Three days had passed since I'd walked away from the forest that now hid my parents' grave, and I was already learning that power without control was more curse than a blessing.
The first sign of trouble came when I tried to build a simple campfire.
I'd found a decent clearing beside a small stream, far enough from any roads that I wouldn't be disturbed. The evening air was growing cold, and I needed warmth, needed the comfort of flame and the ability to cook the rabbit I'd caught earlier. Simple things. Normal things.
I gathered dry wood the way Gareth had taught me, arranged it in a neat pile, and reached for the fire magic that had belonged to the young soldier. Just a small flame, I told myself. Nothing fancy.
The magic responded like a dam bursting.
Fire exploded from my hands in a roaring torrent, turning my modest campfire into a blazing inferno that reached toward the treetops. The heat hit me like a physical blow, sending me stumbling backward as the flames spread in all directions, consuming everything in their path.
"Stop!" I shouted, trying to pull the magic back, but it was like trying to catch water with my bare hands. The fire had its own will, its hunger, and it wanted to devour everything.
Panic rising in my throat, I reached for the wind magic, hoping to blow the flames out. The wind responded too eagerly, creating a miniature tornado that only fed the fire more oxygen. The inferno grew higher, hungrier, turning the peaceful clearing into a vision of hell.
Finally, in desperation, I slammed my hand against the ground, calling on the earth magic to smother the flames with soil and stone. The earth responded with excessive force, sending massive spikes of rock shooting up around the fire, creating a jagged prison of stone that finally contained the blaze.
I sat there gasping, staring at the destruction I'd caused with a simple desire for warmth. The clearing looked like a battlefield, scarred by fire and torn by stone. Smoke rose from the rocky prison I'd created, and I could hear the last of the flames crackling within.
"What's happening to me?" I whispered to the empty air.
But I already knew the answer. The magics I'd absorbed weren't meant to coexist. They were fighting each other inside me, each trying to dominate, none willing to submit to my will. I was a walking contradiction. Earth and fire, wind and stone, soldier and scholar, all of their memories and instincts warring for control.
Form ranks! Prepare for cavalry charge!
The voice echoed in my head, but it wasn't mine. It belonged to the captain, his tactical knowledge surfacing unbidden. I could see the battlefield formation as clearly as if I were standing there, could feel the weight of command that had never been mine to carry.
I shook my head violently, trying to clear the foreign thoughts. But they clung to me like cobwebs, fragments of lives that weren't mine but had somehow become part of me.
The days that followed were a waking nightmare of loss of control.
I couldn't sleep without the dead soldiers' memories flooding my dreams. I'd wake up screaming battle cries in voices that weren't my own, my hands moving through sword forms I'd never learned, my mind filled with the taste of blood and the satisfaction of conquest.
When I tried to walk, the earth magic would activate without warning, sending spikes of stone erupting from the ground around my feet. More than once, I nearly impaled myself on my power, saved only by reflexes that had belonged to men I'd killed.
The wind magic was worse. It would surge at random moments, creating gusts strong enough to knock me off my feet or tear my makeshift shelter apart. I'd lost count of how many times I'd been thrown against trees or rocks by my uncontrolled power.
On the fifth day, I caught a scent on the wind that made my stolen memories stir with recognition. Smoke. Not from fires, but from something else. Something that made the soldiers' knowledge whisper urgently in the back of my mind.
Battlefield. Death. Opportunity.
I followed the scent against my better judgment, my feet carrying me toward something I knew I should avoid. The smell grew stronger with each step, until I could taste it on my tongue. The metallic tang of blood, the sweet rot of decay, the acrid bite of sulfur from discharged magic.
The battlefield spread before me like a wound in the earth.
Bodies lay scattered across the field in the unnatural positions that only violent death could create. Soldiers from both kingdoms, their bright uniforms now stained with mud and blood, their weapons still clutched in death-rigid hands. Ravens picked at the corpses, their black wings fluttering as they feasted on the aftermath of war.
But what drew my attention wasn't the carnage. It was the way my power responded to it.
I could feel them. Every corpse, every fragment of life essence that still clung to cooling flesh. The dead called to me with voices I couldn't hear but somehow understood, offering their power, their memories, their very souls.
"No," I whispered, backing away from the field. "I can't. I won't."
But my feet carried me forward anyway, drawn by a hunger that wasn't entirely my own. The absorbed magics were demanding more, needing more, and I was just a passenger in my own body.
My hand touched the nearest corpse. A young woman in Penomes blue, her face peaceful despite the spear wound in her chest. And the absorption began without my consent.
Her life essence flowed into me like a river of light, bringing with it flashes of her memories. A farmer's daughter who'd joined the army to feed her family. A healer who'd tried to save lives even as she took them. A woman who'd died calling for her mother.
The guilt nearly broke me, but the power didn't care about guilt. It cared about growth, about strength, about the intoxicating rush of becoming more than human.
I stumbled away from her body, my head spinning with new knowledge. Healing magic, agriculture, and the layout of Penomes' territory. All of it crashed into my already overwhelmed mind like waves against a crumbling shore.
But I couldn't stop. The battlefield was full of power, full of potential, and my cursed ability pulled me from corpse to corpse like a puppet on strings. A merchant who'd been caught in the crossfire gave me knowledge of trade routes and accounting. A scout provided wilderness survival skills and knowledge of enemy movements. A young mage granted me water magic to add to my growing, chaotic collection.
By the time I'd absorbed from a dozen corpses, I was barely myself anymore. Four different types of magic warred within me. Earth, fire, wind, and water. Each one is fighting for dominance. Fragments of twenty different lives echoed in my skull, their voices overlapping until I couldn't tell which thoughts were mine and which belonged to the dead.
Charge the left flank! No, retreat to higher ground! Form defensive lines! The supply convoy is three days overdue! My daughter's wedding is next month! Kill them all! Save the wounded! Mother, I'm scared!
I fell to my knees in the center of the battlefield, clutching my head as the conflicting memories and instincts tore at my sanity. The magic inside me was going haywire, creating random surges of power that turned the ground beneath me into a crater of ice and fire, stone and wind.
When the chaos finally subsided, I found myself alone among the dead, changed once again. My reflection in a puddle of rainwater showed eyes that now held flecks of gold, silver, blue, and brown. Fragments of every magic I'd absorbed. My hair had darkened, and there were new scars on my hands that had belonged to other people.
I was becoming a living graveyard, a collection of fragments from the dead.
And I was completely, utterly alone.
I couldn't risk being around living people. Not when I had no control over when or how the absorption happened. Not when the conflicting magics inside me could explode at any moment. Not when I might accidentally drain the life from someone who didn't deserve to die.
I was stronger than I'd ever been, but I was also more isolated than ever before.
The dead had made me powerful, but they were also making me into something that could no longer live among the living.
I rose from the crater I'd created and walked away from the battlefield, leaving the ravens to their feast. Each step took me further from civilization, further from any hope of human connection.
The voices of the dead whispered in my mind, offering comfort and counsel and contradiction. But none of them could answer the question that haunted me most:
What was I becoming?
As if in answer to my question, I noticed something glinting in the fading light at the far edge of the battlefield. A figure in robes of deep purple, lying apart from the other corpses. Unlike the soldiers with their crude weapons and basic magics, this one radiated power even in death.
An archmage.
My stolen memories identified him immediately. The intricate silver embroidery on his robes, the staff of crystalline metal still clutched in his skeletal fingers, the way space itself seemed to bend slightly around his corpse. This was no common battle mage. This was someone who had mastered magics that most could only dream of.
Spatial magic. The rarest and most complex of all the arcane arts.
I approached his body with a mixture of dread and anticipation. If absorbing common soldiers had driven me to the edge of madness, what would taking the power of an archmage do to me?
But I had to know. I had to understand what I was becoming, and perhaps his knowledge would provide answers.
The moment my fingers touched his withered hand, the world exploded into possibility
His life essence wasn't like the others. It was vast, complex, layered with decades of study and mastery. Memories flooded through me like a torrent: years spent in the Grand Academy of Aethermoor, mastering the fundamental forces that held reality together. The theory of dimensional manipulation. The practical applications of gravitational magic. The delicate art of folding space to create storage pockets and instantaneous travel.
His name had been Magister Theron Valdris, and he had been one of only seven spatial mages in the known world.
Now his knowledge was mine.
The absorption was different this time. More controlled, more complete. Instead of chaotic fragments, I received a structured understanding. The archmage's discipline and mental organization helped impose order on the warring magics within me, creating pathways and hierarchies where before there had been only chaos.
When the process finished, I felt... different. Not just more powerful, but more in control. The constant whisper of conflicting voices had quieted to a manageable murmur, organized now by the archmage's methodical mind.
I flexed my fingers and felt the fabric of space respond. With a thought, I opened a small dimensional pocket. A storage space that existed between dimensions, invisible and weightless. It was no larger than a chest, but it would hold far more than its size suggested, and anything placed within would be preserved indefinitely.
"Incredible," I whispered, marveling at the precision of the magic. This wasn't the crude, explosive power I'd been struggling with. This was elegant, refined, and controllable.
I tested other abilities: a minor gravitational manipulation that made a stone float in the air in my palm, a short-range teleportation that moved me twenty feet to the left in the blink of an eye. Each spell responded exactly as I intended, guided by the archmage's lifetime of experience.
For the first time since leaving the forest, I felt truly in command of my abilities.
Looking around at the battlefield, at all the corpses that had suffered the indignity of being left for scavengers, I felt something I hadn't expected: responsibility. These people had died for causes they believed in, and they deserved better than to rot in the open air.
I raised my hands and began to weave spatial magic on a scale the archmage himself had never attempted. Instead of fighting the earth magic within me, I let the spatial magic guide it, using gravitational manipulation to move massive amounts of soil with precision and grace.
The ground across the entire battlefield began to shift and flow like water. Bodies sank gently into graves that formed around them, the earth closing over them with the tenderness of a final embrace. I sorted them with care. Alfaraz soldiers in one section, Penomes in another, civilians caught in the crossfire in a place of honor between them.
The archmage himself I buried separately, with a marker stone that I shaped from the earth and inscribed with spatial magic that would make it visible only to other mages of sufficient power.
When the work was finished, the battlefield had become a memorial garden. Gentle hills marked where the dead now rested, and I used my new powers to encourage wildflowers to grow, creating a place of beauty from what had been a scene of horror.
"May you find the peace in death that war denied you in life," I said softly, speaking to all of them.
Then I turned away from the memorial and continued my journey, walking into the growing darkness. But now I walked with purpose, with control, and with the accumulated wisdom of a true master of magic.
The spatial magic had given me more than just new abilities. It had given me the framework to understand what I was becoming. I wasn't just a collector of random powers. I was something new, something unprecedented.
I was a living archive of the dead, carrying their knowledge and abilities forward into a world that had no idea such a being could exist.
The question was no longer what I was becoming.
The question was what I would choose to do with all this power.