I couldn’t run anymore, that was true, but I still had my hourglass. Haad had followed me here though, which meant that he also knew that I’d met with Seika. If I simply teleported away, what would happen to her? I had to take care of this somehow.

“How about we talk for a while, little Adel,” he said once he came close enough that his head was hiding the moon from my view. “We just informed Seika that her family died. I didn’t wear my real face, of course. No that would be very confusing for her. Rather, some of her professors told her of your untimely death, and yet here you are running around as alive as ever. Why don’t you explain to me what happened in Nara?”

“Why are you attacking me, Haad?” I asked, teeth clenched in pain. “I was looking for you to tell you how our parents died.”

I hoped that this fact would bring him to his senses but if I managed to catch an expression on his face, it was apathetic disinterest.

“You are extremely lucky that I was the one to find you and not someone else,” he said, coldly. “We have seen the carnage in Nara, and we want answers. If you think that the death of our parents would throw me off balance… Nothing matters to me if The Divine is dead.”

“The Divine… It’s dead?” I asked, not believing the words that came out of my mouth.

“Well, It is not responding to our summons.” He took one step closer to me. “So, you’re going to tell me exactly what your stupid parents did to The Divine. Now!”

“They were our parents!” I shouted, disgusted by his indifference. “And they died protecting us.”

“Stupid boy. You can’t look beneath your mortal bounds. I don’t give a damn about the people that, out of pure chance, happened to be my parents. I am a paragon of The Holy Order, and my first priority is finding out what happened to our God and then restoring order.”

He stepped on my hurt ankle and I screamed in agony. He may have looked like my brother but he was nothing like the loving sibling I remembered from when I was a child.

Despite the pain, I managed to swing the sword with my right hand, hoping to hurt him or at least have him take his foot away. He did just that, and as soon as he opened his mouth to talk again, a bright light appeared in the distance behind him.

I covered my eyes as he turned back to see the source of the illumination. I felt his robes flow over my hands and face as he was catapulted above and behind me, the smell of burnt garments and skin following him.

“Adel!” I heard my sister shout, as she ran toward me. “I saw the master follow you from the window of my room, so I followed him too. Where are you hurt?”

I showed her my ankle and turned my head backward to check on the still burning battlemage. She chanted a healing spell with her hands on my ankle.

“Seika, that was no professor of yours,” I told her. “That’s Haad. He attacked me and now you’ve killed him.”

“Then we’re in even worse trouble,” she said, as a warm feeling enveloped my whole leg and made the pain go away. “I didn’t want to mention it to you before. I didn’t want you to worry, but Haad is… different. Power has changed him. He’s done some terrible things in the name of The Divine. But let’s not waste time discussing them here. He’ll soon wake up. We have to leave.”

“You mean that fireball didn’t kill him?”

“A spell like that, kill me?” came the same raspy voice, but behind Seika this time.

She tried to turn and strike him with her elbow, but Haad knocked her out with a punch. Seeing her fall unconscious filled me with rage but there was nothing I could do about it. He had me cornered.

Instead, I flicked the hourglass in my right pocket and hoped for the best.

Sixty seconds.

“No!” I screamed and took her in my arms. “She was only trying to protect me. She knew that you weren’t hurt.”

Fifty-two seconds.

“Our sister shouldn’t have meddled at all in this investigation,” Haad said, and took a step toward me.

Forty-eight seconds.

As he moved closer, I let my sister’s head rest on my knees, picked my swords once again and raised my hands in a last attempt to protect myself.

“Stay away from us,” I muttered angrily.

Forty-one seconds.

“You think those swords are going to protect you, little brother?” he asked, with a smile on his face. “Seika only managed to surprise me with that great fireball of hers, and you think that you can fight me with metal?”

Yes, keep talking. Thirty seconds.

I lowered my blades, taking my time, but did not let go of them.

“Please don’t hurt us, brother,” I said, in an as timid as possible voice. “I will tell you everything you want to know. Just please don’t hurt Seika.”

Twenty seconds.

“That depends on how cooperative you are,” he replied. “I hope that our unconscious sister will act as a better motivation to talk than your hurt leg did. Now tell me, what happened in Nara during the liturgy?”

Eight seconds.

“It was an awful day,” I started and took a deep breath. “The Divine came, and It said that you brother, are a stupid bastard.”

I managed to look him in the eyes, grinning, as I finished my sentence and both Seika and I were teleported to safety.

I immediately raised her head above the water that was contained in the giant metal cauldron. Kard, who had fallen asleep next to it, rushed to help me.

“That’s Seika!” he exclaimed.

“Help me get her out,” I said, still shaking from the rush of escaping.

We carried Seika to a room close to mine while Minja, a girl around my age who was adept with potions, used a gas solution to bring her back to consciousness.

We briefly left the room while she changed into dry clothes and then returned so that Kard and Krysha could talk to her. They really loved her and had been very sad when she decided to stop teaching us and go to the university to study. Krysha especially was ecstatic to see her after so many years.

The three of them talked about how much Kard and Krysha had learned from Seika while she was living in Nara and what she had learned over the past few years at the university.

From what she told us, she was becoming one of the greatest young spellcasters that the university had had in many years. Though she had great reserves of mana, she wasn’t interested in becoming rich by crafting magical artifacts but rather preferred using it to cure people. Her professors warned her that the life of a healer is not one paved with gold, but they supported her nonetheless.

This, however, did not mean that she had neglected to practice offensive magic. After all, the fireball she landed on Haad’s back had been very powerful.

Once the conversation hit a plateau, she began recounting the story that she’d told me hours earlier about what had happened in the archmage’s office and how she saw me in danger and came to my rescue.

She then listed some of Haad’s greatest battles against our manaless barbarian neighbors and how fast he’d reached high enough to become the paragon of one of the archons. He occupied the highest rank a battlemage ever could, but the cost was terrible, as she explained to us.

Nothing of our kind and hard-working brother remained now. In the countries north of our kingdom, he was known as the butcher of Elysia because of all the atrocities he had committed. After becoming a paragon, he had returned to the capital and that was when his trail was lost. It turned out that he was posing as one of Seika’s masters and was present when she was given the news that we had all died.

It was outrageous to think that our own brother could be in the same room with her the moment she found out she lost everything she loved and didn’t try to comfort her. However, given that he did attack me and outright said that he didn’t care about our family, I guessed that my old brother was long gone.

After the talk of my brother’s career, we discussed the fact that the church was not being forthright about what they knew regarding everything that took place in Nara, and about whether The Divine was still alive.

It was not long after I explained how my swords absorbed magical attacks that, one after the other, we started to yawn and decided to call it a day. Kard and Krysha were exhausted from worrying about my return, and I had stayed awake for two days in order to find my sister.

But she was here now, safe with me, and I had completed my personal quest of letting my siblings know the truth about what had happened to our parents, or at least those that still gave a damn. I could finally rest without worrying about anything.

I could finally have my closure.