The village burned like a funeral pyre against the morning sky. Kael stood at the edge of the treeline, watching the methodical destruction unfold before him. Three commanders in Alfaraz colors directed their soldiers with the casual efficiency of butchers at work. Bodies lay scattered in the streets. men, women, children, all cut down without mercy or discrimination.
A soldier dragged a screaming woman from her burning home by her hair. Another kicked an old man to his knees before driving a sword through his chest. A third laughed as he hurled a crying infant into the flames of what had once been the village granary.
Kael's fire magic stirred in its mental compartment, but he held it back. Shaped it. Controlled it. The blade-form he had forged for it gleamed in his mind like heated steel, waiting for his command.
He stepped out of the treeline.
The nearest soldier noticed him first. a young man barely old enough to shave, his armor still shiny with newness. "Another one come to die?" he called out, raising his sword with the swagger of someone who had never faced real opposition.
Kael didn't respond. The air began to distort around his hands, reality bending as spatial magic prepared to fold space according to his will. His footsteps left perfect circles of frost in the blood-soaked earth.
The three commanders turned toward him, their expressions shifting from mild interest to alarm as they recognized the power radiating from his form. The tallest of them, a woman with lightning scars running down her left arm, stepped forward with her hand raised.
"Mage," she said, her voice crackling with electrical energy. "You're interfering with official Alfaraz business. Stand down or. "
Lightning erupted from her fingertips, a bolt bright enough to blind and powerful enough to split a tree in half. It screamed through the air toward Kael's chest, death incarnate wrapped in electrical fury.
Kael raised his bare hand and caught it.
The lightning struck his palm and simply... stopped. No sound, no recoil, no flash of pain. The electrical energy writhed against his skin like a living thing, but it could not penetrate, could not harm, could not even make him flinch. He closed his fingers around the bolt and crushed it out of existence.
The battlefield fell silent. Soldiers stopped mid-swing. Villagers ceased their screaming. Even the crackling of flames seemed muted in the face of what they had just witnessed.
The lightning mage stared at him, her scarred face pale with disbelief. "That's... that's impossible."
"Your turn is over," Kael said quietly.
The woman snarled and raised both hands, calling forth a massive bolt that lit up the entire village square. But instead of directing it at Kael, she aimed it at a cluster of cowering villagers. men, women, and children huddled together behind an overturned cart.
Kael ripped space open.
The air tore like fabric, creating a jagged wound in reality itself. The lightning bolt struck the spatial tear and vanished, redirected into the empty sky above the village. The thunder that followed shook the ground and shattered windows, but the villagers remained unharmed.
"Combat begins," Kael said, and let his magic answer.
Fire erupted from his hands in the shape of a blade, precise and controlled. The edge of superheated air sliced through the first soldier's armor like parchment, opening him from shoulder to hip. The man had time to look down at his bisected torso before toppling to the ground in two pieces.
Ice magic sealed the escape routes, walls of crystalline cold rising from the earth to trap the soldiers in the village square. When one man tried to climb over the frozen barrier, the ice grew spikes that impaled him through the chest and left him hanging like a grotesque ornament.
Wind magic carried Kael across the battlefield in impossible leaps, his feet barely touching the ground as he moved from target to target. A soldier raised his sword to strike. Kael was suddenly behind him, fire-blade sliding between his ribs to cook his heart from the inside. Another tried to flee. Kael appeared in his path, ice magic freezing the man's legs solid before earth magic crumbled the ground beneath him, swallowing him whole.
The second commander, a massive brute with arms like tree trunks, charged forward with an ax that could cleave a horse in two. Kael didn't dodge. He let the weapon strike his shoulder, where it met a barrier of crystallized air and shattered like glass. The commander's eyes widened in shock before healing magic flowed from Kael's touch, not to mend but to accelerate, forcing the man's body to heal so quickly that his muscles tore themselves apart from rapid regeneration.
The third commander tried to rally his remaining soldiers, but earth magic opened sinkholes beneath their feet, swallowing them into graves of their own making. Those who didn't fall found themselves trapped in ice up to their necks, their heads the only things visible above the crystalline surface.
The lightning mage backed away, her hands shaking as she prepared another bolt. "You're not human," she whispered.
"No," Kael agreed. "I'm not."
He folded space and appeared directly in front of her, his hand closing around her throat. She discharged every volt of electricity in her body, enough power to light a city, enough raw energy to stop a dozen hearts.
It flowed into Kael like water into a cup.
The absorption was different this time. More violent. More chaotic. Lightning magic was wild, unpredictable, driven by raw emotion and primal fury. It crashed into his carefully constructed mental compartments like a thunderstorm hitting a house of cards.
Kael's vision went white. His veins lit up with electrical fire, visible through his skin like lightning trapped in glass. Every muscle in his body seized as conflicting electrical currents tried to tear him apart from the inside.
The new magic wanted to destroy. It wanted to lash out at everything, to turn the world into a wasteland of ash and scorched earth. It fought against his control, against his mental barriers, against the very idea of restraint.
"Structure," came the archmage's voice, cutting through the chaos like a blade through silk. "Lightning is just energy seeking the path of least resistance. Give it a path. Give it purpose."
Kael forced himself to think through the electrical storm in his mind. Lightning belonged in the space of judgment. Quick, decisive, final. The strike that came from the heavens to separate the guilty from the innocent. He carved out a new mental compartment, shaped it with the precision of a master craftsman, and trapped the lightning magic inside.
The electrical fire in his veins settled into a steady pulse, like a heartbeat made of pure energy. He could feel it waiting, eager to be unleashed, but obedient to his will.
The lightning mage's corpse crumbled to dust in his hands, her life force absorbed along with her magic. Around the village square, the few remaining soldiers who had witnessed the display fell to their knees, their weapons forgotten.
"Mercy," one of them whispered. "Please, mercy."
Kael looked at him with eyes that flickered with barely contained lightning. "You burned children alive."
"We were following orders. "
"You chose to follow them."
Fire magic, ice magic, and lightning magic struck as one. The soldier's scream lasted exactly three seconds before he was reduced to ash and memory.
The remaining soldiers died just as quickly, just as brutally. Kael moved through them like a force of nature, showing no more mercy than a hurricane shows to the trees in its path. Some he froze solid and then shattered with a touch. Others he cooked from the inside out with precisely controlled fire. A few he simply erased with spatial magic, folding them out of existence as if they had never been born.
When it was over, the village square was silent except for the crackling of flames and the quiet sobbing of survivors. Bodies lay scattered across the bloodstained earth, but now they were all wearing Alfaraz colors.
Kael stood in the center of it all, untouched by the carnage, his expression as calm as still water. Lightning crackled faintly along his shoulders, but he barely noticed. The voices of the dead whispered in his mind, no longer screaming in chaos but murmuring in satisfaction.
Justice, they said. Finally, justice.
The villagers began to emerge from their hiding places, moving with the careful steps of people who weren't sure if the nightmare was truly over. Some stared at Kael with naked terror. Others looked at him with something approaching reverence. A small child, her face streaked with soot and tears, pointed at him and whispered, "God."
Kael turned away from their stares and walked toward the wounded.
The first was a middle-aged man with a sword wound in his chest, blood pooling beneath him as his life leaked away. Kael knelt beside him and placed his hands on the injury. Healing magic flowed from his touch, but it was different now, guided by the voices of the dead, informed by the memories of every healer he had absorbed.
"Clean the wound first," whispered the voice of a battlefield medic. "Infection kills more than steel."
"Seal the lung," added a village herbalist. "He's drowning in his blood."
"Slowly," cautioned a temple healer. "Too much too fast will shock the heart."
Kael listened to them all, his healing magic flowing with surgical precision. The wound closed, the bleeding stopped, and the lung reinflated. The man's eyes fluttered open, wide with disbelief.
"You... you saved me."
Kael said nothing. He was already moving to the next wounded villager, then the next. A woman with a shattered leg. he set the bone with earth magic and mended the fracture with healing energy. A child with burns across her arms. he drew the heat from her skin and replaced it with cool, soothing relief.
One by one, he moved through the survivors, his magic flowing like water wherever it was needed. The voices of the dead guided him, their collective knowledge and experience making him more skilled than any single healer could hope to be.
A young mother approached him, carrying her injured son. "Please," she whispered. "He's all I have left."
The boy had taken an arrow to the shoulder, the barbed head buried deep in muscle and bone. Kael examined the wound with the eyes of a dozen absorbed surgeons.
"The arrowhead is against the bone," one voice observed. "Pull it out and he'll bleed to death."
"Push it through," suggested another. "Clean exit, easier to heal."
"No," said a third. "Dissolve it. Acid magic, carefully applied."
Kael chose a different path. He reached into the wound with spatial magic, folding space around the arrowhead and simply... removed it. Not pulled, not pushed, just displaced from one location to another. The boy gasped as the metal vanished, leaving only clean puncture wounds that healing magic could easily mend.
"Thank you," the mother sobbed. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
Kael stood and walked away without responding. Gratitude felt wrong somehow, like accepting praise for breathing or eating. This was simply what needed to be done.
The village itself demanded attention. Houses had been reduced to rubble, the well had been poisoned, and the granary was nothing but charred timbers and ash. Kael raised his hands and let spatial magic flow.
The fallen beams of a collapsed house lifted into the air, their broken ends finding each other and fusing back together. Shattered walls reformed as stone and timber remembered their original shapes. The poisoned well cleared as he folded contaminated water out of existence and replaced it with clean liquid drawn from an underground spring.
Earth magic strengthened the rebuilt foundations, making them more solid than they had ever been. Wind magic cleared the smoke from the air, carrying it away from the village and up into the empty sky. Within minutes, homes that had been reduced to ruins were standing again, whole and strong.
The villagers watched in silent amazement as their lives were rebuilt before their eyes. Some wept. Others fell to their knees in prayer. A few simply stared, their minds unable to process what they were witnessing.
But Kael wasn't finished.
He walked to the edge of the village, where the bodies of the dead lay scattered like fallen leaves. Men, women, children, all cut down in their prime by soldiers who had seen them as nothing more than obstacles to be removed.
The voices of the dead whispered in his mind, but they were different now. Calmer. More focused.
"We deserve better than this," said a woman who had died defending her children. "We deserve dignity."
"A proper burial," added an old man who had been struck down while trying to protect his neighbors. "With ceremony. With respect."
"Let us rest," pleaded a child's voice, soft and heartbreaking. "Let us sleep in the earth where we belong."
Kael knelt beside the first body, an elderly woman with silver hair and gentle eyes. He placed his hands on her still form and channeled healing magic. not to restore life, but to preserve what remained. The magic flowed through her corpse, halting decay, cleansing corruption, making her appear as if she were merely sleeping.
One by one, he moved through the dead, his magic touching each body with reverence and care. When he was finished, he used earth magic to open graves in the village cemetery, each one perfectly proportioned, each one placed with geometric precision.
The villagers helped him carry the bodies to their final resting places. It was slow work, solemn work, but it felt right. Sacred. The dead deserved better than to be left lying in the streets like refuse.
As the last grave was filled, Kael turned his attention to the village livestock. The soldiers had slaughtered them out of pure malice, leaving the animals to rot in the sun. But death was just another form of change, and change could be directed.
He walked among the dead cattle, pigs, and chickens, his healing magic flowing in new ways. Not to restore life, but to preserve meat, to cleanse it of disease, to make it safe for consumption. The animals had died, but they could still serve their purpose. they could still feed the living.
Ice magic created cold storage, preserving the meat until it could be processed. Wind magic carried away the scent of death, replacing it with the clean smell of snow and mountain air.
"The dead will serve the living," he said quietly, his voice carrying to every survivor in the village. "That is the way of things. That is how it should be."
The work was finished as the sun reached its zenith. The village was rebuilt, the wounded were healed, the dead were buried, and the living had food to sustain them. Kael stood in the center of the square, surrounded by people who looked at him with a mixture of gratitude and terror.
A movement in the treeline caught his eye. A single soldier in Alfaraz colors, attempting to flee the scene. The man had been hiding, waiting for his chance to escape and report what had happened here.
Kael folded space and appeared in the soldier's path before the man had taken three steps.
The soldier stumbled backward, his face pale with fear. "Please," he gasped. "I didn't... I wasn't part of it. I just stood guard, I never hurt anyone. "
"You watched," Kael said simply.
"I had orders. "
"You chose to follow them."
The soldier tried to run. Kael reached out with spatial magic and twisted the air around the man's spine. There was a wet snap, and the soldier collapsed, his legs no longer responding to his commands.
Kael crouched beside the paralyzed man, his expression unchanged. "You're going to tell me about the battalion behind the mountain."
The soldier coughed up blood. "You... you think you've won? This was just a scouting party. Behind the mountain... there's a camp. A full battalion. Ten times what you faced here."
"Ten times," Kael repeated thoughtfully.
"They'll come for you," the soldier gasped. "They'll come for this village. They'll burn it again, and everyone in it."
"No," Kael said, standing up. "They won't."
He turned toward the mountains, their peaks visible in the distance. Lightning crackled faintly along his shoulders, but he barely noticed. The voices of the dead whispered in his mind, no longer in panic but in preparation.
"Ten times," they murmured. "Ten times the soldiers. Ten times the power to absorb."
"Ten times the justice to deliver."
"Ten times the voices to add to our chorus."
Kael began walking toward the mountains, leaving the rebuilt village behind. The paralyzed soldier called after him, his voice growing fainter with distance, but Kael didn't look back.The voices stirred.
Not just the villagers. Not only the innocents. But the soldiers too. the commanders, the lightning mage, even the ones who had begged for mercy before the end. They whispered from within him now, tangled together in a thousand fragmented lives.
Some begged forgiveness. Some cried out in guilt. A few still clung to rage, hollow and fading.
But most were quiet. Watchful. Waiting.
Their thoughts flickered at the edge of Kael's mind. memories that weren't his, grief that had never touched his heart, love for people he'd never known. The chorus inside him was growing. A collective will. Not always aligned. Not always calm.
"You carry us," one voice murmured, its tone more weight than sound.
"We see through your eyes," whispered another. "We judge with your fire."
"You burn with our pain," came a voice that might have once belonged to a child, "but you also rise with our hope."
Kael didn't answer. He didn't have to. He simply let them settle. Let them belong. He had stopped being alone the moment he started burning.
He walked on.
The wind caught his cloak and carried it behind him like a shadow, the mountains growing taller with every step. Lightning curled faintly along his fingertips. not lashing out now, but coiled, restrained, listening.
Ten times the enemy he had faced here. Ten times the power waiting to be claimed. Ten times the voices that would join the chorus in his mind.
"That might finally be enough," he said to the wind, and let lightning dance between his fingers as he walked toward the storm that was coming.
The dead remembered his name now.
Soon, the living would too.