Chapter 158 - 159
Alistar left the estate with a complicated mix of guilt and self-pity, knowing that he would never get to enjoy the normal youth that Patricia wanted him to experience. With such thoughts on his mind, he set off for the outskirts of the county, determined to unearth the secret behind the mysterious madman once and for all.
***
"That backstabbing bastard..."
"Who?" asked Alistar, impatient after repeating the same conversations time and time again over the past several hours. "How did this person betray you?"
"Curses...terrible curses..."
Alistar perked up as he finally received a relevant response. At this point in his constant lines of questioning, he’d decided to try to steer the man’s memory in another direction.
"Do you know who Dalia Silver is?"
"My wife...she’s my wife." Going completely still, the man said, "How are you talking to me right now? They can never speak, not after the first few decades. Mute, they’re always mute..." Going still once more, he gasped as if someone had just removed a hand from over his mouth. "Dalia, is she okay? Tell me, where is my wife?"
Going against all of his instincts, Alistar plunged his dagger into the man’s neck with sickening ease, causing him to fall limply to the ground amidst a series of spine-tingling gurgles. He had already witnessed the man die several times, in some instances appearing to suicide out of instinct rather than as a result of any coherent thought. With this in mind, Alistar had taken the risk of staining his soul in an effort to preserve any bit of sanity that might happen to manifest within the pitiful man’s mind, as had been requested of him by the person in question during his initial visit.
Ten seconds...thirty seconds...fifty seconds...
A rising sense of horror settled in as Alistar began to wonder if the man’s revivals weren’t infinite in number. What if he had actually killed him just now? Wouldn’t that mean that he was a murderer, no better than the guards in Crystellum and those that had sent his family there?