“You bastard,” The Ahsepian mage said to Vell as he finally cornered him in a pantry, as the Dread Mage wanted to ‘borrow’ a few bottles of wine before he left.

There hadn’t been time or an opportunity to talk to him in the meantime, as he had been busy with his business selling his banshee, and it had already been the next day.

“What?” Vell said it absentmindedly.

“I don’t know why you pulled that stunt, but by all that is right, it must have disqualified your apprentice, making mine the winner. You lost.”

“Oh well, what’s fair is fair.” He said.

That frustrated the Ahsepian mage. “You don’t take anything seriously, do you? You’ll rue that attitude one day. I’ll swear by my country and my honor!”

And in return, that frustrated Vell: “What country? What honor? You want the truth?” He said this, quickly turning around and looking at the Ahsepian with his blood-red eyes. “You’re a worm; you’re nothing, not to me or the world. Who gives a damn what you think or what your little country is or has been? Neither the mages here nor the world care. We’re born unthinking and thoughtless, and we die uncaring and inconsiderate. I’ve seen it enough times.”

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“How dare you talk to me like that?” The offended mage responded, “Some of us still care. Just because you have lost your luster for life doesn’t mean everyone else has. Honor, compassion, empathy, and the little things that life offers—these are the things that are important. I can only imagine that your black deeds in life and those without souls you surround yourself with have drained all of that out of you.”

The Ahsepian mage turned around and said, “I only feel shame and pity for you, whereas before I felt anger. When I was young, I imagined you as a great monster, but you're just a hollow shell.”

Then he left.

Vell would have time to think about that confrontation.

The next few days he would spend traveling to Irath with Sonder, the Irathy mages, and their convoy.

He thought that fulfilling Sonder’s wish was ‘caring about the little things’ but maybe he misunderstood what that meant.

And then Vell felt great shame, not because of the words of the Ahsepian mage but because of the life he had led in the past.

He had done many things he wasn’t proud of and many other things he wished he hadn’t, all for the goal of power, and now that he had reached the pinnacle of it, he didn’t care for it.

Even now.

He raised a little girl for the dead, which was against all moral codes in the world, and played along with her wishes, but that didn’t mean that he cared for her very much.

He even thought about selling her—not for the paltry sum of a bronze tau—but there were things that he would have sold her for.

He needed to change, and he had been trying to change for longer than the Ahsepian mage was alive.