Biomancy

by Desdemona Gunn

  Biomancy

  Book 1

  of the

  Biomancer

  Quintet

  by Desdemona Gunn

  Copyright ©2016 Desdemona Gunn

  All rights reserved.

  Biomancy: Book 1 of the Biomancer Quintet

  By Desdemona Gunn

  Cover and interior artwork by Viktor Jones

  Proseyr Publishing

  PO Box 1630, Red Lodge, MT 59068

  www.proseyr.com

  Dedicated to everyone

  reading this book.

  Thanks.

  That's pretty cool of you.

  Contents

  Table of Contents

  Turn 1506 of the third age

  Chapter 1: The Nojerna

  Chapter 2: A Body Condemned

  Chapter 3: Street Rat

  Chapter 4: Broken and Crippled

  Turn 1509 of the third age

  Chapter 5: The Milarics

  Chapter 6: Welcome to Nephkeska

  Chapter 7: Down the Rabbit Hole

  Chapter 8: On the Roof Again

  Turn 1540 of the third age

  Chapter 9: The Atroks

  Chapter 10: The Work of Many

  Chapter 11: Absolute Control

  Chapter 12: The Horror

  Chapter 13: No Rest for the Studious

  Turn 1549 of the third age

  Chapter 14: The Rilarians

  Chapter 15: Just One Simple Job

  Chapter 16: End of the Line

  Chapter 17: Making Believe

  Chapter 18: On Holy Ground

  Chapter 19: A State of Mind

  Chapter 20: The Corners of Her Mind

  Chapter 21: The Brighter Side of Life

  Turn 1554 of the third age

  Chapter 22: The Constructs

  Chapter 23: Pushing the Boundaries

  Chapter 24: Not Just Spouting Hubris

  Chapter 25: Ashes in a River

  Chapter 26: Career Opportunities

  Chapter 27: Laughing Figments

  Chapter 28: Enter the Chief

  Turn 1567 of the third age

  Chapter 29: The Sheduvians

  Chapter 30: The Wild World of Xin

  Chapter 31: New Blood Joins

  Chapter 32: A Thing to See

  Chapter 33: To Steal Into the Night

  Chapter 34: The Black Keep

  Chapter 35: Hope Not Ever to See Heaven

  Chapter 36: Quickly She's Subdued

  Chapter 37: All Clear on the Outer Front

  Turn 1568 of the third age

  Chapter 38: Demonology: The Lost Art

  Chapter 39: My Keep

  Chapter 40: From Whence All Came

  Chapter 41: I Got a Bad Feeling About This

  Chapter 42: Final Touches

  Epilogue

  Turn 1506 of the third age

  High Noon

  Chapter 1: The Nojerna

  The City of Kandra, Octavian Prefecture

  She breathed deep, hoping her nerves would calm. This was her sixth turn of teaching and her jitters hadn’t quite left her. Despite this, her demeanor didn’t betray a drop of trepidation. Most of the students seated were Northmen, but she stood surprised at the diversity of her class. I suppose if any class is going to bring in variety, it’d be Sentient Studies, she figured.

  The room sloped up step by step, each raise holding a long mahogany table with a slight curve, each housing an appropriate number of chairs. There were three tables per rise; a long table to her left, right, and center on each step subtly wrapping around her. Two hundred ten chairs. Shame that half of them are empty, but hey, this is a helluva lot better than I’ve had with Political Rilarian History.

  Tabitha looked the part of a quintessential Northman, at least one actually from the northern continent of Antra. She stood sixteen decimeters, just below average height, and her skin was a soft khaki tone. Most native to other continents had darker skin tones of golds and reds along with more rounded eyes and straighter hair, but Tab was a textbook example of West-Antrian anatomy. Dark brown hair dropped to her mid-back in a tight braid, gently bouncing with each movement against her back. She was obviously skinny, but fairly out of shape; her metabolism thinned her, but failed to tone her.

  She wore a cobalt button-up blouse with flowing sleeves and an under-bust corset over top. A long, loose skirt dropped just shy of her sleek black flats.

  Coolly, she strode to the podium in the center of the room. When she reached it, she dropped her briefcase, drew a parchment and a quill from it, and scrawled her name onto the paper. The quill’s tip glowed a subtle cobalt as the ink scratched onto the page seemingly from the quill itself. She calmly laid it to the side, pulled another parchment coated in unreadable turquoise characters out of her bag, and laid it to the side of the first one.

  In one grand, practiced gesture, she laid her open palm over the runic page, pulled her hand up, and inky azure followed right off the paper into the air. The arcane fluid siphoned itself into the palm of her hand, coalescing into a whirling sphere. She flattened her palm over the paper and pressed the orb into it, making it spread out with small tendrils over the paper, coating it entirely before flowing back into a ball as her hand rose, following it up. Smoothly, she held the ball, took aim at the open floor between her and the students, and threw it. The liquid sphere flew from the podium toward the open floor, slammed into it, and soaked into a subtle blue runic circle carved into the stone floor. Tendrils of blue light shot from the circle, coming together into another swirling azure mass above the class. Slowly, the orb shrank, pushing thick threads out to form a large parchment in full color complete with her name in a fine calligraphy.

  Tabitha considered the sight, the glowing runic circle, turquoise tentacles rising from it into a small blue orb holding a massive parchment aloft. How long did it take the guys at Terathor to create this ritual? Thank the gods for Kandra’s budget.

  She watched the students all draw leather-bound journals from their bags and kicked her voice into lecture mode as the lesson began. “Hello, class.” Without any magical assistance, her voice carried throughout the room with ease. It was partially acoustics, but her genetics assisted greatly. Thanks, Dad, she thought with a smirk.

  “As the floating parchment states, I am Professor Tabitha Atwood. Before anyone asks or quips, no, I am not the T.A. I am the professor. My youth does not hinder my ability to teach, nor does it limit my knowledge on the subjects at hand.” Tab was only two hundred and forty turns old, and past experience with students had necessitated the disclaimer much to her chagrin.

  “To make sure you are in the right place, this is Sentient Studies; CIV 1010. We will be studying the histories, mythologies, communities, social tendencies, and general facts of various non-Northman species, of which I see a few here. Please keep in mind that yes, we will be covering the most well-known ones: Nojerna, Milarics, Rilarians, and Sheduvians. But we will also be delving into some of those less populous in Antra as well as some unexpected civilizations: the Constructs, Atroks, Glossela, Dryads, just to name a few.”

  Thankfully, every student was planted firmly in their seats. Everyone was interested, ready, and in the right place. What a change of pace. “All right, let’s jump right into it then; The Nojerna.”

  She pulled a small painting from her satchel, drew ‘ink’ from the parchment once more, and squished it onto the painting before swiftly drawing it back up and flinging it into the glowing floor rune once more. The b
all splashed like thickened paint on the floor, soaked into the runes, and pulsed through the turquoise tentacles into the projection orb and morphed the parchment into a duplicate of the painting. The image wasn’t perfectly photorealistic, but the detail impressed her nonetheless.

  It featured a silhouette of a woman posed and gorgeously shaped against a background featuring plains and distant mountains, blue skies all the way to the horizon. The silhouette, while not abiding by the traditional definition of the word, functioned as a window into deep space. Her body followed the perfect outline of a striking woman, but the entire interior of her shape was black with distant white stars, like a clear night sky. Not a single planet, nebula, or otherwise celestial body dotted her form, just an endless starscape.

  “The Nojerna are the second most populous sentient species in the known world behind the Northmen. Finding a native home in the forests of Vol’Tyr, they were discovered by the outside world in their unique towns built into trees, as well as their surprisingly populous cities built atop the trees themselves.

  “One of the largest tree-cities, Teral, reaches a height of nearly one point six kilometers. It consists of many houses built into or on top of the branches, mostly above the base, as well as numerous buildings within the tree itself. The branches and leaves in the canopy have matted themselves into a form of undergrowth that allows an entire city to walk around as if on solid ground. The tree, while obviously magical, has no explained origin. There are many theories, but none hold much salt.”

  A student near the front raised her hand, and Tabitha retorted before the question could be posited. “Before any of you ask, don’t worry too much about notes right now, this is mostly flavor, background information to give you an idea of the people we’ll be learning about for the next few weeks; end of the turn, we’ll be moving on to Milarics. Just take it in.” The student’s hand slowly dropped.

  “Now then, the Nojerna also inhabit many ground cities, but even more live in their most famous dwellings: the cloud cities. Non-Nojernan society didn’t actually know about these until certain ‘outsiders’ were dubbed worthy of entering them, so they were considered myth for thousands of turns until urbanization of the world allowed their knowledge to become ‘mainstream.’ Please keep in mind this was less than two thousand turns ago.

  “These cities are ancient and unexplainable. Mostly made of basic stone and nojernite, a metal only found in the cities themselves, these veritable metropoleis float high above the land. Most resting at twelve kilometers or higher, the cities simply float in the clouds, completely invisible to the denizens below. A magical crystal array coats the undersides of the cities, causing a sort of invisibility effect to any looking up at them.

  “Most of these cities easily surpass our own, with their capital reaching an even larger size than our fair Kandra. The cloud capital, Aramoor, holds a population of one point four million people.”

  A surprising number of gasps escaped her crowd. I thought this was common knowledge… I guess the third wonder of the world escapes even the educated in sheer scale. A short silence was quickly broken by a woman piping up to ask, “twelve kilometers is pretty high up. Aren’t there issues with breathing at that altitude?”

  “One would think. The city’s denizens don’t seem to have trouble breathing, though. Even tourists are ported up and walk around without trouble. That far up, it should be freezing as well, but the temperature is fairly typical. There is believed to be a protective arcane bubble that normalizes the pressure, but it has yet to be proven. Honestly, there aren’t really any better ideas. The cities are shrouded in a lot of mystery.”

  “How many of them are there?” the same woman asked.

  “Nine, almost all above Vol’Tyr with the exception of Fallcourt, which floats above the Avazi Desert in Runnir, and the recently discovered Avoria, which floats about fifty kilometers off the Vol’Tyrian shore to the southwest.”

  A male student in front: “What’s the racial breakdown of Aramoor’s population? Do you know?”

  “Last I checked, the breakdown species-wise is roughly ninety-eight percent Nojerna, one point… two percent Northman, with the remaining piece of a percent belonging to Sheduvians, followed by Constructs, etc.”

  “What, the Devils scared to get that high up?” A Northman near the front row blurted, eliciting glares from a sizable portion of the class.

  “Sir,” she said calmly, moving her hair behind her ear as she walked around the podium, leaning against the front. “This is a Sentient Studies class. We study all sentient species in the world, and we, by which I mean I, do not tolerate any form of prejudice against any species in this world. Slanderous terms will not be used in this classroom, and if I hear another one, the speaker will be removed from the class. This is your final warning.”

  Before she could start back up, another Northman student piped up timidly, “Um, Professor? Naturally, the uh... Nojerna look... different from the rest of us, but are shaped similarly... at least it looks like it. What would they look like if they had skin like us? Or, or is it their skin that does that? I assume...” He trailed off quickly.

  “An excellent question, sir.” She liked to say this to the more nervous students, help them feel validated, let them know that asking questions, no matter how simple, is always welcome. In this case, though, she wasn’t lying; she’d forgotten the topic of their anatomy entirely.

  “Firstly, to the skin question, we’re not sure. We assume their skin is what carries the effect, but there’s only circumstantial evidence. Their organs have the same starscape effect, however, so it’s possible it’s a chemical in their system, or an internal organ that does it, we’re not sure.

  “Thankfully, however, we do have an answer for the first question. For academic purposes, some kind folks at the Terathor Biological Institute went through the trouble of taking two willing Nojerna, one of each sex, sealed them both up in wet clay blocks, let them dry, and used the remaining casts to create statues. The resulting forms...” She trailed off while digging through her pack, only to find a periodical. She drew up magic from similar turquoise symbols from the journal. The tendrils formed themselves into an illusory shape just above the journal, forming two figures in the air. She finagled with the illusion, trying to enlarge it before giving up, walking to the front of the class, and holding up the periodical with the floating figures above it.

  The two were statues of a woman and man, both standing as if lying on an autopsy table, looking as normal as a corpse ready for dissection can. The two looked quite like average Northmen, down to the raised nipples, the genitalia, the hair, and the entire face. The only difference was they both had unusually large eyes, noticeable, but not freakishly so. The tops of their ears also stretched back behind their scalps, ending in a fine point.

  “I’ll pass this around so everyone can take a look.” She walked to the far left, handed it to the student, and let them pass it orderly. “The university’s art department painted them to Northman standards, making them look startlingly similar to the average Northman. The forms are nearly identical to native Vol’Tyrian Northmen, save the eyes and ears. Also, while I have no picture to back this up, people have basically painted Nojernan bodies to similar effect. Based on various experiments of making their contours visible, we can tell that Nojerna are, on average, more attractive than the average Northman.”

  “Based on what?” a student near the center of the room bellowed.

  “Polls and surveys of a few large cities. I can get you the sources if you’re interested. Honestly, we’re not sure why they’re ‘more attractive.’ Some say it’s because they’re ‘celestial beings,’ which I’ll get into in a minute. I say it’s because artists painted them. Artists make things pretty.

  “Another assumption is their general sensory output,” she said as she walked back to the podium. “Basically all Nojerna exude pe
rfume-like pheromones, giving off a generally appealing smell, again a subjective term determined with surveys. As well, their skin is nearly always softer than other species’, giving them an appealing feel as well. And while slightly more subjective, their voices tend on the more pleasing side of the spectrum, again, according to surveys.”

  A woman asked quickly, “What about taste?” Tab looked at her with a raised eyebrow for a second. “You know, do they tas-” She stopped herself, and turned a vivid shade of red. A surprising number of students blushed and hid their faces, while the rest laughed.

  Tab, composing herself, responded with, “I’m not sure whether or not I’m at liberty to say.” She debated saying, “I don’t want to delve into my personal life,” or “Perhaps you should find out for yourself,” or “There’s no conclusive data,” or “Based on experience, absolutely.” None of these satisfied her, so instead, “Anyway, moving on...

  “One of the most famous discoveries of the Nojerna is, as many of you know, Camellia sinensis. Tea. In fact, I’d bet that a number of you are drinking it right now.” She looked at a particular Nojernan man in the midst of pouring some from a portable teapot into a matching cup. They put down the pot, gave her a “what?” motion with their hands, and sipped from their cup. She smiled.

  “For as long as history can tell, tea has been an integral part of Nojernan society. Traditionally broken and cooked or steamed into ‘green’ tea, they steep the native Vol’Tyrian leaf in hot water, infusing it into a flavorful, relaxing drink. Many attribute their peaceful meditative stereotype to the relaxing agent in tea. Many also attribute their slower aging process to the tea as well.”