Prologue
~ Cough! ~ Cough! ~ Cough!
"Damn it! What the hell is happening?!" a dark-haired man rasped, wincing as he touched his throat. His fingers met something rough and he froze. "A noose...? I don't remember anything like that. I'm not going to hang myself at such a young age, I'm only forty-seven! Wait. My voice. What's wrong with my voice?!" He hurriedly patted himself down, touching long black hair and smooth, youthful skin... "WHAT?! DID I TURN INTO A WOMAN?! ARE YOU LAUGHING AT ME?!" He grabbed at his groin, went rigid for a heartbeat, then let out a long breath. "It's there. Otherwise, I really would have gone and hanged myself."
He pulled the rope off his neck and studied the black robe with mild interest. Under it was a classic gray suit with a green tie. Then he stepped up to the mirror and saw a young man with black, shoulder-length greasy hair, a hooked nose, and cold black eyes that tugged a nostalgic smile from him.
"Not a bad look. It reminds me of my own, back before I wiped out the entire Magistracy. Oh... those eyes full of hatred and despair... how magnificent that was!" A faint smirk touched his mouth, and his gaze turned to ice as the memory returned. "I remember..." The smirk dimmed into something almost sad. "I died. How depressing, you damned old bastard!"
A lone man in a black cloak stood in the middle of a ruined building. His long black hair was ruffled by the autumn wind... The scene might have looked ordinary, if not for the corpses scattered around him, all dressed in similar dark cloaks. Some were missing eyes, others limbs. There were even those who had been stripped of everything: eyes, nose, ears, tongue, skin...
For any ordinary person, it would have been a nightmare, a real hell on earth. But the man standing at the center of the ruin felt only one thing: relief...
He hadn't moved from that spot for hours. His black eyes stared up at the sky... as if all life had drained from them... Then, a moment later, bloodlust flared in his gaze as he looked at the figure that had appeared. It was an old man in a gray cloak. The hood had fallen back, revealing long gray hair, deep wrinkles, and black eyes filled with disbelief and hatred.
"ALAN! YOU BASTARD! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!" the old man roared, and darkness spilled over the clearing. Black fog swirled around him, and his eyes burned with an ominous red hue...
"You're back early, old man," Alan greeted him with a light smile. His voice was calm, even... even slightly monotonous, though sarcasm still threaded through it. "I thought you'd be here tomorrow, so I entertained myself with your students and started setting a trap for yo... kh..." He didn't finish. Only a rasp escaped him as a wrinkled hand closed around his throat. Alan's smile only widened as he looked at that hand, then at the old man's twisted face.
"ALAN! I WON'T KILL YOU!" The promise in that voice chilled to the bone. "I won't let you die. You'll go through every torment my students endured. You'll feel everything they felt, but a hundred times worse!" Seeing Alan try to speak, the old man loosened his grip slightly.
"Really? I'm honored. Tell me, old man, do you remember the city of Romalia?"
For a moment, the old man went still, peering into Alan's face as if seeing it for the first time. With each passing second, his eyes grew wider.
"You... that child?!" he breathed, stunned. "How did you survive?!"
"Do you remember what you said after you destroyed my home, slaughtered my entire family and friends, and left only me to drag out an existence without arms or legs?" Alan's smile never left his face, and it made something unpleasant coil in the old man's gut. "'I won't kill you. Live. I want to see how you'll live and take revenge...' Those words sank deep into my heart. And as you can see, I survived. In thirty-seven years, I reached the rank of Archmage, all for the sake of revenge. And as you can see, I succee... kh..." The hand on his throat tightened again.
"A genius," the head of the Magistracy drawled with a grimace. "It took me nearly five hundred years to reach that title, and you rushed it. Perhaps in a couple hundred more years, you would have become a Great Archmage. Then you might have had a chance. But you chose revenge now, and you tried to kill someone who reached the peak long ago."
"You were going to attempt advancement to 'Creator' this month, and I realized that if I didn't kill you now, I wouldn't have a chance later. Once you achieved that, you'd recognize me immediately."
"So that's it. You're right, but it's too late..."
"Why do you think that? And isn't it strange that I can speak?" Alan caught the old man's hand, easily tore it away, and looked him in the eyes. "I fooled you. I managed to set the trap." A small dagger appeared in his hand. "I have only one minute. That's how long this spell will last." The smile on his face did not waver. When fear finally flickered in the old man's eyes, it only grew wider.
Alan sliced his finger and began tracing words onto the dagger, while his enemy stared at the hilt in genuine horror.
"I see you recognize what I'm about to do."
"You'll die. You understand that, right?" The old man tried to frighten him, convinced Alan didn't grasp what using 'that' would do.
"Something worse than death for you." The next instant, Alan drove the dagger into the old man's chest. The runes on the hilt flared, sank into his body, and the dagger crumbled into nothing.
The wound sealed almost at once, and the old man could move again.
"That's it." The light slowly drained from Alan's eyes. Two lone tears rolled down his cheeks. "Mom, Dad, brother, Din, Rudi, Clea... and everyone else... I did it. Just wait for me. I'll come to you soon. Just a little longer." Black blood spilled from his mouth...
"WHAT DID YOU DO?!" the old man screamed, horror cracking his voice. "MY POWER! MY POWER! HOW COULD YOU?! YOU BASTARD! I'LL KILL YOU!"
"Too late, but..." Alan met those eyes, filled with hatred and terror, and couldn't hold back a malicious smile. They were so like his own had been that day. "You only lost your power, that's all." Swaying, he stepped closer and grabbed the old man's arm. The old man could do nothing. He no longer had the strength to resist an Archmage. "But you still have too many advantages. Four of them. That needs to be corrected."
"NO!"
~ CRACK!
The old man's arm went limp, and tears poured from his eyes. He had felt pain like that only once, fifteen hundred years ago, back when he was an ordinary Magister. Then, his arm had been broken for touching something he shouldn't have.
~ CRACK!
He lost his second arm. His scream rose higher, and so did the tears. The next moment he lost a leg, then the other. He lay on the ground with nothing left in his eyes but despair.
"You could be quieter," Alan reproached him. "Wolves often roam here in packs. Did you forget?" The old man didn't seem to hear. In a single instant, he had lost everything he had built over millennia, all at the hands of a mere Archmage.
Alan stared sadly at his hands as they began to blacken and crumble right in front of his eyes.
"So this is death... I hope that before I go to hell, I'll see them all, at least one last time..." A moment before the end, he thought he heard someone scream. From beyond the horizon, toward the site of the final battle between Archmage Alan Ilius and Great Archmage Avalon, a bright green light rushed closer, and inside it one could barely make out a human silhouette...
"If I don't remember anything, then I probably didn't meet anyone. And it's the first time I've heard that after using the 'Cursed God's Seal,' you reincarnate... though where would I have heard that?" Alan peered into the mirror again. "With a face like this, it's unlikely anyone will give me anything... for free. But whatever." He sniffed his clothes, touched his hair, and grimaced automatically. "Wash up, and wash all my clothes. That's the first thing to do." He closed his eyes and tried to sense the magic flowing through his body... "This...?!"
There was magic, but it felt different, and the density was about a hundred times lower than in his world, which made control much harder.
"What's going on...?" Alan didn't panic right away. Instead, he decided to look around first.
The room was magnificent. He felt as if he'd woken in a nobleman's bedroom. The first thing that caught his eye was a large canopy bed. It was wooden, carved with beautiful patterns, obviously handmade. A soft mattress lay beneath a silk sheet, and the silk alone shocked him, because it was expensive. Even high nobles couldn't have afforded something like that.
To the right of the bed stood a nightstand. In the left corner was a wardrobe. And directly in front of the wardrobe stood another nightstand, larger, with a big mirror above it. What surprised him was that every piece looked like the work of a true master.
"Who did this body belong to?" Alan wondered. The next moment he clutched his head and dropped to his knees. "DAMN IT! MY HEAD! WHAT THE HELL?! IT HURTS, DAMN IT!" Alan clenched his teeth. Sitting on the floor, he shut his eyes and forced himself to breathe, letting the new memories settle into place...
Only after twenty minutes did he open his eyes again, having skimmed the previous owner's memories and blocked them. If that torrent of knowledge had flooded his mind all at once, anyone would have gone mad, and Alan was no exception.
"Damn, my head is splitting... They should warn you about something like that..." Still, he drew a deep breath and looked up with a sad smile at the frayed end of the rope on the beam. He closed his eyes and shook his head. "...The kid had it rough. But fine. For this second life, I'll help you a little, and then I'll keep living for both of us. I promise your name will be remembered for a long time, whether that's good or bad, depending on how fate plays out..."
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