The voices never stopped whispering.
Three weeks had passed since Millbrook, and I'd learned that absorbing dozens of minds came with a price I hadn't anticipated. Sleep brought no peace when every dream was populated by memories that weren't mine. The dead soldiers lived on inside my skull, their experiences layering over each other like sediment in a riverbed.
The supply convoy moves through Harwick Pass every third day, Marcus Korven's tactical knowledge supplied as I sat by my campfire, staring into flames that reminded me too much of melting flesh.
Check the treeline for archers before advancing, whispered the voice of a sergeant I'd absorbed near the memorial garden.
My daughter's name was Elena, came the softer voice of a Penomes scout, bringing with it the phantom ache of a father's love I'd never known.
I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to quiet the chorus, but it only made them speak louder. Forty-three distinct voices now lived in my head, each carrying its knowledge, its pain, its demands for attention. The archmage's mental discipline helped organize them, but organization wasn't the same as silence.
Through their collective memories, I could see the proxy war spreading like a plague across the borderlands. Village after village marked for destruction, trade routes systematically severed, strategic positions quietly occupied by soldiers who officially didn't exist. The scope of it was staggering.
And I was the only one who knew.
You could stop them, Korven's voice suggested with military pragmatism. You have the tactical knowledge now. Strike the coordination points, eliminate the commanders, and disrupt their supply lines.
More killing, the Penomes scout's voice replied sadly. More absorption. How many voices can one mind hold before it breaks?
I didn't want to find out, but the alternatives were limited. I could continue hiding in the wilderness while innocents died, or I could accept what I was becoming and use it to end the slaughter.
The decision was made for me the next morning when I smelled the smoke.
It wasn't the clean smoke of cooking fires or cleared land. This was the acrid stench of burning thatch and flesh, carried on a wind that tasted of desperation and death. My absorbed memories recognized it immediately: a settlement under attack.
I followed the smell for two hours, moving through forests that grew increasingly sparse as I approached cultivated lands. The village of Thornwatch sat in a valley bowl surrounded by grain fields, or at least it had until recently. Now, half the buildings were blackened shells, and bodies lay scattered in the streets like discarded dolls.
From my perch on the valley's rim, I could see the "bandits" moving through the ruins with professional efficiency. Twenty-three of them, all armed with military-grade weapons, all moving in formation. Their leader wore the leathers of a brigand chief, but his tactical deployment of forces was pure Penomes doctrine.
Third Mountain Company, my absorbed memories identified. Reconnaissance specialists. They're not here to raid - they're here to deny territory.
I watched them work with the cold appreciation that came from dozens of tactical minds. They weren't destroying randomly. Every building they burned had strategic value: the grain stores, the smithy, the meeting hall where local militia might organize. The people they killed were those most likely to lead resistance: the mayor, the militia captain, anyone with the authority or knowledge to coordinate a defense.
It was textbook territorial denial, executed with ruthless precision.
For three days, I observed from the shadows, trying to convince myself that intervention would only make things worse. But the absorbed voices grew more insistent with each atrocity I witnessed.
The breaking point came when they dragged the miller's family into the village square.
Father, mother, two children, no older than ten. The same composition as countless families I carried in borrowed memories, but these were still breathing, still hoping, still capable of being saved.
"Where are the grain stores?" the leader demanded, his accent marking him as educated despite his brigand costume. "We know you've hidden them. Tell us, and your family lives."
"I already told you," the miller gasped through split lips. "The harvest was poor. There are no hidden stores."
"Liar." The leader nodded to one of his men, who raised a crossbow toward the younger child.
I didn't make a conscious decision to act. One moment, I was crouched in the ruins of a burned-out house; the next, I was stepping through a dimensional rift directly behind the crossbowman.
But this time, I was ready.
The spatial magic folded around the archer like liquid, compressing the space he occupied until he simply ceased to exist. No explosion, no blood, no screaming. One second he was there, the next he was gone, leaving only empty air and a crossbow falling to the ground.
"What the—" The leader spun toward me, his sword already in his hand, but I was no longer the rage-driven boy who had destroyed Millbrook. I was something else now. Something colder.
Eliminate the command structure first, Korven's tactical knowledge suggested.
Use the terrain to channel their response, added a dead captain's voice.
Fire magic, concentrated burst, minimize collateral damage, supplied an absorbed battlemage.
I listened to them all, synthesizing their expertise into a plan that took less than a heartbeat to formulate. The leader died from a spatial distortion that turned his spine into origami. Three more fell to precisely targeted earth spikes that punched through armor joints with surgical accuracy. The rest tried to scatter, but I'd already mapped their escape routes through borrowed military experience.
Wind magic herded them into a killing ground where gravitational manipulation turned their weapons against them. Fire consumed those who sought cover in wooden buildings. Earth swallowed those who tried to flee across open ground.
In less than two minutes, twenty-three professional soldiers were reduced to corpses and ash.
And then the absorption began.
I was more methodical this time, moving from body to body with the patience that came from experience. Each absorption brought new knowledge, new capabilities, and new voices to join the chorus in my skull. The leader's memories were particularly valuable: Lieutenant Marcus Veld, officially dead for six months, unofficially commanding Penomes' shadow operations in the eastern borderlands.
Through his memories, I saw the true scope of the conspiracy. Not just random village burnings, but a coordinated campaign to reshape the entire border region. Strategic positions were being cleared, loyal populations relocated, and infrastructure destroyed or captured. Both kingdoms were preparing for something larger than the proxy war.
They were preparing for total war, and the borderlands were being swept clean to serve as a battlefield.
The miller's family was still huddled in the square when I finished, staring at me with the same mixture of gratitude and terror I'd seen in Millbrook. But this time, I didn't stay to see their reaction. I opened a dimensional rift and disappeared before they could speak, leaving them alive but forever marked by what they'd witnessed.
Over the following weeks, I became something I'd never intended to be: a hunter.
The absorbed memories provided a detailed map of proxy operations across the borderlands. Supply caches hidden in abandoned ruins, communication routes between shadow units, and safe houses where soldiers rested between missions. I visited them all, one by one, absorbing everything I could learn.
Each encounter made me stronger, more knowledgeable, and more capable. But it also made me less human. My reflection now showed eyes that shifted color constantly, flecks of every magical affinity I'd absorbed swirling like trapped storms. My voice carried harmonics that no single throat should produce. When I moved, shadows bent wrong around me, as if reality itself wasn't quite sure what shape I was supposed to hold.
The voices in my head had organized themselves into factions. The tactical minds urged efficiency and strategic thinking. The magic users pushed for experimentation and power development. The dying memories of murdered civilians demanded justice and vengeance. Sometimes they argued among themselves, debates echoing through my skull like a parliament of the dead.
But they all agreed on one thing: the proxy war had to end.
You're the only one who can see the whole picture, Veld's voice argued during one of our internal debates. Both kingdoms are blind to each other's operations. Only you have absorbed memories from both sides.
The pattern is clear, added the voice of a Penomes intelligence officer I'd absorbed from a communication post. They're clearing the borderlands for a reason. Something big is coming.
Then stop asking questions and start taking action, growled Korven's pragmatic militarism. You have the power. Use it.
I tried to maintain some humanity through ritual. After each absorption, I would create small memorial gardens, using spatial magic to fold space around cleared ground and fill it with flowers that would bloom regardless of season. I spoke the names of those I'd killed, both the soldiers and the innocents they'd murdered, trying to honor all the dead equally.
But as the weeks passed and my collection of voices grew larger, I began to lose track of which thoughts were originally mine and which belonged to the absorbed. Was my growing tactical brilliance a natural adaptation, or simply the accumulated wisdom of dozens of military minds? Did my increasing coldness come from necessity, or from carrying so many memories of professional killers?
The question became academic when I discovered the fortress.
It sat in a valley that didn't exist on any map, hidden by spatial distortions that my absorbed archmage knowledge recognized as military-grade concealment. The fortress itself was ancient, pre-dating both kingdoms, but it had been recently occupied and fortified. Guard towers bristled with modern siege engines, and I could sense the magical wards that protected its approaches.
This wasn't another small proxy unit. This was a major command center.
Fifty men minimum, my tactical mind estimated as I observed from the surrounding hills. Mixed unit composition. Light infantry, archers, battlemages, support staff. They're not here temporarily - they've established a permanent installation.
Look at the prisoners, whispered the voice of a dead scout, drawing my attention to figures moving in the fortress courtyard.
They were chained together in groups, civilian clothes marking them as captives rather than enemy soldiers. Men, women, some barely old enough to be called adults. As I watched, guards herded them between buildings like livestock, and the absorbed memories supplied too many possible reasons for keeping civilian prisoners.
Intelligence gathering, suggested a spy's voice. Forced labor added a sergeant's pragmatism. Worse things, whispered the memory of an atrocity I didn't want to examine too closely.
I spent two days studying the fortress's defenses, learning guard rotations, and identifying weak points. The absorbed military knowledge made the task almost routine. By the second night, I had a complete tactical assessment and three different assault plans.
I chose the one that would minimize prisoner casualties.
The attack began at midnight with a dimensional rift that deposited me directly into the fortress's central courtyard. Spatial magic had many applications beyond simple transportation, and I'd learned to use it creatively. Air pressure differentials could shatter bones. Gravitational manipulation could turn armor into crushing weights. Distance became meaningless when you could fold space to bring enemies within reach of your weapons.
The first guard died before he could raise an alarm, his neck snapped by a twist in dimensional space that briefly existed in two places at once. The second fell to the earth, spikes that erupted from the ground beneath his feet. By the time the alarm bells started ringing, I was already inside the main keep, moving through corridors with the confidence that came from memorized architectural principles.
Prisoners held in the lower levels supplied the knowledge of a fortress commander I'd absorbed weeks earlier. Separate the leadership from the rank and file, and add tactical wisdom. Control the high ground, suggested the siege doctrine.
I followed their advice, working my way systematically through the fortress. Officers died from precise applications of fire magic. Common soldiers fell to Earth through spikes or spatial distortions. Mages found their spells turned against them by absorbed arcane knowledge that understood their techniques better than they did.
The slaughter was methodical, efficient, and completely one-sided.
When I reached the dungeon levels, I found them exactly as the absorbed memories had predicted. Stone cells filled with prisoners, most of them showing signs of interrogation. They cowered away from me as I appeared, expecting another torturer, but I ignored their fear and began systematically destroying their restraints with controlled applications of earth magic.
"You're free," I announced to the trembling crowd. "The guards are dead. Take whatever supplies you need and go home."
Most of them fled immediately, but one figure remained behind. A young man, maybe eighteen, with the pale complexion of someone who'd spent too long underground. But his eyes held a spark that reminded me painfully of my own younger self, back when I'd still believed magic might come to me naturally.
"What are you?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
The question stopped me cold. It was the same one Lyra had asked, the same one the villagers had whispered in Millbrook. But this time, the speaker didn't sound afraid. He sounded curious.
"I don't know," I admitted, letting my guard drop for the first time in weeks. "Something that shouldn't exist."
"You saved us," he said simply. "Whatever you are, you saved us."
I studied his face, looking for the fear I'd grown accustomed to seeing. Instead, I found something that might have been gratitude mixed with a desperate kind of hope.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Finn," he replied. "Finn Ashworth. I was... I am a student at the Academy of Aethermoor. Before they took me."
The archmage's memories stirred at the mention of his old institution. "What were you studying?"
"Spatial theory," Finn said, and I felt a shock of recognition. "I was researching dimensional manipulation when the soldiers came to my village. They said they needed mages for... experiments."
He has potential, the archmage's voice observed. Raw, untrained, but significant spatial affinity. Rare to find one so young.
He's seen what you can do and isn't running, added a more practical voice. That makes him either very brave or very stupid.
Maybe both, I thought, but found myself oddly comforted by his presence. For weeks, the only voices I'd heard were the dead ones in my head. Speaking to someone living, someone who looked at me with curiosity rather than terror, felt like water after a long drought.
"The fortress," I said finally. "What did they want with you specifically?"
Finn's face darkened. "They were trying to learn how to break spatial wards. Military applications. They thought... they thought torture would make me more cooperative with their experiments."
The absorbed memories filled in the implications. Spatial magic was rare, and spatial mages even rarer. If the shadow commanders had been capturing them for research, it meant both kingdoms were preparing for conflicts that would require breaking through heavily defended positions.
Total war confirmed Veld's tactical assessment. They're preparing for siege warfare on a scale not seen in centuries.
"Where will you go?" I asked Finn.
He looked around the empty dungeon, then back at me. "I don't know. My village is gone. The Academy..." He shrugged helplessly. "Even if I could get there, they'd probably hand me over to whoever asked. Politics matter more than students."
He has nowhere to go, observed a voice that might have been my own conscience. Like you.
He's a liability, argued Korven's pragmatism. Civilians slow you down, make you vulnerable.
He's also a connection to humanity, whispered Mira's remembered wisdom. Don't let yourself become something that can't remember what it was like to be human.
I stood there in the empty fortress, surrounded by the bodies of those I'd killed and absorbed, listening to forty-seven voices debate the wisdom of companionship. Part of me wanted to disappear into the wilderness, to continue my solitary hunt until I'd either ended the proxy war or lost myself completely to the collection of memories I carried.
But another part, a smaller and more vulnerable part, desperately wanted to hear a living voice that didn't whisper from inside my skull.
"I can't promise safety," I said finally. "I can't even promise I'll stay human. But if you want..." I paused, unsure how to finish the sentence. "If you want to help me stop this war, I won't turn you away."
Finn's smile was the first genuine human expression I'd seen directed at me since Millbrook. "I'd like that," he said. "I'd like that very much."
As we walked out of the fortress together, leaving behind another collection of memorial flowers and absorbed memories, I realized something had changed. Not just in my power or knowledge, but in my purpose. I was no longer just a weapon pointed at the proxy war.
I was someone with something to protect against.
The voices in my head whispered warnings about attachment, about vulnerability, about the dangers of caring for the living when you carried so much death inside you.
But for the first time in weeks, I found myself hoping they were wrong.