-I never wanted this. I only wanted to help a few kids…

He took a deep breath.

-It all began with money. See, I don’t come from any wealthy family or anything similar. I grew up on the streets, stealing…

-I do not give a fuck about your sad backstory - I immediately interrupted. - Talk about the kids.

-Of course, of course. - he muttered. - I will be quick. Long story short, one day I managed to steal something more than I bargained for. From some kind of noble, I have no idea who, along with his coin purse I found a stack of papers. Back then, I was about fifteen, and was not able to read, so I just went to a local fence, trying to maybe get a few coins more for that. Imagine my surprise that what I stole was a certificate of ownership of a kid. I of course got paid handsomely…

-You are not helping your case… - I warned him.

-I know, just let me finish, then you can do whatever you want with me.

-Jack! - protested Vendi - We still have a chance! If he…

I really was tempted to remind him who he was dealing with and was very close to grabbing him by the neck to drain him dry, but before I was able to, Jack straight up slapped him.

It was so sudden that even I froze in shock. Vendi just fell back on the floor and silently backed down.

-Do not.

I am not sure if he realized what I was about to do or just lost his patience, but the truth was that this sudden event snapped me out of my “trance” so to speak, and I calmed down. I am not sure what would’ve happened otherwise…

-Continue.

-That was the day that gave me the edge. With the money, I started digging myself out of the dirt, and before I knew it, I was twenty and already an owner of a small establishment in the capital, the one you know of. Of course I never stopped using my old talents, and in the background was still dealing with the thieves and the overall underground. Sooner or later, I moved from petty theft to fencing, and then I got my hands dirty with some slave trade.

I was still listening, but the longer he was explaining, the more I felt like he was a lost cause.

-I never thought much of the people I bought or sold. They were just pieces of paper worth some money for me. That is, until one day, during one of the auctions.

He took a deep breath.

-It was a kid. Never knew the name. I got interested, because his price was ten times higher than usual. He… was pristine. It was definitely odd. Every single slave I have ever seen was barely even reminding a person. Dirty, maimed, sick, you name it. Seeing something like this peaked not only my interest. I asked about his owner and why was he getting the special treatment, just to get a chuckle as an answer and an invitation for a “show” for the next day.

He went silent.

Vendi, still in the corner, was now also listening intently, interested as well. Did he not know the story either?

-I came, of course. Along with a whole bunch of people. Most of them I knew as my clients. What we were shown… was disgusting. A stage was set up, with four small metal cages. Each of them was housing a slave, four grown men and the clean kid. To the mix of amusement and horror of the gathered, all four cages were then targeted by various spells. Bathed in fire, zapped by lightning, frozen, you name it. I don’t need to add that the ones trapped inside did not survive the assault. Public, some confused, some disappointed and disgusted, started yelling. “What’s the point?”, “What’s this for?”, “Keep your past times to your own basement, you fuck.”, “Waste of good slaves…”, and so on. The voices were quickly silenced by the fact that one person inside a cage was still alive and moving: the kid. At first he looked almost like a corpse, his body destroyed beyond recognition, just to slowly start healing itself, and in a matter of minutes he was as pristine as he was before the demonstration. Then, the owner opened the auction.

-I couldn’t help but be disgusted. Both by the show… and myself. - continued Jack. - I was one of those… disgusting people. But I knew that I had to do something, so I started bidding. Of course, I was absolutely destroyed and outbid. The kid got sold and I have never seen him again. It was also the day that I decided that I should change.

He gave me a look, waiting for me to say something, but when he noticed that I was not opening my mouth, he started talking again.

-I continued my exploits as a slave trader, but this time, I stopped selling. Instead I started focusing on buying out all the auctions I could and gathered all my purchases on the outskirts of the capital, in a house I bought just for that purpose. At first, everything went smoothly. Until the day I bought a bit too much…

He sighed.

-I had to step on some toes. To this day I do not know who that was, but someone found out about my “orphanage”. And burned it to the ground. With everyone else inside. That was also the first time I realized the true nature of my magic, life magic. I barely even used it till then, to someone like me, manipulating plants was not exactly helpful. But, thanks to my “new” power, I managed to save some kids… or at least I thought so.

He paused for a good minute.

-I only managed to save a handful of them from the fire. I quickly moved them as far away as I could, to the most remote place I had the access to: the island here. It was the center of one of the biggest slave auctions in the area. The darkest place is under the candlestick, right? Along with the barrier, I thought my problems with that would be over… but it was not the case.

-I am not sure who set the fire to the building, but it was not a regular fire. I learned that the hard way, long later, after completely moving my base of operations here.

-Wow, what a great story… Does it have ANYTHING to do with what I am about to electrocute you for? Or are you just playing for time, hm?

-A bit of both - he chuckled weakly. - But I hope that you’ll at least let me finish.

Even though he did not know me for long, he already figured out that I was curious enough to stop myself. I mean, I wasn’t really hiding that part of me, so it wasn’t the strangest thing in the world… but to stake his life on it? He was betting a lot here…

Since I didn’t interrupt, nor tossed a spell at him, he continued.

-A few weeks after I moved my business to this island, some things started… happening. At first it seemed like a plague of some kind: kids were getting ill. Most of the time it was just a fever that refused to give up whatever I tried doing. See, even though I managed to figure out that my magic was able to heal people, I only really knew how to fix exterior wounds, so I was helpless. One after another, kids started getting ill and never getting better. I still had my money, so I managed to buy out some doctors, but none of them had any idea what was going on. That is, until a month passed since the first one fell ill.

He took a gaze at Vendi.

-That was when I met with Vendi. I managed to heal him and brought here, to maybe help me with the kids. Maybe a day later, we were woken up during the night with a scream. Both of us ran to the source, to check what’s going on, fearing the attack, but what we found was infinitely worse.

In the corner, Vendi shuddered, seemingly remembering what happened.

-It was one of the first kids that I “saved” from the fire. He was hot. And not just “fever” hot. He was literally burning. When I touched his forehead, I burned myself. In panic, we tried cooling him down with water, soaking the bandages and towels with it, covering him. It vaporized the moment it touched his skin.

-We didn’t know what to do - he continued after a pause. - In sheer panic, we wanted to move him away from the bed, to get him to the water, cool him down that way, but none of us was able to pick him up. The heat was unbearable, and besides that, he was flailing so bad that even after we got him out of the bed, moving him was out of the question. It was too late anyway. Few moments after we managed to get him out of the bed, his body started smoking, and he fell onto the floor, dead. In the process he ignited the floorboards, but we doused the fire pretty quick.

He sighed.

-Five kids died like this in one night, to our absolute horror. We tried everything we had on hand. Ice crystals, water… whatever. Nothing worked. But, the next day was both our salvation and the curse: it was the day when Ilon tracked us down.

-That’s why I was so easily convinced to accept his help. He was obviously powerful, and when I explained the situation, he offered that he would try to do everything in his power to stop whatever was going on.

-So… wait. He was the one who experimented on them…?

-No. All three of us did - said Jack. - He tried inspecting the kids that were burning with fever, but found only some traces of fire magic in them. It was concerning, sure, but nothing that would tell us how to prevent them from suffering. Only after inspecting the dead ones, he finally understood… I finally understood. It was all my fault. I never healed them. I only closed their wounds.

By then, I already calmed myself down and sat down, playing with the electricity sparking between my fingers, but that sentence was so absurd that one spark shot straight through my fingers and struck the table between us.

-What the fuck was that supposed to mean?

-There was no sickness. There was no cursed flame. It was just me. When I healed the kids that got hurt in the fire in the capital, I did not treat their wounds. As a panicked amateur, I just poured my mana into the burns, hoping to somehow fix the problem. Sure, the flesh melded, but I used my magic. Life magic. Ilon told me that in that moment, I not only melded their flesh, but also connected them with fire, that, back then, was surrounding us everywhere. With all my heart, I wanted to suppress both the fire and their pain… and succeeded. The fire got suppressed and became part of their body, just so slowly burning them from the inside. All this time, the fire was eating up their mana, weakening them. And, since we moved to a bit infused location, the spell started getting stronger, absorbing mana from the environment as well, until it was too strong and started burning so hot it got painful.

I gazed at him, not convinced.

-There are a lot of things wrong with this…

But it was not impossible… I’ve seen many things being turned into living creatures, fire included. It wouldn’t be out of the question to think that someone would be able to do that to a person…

Fucking life magic. Every time.

-I couldn’t forgive myself. Yeah, sure, Ilon managed to heal the remaining kids. He said it was easy after he learned what the problem was. But that did not change the fact that my incompetence killed a bunch of kids. At first I wanted to give this whole place away to him, but he refused, instead proposing to teach us, so nothing like that would happen again.

-What about the revenants though?

-A day later, we started preparing to give them a burial, but were stopped by him. He asked: what if I told you there is a chance to bring them back?

-Okay, that is just plain insane. What, he wanted to bring back the dead?

-I did not understand him either. He just told me that it is possible. That he’d seen it done before, but he needed my magic for that. Not sure what he meant, I agreed, and we started experimenting.

-So you took a bunch of corpses and wanted to reanimate them. How do you think that would help anyone? - I asked angrily.

-I don’t know! - he yelped. - I just wanted to somehow help them… and he was very… convincing. That’s when he started teaching us about revenants and how you can place a spirit back into an empty body.

-But you still needed the crystal with a soul.

-He told me that as well. But also said that it is possible to bypass that, but he was not sure how. That’s how it all started… We used all five of the bodies. The five attempts. None of them worked fully.

-Fully? - I asked, getting angry again. - What the hell did you make!?

-Five enchanted corpses - he said with a shaking voice. - We never managed to resurrect any of them, but we poured absolutely massive amounts of mana into them. Basically… puppets. They could move, but they had nothing inside. It was just us, controlling a body, filled with mana.

-You are fucking disgusting. All three of you.

-Don’t blame Vendi. I made him do it. I know it doesn’t change much, but every time we failed, we stopped the spell and returned them back to earth.

-Ah yes, killed twice. Amazing.

-Just once… second time it was just using the Ritual to turn them into trees… But yeah. You are absolutely right. At the end we realized that that whole endeavor was doomed to fail. And now, I learned that the secret to fixing this failure was all the time right in my hands…

-You still wouldn’t be able to do anything - muttered quietly Vendi. - Their souls were long gone, not trapped in the crystal..

-But still! If we knew, maybe…

I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was hearing. The whole explanation… was subpar, if you want to put it lightly, that is. Whole experiments, his methods and reasons…

But, I couldn’t say that he didn’t have somewhat good intentions. The results were absolutely fucking horrible, just as methods were.

Now, about his teacher. It felt strange that he found them so easily. But, since he was supposedly so powerful and all, it was not out of the realm of possibility that he managed to track them to the island. From there, he probably, just like me, managed to feel the strange mana anomaly and just followed it here. He didn’t even have to break through the barrier since they essentially welcomed him in…

What did not add up though was the existence of the person itself.

When Melle told me Vendi’s story, she never mentioned about some powerful mage that was nearby. The only people that were of somewhat notice were her, her husband, Jack and Vendi and maybe some stragglers from the caravan. Nah, the stragglers were probably not even close to that powerful, in that case she’d mention about someone helping. Also, according to Jack, he was the one who healed Vendi, and in her story it was some guy from the capital that was involved with their military. I honestly was thinking that it could’ve been Odar… But her husband would most likely recognize him, it’s not like Odar is some obscure figure. Even if he wasn’t the captain, or whatever, yet, he had to be pretty high up. Although he did not seem to me as a person who’d run away.

If both stories were indeed true, it meant that Jack used to work for Axelrod, or at least for Odar.

I mean, it made sense. It would’ve explained how he managed to work so long in this shady business without being pestered by the guards. An ex-guard would’ve also had an easier time getting to know Odar.

But, there was still the issue of that master of his.

Who the hell was that Ilon person? Even his name was strange. It was annoying me for some reason, but that probably was just because it sounded so similar to all those other people I’ve been wondering about. Hell, his name even sounded similar to…

It hit me like a truck. I almost wanted to slap myself because it took me so long to figure it out.

Ilon is Noli backwards.

It was so fucking obvious that started wondering that I might have been a victim of one too many concussions.