At the age of seven, I was taken from my home. I still remember the place, the faces of my family, but the memories grow more loose and dreamlike every year, a disconnected swirl of images and moments. The requirements of my service have never sent me back to that small hamlet, and clinging to the attachments of childhood is discouraged.


    The one resource that the state prizes more highly than corpses is magic. The dead provide a regular harvest of tireless workers, information, and ritual fuel, but all these are nothing without magic to animate or mine them. For that reason, the Dead Lords pay close attention to awakening and fostering new talent. This village has only seen one adjudicator in three years, but an assessor will have visited at least every six months.


    When talent is found — perhaps one in every four hundred children — they are sent to an academy. The education of gifted children is the responsibility and right of the state. There, they learn all that is required to serve the state fully: reading, writing, the basics of magical theory, the full details of the law. And all the while, their magic is shaped and trained into the most effective tool for the Dread Lords’ will.


    A child’s magic is weak and uncontrolled. It cannot be used — cannot even be sensed by its owner — until it has developed further, grown along with them. It is nothing but a seed of potential, and seeds can be cultivated to grow however the farmer desires.


    There are several academies throughout the land, and each one is placed at a site of power, somewhere where the wild magic of death bubbles up from the earth. Take a child with potential, and steep them in that energy. Make it so every breath in their lungs carries the leaden weight of the Dead Lord’s power, so that they are so used to the chill of the grave and sapping weakness it brings to their limbs that they do not even notice it. Let the power flow through them, and see them change.


    Unattended, such a well of magic warps the world, calling to creatures of its affinity and birthing new ones. Rutger’s weaker, wilder cousins are often formed by wild wells. Attended though — with a dozen necromancers bleeding off excess power, guiding the flows — the effects are much more predictable.


    For those students with a talent for the magic of death, those who will one day become Dead Lords themselves, it makes them stronger. The magic calls to their own power, drawing it forth. For those with other useful affinities — ice, shadow, other minor talents that can serve the state — it makes them more compatible with the power of death, angles their growth towards skills that necromancy sometimes has use of. A weak control of water becomes a fine control of blood, a power that strengthens stone begins to work on bones and teeth.


    I fell into the third group. The state does not need magic that calls fire, or makes roses bloom. The Dread Lords know that some powers are less valuable than others. For us, those with unneeded gifts, the steeping in the power of death prepares us for repurposing.


    In the South, there are victory gardens tended by prisoners of war, each one a monument to a city taken, an attack rebuffed. There, enemy nature mages have employed their art to create wonders for the Dead Lords: flowers that bloom and wither as you watch them, an endless cycle. Leaves which whisper the names of dead and undead heroes to the wind. Our native trees bearing exotic fruits from the nations that have dared to defy the Dead Lords.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    A branch can be taken from one tree and grafted to another, melded to the new trunk so that it still can feed, still produce the fruit of its original parent. This is also true of gifts. Take a child, and steep them in the magic of death. Let it flow through them, so much more and more powerful than their own faltering spark. Slowly, make them more compatible, more susceptible, to the power of death. Give them a new gift, one that lets them serve.


    I have never sensed my magic — my original magic. By the time I grew enough, was trained enough, to feel that strange weight inside of me, it had been altered. A piece of power from one of the Dead Lords, a transplant grown around my magic, safe from rejection in a body that had been prepared for years to see the power of death as normal.


    The power is there when I reach for it, a cold heaviness inside my chest, viscous and slow moving when I call it into my hands. I have tried to feel my own magic through it, out of an idle curiosity to know what gift I was originally granted, how it compares, but the enclosure is complete. Once, another gifted, found later than me, told me that her first power had felt fizzy, like tiny bubbles rushing beneath her skin. She called it a wonder, a joy, in a way that I have not experienced. I feel only the grafted power, and the pain when it draws from me.


    The grafting process is not without its flaws. The gift of death does not sustain itself in me, and must pull from my original gift to be used. When that small reservoir runs dry, the borrowed magic takes from my lifeforce instead.  Each time I reach for the magic, I feel the same tightness in my chest, the roots of death contracting as they suck up energy. Not every adjudicator I have spoken to feels it so strongly, but only a lucky few of us can draw the power without discomfort of any kind.


    The more significant flaw is the limitation in strength. The grafted magic does not grow on its own, but can only be added to by a Dead Lord. I have far, far less power than a necromancer, and it is far less versatile. The Dead Lords have total power over flesh and bone and spirit; the grafted receive only a meagre control of one of the three.


    When the graft is done — after the initial pain of having your spirit surgically altered has passed, after the weeks of weakness and sickness as your body, even so acclimatised, struggles to incorporate the foreign growth, you are assessed again. Identify the power you have been loaned, and see you future set for the rest of your days.


    A lump of mutton, half-cut through. The jumbled bones of a mouse. A child’s glove, bloodstained. These were the tools used in my first true lesson in magic. They taught me to turn my senses inwards, to reach for that seed that is not a seed, and call the magic into my hand. They told me to touch the items and command them, one at a time.


    Those who can heal the rent in the dead flesh become fleshwrights, working behind the front to keep the bound lesser dead in good condition. Those who can make the bones wobble, shudder, dance become animators, ensuring that every village has its allotment of tireless horses and labourers who do not need pay.


    When I held the glove and called my power, I collapsed. A storm of images and moments, foreign memories, ripped through me. I felt warmth and hunger, the love of a mother not my own, saw a room I had never been to. Ran in terror, screamed at the claws clutching my ankle, felt the sharp pain in my neck before the end.


    When I had recovered enough to stand, they told me I was to be an adjudicator.