Ah, the blissful benediction of not knowing the sea that ripples beneath every mind. Tristan d’Ondelys called them blessed, for that is precisely what they were; to know this sea was real, as tangible as all seven realms, was its own special curse.

  A curse that planted a dread in any practitioner's heart, yet sang a siren's song of power far beyond any mortal conjuring. A curse, amplified tenfold, masquerading as a blessing, but a curse all the same.

  Tristan exhaled through clenched teeth, muttering a calming spell under his breath. His instincts had begun their usual quiet screaming again, that cold prickle running down his spine. He ignored it, as always. His instincts never shut up when he entered the Sea— this realm of thought and raw consciousness— and today was no different. Other than a faint scatter in his concentration, everything followed the same unsettling rhythm as always.

  He and his subordinates drifted through the vast expanse, suspended in what might have been a sky, if skies were made of veiled fog and formless light. The horizon was little more than a blur, but that wasn’t their destination. Their attention was fixed below.

  An island of tall trees gleaming with a golden hue… ah… a light mage. Surrounded by a rather turbulent sea. Lysska, that was her name. After nearly a day of digging around in Varkaigrad, he had finally navigated his way to her. And through her, he was certain he would finally reach this Jade, who had left her fingerprints on almost every chaotic event to ensue in Varkaigrad's recent past.

  But her own mindscape had proven slippery, leaving no traces to follow. Tristan knew he had promised the leader of the Iron Pact to get her within a day, but he had to admit his assumption had been wrong. He wasn't surprised; for someone like her to have dodged every assassin the those people sent after her— assassins who were simply… unable to find her in the first place— spoke volumes of her caution and craft.

  So, an alternate plan was hatched: if not her, then get the ones suspected of working with her. A little more digging provided a clue. A gang in Varkaigrad's lower district had direct ties to her. Instead of pursuing the ragtag bunch, he decided to target their leader, Lysska, directly. And… here they were.

  Looking over her mindscape, Tristan flew closer and was surprised to see a feeble barrier protecting her mind beneath. Normally, people— even those at the Gold Core— didn't know how to sense the mind sea, much less erect a defensive barrier using its power. And yet, this Red Core Light Mage was capable of that?

  Tristan reached the conclusion that a water mage must have taught her. A powerful one, at that.

  But for all his surprise, the barrier was but a bubble in his eyes. One moment his consciousness was beyond it, the next, he and all his subordinates were inside. Finally, he felt the true force of the emotions this Lysska must be feeling.

  But unlike dread or panic, he sensed a form of tranquility…

  “Is she faking her emotions, Master? I am certain I forced her into sleep before we entered… but?” came a feminine voice from behind Tristan.

  “Faking emotions through a barrier is possible,” Tristan said. “A clever enough mind can project serenity while hiding the real chaos beneath. But we’ve already breached that barrier and she’s a Light Mage. There’s no chance she understands the Sea well enough to manipulate it that way. No, this calm we’re feeling… it’s genuine.”

  And that, somehow, made it worse.

  Why would she be calm? Was she expecting help? Did she know this intrusion was coming? The thought crawled through his mind like a tick. If a Water Mage had been her teacher— someone who’d shown her how to shape a mental ward— it wasn’t impossible that she’d also been warned about him. About people who could twist the Sea of Mind like a living thread.

  Still, Tristan had taken precautions. Reinforcements were out of the question. He had severed her connection through the Mind Sea to her familiar, the last unpredictable element in play, and even lulled that crow-like creature into slumber beside her. There would be no interruptions. No surprises.

  He exhaled, forcing away the unease. Maybe he was overthinking it. Paranoia had its uses, but it could also waste time, and time was not on his side. “Whatever the case,” he muttered, “we won’t be staying long.”

  With that, he and his subordinates descended.

  The fog parted as they neared the surface of Lysska’s island, and the illusion around them rippled. The golden forest bled away, the sand dissolved into light, and the first layer of her mind revealed itself.

  A playground.

  Children— beastkin, judging by their ears and tails— ran and shouted gleefully, climbing trees, playing tag, laughing without care. Their joy echoed through the space like birdsong. They didn’t see the twelve hooded intruders standing among them, for this was merely a dream, a construct of Lysska’s sleeping mind.

  A happy dream.

  He had chosen it that way. There was no need for agony, no need for screaming horrors to loosen the tongue. He could weave nightmares so vivid they scarred the soul, but he usually opted for simplicity, a soft dream of peace and innocence. They were here to extract information, not torture it out of her.

  Tristan’s gaze shifted, and there she was, sitting behind a tree, smaller than in reality. A younger version of herself. Her foxlike ears twitched as she hummed a lighthearted tune, hands busy with knitting something small.

  He approached silently.

  The moment he stepped within reach, her head turned sharply. Her crimson eyes locked onto his.

  “Well, well, well,” she said with a faint smirk. “Guess I truly was unlucky this time. Can’t believe I ran out of luck again… almost all of it, in fact.”

  So she knew. She understood that she had been put to sleep, that they were inside her mind. He expected as much… no one created a mental barrier without knowing what it was meant to keep out. In a way, that awareness had probably kept her consciousness intact even under sedation.

  Tristan offered a thin smile. “I wouldn’t call it unlucky, necessarily. You might still be in luck. In fact…” He spread his hands lightly, as though conducting the air. “This might even be better.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Normally, when one was lulled into the Sea, their conscious mind drifted in oblivion. They dreamed unaware, their thoughts open, unguarded, unable to lie. That was the beauty of dream extraction. Less of an interrogation, more of a simply harvesting the truth.

  A water mage held greater power within the minds of people. But sometimes, a person's inner instincts would prevail, turning the waters of their mind turbulent and unstable. Calming them was possible, of course, but always a tedious process. You could never tell what kind of scars such unrest left behind.

  His mother had taught him that lesson. Treat the mind as sacred, she used to say, even when it belongs to the ignorant. It was the first rule he’d ever learned, and one he still held close. The Order had once been devoted to healing, to restoring balance to fractured minds. That was before they came and seized control, before the healers became instruments of subjugation.

  The thought hit him like a cold wave. Bitterness surged, dragging with it memories he’d buried long ago. The feeling of being a puppet, bound to serve the very people who’d corrupted everything his mother had built. He crushed the rebellion rising in his chest, forcing his thoughts back into their box. He’d done terrible things, atrocities that would stain his name for generations, but he had always, always tried to lessen the damage. He was born a healer, not a butcher. The mind, to him, was sacred. A fragile, beautiful thing and never something to break lightly.

  “We don’t want to harm you,” Tristan said at last. “Just answer our question, and we’ll be on our way.”

  Lysska tilted her head, studying him from beneath her bangs, her foxlike ears twitching. “You know how much time it took me to accumulate it?”

  Tristan blinked. “Pardon?”

  “Never mind,” she said with a dismissive flick of her tail. “Not like you’d understand anyway.” Her tone was deceptively childish. “Let me guess how this goes: you ask where Jade is, I say nothing, then one of you plays the good enforcer while the other plays the bad with threats, intimidation, the whole routine. You tell me you’ll tear my mind apart, maybe even give me a demonstration to make it believable. And in the end, you think I’ll choose comfort over pain. That about right?”

  Tristan froze. The rhythm of her speech, the precision… it was uncanny.

  Lysska gave a small shrug and looked up again. “No? Then surprise me. It’s been a while since I’ve actually been surprised.”

  For the first time, Tristan felt a genuine flicker of unease. It seemed their current target was shrouding herself in a fog of mystery the closer they approached.

  This Lysska did not feel like some clueless gang leader from the ragtag bunches of the lower district. He had seen what she did today; she had purposely provoked an elder of the Flameclaw sect and was in the midst of a highly deceptive escape when they caught her.

  Furthermore, her awareness of her situation, and the calmness of mind to depict the exact plan he had in mind… this woman was no normal person. Had she a water affinity, Tristan could see how truly blessed and prodigious she might have been.

  “Well,” Tristan said finally, as he crouched to meet her gaze. His eyes glimmered a deep, stormy blue, the color of the mind’s sea, while hers burned a sharp crimson. “Since you already seem to know how this plays out,” he said evenly, “then you also know what you need to do to preserve yourself.”

  He paused. “I don’t enjoy doing this. Scrambling minds, it goes against everything I was raised to believe in. Everything my brothers and sisters in this Order once stood for. But fate doesn’t care for ideals. We either serve a handful of arrogant, power-drunk rotten tyrants… or we’re erased from within.”

  He sighed quietly, lowering his voice. “Death might almost be mercy compared to what they do. So, please… don’t force our hand.”

  Lysska tilted her head as she rose to her feet, arms stretching overhead with deliberate leisure. “Well,” she began, “I’d be an absolute fool to say I’m not scared right now. My mind is… precious to me, after all. Having you lot poking around in it already fills me with dread— ”

  “Yet your emotions show none of it?” one of Tristan’s subordinates interrupted.

  Lysska sighed, ears flicking back in mild annoyance. “First, don’t interrupt me. Second, I was getting to that.” Her voice sharpened with playful irritation. “See, what I’m guarding isn’t something I can just let anyone look at. I’ve picked up a few tricks when it comes to mental magic. So naturally, I’ll do everything I can to keep you from peeking too deep. And that’s why I’m calm, because fear clouds focus, and I can’t afford that.”

  She grinned faintly, tapping her temple. “So now, you’ll think twice about what it might be that I’m hiding and what could hurt a bunch of mind mages if you touch it the wrong way. I don’t like tattling about my secrets, so… have fun figuring it out.”

  With that, she sat back down a short distance away, resuming her knitting as if the whole conversation had been a trivial interruption.

  Tristan watched her in silence, a knot forming in his chest. He kept being surprised today, over and over again. And as he examined the emotions radiating from her, raw and unguarded, he knew she wasn’t lying. She was afraid, yes, but there was also restraint. Just as he dreaded harming her mind, she seemed equally reluctant to unleash whatever “defense” she was holding back.

  For a moment, he almost pitied her. Almost.

  He turned toward his subordinates, feeling the unease simmering through the group. Their emotions rippled across the mindscape like faint tremors. A mix of doubt, fear, and frustration.

  “What should we do, Master?” asked one of them quietly. “Do you think she’s bluffing?”

  “I don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t say for certain what her trick is, but… she’s not faking. I don’t know how Light magic behaves at higher tiers— I’ve never met anyone who ascended with Light as their core affinity— so I can’t predict what we’re walking into.”

  Another subordinate stepped forward. “But this is it, isn’t it? We were summoned as a last resort to find Jade. Lysska’s our only lead. Do we really pull back now?”

  Tristan’s expression hardened. “No,” he said. “We can’t. You all know that.” He glanced upward, into the swirling haze above the island. “We can’t afford another failure. Once we’re done here, once those rotten bastards finish their business in Varkaigrad, our contract will be over. We’ll finally go home. We’ll stop being their silent enforcers, their bound hounds pretending to be ‘blessed.’”

  His tone grew bitter, steady. “They’ve lost everything that made them worthy of that word. But until that day comes, if we must stain our hands a little more to keep our legacy alive— to protect what remains of us— then so be it.”

  He looked around at the faces beneath the hoods. “I’m sorry I’ve led you all down this path.”

  The group exchanged glances. Then the woman who’d spoken earlier took a step forward. “We chose this path ourselves, Master. And we don’t regret following you, not for a moment.”

  Soft murmurs of agreement rippled through the others.

  Tristan felt something warm stir in his chest. He smiled. “Thank you.”

  Then he turned back toward Lysska. She was still sitting cross-legged, her face unreadable as her fingers continued their rhythmic dance with the knitting needles.

  “So,” she said, without looking up, “you’ve made your decision then?”

  “Yes,” Tristan replied quietly. “And… I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I am too,” Lysska said. She looked up and moved her lips.

  Tristan could not hear the words, but he could read them on her lips. She uttered something along the lines of ‘Call for Calamity,’ followed by a hideous buildup of mana that dissipated the next second, as if swallowed by a voracious hole in reality itself.

  Before he could even gather his bearings, a terrifying pressure slammed against his mental shield. Tristan screamed as he recoiled.

  What in the seven realms was that? He looked around, his instincts shrieking. There was something else here, something other than Lysska, and something far more terrifying. That single blow against his mental shield spoke of a mind mage of terrifying power.

  Lysska herself was unaffected, merely watching them all squirm under the invisible pressure. Then, a ripple of water appeared beside her. From that ripple, a hand emerged. It was long, skeletal and dripping shadow. It was followed by a nightmarish doll, with twin voids swirling where eyes should be and tattered rags that writhed like living things.

  A maw of jagged teeth split its face as it turned to Tristan.

  And it looked hungry.

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