The Wrong Kind of Immortality

Three weeks passed. The war continued. So did the training.

They had settled into a rhythm: sparring one day, gravity practice the next. The sparring sessions grew more complex as Eirene’s instincts sharpened—Orestis introduced multi-spell combinations, varied the timing, and occasionally threw in environmental hazards to force adaptation under pressure.

She had yet to make him move a single step—that had become a personal goal. She would get there. Eventually.

The gravity sessions followed a steady progression from the badlands to the next challenge: the geothermal fields and their magma variants—commonly called magmabacks. They moved on after her fourth day with the ridgeback burrowers.

The decision had come during a routine exercise. She had been restraining three burrowers simultaneously—holding each one at a different pressure level, adjusting for their individual movement patterns.

The exercise felt easy enough now. She decided to try the variation of the spell she’d been working on.

She modified the spell, adding another sigil to the adjustment layer and changing the shape of two others. The result was an additional force pushing upwards from below.

The three burrowers she was holding went rigid. Not from increased pressure—from being caught between two directional forces, squeezed into a narrow band of space with nowhere to move. Up was blocked. Down was blocked. The creatures couldn’t even vibrate effectively because the opposing fields cancelled out their attempts to loosen the soil.

Orestis watched for several seconds, then slowly turned towards her. He had a faint smile on his face.

Eirene recognised the expression as one he wore when he was properly impressed. The last time she’d seen him with that smile was when she showed him her mana strings.

“What made you think to change the direction of the gravity?” he asked.

“The gravity field only pulls downward. On soft ground, that helps the burrowers to escape,” she said, without breaking concentration, “I thought the shield design could be improved if it could sandwich the target between two opposing forces.”

“That does solve the soft-ground problem entirely,” he agreed. “You’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

She adjusted one of the restraints without looking at it. “Since the second burrower on day one. The one that nearly escaped by digging.”

His smile widened. “All right. We’re moving to the geothermal fields.”

Orestis opened a gate. Then, as he walked through, he said, “By the way. Do not name your spell gravity sandwich.”

It was a terrible name. She tried to keep a straight face. She almost succeeded.

***

The geothermal fields were a different kind of difficulty.

The ground shifted. Heat vents opened without warning, disrupting both footing and concentration. The region’s naturally high mana saturation also interfered with spell constructs in unpredictable ways. This was also what had produced the burrower variants: prolonged exposure to oversaturated mana had altered their biology.

The magmabacks themselves were larger, denser, and considerably more aggressive than their badlands cousins. Where standard burrowers fled first and fought only when cornered, the magma variants attacked. Apart from the physical and behavioural changes, they had also gained minor resistance to magical effects.

The first one charged her.

It burst from the ground in an explosive lunge—three metres of armoured muscle and vibrating plates, claws extended, aimed directly at where she was standing. Eirene sidestepped, threw up her shield, and cast the gravity restraint in the same motion.

The magmaback shrugged it off, but not completely. It slowed, plates grinding against the volcanic rock, and then kept coming. The magic resistance absorbed enough of the spell’s force to maintain its forward momentum.

Eirene increased pressure. The creature’s vibrations intensified—lower, more powerful than anything she’d felt from the badlands specimens—and the soft, mineral-rich ground beneath it began to give way.

She switched to the dual-directional variant. The creature hit the boundary between the two forces and stopped—caught, squeezed, unable to dig or lunge.

However, the mana saturation in the ground was interfering with the lower field, causing it to fluctuate. She had to anchor it against the harder rock beneath the surface layer and increase the output by nearly a third before the restraint stabilised.

The burrower thrashed. Plates vibrating at full intensity, claws scraping uselessly against nothing. It was clearly furious.

“Use the standard downward variation when you can,” Orestis said. “Let your mind get used to the interference here before straining your concentration. Save the dual-directional for when they’re about to escape.”

It was sound advice. The dual-directional variant was effective but draining—not in power, but in concentration. Especially in this environment where she had to also focus on preventing her spell constructs from randomly collapsing due to mana interference.

Switching between the two modes as needed was more sustainable than holding the complex version continuously.

She released the burrower. It lunged at her again. She restrained it again—using the standard variation this time. She was also able to do it faster, with more confidence. It struggled. She held.

After a minute, it gave up and burrowed underground the moment she let go, vibrating with what she could only interpret as indignation.

By the end of the third week, she was handling magmabacks with the same steady competence she had shown with the ridgebacks—adjusting for the resistance, compensating for the terrain, and mostly using her variation of the gravity spell.

Orestis had stopped giving corrections during the exercises. He watched, noted, and smiled occasionally when he thought she wasn’t looking. She was always looking.

***

The war arrived in Orthessa the way most wars arrived in neutral countries: through trade disruptions, institutional briefings, and the quiet accumulation of bad news.

The Consortium’s analysts tracked the conflict with professional detachment. Weekly assessments appeared on the news boards: Logrion retaking a major pass. Kallistrate forces withdrawing from a contested mine. A significant engagement at a supply corridor resulting in heavy casualties on both sides. The language was measured, clinical, and utterly devoid of the human details that made war what it was.

Orestis read the assessments. The pattern was clear: Logrion was winning. Slowly, methodically, one position at a time. The artefacts were doing their work—every engagement report noted Kallistrate’s ‘reduced combat effectiveness among recently trained units,’ which was institutional language for half their soldiers being barely able to stand.

At the passes, the fighting was hardest. Mountain terrain favoured defenders, and Kallistrate’s veterans fought with the desperation of soldiers who knew what losing meant. Each pass required days of sustained assault. Each mine required careful siege work to avoid damaging the infrastructure Logrion intended to reclaim.

But the numbers told a single, relentless story: Kallistrate was losing ground.

The Sovereign, however, made things complicated.

He appeared at critical moments, turned retreats into stalemates, and prevented three separate Logrion advances from becoming decisive victories. The weekly assessments described him cautiously as ‘an unidentified Sixth Circle combatant operating in Kallistrate’s theatre’. Unidentified because Kallistrate had no publicly known Sovereigns—a fact that generated its own quiet speculation within the Consortium’s corridors.

Orestis had seen the man in action once, through an observation gate he’d opened over a contested pass. The Sovereign had engaged an Exemplar—one a bit stronger than the two Orestis had seen before—held him at range with layered spell formations, and then disengaged when Logrion reinforcements began arriving through a gate behind their lines.

A gate which, Orestis noted, was opened despite the anti-gate ward field being in effect. He wondered if it was because Logrion was able to disable the field in a localised area or if they were matching the gate’s resonance with that of the distortion field.

The archives should have notes on that. I’ll go check later.

As for the Sovereign, upon seeing another Exemplar arriving with the reinforcements, he immediately flew upward, cleared the ceiling of the anti-gate ward field, and teleported away.

Fast. Disciplined. And entirely aware of his own limitations.

Logrion will need a way to restrain him.

Orestis had a few ideas that might be suitable.

***

The berserker reports came later.

Not through official channels—those lagged behind reality by days or weeks. The first mention Orestis heard was in the Consortium canteen, where a logistics coordinator was describing what a merchant convoy had witnessed at a border checkpoint.

A Kallistrate soldier had attacked his own unit—without warning, and without provocation. He had been standing at his post one moment and screaming the next, his aura flaring uncontrollably, striking anyone within reach. Three of his comrades had been injured before a mage put him down.

The coordinator didn’t need to elaborate; everyone understood what he meant.

Over the following days, more reports filtered in. Merchants, travellers, Consortium field agents. The same pattern repeated: Kallistrate soldiers losing control. Aura destabilising. Violent, uncontrolled outbursts that ended only when the affected soldier was either restrained or killed.

The incidents were concentrated among the younger troops—the ones who had been pushed through the Temple’s accelerated training programme. It was an obvious sign of Stage IV onset—but not the kind Orestis had anticipated.

He had expected the standard developments: organ failure, muscle atrophy, gradual loss of aura stages. Those were the most common outcomes of structural degradation. The berserker state was a known possibility, but it was rare—historically occurring only in cases where the brain’s aura pathways were damaged. It should have been an outlier, not the primary symptom.

But it was becoming the most common occurrence. And the likely cause was the artefacts.

Because there weren’t this many reports of berserkers before I regressed.

It made sense, in hindsight. The destabilisation field agitated the flow of aura within its range. Sustained exposure during combat would accelerate the degradation along the most volatile pathways first. And the brain, being the most sensitive organ to aura fluctuation, was failing first. The rest of the body had simply been pushed down the list.

An unintended side effect. Or rather, an expected effect—just in the wrong sequence.

He filed it and moved on.

***

Eirene did not move on.

She brought it up during training, on a morning when they were cooling down after a sparring session. Her voice was even, but he recognised the particular quality of her attention—the focused stillness that meant she had been thinking about something for longer than she was letting on.

“The soldiers going berserk,” she said. “Can it be treated?”

“Yes.”

The directness of his answer seemed to catch her off guard. She studied him. “Will you?”

Orestis was quiet for a moment. He had never considered that course of action before. He thought about it. If he were to do a bit of research on those affected, it was very likely that he could resolve the issue. But he didn’t want to.

“I don’t want the attention,” he said at last. “Even the Temple has no idea how to fix it. If I step up and do what they’ve been unable to, it will draw precisely the kind of attention I’ve spent considerable effort avoiding.”

“But you could.”

“I could—but I don’t need to. I have reason to believe someone is already working on a treatment. Or will be, soon enough.”

“Who?”

The memories were quite distant—fragments from a time so long ago that the details had faded. But some things remained. He remembered hearing about the healer who had cured the soldiers’ ailments. She was later known as the Saintess.

He’d never met her personally, but he’d heard rumours of her extraordinary skill and kindness. And he remembered where she was from.

“I don’t know her name,” he said. “But I believe she’s in Nomyra—a devotee in one of the temples there.”

Eirene watched him carefully. He could see the questions forming—the specificity of his knowledge, the certainty beneath the vagueness. She chose not to ask them.

“When the war is over,” she said, “I’d like to find her.”

Orestis nodded. He expected as much.

***

The call-node activated three days later.

Orestis was in his room at the inn when the pulse came. He recognised the resonance pattern—Toren’s device. It was a call he’d been expecting for a while.

He put on the mask to alter his voice, then activated the call-node. “Yes?”

“I’m aware this is a stretch.” Toren’s voice was controlled, but there was an edge beneath it—the tone of a man who had tried everything reasonable and was now trying the unreasonable. “But the Sovereign is a problem we haven’t been able to solve, and I thought no harm in asking whether you have any ideas.”

“I do.”

There was a brief pause. Not long, but long enough to register surprise.

“You do?” Toren asked, the edge in his voice shifting—less strain now, more focus. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting that.”

“I’ve been working on it since the first reports of the engagements,” Orestis said. “From what I understand, the issue isn’t offensive capability; it’s containment. You can’t pin him down.”

“No,” Toren agreed. “We can’t. The moment he’s pressured, he escapes. You have a way to prevent that?”

“I have been working on a spatial suppression artefact. It’s almost complete—right now, it can prevent teleportation and gate formation within approximately one hundred metres. The only remaining issue is maintaining the field. It requires a stable, high-density power source—a mana crystal of exceptional purity.”

“And you don’t have one.”

“No.”

Honestly, he didn’t really need to go through all of this trouble. He could have easily completed the artefact using alternative power sources. But this approach served a different purpose: it allowed Logrion to take part. That had been part of Eirene’s advice.

She had explained it to him in simple terms: nations could not afford to believe in altruism—not at this scale, and not repeatedly. If he continued to intervene without cost, Logrion would not see help. They would assume motive—hidden terms, future demands, or an attempt to bind them through dependence.

In the end, she had suggested establishing a cost to his assistance, even if it was something as simple as money. A merchant’s daughter, through and through. But more than that—she was someone who understood how people thought.

She was also right.

“High-purity crystals are a controlled resource. I can’t obtain one without raising questions,” Orestis said, letting the implication settle.

Toren responded without hesitation. “We have access to several. I will have one delivered within the hour to the usual spot.”

Meaning, the quarry alcove he mentioned during their first meeting. “That will work,” Orestis said.

“How soon can we expect the artefact?”

“To complete testing and final quality checks, I’ll need two days.”

“Understood.” Toren’s voice had shifted. It was still controlled, but with something sharper beneath it; the sound of a man who had just been handed an answer he hadn’t expected to receive. “Delivery?”

“The bridge. In person.” Then, he added, “There is one condition.”

A pause. “Name it.”

“I want Logrion to release the Temple documents to the public at a time of my choosing.” Again, he could have had them leaked through Consortium channels. However, this also reinforced the impression that his assistance came with a cost.

“We were planning to make the programme’s failures public regardless. Agreeing to your timing costs us nothing. Done.”

“Good. Two days.”

The connection ended.

Orestis removed his mask and sighed.

The hoops I have to jump through to avoid being helpful.

***

Two days later, Orestis delivered the artefact at the familiar bridge east of Orthessa. Same open ground, same sightlines. Toren came with two guards. The exchange was brief.

Orestis made sure to highlight one pivotal point: The range was limited to a hundred metre radius. They had to make sure to get within that distance before the Sovereign left the distortion field produced by the pylons—and then maintain that distance throughout the engagement. Which meant that whoever they sent had to be faster than the Sovereign’s flying speed.

Toren’s answer had been simple and direct: “We’ll find someone.”

He asked three more precise questions, received three precise answers, and left immediately after. His time was precious after all.

***

Logrion moved even faster than he expected.

The next morning, after training, he was on his way to check on the merchant work when Eirene intercepted him outside his door.

“Eleuthera says something is about to happen,” she said. “She says it will be worth watching.”

Someone is going after the Sovereign. And it’s interesting enough for Eleuthera to mention.

“Let’s go, then.”

The merchant work had never needed his constant oversight. He went every day because it was routine. It could wait.

Eirene smiled faintly. “She says the tea is already poured.”

I suppose I can get the salted caramel popcorn for her this time.