“Personally, I would have just let her kill him.” Alex spoke in between sips of soup which had been lovingly made by our penal laborers. It turned out that when they were allowed to do what they wanted with the ingredients, they were actually really great cooks. The food was helping me calm down from the chaos that was my confrontation with Elina.

“Irebor warriors are about as stubborn as they come. I don’t get what you see in that guy that made you so willing to piss her off like that.”

I gave Alex a solemn look in response. He simply shrugged and went back to his food. Something inside me had pushed me to fight for his life. I didn’t like the thought of senseless murder, even if it was for a cultural cause like with Elina. The situation reminded me a lot of when I had handed the soldiers over to Nicole in exchange for a future favor, an event I was still dreading.

“I just couldn’t let her do that. I don’t know, I just had a feeling that he was someone that would be helpful in the future. I’ve already dealt with enough losses in one day, and I didn’t need another unnecessary loss.” I looked off into the distance to see Wanderer, sharpening a knife with a whetstone.

“I get that. I just hope you don’t come to regret that decision.”

Same here.

***

The funeral pyre we had created stood tall throughout the entire refinery. There was a collective circle around it, watching it slowly cremate the bodies of the fallen. My mind drifted back to Elric and his passing. Crying was a liberty I could afford back then. Now, I just had to force myself to move on. No matter how much it hurt, I couldn’t slow down. Sera probably felt similar about Twig. I wished I could have known the woman judging from how Sera felt about her, but that time had passed. We hadn’t talked too much about the losses we had already experienced even though I felt like we both really wanted to. It just felt like there wasn’t any time to sit down and mourn with each other.

I don’t want to lose any more people.

I hated those words. I hated them because I knew that they were going to be betrayed as I continued down this path. Death was a part of war whether I liked it or not. I might have known them, I might have not, but the deaths that I will experience along my journey would all be on my hands. I can’t stop losses from happening, but I can make sure that not so many happen in the future.

My mind snapped back to reality as I felt an arm fall onto my shoulder. It was Elm, looking wistful as the light of the flames danced across his face. Seeing him next to me soothed a bit of the melancholy.

“Hey Elm?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember that other light mage you mentioned? Back at the camps, you told me I was a little bit like him.”

There was a noticeable shift in his demeanor at the mention. It was the first time in a while where I had actively asked Elm about his past.

“Yeah, I did. What I told you wasn’t entirely true though.”

Huh?

“I did know him for a few weeks, but I was already in the military. Hell, I was already a major.”

“Why did you tell me otherwise?” There was a slight sting of betrayal knowing that his words had been false.

“You think I was going to tell you I was a major when I barely knew anything about you?” I could tell that he almost wanted to laugh at my question. He wasn’t wrong.

“Anyway, I knew him. His name was Elliot. He was a pretty good light mage. Could even heal. When he joined my unit, he was pretty ecstatic to meet me since I already had a few big wins under my belt.” He grimaced before he continued speaking. “It was the 5th campaign against Uril. They'd been ramping up their defenses as we got deeper into their territory. Near the end, I directed a charge against a fort only a day's walk from the Uril Capital. There were two forces charging them, myself in the east and another in the west. We thought we would just have an easy win, but it turned out Uril had been stocking up on magore tech and been preparing for us to attack since the beginning of the war. It was the first time we’d seen an enemy really turn our own tech against us. Truth be told, we should have been prepared at this point, but the people in command were getting impatient.”

“Did you win?”

He nodded. “We won, but at a cost. Half of them men that charged the fortress that day are gone. Some of them were probably taken as prisoners of war in the retreat, but most of them died. We never found Elliot’s body, but most of them were so mangled that we could barely identify the corpses. In hindsight, the Uril campaign is probably why I turned down the promotion to Colonel and chose to become a researcher."

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He’s seen so much more death than me.

It made a lot more sense hearing those words from him why he’d be fine with me taking his life after the revolt. Not only had he killed many people who fought against Arlin, but many Arlinian’s died while under his watch. He must have felt the same as I did now.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s in the long past. What, were you hoping they were still alive so you could meet another person with a light attunement?”

I slumped a bit hearing those words. “Yeah… There's so much going on. Meeting someone who has the same attunement as me might help.”

Elm gave me a heavy pat on the back in response. “Same here. I wouldn’t mind seeing how much of this is related to you or your attunement, or something in between. If he is alive, I’m sure he’d be willing to help you. He seemed like that type of guy.”

That’s a relief. I really wish he hadn't given me that pat. My back hurts even more now.

“Oh yeah, they have hammocks in the guard’s tents. Thought you might want to use one of them since we’ve been sleeping on the dirt for a good bit. Out of all of us here, you definitely need the rest.”

Elm was right. A hammock would be a nice change of pace.

***

I stared up at the ceiling of the tent, still listening to the sounds of the refinery as people moved about in the night. My conversation with Elm had only scratched the surface of the oddities that had happened today, and my questions about my attunement had only gotten deeper ever since I destroyed the iron chariot. At the center of it all sat one big problem.

Why did it talk back to me?

I had already had my questions about my connection with mana throughout my journey and experience. The first thing is that it seemed to awaken on its own, coming out on a night where I believed that I wanted something to change. That didn’t even factor into the fact that I was managing to do things that were way beyond my level of understanding simply by ‘asking it’ to help me. None of it made sense from a conventional perspective since mana wasn’t really a thing that people talked to. It was a natural flow that went through all things and shaped them in accordance with what surrounded it. The only thing that made us different was that we had the ability to change the flow within our body and express it as another element in the natural world or attune to elements outside of our own body.

Yet for some reason, when I asked it to save me, it spoke back. Saying it spoke felt weird. The words didn’t have as much of a sound behind them. It simply felt like the meaning of the statement itself was directly shoved into my mind. It felt too real to just be something I imagined.

Hey, you there? Can you talk with me again?

No response. Whatever I had done to make it respond to me, I wasn’t doing it again. Emitting pure mana was probably a requirement for it to respond, but my body was too tired. That trick with the magore had taken almost everything in my body to pull it off. Yet the fact that I was alive right now and wasn’t burnt away by the energy must have been due to that voice listening to me. Something about that situation made it go beyond just listening to me in a more direct way and actually responding. It even called me ‘child’, which was weird on its own.

That was all weird on its own, but there was also the question that was pestering Elm and everyone else who knew about my weird relationship with mana-

Why me?

What about North, the son of a candlemaker from Marlisle and a slave of Arlin, was special enough to be on speaking terms with the universal flow of mana? The attunement was the only thing we had so far, but even that didn’t fully add up with the stories that Elm or Alex had heard.

There were a few answers to the question of why it was me, and none of them made me happy. The one that had come up not too long ago and was constantly plaguing my thoughts was the prophetic one. Somehow, for some reason, I fit all the requirements to be a person connected to some mythology or another and that made me special enough to have a weird relationship with mana. That one would answer all of the questions, but would also require me to know enough mythology to link myself up to some myth. It’s also possible that I could end up doing the inverse, where I find some vague prophecy and just end up deciding that it must apply to me. I would ask Elina if she knew of any since if there was ever going to be a culture with a prophecy about some rebel fighter, it’d probably be Irebor, but I hadn’t exactly left her on the best terms.

I didn’t want that one to be the case, since that would put a lot more pressure on me and possibly line me up for inevitable future problems. I wanted to believe that I had the ability to choose my future, rather than having it all predetermined for me by something else.

Then there was the option that it was entirely up to my attunement. It was rare enough to the point where people could just not be aware that light attunements interacted with mana in a different way than others or that they simply had a stronger relationship with the natural flow of pure mana. That was something I could probably run with, but that wouldn’t be provable until I met another person with a light attunement. Issue is, the only other person I knew of who had a light attunement who might have been able to help us is either dead or missing. Elm said that the nobility might keep a few of them just for healing, but I don’t think I can make any connections with nobility.

Well, there’s one noble I could make connections with, but I’d prefer to never interact with her at all.

The final option, at least to me, was that it was the combination of factors I had been surrounded with. I was a person with a light aptitude who worked in the mines. That meant for a good portion of my life I was surrounded by pure condensed mana. Something about that might have affected my relationship with the universal flow of mana and maybe made it more willing to listen to me? But that wouldn’t make sense, because there were so many other slaves and people who lived their lives surrounded by raw magore.

I knew that Elm could probably help, but it didn’t feel like the right time to tell him. Until I better understood my position and was more comfortable with the role of leader, I’d tell him. However, that was for another time.

My mind started to drift as I began to relax more and more in the hammock. The exhaustion had finally caught up with not only my body, but with my mind. As I slowly sank into sleep, a thought drifted through my mind.

I can’t remember what a bed feels like…