Apotho hummed quietly to himself. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had hummed. His grasps towards his body had always been too short to create such an expression of joy, too infrequent and laden with interruptions by this guilty splinter of his consciousness. Now, the roles were reversed. Gizmo could only beat against the cage, sometimes reach out between the bars, but he was confined.

Right now, the splinter was squirming. Apotho could feel that his alter-ego wanted to extend himself to stop what was happening. He didn’t, however, Gizmo didn’t hasten the decay of his fleeting grip on this world by needlessly stretching himself. ‘How smart of you,’ Apotho mocked, ‘then again, you ARE me, an erudite mind is to be expected.’

He raised his hands and warmed them by the fire. It wasn’t particularly large, just two chairs and a stump of wood. For the old Warlock, it had been equally difficult and demeaning to get them on a pile and ignite it. That he, Apotho, would have to do physical labour of such simplicity himself was beyond ridiculous. Such were the times, however, times to which his own knowledge had doomed him.

The result was worth it. Gizmo squirmed as the two dust-covered seats were slowly devoured by the flames, fed primarily by the dried log Apexus had used as his seat. ‘Do you have no respect for their memory?’ the guilty splinter asked its origin.

Apotho could only giggle as he answered out loud. Gizmo could hear either, but speaking simply lorded over the frail character what the Warlock could do right now and he couldn’t. Fitting after over two-hundred years spent. A whole fifth of his long life. “Respect? For resources? Do you respect a can of tea?” The line of thought amused him.

‘Your inability for you to understand is why I exist and why you’re locked up here,’ Gizmo responded and immediately caused the Warlock’s teeth to grind, the smile dying. Then, it returned, darker than before.

“I suppose that is a way to look at it, that it is my flaws that brought me here,” he stated, marching towards the metal fence that surrounded his little clearing in the forest. Stretching out a hand the green flames soon met his touch. His eyes, the eyes of a mage that had ascended all common boundaries, tinted red as he saw beyond the flames and to the connections they had to the runes in the physical manifestation.

It wasn’t easy to create a boundary field that surrounded and locked a single person for eternity. Actually, it was downright impossible. The runes had to be created with the locked person’s blood, written over many days due to the amount of details they necessitated. A barrier was nothing short of a magical circle that locked a part of the world in place. Like all magical circles, be they for summoning, creation or anything else, they needed to represent the local surroundings in an accurate manner.

When one tried to call a god for a short period, making a rough map of the leaf sufficed. When trying to lock away a being close to a god for eternity in a very specific place, the amount of details were insurmountable. None of them were allowed to change either, not while it was being set-up. The way Apotho was locked here was that the runes on the fence described, in immense detail, the place of the house, the state of the herbal fields and the amount of water in the pond.

“You would have loved to lock us in here without water, wouldn’t you, Gizmo?” Apotho asked as he pulled his hands back from the green flames. When a normal person created magical effects, they tended to be blue. That was the base colour of magic. When a Warlock did it, however, their particular ways of manipulating the currents of magic in a much more selfish manner caused them to tint green.

It was impossible to lock Apotho away. The preparations for such a thing, the execution, the place, all of it was too hard to supply. Unless he did it himself. ‘Yes,’ Gizmo responded with a single word, but even that much was unneeded. Although Gizmo had been the dominant half of them following the split by the curse of the gods, Apotho’s clinging to life had prevented him from doing anything deadly to their body. No part of his will was more pronounced than his endless grasp to the waking world.

“See, Gizmo, good Gizmo, it wasn’t my actions that brought me here, it is the rules of a world that savour safety over power,” Apotho touched the barrier again and looked over his shoulder. He was sick of that view. The house, the pond, the little field. If he could have destroyed it all, he would. Like his position to them, however, the place itself was rooted by the rules of the magical circle. The house wouldn’t catch fire, the stones of the pond were unbreakable and the field would just return between the grass.

If he had more power, he could have smashed it all over and over again, overloading the system, causing it to collapse. That was the easiest way to freedom and impossible for him in his current shape. He reached out with his hand again, the barrier was still there, he pulled back. It was the Day of the First Ascension now, no doubt about it.

“How do you feel, knowing that you failed at letting time kill me?” Apotho asked, still yet wanting to savour more of the suffering Gizmo could provide him with. It was only right, after all the annoyances, coughs and creaking bones the Warlock had to live through. Even the crimson of his hair had been robbed of him. Youth, looks, power and freedom. Wallowing in despair was a rather small price to pay for robbing HIM of all that.

‘I… haven’t failed... yet,’ Gizmo answered and the Warlock burst out laughing at the tone. Even the splinter was doubtful that anything was going to happen now that could cross Apotho’s plan.

“It was wonderful to feel, you know? Your realization that you made the tools of my freedom,” the Warlock snickered to himself. “Reysha, Reysha could have been difficult. I knew so terribly little about her. I tried to trick her at first, but behold, the kitten is a bloodthirsty one. A very sympathetic girl, if she succeeds and survives, I might want to see her again one day. She could be a very useful tool. It was wonderful to just have to lay out the truth. That alone was unlikely to succeed, though.”

‘It is still unlikely to succeed,’ Gizmo said, more to himself than to him.

“The chances of her getting through rise with every second the Cardinal is gone and I have ensured that he will be occupied for a little bit,” Apotho continued to snicker. “Ah, yes, Apexus, good Apexus, he trusts you so much and hasn’t been to civilization often enough to realize yet that us humanoids, we lie, steal, and cheat. Really, you should thank me for giving him the lesson that you never gave him. ‘Don’t trust the greedy’ you told him. You should have told him to be greedy himself, perhaps he would have been able to call my lies if he actually inspected his own gains from them a bit more.”

Apotho again let his hand slide over the surface of the barrier. The green fire pearled down his skin in a wonderful display of power. Now that it wasn’t going to confine him much longer, he could admire the craftsmanship his hands put into action. Green fire would soon fall down on those that had confined him.

“Aclysia was easy, thanks to you,” the Warlock solemnly stated and felt Gizmo’s thoughts run cold with shock as the true owner of the body laid down what he had done. “I knew she was the smartest of them and I knew exactly how smart thanks to the months you spent with her and Apexus. She would lie to me to find out a little bit. She wasn’t going to believe even that bit I told her without discretion. North, you told her, Reysha is trying to assassinate the Cardinal, I told her. She will have no choice but to go for the likeliest chain of events, because she is smart. You think you helped her? You just made her draw the conclusion I wanted her. That way, she is going to obey me without knowing it. Wonderful how all of this flowed to my advantage.

“The first doesn’t care for right or wrong and will do what I say, as long as she gets what she wants. Which she will. The second doesn’t know what is right or wrong and will trust what was said. To be fair, I also gave him what he wanted, he will see his beloved Aclysia again. The third does know right and wrong and who she wants to protect. I also didn’t lie to her, her actions will make both Reysha and Apexus incredibly safe. Safe to give the former the time she needs to get her vengeance, that is.”

And the tool of that vengeance was he himself.