Holin looked at the caravan’s doorway, through which his student had stormed off. His heartbeat slowed down, and the sound of blood rushing through his ears faded.

This is getting more and more intriguing.

Twice now he had seen the markings on Gase’s chest grow. Each time it was accompanied by that inexplicable sense of danger. The man wasn’t a threat, not to him at least. So what were his instincts warning him about?

He glanced at the mage. The man was busy scribbling furiously in an open book on the desk. The quill in his hand darted to the inkwell, leaving small drops of ink on the wood as it returned to the page. The mage didn’t seem to notice.

“Thoughts?” Holin asked as he scanned over all the things in the caravan. He reached out and plucked a vial out of its secured place on a rack.

The mage answered without looking up. “Spiritual injury.”

Holin heard the girl suck in a breath behind him. He whistled and turned the vial in his hands over, watching as the brownish liquid at the bottom mixed with the clear one drifting on top.

Like all Thalsmen, and every other person with magical potential, he had been warned of damaging his will. And he had seen why on those who didn’t heed the warning.

“How bad is it?” He asked.

“I don’t know. No way to know for certain, other than forcing it to manifest. But it is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I can say that much. I should be able to find out more with a few more tests.”

A damaged will. Or spiritual injury, as the mage put it. He shook his head; that couldn’t be all there was to it. His gut told him that there was more.

Holin replaced the vial and lifted the lid off of a strange glass container with a long neck that twisted into a circle. He inspected the glass lid in his hand. It was clear and smooth. Expensive.

His eyes strayed to the coffin in the far side of the caravan, lingering on the dark stone. He didn’t know much about mountainheart, but he knew enough to recognise it. That coffin would be worth half its weight in gold. Not something you’d expect to see with a mage from some young city in the middle of nowhere.

Not to mention that mages capable of resurrection were rare. A mage capable of that and also specialised in healing… such a person would be welcomed into a position of power nearly anywhere.

“And you are certain it can’t be something else? You did only use that fancy plate of yours. Couldn’t there have been some mistake in the runes?”

The mage paused in his writing and gave Holin a flat look. “However much I dislike the man who made that array, his skill is undeniable. That plate is nothing less than a work of art.”

“Of course, of course,” Holin said with a nod. Who did he say made it again? Aylin? Alenin? Something like that. He didn’t recognise the name, but someone else might.

He placed the glass lid back onto the container. A frown creased his brows. It was a bit loose, wasn’t it? He twisted the top of the lid and watched it spin. After it stopped, he took hold of the long neck of the container and gave it a little shake. The glass lid banged against the sides of the neck with a loud racket.

“Stop that,” came the stern voice of the mage. Holin turned to the mage and held up his hands.

“What are you even doing here?” The mage asked with narrowed eyes. “You asked me to heal those markings. Did you know what it was?”

“Not at all,” Holin said. “I’m just as interested in finding out more as you are. The man is my student, after all.”

“Student?” The mage was quiet for a moment before he nodded. “Well, if you want to find out more, then I’ll need him here so he can answer some questions and I can test a few spells. It would be beneficial to all; you two learn what’s wrong with him, and I can figure out what went wrong with the resurrection.”

“Sure, if he agrees, there’ll be no problem.”

The mage met his gaze, sharp green eyes not flinching from his pale red stare.

“Very well,” the mage said finally.

Holin smiled. “I’ll go find him then.”

He made his way out of the caravan. Picking up the most recent tracks on the ground took little more than a glance.

He was a few strides away from the caravan when the voice of the girl reached his ears. “Master Lerann, the spiritual damage couldn’t have come from the spell, right? In Eischer’s treatise, he wrote that it is impossible for one person to harm the spirit of another.”

“That is the consensus. But there is much more that we don’t know than things we do. Many of the widely accepted theories were made by the equivalent of throwing mud against a wall and seeing what sticks. That is not to say that…”

The voices faded into the distance as Holin passed other carriages, wagons and people. It didn’t take him too long to find Gase. His student sitting near the edge of the camp. Despite the length of the seemingly aimless route he had taken, he had ended up not that far from the mage’s caravan. He seemed to be busy staring into the forest with the boy sitting near him.

Holin glanced at the marks on his body as he strode up. There was another crescent of marks on his back that Holin had noticed earlier. They were on the same side of his torso, nearly identical from the first, stretching from his shoulder to hip.

Yet, despite him focussing on the marks, Holin’s instincts remained silent. That was throwing him off even more. Was there no danger, or was the danger gone now? If so, why was it gone?

Holin came to a stop a next to the pair. For a long while, no one spoke, and Holin looked at the woods. The bright green and the warm sun were a welcome change to the glowing plants and snow-covered forests of the north. Nostalgic, in a way.

“I died.”

Holin raised an eyebrow and looked down at Gase.

“Not now,’ Gase clarified. “Back in my old life. I remembered dying in a war.”

“A war, hmm?”

“You don’t know of any that were fought recently, by any chance?” His student asked with a self-deprecating tone.

“Assuming you don’t mean a war against beasts, then no. Last real war that I know of was the Skin War.”

“The Skin War?”

“Between the eastern central cities and the animari tribes living near the border of their jungle.”

“Animari…” His student rolled the word. “Beastfolk, right?”

“I don’t think they have anything to do with beasts, but that’s what people call them.”

“I suppose you’re right. People call you beastblighted, after all.”

More truth in that name than you might think.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Gase shook his head. “The war I died in was between people.”

Holin shrugged. “Maybe a city siege? Don’t know of one recently though. But, if you already died, why care?”

“…I had a family. I need to find them,” as the words left his mouth, Gase glanced at the boy who was now staring at the ground.

Holin caught the wince on his student’s face.

“Well, the mage has some idea of what happened to you at least,” He said. “He wants to test a few more things.”

“Of course he does,” Gase said. Then he shook his head again, more forcefully this time, as if clearing it. He stood up and brushed the dirt from his leggings. “If he can give me back my memories, he can run all the tests he wants.”

----------------------------------------

“Good, you’re back,” The mage said as Gase and Hadi stepped into the caravan after Holin. The man was sitting on the chair where Gase had last seen him. Except now, he faced the desk, with an open book in front of him and a quill in his hand. “I need to ask you a couple of questions. But first; Ivy, try to heal those markings. Let’s see if there is any change.”

“First, I want to know some things,” Gase said. “Whatever that spell of yours did, it brought back some of my memories. Why? And why did I forget them in the first place?”

The mage gave an exasperated sigh and rubbed at his temple. “I’ve already said those aren’t your memories. Whatever you are thinking you are remembering is most likely a result of a spiritual injury.”

“Most likely, so you’re not sure?” Gase pressed.

“I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t know everything, but that doesn’t mean every possibility is equally likely,” the mage said. He spoke slowly as if speaking to a child. “You somehow getting pulled into the body of someone else is, as far as current understanding goes, impossible. Limited our understanding may be, throwing away valid judgments for the sake of one man’s account doesn’t strike me as a wise thing to do. Especially not if there is a perfectly good explanation that doesn’t have that problem. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Could we just assume for the conversation that that is what happened?”

“You can’t draw conclusions from a faulty premise and expect to arrive at the truth,” the mage snapped.

It is precisely a faulty premise that I want to avoid.

Gase bit back the words and took a breath. “Just humour me.”

“…Fine. As far as I can tell, your spirit was damaged in the resurrection. Even if we discount the damage to your mind, the marks on your body is a clear indication of that.”

“My spirit?”

“Yes, your spirit. Your soul, will, reflection, shadow, whatever you wish to call it.”

Gase frowned, he could just remember something along those lines that Y’rid learned at the temple when he was a boy. Something about Tella’nash giving souls to people, so they could use magic?

“What does this mean?”

“Hmm... what do you know of the interaction between the physical and spiritual?”

Again, some half-remembered snippets or phrases came to mind. None of them seemed particularly noteworthy. “Nothing.”

“I suspected as much,” The mage said with another sigh. “The physical shapes the spiritual, and the spiritual shapes the physical. The first part is simple and holds true for everyone. Their physical form, comprised of their body and mind, shapes their spirit. Your experiences, thoughts, memories, physical body; all of these things provide structure to your spirit. For most people, this is inconsequential. Their spirits can’t be damaged, and they will never use them. For all intents and purposes, they might as well not have them.

For mages and… partial mages, horrible term. For anyone magically inclined, the second part comes into play. The stronger your spirit is and the stronger the connection between it and your physical self, the more it influences you. You must have at least heard of how people with magical capability heal faster and age slower than others?”

Gase nodded. Holin did mention that partials heal faster. The ageing bit was new though.

“This is because of the spiritual shaping the physical. It reflects the body and also changes the body to reflect itself,” the mage continued. He paused as he saw Gase frown and tapped his quill on the desk absentmindedly, leaving little dots of ink to stain the wood.

“Imagine staring at your reflection in a pond, except that the reflection moves much slower than you do. Now, imagine that you are also a reflection. If you get wounded; there now is a discrepancy between your body and spirit. Both will work to remove this discrepancy, influencing the other to reflect itself.

While physical healing takes a set time for a given injury, so-called ‘spiritual healing’ is based solely on the strength of the spirit and its connection with the physical. So, a person with a sufficiently powerful spirit can ‘heal’ their physical form quicker and more completely than their body ever could. By the same logic, if your spirit and its connection are weak, it will reflect your body before it could have ‘healed’ anything.

This is the method that I used to attempt to heal you. The rune array inscribed on that disk momentarily strengths the connection from the target’s spirit to their physical form, allowing the spirit to change the body. In your case, however, the spirit was the part that was injured.

As for your’ memories’. Those, I suspect, also comes from the injury to your spirit. Your damaged spirit is changing your physical self, including your mind and memories, to reflect itself. It is bizarre that this occurred by itself, however. The strength of the spirit in non-mages is weak. One would expect your physical form to have changed your spirit before it could affect you.”

“So…” Gase began, taking a moment to process the information. “These markings. They are on my spirit?”

“Yes.”

“And they are injuries of my spirit? But I feel perfectly fine.”

“I don’t know how it will affect you. This has never been done before. There are no records of spells cast by others affecting the target’s spirit. Usually, damage to the spirit only occurs through overextending,” the mage said.

Gase let out a sigh in frustration. Couldn’t anything be simple? “Overextending. What’s that?”

“Placing too much tension on your spirit through the use of magic.”

“Think of it like this,” Holin added. “Your will, or spirit, is like a muscle. You use it, it gets stronger. Your try to pick up something too heavy—use an inscription you can’t handle—you damage it.”

“That’s… one way to think of it,” the mage said. “All mages overextend at some point. A minor injury can simply leave you unable to use magic for a few days, until your spirit healed. More serious ones can lead to memory loss or personality shifts. The most severe cases can turn a man into a drooling idiot or deform his body into a shrivelled husk. We don’t have any idea what the extent of the damage to your spirit is. Which is something that would be of use to both of us. So, unless you have any more questions?”

Gase did. He just didn’t know where to start. Was he going to turn into a ‘shrivelled husk’ or ‘drooling idiot’? The image of seeing his body being slowly deformed in front of his eyes was not a pleasant one.

The mage took his silence as a no and turned to his apprentice. “Ivy, try to heal those markings.”

The woman stepped up to Gase and looked at him. He gave her an absentminded nod, his thoughts still turning over what the mage had said. The white glow, brighter here than it was outside emanated from the pendant around her neck. Gase looked down at his chest as he felt the warmth of the spell take hold. The same glow seemed to shine from his chest, and he could just make out the blood vessels underneath the skin.

Then the glow cut off, the warmth snuffed out as the woman jerked back slightly. She swallowed and shook her head.

“It just falls away. I don’t know how else to describe it. I can feel the spell take hold, but when it reaches the marks… they’re like holes.”

“Fascinating indeed,” The mage muttered. “I have never seen an injury that manifested in this way.”

He turned and dipped the quill in his hand in the inkwell before scribbling down notes.

“In fact,” he continued. “I’ve never heard of one either. Perhaps it is unique to resurrection. Or maybe it is a result of the rune array itself… We’ll try a simple cold array next. Ivy, get the inscriptions you have been practising.”

Gase touched one of the black spots as the apprentice quickly left the caravan. Certainly, if something bad was going to happen; he would have felt something, right? He suddenly felt an uneasy feeling settle in his gut as a something the mage said struck him. The connection works both ways.

“You said the memories of my old life came from my spirit. And that my… physical from was changing it to reflect itself.” – He paused. – “What if I am right? If I am not the one you wanted to bring back. What would happen to them?”

The mage gave him a weary look. “If such a thing did happen; I suspect it would be a struggle between the physical and the spiritual. Your spirit should continue to affect you while it is being changed, until a balance is reached.”

“That means?”

“Some part of both your physical and spiritual mind and memories would fade as they discrepancy between them is removed. Seeing as you are a non-mage, I suspect the balance would be found in favour of the physical.”

“So, I’ll lose my memories, who I am.”

The uneasy feeling slowly turned to dread as he stared at the mage. He knew Y’rid’s memories had been influencing him to some extent, but this...

“Those that hadn’t integrated with the physical, before your spirit changed, yes.”

“We have to stop that,” Gase said quickly.

“You can’t.”

Gase looked around, his eyes falling on the disk on the floor. “That disk. It brought back a piece of myself. You said it’s a balance. What if you tip it in favour of the spirit? Have it change my body before my body can change me?”

The mage seemed surprised for a moment. He opened his mouth to speak but seemed to think better of it. When he spoke, there was a glint in his eyes. A look of anticipation. “…Yes. I could do that. Of course, you wouldn’t want to change into someone else and have your mind altered like that! No, I am confident we could keep you yourself.”

Holin cleared his throat. “You did hear what happens to people who damage their wills, right?”

The mage gave him a glare, but it had absolutely no effect of the hunter.

“All you have to do is nothing,” Holin continued. “Your will would repair itself with minimal spread of... whatever this is.”

Gase shook his head. He couldn’t stand the idea of losing himself. Of not even remembering his daughter’s name. “I have to do this.”

Holin held his gaze for a long while before finally shrugging. “It’s your price to pay.”