As unlikely as it may be, no, I did not have a name to give. I considered picking one on the spot, so I would not fail to answer such a trivial question, but that proved quite a challenge, since the only names I knew were those of his colleagues.

“Well?” the scarred man pressed, unsatisfied with how long I was taking to reply.

Lacking time to decide, I elected to just go with the truth. “I do not know.” I knew it was a terrible start to this interrogation, making it look like I refused to cooperate.

“Fine. No name,” my interlocutor acknowledged. “Fitting, I suppose.—he sighed—It doesn’t matter. Who’s your lord? I’m not buying the Vallo crap. He’s not that stupid. Not cunning enough to be planting evidence against himself, either.”

I saw no way to escape telling the whole truth to this man. If I kept answering in a deflective manner over and over, his patience would soon run out. While I had been looking for someone to help me, this was not the person I would have picked, given a choice. It seemed I did not have one. At least things were not going as poorly as I would have expected. Indeed, there were no torture devices in sight.

“I honestly do not know. My earliest memory is of waking up this morning in the woods outside the city. I believe I have been the victim of a particularly vicious, mind-altering spell,” I explained.

Silence fell as my captor took a moment to think.

“This...” he began, “this is what you’re going with?” He sighed again, then stood up. “Look. You’re stuck in here until I decide otherwise. If you don’t have any better explanation to give me, I see no reason to let you out.” He turned to leave. “He’s all yours, Nouel, just keep me updated,” the man said before closing the door behind him, not waiting for a reply.

Ah.

It dawned on me that I might have sightly misjudged the situation earlier. There were, in fact, plenty of ways to inflict severe pain in this room. A mage required no specialized tools to achieve that. I gulped in fear, then tried to assuage my potential torturer.

“I-I’m the telling the truth!” My voice was shacky. “There is absolutely no need to resort to violence!”

Nouel was not even looking at me. He started placing stones on the table. What kind of spell was he shaping?

“I simply can’t tell you what I don’t know! Believe me, no one wants to know what is happening more than I!”

I was panicking. The mage still gave me no reaction.

“The dagger isn’t mine, alright? I don’t know who Vallo is. Just found it shortly after waking up. Took it to defend myself.”

More pebbles were being set on the desk.

“Listen,” I pleaded. “There were a bunch of bodies. I don’t know what happened. It’s possible that I killed them all, but I’m a different man now.”

My rambling was making considerably less sense as emotions disrupted it, but that got a reaction. Nouel frowned. He was listening, then. The information must not have been to his satisfaction, though, for he stayed quiet.

“I mean, I did steal some food, but people seem to want me dead, and I don’t know why,” I continued. “Oh. I also stole a shirt, I guess.”

Not having anything else to admit to, I fell silent and tried to discern how the mage was taking my confessions.

After it became clear I would not speak further, Nouel opened his mouth. “You seem to misunderstand my purpose for being here,” he commented. “Yes, Lord Derrien is interested in the political aspects of your situation. I, on the other hand, am not. Oh, I will communicate anything relevant to him, of course, but what I am truly curious about is what happened to your soul.”

I started calming down as the mage kept on speaking. It seemed like pain would not be involved in whatever Nouel planed. I reasoned no torturer would ever be this talkative.

“A-are proposing to help me, then?” I asked, hope growing.

“No,” He replied. “This is not by choice, mind you. I don’t believe it to be within my abilities. Understanding is the best we can hope for, I’m afraid, and I would rather have your cooperation in this venture. After all, did you not ask such a thing earlier?”

“Yes! Yes, understanding would be plenty. My memories are not so important,” I confirmed. I would not refuse information so freely given.

Nouel stopped manipulating his rocks and looked straight at me. He held my gaze, trying to discern something.

“Are your memories really the only thing missing?” He asked, still staring.

I paused, thinking. The question made no sense. I frowned. All I had seen of Nouel pointed to someone who would see the glaring problem with that query. How could I possibly know what else I was missing, without memories to tell me what I used to have?

“There is no way for me to know,” I replied. Maybe this was some sort of test?

The mage did not acknowledge my answer. He seemed lost deep in thought.

“You do not have the slightest idea of what I am feeling right now, do you?” he asked.

I was now utterly confused. This question made even less sense than the one before. What was Nouel going on about? What did this have to do with anything?

He did not expect an answer it seemed, for he continued without leaving me enough time to provide one.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“No, I suspect not. Well, I believe this confirms it. When I first heard of your case, I expected some rogue with a masterful disguise. Of course, if it were so, you would not have been detected a second time. By then, we were suspecting some sort of strange undead remnant. That would have been quite the novelty.” He chuckled. "We decided to find out ourselves. I expect to hear about a bounty for your capture fairly soon. We just acted preemptively to avoid the competition. Honestly, seeing you were a living being was quite a shock."

He paused, taking a breath.

“The subtlety of it is unfortunately lost on you, but there is a long-standing debate on whether mind and soul are one and the same. Indeed, we can all see the soul of any living being capable of thought. And a soul has pretty much always implied a mind, no matter how dull. That is traditionally the core of this debate, the question being whether mushrooms and plants have minds. It’s hard to judge, but the general consensus is that yes, they do.”

Had Nouel been using these magic stones to look at my soul all this time? What did that even look like?

“Is... Is there something wrong with my soul, then?” I asked, trying to figure out where the mage was going with this.

Nouel smiled. “Well, to put it bluntly, you are a living answer to this debate. A mind, but no soul.”

No soul? What did he mean? I understood souls to be an unfathomable concept tied to religion. It filled me with frustration to realize that while I knew this, I could not recall even a single religion. Yet another hole in my memory.

The notion of soul was too abstract for me to feel anguish at its loss, however. I had not thought of my soul before, so I did not feel like I was less for not having one.

The mage must have been expecting me to need some time to recover from that revelation, because he stayed silent, awaiting my denial.

I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something. What had he said prior to talking about souls?

It took me a few seconds, but then it clicked.

“You believe I have no empathy,” I said, perplexed by the conclusion. This had been the reason for his question about being able to tell how he felt, had it not?

“How could you?” Nouel asked. “Empathy requires a connection between souls.”

A strange notion, and easily debunked.

“I can feel your excitement at this discovery. This would not be possible if you were right, would it?” I challenged.

Nouel’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed. How are you able to, without a soul to interact with mine?”

I tried to figure out how the obvious answer might hide secret depths, but could not find any. “The expression on your visage, the intonation of your voice, and its increased speed, I suppose.”

Nouel spent a few seconds thinking about my reply, which felt ridiculous, until I heard his conclusion.

“This is not empathy,” he proclaimed. “You do not feel my emotions. You are using reasoning to identify what I must be feeling.”

It seemed we were debating semantics, but I was no fool: I had seen enough to know I was missing something. Deciphering a difference in meaning here could prove key to understanding exactly what. And if we disagreed on that word, I would have to be careful about the potential for other misconstrued words. Nouel referred to souls as something much less abstract than I would have expected. “Nouel, what is a soul, according to you?” I asked.

He smiled.

“Ah. Quite the philosophical question,” the mage remarked. “Unfortunately, while this would indeed be an enlightening discussion, I lack the time for such debates. I suspect I will stay busy for the foreseeable future, thanks to you.”

Some bell chime resonated in the background. Soft, but hard to miss.

Nouel reacted to it, starting to retrieve the many stones he had spread over the table. “Yes, it is getting late, is it not?” he said. “I have two more questions for you, though.”

Without warning, he tossed one of his pebbles at me. I fumbled, and it fell on the bed. Once I grabbed it, Nouel asked his first question. “Are you at all familiar with this sort of magic?”

I shook my head, looking at the stone. It had a symbol etched on it, but I could see nothing else marking it as magical.

“What about Concept manipulation?”

“I do not know what that is,” I answered honestly.

“Yes, I assumed as much,” Noel mused. “Possibly the intent behind your missing memories.”

Nouel had finished collecting his stones, and got up to leave. That was too soon! I still had a lot of questions!

“Wait! What do you mean? Did you figure out what happened to me?” I desperately asked Nouel’s back.

“Only a strong suspicion. See you some other time, o unnamed one,” he answered, amused, before closing the door.

I found myself alone once again. While I had gotten valuable information, it was clear Nouel shared but a fragment of his findings.

Our disagreement on the definition of empathy was puzzling. Considering that all signs pointed to the mage being nothing more than a slightly eccentric scholar and that I was the one not fitting in, I felt no confidence in my beliefs. I therefore accepted Nouel’s notions over my own, admitting the existence of perceivable souls that enabled true empathy, with the feelings of others being shared in a very literal sense. That could explain people in the streets unsheathing weapons nigh instantaneously whenever someone became angry. Emotions were contagious and fast spreading. Not everyone had reacted, though, so there was more to it than that.

If indeed I lacked a soul to form these connections, that explained the confusion I kept being met with. I did not understand why violence stemmed from that, but at least I knew the root of the issue. Nouel had suggested covering me with an enchantment to mitigate it. This implied a relation between that form of magic and the soul connections, and confirmed that souls were more than emotion conduits.

Thinking about the meaning of souls again brought up a troubling realization. I could not blame this divergence of semantics on my amnesia. This was not ignorance, for I already knew what empathy was. Not as well as a psychology expert would, perhaps, but enough to be sure this was more than a difference of opinion.

I spent some more time thinking about this, but did not find any satisfying explanation.

At some point, the room’s door opened, and Loann entered. He had lost his focused expression and now adorned one more fitting to the late hour. My captor was carrying a plate with some bread and a wooden jar, making the reason for his visit obvious. Having already eaten my fill today, I was more interested in the set of clothes tucked under his arm.

Loann’s tiredness did not invite deep conversation, but I was desperate for information. “Loann, would you mind answering a few of my questions?”

He did not answer, carefully setting the plate down in front of the bars so that I could reach for its content.

Feeling bold, I noted he had not forbidden me from asking. “Why did you need to put an enchantment on me earlier?”

He turned and started leaving.

“Nouel’s the one you want for that kind of stuff, man…” he grumbled, sounding half asleep, before exiting the room.

No one else came to visit and, lacking for anything better to do once my stress died down, I went to sleep.

----------------------------------------

I jolted up, having felt something fall on me. Not yet fully awake, I had a passing thought that these rude awakenings needed to stop before they caused me to develop further mental issues.

The room was pitch black. Only now did I realize I had seen no sources of light in it before. I guessed it must have been some enchanted stones, but I did not know how to turn them back on.

Grumbling, I tried to grope for whatever had dropped on me. It did not take me long. A palm sized ball with a glassy texture was resting on my bed. I was fortunate it had not rolled away and gone out of reach.

When I held it, I felt it warm up a bit, and saw a very faint white glow emanate from it.

‘SCANNING IN PROGRESS. PLEASE HOLD.’

The foreign thought invaded my mind, and I almost dropped the item. My muddled brain wanted to point out that I was already holding the sphere. Though, maybe I should not have. Did I want to let it scan me?