“What if I do it wrong?” The boy paused and looked up at Baius, sweat evident under his disheveled straw-colored hair. The symbols under the boy’s feet glowed with ethereal light.

Baius glanced unconsciously at the small graveyard that had amassed in what had once been the garden patch near his hut. Seeds, he decided, were more profitable than corpses. Well, the wrong kind of corpses, anyway.

He turned back to the boy, who followed his gaze with fresh surges of fear. Baius decided, upon sudden reflection, that perhaps initially hiring the boy for the explicit purpose of gravedigging for his prior apprentices might have imparted some impression upon the lad.

Baius clapped him on one shoulder: “Then I shall remember you fondly.” Turning his back such that he did not catch the young man’s now-petrified expression, Baius began to walk away.

He paused.

“Boy.”

The lad turned.

“What is your given name?”

The boy shook his head as if clearing an unseen fog. “I’ve served you for eleven seasons yet.”

“Yes, and done a passable enough job,” Baius waved one hand impatiently. “Now, out with it.”

“Farolf.”

“Yes, very good. Well, as you were, boy.”

The child resumed his posture and motioned as if he were about to begin the incantation.

“Boy?”

The boy turned.

“When you die, I would take it as a courtesy were you not to shriek and flail about in your own entrails for half the night. Die cleanly as a man should.”

“But I’m not yet a man.”

“That is between you and the forest. Do as you will. Just do it quietly. It serves the scroll poorly should my ink go astray.”

Baius nodded once in final approval, and then returned to his hut, and subsequently his scrolls.

Later that night, as the stars rose high in the night sky, the residual howl of wolves was drowned out by an inhuman bellow of rage, one which transcended this mortal plane. Almost as quickly arose the far higher shrieks of conversely human agony.

Baius looked up from his crudely-hewn stool, from where he had begun inscribing upon a new scroll. A streak of ink jaggedly cut across the page as he jerked his hand up in response.

He sighed, arose, and closed his window, drowning out the clamor.

He would go into the forest in the morning and bury the remains alongside that of the others. The garden would continue to flourish with this newest addition to the crop.

Then tomorrow, he would go into town and procure a new apprentice.

A position had just vacated.