As he sat there staring into his empty bowl and thinking, Olena walked over and sat down next to him. She had been talking to Elder Yim, but Richard hadn’t been paying attention. He was startled out of his introspection by the bold move and turned to look at her.

She spoke with a quiet and smooth voice, “Richard, you know we have questions, but you don’t really need to answer them today if you don’t want to. The most important thing to us is trying to figure out how we interact moving forward. It is our hope that we would find an ally in you, in case we needed help. More, we hope to find a friend or a safe place to settle.

“You have a great place here and knowledge that dwarfs our own in some ways. We could find safety here, if you were to allow us to join you. Even if you don’t like that idea, we could be great neighbors. But there might also be danger.

“We just need to know the important things about you and this place in order to determine if it is safe before moving forward. There are hints of great and terrible things in the words you have spoken and the land around us. The land itself seems torn, the veils are strange, and you yourself are a strange warrior with armor and skills we don’t understand.

“You have said a few times today that you have forgotten things, and you throw power and magic around like something out of our legends. We still don’t really understand your situation or who you are, but from what I’ve seen so far, you seem like a man with a good soul. If you will, could you explain the war, this fortress, the rift… the things that you would want to know if you were trying to determine if a place was safe for your friends and family?”

Richard studied Olena’s green eyes. He saw compassion, curiosity, and resolve within them. He didn’t actually know what those emotions looked like in another person anymore, it had been so long since he had seen them. That didn’t stop him from understanding her any less.

He realized that he had a choice, here.

He could say no, or lie, or try to change the subject, or any number of things and the relationship between him and the only people he’d seen in a thousand years (or however long) would be irreparably damaged.

Or he could crack open those thoughts and memories, the scars on his soul, the desperate loneliness. He had buried them under whimsy and humor, buried them under nonsense and distractions, he had forced ignorance upon himself as a defense mechanism. If he were to reach into that cold part of his soul, he might not come back out the same.

If he didn’t, he would lose the warmth of the people who had finally arrived and the possibilities the future may bring.

In the end, he didn’t have a choice. Not really.

He decided to go all-in. He had lied and told them there was extra security because he hadn’t yet been ready. He had hinted that there was more, but had held them at arm’s length. Well, if he was going all-in, might as well stop pussyfooting around. There was no future Richard that he could lean on. Not this time.

He nodded at Olena, and stood. He made eye contact with each of his guests, and saw the curiosity and conviction in each of their gazes. He looked at his feet, drew a deep breath, and nodded one last time with his decision.

Something snapped in his mind, and he began to feel more, and to remember.

He had always been talented at mind magic. It might seem that over time he hadn’t tried to learn anything at all, but that hadn’t been the case before. He had learned plenty, but nothing ever really changed in his situation and so he became despondent.

Mental magic was tricky and difficult to experiment with, but he had all the time in the world. He learned ways to partition his mind into bundles. It would let him learn something all over again, just so that he would have an objective to work towards and be able to feel like he was accomplishing something.

Eventually he learned how to lock large portions of his mind away with magic. He could bottle up the painful memories and seal them within himself. This is why it was always difficult to meditate too deeply, because he would eventually find incongruencies and awaken himself. It took time to put everything back into their boxes once he had unpacked them.

Just like his skill with the stasis spell for setting conditions upon which it would break, he had set certain marks for his mind. Being able to talk to someone and to believe that it wasn’t a hallucination this time, awakened a bit more of his mind. Deciding that his long wait was over, was another.

And so, deciding in his heart that his long vigil had changed in a fundamental way, spells he had forgotten he even placed on himself began to unravel.

His mind began to fully wake for the first time in many hundreds of years, unlocking memories that he had pasted over on purpose, but there were some things he would never forget. Could never forget.

“Alright.” He said in a gentle voice that both reverberated in the air, but felt like a whisper on the breeze. Everyone looked at him and they seemed to almost be holding their breaths.

His essence began to fully settle into the world around him. He had cut himself off, time and again, from his… prison. But he was always connected deeply to it.

Richard looked up, blue eyes faintly glowing and drowning with age, and said, “Alright. Follow me.”

He turned and walked slowly towards the fort. The others were all startled, but they felt something strange compelling them, and so they followed.

As he slowly walked; he began. “At first, we all thought the incidents were local. Even villages dealt with them and didn’t think to report to towns or cities. They were small things. Aggressive creatures mutated in strange ways but they were easy enough to put down.

“A few years passed, and the reports were finally coming in that something might be wrong. People were dying. There were more monsters than usual, and people who lived away from safe areas were beginning to disappear.

“Cities added more guards to the rolls, they increased patrols. It would pass, they thought.

“It didn’t.

“By the time we began to take the threat seriously, the cities were beginning to fill up with people seeking shelter. People who used to make the food that the cities relied on, no longer were. People were going hungry, the nobility began to find delicacies more rare. Something was happening and the upper levels of power were beginning to notice.”

Richard hadn’t cast a light spell, and it was hard to see as they moved into the fortress. He reached to the side, and brushed his fingers against a power conduit. Using his connection to the fort that was seamlessly integrated into his mind, he activated a feature. The hallways were suddenly lit by faint white light that flowed through every rune and conduit, all connected together in a beautiful tapestry. The others following him exclaimed in surprise, but Richard didn’t pause his slow march.

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“Governments began to call for aid, finally, only to realize a horrible truth: Their allies, those who they hoped to call for help, were dealing with the same situation. Everyone was. Across the entire globe of our beautiful world, message spells were sent frantically, great mages and kings began to hunt for the cause, finally awakened to the problem. Politics were set aside in the face of a great threat, but it was already late.

“As they searched and talked, we began to die. Armies were created, all adult men were drafted. It gave us some breathing room. The monsters were pushed back, for a time.

“As villages and towns began to fall - It was found. A pattern. A direction. ‘North’, the great scholars said. ‘Something is happening in the mountains’”

Richard stopped at his room and walked in. He waited until they were all inside before pointing at The Wall.

“This isn’t part of the story, but you wondered - I can feel it in your auras. Each of those marks is a year, and I stopped counting long ago.”

His guests looked at The Wall. From the top left to the bottom right were rows of marks. The number was hard to determine, but it must have been great to cover a wall so fully. Hundreds, surely. Thousands? They didn’t understand, not fully. Richard waved for them to follow him as he began to walk through the hallways again.

He continued; “We lost many before we found the rift. These monsters, or Twisted as you say, are simple things. Aggressive, occasional magical anomalies, tougher, larger, yes. They are something that a single well equipped soldier can deal with.

“The horrors that came out of the Ether were different. Horrible and ever changing, drenched in magic, tireless, enormous. They were nightmares given form, and it took many to put one down. They came from the rift, the same one just north of here.

“Some were different. They almost made sense, like the forms were from our minds, but plausible. Dragons, Griffons, Dryads, Selkies, Goblins, the great monsters in the deeps… They all came from the rift. We couldn’t push them back, not at first. Many escaped into the wilderness or the river.

“Those who still had authority dug a tunnel underneath the land to get close and study the rift. Our greatest minds were assembled in the basement of this fort, though it had not yet been built as you see it. They determined that it must be closed, at any cost.

“The Ether was sending mutating energy throughout the whole world. If it could be closed, they said, the world would be saved - or at least it wouldn’t get any worse. They began to bring in soldiers and mages, to build a fortress we could hold while the great army was assembled.

“Every nation on the planet sent who could be spared from the defense. Women, children, older people, all were drafted into the war effort. I was fourteen when I joined originally, after my sister was killed and my mother joined the city levies. It was before the last push, but almost everything had been lost by then.

“I was lucky that I had magic flowing inside of me, I wouldn’t just be given a spear and told to stand and die in a line.”

Richard paused and cocked his head in thought. “I still can’t remember their names…” he whispered before continuing on, echoes of sadness and loss almost palpable in the air.

“By the time the fortress was complete and the area secure enough to begin the push, I was twenty. I was talented in dealing death with magic, but had never been trained to do anything else. In fact, it wasn’t my main talent, but that was irrelevant at that point.

“Archmage Hollister, who was in charge of the magical defenses, came up with a plan: To bind a soul to an Arcstone - a magical relic designed to channel the energy within a ley line. With its power, guided by a consciousness, the horde of horrors could be pushed back and a seal placed upon the rift. This would have been, in less desperate times, so wholly grotesque and illegal as to be unthinkable.”

He paused, to let them think about that.

“I volunteered immediately. They needed not only a powerful war mage, but one with a predisposition to mind magic. Word had just come to the army that Helveric had fallen, you see. It was the last city of my country - where my mother had been fighting. It was an honor to be allowed to strike back in an appreciable way.”

Richard turned the last corner and came to a stop; there was the iron door. It’s blue glow, usually subdued, was strong and sharp with the wards activated. The others had been following along silently, and stopped behind him.

Richard looked over his shoulder and said, “If you aren’t with me, do not enter this room. Don’t touch the door. The door doesn’t warn, like the boundary of the inner wards.” He waited for everyone to nod, then turned and pushed the door open.

Glorious golden light spilled out of the room, the Arcstone placidly spinning in its cradle. Behind him, Richard could hear gasps and prayers. His heart was almost bursting in his chest, and he was breathing heavily.

“An Arcstone. The last, probably.” Richard whispered hoarsely.

He moved into the room and stood next to the stone while his guests filed in and looked around in awe. All of his notes, covering almost every surface, the Arcstone, the well. It was quite a sight. He waited for them to collect themselves.

His guests were obviously overwhelmed, but they would remember every single word and experience that they had been exposed to - Richard made sure of that. There was only one outlier. Olena had come to a stop just inside the room, and seemed transfixed by the energies below the Arcstone. Perhaps it was her extra senses when it came to veils?

Richard cleared his throat and waited to have complete attention before he resumed.

“I bound myself to this stone, and after I had acclimated to it the battle began. It lasted about a week, I think. Or maybe… a month?” He shook his head. “Frankly, it may have even been years. This portion of my mind was very scrambled while I was attuning to the stone. Anyway, the amalgamation horrors continually poured out of the rift as I bombarded it. The area was finally cleared long enough for the last of our mages, including Archmage Hollister, to get close enough to the rift to place a seal upon it.

“It was a desperate gamble at that time - there were so few left. But they did it. Those heroes saved the world by successfully sealing the rift, and most paid with their lives.

“Below our feet is a vast room upon the walls where every name and rank of every soldier who was part of the final battle, from the construction of the fortress to the end. I haven’t gone down there since the final battle.

“The few hundred that were left after the horrors had been cleaned up met for one last time in this fortress. The battles across the world had thrown up so much dust that the very air was beginning to cool across the world, and they had a long way to march to get to civilization. The winters had been getting longer for a long time, and I felt that those heroes needed all the help I could provide. I gave them all I could spare, for I would need to stay behind.

“They said they would find help, that they would send someone to relieve me, that they would send supplies. No one ever came.

“I have been here, all this time, to safeguard the world from the rift so that what happened to us may never happen again.

“The room with the marks on the walls was the infirmary. It has a stasis spell attached to the stone slab. I slept away during the long winter. I’ve slept away every winter, in fact. Constantly hoping, constantly waiting and holding the rift closed. Doing my duty.”

Richard paused. He tried to convey with his glowing eyes what he meant to impart on his guests. He wasn’t sure if they understood, but they were spellbound. He had already wrapped their minds inside of his own aura and with mental spells to make sure they would never forget what he was saying… or at least wouldn’t forget it if they didn’t have hundreds of years like he had.

“I discovered many many years ago that the Arcstone was affecting my mind. It kept me sane, mostly, and gave me a purpose. It is a prison, you see. I cannot get a certain distance away from the stone, and I cannot abandon my duty. I wouldn’t abandon it if I had a choice, but loneliness and hopelessness can warp a mind. Despite the stone balancing my mind, I have fantasized about an end more times that I wish to recount.”

Richard, who had been staring into the Arcstone’s light, turned to his guests. His eyes were glowing bright now and he was wrapped in an ancient aura. They all shivered, for someone looking like they were barely past their twenties shouldn’t look like they were older than the hills.

Richard looked down to the ground to think for a moment before raising his eyes to capture their attention again. “You asked me about humanity. That’s all there was when I was a child. Your ears and tails are strange to me, for while the colors of skin, hair, eyes could be different, we were all the same. The only conclusion that I can reach is that the energies twisted those few survivors, giving them the tools to fight for a place to live.

“Does this mean I may hold some feelings against you for how you look, as your tribe has clearly dealt with before with the Kaila? No. Never fear that, for you are the most beautiful things I have seen in all of my life: Survivors. Irrefutable proof that my long vigil has not been in vain. I have been waiting for you, and I would never wish you harm.

“Could I protect you and yours? Most assuredly. It would not only be my honor, but my greatest joy. For the only thing I have had to live for for over two thousand years is the hope that someday, I might meet you.”