Wilmette was gone the next morning, so I set out to clean up the mess from the day before.

About a mile away from the campsite there was a ravine that was not near any of the water sources that we were using. I used one of the axes to first clear the underbrush into a direct trail to the ravine, and then I built an improvised travois from deer hide and a few straight saplings.

The dead goblins were already starting to decompose and I didn’t want to touch them, so I wrapped my hands in some more deer hide and then tied two corpses to the travois. Then I hoisted the other end up onto my shoulders and began the long and laborious process of dragging and dumping corpses, two by two, into the ravine.

Once I was done, I considered dumping a layer of dirt on top of them. I didn’t know how long we would be here. Lyme would be better, but I had no idea how to get or process Lyme. In the end, I decided to just leave them to the scavengers and elements.

Then I went back into the campsite and dug up the blood-soaked dirt from the arena we’d built, dragged it a short way from camp and replaced it with fresh dirt which I then stomped on until it was packed down.

All of this took hours, it was getting dark, my body ached from the hard work. Still, I went back into the forest and started to gather some more healing herbs. I was pretty sure that the events of the night before would be a regular occurrence.

When I got back, Wilmette had already gotten back to camp. Sure enough, there were already a dozen more goblins fighting each other for status inside their tiny little cage. I shook my head at the futility of that.

Then I sat down and started a small fire. I hadn’t been able to find any bees or waxy plants, so I would have to use animal fat, but healing herb would work better as a salve, so I would probably have to use rendered animal fat and just change it regularly.

I piled the herbs beside me and started crushing some and cutting others than putting either the juices, the pulp, or the diced results into a clay pot. Then I felt a figure looming behind me. I looked up, and Wilmette was watching me as I worked.

He snorted. Then he walked over to the goblin cage, opened the gate and reached in and grabbed a goblin at random.

The goblin struggled and tried to bite him, but it couldn’t do much with the shackles that Wilmette still hadn’t cut off. With a practiced way, the goblin was carried over to where I was working.

Making sure that I was watching, Wilmette casually shattered the goblin he was carrying’s arms and legs. And when I say shattered, I don’t mean broke, I mean the bones in those appendages were pulverized into tiny fragments. Wilmette then pulled out his knife and cut off the Goblin’s tail, shackles, and made two thin gashes across the goblins chest, before he dropped the poor monster on the ground. The goblin by this point was unconscious.

He then looked at me and said “Bakka” which was the broad term for the general life rune. I watched as the magic formed and it was indeed Bakka. But then as I watched some more runes formed and I suddenly saw the conjunction of “Chest” and “Cut”, I saw the modifiers “Slow” and “Absorb” and “Comfort” and “External” and I saw five different short storage meta runes.

It was the single most complicated spell I had ever seen worked near me up close, and in a world of magic, I wondered why nobody had previously let me see casting.

Wilmette made a motion, and the glowing runes that only he and I could see sunk into the goblin’s chest. As I watched the cut began to close and heal. But not the creature’s legs or arms or any of the other wounds on the beast.

Then he looked around him for a second, found a stick, and began writing out the “spell” — because that is exactly what it was — out in the dirt. When he was done, he pointed at a few runes.

First, he pointed at “Chest” then he pointed at where the first cut had been on the goblin’s chest. Then he pointed at the rune “Cut” and said, “Cut” then he drew the rune “Break” and the rune “Left Arm” not in the original spell he’d made, but off to the side, as if they were options. Then he pointed to the Goblin’s left arm, then back at the two rune’s he’d drawn.

He also pointed to the joining between “Slow” and “Comfort” and said “Som time. No som times” — Sometimes. Sometimes not.” So he redrew the whole spell again twice more this time with the Fast rune leaving out comfort, which I saw was very mana efficient and would cut down the time drastically.

Then Wilmette redrew the spell yet again, this time changing the slow to a period of time rune — the one he used was six hours — then he changed the “Comfort” rune to “Increasing” and “Pain” and added an “Aware” a “Conscious” rune to the mix.

He looked at me and winked.

Wilmette then had me heal the goblin of all its wounds. When I had fixed the poor thing’s broken arms and broken legs, he cut the monster open a few more times and let me try out variations of the spell. Once I had it down and could cast it without thought. He pointed to the last spell. The torture spell.

Through this entire training process, the goblin had been unconscious. Periodically it would wake up, but then Wilmette would sadistically break one of its legs or cut it’s belly open, and it would pass out again.

I shook my head. I said “Do’t ne” — I don’t need it.

Wilmette simply smiled, but not the pseudo-friendly smile he had been wearing while teaching me this skills, instead, it was the look he wore when I woke up at night an saw him watching me and playing with his knife. The look he wore while I watched him vivisect that goblin last night.

So when Wilmette, pulled out his knife, I turned and began casting the torture spell on the goblin. I changed the time period from 6 hours to 10 minutes and lessened the pain variable, but essentially it was the same spell.

The goblin work up, wide eyed and started to writhe on the ground. Wilmette got up and looked at it. “Gud,” he said. “Last, must bestest lessun.”

He turned to me and with a flash of his dagger, made a long deep cut in my stomach. I fell to the ground, desperately trying to keep my intestines in. He kicked my face forward onto the ground and broke both my legs. Then while I was fighting to keep conscious, he said.

“Practice.”