enchantment. Usually I have to find vagrant travelers or whores shipped in from elsewhere, but it was my good fortune that you came to me instead. It’s a good thing you weren’t a virgin, otherwise the reaction with the Holy energy would be quite severe—”
A bright flash managed to pierce through her closed eyelids and she barely felt the intense heat that flared up beneath her. Her last thought before her body turned to ash was, I guess nobody wanting to touch me came in “handy” after all…
Chapter 3
Sandra thought about what her father would do when he found out that she died; he made it no secret that his sole purpose in life and everything he worked for was to make his daughter safe and secure. While he hadn’t exactly said that out loud, it was obvious from the way he protected her and was paranoid about the smallest things that he was more concerned with her well-being than even his own. Now that he had lost not only his wife, but his daughter—
Wait a minute…how am I thinking these thoughts at all? Aren’t I dead? Is this the Afterlife?
A dark blankness enfolded around her, which cutoff all types of visual stimulation. Not only could she not see anything, but she couldn’t hear nor feel anything; she tried to move something, but she didn’t seem to possess anything that indicated she even had a body. Am I just a mind floating around in a featureless expanse? Or am I now a spirit of some kind?
She didn’t know what was going on; the only thing she knew was that this was completely unlike anything she had heard about the Afterlife. Then again, no one had ever actually been to the Afterlife and come back, so it was unlikely that the descriptions of an endless paradise were accurate or truthful. If this was indeed the Afterlife, it was going to be a mind-numbingly boring existence if all she had were her thoughts for eternity.
Sandra…“floated”…in the featureless void of nothing for an indeterminate amount of time. Since there was no external stimulation, it was hard to tell how long it had been s
ince she had been killed; it could’ve been a day or 100 years – and she had no way of knowing if the passage of time even occurred at the same pace.
Regardless of how long she was there, Sandra knew she had to do something to stave off both boredom and possible insanity. She was starting to feel the hopelessness at her situation start to set in quickly; knowing that she had a possible eternity alone with her thoughts, she started to review her life in the hopes that it would keep her mind intact.
Regret, remorse, and guilt were the prevalent emotions she felt over her recent actions. Even though she was the one that had died, Sandra knew that her father would take the news of her death hard. While Ardling was still a robust, driven older man, with her out of the picture she didn’t know if he had it in him to continue his business. In her travels, she had seen countless people over the years succumb to the ravages of family tragedy, and she was afraid that her father would be one of them. She could almost picture him giving up his merchant life, settling down somewhere and wasting away in despair. As such, Sandra believed that she had essentially killed her father.
She beat herself up about it for a good hour or century (she still couldn’t tell time very well) and thought about the mistakes she made that led to her current predicament. If I had only been more cautious in my questioning of the whereabouts of Dramien, if I hadn’t convinced my father to travel to Shardenvale, if I hadn’t been obsessed with completing my quest to learn everything I could about crafting, if I hadn’t started down that path in the first place – my father and I would probably still be alive.
Even though she didn’t know for sure her father was going to waste away and die at the news of her death, she knew him well enough to make it nearly a certainty. The guilt of pursuing knowledge for selfish reasons which led to both their deaths ate away at her for minutes or eons, until she was just a hollow shell of herself.
Strangely enough, though, she couldn’t summon up much in the way of anger towards Dramien and what he had done to her. Oh, Sandra was plenty furious – but most of that anger was directed toward herself. While she didn’t know specifically how dangerous the man was, she knew enough from her information-gathering that Dramien was secretive and didn’t want to be found. Yet…she pressed on, confident that she could get him to teach her his technique if she could only speak with him – it had worked countless times before, so why not again?
Yes, he was an evil person and deserved to die a million times for what he did to her – and from what he hinted at, many innocent victims before her – but Sandra couldn’t hold onto any rage, fury, or anger toward him. As far as she was concerned, she had unwarily stepped into a monster’s den and gotten killed for invading its territory. It all came about because of her own choices – not that she deserved to die or considered his actions appropriate, of course. Quite the opposite, actually, but there was nothing she could do about it now. It was done; she had paid for overreaching and digging into things that should’ve been left alone, and Dramien had gotten his justice in the form of a powerful enchantment explosion.
After countless minutes/hours/days/years of a despondent and guilt-ridden consciousness, Sandra decided that there was only so long she could dwell on the recent developments before she actually did go insane. Therefore, to put those thoughts aside, she instead recounted the various procedures, secrets, tricks, techniques, and recipes she had picked up after 18 years of learning about crafting.
Her mind had been like a sponge as she soaked up the information over the years. She could still picture the proper way to create all manner of weapons in a blacksmith’s forge, the special techniques to increase their durability using different materials, and the various secrets of finishing them off to increase the sharpness of their edges while not sacrificing their strength. She thought about the bowyers and fletchers she had watched over the years making specialty bows and arrows, about the best type of material to use, and how to take advantage of the natural grain in the wood.
She had watched alchemists, basket-weavers, leatherworkers, glassworkers, carpenters, tailors, potters, masons, cobblers, bookbinders, cooks, jewelers, and even florists ply their crafts. While she hadn’t been able to replicate their crafting herself, she could still recall how it was done; and each time she learned about a craft, there always seemed to be something else to learn. For instance – Enchanting.
This was the most frustrating thing for her to learn, because the procedure was so far beyond her that she couldn’t even begin to attempt it. Everyone had at least a small reservoir of magical power inside of them; those that had a greater quantity usually became Heroes or Enchanters. Sandra, on the other hand, was unique was completely devoid of magical power – which she was both disappointed about and thankful for. She was confident that if it hadn’t been for her inability to personally replicate the enchantments she begged and pleaded to learn from Enchanters over the years, that she wouldn’t have learned even half of their secret techniques.
It was next to impossible to teach someone how to do an enchantment without a visual representation, because being able to describe or even draw a certain design was not the same as seeing it in person. As a result, other than some very basic rudimentary enchantments that every Enchanter usually learned, there were very few instruction books regarding the craft.
Even the greatest and most-accomplished Enchanters across the land of Muriel only had access to – and could actually visually see – two or (in rare cases) three elements, and never before had she seen one with opposing elements – such as Fire and Water. Until she had seen Dramien, at least – which was why Sandra had been so surprised that he had used both Nether and Holy elemental energy in his enchantment.
She wasn’t sure if it was a side effect of not being able to manipulate any innate magical power or energy, but Sandra was able to see every element and how they were used in enchantments. In theory, if she had been physically able to create an enchantment, she could’ve been the most powerful Enchanter the land of Muriel had ever known!
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Without any way to make or teach enchantments to other people (even if she wanted to), Sandra had to settle with just learning about them. She didn’t think it was quite as fulfilling as it would’ve been to create an actual enchantment, but she lived with the satisfaction of at least gaining the knowledge.
Another indeterminate amount of time later, Sandra had gone through everything she could remember about crafting swords, knives, shields, leather armor, clothing, shoes, woven baskets, books, different regional meals, necklaces and rings, tableware, stone blocks, and every enchantment in her vast repertoire. And then she went through it again and again and again; eventually, it all seemed to blend together into a vast mishmash until she could barely separate one thing from another…so she stopped before her knowledge became useless.
Not that she foresaw a use for it, but she didn’t want two-thirds of her life to go to waste because of boredom.
Fortunately – depending upon how you looked at it – as soon as she stopped recounting her enormous collection of crafting recipes for the umpteenth time, there was a massive spike of pain that injected itself directly into her consciousness. She wasn’t exactly sure how her thoughts could be “hurt”, but she didn’t have to contemplate it for more than a moment before even her awareness was swallowed up into the vast expanse of nothingness.
Chapter 4
Her unconsciousness didn’t last long. The transition from nothingness to full awareness was abrupt; Sandra suddenly went from feeling and thinking nothing at all to being fully aware of her surroundings in less than the blink of an eye. The experience was jarring to say the least, and it took a few moments for her to get her bearings and figure out what was going on.
The first thing she noticed once she finally focused on it was that she could see. However, it wasn’t quite the same as looking through two eyes – it was more like looking through hundreds or thousands of eyes at the same time in all directions. Fortunately,
there was no difficulty in taking in all of the information. Somehow, for some reason she didn’t quite know yet, it felt…normal.
Not that there was a lot to see, of course. A steady white glow illuminated what appeared to be a small dirt and stone cave all around her, and Sandra could see the same material along the relatively flat surface of the floor. Just as that fact occurred to her, she realized that whatever she was looking out of was suspended in the middle of the air with no identifiable means of levitation.
But that was it – there was nothing to else to see, nor did anything stand out to her as unusual (other than her presence there in the first place). She tried to move, and nothing happened as far as motion went; however, she discovered that she could extend out a tendril of her thoughts and “touch” the nearby wall. It wasn’t the same as touching it with her hand would likely be, but sit was somehow better – she could feel the elements of the material under her touch. It was almost as if she could see through it to its basic building blocks; the dust-like particles that fit together to form the dirt and stone in her vision suddenly made sense to her mind and she instinctively knew how to manipulate it.
Without conscious thought, Sandra “ate” away at a portion of the cave wall and within moments she saw the part she was “eating” de-materialize into those small particles and flow invisibly into her in a steady stream. And it “tasted” delicious – which freaked her out for a moment, but her hunger for the cave wall far outweighed any other concern. She scooped away a little more and she suddenly felt full. The glow that had illuminated the cave started to dim until it was just a slow flicker of light, and she started to become concerned. The uncomfortable fullness in her new…whatever she was now…started to fade after gorging herself on dirt and stone, but she was disinclined to try “eating” any more.
The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) Page 2