The young man stared forward with a rapt focus, eyes directed and unblinking, reddening slightly around their edges. No more than a handful of inches away, a mirrored pair of vertical pupils stared back in equally rapt attention. The man tilted his head to the left, the soot-colored feline did the same. He tilted right, the cat followed. After a drawn-out pause, the furry face pulled into an unnatural Cheshire grin before equally suddenly snapping into a much more natural scowl. The cat hissed in a righteous indignation and batted limply at the nose of the man staring him down.

Boisterous laughter erupted from him as he dodged backward from the cat’s halfhearted attack. His dark curls bouncing atop his head as he let himself fall back from the simple rustic table into the matching chair he sat in. He reached out and scratched the head of the pouting feline, assuaging its yowls of annoyance.

“Come now cat, I only controlled your face a little, hardly the worst price you can pay to stay safe, fed, and well petted in my room all day like some freeloader.

I am sure master will reward me once she learns of this latest success, and I will share that reward freely with you. Bow down at my gracious benevolence”

Shooing the cat off the table and promptly wiping away the soot-drawn circle filled with geometric shapes and precisely drawn runes, the man stood up from his seat to stretch. He was bedraggled, but clearly not so much out of poverty or exhaustion as it was out of lack of care. As a young man, not quite approaching his 30s, the last traces of youth were gradually leaving his visage, replaced with a dark scruff of stubble and hair fuzzing up into a loose, unrestrained kinky mess. The dark bags under his eyes and sallow features rather pointedly displayed a man too focused to notice his own gradual degradation. In fairness, the incredible mess of the well-built but simple shack he occupied did not belie this message. Books were strewn over every elevated surface, the only places unoccupied were the places covered with papers scratched with similar circles to the one on the table and the tiniest spot on the bed that one could assume would be just enough for him to sleep if he pulled his legs to his chest and curled up like a pillbug.

He adjusted his disheveled robes, stained with ink and beginning to smell from the lack of care and cleaning, checking himself and finding his state, if not acceptable, at least passable, albeit only in his own eyes. Walking over to one of the cluttered desks, he dug around among various odds and ends until his hand came up with a polished brass disk, when he flipped it open, an hourglass covered with precise lines and measures was revealed, the sand falling sideways in defiance of gravity, clearly some form of measurement tool to mark the passage of hours. Checking the time, the man turned to move on before he shivered, seemingly struck by a revelation, and turned back to the device.

“Oh… Oh no… How is it that early, has the night already passed? But I only just sat down… Ugh fuuuuuuuuu-”

Cutting himself off, and tentatively opening up a shutter only for the dark and dusty room to be washed with light, he seemed to fully wake from his reverie and joy at his previous success.

“Damn, I lost track of time, master will be back at…. Noon… and it is? Nine… Oh dragons above, if she sees this mess I can kiss my reward goodbye.”

Whirling to glare at the cat that had climbed onto the now open windowsill and laxadazically begun to stretch out and lay down he complained, only to be met with a disdainful glance out of the side of it’s eyes and a yawn.

“Why didn’t you tell me so long had passed?!? You are just as responsible for this as me you know! Stupid cat…”

Whipping about, he marched to another table across the room and began digging through a pile of loose papers with a purpose, clearly searching for something specific. Eventually with a grin he whipped out a page marked with several complex circles on it. Turning to dig through a chest set on the floor underneath the table, he dug for a moment until he pulled out two glistening white hekatite crystals.

Moving to the center of the room, he began to etch the contents of the page onto the floor using a plain wooden walking stick and the same soot he had used on the table only moments prior. After a painstaking ten minutes of drawing, despite his incredible speed and precision, a complex set of interconnected and nested circles was transcribed. Smiling to himself as he reviewed the circle, he nodded in satisfaction and returned to the chest to dig around again, his arm disappearing up to the shoulder despite the exterior of the chest seeming to not exceed a foot in depth.

Pulling out a bound stack of wrappings and cut hemp cord, he tossed his new acquisitions around the circle and reviewed one more time before gently placing the crystals in the center of the circle and then crouching down at the edge and placing his hand along the periphery, right at a sharp point of the geometry.

“Here goes nothing. It will only decide if master rewards or punishes me on her return, no pressure. Its only an untested spell that my entire success depends on, what could go wrong”

Grimacing as he failed to assure himself, the man took a deep breath, sighed, and then a trickle of light began to seep out of his hand, the soot burning a bright gold, crawling around the circumference of the outer circle. Once the highlighted part of the circle completed its loop and connected, with a whoosh the air in the room changed, a tangible pull could be felt to the circle as its inner components began to light up one by one. In the eyes of the man, the gentle silver that always persisted in the air around began to get pulled toward the circle at an incredible rate as everything in the room began to shift.

Books lifted off the surfaces, closing themselves and flying over to each one of the scattered wrappings, seemingly sorting themselves into piles. The rest of the objects around the room did the same at quite the velocity, startling the cat off the windowsill with the third indignant hiss of as many minutes. Eventually, once everything in the room seemed to have sorted itself, the wrappings moved by themselves to enclose their particular piles, the cords winding and twisting through the air, wriggling like unearthed worms seeking moisture until their caught themselves by their other ends and tied tightly into bindings. Finally, each package flew across the room towards the chest, depositing itself into it in an absurd and impossible fashion, the enclosure that seemed no larger than a shoebox appearing no fuller than it had the moment before.

Heaving deep breaths and considerably sweatier than before, the man fell back on his haunches with a victorious smirk on his lips.

“Heh… Best… Spell… Ever…”

Eventually mustering the energy to unsteadily rise to his feet, he dusted himself off before paling as he realized JUST how unpresentable he seemed, soaked in his own sweat and covered in haphazard ink stains.

“Oh, I definitely need my self-cleaning spell. How did it go again?…”

Looking around for his reference, he paused, slowly turning to look at the nicely packed chest and then closing his eyes in embarrassed resignation.

“Alright. To the river it is, maybe I’ll still beat master home…. Or not, but at least I will be clean.”

Snorting and giving up, he trudged out of the front door, squinting back the pain of moving into the sunlight.

***

One halfhearted bath and a copious amount of scrubbing at stains later, he supposed he was presentable enough to greet his master. A quick spell to dry out his clothes, with an equal amount of regret for not learning a suitable cleaning spell in the first place, the man trudged back through the small copse of willow trees and across the stunningly violet heather moor that separated him from the small stone and board cabin that had been his home for the last months awaiting the return of his master.

As he crested the last rocky incline before home, the symphony of flowing color he always saw suddenly seemed tinged in an angry reddish-black; the last color he should have hoped to see upon his return.

Gasping and grasping at his throat as the suffocating violence of the ruach almost overwhelmed him, he bolted up the last steps to the cottage, desperately searching for his master, yet equally terrified at the prospect of what he might find. Over the crest. Through the door. And there she was.

Lying on the wooden slats of the floor, her chest heaving was a chestnut skinned woman, her long black hair cascading onto the floor haphazardly, her starry midnight robes tinted with a conspicuous and spreading purple stain.

“Master!”

Rushing forward and pulling her petite frame upwards and onto the bed and then kneeling before her, now seated, figure, the man took in the state of his teacher. Blood poured from a vast number of wounds all over her body, her robes torn in places, and in others seemingly bludgeoned and pressed into her previously smooth and youthful skin. A deep gash ran from the center of her forehead, splitting her nose diagonally across the bridge and cutting a run under her eye socket down her cheekbone. She was pale from the blood loss and although her gentle eyes drooped from exhaustion, the sharpness had yet to leave them.

She turned to her desperate apprentice and smiled, a little garish with her wounds, yet seeming to covey a maternal love for the man. Reaching out with a trembling bloody hand, she caressed his cheek.

“Ah. Aron. Sweet boy, there you are”

Aron froze, seemingly unable to process the scene before him, the godlike figure of his worship, his unbreakable and undefeated master sat there… Broken… After only a moment of pause, he seemed to realize his own state, and began to scramble to take in and cover his master’s wounds.

“Ah… Ah! Hold on master, I will get my…. My healing supplies!”

He turned to his recently-packed bag and thrust his arm in as fast as he could, retrieving one of the smaller bundles with a practiced ease, his fear and anxiety only betrayed by his fiercely trembling fist, a trickle of blood pouring from the point where his nails met flesh.

Returning to his master’s side, he focused on his eyes to assess her condition, simultaneously beginning and infusion of his own ruach ha’lev into her body. His eyes began to fog as he realized the true extent of her condition. Her body was falling apart, each of her vital organs failing one by one, no matter how much energy he infused into her. Her energy core, was split, hemorrhaging her ruach into her body at random, untuned energy wreaking havoc on her circulatory system Worst of all, her nefesh, her soul itself, was flickering with a dying light showing how overtaxed she was.

Fighting the onset of tears, not for a second letting up on the infusion of vital energy into her body, he began to flip through the small tome of spells he retrieved from the bag, habit saving him despite the crawling function of his shell-shocked mind as he stopped on a specific page.

Whispering words of prayer to the creator, the dragons, and any being who might listen, he began to channel ruach through the circle on the page. A great influx of the energy was pulled over the book and coalesced into an orb of golden light, a mirror of the thin streams flowing from his body into hers. Closing his eyes to focus, he grasped the orb with one hand, and directed its flow with the other, trying to manually mend the parts that were broken. His years of study and practice seemed to pay off as he envisioned the proper function and form of the body, and a he rapidly traced a much simpler circle from her own blood onto a patch of unmarred skin.

For a blissful moment, he felt more than saw her wounds begin to close, function restored to her heart first, then her lungs. Opening his eyes in determination he directed the flow to her liver before hope seemed to fray again, just for a moment, then collapse into a suffocating dearth of despair as the work he put in unraveled. A corrosive, ugly golden glow emanated from her wounds; the foreign, corruptive energy fighting to undo the work he had done and steal the energy he had committed towards its own purpose in a brutal mockery of a cleansing light.

“…en… …ron... …ough…”

As his emotions flared and he prepared to try again, a small but firm hand grasped his arm, breaking his reverie and pulling it away from the book, another hand tilting his chin up, forcing him to stare into the deep abyssal, yet ever so comforting eyes of his master as she lilted in a weak tone that nevertheless brooked no response.

“Maspik hammuddi… Little one, that’s enough.”

Her beaming smile as she held his arms tight proved too much for Aron, tears silently carving rivulets down his cheeks. Gently wiping away his tears, her smile became melancholy and pained as she muttered under her breath, words so quiet only she could hear.

“Ah, little one. I knew this would this would be hard, but this…”

Sighing, her smile returned its brightness even as the color began to fade from her cheeks and she spoke again, this time directed at her apprentice as he nuzzled his cheek against her increasingly chilled palm.

“Little one, you know what these wounds mean. My time has come to a close, but you, you must live on without me... These next years will be painful, and cruel. I am so sorry that you must endure them, but you MUST endure them.

Fate is cruel, and time’s flow incessant, but the paths are laid, and you must walk them. You must walk them to the end, no matter what.”

“Master, I don’t understand… What do you mean?… Hold on, I’ll try again, if I can purge the divine-”

Aron attempted to return to his book, shaking hands pulling against the vice-grip that contained them, only for that grip to tighten again, his face once again pulled back to focus.

“Aron. Look at me. There are things you do not know, cannot know, but I hope that I have earned your trust. I must hope that I have earned at least this much.

Please remember. Above all. I love you. You are my son, perhaps not by blood, but always you will be my son.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Pulling his head into her lap, her stained robes now colored with salty tears on top of the blood, she cradled he head for a moment, her free hand gingerly pulling a chain over from her neck, over her head, and onto his. Her hand moved for a moment, and with inhuman speed, traced a circle onto the nape of his neck, each finger moving independently as her eyes fluttered closed and her head tilted back and swayed to and fro as words of power manifested from her lips.

Harsh but beautiful words flowed from her lips, words that defied the capabilities of mortal vocal cords, words that would drive a human mind mad with incomprehension. Reality trembled as she spoke, space fluttering like a silk blanket in the breeze, at moments seeming to crackle like a splintered pane of glass. The circle she traced on her apprentice’s neck seemed to come alive, forming a silver and black dragon, dancing in a circle as it ate its own tail. A primal roar seemed to echo through the room.

Realizing something was occurring, Aron tried to struggle, but he found he could not move his head from his master’s lap. Pulling and begging in fear at her uncharacteristic behavior, he went still for a moment as the spell climaxed. He shuddered as it took effect and he realized what was happening. The world stilled and went quiet, the sounds of the chant fading into silence, the glow of the circle disappearing at once, to be replaced by a simple tattoo sharing its shape which itself faded into his skin leaving it again spotless, and the shifting of reality settling into a placid calm.

All at once Aron felt a sense of loss. Of rejection. The ruach was gone. His lifeline rejected him wholly. Bodily function moving on autopilot as any common man’s, his connection to the lifeblood of the universe silent and still. Worst of all, when his master’s grasp on his head loosened and he was able to lift his eyes again, the world had lost its color. Plain. Drab. Grey. Quiet…

“Master…”

Betrayal and confusion flickered in his eyes as he met those of his lifelong teacher one last time. A river of tears poured down her whole cheek as she leaned forward, kissed his forehead, and shoved him backwards to sprawl on his rear, just as the door of the cottage slammed open.

A tall figure stepped through the door, cast in a golden halo of the midday sun contrasting the dark of the cottage. Snow-while hair, speckled with gray was slicked back with sweat across the brow of the newcomer, a thick but tightly trimmed beard of the same color framing his distinguished face. He was clad in gold and white raiments that somehow simultaneously evoked a holy and yet combative aura, a billowing amber cloak trailed over his shoulders. In his right hand, he held a gilded arming sword, cross guard and pommel decorated with angelic images that stood in sharp contrast to the streak of crimson blood dripping down the silvered fuller. In his left, was a compass, needle pointed straight towards the bloodied woman. As his face came into view out of the sharp light, he turned to the bed and faced her silently for a moment, before he spoke in a deep, aged baritone.

“Merlin. I must admit I am disappointed at how simple this was, given your… Previous achievements”

Snort. Merlin chuckled weakly from her spot, her former warm smile gone, replaced by a vicious bloody grin.

“Sweet of you to say, even after I slaughtered more than a hundred of your paladin fanatics.”

“True, but I still expected more considering your age and… experience… Well, what’s done is done. It’s time for you to give me what I want. If you do, I see no reason to pursue your further, we can both move on with our lives.”

Pausing for a moment, Merlin looked up into his dead, grey eyes. Then her grin turned feral, her eyes manic.

“Catch me if you can”

With not a second delay, the woman popped. A wave of energy erupted from the spot she sat, throwing the residents of the room back into walls, then blowing the walls out in an eruption of pure, silver energy.

Stumbling back in the ruins of the house and staring at the blood-stain that used to be his prey, the man roared in fury, huffing and fuming. Several similarly dressed figures who had been stationed around the house, quickly moved into defensive positions around the fuming figure, one dashing to the shocked form of Aron, splayed on the ground, grabbing him by his hair, and dragging him in front of the man before kneeling himself and waiting until the fury seemed to die down into a simmer.

“Your holiness, what should we do with the apprentice? Should we bring him back to burn in his master’s stead”

Turning to look at the dark-skinned man with now vacant eyes and tear-stains on his cheeks, the grey-haired man’s eyes glowed brightly for a moment before he snorted.

“Apprentice my ass, look at him, this one couldn’t wield the cursed magic even if he tried. More likely a servant. No one point in burning him. Brand him and give him to the slavers, Im sure they could make use of him.”

As he turned to leave in a huff, he paused for a moment, then turned back to the newlydead-eyed man. Reaching down and pulling him up into the air by his scalp, he looked into his eyes and spoke again.

“Actually, there is some chance you are of use. Tell me, where did Merlin hide her legacy? Hmm?”

Blinking, slowly in confusion and pain, he mumbled a response in a hoarse, shallow voice.

“Legacy? What legacy? She’s gone.. I’m alone…”

“…a useless cur after all. Wasting my precious time”

The last thing Aron saw was a gauntlet wrapped in light before everything went blank.

***

Gasp

Aron sat up with a start, clutching at the amulet that had not left his neck in over a decade, frantically feeling for his master’s last touch. Only slumping backwards once he felt the cool metal press against his ribs.

A dream. Just a dream. I’m not there anymore…

After a moment of catching his breath, he lifted himself back from the cold stone wall, stumbling to hit feet with a clatter and clang of chains loosely hanging from his manacled feet. The last 12 years had not been kind to Aron. If before he had looked the part of the uncaring scholar, now he was naught but skin and bones. His dark skin had faded to a pale, sickly, olive, and his luscious tangled curls had devolved to long, untrimmed locks that fell down unevenly upon his shoulders, clearly trimmed with a tool barely sharp enough to part their fibers. His scalp and gangly beard were flecked with far more grey than could be expected of a man not yet 40, especially one who should have been preserved by the flow of ruach, or as the theocrats called it, “wyll”, a term far too old and distinguished for their disdainful tongues.

In the greatest of ironies, one that could only see said to have been a joke by the spirits of fate, only once he had lost the daily comforts he had taken for granted has Aron begun to care for those simple luxuries. Doing his best to straighten and dust off his tunic and trousers that barely accounted for more than a pair of rags, he stretched his sallow, starved body and prepared to move for the day.

Shuffling out of the cramped stone room, Aron began to make his way from the slave-quarters towards the canteen to get some morning food before having to work for the day. The frosty chill of the the winter air was much worse outside, but his bare feet were calloused enough that he no longer felt the invading ache of frostbite, regardless of the season.

Passing by a cluster of similar rooms to the one he occupied, Aron was greeted by haggard men and women who each raised two fingers to their lips and lowered their head and muttered a greeting “ropheh” before turning back. They were of many different races, men and women alike. Among them were even some of the spirit-kin, animal features appearing prominently from scaled skin to fur and tails. The only things they had in common were their horrid emaciation and a brand on their necks, each wore a dark blue, raised brand depicting a circle crossed out with a straight vertical line though the its center and a wavy horizontal line broken by the vertical. Despite being old markings, each was in a perpetual state of swollen and red. Subconsciously touching his own brand, Aron grimaced, but coached the expression away to return the greetings. It always disgusted him, this flagrant violation of the “mercy” the Trinity zealots always proclaimed to believe in.

After a short walk, eventually the scenery changed. From the inhumane collapsed stone buildings that he woke near, a clear improvement could be seen. While they could not be considered luxurious by any means, the rickety wooden houses he now walked by were clearly of a better make and considering the building material, were much easier to repair and keep sealed. Some of the buildings had thin blooms of white smoke rising from ramshackle chimneys.

In this area, Aron was greeted only by grimaces and heads turned away. Here the residents walked without the manacles seen before, and on their necks rather than a branded sigil, sat one of two types of tattoos, some bore symbols of a coin, while others had a rough depiction of the chains that graced Aron’s feet.

After passing a few houses, a thin elderly man fell in beside him. Dressed in ragged clothes that at one time would have looked quite gaudy for being made of plain materials, the man was clearly much better groomed, even if he shared the dirty aesthetic of other slaves in the camp. On his neck was a very dark coin shape with the number 34,932,433 printed within. A moment after he fell in, it ticked up again by one and the veins on his neck briefly twitched.

“Fine morning ropheh!” the man greeted with a rough, grating voice and a tilt of his head that was polite, but not defferneital.

“Gmornin’ Henry. Please, you know I hate it when you call me that”

“Heh, but what fun would it be to only give you what you want”

The corner of Aron’s lips tweaked into a slight smile, before he brought it back to straight, keeping his eyes facing forward as he conversed with the man beside him.

“I assume this isn’t a social call? You certainly wouldn’t want to be seen interacting with a Heretic, lest your Debtors decide it’s time for a change in leadership.“

“As much as I would love to pick your brain about any of a number of topics, you are indeed correct. One of mine took a nasty spill in the mines yesterday, her leg is twisted something bad, and I was hoping you could take a look”

“I could, I could. But what can you do for me? My hands are already quite full, winter months are rough in the Heretic camp you know. Nothing like your debtors, or Peter’s crooks in your fancy chicken coops ” gesticulating outward in a dramatic gesture, Aron’s voice took on a slight teasing tone.

Henry chuckled a bit before reaching into his pocket and slipping over a small slip of paper into Aron’s now waiting hand. Subtly flipping it forward and reading out of his cupped palm, Aron let himself smile briefly.

“Indeed, I think I can work with that. I’ll come by this evening after the mines, the vice-super should have gotten paid yesterday, so in all likelihood he will be just drunk enough for me to get to your zone”

“Good. Well, I will see you after then”

With a polite smile and nod, the elderly man peeled off and began walking down a different lane between the cramped wooden buildings of the Debtor slave quarters.

***

Reaching the kitchen area, Aron made his way to the counter and received his bowl of morning slop, accompanied by a hearty look of disdain from the coin-marked cook. Grimacing at the cold, unappetizing food, he made his way over to a table at the far reaches of the cleared area, sitting down at a table filled with men similarly marked with brands rather than tattoos. He nodded a greeting and all but the boy directly in front respectfully responded with the familiar two fingers upon their lips.

The young boy before him shared a lot of the same features as Aron had possessed before his imprisonment, from his dark, swarthy complexion to his curly black hair. His mark was obviously much fresher than the others, signaling only a short time since his incarceration. He was remarkably healthy in comparison to the other Heretics in the camp, in part due to his recent enslavement, and part due to his young age of barely 13 years old. Leaning forward conspiratorially, he began babbling excitedly in a lilting voice, spoken in a language unfamiliar to most in the camp.

“Good morning doctor! Did you hear? Everyone in the camp has been talking about it since last night, but you went to bed early after checking on Iva’s baby. Some bigshot is visiting and the warden has the crooks all riled up getting the camp read—”

*Cough* *Cough*

“David, calm down, and chew your food before speaking, and please, please, use Menenic. The debtors are always looking for something they can report to the guards to get some repayment on their indenture. We’ve been over this. You know this”

Standing slightly and reaching over to calm the sheepishly smiling and still hacking boy down, Aron allowed himself to smile a little. David had been a part of one of the surviving Puran caravans that had wandered their native desert, even after the church burned their cities when he was a boy not much younger than David himself. The Church made hunting these caravans sport, and their people were always directly enslaved and shipped back across the Dragon’s Spine to be put to work on the various projects of their empire. If anything was assured for these slaves, it was a short, brutal life. Yet they persisted.

This reality had been nothing more than a point of sympathy for Aron himself after his master lifted him from the ruins of Pura, all the way until her death. A dark boogieman to haunt the imagination in his dreams until Engono rose in the morning to spare him of its clutches. Now such a rising just served to remind him of the passage of another day in this cesspool of misery. Another reminder that his master was gone, and taking with her the only thing besides her that he had truly loved.

He never understood why she took his magic with her into death. Intuitively he was aware that it spared him from immediate death by the inquisitors who had cut her down so viciously, but this sort of slow death was barely much better. But with every beating, every time he considered just rolling over and letting the cruel fate have its way with him and allow death’s gnawing hunger its fill, he was forced to remember Merlin’s request to endure. So he endured.

For the first years, that was all he could muster. Locked in his own nightmare, his mind caged and abused, he just endured, nothing more. Little more than a shell of a person, he went through the motions, work, eat, sleep, get beat. Work, eat, sleep, get beat. Over and over he endured. Until one day, his dispassionate response to the violence led a particularly sadistic guard to shift that violence from him to one of his peers. Turning all of the violence that he would have inflicted upon him onto the woman, torturing her in his place until she could bear it no more and perished.

It was then that the remnants of himself he clung to so desperately he broke completely, the fragmented pieces that had endured and barely held together with what tiny vestige of will remained, shattered and from the pieces he was able to rebuild. No longer could he be Aron the apprentice of Merlin, no longer could he be the boy who woke every day to breathe of the wonders of magic and creation. No, he had to be the ropheh, the healer, the last of the priesthood of Pura. And he so he gathered himself, turning his abject pain and despair into channeled rage. He raged at the filth who burned his home, not once, but twice over. He raged at the unfairness of the world that would condemn all those who wished to explore her mysteries, he raged at the weak willed sufferers who turned their own punishment onto their peers for nothing but a brief moment of respite from their suffering. And most of all, he raged at the powerlessness he had been forced into, he knew that even if his master had not stripped him of his power to affect reality, the brand scored into the skin of his neck would have.

With that decision made, he decided to focus on what he could do. While he could no longer reach out and guide the world, he could at least control his own self. Without much nourishment and through the perpetual violence, his ability was limited, but he had nothing but time and the knowledge that came from a life less common. So he became what he needed to be, during the day he turned his knowledge to healing, helping the other sufferers survive even a day longer. At night, he turned inward, sharpening his mind into a blade and developing his soul into a burning flame. By the time the guards noticed the shift in his personality, he was already the one leading the Heretics, those of the conquered peoples and those who had once held powers and abilities beyond the Church’s ken before being branded and sealed. Unwilling to turn him into a martyr by killing him outright, they pushed him further and further, hoping that he would give out, but unwilling to put him to the blade themselves. In the absence of nutrition, he became gaunt, sallow, and worn, but hiss knowledge of healing arts and the lingering vestiges of his ability let him control his own vitality if not that of others, so he endured.

By the time David’s caravan was ambushed, the leaders butchered and others separated to different camps, Aron was an icon amongst his people. Although David was born after the fall of their civilization, he was raised with their traditions, so he felt deeply attached to the priest he had met. It was a small light in the darkness for Aron. The others of his people treated him with deep respect, but detached caution. The who had lived before the fall remembered the priests as distant figures, mystical existences who helped them guide their prayers, granted them knowledge and understanding, and came to treat their wounds. They were pillars, but not human as much as symbol. So David became a small, fragile light of hope for Aron and kept him moving forward.

Finally, finished coughing, the boy fidgeted and looked away sheepishly before his curiosity overwhelmed his embarrassment again and he leaned forward to continue on, this time using the common tongue of the continent.

“Anyway! Apparently there is some bigshot paladin coming to check some of the items we dug up from the mine! He will be here tomorrow, so the guards are all getting themselves put together so the warden can look good. I gotta find a good spot to lookout and see if I can see him when he comes through!”

A tremble of fear spiked through Aron, shaking him from his remembrance as the face that haunted his dreams for the last decade flashed before his eyes. Surely it wouldn’t be him.

“No” Taking a firm tone, Aron grasped the boy’s chin and pulled it so that he looked him straight in the eyes. “No. You do not understand the danger a paladin can pose, even the weakest among them. You must stay away. Far away, As far away from him and you can, when he visits, do you hear me?”

“But ropheh…”

“No. This is too important, I need your promise. Now.”

Looking a little more dejected and defeated, the boy muttered a quiet affirmation. Although he felt contrite at quelling the fervor of the boy, Aron knew this was far too dangerous. Sighing as he realized he would have to give up on his promised reward in exchange for Henry’s later assistance, he cursed under his breath and went back to his food. It would be a long day.