******

First I heard the laughter.

Unbridled, wild, mad. Absolutely mad. Ringing in the night, clear and hollow. Echoing in the silence, almost a part of it.

Then I saw him.

His face aglow with power; his blond hair dancing with the bitter wind. His crystalline blue eyes bright, drunk from happiness. A full, blinding smile graced his lips. His pipe cradled in his arms, polished and beautiful. He looked like a saint, standing over me, moonlight bathing him in silver.

"Thank you, my dear Klaudia," said Lord Himmel. "Thank you for giving back what you had taken from me."

Only then did I feel it—the aching loss of something inside me. It was as though I had lost a limb or an eye, and all of the sudden I was lost. It took me a few moments to let the full realisation sink into my head.

My Affinity had been stolen.

It was gone—ripped away from me. The emptiness in my soul would testify that. There was no way to describe how the loss felt. It was worse than everything I'd been through so far. Worse than suffering multiple beatings from the Mayor; worse than the pain of learning about my past; worse than being locked in that wretched dungeon for weeks; worse than having all my inner demons being set upon me just now.

"What have you done?" I whispered hoarsely.

"An illusion, my dear. It was all an illusion. One that feeds off your deepest, darkest fears. A mighty splendid one, I might say. Of course, that might be attributed to the fact that all your nightmares had started in Hamelin."

I felt sick. Lord Himmel had used every single one of my weaknesses against me, just in attempt to win the power to control minds.

My Affinity had been stolen.

And it now belonged to Lord Himmel.

I was crouching on the ground, arms hugging myself, head bowed so low it almost touched the snow. I couldn't cry—I felt too hollow for that. And yet I was soaked in grief, drowning in it. All that I had endured, and it all came to this. All that I—and so many others had fought for, and in the end, my nightmares had come true.

I'd failed them all.

It was over.

"There, there. Don't look so downtrodden. You made the right choice, my dear." His voice was as smooth as honey. As sweet too. But it invoked a storm of anger within me. My hands clenched into fists, and I gritted my teeth, looking at him through white-dusted lashes and tangled curls.

With a roar, I threw myself at him.

He looked mildly surprised when I managed to spring up from my crouch, in spite of my bad leg. The full force of my weight came crashing upon him, and we fell together, him below and I above. I screamed, flinging my flute aside and wrapping my fingers around his throat, squeezing them for all I was worth. So vulnerable. He was a Magus, but he was still human. He still had life; he still could die. He clawed at me, unable to use his voice to sing. He was a man, and he was supposed to be stronger, while my muscles were weak and untrained. But I was fuelled by pure, unfiltered rage. It poured out in a torrent, fixing its focus upon the man before me. And at the sight of his face going purple, some small part of my heart rejoiced, gladdened that I was taking revenge for what he had done.

Strong arms pulled mine away from Lord Himmel's throat and dragged me away from him. I kicked and screamed, to no avail. Kaiser held me fast, not allowing me a chance to escape. Another sorcerer came up to me and swiftly applied a gag to my mouth. I continued to thrash around, furious.

Lord Himmel, coughing and sputtering, hauled himself onto his feet. He gently touched the red marks around his neck, and for the first time I'd ever seen, his eyes held real fear. Death had been so close to him, and the only regret I had was that I couldn't hold out the torture a little longer. His eyes bore into me, hard as stone. I didn't look away.

"Foolish girl. Let me show you the power you had in your hands," he snarled.

He took up his pipe and began to weave a song. Everyone held their breaths as it rang out. It was eerily similar to the last one I'd played. Bone-chilling, awe-inspiring, beautiful.

Deadly.

My mind went blank.

******

When I came to, there was something warm and sticky on my hands. I was still standing where I had been moments earlier, gag in my mouth. But there was something wrong with my hands. They were unbound; that was the good thing. The bad thing was that a dark red liquid was dripping from them. The drops bloomed against the snow, like darkness tainting light.

Blood.

I looked at the scene with horror. Then slowly, I allowed my gaze to travel further beyond my hands.

And I screamed.

There was a corpse on the ground, its chest ripped open. Blood was splattered over the coat it wore, and its limbs were twisted into unnatural angles. Its eyes were rolled back in its head; its mouth was open, tongue lolled out. It looked like it had been taken by surprise when it died.

I realised that it was the sorcerer who had placed the gag in my mouth.

The sorcerer who had been standing in front of me, within arm's reach.

The sorcerer who had been alive.

I needed to breathe, and I couldn't breathe through the cloth. I ripped it away, gasping for air. I was so terrified that I didn't scream, didn't cry, didn't shake. My knees gave way beneath me, and I sank onto the ground.

I emptied the contents of my stomach.

Unfortunately, there was nothing much left for me to empty. So I was dry-heaving. But it was all right. Anything to get rid of the terror, the pain—the gory sight just before my eyes. Anything to get rid of the image being burned into my mind: the lifeless eyes, the blackened tongue, and the blood.

Especially the blood.

The sound of boots softly approached me. I recognised them as Lord Himmel's. "Why do you react so, my dear?" he said, amused. "This is what you can do—under my command. You, a cripple, a girl, a weakling, bringing down a grown man. You can have the strength to do anything. You need not make yourself suffer any longer."

"Why?" I croaked, keeping my gaze pinned onto his boots.

"To prove how much power I hold over you. And to prove how much power you can have as well."

I finally looked at him. There was no sympathy in his expression. Only pragmatism. And madness. What sickness had invaded his mind? He had made me kill a man just to prove his dominance? Did he have any idea how this would impact me? I suddenly felt like I was about to retch again.

"Well then, best we get back to Hamelin, eh?" he resumed, sickeningly cheery. "Wouldn't want to freeze to death in the middle of nowhere."

"I won't go back to Hamelin," I replied evenly. "I won't play anymore of your games."

He cast one withering look at me before he played his pipe.

******

I gasped in shock. One second, I was out there in the snow; the other, I was in the town square of Hamelin.

I tried to move, but my hands and legs were bound. There was a gag in my mouth, and tried as I might I couldn't spit it out. I was shoved against a wall, the worn bricks threatening to crumble behind me. There were barrels to both my sides, the splinters cutting painfully into my flesh. I decided that it was best if I stopped wiggling for now.

I blinked, adjusting my eyes to the night. The moon hung in the sky, sinister and taunting. I almost heard Saint Bromilde laughing at my plight. There was a group of people clustered in the centre of the town square. Their heights varied, but they all were similar in a sense that power radiated from them. It was the sorcerers.

And in the middle of them, was Lord Himmel.

I'd seemed to regain consciousness in the middle of some kind of ritual. Like the one they had performed on me earlier. Their words carried weight, magic tightly laced into each carefully pronounced syllabus. The combination their magic was overwhelming, and my Core trembled in response. This wasn't just some simple conjuring; this was raw, primal. Of the earth.

Of the corrupted earth.

I didn't know how they were doing it, but my Core told me that they were somehow finding invisible streams of magic in the earth. It was supposed to be drained, empty. Yet they found tiny wells. Small cracks that had been too miniscule to be taken notice of. Now they were binding themselves to it, yielding their souls to the ancient, evil power that thrummed beneath the surface of the ground.

Lord Himmel was the director of the magic. He took it all from his sorcerers, but never allowed it to linger in his body for more than a second. His arms were outstretched, and the magic pooled into an upright circle before him. The circle glowed a vicious purple, swirling like the Fountain in Heidelberg. As Lord Himmel fed more power into it, it grew and grew, extending its circumference until it was at least one third the size of the Fountain.

He said a few words, "Braelin, ma kinnas. Braela, ma sorceriel." The language was nothing I'd heard of before, but there was a deeper meaning to it that I instinctively understood, magic speaking to magic.

Farewell, my children. Welcome, my sorcerers.

Oh no...

The elite guard started to glow the same purple as the portal. It started from their Cores, and eventually spread to their torsos, their limbs, their heads. Soon, the entire town square was filled with their light, and I briefly wondered how anyone had not noticed this.

Then the sorcerers exploded into purple dust.

Gone.

I tried to feel for them with my Core, wildly gripping around to sense everyone. But there was only mine, and Lord Himmel's.

Gone.

I squeezed my eyes shut, taking in the horror of it all. Just in one night, I had been taunted by my fears, forced to kill a man, and forced to witness a scene in which twenty-nine sorcerers—minus the one I had killed—died. Sacrificed their lives for something—for their lord. For their master.

Gone.

******