There were a lot of people scowling at or around me. First, there were Anders and Chione. Then there were Axina and the other priestess, both trussed up like Christmas pigs on the ground, gags of cloth instead of apples. Ethan was always good for a scowl as well, you would think his default setting was a scowl, or maybe it was just when he saw me. A few other people were scowling as well, the troopers at latrine duty and those that were tasked with corpse disposal.

The only corpse that was handled with respect was Moras. The trooper that had been killed by a paranoid elf sleeping with a dagger beneath her pillow. We would burn his body shortly before leaving the waystation, which would be after dinner, and it was morning at the moment.

We were outside since there was no office or anywhere else for holding a meeting of any kind. Besides the scowling people, there were some not so scowly people. Yathanae was there to act as translator for the others, Mina and Justine to ensure we got the truth. Hrothgar, Alan, and Linus were there as well.

The first order of business was asking about the undying part. It happened in Elvish and away from the others. “Yathanae, why are the lampads called the undying?”

“Have your people forgotten?” she asked.

“No one has mentioned it to me, which is why I ask.”

She shook her head. “The curse of a short lifespan is a short memory it seems. Only lampad priests are called the undying. They’re called that because unless they die from old age, their body will be recreated in fire and their soul placed in the body. It comes at a cost though, they require another soul to take the place of the one spared.”

“Resurrection?” I was baffled. I knew it had to be true because I was pretty sure I had killed Axina in the mountains, back at my Hold. “Can they do it for others?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know off, it’s never something I’ve heard mention off.”

“So I can’t kill them, they’ll just resurrect?”

“If you hadn’t buried that Soulrend Blade you'd be able to hurt their souls and prevent their resurrection,” Yathanae said. “But why don’t you know this?”

‘Buried?’ I wondered what she meant when my mind flashed to the vile Heretic Blade that the Cardinal had, which I had buried. With a shrug, I said, “There’s a lot I don’t know, I’ll have to ask Ethan. Thanks for the info, wish I had known it earlier.”

“You’re welcome. If I had known that you didn’t know, I would have mentioned it. It’s common knowledge for us, and since humans invented the blade, I thought they would have told their champions,” she said, her hand momentarily caressing mine before she went over to join the group.

When I turned around to follow her, I saw a look of disgust on Axina’s face, though she quickly hid it. The younger priestess looked around fearfully. In the light of day, or at least of dawn, there were a number of similarities between their faces. Either mother and daughter or sisters.

“Ethan, Linus, I need a word with you,” I said. I stopped in front of the two prisoners, positioning myself so that I could keep an eye on them while I talked with them.

“Yes, Milord?” Linus asked. Ethan just scowled at me.

“What is the power of the lampad priests?” I asked.

“We don’t really know, we assume it’s something to do with fire. As I told you, the elves are attuned to one of the four elements,” Linus said with a shrug. “You’ve to understand, we thought the lampads had been wiped out during the Rising. We only encountered them a few hundred cycles ago again.”

“Ethan, anything to add?”

“No, what he just said,” Ethan answered. “The Church did not bother with the lampads, they were wiped out, or so they thought. So we’ve only records of the three other elven races.”

I looked at them thoughtfully. It was clear from her facial expressions that the younger priestess understood everything we said. However, I was not sure about the older one, but I thought it to be the case. “What’s the purpose of Heretic Blades?”

Linus frowned, “They leave wounds no magic can heal, Milord.”

Ethan had a bit more to say on the subject, “They wound the soul, meaning that you can’t use magic to heal. Though you can heal naturally.”

“I suspect they were specifically used to kill lampad priests,” I told them. I kept a good eye on both of the prisoners, to gauge their reaction. The young one gave me the confirmation I was looking for, and even some emotions cropped up in the older one’s eyes.

“Why not just a normal blade?” Linus asked.

“Remember the elven raiding party we handled back at the Hold?”

“Of course, you made me climb that fucking mountain, over and over again,” Linus complained, quickly tacking on a “Milord” at the end.

“I remember the prisoners you collared. All of them,” Ethan said, anger in his eyes. He might need an attitude adjustment because he was getting mightily mouthy.

“Good, then you remember that we killed a lampad priest there, right?”

“Yes, Milord,” they answered, still confused.

“Well, she is sitting right there,” I said and pointed at the older priestess.

“What?” Ethan asked.

Linus just looked very confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I heard something tonight, and Yathanae just confirmed it. The power of the lampad priests is resurrection. Rebirth from flames or something. Though I suspect if killed with a Heretic Blade, they can’t use that power,” I explained.

“Impossible, no one can return from the dead,” Linus said. “There is no one that has that power in recorded history. Never.”

Ethan looked thoughtful. “It explains why the Heretic Blade was called Flame Destroyers in the old days. The Hierophants changed the name thousands of cycles ago, only the oldest scrolls reference the blades as Flame Destroyers.”

“If that’s true, what are we going to do about them, Milord?” Linus asked, gesturing with his heads towards the priestesses. “They can commit suicide, or make sure they’re killed. Even kill each other, and they’ll be back.”

“You make a good point, even if you just gave the woman plenty of ideas for getting out of this situation,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“They speak human, you dolt,” I said. The old woman had not reacted visibly, but there was still comprehension in her eyes from time to time. The younger one was not that hard to read.

“Milord, my apologies,” Linus quickly said, with a deep bow.

“No worries, I asked you to talk with me here, because I needed to find out if they did speak human. Makes it much easier for all of us,” I said and then switched to Elvish. “However, I can always interrogate you this way instead.”

The younger priestess looked surprised that I spoke Elvish, while Axina already knew that I possessed some way of communicating in Elvish. I decided to continue in Elvish so I would not have to deal with Anders. I put on my best poker face as I started to explain to them, how their captivity would go, “As you heard, we’ve been made aware of your ability to come back to life. Apparently, I already killed you once before—Axina.”

That got a reaction. Not so much that I had killed her, but the fact that I knew her name. They did not react until I mentioned her name. I gave them a cold smile. “Yes, I know who you are, and what your power is. Even though I can prevent you from using magic to contact other priests, you’ll soon be able to find a way to get yourself or the other one killed.”

I looked at both of them and Axina had a small arrogant smile on her lips. I had hit the nail on the head with regards to her plans. I continued my bluff, “So here’s what will happen. You’ll be kept away from each other at all times. So you can only facilitate your own death. If you do, you condemn the other person to a hell unlike any you’ve ever imagined before.

“I will rape her over and over again. And when I get tired of taking my pleasure from her, she’ll be given to my men. We’ll have her carry them lots of children that we can sell to those that prefer such things. I hear that there are hidden restaurants in Central City where they serve elf flesh, the younger the better.

“When her body is so broken it cannot produce any more children, we’ll let the dogs rut with her, before feeding her to the pigs, alive. This is the fate you condemn your family member to if you try to escape by dying. A milder version of this punishment will be given to both of you if you’re too disrespectful. Understood?”

The younger one turned pale, looking like she was going to be sick, she did not throw up. However, she did break down and started sobbing, nodding her head frantically. Axina went from haughty to angry to horrified. In the end, she gave a small nod, all the while trying to kill me with her eyes.

Seeing this, I gave a single nod before switching to the human language. “I’ve told you what happens if you’re uncooperative. Here’s what will happen if you cooperate. No one will touch you intimately, not even me. On that, you have my word. You’ll travel with us until such time that we return to human civilization. There you’ll have a choice, continue serving me as a serf or death. I promise there’ll not be used a Soulrending Blade when you’re killed.”

“Milord, I must protest. If they have got the ability to resurrect, the ability must be studied at the schools of magic. Maybe we can learn something from it,” Linus said. I gave him a hard stare. He turned to Ethan. “Ethan, tell him. It’s enormously important for the Church that we bring them this news. They’ll want someone to experiment on as well.”

Ethan gulped when he saw the look I gave him. “It’s correct that the Church would want them, but we already have weapons to defeat them. That information is enough.”

“Of course, if they disobey, we can arrange that as well,” I commented nonchalantly. That was actually a punishment I would be willing to administer. Linus looked like he was about to argue some more, but he shot up when I glared at him.

I knelt next to the younger priestess and waved Mina over. “I’m going to remove your gag and then you’ll answer some questions. Mina is going to ensure you tell the truth. Excessive lying means that both of you will be punished. Have I made myself clear?”

She nodded and I removed her gag. “Okay. First of all, who are you and what is your relationship with Axina?”

The woman’s voice quivered a bit as she answered, “My name is Shenerah. Axina gave birth to me.”

“Interesting answer, but not important for now. Why are you here?”

She looked confused for a moment, then fearful. “I don’t mean to disrespect you, but could you be more precise?”

I shrugged. “I guess that question could be interpreted in many ways. Very well, a more precise one then. Why are you at the waystation?”

“We are supposed to be heading up the mountain to the tower to relieve the guards there,” she said. A bit of hope entered her eyes, and with some conviction, she threatened, “They will know we’re not heading up, they’ll spot you soon. Then the entire elven army will hunt you down!”

In Elvish, I asked, “Will you show as much spirit, when my men are done raping you and your mother? Be respectful.”

Her face paled again at my threat. She shook her head, and mumbled, “Sorry, Milord. Please forgive this one’s impertinence.”

I switched back to human. “As long as we understand each other. Anyway, they’re of no concern for us. Since they are already dead. When is your mother supposed to send her first report?”

“I don’t know,” was her answer, and Mina verified it.

“Okay, thanks for being truthful. Now let’s hope your mother is the same, so you don’t have to suffer a fate worse than death,” I said and put the gag in her mouth. She struggled for a second, but a slap to her temple reminded her of her place.

I moved over to her mother who was staring daggers at me. In Elvish, I reminded her, “Your daughter’s fate depends on your civility.”

Her eyes softened a bit and she nodded. As soon as I removed her gag, she spat at me. I was surprised by that action, and it hit my cheek. Axina then turned her head and spat at her daughter, before she started cackling, bloody foam running from her mouth.

My cheek started burning, I got dizzy, it was hard focusing. I saw Shenerah’s face started melting as if acid had been poured on her face, she was screaming into her gag fear in her eye. I heard swords being drawn, men shouting in surprise. It was Yathanae who shouted, “Last Rancor! Nathalie, we need your healing.”

I slapped my undamaged cheek, to focus, and with a scoff, I started healing myself. I immediately knelt between each of them, starting to heal them as well. Axina’s eyes grew large and she started thrashing, trying to get away from me. I also sent a probe to the manacles she was wearing, but they were working as they should. So that left me one big question: How had she attacked me?

“Hold her down, need her alive” I managed to grunt through the pain. I could not heal all of us at the same time and null my pain. It felt like I was losing the battle against the burning pain. Every time I managed to repair some of the damage, it was immediately damaged by the poison or whatever it was.

Axina was screaming profanities at us, but soon the men holding her down had her gagged again. A feeling of relief washed over me, the second after I felt someone touch my arm. From the connection to her soul I knew that it was Nathalie. With a grunt, I indicated Axina with my head. “Heal her.”

“Milord,” Nathalie said hesitantly but did as I commanded. When I felt her magic intermingling with mine to heal Axina, I withdrew my healing from her and used my magic to ease both mine and Shenerah’s pain. A sob of relief washed over the young priestess, and she looked up at me with glazed and teary eyes.

A moment later Astrid, the other healer, arrived as well. She looked at me for orders. With a chin thrust, I indicated the young priestess. She immediately did as commanded. Soon we had her healed up, but the poison remained, refusing to be healed.

Yathanae kneeled down next to the priestess. “This is Last Rancor, you know what that means, right? Astrid, make sure to deaden her nerves, this will hurt.”

The priestess nodded and closed her eyes as Yathanae brought her dagger down and cut the gag off. Even though the gag was removed, Shenerah kept her mouth open. Yathanae’s dagger pierced her cheek, all the way through into the mouth, and then started cutting in a circle around where the Last Rancor had landed. She very carefully held a stone bowl up to the wound. Not to catch the blood, but to catch the piece of flesh she had just cut out.

“We need to do the same with you, Milord,” she said after she had finished. Shenerah was sobbing as the ghastly hole closed from our healing.

“What about Axina?” I asked. “And why can’t I heal it completely?”

Yathanae shook her head. “We would need to kill her to remove all the places the poison is spreading from, she swallowed it. It’s eating her up from the inside. We should not waste time on it. It can only be cut out, because it’s a magical poison used by assassins as a last resort, because death is certain. Or it was. ”

My eyes narrowed. The moment she died she would be reborn, even if it took a little while, she would resurrect. As a priestess, she could warn other priests of where we were. That would not do. There had to be some way to prevent it. Irritated, I ordered, “Keep healing her. Everyone, supply mana crystal to Nathalie and Astrid. Astrid as soon as you’re done, go help Nathalie.”

A chorus of “Yes, Milord” sounded, and I turned my attention to Yathanae. “Do it.”

I closed my eyes, and despite having deadened my nerves, it hurt like hell, when Yathanae cut a circle out of my skin. While Yathanae tended to me, I heard Shenerah start sobbingly ask her mother, “How could you do this to me? It hurt so much!”

“To save you from that fate,” her mother answers between gasps of pain, her voice hoarse.

“If I had died, I would’ve been condemned to a fate just as bad,” Shenerah screamed before one of my men gagged her. After Yathanae had cut away the flesh, I kept healing myself.

While I had been administered to, I had gotten a sliver of an idea, but I needed more information. I had no idea why I was so certain it was possible, but I felt certain it should be possible. After a few minutes, I asked Nathalie, “How long can you keep healing her?”

“Probably an hour if we don’t deaden her pain, but then we’ll both be out of mana,” Nathalie answered. “Now that we’ve contained the poison, it’s easy to maintain, but still takes a lot of mana.”

“How much mana would you need to maintain it indefinitely?”

“Milord, that’s not possible,” Nathalie exclaimed.

“It’s a hypothetical,” I said irritatedly.

“Erhm, I would say the regeneration rate of two power rating thirteen could keep it up,” Nathalie said after a minute.

I turned to Ethan. I could check myself, but I was not sure that I would be able to reliably gauge her rating. “Ethan, I need to know her rating.”

I then waved Mina over. I looked her in the eyes and told her the truth, “I’m about to do an experiment, I would like your help. I can’t promise it’ll be safe. Do you trust me?”

“With my life, Milord,” she said with an intensity that made me believe her. I produced a mana crystal and handed it to her. As she absorbed some of it, I let my senses flow into her to see how it worked, what pathways it followed and so on.

I kept that image in my head and then set about creating a new mana crystal, this one with a purpose. It would store energy from other mana crystals, and then push it into the mana pool on its own until it was almost empty.

“Hold this,” I asked Mina. She did so, and I touched the spell crystal with a mana crystal. It started feeding mana to Mina without her trying to absorb it. Her eyes went wide with wonder as she stared at the crystal in her hand. Of course, that was when things went pear-shaped.

The moment her pool was full, the spell crystal should have stopped feeding her mana, but it did not. Instead, it continued to fill up her pool, and the barrier started breaking down. Mina started screaming in pain, blue flames erupting from her eyes and mouth. Mana combustion.

I slapped the crystal out of her hand and immediately plunged my mana into her body and around her pool. The barrier was still breaking away, so I forced my mana to envelop the barrier, press in on it, forcing it back in place.

How long it took before the mana pool stopped trying to break the barrier down, I did not know. It felt like hours but was really only minutes, but in the end, it stopped. The barrier was lessened, as if she had attained higher rating, however, it was also looking very fragile. Instinctively, I knew she could not use mana as long as it was fragile, otherwise, her mana would combust again.

When the pain stopped, she fainted. I managed to catch her. Looking up I saw a lot of worried faces, though Ethan looked more surprised and thoughtful than anything else. I had felt his mana for a moment, as it had surged in, to observe what was going on.

“Ethan, what would you say her rating is?” I asked.

“You should already know that,” he said a bit disrespectfully. When I glared at him, he gave a sigh. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he looked at me, it was with surprise and wonder in his eyes. “It’s an eight, but there’s something wrong with her barrier. It looks like it’s about to shatter.”

It did not shock me. I knew her rating had increased, but now I knew by how much. It had gone from a seven to an eight. Despite this snafu, I was certain I was on the right track, and I somehow instinctively knew what had gone wrong. Where that certainty and knowledge came from, was a mystery. However, I expected it was from the one who saved me from my mana combustion.

“Justine, please come over here,” I said as I formed a new spell crystal. Justine looked frightened, shaking all over her body. We replicated the experiment, and Justine heaved a great sigh when she did not feel any pain.

The first part of the puzzle was done, the other part would probably be easier. I went over to Nathalie. “Has she been healed to the point where you’re just maintaining?”

“Yes, Milord. Will Mina be okay?” she asked, a little frightful.

“Eventually, she will be,” I replied, before kneeling down next to her. “Astrid, please let Nathalie do all the healing, I need to observe it.”

For a few minutes, I observed the weave of the magic that Nathalie wielded and how it interacted with Axina’s body. I then waved Ethan over to me. “Ethan, can you make a hole in the collar, one large enough to fit a spell crystal?”

He looked thoughtful for a moment, before nodding. “Yes, that should be possible, we can change the shape as we want, but we can't take them off or make them into a shape where they can fall off. In fact, we don’t have to make them collars, it could be gold necklaces instead if we wanted.”

“Good to know,” I said thoughtfully. “Anyway, please make it at the base of her neck. I’ll create the spell crystal directly in the slot you create. Afterwards, create one on each of the manacles.”

“I know you want to observe what I do, Milord, but if you do, it’ll be the same as me revealing how to make them. It would kill me,” Ethan said apologetically. In the last few minutes, his demeanour had changed completely.

“I shall keep my mana away from what you’re doing,” I said with a nod. “What rating is she?”

“She’s an eleven, quite powerful, Milord.”

As soon as the hole had formed, I created a new spell crystal. This one would heal her the way that Nathalie was healing her. At the same time, it sent tendrils of mana to interweave with the collars tendril and leeched mana off of them. Because of the decreased amount of mana arriving to the collar, it started draining more mana from the pool. A cycle that continued until the spell was fully fueled.

For the manacles, I created two of the spell crystals I had tested on Mina and Justine. All we would need was to touch a mana crystal to these crystals, and it would recharge Axina’s mana pool whether she wanted to or not. The moment I had created the third spell crystal, it was like I woke from a state of heavy concentration. I could still remember what I did, but it suddenly felt like everything was a little fuzzy. The insight or inspiration was gone.

“What have you done?” Axina rasped, clearly in pain. I had not included easing her pain. She could live with what she had wrought.

“Made sure to keep you alive,” I said with a vicious smile. I stood back up and went over to Shenerah. After hoisting her onto my shoulder, I gave Axina an evil look. “I told you what the punishment was, so now I’ve to administer it.”

“If you touch her, I’m going to gouge out your eyes!” she screamed in human.

Anders stepped in front of me, as I started walking towards the barracks. “What’s the meaning of this?”

“Get out of the way Anders, I made them a promise, I intend to keep it,” I lied.

“I can’t let you do this,” he growled and put a hand on his sword. Immediately Alan, Charles, and Nishka had weapons levelled at him.

“Detain Lord Anders and Chione until I come out again,” I ordered. “Put up a pole outside the window of the last room on the left, then tie the elven bitch to it. She gets to enjoy hearing what happens to her daughter. Yathanae with me.”

I strode into the barracks, with an elf on my shoulder, one following me, and one screaming obscenities at me. I could not go back on my punishment, or she would try again. However, how the fuck was I going to bluff my way out of this one?