Dire Straits Read Online Free PDF

persisted, it became harder and harder to ignore as a legitimate branch of magic.  Like Rune Magic, it was powerful and required a great knowledge base. The only difference was the type of knowledge—Rune Magic focused more on runes, lore, history. Alchemy required a heavy scientific foundation. But without alchemy, such things as the silver and rune bullets and thousands of other items would not exist.
    Sympathetic magic was often called charlatan magic. Empathy, telepathy, mind control, dream reading—these and other similar magic were the purview of sympathetic magic. Especially talented practitioners could even persuade the body to heal itself at an accelerated rate, and while it was nothing like the stories made it out to be, the healing ability had saved many a life.  But unlike Rune Magic and Alchemy, which required extensive study, sympathetic required training one's mind; it required strong control over one's mind, and then learning to handle the minds of others. It was also an imprecise art. Reading a mind, interpreting dreams, was not as simple as reading words upon a page. It was more like looking at a page that had gotten wet and caused the ink to run and trying to make sense of what was left.
    In addition to mastering the mind, Transformative magic required complete mastery of the body; it required changing one's body via magic, and it could be a brutal thing to learn. More than a few mages had died in the attempt to master transformative magic. But the prize for mastering it was the ability to shift shapes, to become something new. Transformative mages generally mastered two forms in their lifetime. The highly skilled could learn three, even four. Rare was the mage who had mastered more. Of the five, it was the most dangerous branch to master.
    Necromancy was the most esoteric of the branches, almost more a subcategory of Rune Magic, than a branch of its own. Many described it as the shadow of Rune Magic. Certainly it was true that all necromancers started out as practitioners of Rune Magic and simply went down the path of contorting and twisting their energies, learning to see the shadows and the dark and everything that dwelt in them. Bannick had once met a necromancer who described necromancy as learning a terrible secret—it could not be unlearned, it could not be taken back; a necromancer had to learn to live with the knowledge, because once on the path of necromancy, there was no getting off it.
    Though necromancers were held in awe and even fear, for they, more than any other magic user, came from a sordid history, they had a true and proper place in magic. Necromancers alone could interact with the dead, reading to some degree their final thoughts, final emotions, even occasionally the last things they had seen.  Ghosts, poltergeists, vamphir—these were the dominion of necromancers.
    Then there were the dires. Any alchemist or rune mage could make a dire, but once made, only a necromancer could destroy it.
    Bannick sipped his coffee as he continued to watch Ezell. Though necromancers had a handful of options when killing a dire, the dire cage was the most effective. It literally confined the dire to a space—the stable in this case—and steady unwove all the magic that had first brought the dire into being.
    In lesser dires, this was a simple enough process and took only moments. The final stage of a dire cage burned whatever was left of the remains, along with whatever else was trapped in the cage, ensuring that no part of the dire remained.  In most cases, destroying the dire took only minutes. Bystanders typically only saw the capture and the burning as the unweaving of the magic itself was too quick and subtle.
    With a dire demon, however—and one that had been growing in power for nearly a hundred years—it would take time. There were faster methods, but they were draining, dangerous. With much of their energy spent just to trap it, better to move slow and steady than risk screwing up