John kept any expression from his face as he walked deeper into the room, sliding his attention to the boy on the bed. Strapped and secured, the child kept his eyes on the ceiling—not that he had a choice—watching something that probably interested him. In that moment John conceded a point to Alnon. The boy was strange.

The boy’s eyes were a deep grey. Where a person’s iris was like a picture painted by the hands of a talented artist, layered with different designs of the same color as if on a single canvas, there was a dimensional oddity to the boy’s. Layered as it was, as most people’s are, it held depth, its design seeming to sink inwards. Looking into it gave John an odd sense of vertigo. It was like looking into a bowl of clear water, its depths ever descending.

He pulled his attention from the boy’s eyes to study him discreetly. Skinny and malnourished were the words that did him the best justice. If someone had sent him, that person must have really had something against him. His skin was mildly tanned and his hair was a deep black with a smattering of brown. It was what hair would be if a deity took its strands from the night sky only to have it tainted with the earth's soil. Still, there was something appealing about its look. It was certainly aesthetically pleasing.

The boy mumbled under his breath. The sound was barely enough to disturb the air.

Golds heard better than was naturally logical and one would’ve heard the contents of his mumble. Baron’s heard on the level of gods in comparison, and John heard every word.

“You do know he’ll hear me right?” the boy asked.

This time John studied the child unabashed. With the sound, the boy’s mouth had barely moved. It reminded him of ventriloquists of old, not that he’d seen more than a handful of them. He’d been born after the first crack and there wasn’t much room left for entertainment in the world. Before joining the seminary he’d seen none, but his parents had told him stories of…

John cut that line of thought like a pair of scissors against thread. He had no family now… only the seminary.

The boy whispered something else and, lost in his own deprecating thoughts, John missed it. But he did sense the annoyance in it.

How broken is he? he wondered.

“I will speak only to Dante Faust,” the boy said with a sigh, speaking clearly for the first time.

“So I’ve been told, child,” John replied, taking a seat on the only chair in the room, keeping his poise despite how frail and uncomfortable the seat was.

“So,” he added when he’d settled in. “What do you have to say?”

……………………………….

Please give me something to eat, the thought rose in his mind but Seth did not utter it. He was a prisoner and knew it. This odd compulsion to speak with this man named Dante Faust was annoying, and his minds’ constant bickering did nothing to appease it. Worse, the headache he hadn’t felt for more than half a year was creeping back in. He could feel it at the back of his head, a mild thrum teasing an odd crescendo. The culmination of everything made him irksome.

And now comes a twat with a lie, thought a piece of his mind.

Seth frowned but gave no response.

Ignoring us, are we?

We’re not going anywhere, though. This from another thought.

Seth had been wondering if they were a sort of exchange for his headache. Then, he had agreed that he’d choose them over the headaches anytime, but now he was beginning to wonder if he’d gotten the wrong end of the deal.

“As interesting as your facial expressions are,” his new companion said. “I have things to do and would rather hear what you have to say quickly.”

The man spoke like a prim and proper gentleman. His accent was genteel and his words were chosen as if picking flowers from a garden. Seth decided he didn’t like the man, and so did his minds.

No man lies so smoothly, one of his minds thought.

No, another disagreed. No man should speak so smoothly.

Jonathan did, though, another stated.

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And we hated him so much.

“No we didn’t,” Seth blurted.

“What did you not do?” the man in the room asked, snatching up the words.

Seth cursed under his breath.

Since the other man had left the room he’d had more than enough time to listen to his minds bicker and had learned something from it. Thinking back was strenuous; he could barely hear himself think; he could barely even think. And on more than one occasion he had quite literally lost himself in the cacophony of their cycle so that he didn’t even know which thoughts were his and which were theirs. It had only happened for a single moment each time. But the moments were enough to acquaint him with a new kind of fear. A fear of losing himself.

“I will speak only to Dante Faust,” he replied the man simply.

He might be Faust though, a mind pointed out.

But we said he’d been lying, another replied.

Since when?

Just moments ago.

We doubt that, it huffed. We would know.

We do, a mind snapped, and Seth felt his frustration grow, emotions swirling to a conversation he wasn’t even a part of. We said it less than a minute ago.

A minute? His thought mused. And how long is a minute; what really is time but the consequence of a cage we have trapped ourselves in? Can we truly say how long we’ve lived; when we were born?

Why. Did. We. Call. Him. A. Liar.

Seth shrugged before his thought answered. Dante Faust has red eyes.

But we don’t know the color of this guy's.

Seth frowned at that. It was true. They also hadn’t known the color of the eyes of the man before this one.

Seth’s lips parted, then closed, his awareness of his companion coming to memory. He was held back by his refusal to give too much away. So instead, he went into his thoughts. There he froze, terrified at the feeling that came with losing himself once more. Fear, he was continuing to learn, was a deadly thing.

Capable of breaking even the strongest of minds, a mind thought. And about the eyes, Jabari said so.

Seth felt puzzlement just before another asked: When?

When all of us were passed out of course.

Then how did we hear it?

Seth shrugged while the answer came, the action strangely compelled by the thought that came: We guess we’re just stronger.

Seth wondered if he’d ever get accustomed to his minds’ constant use of plurals to identify themselves.

“Are you stalling?” the man interrupted. “Perhaps trying to keep me here for some reason?”

Seth gritted his teeth, withholding his annoyance at a possible Baron. “Dante. Faust.”

The man rose from his seat with a tired sigh and walked into Seth’s sight. Unsurprisingly he was clad in a cassock. It was white and plain, which surprised Seth, considering he’d expected something more… different. The priest was bald with an equally bald face with sharp features and strong jawlines. There was no smile on his face, neither did his eyes seem amused. If anything, they seemed curious. Pink as they were, they also seemed tired.

That’s him, a piece of Seth’s mind thought hurriedly, only to be shut down by another piece.

We’re looking for red, retard. Those are pink.

We sure Jabari didn’t make a mistake? This from another mind.

“I don’t think him capable,” Seth answered it, and the man before him frowned.

“Capable of what?” the priest asked.

Mistakes.

“Capable of what?” the priest repeated, his voice deepening when Seth didn’t answer. “Who do you not think is capable of what?”

This one has a temper, a piece of his mind whispered.

Another giggled off in a corner of it. Do you see that massive vein in his neck? It thought. This one’s a biter.

Another scoffed. We’ve faced worse.

We have?

Of course; Jeremy was a biter. Remember?

For the love of… the thought trailed off in exasperation. We swear we can never take us seriously. Here we are talking about a gold—potentially Baron—mage, and we’re talking about our baby brother. We swear—

Pain pressed down on Seth’s mind. It broke his thoughts, and his body balked at it. Above him a rune of pink evaporated into nothingness, leaving him to the sight of the priest.

“I make it a rule not to use runes on the seminarians,” the man said coldly. “But it only took me a moment to remember that while you are also nothing more than a child, you are not a seminarian.” He leaned closer so that Seth stared into his pink eyes. “That makes you fair game, boy. Now who sent you? And what do you want?”

While no longer overbearing, the pain still remained. It was a phantom of what it once was. It reminded Seth of the situation he was in. The silence of his minds told him they’d been reminded too. Still, he kept his silence a moment longer, not out of stubbornness or rebellion, not to make a point or in some misguided need to annoy the priest. He kept his silence for the simple fact that both his mind and body needed to process what had just happened to him.

They tried, and they failed. While he'd somehow felt the pain in his head, it had actually come from nowhere. There was no actual point of ingress, no place from which it had originated. There had simply just been pain. If he was asked to try and describe where it had come from or it had hurt the most, he would've failed to produce and answer.

The priest raised a single finger and it seemed to bear the wrath of the world behind it. For some reason, however, the priest seemed confused. It was as though Seth’s sudden silence had not been anticipated. Seth wondered if the priest had expected him to cry out in pain or something. The man looked as if he had been expecting a different outcome.

When the priest’s finger twitched, Seth’s mouth came open instantly.

He wanted to beg; to plead his case. With a show of pain, the games were over. He was a child dragged from his life and cast into one he did not want, at least he wasn’t sure he still wanted. He had suffered and struggled and been forced to live through things he doubted any child his age was supposed to.

When he spoke, it was in unison with all fragments of his mind. There was neither doubt nor question, only the compulsion that was, so that when words came, he and his minds spoke as one.

“We will speak only to Dante Faust.”