In the early hours of the morning when the sun had just started peaking over the horizon, the cries from the silk road rose the Albus Citadel’s inhabitants for their morning affairs. Near the wall separating The Silken Cradle from The Crumbles, many of those inhabitants grumbled and swore at the men piling out of the biggest house on their road, who had seemingly partied all night long. Those men stumbled down the street, waving off the complaints with half hearted apologies. When the men had walked a fair distance from the house, each man would peel off from their drunken group to wander down an alley. Once they were out of sight, they disappeared into thin air, one by one, over the course of the next ten minutes.

  “Anyone acting strange?” Michael asked, sitting on a chair with his injured foot propped up on another.

  “Not that I can see,” Ellis replied with a wince, cradling his injured wrist while peeking through the curtain. He stood atop a pillow, trying in vain to avoid the blood covering almost every inch of the floor.

  “I told you the illusion worked,” Amena chimed in. “Ellis, go sit down. Your blood might get on the curtains.”

  Her eyes remained locked on Leno despite giving Ellis an order. The guard was gagged and unconscious right where Michael had left him.

  “Okay. Has he still not woken up yet? I really need those bandages, I feel light headed,” Ellis said, walking towards an upturned chair and righting it, before falling back into the seat with a heavy thump.

  Ameena glanced away from the unconscious man for what felt like the first time that morning. Her red eyes darted between Ellis’s wrist and Michael’s foot. She hesitated for only a moment, before sighing and walking towards Michael with an outstretched hand.

  “Heal the kid, this is nothing!” Michael boasted, standing up and wincing in an exaggerated manner as his foot touched the floor. He limped to a body with its guts hanging out, lying close to the door. Swearing, he started dragging it towards the middle of the room.

  Ameena picked up a chair and came to sit across from Ellis, her back now to Michael. Taking his hand in hers, she placed it over the injured area as her eyes started to glow faintly. Michael glanced over his shoulder, and instantly stopped dragging the bodies the moment he saw Ellis and Ameena’s hands touching. He gave Ellis a hard, unbroken stare for several agonizing heartbeats before pointing two fingers at his eyes, then pointing them directly at where Ameena was touching him. Without looking away, he threw the body he had been dragging three meters into the makeshift pile he had started, landing with the wet slap of meat as it collided with the rest of the corpses.

  Ellis couldn’t even muster the energy to curse at him internally, the nod of agreement he gave making his head spin. Ameena’s hand started feeling cold the longer she sat there, and after a moment it felt like snakes were digging through his wrist, biting and wriggling deeper and deeper into the wound. He winced at the cold, but almost screamed at the feeling of the snakes. She did not let him snatch his hand away from hers.

  “What are you doing!?”

  “I am healing you. The wound is deep, and it’s going to be an uncomfortable process to stitch it up. Don’t complain and bear with it,” Ameena ordered after seeing him squirm.

  The pain felt paradoxical, renewing his body with the strength needed to scream. But he bit it back with the tears, and tried to focus on anything else. His wandering eyes landed on Jacob's vacant ones, staring straight at him from the pool of his own blood, Ellis’s broken bow covering his mouth. Ellis stared at the corpse, the lie he had told to get the knife into his heart almost mocking him now as it replayed over and over in his head, Michael’s maddening laughter accompanying it.

  With all the strength he had left, he dragged his misty eyes away from that corpse, only to snap onto the tip of an arrow, sticking out another man’s lifeless body. The first man Ellis had killed last night, forgotten, like he was some unimportant thug in a back alley.

  What caused the tears to fall was a simple voice in Ellis’s head, whispering all the things that man might have been, and yet Ellis couldn’t even name him. The dam broke, a wracked sob escaping his lips as his hands started shaking, the snot and tears pouring out of his face. Ameena tried to hush him with a cold glare, but it was too much. It was all just… too much. His thoughts stopped. And his breathing became an echo of the real thing as he sat back in the chair, and let the snakes eat away at him.

  Several moment’s later, Ameena’s soft whisper broke the silence between them. “Look away Ellis.”

  Ellis continued to stare.

  She dropped his hand, which came to a stop dangling by his side. With a scowl on her face, she picked up the chair and placed herself firmly between Ellis and the rest of the room, then had to reach down to grab his wrist so that she could continue working on it.

  Ellis’s eyes remained still and unblinking, like Ameena had not moved at all.

  “One can’t take it and the other loves it too much,” she complained under her breath, before she sat up straight. “Listen to me Ellis. Focus on my voice.”

  She glanced up to find Ellis ignoring her totally and completely. His dead eyes made her fidget in the chair before she patted the wand at her hip and started speaking.

  “My wand lets me cast illusions. But my real magic is in knitting things back together. I’ll be able to patch you up from every scrape, even ones worse than this. I know you have started using mana… but your lip still wrinkles every time I use mine, so I assume your opinion on it hasn’t changed. Tell me, can mana still be evil, when I can use it to help people?”

  Ellis did not respond.

  With a shake of her head, she placed her hand back on his wrist and averted her gaze from his tearful face. It took her three minutes to knit most of the flesh back, and towards the end a whisper escaped Ellis’s lips.

  “Do you even feel this?”

  She glanced up, a flicker of shame curling at her lips. “...Not anymore. You get used to it.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The ringing in his ears made his mind start to work. Slow thoughts, muddled and half remembered memories flowing through his head. They met each other's eyes for a heartbeat, which somehow deepened his hatred for her even further. Is that what she felt when she killed his family? ‘Used to it’?

  Before he did something stupid, he looked away.

  “I leveled twice! Ameena, we gotta do this more often!” Michael called out like a gleeful child.

  Ameena nodded at his insanity, continuing her work. Ellis checked his status, and his hands almost shattered the handles of his wooden chair. He focused on his wrist, hoping the pain would calm him down.

  He had only leveled once. Despite his failure to level as much as Michael, what angered him was the realization of how leveling worked around Michael. It was so easy, so simple, so… evil that it made that ringing in his ears make his entire body shake. He wanted to scream at the gods, at all the injustice of giving him such a gift. The way leveling worked was the exact reason as to why his home had burnt down.

  All Ellis had to do to level was to kill more. A lot more.

  The feeling of the snakes intensified as Ameena’s focus on the task increased. But the pain could not dull his fury. Looking back at the arrow tip, he almost spat upon the dead thing, hating it for distracting him from his mission.

  “So did I,” Ellis announced, the strength creeping back into his voice.

  “We’ll assign the stats after we find those mana items,” Ameena commanded, speaking loud enough for Michael to hear, who grumbled an angry response.

  The logic was sound, so Ellis nodded in agreement before inspecting his wrist. Earlier, he could see right to the bone, but now there was a small piece of pink skin in place of that wound, a blue substance filling the crater that moved about at an agonizingly slow pace.

  He did not thank her for the healing.

  A groan filled the air, and Ellis was worried one of the guards had lived. But it was Leno Warde, waking up from his unconsented nap, just as Ameena finished her task. A cold smile split her lips as she stood and crossed the room in a heartbeat. She grabbed him by the throat and dragged him towards the empty room they had scouted out earlier.

  She threw him inside with a grunt of effort, before turning back to her companions. “I will see you tonight. Do not disturb me.”

  With a wave of her wand the sound of a children's birthday party filled the air, the children’s laughter as loud as the drunken party from last night, punctuated with the sound of adults discussing what they would gift the ‘maid of honour’. Seeming satisfied, she walked into the room and closed the door.

  “If you're done crying, come move the bodies,” Michael commanded.

  The moment Ameena closed the door, his back straightened, and he walked around as sure footed as always, even using his injured foot to kick one of the body’s arms aside. The blood of his toes sprayed the wall as he did so.

  Ellis felt like a fool. He had actually believed that monster when he saw him wince at his skewered foot, that at last, he would see that thing suffer. But no, of course he didn’t feel pain. He propped himself up in the chair Ellis had been healed in and fell asleep, the bone and meat of his foot still visible through his boot.

  Roughly two hours after sunrise, a heavily pregnant woman with a wicked scowl in her eye knocked on the front door. Ellis answered and received a verbal tirade for half an hour about the noise. He apologized to the best of his ability, while also trying to shield the bodies from her view. The lie was easy though, Ameena’s illusions did all the heavy lifting.

  He explained that the guards had stormed a sorcerer's home and brought the man to justice, which they had celebrated last night. And that the man who led the investigation, a man named Leno Ward, was to be betrothed to a noble lady who happened to have a daughter. So the men were celebrating that too.

  She gave him a skeptical look, before rolling her eyes and walking off, muttering all the while. Ellis slammed the door behind her and turned back the large pile of bodies. He did not fulfill Michael’s command purely out of spite. Too angry with that monster to do anything today, he instead closed Jacob and the other man’s eyes. He prayed for an hour over their bodies, and hoped Alehemet would show them her kinder side in the afterlife.

  But peace was for the dead, it was about time Ellis focused on the living. He needed to move the bodies away from the entrance to the home, so he started wandering around. Activating his necklace as he moved through the house, many small tidbits of information that would leap out at him

  He discovered this house had stairs, almost hidden behind the room Ameena was currently occupied in, which led to two bedrooms. In the master bedroom, he found a royal seal welcoming one Leno Ward to the palace guard.

  While this was interesting, it did not help him with the bodies. The upstairs was not a place to put them, since the windows in each bedroom sat mere meters away from the adjacent houses. Their occupants would smell it before the sun set. Going back downstairs to that awful noise, he decided to put tables and chairs in front of the door in the hopes it would block any interested neighbours.

  By mid afternoon, Ellis had turned away two more families, and a man who wanted to collect the house's chamber pot to throw into one of the food pits. The hours ticked by, and Ellis found even the patience instilled into him as a boy was wearing thin. He had been sitting in a chair twiddling his thumbs, going over last night with a clearer mind. But every so often, he kept hearing Ameena’s voice peek out from under the door, followed soon after by muffled cries. Curiosity gnawed at him like a dog, because every so often Ameena would emerge to keep the illusion going. And each time, more and more blood would cover her. The last time it had even been in her hair.

  Shuffling over to the door, he put his ear against it.

  “Please… please no more… I’m sorry! I never laid a finger on you, please no more! Have mercy!” Leno begged. Ellis could barely recognize his voice with all the fear in it.

  A tapping sound followed as Ameena said, "You never touched me, I will give you that. But tell me, in those long nights, how often did you come to fetch me?”

  Leno gurgled a reply Ellis couldn’t hear over the illusion.

  “So close. Five hundred and thirty four. That’s how many times you knocked on my door. All the others barely lasted a dozen nights… but not you. We’re only on three hundred and six. Stop complaining.”

  Ellis stopped listening after that, since the scream that followed chilled him to the bone.

  When the sun had set, a scream cut through the illusion like a blade, piercing Ellis’s ears so badly he fell off his chair. It was cut short a second later.

  Ameena emerged for the last time after a few moments. In her hand was a piece of meat, which she tossed over her shoulder back into the room. Ellis caught a peak of the house's owner before she closed the door. Every inch of him was covered in deep wounds, the deepest of which led from his stomach to in between his legs. Ellis couldn’t see the rest, the man’s bloodied thigh hid it away from him.

  “We need to move the bodies,” Ellis said, trying to erase the image burning itself into his mind.

  “We’ll bury them in his secret room, it’s beneath his stairs,” she said matter of factly. “Go fetch me some water from the well down the street, I want to wash up.”

  Ellis nodded at her request, barely recognizing her through all the red. Then he turned, and left.