MAGUS INFINITE

Ruggah did not answer straight away. He looked at his team, as if he wanted to be sure that they wanted him to tell their story to me, and he must have gotten an affirmation as he turned towards me and said, "The first four weeks do not matter, even though we were facing enemies ten times our number, we were the best, and they would need a hundred times more bodies to shake us from our foundation... our loss came from within."

He touched his empty eye socket. "We had all denied the touch of the Great Fitting, but the enemy has a way of getting inside your head. They do not need to breach your walls; they only need to reach one person and turn them, and that person turns the one beside them, and so on. We had expected this, but we did not expect the one who fell to its temptation."

"Who turned?"

"The commander." He said it flatly, without inflection. "He was given a gift by the enemy. A dark seed that grew in his mind, poisoning his thoughts, making him see his own men as a resource to reach a greater height. He did not even know what was happening to him until it was too late."

I looked at the others at this point to see how they were taking this, but they were all still, as if they were afraid of distracting Ruggah. There was something in the way he was speaking that made it seem there was more to this story than I was being told.

"You killed him," I whispered.

"I had to." His voice did not change at all. "He had already turned seven thousand men, and opened our gates before I caught him. I had to cut his head off to make sure that the infection would stop spreading, but it was already too late."

The camp was quiet, even the horses had stopped their restless shifting. At this moment, something strange happened. I saw a battlefield filled with bodies, and kneeling at its center was a headless armored figure. The body had been pierced with five spears, which stopped it from falling, and the skies above the field of bodies were filled with black birds.

I blinked and the vision disappeared, and my Status Screen vibrated.

[Eldritch Perception: 24 → 26 (Initiate)]

Interesting, was that a vision I saw just from listening to the story of Ruggah? This mysterious skill was becoming stranger with every passing moment. A soft growl came from the tiger, and I looked at the beast, and she almost flinched.

I could see the tension in her massive frame, and I wondered what she was sensing from me that placed her on edge. "Your tiger is afraid of me," I said.

Ruggah’s eye flickered. "She is not afraid of you. She is afraid of what you carry."

I went very still. "What does she sense?"

"I do not know." He put his hand on the tiger’s head, and she leaned into the touch. "But she has never been wrong before. She warned me of the commander’s betrayal a full day before it happened. I did not believe her, and I paid for it with my eye and thirty thousand lives."

He looked at me, and I saw the weight of that loss in his gaze. "She says you are powerful, and that is all that matters. We need powerful allies."

The air had grown colder, and I felt the weight of their stares press against me. I did not know what to say, so I said nothing.

"You told me you are Ruggah," I said finally. "But you did not tell me the name of your tiger."

For the first time, something like surprise flickered across his face. "You wish to know her name?"

"I do."

There was a time I would not care about something like this, but a companion had taught me to be better.

"She is called Battle. I named her when I found her as a cub. She was the only one who survived the slaughter of her litter. I thought she would just be a weapon, but she has become something else entirely."

"She is more than a weapon." I smiled, and I meant it. "She is your companion, your partner, and the reason you are still alive."

Ruggah’s single eye met mine, and I saw something shift behind his gaze. Then the Beastkin nodded once and turned toward the fire, gesturing for me to join them.

"Sit," he said. "You are the guest of the mountain, and we are guests of the mountain. That makes us neighbors, for as long as we are allowed to remain."

I sat down on the cold ground across from them, and I felt the heat of the fire touch my face. The soldiers had not relaxed, but they had stopped watching me with open suspicion.

Thurrim was the next to speak. "You look at us strangely," he said. "As if we are not quite real to you."

I was surprised how perceptive the dwarf could be, something that even Dorrik might not have noticed, but he was a god, and the way he saw the world was different. I shrugged. "I am not used to meeting so many different kinds of people."

"Different kinds?" Thurrim frowned. "Where are you from?"

I considered my answer carefully. "A place that is far away from here... In that place only humans are left. The rest are... nearly gone."

"That is impossible."

I wanted to glance at Coin to drive home my point, and I did not, so I just said, "I did not say it was good. I only said it was true."

Ogg looked up from the horse. "And you are human?"

I cocked my head to the side at the strange question; did I not look human enough? "I am," I replied to the Troll’s question.

The troll studied me. "But you are not like the other humans." He nodded toward Tam and Ines. "Those two are human, and I have healed many humans, and I know the sound of their hearts; yours is so strong. There is no light of divinity inside you, and yet, you are so strong, far more than any human could ever naturally attain."

I thought about denying it, but there was no point. They could all see it. My hair was white, my body was dense and hard, and there was a faint glow on my skin, even though the seal on my soul had suppressed the glow from my channels.

How could I explain to these people that I did not come from a where, but a when? There was never an easy way to say this, so I held back a lot of the things on my mind, and just said a part of the truth that would not reveal too much.

"I was not always like this," I said. "I changed."

"That is the nature of things," Ogg said. "You change, or you die."

Tam spoke up. "What are you, then? If you are not like us, what are you?"

I looked at the young man who had seen too much and lost too much. There was a hunger for power in his eyes that threw me off, and I wondered how humans fared in this day and age, and if this was the hunger for power that kept us alive through the ages.