Death After Death PLUS 285-287

Ch. 285 - Into the Dark

No one else woke at their passing, but even though the man wasn’t particularly quiet, the way that his peers lay completely still implied that magic was involved. Have they put me to sleep like this often as well? Simon wondered. He was often awake for part of the night, but if someone were to place a sleep spell on him, he’d never know. 

It galled him that he still hadn’t learned that word of power despite all of his meddling. However, at the moment, such a piece of knowledge was the least of his worries. Right now, his thoughts were racing. Was this a minder or someone more sinister? Did they know what he’d been up to? Where was he being taken? Was he being disciplined or promoted? 

Simon had long prepared to use a greater greater word to end his life if things turned ugly. Inside the pyramid, he’d planned to use an amplified word of force to bring the whole thing down on his head. Outside of it, he planned to use an amplified word of fire, if he had to, to make his body explode. While he couldn’t be sure that such a thing would keep them from having some grip on his soul, it was the best he could do if things got dire. 

Simon was led outside into the chilly night without a word. It was late enough that the arboreal plaza was empty and filled with shadows instead of drunken Magi, and the only clue he was given was that they moved steadily toward the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles. That told him nothing, though. Whether he was moving a step further in this diabolical food chain, or they planned to sacrifice him on some cursed altar, all roads would lead here. 

The first surprise came when they reached the base of the giant structure, and they didn’t go up the stairs. Instead, they entered the lowest tunnel and then took stairs down into the bowels of the earth.

Simon had long known the place was a mound of rooms and tunnels stacked on top of each other. He had no way of knowing exactly how many there were, of course, but he suspected that the deeper they went, the more diabolical they got. They made it a hundred yards and three floors before Simon heard the first scream distantly, but he ignored it and instead followed the black-robed man more by the sound of his footsteps than by sight. 

“You have learned the basics of reading and writing, yes, Nijam?” the man asked as they walked through the dark. “And the importance of clean, precise lines when honoring or beseeching our God-King?”

“I… I have,” Simon agreed, sure that’s what he was supposed to say here.

“Good,” the man answered, not sounding particularly pleased. “Very good. Then you know enough of the basics to become a shadow, at least. You shall wait here in quiet contemplation until someone comes to collect you. You are not to speak to anyone. In fact, once they collect you, you are not to speak again. Not ever, until you become a true acolyte. The things you will learn in the coming days and weeks are dangerous, and if you attempt to repeat them without preparation, it might very well kill you. Do you understand?”

“I under—” Simon started to say, but the air was stolen from his lungs as the Magi accompanying him used a lesser word of force and sent Simon flying to one side. He’d been pushed into some kind of shallow cell. He slammed against the wall and then fell to the ground, gasping. 

“I told you not to speak. Someone resurrected by the God-king himself should know better,” the magi chastised him. “That was your last warning. Now, wait here until someone comes to collect a shadow. Then, listen and learn as much as you can, but say nothing until the time comes to take your next vows.”

A few words from me and you’d be nothing but paste, Simon told himself silently as he lay there gasping. He was probably supposed to be terribly afraid to be left in here for an uncertain amount of time, but he was mostly just angry.  

Simon still hadn’t recovered by the time he heard the man walking away, but he was too busy berating himself to notice. He should have suspected it was a trap. Everything here was. Everything was a trap, and everything was a show. At this point, somehow, this place embodied the worst elements of a cult and a military boarding school. He didn’t dare say that out loud. He didn’t even sigh in annoyance. Instead, he sat up, and after he felt around enough that he was satisfied he understood the shape of the room, he sat there and meditated, listening to the world around him. 

For months now, Simon hadn’t known true silence. That was impossible when he slept in the same room as dozens of other boys his age. Even his time in the depths of the pyramid recovering from his own faux-death hadn’t been completely silent, and tonight was no different. 

Simon tried to listen to the distant chanting and, more rarely, the echoed cries of pain, but mostly, he just reminded himself that this was all meant to make the inducted members of the cult feel a certain way. This time, he decided it was more fear than honor or awe that they were trying to induce. 

What if they forget about me? Simon decided that most boys his age would think if they were left here for this long. What if something happens and they never find me?

While Simon’s thoughts weren’t quite serene, he wasn’t exactly about to piss himself with fear. He knew this was part of the show, and he waited patiently for his hunger to rise and then fall, telling him what time of day it was. The noise picked up some time after he estimated it was breakfast, which tracked. 

There were definitely times in his life when waiting like this and staying perfectly silent and still would have killed him. Fortunately, he wasn’t that person anymore. He had eternity these days, and it was time to start acting like it. Besides, he was pretty confident they’d keep him here for less than a day. If he was supposed to stay longer, he would have heard the other people who had been left here from the day before or the day before that. They’d be whimpering, or at least breathing, but they weren’t, which meant he was all alone. 

Or they’re all dead, his mind whispered to him, but he ignored it. He’d been locked in caskets and frozen in stone for decades; sitting here for a couple of days was nothing. 

Simon’s logical conclusions were rewarded later that day. Sometime later, after his hunger started to wane, they came for him; this time, it wasn’t Magi, though, but older acolytes. 

Simon’s hunger, or lack thereof, told him it was night and that eighteen hours had passed, but the boys tried to make it seem like days had passed as they hazed him. “Really? We came all the way down here so you could get a shadow this sad and pathetic?” One of the boys asked with a sneer. 

“It’s not like I get a say in it,” the second boy said glumly. He carried a lantern, and once Simon could see past the glare, he saw there were five of them. 

That made sense. The fact that only three of them spoke while the other two lingered sullenly behind them also made sense. Two of these boys had shadows, and one of them was there to pick his up. They were all slowly moving up this demented pecking order, but somehow the Magi managed to make all of them feel like shit about it the whole way. 

The three boys who could speak bickered a bit and found a dozen ways to criticize Simon. He was dumb. He was ugly. He looked poor. They seemed to be doing their best to provoke him, but he was sure that nothing good would happen to him if he so much as looked angry. After the way the magi had launched him against the wall, he was pretty sure that these three had all the authority in the world to beat the shit out of him. 

He found out just how true that was later that night. Not personally. He watched acolytes beat the shit out of two other boys. One in the mess hall when he cursed because he wasn’t getting any food, and once in the bunk room when someone cursed after they stubbed their toe. 

Simon took back everything negative he’d ever said about the way the other brown-robed initiates had treated him. The brown-robed initiates might have been little barbarians, but the acolytes he was with now were little monsters. They were always fighting and struggling with each other for scraps of anything. Food, blankets, and especially recognition. They acted like stray dogs, not like little boys and girls, and Simon struggled to keep his disgust off of his face.

That night was rough; he barely got any food, and he wasn’t able to sleep well at all on the cold stone floor, but he made do. It wasn’t until the morning that his acolyte gave him the facts of life while they waited for the doors to be unbarred so they could run across the plaza for breakfast and lessons. 

“You seem to have figured some of this out already because I haven’t had to put you in your place yet,” the boy said to him without bothering to give Simon his name. That disrespect offended him a little bit because he could very easily beat the snot out of the rail-thin boy, but Simon reminded himself this was all part of the game and nodded instead of scowling. “But there are a couple of things you need to know.”

“First,” he exclaimed, “Is that until last night you were nothing. You were literally so useless that you didn’t even cast a shadow. Now that you can read and write, that’s all you are. You’re just a shadow for your betters, and that's all you'll be until you're ready to be tested and take the oath. You—”

Simon could tell he had a whole speech worked out, and he was fairly certain it was the same one that was given to him weeks or months before. It was hard to create awe and wonder on an assembly line, but the Magi were certainly doing their best. 

“And if you slow me down, and we don’t get anything to eat, I’m taking it out of your hide!” the boy finished as the doors slammed open, and nearly a hundred boys and black robes started running across the plaza in the same mad dash he’d grown used to in his first months here.  

Ch. 286 - Into the Dark (part 2)

Simon didn’t slow anyone down as they raced across the plaza. He stayed exactly a step behind the boy he’d been assigned to shadow as they went up the steps and into the giant ziggurat. He could have outrun the acolyte easily, but that wasn’t the right move just now. He didn’t seem like a bad kid comparatively, but he could make Simon’s life for the foreseeable future pretty hard if Simon got him in trouble or showed him up. 

Instead, the two of them stayed together in the middle of the pack, and Simon received only a heel of bread for his trouble. That seemed to be pretty standard fare for shadows. At dinner, they were fed the scraps their acolyte felt like giving them, but for breakfast, the minder apparently decided they didn’t actually want half of their students to starve.  

Today, though, it wasn’t the food that he was interested in, not when he was finally in something that looked like a classroom. He’d jumped through so many hoops to get here, and now he couldn’t take his eyes off the cavernous room. 

When his acolyte saw Simon’s reaction, he just laughed between bites of breakfast and said, “Yeah, well, enjoy it. I’ve been here for months, and eventually, you get tired of it.”

Simon only dimly remembered his college days at this point, but he was fairly sure he hadn’t cared for the experience. The man he’d become, though, would never get tired of learning, and so this new place, sinister though it was, felt almost as awe-inspiring as the Oracle’s temple. 

The room that the hundreds of boys and girls gathered in was a vast dome that had been carved like an amphitheater, with great care paid to the acoustics. The slope was steep, like a lecture hall, and each seat was like a stone desk with seating for perhaps a hundred, which wasn’t nearly enough for everyone here. 

I probably won’t need a seat, though, Simon thought as he appreciated that place. 

There were certainly many details worth studying. The way it was carved made it unlikely it had been made with physical tools, but then, Simon wouldn’t have expected anything less in the very heart of the Magi’s symbol of power, and he idly wondered how many centuries of human life essence it had taken to power the words of earth that had shaped this place. 

There was a large chalkboard at the front and a few large binding circles carved into the floor near the instructor’s lectern. Those were impressive, but aside from those details and a pillar that had been carved into a giant statue of the god-king holding up the ceiling, there were no other decorations in the room. 

He was even more pleased when an actual Magi showed up to teach them, and the acolytes opened up actual textbooks. About fucking time, he thought to himself as he stood there. He was very pleased to be in a place where actual learning was finally happening. This is what he’d hoped for from day one, and it had only taken a season to get here.

Innumerable days of boredom and dozens of minor bouts of suffering had been worth it, he finally decided after the class had been in session for a few minutes, even if he was a little let down by the content of the course. After months of slowly bubbling up through the Magi’s demented mage school, he was finally in an actual lecture hall, listening to a real Magi lecture on the nature of magic. 

Those words turned out to be a letdown. They were equal part propaganda and theory, and half of the theory seemed to be conjecture that disagreed with some of Simon’s own theories, but even that was progress. He’d proceeded from grade school brainwashing to high school brainwashing. 

Magi Karala would call on acolytes at random and ask them questions at random, like, “Why is it you must begin every spell with the same word?” or “What is the fifth word of our lord, alphabetically?” then capriciously mock or punish them when they got the answer wrong. Sometimes, she would even whisper something and make them cry out in pain. 

What is that word? Simon wondered, wishing she’d speak up as he tried to read her lips. He had no real desire to use a word of pain on someone, but he would dearly love to know it. 

It was hardly fair; most of the questions had to do with memorization more than knowledge, and even though he knew more about magic than anyone in this room, it was rare that he even had a good guess. 

Fortunately, no one ever asked him. Shadows were not to be spoken to and were not expected to know anything. They existed to listen and learn, and at least here he wasn’t relearning the alphabet. They were at least discussing words of power; better, they had books where those words were written down, and Simon was permitted to look over his acolyte’s shoulder as he learned about them. That, at least, was worth something.

If I had known how watered down all of this was, would I have even bothered? He asked himself as he stood patiently behind his acolyte’s seat, listening to her lecture about the ‘will of the God-King.’  

He wasn’t sure, but if he hadn’t, he probably never would have come to hate this group so much, and as this life dragged on, his hate for the Magi was becoming one of his most cherished possessions. He was planning to use it a great deal in future lives when he taught these people the importance of humility.

Broadly speaking, the Murani people were nice enough, aside from the whole slavery thing. The rural horse tribes were actually very welcoming and respectful of strangers they didn’t perceive as a threat. Even the common citizens of the capital were people, just like anywhere else in the world he’d been to. Their ruling caste and their self-serving views on the nature of magic, though, were positively maniacal. 

Just think of how easy you’ll be able to impersonate one in later lives if you need to pretend that you're one of them, he told himself, trying to stay positive. 

For that, at least, he’d need all the help he could get. It was hard for him to stay passive, let alone positive, in the face of so much cruelty. The entire system seemed built to torture the lowest people on the totem pole, and he saw someone snap under that pressure on his very first day. 

It happened when their Magi teacher asked a boy to produce a pyramid with a word of illusion. He’d tried to obey twice. The first time, he flubbed the word, and nothing happened, and the second time, he’d cast the spell, but it was an ugly, misshapen thing with no real visualization. It was neither a replica of the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles, which Simon would have tried to create to show off, nor was it a bland, idealized pyramid. 

When he failed, the teacher punished him with pain. He responded by doing the unthinkable and trying to lash out with a word of lesser fire at her that reached less than halfway to the lectern. That caused a stunned silence to fall over the room. 

The red-robed magi reacted instantly and used a word of distant nullification on him even as a minder stepped out of the shadows and beat the disobedient child senseless. As his unconscious body was dragged from the room, Simon wondered what would happen to him. 

Even after the boy was gone, silence reigned for the rest of the day. Simon chewed on what had happened more than the meal he had that night once they were released. He couldn’t ask anyone about it, but he listened to every rumor within earshot without much luck. 

When the whole thing repeated itself the following day, he saw no reason to change his very dim outlook on the whole affair. The most interesting part of the classes quickly became the book that the students read from. 

It certainly wasn't the teacher. Though he'd held high hopes at first, he quickly revised those downward. The sorts of things that she tested them on mostly revolved around the 12 words that the students were given access to in their texts. One was the lesser word, which they were told wrongly was the key to all magic, and the rest were a smattering of the least dangerous words he had, along with very limited meanings.

Of course, the word of fire or ice could never be called safe, but they weren't nearly as dangerous as the word of transfer. Either way, it didn't matter to Simon. He already knew all of them, so all he could do was hope that some new context would accidentally slip into one of the lectures as he watched the students struggle with basic concepts that he’d long ago mastered. 

The exercises were all fairly rudimentary. Use light to make this shape, use ice to freeze this bowl of water, produce fire, or make your book levitate with force. Despite their simplicity, though, it was far more common for a student to fail than to not. This only rarely resulted in them injuring themselves. Usually, they just coughed and gave that familiar sour expression that never failed to remind him of the sulfurous taste that came with getting a word wrong. 

Really, the whole thing was an exercise in nostalgia for him. He watched the acolytes struggle with all the different things he’d worked through early on. He saw people fail to pronounce the word properly, fail to give it the correct amount of intent, imagine the results imprecisely, and everything else someone could do wrong. 

None of those were the real mistakes, though. The real mistake was in failing to correct the mistakes properly. The fault lies with the teacher, he decided very quickly, not with the students. Simon’s only two students had exceeded all of these boys and girls in less than twenty-four hours, and the reason for that was because he’d offered them detailed feedback and personal explanations. They could do the same thing here, but that wasn't the point.

The whole point here was to make them feel bad and be beholden to the Magi, Simon concluded by the end of the first day. If magic is easy, then anyone can do it, but if it is hard, then everyone has to supplicate and venerate those who have it. 

The teacher, on the other hand, was good only for entertainment, though he was careful not to smile when she berated someone. She had a few tests she used for each word, and they were quite repetitive. Give a lecture, embarrass a couple of students, repeat as necessary until the sun had set, and the children could be let loose on the dining hall once more. 

The newness of this latest experience quickly wore off and was replaced by a growing bitterness. Every time he saw a child dragged away by a Minder for some terrible punishment, his desire to burn the whole place down increased. 

Mostly, the children meted out their own torments to keep each other in line. Everyone lived in fear that if you got a Magi involved, things would get infinitely worse. Simon was in this new class for less than a week before he learned how children sometimes died. Unfortunately, it was the same day he learned that his time here would be coming to an end sooner rather than later. 

Ch. 287 - The Dreaming Sphere

By the time their teacher showed them the Dreaming Sphere, Simon had all but given up on this place. Ironically, after months of patience,  it had taken less than a week in this new role to burn him out. He’d had a great deal of understanding for the initiate phase, despite his overwhelming sense of boredom, because he understood how rare literacy was in this world. He’d even tolerated the culty messages they gave for those barely literate children to read. 

If you wanted to give people this much power, then you wanted to make sure they were loyal, too, right? All of that he could accept, with the idea that he would eventually learn magic himself. Even the cruelty, while distasteful, was something closer to a cultural difference than a reason for him to quit. 

What he couldn’t stand was how wasteful all of this was. What he’d learned here could fit in a thimble, and they weren’t just teaching the children poorly, they were lying to them the whole time they did it, making the whole thing even more counterproductive. 

He could have built a school in Ionar inside a shack and trained a dozen mages a year to a better level than anything the Magi were offering. The only thing that might have prevented such a thing was the amount of blood magic that would be required and his fear about the number of unforeseen consequences he'd unleash into the world. 

You sure you want to stick around here, Simon? he asked himself every time something awful happened. Only like three more years of this cesspool, and you might actually learn something. 

Simon was seriously considering how he might bring the pyramid down in the middle of the night to kill as few people as possible by his sixth day, and it was the idea of murdering children more than anything else that stayed his hand. Then came the giant, evil-looking orb. The magi used a word of force to slide her lectern aside and then another to raise some mechanism in the floor, causing the stone stand that held it to climb out of the floor. 

The thing was huge, and the way the older students squirmed nervously, Simon was certain that they’d seen it before, but to Simon, it was the first interesting thing he’d seen all week. It was a giant sapphire sphere twice the size of a man's head, wrapped in wide, unevenly spaced bands of gold. The thing had to weigh hundreds of pounds, but none of that was the interesting part. 

That was the fact that both the bands and the facets of the titanic gem itself were inscribed with words of power. Simon could see that from where he stood near the back of the classroom, but it was too far away for him to read them. 

Magi Karala offered no explanation; instead, once the strange orb was in place, she simply called out the names of two acolytes at random and ordered them to the front of the cavernous classroom that they met in every day. 

Simon barely noticed them, though. He was too busy studying every detail. He only paid attention to the boy and the girl as they arrived at the front of the room. Then, after a nod from the teacher, all three of them placed their hands on the orb.

This time, he saw the thing flare to life, glowing a brilliant white deep inside the crystal. Is it hollow? He wondered. He didn’t have a chance to answer that. As soon as he focused on the white light, some part of the magic made it expand across his sight until it took up most of his view. Even as the details started to solidify into what looked like three people, Simon looked away, and the magic faded. 

How in the hell does that work, he wondered, resisting the urge to look a second time as he glanced surreptitiously around at all the other students. 

Everyone but him, which luckily included the Magi, was staring at the orb, and all of them had that strange white light reflected in their eyes. No, it was more than that. Their eyes were glowing, too. He would have been able to see them in the dark. 

Does that mean they’re powering whatever’s happening, or— Simon asked himself as he saw the girl touching the orb flinch as though she’d been struck. That made him raise his eyebrows, and it was enough to make him return his eyes to the orb and let its magic embrace him. 

What he found, when the glow consumed him a second time, was a battle of sorts. The room had vanished, and the world was replaced with a vast white plane that went on forever but contained only the teacher and the two students touching the orb. The rest of the class, including him, were nothing but disembodied spectators. 

“Again!” the Magi barked. “How can you expect to understand a spell if you can’t endure its sting!”

The girl looked determined, but the boy looked unsure. It was easy to see why. She looked like a burn victim, and though the blue robes she wore must have looked lovely once, they were scorched in several places. Simon saw why when the boy hit her another time, a small jet of flame after using a word of lesser fire. 

This time, she took the burn stoically, and the teacher said, “Better, now show me lightning!” before the boy launched into a new attack of his own, but none of that interested Simon. He could cast lightning and fire whenever he wanted. What mattered was that they were doing so in this sphere, and it wasn’t hurting their physical bodies. 

They’re simulating magic combat? He thought, gapping. Inside a magical item? What in the hell is going on?

The two traded blows as they cycled through a few more simple spells at the teacher’s direction. Sometimes, they cast them at each other and sometimes at targets that the teacher would manifest into existence with a wave of her hand. Unfortunately, they never dueled in a real sense, and the magical combat that Simon was hoping for never materialized. Really, she seemed more concerned about whether students were able to take it as well as they dished it out. That was distasteful and more than a little cruel, considering the average age of the room was 15 or so, but it wasn't entirely unreasonable. 

Not even those disappointments were enough to overcome his wonder as he watched the whole thing. Simon had built any number of magical items over the course of his many lives, but all of them added together lacked a tenth of the complexity of whatever this thing was, and as he watched the spectacle, he was filled with questions. 

Did the users power it, or did it have another source? How complex was the magic that allowed this to work? How did it simulate magic? Simon’s mind boggled at the ideas contained within it. Up until now, all he’d wanted to do was lock himself in the library and devour all of the books he wasn’t allowed to read. Now, even more than that, he wanted to study every inch of the thing.

When the teacher was satisfied, she released both of them and chose two more students. They did better than the first group and were soon replaced with a third, giving Simon a chance to study the predictable interactions with detail. Though he didn’t like watching his classmates scream in pain, he took solace in the fact that when they returned to their seats, they were unharmed. 

Their teacher seemed much less happy with the third group of students than she was with either of the previous two. Both of them were doing what they were told, and the spells seemed to be decent. It was only after a couple of minutes, when Magi Karala said, “No, the goal of magic is not to cast the spell but to work your will with its effects!” that he understood. 

They were doing what they were told, but the boy on the left was pulling his punches to some degree. His fire flared, and his lightning arced, but it was all flash and no heat. 

“But Magi, I did as you said,” the young boy started to protest.

“Silence! You must learn to embrace your pain!” she roared, crackling with unjustifiable fury. “If you are afraid to hurt your opponent, then I will do it for you.”

She didn’t say any words out loud. She whispered them as she always did, but what followed was almost certainly greater cold. It was an interesting version of the spell that Simon had never thought to try before. With a wave of her hand, a ball of throbbing blue light appeared. It reminded him only vaguely of the crystal they were all touching, but as soon as it drifted between the three of them, it exploded in a maelstrom of frost. 

Simon worried that the ice shards at that range would shred everyone, but instead of ice, all three of them, including the teacher, were enveloped by waves of supercooled mist, and he watched all of them freeze in place in real time. “If you let go of the orb, your time here will be at an end,” the Magi gasped stiffly as they slowly all slowly froze solid. 

To their credit, neither child released their grip on the icy orb, even as their frozen bodies began to crack and fall to pieces. Simon looked away, then. He could endure a lot of things, but watching children play at blood sports and torturing them was a bridge too far. So he was watching from the real world when the teacher finally released her grip on the sapphire sphere and stepped back. 

She seemed stiffer than she’d been before the demonstration, which was enough to tell him how much what she’d endured had hurt, but that was clearer when she canceled the magic, and the two students that had been gripping the orb both fell to the ground instantly, like their strings had been cut. 

For a moment, Simon worried she’d killed both of them capriciously, and he felt a rage boiling up inside of him. You built a toy so you could have your students hurt each other without getting hurt, and you kill them anyway? He wanted to scream. 

That rage abated a little when one of the two students tried and failed to rise to their feet, but when the other one lay still, Simon knew that his first instinct had been correct. This was an amazing tool for teaching, but it was being used to murder students who Magi Karala decided weren’t good enough. 

“You must all understand,” she lectured the group as a pair of gray-robed slaves came in to fetch the body and take it away. “Inside the dreaming sphere, or outside of it, the world is the same. You use magic in service to the God-King and him alone. You carry out his will and the commands of his servants, and if you are weak… Too weak to finish your opponent or something as trivial as pain, then you have no place in his plan.”

Simon’s heart grew cold at her words. He knew why the bodies they left at the base of the pyramid died without a mark on them now, and he hated it. Even as he wrestled with that hatred, though, he realized something else, too. 

While he might be able to endure all of this for long enough to rise to the level of true acolyte, he was never going to be able to get called up to the front of the class for that thing. The second he did, he would be revealed. 

He very much doubted that his mental image of himself was anything close to the boy he was pretending to be. None of the students he saw in the Dreaming Sphere, as his teacher had called it, looked anything like the hollow, sunken-eyed acolytes they’d become. They didn’t even wear black robes in their mind's eye. They’d all seen themselves as children, still. 

Outwardly, Nijam was short and young, with dark skin and hair, but Simon’s mind probably wouldn’t reflect much of that disguise. He almost certainly still saw himself as a fat white thirty-year-old deep down, and the second that Magi Karala saw that she’d kill him. 

Looks like you’re never going to graduate, Simon told himself as he watched the orb slide back into the hole it had come from before the lectern slid over top of it again, sealing it away. As did, he reflected on the travesty of it all. He’d wondered for a long time what was getting people killed, and now he had his answer. 

It wasn’t magic, blood sacrifices, or even the orb in front of him. It was sadism and negligence. That made sense; it seemed to power the entire priesthood of the Magi, and he was going to have to do something about that.