Chapter 19: Chapter 19. Roommate
"Hello."
The boy looked up.
The moment his eyes found Necrotize, something in him simply gave out. The color drained from his face in a single instant. His hands, his knees, his entire frame began to tremble. A thin sheen of sweat appeared across his forehead.
Before any conscious decision could intervene, he was on the floor, forehead pressed to the ground, hands flat against the boards on either side of his head.
"I prostrate before thee."
He had found out on the way in. Some students in the corridor had been talking about it — about who occupied the room he’d been assigned to, about who his roommate was going to be. He had spent the walk down the hall trying to prepare himself.
It had not worked.
Necrotize looked down at him with an expression that was not quite displeasure but was moving steadily in that direction.
"Get up." His voice wasn’t harsh, but it carried enough weight to make the instruction feel non-negotiable. "I’ve made my feelings on this clear. I believe I asked everyone not to do that in my presence."
The boy scrambled upright with the speed of someone who had been briefly electrified. He stood with his legs slightly apart, redistributing his weight in the instinctive way of someone whose knees had stopped being entirely reliable.
Necrotize crossed to his bed, sat down, and folded one leg over the other. He regarded his roommate with patient, unhurried attention — taking in the awkward posture, the careful attempt to hold himself still despite everything his body was doing.
"Your name."
"...Simon."
Necrotize exhaled slowly.
"You don’t need to stand like that, Simon. You can sit down."
Simon received this information and acted on it with extreme care, lowering himself onto the edge of his own bed with the deliberate precision of someone who had decided that even sitting could go wrong if not approached correctly. He perched there and looked, despite himself, at the person across from him.
Dark hair that fell with the kind of effortless arrangement that most people couldn’t achieve on purpose. A face that was, if Simon was being honest with himself, deeply unfair to encounter without warning. And those eyes — violet, vivid, carrying something in their depth that ordinary eyes simply didn’t have.
The God of Destruction.
That was what was sitting across from him, one leg crossed, watching him with the relaxed attention of someone with nowhere to be. The God of Destruction was his *roommate.* His brain presented this fact and then politely declined to fully process it.
Necrotize heard the shape of his thoughts and felt a flicker of mild dissatisfaction.
"You don’t need to be afraid of me," he said, his tone evening out into something closer to conversational. "I haven’t come here to harm anyone, and I don’t intend to. I’m here as a student — nothing more than that." He paused, letting it settle. "Which makes you my classmate. And my roommate."
The words helped, marginally. Some of the acute tension in Simon’s frame settled into something more manageable — not comfort, exactly, but a notch below crisis.
He remained careful, however. Extremely careful. He had no intention of saying or doing anything that might produce displeasure in the being sitting across from him.
The problem, which he was acutely aware of, was that he wasn’t entirely sure where the lines were. He was a commoner. He hadn’t grown up with tutors drilling etiquette into him, hadn’t spent his childhood learning the precise protocols for navigating interactions with nobility, let alone his mind briefly shied away from the full weight of it this. Whatever the correct way to behave in this situation was, he genuinely didn’t know it, and not knowing it made him more careful still, which made everything stiffer, which made him more aware of the stiffness, which made him more careful.
It was not a comfortable cycle.
Necrotize assessed the atmosphere in the room and decided, with the pragmatic instinct of someone who had navigated a great many awkward silences across a very long existence, that it needed to be broken by someone. That someone was evidently going to be him.
"So... which department are you in, Simon?"
Simon straightened almost imperceptibly at the question. A direct, answerable question. Solid ground.
"My lord ... I’m a student in the Alchemy Department."
"Alchemy Department." Necrotize turned the words over with what appeared to be genuine interest, his gaze going slightly distant in the way of someone making new connections. "Hm."
"Why Alchemy?" Necrotize asked.
Simon blinked. "My lord?"
"You chose the Alchemy Department. Why?"
The question was simple enough. Simon opened his mouth to give the answer he had prepared for exactly this kind of question, the one that sounded reasonable and composed and wouldn’t draw attention to anything.
Then he looked at the person asking it.
Necrotize was watching him with the particular quality of attention that made evasion feel pointless. Not threatening. Just... present. Like he would hear whatever was underneath the prepared answer anyway and was simply waiting to see which one Simon would choose to give.
Simon gave the honest one.
"Because it’s the one subject where it doesn’t matter where you come from." He paused, then continued more carefully. "Swordsmanship favours people who’ve been training since childhood. Magic favours people with strong affinities, and strong affinities tend to run in noble bloodlines. But Alchemy is mostly knowledge and patience. You either understand the theory or you don’t. Your family name doesn’t change how the compounds react."
Necrotize considered this.
"That’s a practical way of thinking about it."
"I’m a practical person, my lord."
"Clearly." There was something in his tone that wasn’t quite amusement but was adjacent to it. "How did you get here? Silvercast doesn’t admit many commoners."
Simon was quiet for a moment.
"I studied. For a long time." He looked at his hands briefly, then back up. "I couldn’t afford a tutor so I used the public library in the city. I went every day for four years. When the entrance exam came around I sat it and passed."
"You taught yourself."
"Yes, my lord."
Necrotize said nothing for a moment. He simply looked at Simon with an expression that was difficult to read — not pity, not admiration exactly, but something attentive and quiet that made Simon feel, in a way he couldn’t quite explain, like he had been seen clearly.
"That required considerable determination," Necrotize said finally.
Simon didn’t know what to say to that. He settled for a small nod.
A silence followed — not the painful, suffocating kind from earlier, but something easier. Simon noticed, after a moment, that his hands were still. Not trembling. Not gripping the edge of the bed.
Still.
He had been talking to the God of Destruction for several minutes without his body staging a complete revolt.
He became aware of this fact.
His hands immediately began to tremble again.
Necrotize leaned back slightly, his expression settling into something that Simon was beginning to recognise as genuine curiosity rather than the prelude to something terrifying.
"Tell me something," he said. "What is the foundational principle of Alchemy? The thing that everything else builds from."
Simon blinked.
It was such a basic question. First-year, first-week material. The kind of thing he could answer in his sleep.
He answered it.
"Transformation," he said. "The conversion of one substance into another through a controlled process. Everything in Alchemy comes back to that. You’re never creating something from nothing — you’re changing what already exists into something different."
Necrotize was quiet for a moment.
"You need to understand what something is before you can change it," Simon continued, gaining a small amount of momentum now that he was on solid ground. "That’s why Alchemists spend so much time on theory before they ever touch a compound. If you don’t understand the base nature of what you’re working with, the transformation either fails or goes wrong in ways you can’t predict."
"Understanding before action," Necrotize said.
"Yes, my lord."
Necrotize looked at the middle distance for a moment with that slightly distant expression Simon had already seen twice today.
"Everything eventually becomes something else," he said quietly. "Given enough time. Given enough force. I suppose that’s true at every scale."
Simon wasn’t entirely sure what to say to that. It sounded like agreement, but it also sounded like something larger than agreement — like something that came from having watched the principle play out across a timeframe Simon couldn’t fully imagine.
He settled for a small nod. A silence followed. Not uncomfortable. Just... quiet.
After a moment Necrotize asked another question. Then another. Each one was simple, foundational, the kind of thing a curious person asks when they genuinely want to understand rather than to test. Simon answered each one as clearly as he could, occasionally catching himself mid-explanation and remembering who he was talking to, then continuing anyway because stopping felt stranger than going on.
At some point he stopped noticing that his hands weren’t shaking.
When Necrotize finally said he was going to sleep and that Simon should do the same, Simon stood, nodded, and moved to his side of the room on steadier legs than he’d had an hour ago.
He lay down and stared at the ceiling.
I just spent an hour explaining basic Alchemy to the God of Destruction, he thought. And he listened to all of it.
He was also going to have to do this every night. Share a room with him. Wake up across from him. Navigate whatever version of normal that turned out to be.
He wasn’t sure what to do with that information either. He filed it away and closed his eyes.
***
A room with no light to speak of.
Shelves lined every wall from floor to ceiling, packed with books whose spines caught nothing, there was nothing to catch. The darkness was total, and yet somehow the room’s character survived it. The quality of the furniture, the weight of the silence, the particular stillness of a space that was used only by someone who preferred not to be observed, all of it communicated something about its occupant without requiring illumination.
At the centre of the room sat a desk buried under open documents and scattered grimoires, their pages dense with notation that would have been illegible even in better light. Between them, a single candle burned. Its flame was wrong, not the warm amber of ordinary fire but a cold, faint blue that suggested the candle was producing something other than light.
Beside it, a large crystal orb. And within the orb, a face.
"Everything you’ve reported today, all of it is accurate, Nicholas?"
The figure visible in the orb wore a dark robe with the hood drawn forward, features lost entirely to shadow. The voice that came through was measured, but something underneath it wasn’t.
Nicholas sat on his side of the connection in his chair, his expression precisely what it always was, calm, unreadable, giving nothing away to anyone who hadn’t earned the right to read it. He had relayed the day’s events in full. Every detail. Every development.
The robed figure’s composure frayed slightly at the edges.
"We cannot allow this to derail what we’ve built. The Dark Order has been working toward this for years. One variable does not undo everything." A pause that contained more anxiety than the words did. "Necrotize being here changes nothing. Lord Morthos has given us his blessing. We will see this through."
Nicholas gave a single, slow nod.
The figure severed the crystal orb’s connection without ceremony. The orb went dark. The blue candlelight continued its cold, quiet burning.
Nicholas remained in his chair.
He leaned back gradually, until his head rested against the high back of it, and raised one hand to cover his eyes. He stayed like that for a long moment, not resting, not thinking, or perhaps thinking about exactly one thing.
"...Necrotize."
The name sat in the dark room and didn’t echo.
