“No, it happened a little while later when I was in the forest looking for ingredients and then again later when I found the bandit camp I told you of.” Albin pressed the palms of his hands together as he listened. I could see him putting the pieces of the puzzle together as I spoke.
“I didn’t really notice anything until a little after killing all of the bandits and walking back towards the city. It was rather scary to find myself walking through the forest with my sword covered with blood when only a moment ago I was perfectly calm.”
“You said this all happened after this dream of yours. What exactly happened in the dream?” Albin asked, almost interrupting me.
“Well, I was in a strange place that I knew I had never been to yet felt very familiar. It was in a temple of sorts and there were many other people there all kneeling to the altar. I had no control over myself and I followed by kneeling as well, then the priest that was there used a dagger to leave a small cut on my hand before he started chanting softly. When I looked back up I saw an eye formed entirely from blood, it was speaking but I couldn’t understand it until its very last words.”
“And what were those words Arthur?” Albin was standing at this point and leaning over his desk. I could see the desire, no, the need to learn what I dreamt of.
“Wake up child. It is time.” I said exactly like the eye said to me. Albin nearly leapt back out of shock at my sudden change in tone and I almost gasped. There was the evidence, now I only hoped that I could be helped by Albin and the divine magic of Solarius.
“You are not well Arthur. I think I may have a way to help you, but you will need to return to this place later this evening. I have never personally done an exorcism before but I know of the magic and I will have some help in doing so.” I could see his hands were shaking as he walked back to his chair, he was worried or surprised about what he just saw.
“So that means you have a way to fix whatever it is that is wrong with me?” I asked, I didn’t know what an exorcism was but it sounded rather strange.
“We have a method that may work, but that entirely depends on what you are suffering from. The most likely possibility is a demon is possessing you, though given your independence and self awareness the demon is either very weak or you are very strong willed. The preparations will take most of the remaining day so I will need to ask you to return to us then. If you so wish you may stay until we are done, but I assume you have something to do to fill the time with.”
I soon left the temple with a small feeling of hope in my soul I hadn't felt in some time. As I stepped off the stairs leading to the front entrance I looked back up to the temple and looked at the symbols carved into the top face of the temple. Humanoids in metal armor were carved into the stone like protectors and it gave me the feeling that I was being protected.
I left for the eastern district to sell off some of the jewelry that I took from the bandits as I was still in serious need of money for my experiments and practicing. I found a few stores that sold trinkets, gemstones, and other apparel items and sold a handful of silver rings and necklaces for what I assumed was around held their value. When I was done I counted up all my money and found that I have just over thirty five silver coins which equaled one gold and fifteen silver coins. It still wasn't enough to buy even the least powerful of mana stones but it was progress and I still had more jewelry to sell and potions to make.
I spent the rest of the day practicing my ritual magic in the old abandoned warehouse where I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I made a bit of progress but for anything substantial I would need a mana stone to use actual tier one spells in the rituals.
**********
I returned to the temple at eight o’clock that night when the sky was getting rather dark. The streets were mostly empty and the few guards and people that were still about kept their distance from me as I did the same to them. When I climbed up the stairs to the front door of the temple I found the young priest Quintin there waiting for me.
“Good evening Mr. Arthur. I am here to show you the way.” Quintin smiled softly as he brought me inside the temple and closed the door behind us.
Quintin led me towards the door at the back of the room to the stairway and we started walking down under the ground. We walked down three floors before we stopped and entered a hallway carved from stone. Along each side were three doors and we entered the first one on the right side.
Inside was a square room about ten meters in length and width, in the middle was what looked like a complicated ritual spell with a handful of mana stones in a pattern I didn't understand. Albin was there in the room alongside two other priests that I assumed were a rank or two below his own based on the designs of their robes.
“Ah, there you are Arthur. We are almost done with our preparations if you would just give us a moment.” Albin smiled and waved to me as he spoke. I just nodded in response before he was back down on the floor finishing up with the preparation with the ritual spell.
About five minutes later the three were done with their preparations and Albin started speaking again. “Now if you would please stand in the middle of the formation.” Following his instructions I stepped over the mana stones and what appeared to be enchanting in and stood in the very middle which was only around two feet of space.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Is this a ritual spell you are using for this exorcism?” I asked as I took my place.
“Oh, you know about ritual magic. Where did you learn about that?” One of the other priests half jokingly asked as he took his position one third of the way around the formation from each of the other priests.
“Well I am a mage, I just recently started learning about rituals and how to cast them. Though if I am to make any significant progress anytime soon I will need to invest in a mana stone which will cost me five gold coins from the guild.”
“So you belong to the guild, and from what it sounds like they charge mana stones at cost. Anywhere else would charge you at least seven for a petite mana stone, though the legality of those establishments should be taken into account.”
“Not to be rude, but now is not the time for such conversations. We are about to start the exorcism.” Albin interrupted the conversation I was having with the unnamed priest. All three started focusing entirely on the ritual which at first was nothing notable but soon the mana stones and magic ink started to glow brighter and brighter.
I felt the divine magic flowing like blood between the mana stones and the ink. It started as a soft and gentle grasp around myself before it slowly became stronger and more forceful until I could feel the ritual magic beginning to work. The three priests started chanting and directly the flow of magic towards me. I could feel it working as I looked around the room until suddenly the world around me faded into black and my vision went blurry.
When I next opened my eyes I was back in the room with the altar where all the people were kneeling, only this time I was alone aside from the eye of blood floating about the altar that was looking at me intently. It remained silent for several seconds as if it was studying me.
“You cannot survive without me, child. The hatred, the wrath that I offer you will be your only way to victory. Without it you will fall and fall again and again.” The voice was rough and deep just as I remembered it the first time I saw it.
“Who are you? Why am I here? What have you been doing to me?” I asked as I rose from my kneeling position standing before the eye with a weary soul. I couldn’t feel anything physically pushing or wearing me down which meant that it was likely some sort of magical phenomenon that happened just by being near it.
“I am not here to harm you child, I am here to help you. I know you do not remember what we were, our enemies did their best to ensure neither of us would live another day, but here we are anyways. That is why you must trust me, to recover your memories of who you once were. You must allow me to help you child.” I could somewhat feel the emotions of the eye, it was telling the truth when it said it was here to help. It did care about me, and somehow it knew me, knew who I was in the past. But I didn’t really want that.
“I want to be happy, but I can’t be happy if I am killing people with that mindset like I was before. That isn’t how a normal person lives their life.” I looked up to the eye as it stared at me without any movement aside from the flowing blood.
“You want to spend your life with that young woman.” The eye said, the sadness evident in its voice. “You will never truly be happy with her, because you will never keep her. Regardless of how long it takes we will have this conversation again, no matter how many times you must cheat death to do so.”
I was about to speak, to ask how it knew about how I died before when the dream world around us faded into black and I left. I tried reaching out to get an answer, but I could do nothing as I was forced to return to the real world.
********
I woke up again in the same room where the ritual magic was done. I was laying on the cold stone floor in the middle of the ritual formation with all the ink and mana stones surrounding me. The three priests looked at me with a mixture of worry and relief as I raised my head and the two I didn’t know the names of rushed to my side.
“Are you alright?” The youngest of the two asked. I recognized him as the one who asked how I knew about ritual magic, the other had remained quiet the entire time aside from the chanting during the ritual itself.
“I think I’m alright. Was that supposed to happen? I would have imagined it would have just removed any spells I might have placed on me.”
“Not exactly. The intention of the spell was to force out any outside influence that we would detect, I am certain that your eyes were not supposed to start glowing red as you stood in the middle.” Albin started to clean up the formation around me as he spoke, he started with the mana stones by placing them in a small bag. The other two priests started to clean up the ink with pieces of cloth that absorbed it.
“So what exactly did happen? I feel a lot better than I was before this exorcism.” A few awkward looks were shared between each of the priests in the room before Albin stood to explain what happened.
“At first we didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, the only odd thing that happened was that you closed your eyes. Not exactly something that calls for our attention. Then as the ritual was starting its scan for anything out of the ordinary your eyes shot open, they were glowing red like a demon. You didn’t say anything, not a word came from your mouth so we continued. We found the source of this personality shift you described and tried to do something about it when we discovered it was no simple demon.”
“Then what was it? I saw the eye again during that time and I was back in the same place. It said a bunch of nonsense and that I wouldn’t be happy without the anger it was giving me.” Albin and the two other priests looked at me again with increasing concern as I told them what I saw at the end of the ritual.
“Well we do know that it wasn’t a demon, it was something else. A demon would have used your physical body to try and stop the ritual from finishing as we in the circle of fire are established enemies of the demons. It was more likely one of the fey with connections to demons that was possessing you. You should just be thankful that it allowed you to go without a fight, those fey can be rather chaotic at times, even the good ones.”
I remained silent for a while as I thought about Albin’s words. I had heard of the fey several times throughout my journeys but never anything definitive, I knew they were powerful beings but this was the first time I heard them compared to demons in terms of power.
‘If that eye was some sort of fey then why was it so interested in me? Why did it start influencing my personality? Why did I think I would never be happy with Calavia? How did it know about how I have died before?’ I was left with several questions and I was worried that unlike most people who wouldn’t get an answer to these things I would, and I wouldn’t like that answer. It acted like it knew me well while I didn’t know anything about it.