I'm still on the roof of the Mari manor when he arrives. I don't notice when Corinth makes it up to the roof. Just one moment, I am alone, and the next, he is standing on the slight slope of shingles next to me. He appears so different than what I remember from the night before, just a man as regular as you might find anywhere.

"Been here long?" he asks. The roof creaks as his feet softly touch the surface.

"I don't know," I say. The feeling, the scratching of impatience underneath my skin, has faded as I stared out at the city. Not gone, just quieter now. "I didn't know you would still be here when I woke up. Didn't really know if I had imagined you coming or not."

"Well," he says, "I'm here. I had to leave for a moment to help reunite Sagistan with Kardev. The princes should already be back in the capital now. Last night's events are going to cause a lot of commotion. They're going to set a lot of things into motion." His one eye blinks, and he shakes his head. "Sorry. A lot of things to worry about, but they aren't for you to worry about."

"I'm fine, Corinth. So much better than everyone else."

"That isn't true," he says.

"Did you visit Halford?" I ask him. "He's still in bed downstairs, bones broken, his whole right side purple. That thing kicked him into the clouds. I don't know how he survived a thing like that. It seems to have cost him. I'm fine, though." I look down at my hand, holding out my fingers, wiggling them. I can still feel it when I think back to it, the sensation of razor-sharp iron stabbing into my skin, the total pain that came in the seconds before the whole limb was torn off. "That's what makes me special. I'm getting to where I can bounce back from anything."

Corinth releases a long exhale, the sound almost mimicking the slowly passing breeze. "You're remarkable," he says. He nudges a pebble caught between two shingles with his toe, knocking the rock free to bounce once, twice, and disappear over the edge of the roof. "There's something that's been bugging me for a while. Given how special you are, let me vent about it." Before I can form an answer, he groans, easing himself to sit on the roof next to me.

"I was conscripted into a field army in Tazith. That's a kingdom in the southern half of the empire, a small place, doesn't get too much traffic. This was…nine years ago now. I was still first rank then, just a kid travelling around the empire, searching for where I might make some kind of difference, where I might find my destiny. Got it into my head that I would be some kind of hero, so when I heard about a baron in the region abusing the people under him, I got it in my head to go have words about that. Only, the man was already deposed by the time I arrived, had been a long time. I wasn't even in Tazith for a day before an agitant for another Baron, an asshole named Carineen, arrived at the local guild hall. A war was on, lords will do that some times, send people off to die, a more civilized way of handling disputes.

"Dumb kid that I was, I bought the adjutant's line, decided that Carineen was in the right of it, and signed up to join his army. The rules about how the noble men and women of the empire conduct their interpersonal wars are actually quite fascinating in an awful kind of way. They can recruit magicians into their armies as long as they are of sufficiently low rank. There were eight of us from the guild, rolled into the ranks of peasant-pressed levies that marched through the hills toward the enemy. I can't even remember what the other lord's name had been anymore.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"The whole time as we marched, we spoke with one another, thinking about what we might have to do when we arrived, thinking that we might have to kill an elf. I was excited about that, though I tried not to show it, tried to keep a serious face and admonish those who showed their enthusiasm for the task too openly. But inside, I wanted it, wanted to get back at some of them, any of them.

"We arrived at a small village. The man in charge of our small army removed the villagers from their houses so that we would have a place to stay, told them to gather in the tavern and the mill while we waited out the bad winter weather. That man kept telling us that we would be marching again, that the enemy was just a few miles down the road, that we would see them any day now. The winter storm came, lasted a week and a half, and when it was over, we were told to stay. Four days after that, another storm blew in, and we had to huddle down again.

"We waited, the thirty or so of us, for more than three weeks in that little village. Then, one night, there was yelling out in the dark. I still remember the man, Bandson, stumbling into the mayor's home where most of us were staying, holding his ribs while blood poured down the front of his shirt. The enemy had found us; they were here.

"The rest is mostly pointless to recount. Those who came to root us out of the village were cramped from marching through the winter storm, their hands barely holding onto the shoddy spears they had been given for the short war. They didn't have any magicians among them. We tore them apart, the two dozen or so that made it to the home. When it was done, half the village was on fire. That was on me; I hadn't learned how dangerous fire could be yet. When the storm broke in the morning, we found more than half of them never made it to the attack, their bodies lying out in the snow. News arrived three days later. The war was over, had been for more than a week.

"The baron's adjutant paid me three gold coins for my service and gave me one of the horses we took from the village. It seemed so right at the time, like we deserved the animals. The farmer couldn't use them anymore anyway; he'd died of the cold one night in the mill. There was a hole in the wall near his cot. No one noticed until it was too late."

Corinth stops speaking for a moment, staring out at Danfalla as it stretched out before us. "I think about that a lot, my first real battle, just a desperate struggle in the dark and cold with no point. I dream about it sometimes."

"Still?" I hear myself ask.

He nods. "Still."

"What do you do when you think about it?"

"I talk to friends," he says. "I talk to people who know me, who I trust. That helps a little. It doesn't make it go away. Time is the only thing that does that, makes me slowly forget about it until I remember again. Having people around is the only real help."

I take a seat next to him, leaning my shoulder into his. "That's good to know."

He grunts. "Thanks for letting me get that off my chest," he says. "If you ever need anyone to listen, I'm more than willing. However, I do need to have a discussion with you. It's incredibly important. Let's go inside and…"

"No," I interrupt. He pauses, stopping at the panic in my voice. "No, I…I want to stay out here."

Corinth looks down at the roof, his eyes scanning the sky around us. "Alright," he says. He tries to hide it from me, but I catch the motion of his finger drawing a burning rune in the air in front of his hand. The intricate lines flash dully, disappearing into the air as an almost imperceptible touch of magic spreads around us. "No one can hear us now."

"Is that necessary?"

"It is," he says. "I need to ask you about something important, Charlene, something that no one else can know we are speaking about. I need to ask you why you have a connection to one of the Thrones now. I need to ask you why you have been touched by Exeter."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.