Olga was taken to the Healing Room, where Lady Valaya quickly looked her over. With the Dark Poisoning cured, all that was left was for her to sleep off the exhaustion that’d befallen her. And, of course, to eat and replenish herself. She was fine. I knew she would be fine, because I had been the one to heal her by removing the taint in her magic. As far as I understood from Lord Joseph, Dark Mages and Light Mages were natural enemies; since I’d already healed her of Dark Poisoning, no one would suspect her of being a Light Mage. At least, that’s what I hoped for. But that was a fool's hope; I knew, somewhere, at the back of my mind, that the Dark Lords already knew as well, but simply refused to do anything about it. They chose to let Olga be for whatever machinations they might have, because - of course - they would have them. I could only hope that Olga was ready to face what was surely coming for her. I could only hope that whatever talents and abilities she was keeping hidden from me, from everyone, would be enough to save her.

There was no telling what the future held.

With Olga safely asleep in the Healing Room and under Lady Valaya’s care, I moved on back to the Neophyte Dormitories, walked into my personal quarter, locked the door behind me, and slept immediately – dirty robes be damned.

I was tired and hungry, but mostly tired – hunger was, at the very least, the one sensation I was most accustomed to.

Sleep was not difficult to find, but it was far from restful. My body was changing – as my magic, which was apparently a fragment of sorts of Joseph the Red, had told me. It was painful, but in a dull and throbbing sort of way. I felt my bones slowly lengthening and my muscles hardening. A thousand other things were happening inside, a thousand growths that I could hardly pinpoint or explain. The only thing I knew was that everything hurt – everything was aflame. Everything was agony, as though there was a literal fire that blazed within, bringing my blood to a boil. The fact that steam occasionally crawled out from my mouth and nostrils meant I was probably right – to a degree. And so, while sleep came easy, rest was an altogether different affair.

Still, I found some measure of rest, despite everything. I couldn’t quite say that I’ve been through worse, but I was confident in the fact that pain was an old friend – pain, of this level at least, was still somewhat bearable, still outside the limits of the sort of agony that might make me scream.

And so, I slept and dreamed. But my dreams were not my own, for they were not dreams, but memories – scenes and stills of a life I did not live, of a people I did not know, in a city I did not recognize, and surrounded by a family that was not mine. It was strange. Everything about it was strange. Everyone wore strange clothing, skirts and robes instead of pants. And the road they walked on was made entirely of flattened dirt, dry and arid. The buildings I saw seemed to have been constructed using sand and mud.

What was this place? I looked, I saw, but I could not touch. My feet weren’t even on the ground, strange as the thought was. It felt as though I was... looking at a moving painting, while I was somewhere beyond sight, beyond touch.

“This... was my home,” A familiar voice spoke next to me. When I turned, I beheld a man who was probably in his late 40s, with gray streaks on his long hair and eyebrows. His eyes burned with crimson fire, smoldering like coals on a cold night. He was a Dark Mage, then, I realized; this was Joseph the Red. He smiled at me. “At least, this was my home as I remember it.”

I nodded, unsure if there was anything for me to say in that moment. “Where are we?”

“The city had many names, but most called it Catalhoyuk; it is the city of my birth, where my mother gave her life in an attempt to shield me from the darkness. She failed. Many gods rue the day I was born.” Joseph chuckled as he spoke. He then reached out and swiped his hand across the scene that depicted life in the city and changed it to another scene that showed a small house that lacked a door on its walls, save for a rectangular opening on the ceiling with a ladder hanging from it and onto the floor. I assumed that was how they entered and exited the place.

“Where is this city?” I asked, curious now as I have never seen or heard of such a place before. Such a people, they seemed like villagers of some distant and isolated tribe, hidden from the rest of the world.

“It no longer exists,” Joseph answered flatly. “It has not existed for seven thousand years. But, if we were to visit where it once was, then we’d find ourselves somewhere in the domain of the Hittites – if the Hittite tribes still stand at all. Though, I will admit that my knowledge on modern geopolitics might be severely limited. When last I walked this world, Egypt was still the dominant presence among mortal kingdoms.”

I shrugged. “I understood very little of what you just said, Lord Joseph. I don’t know what the Hittites are or what Egypt is.”

“Ah, I had expected as much,” Joseph said. A woman climbed down from the opening on the ceiling, with a baby cradled to her bosom by a cloth wrap. She was a tired-looking woman, face filled with lines and wrinkles. Her hands were thick with callouses and her skin was burned brown by the sun. And yet, she smiled at the babe that dangled over her shoulders. “Look now before you; this place was my home, before the Dark Mages, the first of them, found me and took note of my potential.”

The wall melted, becoming black slag that seemed like lumps of ink. Three figures in black robes stepped forth. The woman screamed and attempted to run up the ladder that would lead her through the ceiling. Before she could, however, one of the robed figures held out an uncaring hand and the woman’s flesh was flayed from her bones. She did not even have time to scream. What remained of her fell to the floor in a bloody heap of smoking flesh and skin, and pale-white bone. The baby cried as it squirmed in the mass that used to be its mother. The Dark Mages then gathered around the crying babe and threw the infant into a hole of shadow and darkness.

The cries disappeared. And all was silent.

“I never knew her, my mother. I never knew the sound of her laughter or her the tenderness of her kiss, or the warmth of her embrace. They took that from me. And I never forgave them for it.” Joseph suddenly said, eyeing the remains of the woman that gave birth to him. I wondered then, for a moment, if the family I’d glimpsed in the beginning of the dream was real or if it was nothing more than Lord Joseph’s imagination, his own dream of what might’ve been. Honestly, I didn’t care. “I like to think that she loved me with all her heart – the only one who ever did.”

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Still, I nodded in something of an understanding. “I never knew my mother. Though, I think I see her at times – in my dreams. But I could never see her face or hear her voice. I knew that she was alive at some point. And I knew that she loved me. But I don’t quite remember any of it.”

“Hah, to think that this fragment of mine would end up in some other orphan,” Joseph chuckled. “I’m either cursed or am just possessed of shite luck. It would’ve been nice if I ended up in someone who had a nice home and a good family.”

I shrugged. “I don’t have either of those things now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have them in the future – the very far future.”

“Well said, boy,” Joseph said. His eyes were melancholic. I recognized those eyes. They were like mine. “Many Dark Mages forget that the first of us broke free from the Light because we wanted to embrace our emotions – both good and bad. Yes, we feed on suffering and agony and souls, but we can also feed on love; I doubt any Dark Mage now is even aware of that. The most prevalent emotion in the Shadow Academy seems to be... hate and rage. My descendants have become drunk with power.”

“You see, Uriel, the Power of the Light comes from peace and tranquility; it comes from the absence of passion – a calm and still mind, devoid of emotion. That is what allows the Followers of the Light to reach Apotheosis, a state of utter and pure detachment from both the spiritual and physical realm.” Lord Joseph explained. I listened attentively; anything I learned from him would be a boon for my future. “Light Magic manifests without destruction; it is swift, clean, and precise. Those killed by the Power of the Light will never feel pain. Its practitioners derive their power through meditation and denial.”

Lord Joseph reached out again. “The Followers of the Dark, on the other hand....”

The scene before us shifted. There was darkness for a brief moment, before the colors returned – muted and dull, filled with shadows and drab gray stone. A child stood at the face of an altar, where a naked woman lay bound, screaming as tears streamed from her eyes. Her hair was disheveled and there were bruises all across her body. “This is where they taught me to harness pain and suffering, to feed on fear and dread, to become the sort of monster that mothers tell their children about at night. This is where they created the Red King.”

The woman screamed in terror as the child approached her. The child, who I figured must’ve been Lord Joseph in his younger years, carried with him an ash-white knife that seemed to have been made entirely of bleached bone. And then, my eyes widened. Lord Joseph harrumphed beside me, almost snorting. “Indeed, they gave me a knife that was made from the bones of my own mother – rather poetic is it not?”

I would’ve vomited if this had not been a dream. Instead, I just felt sick – not to my stomach, but to the very core of my being. This was beyond reason. The Dark Mages were cruel for its own sake. They were cruel because they had the power to be cruel. And they enjoyed it. For a moment, my mind drifted and I heard the screams of the man whose body I had desecrated, whose liver I had pulled, all to satisfy Lady Victoria, my mentor.

“The Followers of the Dark learned to derive their power from powerful emotions,” Lord Joseph explained. “Most of all, however, they learned to harness the pain and suffering of others to feed themselves, to grow in might. They sat and simmered in the depths of loathing of rage, and – somewhere along the way – they forgot to harness power from other emotions, from love, from courage, from defiance.”

The woman screamed as the child took the bone knife and plunged it into her belly. Her screams grew louder as the child sunk his hands into the bleeding orifice. He seemed to be reaching for something inside her – an organ, perhaps. Whatever the case, the woman paled and stopped screaming a few seconds later, her eyes rolling to the back of her head, foam streaming through her open mouth. She was still alive, I figured, but she was unconscious. And that was the greatest mercy she was likely to receive. Blood poured out of her as water poured from a faucet, drenching the stone altar in the crimson of her vitae.

I gulped as the child retched and paled, but forced himself to go onward, regardless.

A few moments later, the boy who would become the Red King pulled out the woman’s still-beating heart and held it up high. He then screamed something in a tongue that, curiously, I did not understand. And then, the heart burned in his hand, set aflame by a torrent of crimson fire, until it became naught but ashes that soon fluttered and dissipated with a slight breeze. Figures in dark robes emerged from the shadows and converged about the boy. They whispered and spoke in a language that I could not understand.

“Before I founded the Shadow Academy to train a new generation of Dark Mages,” Lord Joseph began. “The Followers of the Dark were forced to hide away in the shadows, practicing their arts in secret and very rarely venturing out to steal gifted children from their mothers. The Followers of the Light dominated Agartha; when I was but a Neophyte, like yourself, they were feared and respected by all. Dark Mages were hunted down and killed as though they were little more than animals.”

“I changed all of that,” Lord Joseph continued, smirking. “I tipped the scales and destroyed the balance. It was by my power, by my effort, that the world trembled at the mercy of the Dark Mages. And they still do; I can almost taste the fear and the loathing directed towards us.”

“However,” His gaze became distant and yet downcast all the same. The scene shifted, showing Lord Joseph when he was already older, though still relatively young. He stood side by side with a woman whose hair glimmered like pale-gold, like silver and sunlight. They held hands and were at peace. “Mariah... she was the one who taught me to be more than what the Dark Mages had made me to be – more than what I thought I could ever be. She taught me to love. She taught me to enjoy life. And that, more than anything, more than any spell, more than any ritual, made me stronger.”

My brows furrowed. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m telling you, Uriel,” He answered. “Because I don’t want you to go down the same path as I did. The other Dark Mages are beyond saving, like your mentor who once sought knowledge from me and that Ice Queen; they’re drunk with power, having tasted the souls of entire worlds. They can’t stop. They won’t stop. And they know no other path. That was my greatest mistake, my greatest sin. But you, boy, you can still learn the ways I never thought to teach them – the lessons I failed to impart.”

“And what lesson is that?” I asked now, genuinely curious.

Lord Joseph raised a brow as he turned to me. “Don’t abandon yourself in the pursuit of power. All the magic in the world won’t make a difference in your life if you’re miserable and paranoid, like all the other Dark Mages. Learn to love, learn to embrace yourself, learn to enjoy life for what it is. Of course, do not let go of hate and rage, either – for they are tools, just like every other emotion.”

My brows furrowed. I understood what he said, but I also was confused as to why he bothered to tell me any of that at all. Lady Victoria never told me to abandon any of my human emotions. And most of the Dark Lords and Ladies I’ve met all seemed... somewhat normal. “So... you... you just want me to be completely normal?”

Lord Joseph shrugged. “In a manner; by the time you reach the end of the path before you, however, you will be anything but normal, Uriel.”

“It is time for you to awaken,” He continued. “You have a long day ahead of you, boy. Say hi to Lucifer for me.”