“Sanguis fluere tereb et secar,” Beltane chanted weakly as bubbling blood slowly spilled from his mouth.

I looked down and saw that he had drawn a Blood Rune on his own chest where the Red Knight’s sword had cut his shirt. The Blood Rune started to flare a dark red as he scrunched his face up in concentration. Beltane’s wounds suddenly tightened as if the blood itself had hardened, and his bleeding stopped.

My eyes snapped toward Feldrast Manor. If I could get back to the master bedroom, I could probably find one of my mother’s old sewing kits to stop Beltane’s bleeding for good. The thought of reentering that scene filled me with dread, but I would do it if necessary.

With a trembling hand, Beltane reached into the folds of his cloak and produced a small glass bottle. Within the bottle was an opaque red liquid that glowed lightly in the fire of the burning houses. I took the bottle in my hand, and I only realized what Beltane was handing me when I held it.

“D-drink…” Beltane sputtered as crimson liquid fell out of his mouth.

In my hand, I held a Healing Potion, a magic draught that held the power of Prayer in liquid form. Something like this would cost between ten and twenty gold pieces.

I uncorked the vial and drank from it. The bottle only held a single swig of liquid, so I finished the Healing Potion in a second. A moment after the healing draught descended my esophagus, a momentary feeling of warmth pervaded my entire body. The tightness in my chest disappeared, and the full body ache that I had been feeling for about a minute suddenly faded away.

Frantically, I took Beltane’s fallen hand from where it had fallen and pressed it against the stump where his hand had been previously. I made sure to align the radius and ulna so that they would be able to fuse back together with minimal difficulty. He had been cut just under the wrist, and the removal was impossibly clean, so lining everything up was astonishingly easy.

“May Nyx repay you for what you have done!” I chanted as soon as the warm feeling disappeared. I trusted the pealing Potion to cure whatever was preventing my magic from working.

My [Prayer] hooked onto something, and I frantically began pouring my mana into it. By the time I was done, a terrible headache was shooting through my head, and Beltane’s bleeding had stopped.

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With relief flooding through my body, I fell to my knees. Beltane sat up slowly, flexing his healed wrist as he did so. He checked his various wounds and blood loss. When he was certain that he had been healed sufficiently, he let out a long sigh and rubbed his face with his palm.

We sat there in silence for a long time. The battle was over, and all we could do was stare out at the burning buildings as the torrent of rain extinguished my fire. I couldn’t even feel the rain on my face.

As I sat there on the ground, everything that happened finally began to sink in. My mother was dead, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it. Her death was predetermined by fate. I could have known exactly what was going to happen, and I still would have been powerless.

The Red Knight was a fighter of the highest possible caliber. If I could have read his character sheet, I was sure his class would be Sword Saint. His level couldn’t have been less than 90, considering the speed of his attacks. Despite this, the most shocking aspect of the Red Knight was that I had no idea who he was.

I thought I could name every sword saint, philosopher, and archon on Ferrum, but nothing about the Red Knight rang any bells. He was probably in the top twenty strongest NPCs, yet there was no one I knew of who fought like the Red Knight and wore the livery of the Church of Nyx.

Ever since I had come to Ferrum, I had never felt so weak and so ignorant.

I had the fire of Hell at my fingertips, and I could draw upon a wealth of knowledge that any scholar on Ferrum would kill to replicate, yet I could not protect one woman. There was nothing I could do to resist the careless whims of fate. If I couldn’t prevent my mother’s death, then how could I hope to prevent my father’s death, the Etronian civil war, and my own gradual slip into evil?

Everything would happen exactly as it did the first time. My father would die, I would become the Count of Northwind, I would kill Miriam, and then Merrick would kill me. There was some force, some malevolent god who assured that all my labors would come to naught.

With tears falling down my face and my teeth grinding against each other so harshly that I could hear them scraping, I let out a harsh, derisive laugh.

“There’s no point!” I said, laughing at my own weakness. “It all happened just like the first time!”

Beltane looked at me, shock evident on his face, as I delivered my insane proclamation. I didn’t care. Why even bother pretending when nothing I did mattered?

I stared at the sky, weak laughter creaking out of my frail lungs. My laughter only stopped when I was overcome with a coughing fit that briefly consumed my whole body.

When the coughing subsided, all energy disappeared from my body, and I slumped down. All emotion drained out of my body, leaving nothing but emptiness.

After a few minutes, the fires around us were extinguished. Beltane got to his feet and said something that I couldn’t parse in my current state. He touched my shoulder, and it was only when he began to drag me with him that I begrudgingly began to follow him.