Both Felin and Amy stood outside of her home, watching the clouds go by. Almost like my ascension, but different. And I bet Frieda's wondering where the Hell I took off to too. I did say I was investigating on my own though so that gives me at least a few hours.

"You've made your choice then?" Felin asked, looking up to her from the ground.

"I think... As much as this feels like going the coward's route... I'm taking your advice: I'm going to ask for help."

"Good. You may think of it as cowardly, but it is also the smartest. If my time with my past contractor told me anything, then delegation and pushing off work to others is society's greatest boon," Felin grinned, proudly.

"You could say that!" Amy laughed, wiping away some stray wetness around her eyes. "To the Tower, then?"

"To the Tower, yes. We still have to retrieve something after all."

"What is it?"

"I'll keep it as a surprise. In fact, I believe you have already seen it," He said, coyly.

"Huh. Keep your secret's then," Amy smiled, walking back around her house to walk the familiar path to that ruin. Felin led in front, stepping up to float in the air straight ahead of her. The journey was quiet, and solemn, as Amy grappled with something inside her head. Maybe I should tell him about it... before I go and do all of... this. No, I'll wait to the Tower. At least.

A little less sure in her step, they finally arrived at the curtain in reality, passing through it just as easily as they did the first time. This time, however, Amy could sense the touch of Illusion of Unknowable in the curtain, with a wild mix of Fae to make everything more real. Behind the veil of reality, the Tower stood tall, just as enchanting as it had been weeks ago. The grass that Felin had cleared for their initial talk was still short, but clearly longer than before, while the surroundings seemed relatively unchanged. Silently, they continued on, up less familiar paths, and into the Tower. Amy spotted the broken glass from the affinity test on the ground floor, amid the pile of Wizardly books she never got around to read. She went up the staircase, past the various other rooms and labs, filled to the brim with defences against intruders, such as her and her Familiar, until they reached the top. The coffin room.

"The hat, then?" Amy guessed, entering the room. It was just as she'd left it; only the brittle bone corpse was gone. Next to the coffin was the very same hat she'd left behind.

"Correct," Felin said, sitting down next to it. "This is the Wizard King's Hat, full of enchantments and protections that don't really matter now. Not when the person it's keyed to is dead. You can treat it as a regular hat, if you want, only sturdier and more resistant to rips and tears. Eventually, you, or maybe even I in a later Tier Familiar form, might be able to break the key and use it to its full capabilities, but for now, it's just a pointy hat."

"I see," Amy nodded, serious. Picking it up carefully, and laying it on top of of her head, she added, "I'll make sure to treat it with respect."

"You can treat it with as much disrespect as you want and I wouldn't care; not really. It's just a relic of an age long past."

"I still will."

"If you wish, my Apprentice," Felin smiled languidly.

"I... I don't think I ever told you why they hated me, didn't I?" Amy muttered, trying not to let her anxiousness show, as she looked out the balcony.

"You did not; at least not the full story," Felin said, looking up at her from behind.

"Well, I guess it started when I arrived here," She began, sitting down beside and leaning against the empty coffin, the lid moved out of the way. "I was fresh out of Schooling and with, what I thought to be, a bright future ahead of me. The village didn't often have new people moving here, so a lot of people adored me, thinking it a sign of new life being brought into Triesen after a period of stagnation I never bothered to look into.

"Everything was going so well. I was making friends - Maria you now know - had made some connections, and my herbalist business was doing great. Henry called upon me a couple times for an odd job here and there which required some magical solutions, but nothing major. At least until it came. A plague.

"It was, looking back on it, quite minor. The symptoms were bad, yes, but the illness went away quickly and we didn't lose a soul to it. I was stressed, going back and forth, searching for some kind of cure for it as my mixtures stopped working. As the ignorant person I was back then - and still am in a way - I went back to my Schooling. Without any sort of experiences supporting me, I only had what I was taught and that was often assuming the worst. That being, a magical plague.

"I convinced myself that it was magical so quickly and so assuredly that I couldn't even fathom it could be anything else. It was simply adapting too quickly, I thought, when really I was just making mistakes from long days at work. I knew Frieda distantly, but she was the 'face' of the medical operation while the Mayor was having me work my magic on the more severe cases. She was also a rival business woman so, though I'm ashamed to admit it, I hoped she would mess up and get booted from treatment.

"Containment was also going well, and soon there were little to no new infections, so Frieda got her break in the end. It was just me, dealing with the worst of it. I was practically channelling Soothe Wounds every second of my day, Elemental Healing running through my veins constantly. My mana pool was wrung dry again and again, as Spell after Spell didn't seem to work. I was too focused on the magic side of things, I neglected the mundane, and my patients suffered for it. They got worse. And all of this only made me so much more sure it was a magical plague.

"Eventually, I came up with a crazy idea. An idea that I suppose only an arrogant Mage graduate fresh from School could come up with, too obsessed with the idea of playing hero than anything else. Another Mage was behind the plague. They had to be! All my Spells were negated, and the plague seemed to adapt to anything I threw at it. So, I started playing the information game. Purposefully telling certain people about what I would be doing, trying to catch the evil Plague Mage red-handed, trying to counteract the work I did. Just when it seemed like I had hit a dead end, I found myself talking to a couple farmhands concerned about their employer, who was infected. One of these was his son, Ben.

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"Ben, out of all of them, seemed especially interested in how his father was doing. I was too deep in my delusion that even the concern a son had for his own father seemed suspicious. I decided to reveal that I'd be rolling out a new set of treatments the following morning that would hopefully work a lot better than last. You see, even though the village was still happy with me, they were getting restless as the plague had been going on for too long at this point. Far longer than it usually did for past patients. Some rationalised it as just coincidence; others seemed to think it was the plague's 'last revenge' or something like that; while a scarce few suspected me, that I was complicit in it.

"In a way, I suppose I was.

"I sat waiting all night for the evil Plague Mage, barely finding myself half-awake by the time the 'new treatment' arrived. I woke myself up a little but I was well and truly exhausted. Not in my right mind at all. It was just all the better then that the Mage revealed himself. I watched him sneak into the ward under a cloak - just like the typical evil Mage from storybooks - and I realised that it was my time to shine; my time to finally be a hero.

"I approached him from behind, as quiet and careful as I could. I needed to catch him in the act, or it wouldn't 'count' - something like that anyway; I wasn't particularly rational in those last few days. I actually broke out smiling when the evil Plague Mage started casting Spells, but, in my excitement, I ignored exactly what Spells he was casting. If I had focused more, I would've realised it was the same Spell I'd been using the entire time. Soothe Wounds. The evil Plague Mage was trying to help.

"So sure of myself, I appeared from the shadows and casted Bolt after Bolt at him, until he collapsed and stayed down. I pulled down his hood, standing over him, a grin on my stupid arrogant face, and saw Ben, scared shitless and in incredible pain from everything I pelted into him. The guards arrived at that point, hearing the scuffle, and some of the village people who had been waiting outside for their loved ones joined them. They found me, standing over a half-dead Ben, scorched and harmed by all sorts of things, with an 'evil grin' on my face. I was the Witch.

"They pulled me away from him and did their best to treat him. He survived, but he's basically a cripple. Can barely work the farm anymore. I was still adamant, screaming that he was the evil one, he was causing the plague. It was ironic then, that when I was away from treating the patients for only a day, that almost all of the patients got better and were ready to be discharged. That only made everything worse.

"Suddenly, I wasn't the hero I always thought I'd be. I was the evil Witch, spreading plagues and killing those who tried to help.

"It was about a week on from the incident, the plague long gone, and everyone back to normal, that I finally realised what I had done. I was no longer exhausted, and I could finally see my delusion for what it was; a delusion. I almost killed myself a couple times in the next month from guilt alone. The shunning made it worse, but the guilt affected me more... somehow. And when the children started picking on me, I didn't fight against it. I deserved it, didn't I? This was simply my penance.

"Maria, though, didn't put too much weight on the rumours and saw that I was repentant, so tried to mend our broken relationship, after the fact. I believe we succeeded, but it's probably broken again after what happened at the village hall. And this time, it's most likely irreparable. If it wasn't for her, I don't know if I'd still be here. I would have either ran away or... maybe I'd have gone through with one of the attempts and finally ended it. I was extremely fortunate I hadn't been lynched to be honest, but the Mayor did his best to stamp down on that. He didn't want Triesen to be known for killing its Mage ward, as that would have the Empire come crashing down on it.

"I got better eventually, and after about a year I gathered up some courage and visited Ben. He accepted my apology, 'forgiving' me, and admitted that although my reaction was extreme, he'd probably react in a similar way. At seeing a strange Mage casting Spells above those they protect, that is. We talked for a while, and I kept visiting him every now and again. It's been about two months since I last visited him and he was doing better. He can start doing work on the farm again, light work only though, and his dream of inheriting his father's farm hadn't been ruined.

"I had started fighting back against the children too at that point, finally fed up with their antics. I still deserved it, I thought so anyways, but it was getting a bit much with them breaking into my house at one point. Now that was too far. I was a Mage and who knew what they would discover if they snooped around enough. I was still broken, and still am, but I was better. When that wave of Fae mana came, I was almost happy, accepting that things would finally change; even if it caused unparalleled destruction, like most magical events do. I discovered the Tower, though. And, well, you know the rest of the story."

By the time Amy finished her story, the sun was visible in the sky from the balcony, hidden slightly by the cloud cover, setting as the sky began to darken.

"...I see," Felin said, his voice unreadable. "Do you... want my opinion on the matter?"

Amy said nothing, only nodding, unsure.

"I believe... that yes, you were at fault. And that yes... you deserved some of what you experienced," Felin declared, shocking Amy still, tears beginning to creep around the edges of her eyes. He hates me now, doesn't he? "However... to attribute everything that went wrong in that situation to you would be foolishness, and I instead would be wrong.

"Yes, perhaps you shouldn't have gone that far in attacking Ben. But, as he so pointed out, any other Mage would've likely done the same. Maybe even worse.

"Yes, maybe you shouldn't have stopped using mundane treatments. Yet, if it was indeed a magical plague, then they wouldn't have helped much anyway.

"Yes, you probably should have realised it wasn't a magical plague. However... you were and still are inexperienced; 'fresh out of Schooling', as it were.

"Amy, you are not the sole person at fault for what transpired back then. Mayor Henry Peters should have supported you more and not left everything to you, relying more on the mundane - Frieda's medicine and treatment - than the magical. The Empire shouldn't have appointed an important station like a ward to an inexperienced Mageling who had no idea how the world, both mundane and magical, actually worked. The village... they should have investigated more, even if that meant uncovering the truth about magic, and would have uncovered the reality behind what transpired, versus second and third and fourth hand accounts that were passed around as rumour.

"So, yes, Amy, you might've done wrong. That is in the past now. Ben, the one you feel so guilty about, has forgiven you. The village doesn't matter anymore, as they weren't involved in this. The only person left for you to forgive is yourself."

"B-But, I-I can't, I-" Amy sobbed, crying her eyes out, curled up into a ball, wracked with guilt.

"There, there, my dear Apprentice," Felin soothed softly, walking up to her and forcing his way into her lap. Amy held onto her Familiar hard, cuddling him to her chest. "There, there."

The Mage and Familiar sat there for some uncountable amount of time, crying and watching the clouds pass, and the falling sun in the sky. Barely audible from above the balcony were the chirps of hungry chicks, cuddling together, begging for food.

The sun fell, and the ruin went quiet.