"What did you think of the class?" He heard Viktor ask a great voice next to him. The accent was that of the city of Genbofen itself.

Looking back, Viktor saw another student trotting forward to catch up with him as he left the classroom. He appeared to be the same age as Viktor, with a neat head of blond hair and a fuzz of beard on his chin, trimmed in the style of what Viktor believed was the fashion of the imperial capital. He also weighed between five and ten kilos more than Viktor himself. The student clutched to his chest a half-open backpack with scrolls and a quill sticking out.

"Fascinating. Better than he had expected. "

Better than you had hoped for? What do you mean by that? "

“Uh… It doesn't matter. It has truly been everything he had hoped it would be. "

"Professor Theodria is certainly an excellent speaker, right?"

"It is obvious that he is a man of great intelligence and a scholar of the arcane arts."

"Extremely," the other young man agreed enthusiastically. "Was this your first class?"

"Yes. Also yours? "

"Yes."

The two young men stopped in the corridor on which the classroom opened in which a lecture on mana control formulas was being held, where the bustle of the other students continued to advance and left them behind.

"Excuse me, I forgot to introduce myself," said Viktor's classmate, who almost dropped the bulky bag as he dropped one of his hands to reach out to him friendly. "Herwin Reiss."

"Viktor Drichey." Uncertainly, Viktor reciprocated the other's gesture, and they both shook hands. It was a very different greeting from the one his roommate had given her.

"Where are you from?" Herwin asked cordially.

Chipped. A small town. I don't think you've heard of him. "

"Have you been in Genbofen long?"

"Three days."

"And what do you think of the school?"

"It's unbelievable, to tell the truth."

"Yes, I have to agree with the diagnosis, as Professor Theodria would say," Herwin commented with a chuckle.

"I gather that you are from Genbofen"

"Correct. I live with my mother, who is a widow. Now I am the man of the house; I have been since I was thirteen. But the inheritance my father left us will not last forever. So I'm studying at school, following in my father's footsteps, actually. He was a respected Conjurer. And now I am doing my own career; Like my father, I will specialize in the school of Conjuration with a focus on the sub-school of Healing, I will be something like an arcane Doctor. "

"I guess school is nothing new for someone like you," Viktor commented admiringly.

“I don't know what to tell you about that. This city has a good amount of emotions for citizens and visitors. I guess you've already heard of the 'Tomb Raider'. "

"The 'Tomb Raider'?" Viktor repeated, his pale expression of uncertainty beginning to show anxiety. "N ... no."

"Well, I am surprised by that revelation, friend Viktor," Herwin said, then led him to the side of the hall, they looked like a couple of conspirators. "Right now there is no talk of anything else among the students of the school, right now, since the second body disappeared from the morgue in the cemetery."

Viktor felt an involuntary chill run down his spine like a drop of icy water.

“They say that Father Albert has been furious about the matter. He has asked the city council to post soldiers at the entrance to the cemetery in order to prevent it from happening again. "

"Father Albert?"

"The priest of Mortis of the church of the six great gods."

"And who is the 'Tomb Raider'?" Viktor asked nervously.

“The name has its origin in the popular fable that parents tell their children to scare them and make them behave well. But now it seems that the "Tomb Raider" is not a simple scary tale for children, after all. The first bodies began to disappear at the end of last year. Three in a few months. The first was hardly missed, since it belonged to a hanged criminal. The second was, apparently, that of a beggar who had died of cold just before the Temple of the triumvirate. The third was from a man they had taken from the river. But now two more have disappeared within a week, both from the funeral chapel of the cemetery itself. "

"But who would do such a thing?" Viktor asked, horrified. "And because?"

“Valto, Professor Staudinger's apprentice, overheard some of the veteran members speaking in Staudinger's office. They fear it is the work of necromancers. "

Viktor felt the blood drain from his cheeks. Necromancers. The very scourge of all life and of the life of his father in particular. That was what he had heard his father say on several occasions. They were a plague and the deadly enemies of the priests.

Viktor hated the very idea of ​​their existence. It was inconceivable to him that anyone would want to interfere with Mortis's plans and desecrate the final resting place of the dead and then, on top of that, return the dead to an unholy and inhuman life for their own benefit, to carry out their own plans. insidious.

He had come to a city where a madman, murderer, or even summoner of the dead, spread terror during the night hours. And three days before, Genbofen seemed to offer him so many promises… Now the thought of spending another night in the city disturbed him deeply.

Erich Lieter had also heard the rumors regarding the 'Tomb Raider'. He, however, was less convinced by the idea that the ghostly body looter was a practitioner of black magic.

"In a city as big as this, all kinds of doctors, surgeons, magicians and other researchers work," Erich said as Viktor realized that he was inviting another jug ​​in the tavern after class on Erich's side. “Not everyone is licensed for their professions, believe me. Dangerous madmen or advanced thinkers, they all need to get somewhere the bodies they use for their studies. And the desperate ones immoral enough to do the dirty work and exhume corpses from the graves for a modest price abound. "

Erich took another sip from the mug and fixed Viktor with a knowing look.

“Not all the adversities in this world are due to black magic. There is enough evil in the hearts of men that we also need necromancers and demons. "

♦ ♦ ♦

As the days of mutual confinement in their shared room had passed, Viktor grew fond of the disheveled and rebellious Erich.

There was something secretly charismatic about the unruly apprentice of magic. And on the part of him, Erich seemed to like the company of someone as young and naive and as easy to impress or scandalize as Viktor.

Since he was new to the life of a commercial city, and still innocent to most worldly events, Erich could offer him stories of youthful exuberant excess in a city that had almost everything a rebellious young man could wish for.

Erich also had an absorbed listener when he wanted to expose what he thought was wrong with the world or, to be more precise, what was wrong with the School of Magic or 'School of Fossils', as he preferred to call it.

It wasn't long before it became clear to Viktor that if Erich couldn't afford to live in a better place it was because he had found other things to spend his pay on.

Erich would rather spend his money on debauchery and crazy drinking days than on comfortable accommodation.

The loft was located on a street that overlooked the poorer parts of the city, but it was the only place Erich and Viktor could afford to live. There were three other people who shared the dilapidated building with them.

Enye Hawk, their landlady witch, occupied the ground floor. She had told Viktor that the rooms on the first floor were rented by a famous actor, one Frix Liverti. In reality, Frix was a Belladonna consumer fond of seducing the latest young star trying to achieve fame in the theater.

The rooms on the second floor were used from time to time by one of the city's most highly regarded merchants. Enye Hawk assured Viktor that she was too discreet to mention her name, to accommodate her cousin during her frequent trips to Genbofen from the imperial court in the capital.

That left only the third-floor outbuildings, which were really nothing more than the plainly decorated attic of the dilapidated building where Viktor and Erich resided in their thin-walled rooms.

All floors could be accessed by a precarious wooden staircase that climbed to the top of the building from the front door. It led directly onto the smelly street that ran a sewage canal.

So that was life in Genbofen, Viktor thought as he tried to fall asleep that night in an uncomfortable bed in a drafty loft, set in a city full of people whom he, Herwin and Erich aside, seemed not liking them without even meeting him, and with a body thief or possibly something worse loose on the streets.

Viktor couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. His dream was not quite what he had hoped it would be in reality.

But at least he was already finding his place in the magic school. Nothing could really dampen his enthusiasm for the path he had started down, and that was the only thing that really mattered.

After only two or three years, his training would conclude and he could return to Chipped with his beloved sister Karen.

As his eyes closed, he saw her face, her swan neck and almond eyes so similar to his mother's, her shiny hair, the luster of her braids, like moonlight on a lake at midnight, that framed the delicate pale features.

So much like her mother… So different from her father… And then, surprisingly, the raven-black figure of his father, devoid of feelings, appeared with total clarity in his mind.

He would no longer be the lonely son of Brechtal Drichey, priest of the god of death.

It would be Viktor Drichey, the master magician.

Yes, he liked that definition. Curled up under the rough fur blanket on the thin straw pallet of his bed, he mentally repeated the title over and over as sleep overcame him.

Yes. Viktor Drichey, the Master Magician.

And then, as sleep finally took hold of him, one last obsessive image appeared in her mind and dreams of him.

It was a face he had never seen before, a face he could never have seen in his life. A hideous bandaged face with a dire yellow eye that peered through the bloodstained cloth, and a mouth that was a ruin of shrunken gums and long rotten teeth.

In spite of everything, Viktor somehow knew who it was, although at that moment he was unaware of its importance.

It was the face of the Tomb Raider.