The crack of a whip rooted reality in place. The merchant was gone, with Kaleh taking his place unharmed. The pool of blood I was once standing in was now a rippling pond. The bolt was torn to shreds by an unseen force, as the vortex around me kicked up dust. Stray fragments of the crossbow bolt crashed into my shoulder, the weapon ground to dust where it hovered.

  Everyone was standing still, staring at me with stagnant dread. The soldiers dared not to advance, despite their orders. My legs wanted to give out, my arms were trembling like a child’s. The pattern on my forearms unraveled from the repetitive spirals, changing into long, waving lines. As the scrawl did this, so too did the pond at my feet gain power, spiraling into a whirlpool.

  “Leonn!” Shouted Marie.

  Before I knew what was happening, my legs collapsed under me. She grabbed my shoulders, steadying them in an attempt to quell the shaking. The twisted vision was long-gone, but every feeling I’d experienced lingered.

  Now I noticed how heavy my breathing was. I gasped for air, left hand remaining where the sword had been as my wound blazed.

  Elias tightened his jaw, lifting his sword in a defensive stance.

  “Come on, you’re proud Vuudweyen soldiers- Advance!”

  He commanded, though they seemed to barely hear him.

  The vanguard stepped forward, forming a fairly weak wall of three. Their steps were out of sync. The soldiers behind them seemed rooted in place, and the captain continued to urge them to no avail.

  With a pain filled groan, Kaleh forced himself up. “I’ll take on every last one of you.”

  He clutched his ribs with his left, and raised his longsword in his right. Agnes rifled through her bag, pulling out a vial with a powder. Her uneven hands corrected themselves as she hurled it directly at the captain, causing it to shatter against his helmet.

  He and the rest of his company began coughing in a ragged fit.

  “Gods! What is this?” A soldier shouted amidst the chaos.

  The shield wall broke rank to escape, eyes closed and shedding tears incessantly.

  “Full retreat! Full retreat, now!” Elias finally ordered, sending the entire group to file outside, and disappear into the forest.

  Kaleh’s sword clattered to the ground. “Im... fine—” he gasped, before falling over entirely.

  He’d spent what was left of his energy standing up to fight. Now that the danger is gone, nothing held him upright.

  Marie turned to look, hands still anchored on my arms.

  Agnes rushed in, “I can’t carry him alone. Leonn said there’s a couple beds in the east wing, right?”

  She placed herself under his arm, and instinctively I moved to do the same. He moved for me — now I move for him.

  We steadily made our way to the living quarters, Marie following close behind in case I collapsed, myself.

  Truth be told, I almost did. Each step I made demanded my full attention, each shift of my weight threatened to send all three of us tumbling. If there’s one thing I learned from Kaleh, it’s willpower overriding all else, until you have the choice.

  We reached the room, setting Kaleh down on the bed as his bandages began blooming.

  “Great. Leonn, Marie, I need you two out. Gonna need to focus for a while.”

  Marie nodded for both of us.

  “Let me know the moment you need anything.”

  The door closed, shutting whatever fate awaited Kaleh away from the outside world. As much as worry clawed into my chest, I knew he would be alright. Marie turned to me, eyes studying my every move.

  “Still... thinking about a lot?”

  “Yeah.”

  Marie gently guided me into the adjacent room, sitting beside me on the surprisingly soft bed. We remained in silence for a while, and that might have been enough. The agony crept back in, drawing my hand to the spectral blade once more. She grabbed it in hers, clasping it gently.

  “You were staring right through me back there. What did you see?” She finally asked.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  A pained smile barely hung onto me, “what didn’t I see? Argos, the burning market, the marching soldiers...”

  Tears began to well in my eyes. I averted my gaze from her, continuing.

  “...I saw so many people die. I almost bled to death on the pavement. I’ve never been more...” terrified.

  I continued talking, this dam I never knew I carried suddenly bursting open without warning. That world was so...surreal, haunting, but it was the most real thing I’d experienced. Her hands tightened around mine, drawing my eyes back to her.

  Marie’s mask cracked at the edges, lips slightly trembling, eyes beginning to glisten in the firelight of a nearby candle. She released my hand, suddenly lunging with her arms out and pulling me in.

  Her broken voice pierced the silence, “you’ve been... holding all of that in?”

  My breathing hitched, and my arms hovered. Eventually I wrapped them around her. Her grip tightened, hesitant at first, but firm — as if she was afraid I’d slip through. I felt her pulse travel through my shoulder. Quick, weighted, uneven.

  “I didn’t know...” she whispered into my shirt.

  “I had no idea you saw all of that.”

  I drew air again, “I didn’t either. My mind saw things it couldn’t forget, but it made me forget.”

  I looked out the window, evening had fallen over the forest.

  “I convinced myself that it didn’t matter. I survived, so why would it?”

  She pulled away just enough to look at me, and no more.

  “It mattered. It always mattered...”

  A stray tear rolled down her cheek, “you shouldn’t try to carry that alone.”

  Something about that sentence struck a chord in me. My throat tightened further, threatening to choke me. My hands gathered the fabric of Marie’s cloak, fingers curling in to keep myself from falling apart in this charged maelstrom.

  Just like that, silence reigned once again. Her grip was near crushing me, and I couldn't let it soften.

  Marie was long gone now, off to sleep away the fatigue of today’s troubles. To be fair, I probably should as well. Something in me refused to shut off, leaving me stranded with these thoughts.

  I heard footsteps in the main room paired with the rustling of papers. Following the sound to its source, I found Agnes sitting alone in a trance. She was surrounded by circles of paper. Diagrams sat pinned under used ink bottles, black journals were cracked open so wide the spines begged for mercy. A nearby candle — her only source of light — carving dark shadows around her eyes.

  “You’re gonna need to make yourself some medicine if you keep this up.” I half-whispered.

  Agnes staggered out of her focus.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m well aware,” she muttered, “but I’m not stopping. If I lose this thread, it’s gone forever.”

  I pulled out a chair, joining her in front of the nonsense. Her hand moved between journals, pointing out the most important ones to me.

  “These entries keep repeating the same two things. The first is the Vuudweyen seal, and the second are these number scripts the Kastvassens came up with.”

  Her boot tapped the stone floor with a sense of urgency.

  “The journals cross-reference each other. The intent was clearly to make this unreadable without all of the pieces.”

  She swept one of the books aside, revealing a diagram I recognized from Eligor’s book. Four elemental sigils arranged in a circle.

  Except this one was different.

  Each sigil had a number beside it. And the fractions were different on each one.

  “At first I thought it was a sequence, or some sort of dosage, but...”

  She opened another journal, placing it beside the diagram. Same sigils, same fractions, but one element was circled with a jagged black ring.

  “The circled element doesn’t have a fraction? Why does it break the rule?” I asked.

  The pattern exists for a reason, there also has to be a reason for the anomaly.

  “That’s the thing! I thought it had something to do with each subject’s primary attunement. No. I found this.”

  She stacked a couple of these diagrams, all replicated from different journals, onto plain parchment paper. As she held the stack up to the light, all 4 diagrams were visible. The rings overlapped into one composite image.

  My breath caught as the revelation dumbfounded me.

  “They all meet in the center...” I responded.

  “Is that coincidence?”

  She placed the papers back onto the table.

  “No. The rings mark an absence.” She paused, looking around the room.

  “They carved out the subject’s natural balance. They... erased it.”

  Something crawled up my spine, remembering a relevant detail from Eligor’s old tome.

  “Isn’t that what happens when people fight elementals? The imbalance hurts them?”

  “Yeah, that's exactly it.” Agnes responded, snapping back to one of the older journals.

  “Oh, gods... I forgot about this. ‘Rejection’. All of the entries end with this word except for one. The imbalance is so devastating that it ends up killing the subject.”

  My eyes widened further, and I finally see why Agnes was so invested.

  “This research was killing people?”

  She said nothing as she continued, pursuing a hunch as her face slowly drained, and her hands slowed down.

  “These symbols... they weren’t trying to stabilize anything at all. It wasn't about combatting the elementals.”

  She stopped, pieces appearing to click in her mind as her eyes rolled around haphazardly.

  “They wanted to reverse engineer the scrawl, but without limits. The wrath project... is about creating a living weapon.”

  She stood up from her chair, clutching her head in her hands as she paced around the table.

  “You said... all but one, earlier.” I commented, mouth dry from the thought of an unstoppable weapon.

  She didn’t answer immediately, hell she didn’t even look at me. Just... kept staring at the journals.

  Then, in a voice barely above a breath:

  “...yes. They succeeded once.” Her eyes returned to P17-W. Flipping to the last line of the entry.

  “Subject is stable. Consciousness remained. No promise. Discard.” She repeated from the black book.

  “...and then nothing. Seventeen is out there somewhere. Dormant. Waiting to surface.”