Cypher felt as if he had crossed some kind of line, and he wanted to apologize if he had upset Alvin with his curiosity. After a few moments, he set aside his notes and got up to head outside. Once on the balcony, Cypher could see the faint glimmer of a tear at the corner of Alvin's eyes.

"Alvin? Please forgive me for asking about such things. If I offended you I am sorry, it was not my intention to do so." Cypher stood a few feet away, not wanting to intrude on Alvin's personal space.

Alvin sighed again and wiped away the tears in his eyes. A moment of silence passed before he turned and answered, "No. It's not your fault you have every right to ask about these things and it is my duty to instruct you on these matters. Forgive me for my outburst a moment ago. Please, come, and join me. There is something I wish you to know. It is of a personal nature, but if you are willing I would share it with you."

Alvin held out his hand and Cypher moved to stand next to him, gazing out at the mountains with him. Alvin patted him on the shoulder and continued smoking from his pipe. Another moment passed and then with obvious pain in his voice, Alvin began speaking.

"It was about twenty years ago. I had just broken through to the third rank and my sister and I had settled on how we would celebrate the achievement. We took a vacation to Sarna, a country all the way on the other side of the continent to the southeast. It's a dusty desert of a country. Hot, dry, and full of ancient ruins from civilizations long forgotten by history."

"Elise was an avid archeologist you see, and there was a dig site she had been itching to examine for several years. At the time, we were assigned to the same unit and were still serving under the king of Dellorim. We must have had another three years left on our contract if memory serves me correctly."

He took another drag of his pipe, pausing to wipe away another volley of tears that had welled up in his eyes. The pungent smoke lingered in the air, and he continued, "Because of that we couldn't simply take off and explore some dusty hole in the ground on the other side of the world. We had responsibilities."

"However, Elise was quite the smooth talker. She managed to convince our captain to allow us a few weeks of freedom in honor of my achievement. Thus, we packed up and headed southeast. The trip was more for her sake than mine, but I enjoyed the time off, and it would be nice to get away from everything for a while. The trip didn't take all that long. You of course know all about Slingates, but they aren't exactly everywhere so at times we had to travel by foot."

"We stopped in several taverns along the way and she was so excited about all the possibilities that awaited us at the dig site that she just couldn't shut up about it. She spoke too loudly I suppose, it was her passion after all."

"Anyway, eventually we arrived at the dig site. The first few days were completely uneventful. Most of the time was spent with her flitting from place to place, carefully unearthing some piece of broken pottery or a buried dwelling and marveling at her discoveries."

"Then on the fourth night, it happened. I couldn't tell you when, but at some point in our travels, someone had started tailing us. I suppose they must have heard Elise talking about some valuable jewels or something, I can't properly remember. Whatever it was that caused that man to tail us, we somehow failed to take notice of him until it was too late."

"Elise had just discovered a hidden chamber after falling through some kind of trapdoor and I quickly followed after her. She was always a frail girl growing up. Despite having a rank two body, she still took a bruising from the fall. When I got down there, however, the room we found ourselves in was still perfectly preserved. The walls were coated in sturdy metal known as orichalcum and engraved with symbols I never discovered the meaning of."

"We quickly found that there were several other rooms and we began to explore them one at a time. She was gasping left and right, completely ignoring the pain from her fall. We collected and stored all kinds of small artifacts leaving the larger ones for a second team to extract once we returned to Dellorim. It was all pretty standard stuff, daggers, pendants, you know, little things that we could examine on our own. After a while, we came across a pedestal standing in the very middle of a diagram."

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"As per routine, we carefully examined it and found that it was harmless, so we moved forward. Upon the pedestal was a small statue and Elise picked it up and examined it carefully."

"She mentioned something about how it could change everything that we knew about the Zenith culture and the people who had once lived in Sarna. I'm not sure, I wasn't exactly interested in that kind of stuff back then. It was a curious little statue. The more she fiddled with it the more secrets it seemed to give away. Eventually, she managed to get it to open up, and inside was a small scroll.”

“Something that delicate needed to be taken to a proper location and examined in a safe environment so she put it back into the statue and we headed back out. We made it back up to the surface and Elise was getting ready to contact a friend of ours back in Dellorim. But… I...I didn't even have time to think before the explosion happened. One moment she was smiling at me and the next..." Alvin stopped there and broke down crying for a few moments. Cypher could feel the raw emotion coming off of him, and reached out to console him.

However before he could, Alvin straightened up and wiped away the tears, anger welling up on his face. His fist clenched so tightly that the pipe in his hands cracked and fell apart, the pieces falling off the balcony and onto the ground far below.

"The man who had been tailing us slaughtered her right in front of my eyes, and he did it with catastrophe magick. There was nothing I or anyone else could have done to save her. It’s in the name after all… Catastrophe Magick causes the worst possible outcome to occur for the target. It has a high chance of failure, but when it succeeds it’s devastating. As I said it requires that the caster is of the Darkness affinity, its effects are somewhat random as well. Anything, nothing, and everything in between can happen to a target of Catastrophe Magick.”

“In the case of my sister… it caused her Orrium to violently rupture. After killing her, he felt like it was safe enough to come out and our fight began. It was clear that he was after her satchel, as he kept trying to get near Elise's body... or what was left of it. I beat him to the punch though and secured her bag which held all of the artifacts that we had collected."

Alvin dusted off his hands then and pulled a piece of the pipe out of his palm. He inspected the damaged area and then spit off the side of the balcony before continuing, "Our battle carried on for a few more minutes before he took advantage of an opening."

"I hadn't noticed, but during our whole fight, he had been preparing a spell most foul. Before I could do anything he had made his way over to Elise and began manipulating her body with his repulsive necromancy. That alone enraged me more than anything ever has. However, because of that rage, it took me a moment to realize that in doing so, he had also soul trapped her."

"You see when normal people die their souls dissipate almost as soon as their heart stops. But with Conductors, our natural defenses and abilities slow this process down immensely. She was still only a Rank-Two Conductor, but her soul had lingered for a moment too long and before I could get to her, he held up the crystal containing her essence."

"I didn't have much of a choice at that point but to stop right in my tracks. He held my sister's soul in his hands and if I wasn't careful he could destroy it long before I was able to kill him. He looked me right in the eyes, smiling as he ordered my sister's corpse to drag itself over to me. I was frozen. Though be it in fear at the demise of her soul, or because of the rage coursing through me I still don't know."

"The man somehow knew far more than I had expected and demanded that I give him the statue, or else he would destroy her soul, kill me, and leave our corpses to rot in the sun. I knew I couldn't trust him. But I also knew that if it came down to it, I could kill him before he was able to kill me."

"The only problem though was that he would be able to shatter the crystal she now resided in. I couldn't allow that. Whatever it is that happens to us when we die is irrelevant. If your soul is destroyed you vanish. No reincarnation, no afterlife. Just nothingness."

Another bout of emotion boiled up from within Alvin and he wept, sobbing into the crook of his arm. "He forced her broken and ruined body to drag itself over to me and she looked me in the eyes the entire time. Despite all the blood and gore that covered her, she was still my sister. I couldn't attack her even though her eyes were cold and devoid of life, she was still family. My only family left…"

"I had no choice. Reluctantly, I gave in to his demands and threw him the statue. The moment it touched his skin, he laughed and teleported away, leaving me alone with the still-moving remains of what had once been my sister. I did what I could though, despite the situation I managed to slip the small scroll inside the statue into the satchel before I surrendered the artifact to him.”

“I wasn’t about to let my sister’s final discovery fall into the wrong hands… Honestly, I think she would have been proud of me, I was never very good at being subtle. As for my sister’s remains, I dispelled the magick that animated her limbs and brought her body back to our home where I buried her."