“We held the funeral two weeks later,” Angel said, wiping tears away from her eyes. She sniffed softly, “It was a small affair, just Master Scopal and a few close friends among the people assigned to us. Some government officials came as well, but they were cold and distant. It didn’t feel like they belonged there.

  “They were the ones who told me about the war. It wasn’t the right time to learn about that, not on the day of my brother’s funeral. Learning he had had to carry such a heavy burden on his own nearly broke me. Especially since it had been our own parents who killed him.”

  I stood there silently, digesting the story I had just heard. What a horrible experience to go through, losing your brother to your own father’s hands. I couldn’t imagine if that happened to me. I would go berserk and probably kill a good deal of people before anyone could stop me. Especially now that I was holding back the madness by what felt like a sheet of cardboard.

  Sure, I knew what it was like to lose people. But the memories I had of that experience were heavily dulled, like having a tooth pulled after severe sedation. And I knew what that was like, having been one of the last few to have my wisdom teeth surgically removed. Nowadays, they just used a small amount of erosion magic and a dash of healing. It was quick and painless, no medication or downtime needed. The same went for any and all other teeth problems—just a bit of regrowth magic and voila, all better.

  But memories didn’t work that way. There was no ‘magic cure’ to help ease the pain of a lost love. Sure, there was magic that could take away the memory of such a person, but bearing the pain was always worth retaining such memories.

  People always say that if only they could forget about the one they lost they would be better. No they wouldn’t. They only say that because the pain is so loud. It consumes the thoughts and overwhelms the senses sometimes even to the point of despair. But a person who forgets something is no longer the person they once were. Their personality changes. All the effects that person had on them, as well as the effects their loss has had on them, vanish into thin air and they are left with less of themselves than they once had.

  This is one of the reasons mind magic—specifically magic relating to memory and free will—is so dangerous. And why it is, to this day, outlawed under penalty of death. Messing with the personality or autonomy of a human being is one of the greatest sins imaginable, and nobody can be allowed to live after altering such a thing.

  Mind magic is insidious and corrosive. It corrupts the will and enslaves the soul, and it is a slippery slope. Those who use it are exponentially more likely to use it a second time, and then a third. It’s like a drug, except infinitely more harmful to others around the user.

  I was helpless, standing there and watching Angel cry, wishing I could do more to help but knowing I was a complete stranger to her. We had only met the day before, after all.

  “Do any of our party members know?” I asked, hoping against all hope that she had managed to trust them with anything more than her name.

  She shook her head, throwing my hopes out the window. “No. I haven’t told them anything about me. We only met a week and a half or so ago, after all.”

  “Then why tell me?”

  “I don’t really know, to be honest. I just went with my gut and look where we ended up. Here I am, crying. It’s pathetic.” She furiously rubbed at her eyes which looked like she had rubbed them with a salt-lick. They were red and puffy and brimming with tears the second she took her hands away.

  Well, she was able to share the story. That was good, at least. That, and there was some other news I could tell her. I wasn’t sure if this was the right time for it, as it might just make her angry and sad all over again, but it wasn’t right for me to withhold the information.

  I made a decision, then. There were things she needed to know that she was ignorant of. I didn’t know why the others had kept her in the dark for so long, but it was about time she learned something of what she had missed.

  “I knew your brother, you know,” I said, “He was a good kid, and he didn’t want this life for you. For any of us, really. But we didn’t have much of a choice in the grand scheme of things.”

  The gears in Angel’s mind clunked to a dead stop. Her eyes went blank with a special kind of shock reserved for the tenuously sane receiving either the best or worst news of their life. I would know, as I was very tenuously sane myself. Though, Angel wasn’t nearly as in danger of throwing herself off the deep end as I was.

  “You… knew him?” her voice trembled.

  “Yes. We met every week.”

  A shadow stepped from behind a nearby tree, resolving into a tall man with dark hair and concrete features. His body was built like old tank siding, and his eyes mimicked the bullets they fired. “Are you sure about this?” he said, “If you tell her, there’s no going back. She’ll be irrevocably tied up in things.”

  “Nice of you to join us. And yes, I’m sure about this. She’ll be involved sooner or later, and it would be better if she knew ahead of time so she can prepare—the earlier the better. Are you going to let him tell the other?”

  The man shrugged, “Maybe, but I don’t trust him quite as much as I trust you. She’s his sister, and that might drive him to do something rash. I haven’t been keeping an eye on you so much, but based on your demeanor now, I think you’re thinking clearly enough. And for what it’s worth, I agree with you. The sooner we tell her, the better. The other, maybe not so much. I’m still holding out hope that she won’t have to get involved. But that hope is getting slimmer by the day.”

  “What will you be doing in the meantime?”

  “I’ll be hiding. It’s what I’m good at, as we agreed. Maybe some day I’ll join the party, but for now we need to be separate. Teamwork comes later. I’m not sure I approve of your situation for the moment, but I’ll defer to your judgment. Just remember you’ll need to part ways sooner or later.”

  “And what is he becoming? Is he following his set path like us?”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Mostly. He’s leaning a bit more on the magic side of things than we planned, but its looking like overall he’ll become a swordsman. And much to her disappointment, his sister is becoming a healer. It’s rather amusing, watching her complain while not realizing he’s the one pushing her in that direction.

  “Anyway, what’s your floor quest? I got a decently easy one for some reason, and I’m off to the next floor after this.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I have to kill that pesky witch you’ve seen on the announcements. That, and her Shadow. She managed to manifest one, which is impressive for such an early floor. It’s Madness this time.”

  “Useless,” the man scoffed, “Nevertheless, it’s good to see one this early. Means we’re on the right track, possibly even better than he was. You gonna try for it?”

  “It’d be foolish not to. Besides, I’ve already been afflicted, so it won’t be that big of a problem. Not this early.”

  “What did you sacrifice?”

  “I’m guessing memories, as all my motor functions still work.”

  “Wise. I guess that explains your temperament. We’ll have to fix that eventually, but for now it won’t do you any harm. Anyway, I should be going now. You have your little conversation, but don’t share too much. We don’t need her spilling vital information until we’re certain she’s invested.”

  I saluted, and the man melted back into the shadows and was gone.

  Turning back to Angel, I scratched the back of my neck. “Sorry about that. Don’t worry about him, he’s nobody you need to know about yet. Where were we? Ah, yes. Meeting with your brother weekly. Do you remember all those chiropractor appointments he went to?”

  Angel looked a bit skeptical but eventually she nodded and I continued, “Those were all lies. He never needed a chiropractor—your healer was good enough for that. Instead, he and the rest of us were holding meetings to talk about what was going on in the war. We left you girls out of it, because we hoped you wouldn’t have to get involved. That you would never find out about the conflict with the face-stealers. But when Axel died, there was no choice but to inform you, and we haven’t continued the meetings since.

  “I know this must all be a bit sudden, but you can’t ask me too much about it. You’ll find out in due time, and I can’t risk anyone overhearing this conversation. I’ll give you a few questions now, but then the conversation is over. Quickly, too, as our friends are probably going to wake up here soon.”

  Angel was veritably shaking by the time I finished telling her this. Her face turned a deep red, like vintage wine, only just visible enough to be noticed over her light tan. “You kept all that from me? On purpose?”

  “Yes.” I said.

  “There was important information out there, and you hid it from me. My own brother hid it from me. Was anything about my childhood real? Axel was out making friends in the real world while I was stuck in a cage. A well-gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless.”

  “Angel—”

  But I wasn’t able stop her. She was in a fit of rage, shaking and raising her voice incrementally. “I mean, do you know how lonely I was in that place, with no outside contact and no one to talk to beside my brother? No other girls. Not one friend to call my own. Yet you just kept me locked away all those years without an ounce of remorse? Do you have any idea how selfish that was?”

  I couldn’t take it any longer. I burst out in a hiss, holding up a finger when she tried to interrupt. “Yes. So selfish of us. So cold and heartless to leave you there all alone while we toiled away trying to figure out better, more efficient ways of slaughter. What do you think we were doing all those years? Partying? Having fun at a bar getting drunk with the boys? That’s a laugh. We were sitting around a table throwing ideas at a wall, theorizing about easier methods of ripping out throats and removing heads. We talked tactics and war and studied maps of the known universe. We succeeded and failed at learning to differentiate between friend and foe. The one thing relating to war that we never did was kill anyone—only thought about it day in and day out.

  “Do you have any idea what that did to us? What all that theorizing did to our psyches? It tore them apart like a lawnmower would a pile of water-balloons. Thanks to those years we grew hard and sharp and cold and calculating. We became the closest thing to human weapons we could without actual combat. We still are. You would not recognize your own brother if he came home acting like he did in those meetings.

  “And then, over the course of a day, our numbers were cut in half. Three of us, men we had learned to trust as brothers over the years, were suddenly gone. And we weren’t ready. Sure, we had prepared for emergencies such as that, but what we couldn’t predict was the overwhelming presence of sorrow. It broke our small group apart and sent us each our separate ways. That was nine years ago. We never saw eachother again after that.

  “So before you go pitting your pitiful whining and the loss of your personal freedom, consider what your brother and the rest of us went through. Then realize, you don’t even know the half of it.”

  My voice was cold and alien to my ears, slowly crystallizing with frost so frigid it would have turned the very air to ice had it been real. It was the voice of a bulldozer on an arctic shelf pushing fifty tons of gravel and ice into the abyssal sea. It grated horribly, making Angel flinch in what could be construed as a mix of hurt and shame and a mess of other feelings neither of us could untangle. Anger was in there somewhere, as well as utter terror and dread.

  I hadn’t meant to go that far, but the environment was bringing out my old self. It had been nine long years since that side had seen the light of day, and I had hoped it had been buried for good. Something had been keeping it under, but now that something—whatever it was—was gone.

  My shield was cracking, and nothing good would come of it.

  Tears began to well in Angel’s eyes and leak out the corners. Poor thing, she was overwhelmed. Her injuries from the day before still weren’t completely healed—and neither were mine, for that matter—but her internal injuries were worse. And it was all my fault. Sure, it would be better for her in the long run, but that didn’t excuse the pain in the now. I had ripped open a decade-old wound and deepened it. Now that wound would be even more ugly when it healed and scarred over. It would be all the more jagged and messy from my knife as well as her father’s.

  Speaking of which, I had some news on that front. But now was not the time. She’d been through enough for the night.

  I did my best to comfort Angel, though what little comfort I could give her felt distant and hollow, as though speaking from across a deep chasm, wider than the ocean. One side was lush and green and filled with flowering trees and fragrant flowers, and the other was burned and scarred and broken by the passing of time and by countless wars. And the terrifying thing was, I didn’t know who was on which side.

  Was I laying spread on the soft grass, comfortable in my certainty and knowledge; or was she there instead, living in blissful ignorance of the horrors the Ezgendi had wrought on our world? Was she kneeling on the tortured earth, wracked with the pain of grief and loss; or was I, youthful yet old and bowed by the weight of a centuries-long war recently brought into the light of day once again?

  Maybe we were on both sides, maybe neither. Who could tell? Not I.

  The camp stirred in the soft morning light, signaling the start of the new day. Angel hastily dried her eyes and lifted the hood of her jacket to hide her puffy eyes in the relative shadow it provided. Her leather breastplate shifted over it, and I realized—with a shock—that she had probably slept in her armor.

  I needed to buy some of that. I was running around in a tattered shirt and jeans. And I was a tank. Having a tank without armor was like having a frame without a door—you would walk right through it.

  Sighing, I rose and offered my hand to help her up, which she ignored. Fair enough. I had turned her life upside-down in the space of an hour or two. Still, it was a problem that would need to be fixed in the future.

  In the meantime, though, we needed to focus on the day’s task: killing that stupid witch and removing this blasted curse from my head. It was getting annoying, holding the madness at bay, and I really needed to get my brain screwed on straight. Which… meant I was going to have to kill somebody.

  Today was not my lucky day.