Chapter 15 – An Affair of Wills

“Grimm.” A gentle, womanly voice called me from the darkness of my mind.

The world around me flared to life and I was sitting in a small room, by myself, holding my knees to my chest.

The walls were dark wood, the bed I was sitting on was old and smelled of mildew, and the woman, I remembered, was coming to give me my lessons.

“No, I don’t want to do my lessons today!” I yelled at her from the room.

I didn’t have a lock on the door, just a simple latch and handle. It was intended that way, so I couldn’t lock myself in my room again after being moved from one foster home to the next in the Guild City.

“You have to do your lessons, or the Guild won’t take you. Come now, Grimm, make us the money you owe.” Brundil, that was her name.

She knocked ever so softly on the door. Brundil was a pleasant woman, but her husband, Irven, was a monster.

“No, I won’t do it. You tell Irven that he’ll have to work like everyone else.” I didn’t want to go to the Guild, I wanted to just be a normal kid, like all of my friends before I accidentally burned my house down.

“Please, Grimm. You have to, or he’ll beat me again.” Brundil was whispering through the door, her voice cracked, and I knew she wasn’t just trying to blackmail me into working.

“Fine, but you can’t let him do that anymore.” I got off the bed and opened the door to an outstretched hand of papers, charcoal pencils, and a small writing tablet.

“Okay, what is it today?” I asked, barely hiding my annoyance.

“Letters, Numbers, and I gave you some runes to memorize. Nothing difficult, just some basic wards.” Brundil gave me a polite smile, though there was absolute misery behind her eyes.

“I’m sorry.” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“What do you mean?” Brundil looked even more sad.

“I’m sorry he does that when I don’t behave. I’ll try to be a better child.” I took the papers and the tablet and got to work, doing what needed to be done.

The wards were, actually, rather simple. Incineration, Stasis, Revealing Light, all things I already, mostly, knew.

The letters and numbers I was way behind on, because I simply hated the language as a whole, but I knew how to count to one-hundred without using my fingers, and could easily recite the alphabet without stopping, though I didn’t like to write them.

I hated writing in general. Took too much effort. Not like runic inscribing, which was flowy and articulate. Yeah, it took effort too, but at least the results were something that came off as useful.

Setting something on fire? Easily done with the right rune. It’s considerably harder to set something on fire with words. I mean, granted, many spells had verbal components, but an extremely small amount of them had written components.

Runes, though, were all carved. And I loved them dearly.

“You’ve really taken to the Runic magics.” Brundil said sweetly.

“Yeah, they’re my favorite.” I explained, finishing tracing the ones she made on paper with my finger, memorizing their intricate details and designs.

“Remember, you can never use them to harm people, Grimm.” Brundil lowered her voice. “Even if the Guild wants you to.”

“Why not?” I asked, my voice a whisper.

“Because they’re special, and using Runic Magic on people isn’t nice. It’s disrespectful to the Alchemists who developed them years ago.” Brundil gave me a small smile with a nod, then backed out of my room.

“What are you telling that little shit under your breath, woman!?” Irven grabbed Brundil by the shoulder and shoved her against the wall outside my room.

“Nothing, we were just going over his lessons.” She said, looking away from him and staring at me.

She was mentally going somewhere else to get away from the pain. I had seen that look before, from my mother, before she had died in the fire.

“You better not be poisoning our meal ticket, or you won’t eat for a week.” Irven said, his speech slurred.

He was drunk again, and he always hurt Brundil when he was drunk. Sometimes I could hear her crying upstairs as the ceiling creaked and he groaned loudly. Other times he would straight up beat her in front of me and the other children in the home, ‘as a reminder,’ he would say.

Today, though, he wasn’t letting it go.

“You tell me what you said, or I swear I’ll make it to where you can’t talk for days.” He narrowed his drunk eyes at her and I lunged out of my room, taking the charcoal pencil with me.

I slammed my body into his side, knocking him against the wall. My shoulder dug into his groin, causing him to double over in pain.

“Why you stupid little shit!” Irven yelled as he collapsed to the ground.

“Run!” I shouted to Brundil, who just stared at the crumpled, dastardly old man.

She was either frozen with fear, or didn’t think what I had done was right, but it didn’t matter, because the next thing I felt was Irven’s hand around my neck, picking me up off the ground.

I struggled to breathe and kicked and flailed wildly, hoping to hit him with one of my limbs, but nothing connected.

“Now you’re gonna learn what happens to little kids who don’t listen to daddy Irven.” His face was contorted with rage as he tossed me like a rag doll across the hall.

My back slammed into the wall and I felt bones in my chest crack.

Breathing was a chore and every breath I took felt like pulling fire into my lungs. But I had to get up. Irven was up and he punched Brundil in the belly, doubling her over.

His strike held nothing back, and she spat up blood as she collapsed to the floor, sobbing.

“No, no!” I shouted, my throat hoarse from the heaving breaths I was taking.

I needed to do something before he beat her to death. Before there was nothing left of the sweet, older woman that tried her hardest to take good care of me.

A fire rose up within me and I found strength in that hatred. I hated Irven.

I hated what he did to poor Brundil. I hated what he did to the other foster children. And I hated what he had done to me.

I grabbed a piece of wood from the floor, a stick one of the children had likely brought in and left, and I rushed Irven.

I stabbed him in the leg with the stick, then quickly carved the symbol for Incineration into his leg.

Now all it needed was a trickle of magical power, and his entire body would go up in flames.

He caught me by the collar of my shirt and lifted me from the ground.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you little bitch?” His breath smelled of alcohol and decay. But as far as I was concerned, he was dead.

I swung at him and missed, spinning myself in the air.

He laughed at me, so I kicked him in the face, knocking out some of his rotten teeth and causing him to drop me to the floor.

“You’re becoming too much trouble, you gutter shite.” Irven said, spitting blood and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

I had crumpled when I fell, my legs giving out, and now I was sitting on the floor, backing up on my hands and feet, trying to get away from the man whose face was so bright red, it looked like the veins in his face would explode.

I intended to make that very thing happen, but I didn’t want to be killed either. And Irven looked fit to kill me for all that I had done.

He picked me up again, but the throat this time, and held me close to his face.

“There’s a plot in the garden for your body, kid. Act up like this again, and I’ll make sure you never get the chance to do it a third time.” He narrowed his eyes at me and I reached out, touching his face.

I released a trickle of magical power, igniting the rune on his leg, causing it to flare to life.

Irven screamed and dropped me again, clenching his leg as flames leapt from the rune, surging up his leg and onto his torso.

His screams carried for what felt like forever as his body slowly burned, the magic eating the flesh and hair of his body, setting it alight as it pulsed through his body.

“What did you do, Grimm!?” Brundil asked, through her sobs.

“I stopped him.” I said, my eyes wide, unebelieving what I had just done.

Irven fell to the ground, his legs burned to ashes and his mouth wide open in a silent scream.

His face was scorched and his eyes had been burned from their sockets.

Nothing remained of the man who had just beaten his wife and myself, aside from a charred partial corpse.

Brundil sat, silent, on the ground, staring at the remains of Irven, as I got up and went to work burying the charred remains.

The garden plot he had intended to put me in instead housed his own burned body, destroyed by the very magic he so greedily desired to sell to the Wizards’ Guild.

I refused to believe that what I had done was wrong, but the way that Brundil looked at me as we shoveled dirt over Irven’s corpse, told me what I had done was horrid.

Just hours ago, Brundil had told me never to use Runic Magic on people, and here I was burying the corpse of her husband, on whom I had used Runic Magic.

“We’ll just tell them he went on a trip and didn’t come back.” Brundil said to herself, her voice hollow and empty. “Yes, that will work just fine.”

“Brundy, he beat you, you should be glad he’s gone.” I said, not believing my own words.

Sure, Irven had beaten us all, he was a horrible foster parent, but he was still the provider for the house. And now that I had killed him, Brundil would have to go to work. Where? She had no skills aside from cooking and cleaning and teaching.

Maybe, though, she could become a local teacher at the Mid-level school in the town. Or, if she were to work really hard, maybe she could become a lecturer at the Wizards’ Academy.

The final shovel of dirt fell onto the patch of earth we used to bury Irven, and I awoke with a start.

“Leese, what time is it?” I cleared my throat and coughed.

I hadn’t had a nightmare from my childhood since I started the madness of the Dungeon Lord business, and they were beginning to become…tedious.

“Time, honestly, is irrelevant, but you have about four hours before the next Raid happens.” Leese’s disembodied voice called out from all around me.

“Ah, yeah, but what about the market?” I asked, wanting to go shopping and get some real food, beverages, and maybe some better armor.

“Well, you can’t really spend Glimmer, and most of your gold is gone, so…” Leese said, appearing in front of me with a spin.

“I still have some, though. I mean, food.” I held out a hand, expressing my intense desire.

“Yes, food, but what about your insane nightmares?” Leese raised an eyebrow, and the way she looked at me sent shivers down my spine.

“What do you mean?” I was taken aback.

“I can see your dreams, Grimm. I’m a part of your implants and such now, since you’re the Dungeon Lord. They’re horrifying. Do you want to talk about them?” Leese sat on the edge of my bed and put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t want to talk about them, no. I do, however, want to get to the market before it closes. Now, what time is it?” I pulled open my interface and checked the World Time, showing that it was 12:17 in the afternoon.

“You should really unpack all of that intense anger and angst, Grimm. One day it’s going to give you an ulcer.” Leese stood up and shrank down to her normal size, then took flight, hovering in front of my face.

“Yeah, I know, I figured. But now, I want something to eat. How in the Underneath do I get to the city from here? Walk out the front door, deal with the wandering monsters, and hope I get to the city within a reasonable amount of time?” I leaned on the edge of my bed and just stared off into the distance. “Sounds like suck.”

“Or you can teleport.” Leese waved her hands in the air and a portal sprang to life.

The blue, shimmering sphere of light took up only a small area, about the size of a normal door, but inside the sphere I could see the market stalls and the people walking around on the stone pathway.

The sounds of the busy market carried over into my small quarters, and I could even smell some of the food the street vendors were cooking. Oh, it all smelled so delicious, and I wanted even more desperately to go.

“Wait, you said I had to walk previously.” I gave Leese a disapproving look, but she blushed and turned away.

“I might have not realized that I could create portals to nearby locations for you. I figured that out while you slept.” Leese answered, looking at the portal. “So, are we going?”

“Yes, absolutely. Manifest the gold so I can carry it with me, and let’s go get us some food. And maybe some armor or something.” I said, holding my hand out.

The gold coins, all two-hundred eighty-two of them, appeared in a pouch in my hand, digitized at first, then becoming solid.

I slipped the purse through a loop in the belt of my armor, and beckoned to Leese.

“Let’s go, Leese.” I picked up the Avatar she had created off the table and plopped it onto my shoulder.

It came to life and the digital image of Leese blended together with the Avatar.

“Ready to roll?” I stepped toward the portal and stopped for a moment. “Wait, am I going to get attacked in this city?”

“I already told you this city is neutral, so you should be totally fine. Granted, if you stab someone in the spine, I can’t guarantee your safety, but you get the idea.” Leese’s Avatar rolled her eyes.

“Right, so don’t stab anyone for no obvious reason. Got it.” I said, stepping through the sphere of shimmering blue light.

The portal itself was somewhat disorienting, as I stepped from the darkness of my bed chamber into the brightness of the sun.

The alleyway I appeared in was narrow and dark, but the sun was still shining down, making it brighter than the Dungeon halls I was now quite used to.

“Wow, it feels good to breathe city air again.” I said, taking a deep breath and walking out of the alleyway.

“Just watch yourself here, okay? Don’t be talking big about being a Dungeon Lord or anything like that.” Leese warned.

“Off to the food wagons.” I said, striding out into the market traffic and immediately getting horribly lost. “Oh, right, this isn’t the Guild City.”

I stepped out of the traffic and looked around, trying to figure out where to go, and what to do.

“Well,” I started, raising my nose to the air and taking a huge sniff, trying to find the smells of the food vendors. “I guess we start with my stomach.”