Author's Note: I'm ung a ory. It's a non-human MC game lit about a cursed sword. sider cheg it out here!

  Of course, even after a month, the work was only halfway dohey still spent days and days ting the thing in pce Bertrand was happy with the pt of all the pieces. It was only wheire project was finished, and they’d spent half a day sealing and polishing it with a cake of beeswax that they sat on the yon rim and admired it from above with a celebratory bottle of wine.

  Simon leased. Even if it wasn’t perfect, the giant mosaic below was a much better effort than all of the paintings that Bertrand had made up until now. Once he stopped obsessing over the quality of his lines and his strokes and was forced to use nothing but imperfes, he finally got out of his own way, Simon thought to himself. He said none of that to the boy, though. He was already smiling from ear to ear. Now, all that o be done was show his father.

  The two of them returned from the yon skinner and dirtier from the wear. Simon said nothing about the fight, and Lord Alexin leased enough at the mosaice he’d set eyes on it that he said, “It’s a shame you put it all the way out here where I ot rub the fay rivals in the work of my son.” That was as high a praise as Bertrand was ever likely to receive from the man, but even so, he beamed.

  “Sometimes art must be done for its own sake,” Simon said, “In this case, the audience was only a single person.” He let that ent hang there, unwilling to specify whether the audience was the father, the teacher, or the artist himself. That was the main lesson he’d got from being a teacher so far. The longer he asked questions of children to get them to think about things, the more he realized there were often many ao the same question.

  The three of them rode back to the house together after that, and on the way, Bertrand’s father offered him a ission to retile the guest house at their summer estate in simir heroic themes. The price for the task was a little low, but that was the way the man was with his tests, and Simon vowed to help the boy cut some costs with a couple of the suppliers he ko make the project that much more lucrative for him.

  In private, Lord Alexin fessed, “I did not know if your mad pn would work, but now, after thinking on it, I believe that simply tearing that boy away from his friends and the girls might have done as much good as all the broken pottery and high-minded ideals in the world.”

  “Hehe guest house,” Simon said, ag perfectly aware of the man’s ulterior motive, even though he hadn’t given the isotion part of the project a lot of thought sihose first few days when his pupil had been nothing but pints.

  “Hehe guest house,” the Lreed.

  Bertrand never mentiohe way that Simohe bandits to anyone, but once he pleted his task and redid the floors with brand-new works of art for his father t about, he begged Simon to add sword lessons to his curriculum. Simon saw no problem with that. He’d done plenty of art at this point and ending more and more time teag Bertrand’s younger siblings, so he had plenty of time. He was running down the cloow.

  He’d already established himself as a man with a reputation up and down the coasts of Ionia, and over the couple of years, he took it somewhat easier. He still worked on art, of course, but they were small private studies rather than giant public works as he’d done so far. He’d gone as far as he could with honing his skills on the sides of buildings. If he wao make further progress, he was going to need a more refined medium. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to make oil or even acrylic paints.

  There were clues in the name, he supposed, but it was hardly a on art form in Ionia. He’d seen a few paintings in the houses of the wealthy in Abresse, but the only stretched vases he’d seen were in Brin and their mountainous neighbor to the east.

  It’s so weird that a few hundred miles make such a difference, he thought to himself. Oh, I could have gotten all this from orip to the mall.

  That was as true of foods as it was of art supplies, of course, though he wasn’t sure if that was true anymore. He had no idea how much time had passed oh now since all of this had started. It might have beeuries. At this point, they were in some weird post-human future where they could replicate anything with maes, or the entire pce ost-apocalyptic wastend. There was no way to know for sure.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he sighed to himself tentedly. “Either way, I’m still out here trying to i paint.”

  Sometimes, he thought about what he could have doh his life if he’d been like this from the start, but it was always an irrelevant question. He never could have been this person from the start. It had taken an awfully long time to hike this far on the road of life, and he felt like he was still nowhere he peak of the mountain.

  In Simon’s st few years before he turned south again, he only engaged in one plex project, and that was the vampiriife he’d been designing and daydreaming about for some time. It wasn’t like it was even hard at this point. He had a small private fe he used to make his tools on the Alexie already, and even rare materials were easy enough for him to afford.

  Something about the transfer magic just kept him away, and for years, he always found something more important to do. It was only when he felt the beginnings of arthritis after particurly intense sparring sessions that he realized he probably needed something more if he wao provide the same sort of instru to his own son that he’d provided to the Alexin family for the st few years.

  Before he started, though, Simon did some experimentation on small farm animals and hat lesser life transfer was nearly as powerful but less euphoric than nothing but a pure word of transfer. He was uo determine if it was more or less powerful, though, because both the written and spoken versions of the lesser word killed chis and goats, and he was unwilling to test if on ne’er do wells, or even his beloved donkey, Daisy the Third.

  Eventually, he was ready. So, using the same teiques he’d learned in the forbidden fes of the Unspoken, he finally got to work. First, he fed three identical daggers, knowing full well that half of all the bdes were rejected for quality issues in the sed stage. He carefully tempered and sharpened all of them over the course of several weeks before he did anythiely magical.

  Ohat was done, he carefully drew the inverse of the symbols on the bde i cy. The pattern he’d chosen was plex but not ridiculously slow. It has a trigger point oip so that it would activate whe stabbed into something living. To that circuit, he added the words of lesser life transfer.

  Then, when it was masked appropriately, he soaked the thing in acid ht. The day, he found that his efforts were in vain and that he would have to start again. Though most of the marks were fine, one of the ses of cy had e loose, marring the lesser word that was ched on one side of the bde.

  After the failure, he hammered that bde intnizable uselessness, and thearted again. The sed result was much better than the first, and Simo a few days carefully gilding and polishing it before he started to carve the handle and fit it to a pommel and crossguard. He might have vished a month on clever designs. The idea certainly appealed to him, but not as much as the idea of keeping a low profile, at least in sards.

  In the end, his only effort at artistry was to carve a skull into the pommel as a small memento mori. After that, he tested the thing. For this, at least, he went into the mountains until he found evidence of a beastman tribe. Then, he huhem until he found a group of two of the creatures alohe first one he slew quickly, only grazing it with his new dagger once for a noticeable jolt of life forbsp;

  The monster’s friend wasn’t so lucky. Once Simon was faced with only a single foe, he took his time, and he used his sword only to parry the creature’s on. He wasn’t trying to torture the beast or anything, but he wao know just how potent the life-drain effect was.

  This sure would be easier if I could see damage numbers above his head every time I struck him, he sighed as he inflicted a death of a thousand cuts on the monster. In the end, it took six stabs with the ko drop it to the ground where it y, bleating weakly. After that, Simon pluhe ko the thing's bad felt the energy flow through that bloody link for several seds before the creature finally stilled.

  In the end, there were too many variables for him to know for sure. He wasn’t sure how lomen lived and how much of the fatal damage was done by the bde rather than the magi it, but Simo like each stab had gotten several minor words worth of power back from the creature, but not quite a full word.

  That means what? Two or three weeks' worth of life per stab? He thought on the way back. Maybe four months altogether?

  Simon thought that was very iing. For two or three hunting trips like this a year, he might never age again. It seemed ridiculous, but he could find no fault in the logic. Well, only o least.

  At the moment, he hadn’t noticed the terrible euphoria building oab at a time. It only wore off while he slept that night, and in the m, he felt a terrible craving he hadn’t felt in a long time. That both annoyed and disturbed him because he hadn’t felt any simir cravings when he’d beeing the bde on farm animals. That plicated things, and he vowed to leave the bde in its sheath until he determined if it was the dose or the type of victim that caused him to feel like this.

  Simon took that as his cue to leave. He gave his patron little notice. He just packed up his most prized possessions, left a note for Bertrand regarding a few unfinished projects if the boy wanted a challenge, and then approached Lord Alexin for a letter of reendation.

  “You’re leaving us already, Master Ennis? What have we doo deserve the shoddy treatment?” the man asked. “I’ll double yes again if that’s what it will take to keep you a good while longer.”

  Money, of course, was no object to either of them, but this art of the dance when it came to his patrons. They all wanted a famous, talented artist in their pocket that they could show off to their friends and enemies alike. At this point, half of Simon’s job involved attending parties and sounding wise.

  He refused the man, of course, insisting, “I’ve heard that the queen will soon be seleg a tutor for the young prince. I aim to shape the future of the nation. Should she reject me, I will return iime.”

  “Oh, well, then we shall just sider this a vacation,” he mused. “A loan to the queen until you e back here to tinue yreat works.”

  Simon ughed at that. Lord Alexin’s you children were already almost as old as Bertrand was when Simon started here, and his eldest son was an artist with a growiation in his ht. Simon had done everything he o here, and he doubted that he’d ever be back.