.

.

"This is disgustin'."

"Hush."

Xander watched his old teacher and made a rather childish face of pure disgust. Melerthon was not old, not by any standards, having aged only into his twenties. To a boy of twelve; however, he was considered old. No grey spattered his brown hair or beard yet, and only the faintest of lines marred an otherwise smooth face. Then again, to Xander, anyone over the age of fifteen was eligible to be considered old. "Wha' you wanted me to go do that for??" he asked, peering at a rather large canvas sack, the same one he had lugged up the many, many, dusty old stairs and into the wizard's chamber. Xander had always wondered why wizards always sealed themselves away in the furthest, most inaccessible towers of any castle. He grumbled a moment.

Melerthon reached into the sack and after a moment of digging, withdrew his arm; along with another, severed arm. The wizard looked at the limb, scrutinizing it as if looking at the body of a fine horse up for sale, his gaze moving with a casual nonchalance. Xander gagged a bit. "Because, young one, I've found a number of my scrolls to be missing and my wards disrupted. And frankly, the guards of the palace are as inept at magical guardsmanship as...well.....you are," the wizard replied, his voice carrying no hint of animosity, as if he were merely stating a fact. Which he was, as Xander could not yet cast any spells, much less those of guarding.

"But wha can parts do..???" he asked, as if his question had been avoided.

Melerthon, in his cryptic and sometimes annoying way, chuckled and stood back. He drew the ropes of the bag closed and tossed it into a corner, the remaining bits and pieces of bodies -pieces Xander had retrieved without a little sickness- crunching against each other as bone met bone. "Hush and you'll see. I need you to be quiet."

Xander crossed his arms in an attempt to look as cool and collected as the wizard, but the stench of death was still too strong. He could not understand why Melerthon had requested the body parts. He had seen golems before, made of stitched limbs, but no thread waited nearby. And golems were generally mindless idiots. If rather deadly, but wit had saved Xander once when he had crossed into a wrong room. Somehow Xander could not see Melerthon entrusting his precious scrolls to a golem. He did step back from the stone table where the body parts were arranged. The boy reached over and turned up one of the smoky lanterns to shed a little more light. He yawned.

Melerthon stood back for a few moments, looking at the body parts on the table; torso, arms, legs, head, everything was there and in order. He eyed the pieces with an almost artistic care, as if it were merely a sculpture that had been shorn into pieces. In a way, he supposed, this thing would be a work of art to him. Had he not, much like an artist, spent countless hours up late considering how certain parts of this venture should be handled? Had he also not spent most of those nights studying ancient, dark spells that had the current king and queen found out about, would have cost him his place? As benevolent as King Gwydion and the Lady Queen Evnissyen were, he knew they would not condone his possesion of dark magic. Melerthon sighed at those thoughts and then he scowled a bit to himself when he took note of the shading differences of skin and cursed the land about him for its cultural diversity. "Such can be remedied, I suppose," he muttered and walked closer again, shoving his sleeves up over his elbows. No matter what his leiges may think, what he was doing was neither dark nor evil, with any luck it would benefit them all. The fingers of his right hand began to slowly illuminate, glowing a pale green, as did then the fingers of his left, crackling and snapping with an almost electrical energy.

He laid his fingers upon the assembled corpse, moving the flat of his thumb to the place where he had set the bones of one arm against the shoulder of its assigned torso. The skin, long cold and dead, became pliant, moving and almost smearing under his touch like clay, to be shifted and moved at his will. For the better part of an hour he worried over the juncture, smoothing and resetting himself to another position so that he could better see what he was doing. Xander occasionally was called upon to move to turn up lanterns, but nothing besides. The boy made no sound.

It was another several hours before the wizard stepped away from the table again and crossed his arms, his face dark and broody. "What do you think, Xander?" he asked and turned his eyes to the boy in the corner.

Xander looked out, a lock of blond hair falling into his eyes. "Looks like a callie-co cat."

Melerthon looked back and nodded. The skin of the "donated" body parts did make the thing on the table look rather odd, the shades differing so. "So he does." He reached foreward again and touched his fingertips to one arm. A blackness, shimmering like oil, spread through the assembled body's arm, under the skin and part of it, until the entire body was as black as a carved, obsidian statue. "Better?"

Xander looked and remained quiet. The thing had been ugly before, while it was in pieces, but with the junctures now sealed and invisible, the male figure looked downright sinister. He shuddered. Melerthon looked at him, catching the motion out of the corner of his eye, and laughed. "I see he has the desired effect. Good!"

The wizard turned on one bare heel and marched to a high set of shelves. Not finding what he wanted on the first several, he quietly levitated upward, searching the higher shelves. Just before his head would have contacted a rafter, he found what he sought and snatched it from the dust. It was an owl, carved from ivory, and barely over two inches long. On its back, it had an onyx stone set into the ivory. The onyx eyes glowed still with power. He clutched the owl in his fingers and floated downward. Once back on the ground, he took the small stone to the table, placing it upon the ebony chest before him. Xander rolled his eyes, Melerthon's little thing for floating no longer awed him as it used to.

Melerthon looked from Xander to the full figure on the table a moment, and then took the owl again. "Go grab me those clothes from the bed and help me cover him before he wakes up. Going to be disturbing enough without being naked," Melerthon muttered. He and Xander clothed the form on the table in shades of grey and black, a simple tunic, pants, belt, and boots. The wizard also made certain that certain weapons were on the body. A pair of silver scimitars he'd had commissioned, the hilts ivory owls that matched the one now in Melerthon's hand, minus the onyx stone, a dagger of matching hilt, and a whip of black, braided leather. Melerthon cocked his head, wondering if they would be enough, and knew he could always give the thing more if he so desired. "Much better," Melerthon muttered and smiled. Xander did not answer. It seemed to him that the more they did with the full body, the more he did not trust it. Xander retreated to his corner.

Melerthon took a series of several long breaths, placing the owl back upon the body's chest, then adding his own fingers there to touch the dead muscle. "I call you Midnight, my dark one. A servant to whomever can hold you; to be free of mind, emotion, and body unless summoned by the one you call Master. This stone you shall call home, a shadow living within the heart of the bird until it is desired that you walk the earth as a man. The man of whom you serve shall be your only god, capable of reward and punishment, and shall need only the owl in order to apply them. You shall walk as a shadow, a breath of wind that can hear, see, and touch; and as a man that can speak and feel, hurt and be hurt and capable of being killed, but living forever in cunning. You shall live, breathe, and feel your mortal heart race, a creature of magic, wizardry in the blood that sings through your veins and soul, and you shall master it, but not rely upon it. This place shall be your home, Dwyr, and when apart from it, you won't be as whole, as powerful, as you are here, always forcing you to remember where you came from," Melerthon whispered and both the owl and his fingers began to radiate green once more, this time the glow wrapping itself about the body on the table, entering the corpse where it could.

Melerthon's careful chanting continued on for hours, until the first dim light of day began to turn the skies above Dwyr's horizon a subdued purple. It was at the moment that the rising sun disconnected itself from the earth that a piercing scream from one of the furthest reaches of the castle shattered the misty stillness. The cold body on the table arched its spine skyward and there was a flickering in the royal blue eyes before the living thing vanished in a whirl of black mist. The white owl that had been resting upon its chest clattered to the tabletop and Melerthon snatched it before it could fall to the cold stone of the floor and break. He had not spent the night working for naught. The owl was warm now to the touch. The wizard's brow dripped sweat, the veins standing out upon his neck and arms from the strain. To Xander, who was cowering now in the corner, his teacher suddenly looked impossibly pale and sick. Melerthon ran one finger through the only thing that marked the servant's passing, a dew as black as if it had been left by oil. His brow furrowed, he had not intended that, anything to betray that his servant had been there. Midnight should have left no mark. The wizard straightened, wondering what else had emerged in the life he had created that he had not intended upon. Would it be as obedient as he had carefully tried to make it? Panic suddenly rose in the wizard and more than once he almost smashed the owl into the floor to kill what had just gotten life and now lurked within the stone piece. But he did not. Instead he placed the owl into a lidded box, resting the stone upon a cushion of velvet, and shut the lid. He locked it and crossed to his bed, seating himself, the first inklings of doubt crossing his features. The owl remained within the box for the better part of a year, and after that was carried within a leather pouch about Melerthon's neck, its occupant never once summoned.