Perriander Lafey opened his eyes, strained against the brutal rays of the afternoon sun. He lay supine on a beach, his clothes stiff from being soaked with seawater and left to dry in the late summer heat.
On any other weekend, the beach would have been aflutter with activity. Tourists and tired students alike packed onto Phrygia’s meager, temporary shores, to enjoy the water while they could. But he was alone, the world glowing white as if a spotlight shone on the entirety of his surroundings, turning everything he saw into a blown out blur.
Then he felt that uncanny presence again. He turn around, the dark angel sat at card table, topped with a kingsboard. She had traded her voluptuous, lascivious visage for that a stern of grandmother—granted, a grandmother clad in blackened iron mail, covered head to toe in battle scars.
“Sit!” her voice rolled through the air like a ship’s airhorn.
Something pulled Perry to the table—or the table to Perry—and he sat across the woman. The pieces on the board were laid out in their starting positions, ready to be played.
Perry stared down at the board, back up into the vacuous obsidian orbs scrutinizing his every move.
“It is not your time,” the angel said. “For now, listen.”
Perry’s eyes widened as she told him his purpose, why he needed to return to the waking world. As she finished her tale, the light around them grew more intense, concentrated until the angel’s face became a glowing orb of clinical light.
Muffled voices echoed all round, and everything Perry had been told dissolved into its raw components—purpose. As he opened his eyes, emerging from his swill of a dream, he remembered nothing of the angel, nor her words, but knew in the depths of his soul that he had an important job to do before Death next claimed him.
“My gods…” a woman said. “He’s waking up!”
I opened my eyes to see Marta de la Rosa hunching over me, caressing my head in her arms. I moved to wipe my the sleep from eyes, but my hands were bound to the railings of a hospital bed.
I couldn’t have drank that much…
“Perry…” she whispered. “I knew you’d come back.”
“Wha—” I felt like I had swallowed gravel. I coughed, clearing my torn throat. “Come back from where?”
She shifted, looking me into my eyes with hers—so round and sincere, wet with tears. A shooting pain lanced across my face, down my body and into my feet.
The only pleasant sensation I perceived was Marta’s perfume. Some blend of lilac and gooseberries or lavender and elderberries—I could never tell. I considered just asking her. Then again, the mystery of it drove me wild, had me thinking of her anytime I had a moment for a spare thought. I held on to that childish mystery because she was far and away from me, and thus, her perfume was something intangible I could selfishly hold on to without anyone knowing, once the world swept up Marta in its rushing currents.
I thought of those few nights she and I spent talking on the pier. I breathed deep, her scent trickling over my broken lungs like honey. I tried to sit up, but felt my body give as if my bones were naught but broken glass.
“Shit…” I groaned, overcome with all-encompassing pain. “Did I fall off the edge or something?”
Marta pulled back. “Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what? How’d I get here?”
“Well, well, well!” said a pudgy main, striding through the door way. “Look whose finally come back from the dead. Marta—give us the room, will you?”
Marta graced me with another glance, then rose and bowed to the man before leaving the room.
Instructor Torloon Bastilion slumped into Marta’s chair. There were bags around his sunken eyes and he hadn’t shaved in several days. “Archmage…” I croaked, scattered memories dancing behind my eyes.
“You baffle me, Lafey. Always have. Your first few years in siege made me question why you ever came to the Citadel—you’re knowledgable, well read, but a damned poor wizard.”
I scoffed, then groaned as I paid for my gesture. I decided not to say anything further, for fear of the tremendous discomfort that followed even the most minute movements.
“I’m disappointed in your actions the other day, standing up for that…” Bastilion looked up at the ceiling, searching for the right word, “…dissenter—traitor!”
Traitor? The word brought it back. Haslow. Worldfire. Gods in hell, did Haslow send me here?
“I didn’t know…”
“I believe you, Lafey. The Dean believed me, too, thank your lucky stars. If you hadn’t been inside his circle and quelled his sorcery long enough for me to issue the final counterspell, surely we would have all been reduced to ashes…” Bastilion sighed as he looked out the window. “Still—fact is that you stood in support of a traitor to the state, knowingly or no. I regret to inform you, that you have been expelled from the Citadel.”
“What?” I launched into an upright position. The sickness rolling through my guts was greater than pain holding me to the bed. I grabbed Bastilion’s forearm. “You can’t—ten years of my life! This is bloody madness!”
I almost wanted to laugh. To think I had ruined my career in that last week of residency. Now—there’d never be a career to ruin. I’d be a ghost in limbo, stuck between two inaccessible worlds, both refusing to let me step in.
“Relax, Lafey… you’re in no shape to—”
“What am I to do?”
“Shut up, boy, and I’ll tell you! Now relax, you’ve only just woken up.” Bastilion withdrew his arm, straightened his coat. “Mister Hamator from the Department of Internal Statistics and I vouched for you and pleaded your case to Headmaster Pascal Doon—he was sympathetic to your plight. The Headmaster convinced the council to allow you to return for your capstone after you complete an act of community service.”
I blinked. “Like picking up trash?”
Bastilion chuckled. “In a sense. You have four sessions of physical therapy between today and tomorrow to recover from the forced healing—then you are to set out to bring the traitor to justice.”
Haslow… what have you done?
“You want me to kill my friend?”
“I want you to win back your future. I wasn’t sure about you for a long time, but to successfully quell Worldfire… well, that’s a feat I can’t ignore—not in times like these. Killing the traitor isn’t required, though it might be necessary. You know him, so—gods willing—you know how to find him. Convince him to come quietly, then we’ll handle it from there. But if he refuses…”
“I see—and if I refuse…”
“Expulsion—banishment. You’d have to leave the city.”
“My whole life…”
Bastilion expression was tender, almost fatherly. His softness told me he understood the injustice befallen me—so too, it told me to get over it, to get moving. I’d never been one to roll with the punches. I’ve always needed time to mull over my thoughts and feelings regarding even the smallest of hiccups.
“Once you’re discharged, you’ll have seven days before the city descends. You’ve been sleeping for three, and you won’t be allowed to leave the hospital until tomorrow night. That leaves seven days to track down this menace before he can flee without detection.”
I shook my head. “What about the In Between? He could have transposed—”
“In Between is swarmed with personnel. We would have found him if he tried to slip through the cracks. No one gets in or out of Phrygia without the Citadel’s knowledge, even in when there isn’t a war on our heels.”
A moment passed. The air was heavy. So was my heart.
“Will you do this, Lafey?” Bastilion seemed desperate, as if I were the only person capable of hunting down Haslow. I had no clue where such dependence was coming from.
“I need to think on it.”
Bastilion rose. “I need your decision tomorrow, before you leave.”
Then he left me alone with a storm brewing in my head.
My recovery was remarkably quick—and excruciating. The miracle workers came in shortly after the Archmage left. For hours I was surrounded by strange, old women wearing blindfolds and white robes. They laid on me their hands, chanting in the Elder Tongue—most of which was beyond my novice grasp of the language.
By evening, one of the women helped me hobble about the hospital. At first, I thought the shocked expressions following my every move were due to severity what I had survived. But as I retreated that night into the loo for my first belated shit of the day, I saw an altogether different man in the mirror on the door.
I had to look twice. I thought I had seen a monster.
I was mutilated. Half my face was twisted, the flesh twisted into a mottled patty of ground beef, a cruel and distorted echo to the unharmed side of my face that still bore some amount of me. The burn scars spread across my body; across my chest, atop moth my shoulders and running down one of my legs and feet.
Looking the mirror, I moved my lips, revealing my teeth. My bottom lip looked as though it had been filled with air until it popped and filled itself back up with bile.
Marta saw me like this. I lingered on that thought, recalling her tears. We’d barely known each other—I had only met her last year, when she enrolled as a siege major. Though I didn’t know what we shared, I knew we shared something—something that had only just blossomed beyond mere friendship. Were Marta’s tears mourning my pain, or the loss of a potential mate?
I couldn’t comprehend a reality where a woman like that would settle for a bloody monster—one expelled from the Citadel, no less. A connection to me, meant exile for her.
You did this… I glared into the mirror, my eyes alight with something I had never seen. You took everything from me. Those words repeated in my mind, accompanied by flashing images for horrific violence I yearned to enact.
I’d known Haslow for years. I’d given him food and shelter. I’d confided in him, told him things I hadn’t shared with anyone else. I’d done the same for him.
Just who the fuck are you, Haslow? Where did you learn how to summon Worldfire? Why did you call it?
Worldfire is said to be alive, sentient. That’s what sets it apart from other sorcery that evokes flames, why it’s a forbidden art and strictly policed. I knew exactly zero-point-zero-two percent of victims survive a brush with Worldfire, and one-hundred of those who had come into physical contact suffer lifelong pain and intense shifts in personality.
If you’ve bathed in the fire that breathes, it will never again wash off of you.
The mottled skin covering my body quivered, moving unnaturally, as if I were a golem stitched together rather than a living person. This is the trouble with force miraculous healing—it closed the wounds and cleansed infection, but it left its mark on the body. And Worldfire leaves its mark on the soul.
Sitting on the chamber pot, I stared at my monstrous, wretched body and I felt something entirely alien to my previous self—pure, unadulterated rage. A fire fuming in my chest, where a heart should be.
Looking in the mirror, I had made my decision.
You will suffer, my friend, said an unbidden voice in my mind. You will suffer, dearly. Upon Haslow, I issued a curse—and thus, a die was cast.