Eighteen hours and seventeen minutes. For more than eighteen hours, I felt myself being dragged away, my soul pulled from my body through my connection to the throne. The path between me and it is broken; it has holes in it like a colander, and for that time, I fought falling through. I don’t know what is on the other side, but there isn’t any light there.
For eighteen hours, I watched my own body like a spectre, unable to move, unable to feel. The woman in white took Jasper from me. She healed him first, and then she took him away. The officers moved in, and I let them throw my body to the ground, bind my arms and legs, and wrap me in nice and fluffy blankets. They had a hell of a time trying to move me anywhere with the huge wings dragging behind me, and in the end, they bound them too. I let myself be reduced to an invisible track of black sand absorbed into my body, as they slapped a collar around my neck that restricted my presence and my magic. I lost sensation then, all sight, all sound, everything I had been using my soul to perceive reduced to just a nanometer of wiggle room past the surface of my skin.
The world returned hours later; I only know how long due to an old clock hanging on the wall of the holding room. Dovik was there, his tired eyes staring down at my unmoving form, belted to a hospital bed. He sat there for hours, sometimes holding my hand, sometimes simply looking down at his own. He cried, begging me not to do this too, begging me not to leave him here. Then, later, he yelled until some of the staff came into the room, blaming me for not being invincible. I couldn’t move, not even for him.
When I finally managed to attach my soul back to my body, to pull all the disparate parts of me from the connection to the Throne of War, I didn’t bother to break the bindings keeping me attached to the bed. Inspectors for the Faeth Authority entered at some point. They asked about what happened, asked me for my perspective. Jasper had woken up hours before, and I gave them the same story he did. We were the closest to the blast, apparently.
I didn’t tell them what else I knew, what a cursory glance at the new mana adhered to my soul index told me. There was a lot of it, far more than I ever could have expected. The sand might be awful for defeating any kind of physical attack, but its ability to absorb magic is astounding. That is likely the only reason Jasper or I survived the blast. I took the mana from the explosion and compared it to one of the affixes stolen from my penthouse, and I found it to be a match.
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Twenty-two hours after the authorities released me, I conjured more of the mana from my soul. An hour after that, I stand on the corner of Buster Lane and Mesa Ave. The bronze paint still lingers on the buildings, making even these dilapidated structures look like they might have some measure of class. From across the street, I search one building in particular, letting my soul seep through the stone. I can’t see anything of the second floor; it is a void to me, but what I see from the first and third stories is more than enough.
Men move around, almost all armed with weapons of one kind or another. On the top floor, a faethian man sits in a recliner, his body badly burned and covered with a host of bandages. He struggles to breathe, struggles to even move.
Eleven people died in the explosion that night. Letting people steal from me caused the deaths of eleven people. I feel it now, responsibility. How long has it been since I felt that?
The cold cream container disappears back into my inventory as my presence moves to encompass the entire structure. It is trivial to do. With just a bit of effort, the brickwork in front of me begins to shake. The people inside pause, looking around as bits of dust begin to fall from the ceiling, as cracks form and run through the walls. Only one has the wherewithal to make for an exit, but he doesn’t make it in time. With a thought, every molecule in the three-story structure triples in weight. The structure collapses in seconds.
I feel an odd detachment as I watch a cloud of dust spray into the air from the collapsing structure. Fourteen men, probably more on the level of the building that I couldn’t see, lose their lives just like that, and I don’t feel anything. People begin shouting on the street, racing from their homes and the shops that line the road to get a look at the aftermath. A stolen storage ring zips through the cloud of dust, brought to my hand by a coating of black sand, and vanishes before anyone can notice. As I turn to walk back home, I find myself scratching at the beds of my fingers again. This time, I can’t stop it.
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