--- KOLEN ---

Across a distance as mind-numbing as the sky, in a place where no one had ever even heard of the hero, there was a swamp filled with miserable artificers. They weren’t the kind of weird to live out in the middle of a swamp without reason, but they were the kind of weird to have built a heavy compound that had a bad tendency to sink into the wet earth, giving it an extra basement or two every fifteen years.

In one of these basements, snooping through a secluded closet, a cheerful teen stared eagerly at the most terrifying crystal he had ever seen. It was roughly the size of his head, which is to say roughly the size of your head, assuming you’re human-shaped. It glowed a sickly purple color, giving off a vibe reminiscent of rotting cheese as it floated about a foot into the air.

In any other situation, Kolen would have bolted the moment he realized what the crystal was, but instead, he was excited as he stared into the depths of its sinister-as-all-heck glow. He wondered if he could take it to his room and pretend to cast magic with it…

Looking back, Kolen would have probably told his younger self to leave at this point and never come back, leave the entire Order and make a name for himself in some far-off fishing village or something, screw his aunt Cherry’s visions for his future, but time travel is impossible and his older self didn’t learn as much from this experience as he claims to have.

Kolen hesitantly reached his hand out and touched the crystal, feeling a jolt of energy run through his arm and into his very soul as a stream of the stuff started pouring into him. Kolen tried to let go of the crystal, but it seemed like his hand didn’t really…feel like it.

At that point, Kolen finally started to feel a little bit of caution, as he fell to the ground and passed out.

-

Kolen groaned and sat up, his head feeling like someone had smashed it between two blunt objects over and over again. Everything was a bit too fuzzy, and Kolen had a feeling that he would sorely regret letting any of the bigger-time artificers know what he’d done to the important-looking crystal.

The crystal in question was no longer glowing, in fact, it was straight-up gone. Kolen wasn’t sure what had happened to it, but it sure helped with his plan to pretend that this hadn’t happened.

Kolen stood up with a wince and eagerly left behind the scene of the crime, intent on washing all the windows on the upper floors as an alias, he managed to find a bucket of water and some rags, so—

“What the hells are you doing?” A rough, annoyed voice asked Kolen from behind. “We had someone washing these windows just last week.”

Kolen grinned at him and nudged the bucket with his foot, “Eaton sir! Are you here to help me wash windows?” He scrubbed at a particularly messy spot for a moment as a means of emphasis. Really if this was done just a week ago, it hadn’t really been done well. Either that or they just needed to be cleaned more often.

The artificer furrowed his brow, his tone rising into anger. “Boy…why are your hands glowing?”

Kolen glanced at his hands, which were in fact glowing. “Huh, neat.” He glanced at the bucket. “Is that magic water by chance?”

Eaton shook his head slowly, as if baffled, “There’s no such thing as magic water—”

“Pity that, I’m sure it would taste even better than the stuff from that spring up north.”

The man took one of Kolen’s hands roughly, tired of waiting for him to explain. Eaton was left turning it this way and that, he watched as the green glow pulsed weakly, growing stronger by the moment. A sheer panic erupted in the high-ranking Artificer when he got a good look at that glow. “Idiot! You absorbed something!”

Kolen didn’t have a chance to confirm or deny anything as the artificer roughly dragged him through the hall and into the nearest examination area. The people inside were busy trying to make the energy released by crystals turn machinery in increasingly delicate ways when Eaton burst in, annoyed and angry at the world.

“Someone get me that measurement equipment we got from the king! You there, stop standing there like an idiot! This boy is under some kind of unknown effect! All of you are completely incompetent! Intern!”

The room flooded with chaos as the high-ranking artificer yelled orders and insults one after another, they listened, but Kolen could sense a stark resentment toward Eaton with how they cleared the room of people, brought out the right equipment, and started scanning Kolen with it.

Kolen smiled at the lady scanning him, figuring she didn’t want to be here any more than he did. Crossing Eaton was a surefire way to get yourself exiled, killed, or turned into an experiment subject. Kolen had a feeling that one of those things would be in his own future.

The device beeped a few times before the spirit inside seemed to have had enough with the mortal mechanism. A young lady manifested in the air near Eaton, her deep blue eyes glaring in the way of river spirits. “I have a few complaints about this device of yours—”

Eaton raised an eyebrow, “You ruined our crops last year, it’s either serve or be exiled.”

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She huffed, “I can easily tell you what you want to know without using that demeaning thing to do so! Do you know how small it is in there? I had to half my mass just to squeeze inside and—”

“Do your job, spirit.” Eaton almost snarled the words, like a wild animal. His eyes flashed in a reminder and the river spirit hastily backed down.

“The boy will be fine. He’s under a wind curse, I’ve seen them before. It might fizzle out in a couple hundred years.”

Eaton turned his glare back to Kolen, who had somehow managed to get his hands on the spirit’s device and was tinkering with the showy dials and buttons. “Boy! What the hells did you absorb?!”

“Eaton sir, have you read my record?”

“Why would I care about the record of a worthless—”

“Because if you read my record you would know that I don’t like it when people are acting like dragon-kissers. I’d like to say that you aren’t in that category, but until you get your act together and start treating people like people, I’m not going to tell you anything.” He glanced back down at the device with a frown, pushing a button and handing it back to the woman who’d been holding it earlier. “Thank you, Shauna, it’s a very interesting device.”

Shauna looked as if she would rather be anywhere but here, but she took it back and hastily retreated. The river spirit sighed, “If he absorbed anything it was probably the sleepless curse.” And then she was gone too, racing after Shauna.

Kolen hadn’t realized spirits could manifest while under contract, otherwise, he would have learned all their names by now. He resolved that if he got out of this situation in at most two pieces, he would search for that information.

Eaton, meanwhile, was fuming. A vein in his head was bulging, his hands were balled into fists, and anger poured off him like a thick syrup. Kolen frowned at him, realizing he’d been a dragon-kisser himself for a bit, which never really helped in these situations. Kolen sighed before the rant that he was expecting could start, “Sorry, that was stupid of me, I’m sure you’re a lovely person…deep…deep inside.”

Eaton only glared harder, “Get the heck in that closet.” He pointed at a burly-looking artificer who was trying to edge away discreetly, “You there, guard this idiot and make sure he stays in that closet.”

Kolen smiled at the man, “Bereth! Great to see you! I’m sure you’ll do great at keeping me in that closet.”

Eaton glared at Kolen again, “No, never mind, you can go. Intern! You keep the idiot in the closet.”

The intern in question pointed at herself with confusion, which was evident because she was barely shoulder height on Kolen. Odds were she wouldn’t be able to do anything if Kolen decided to just walk out.

Eaton nodded, “At least I can fire you and have a reason to kill him—” he pointed at Kolen, “—once he inevitably escapes.”

Kolen gasped with overinflated shock, “Wow, devious of him, he’s using my best friend Khrih to keep me in a closet!”

Eaton almost growled at this, almost, it was more of a grating-groan sound that probably just meant he was infected with something. “Is there anyone in this entire compound you aren’t best friends with?!”

Kolen shrugged.

Eaton threw his hands in the air and stomped off.

Kolen walked over to the closet and shut himself inside, immediately snooping through the pockets of the coats left inside and the boxes of crystals they’d been using for those experiments.

He’d expected to get kicked out or killed once he joined the Order or Barriers, he was just that good at accidentally aggravating people, what he hadn’t expected was for it to take so long to happen.

Really, how in the world did it take Eaton a whole week to run into Kolen?

--

Kolen closed the folding knife he’d found in the closet, wondering if he would need it shortly. He wasn’t quite sure what would happen next, and he definitely wasn’t sure that he would be alive tomorrow. Somehow though, he didn’t panic. There’s only one other person I know who would react the same way to impending doom, the most important difference being that—last I checked—Kolen was mortal.

He fingered the knife again and tucked it into a more obscure pocket, figuring he’d better be safe than sorry. Following the same train of thought, he took one of the smaller crystals from the box in the corner and pocketed it as well. Strangely, when he touched it he could sense a bit of something from it, like he could feel the magic inside.

Thankfully, his hands had stopped glowing after an hour or so, and he didn’t absorb this crystal like what had happened with that sinister-looking one. It was placed harmlessly into his pocket and the slight sense he’d had of the magic inside disappeared.

Kolen was in the middle of disassembling a piece of broken equipment when the closet door finally opened. Eaton had actual guards this time, and despite knowing who they were, Kolen was already certain he wouldn’t be able to use that as leverage.

They pulled him roughly from the closet and marched him down… down, into the depths of the compound.

---

Kolen didn’t sleep that night, or the night after, by the time it had been the tenth night, he was fairly certain he would never sleep again.

Eaton locked him in the last basement of the compound, a place that smelled of death and damp soil. The walls were cracked under the pressure of the building above, flooding was common, and Kolen had learned quickly to not look too hard at the moldy sheets and mushroom-filled walls.

He tried to tire himself out several times, but he never passed out no matter how much his muscles ached and his energy dwindled. He tried doing increasingly complex math problems to tire his mind, he tried hanging upside down until he barfed out his last meal, and he tried laying on the moldy blankets thinking about the intricacies of the universe.

He still didn’t sleep.

Eventually, he settled for teaching himself to meditate, he figured that would do the best in order to keep him from getting sleep-deprived, though he didn’t feel any signs of that yet, which struck him as odd.

The only times anyone visited the last basement was to give him food and take his blood for tests. After the first few days, the guard claimed they were going to execute him for having developed some kind of magic, but…Kolen was still waiting for that day to come.

I think the artificers liked having a steady source of magically infused blood for experiments, not having to send people on perilous journeys to Melor just to get it must have been convenient for their little evil organization.

Days passed, and sleep did not come.