9th of Zund, 322 A.D., Kingdom of Arabist

It thundered. Ash waved the memory away and yanked the doors open. They didn’t budge. Cursing, he pushed them instead of pulling and entered the dark hall. Somewhere in the back of it was a woman, her face obscured by shadows. Not even the occasional flash of lightning revealed anything more than the helm of her lush dress.

“You’ve found me.”

“So, I have.”Ash nodded.

“Any questions?”

“Not really. I’ve figured it out.”

“Really now?”

Chuckling, she rose from her chair and took a step forward. Heels clicking on the marble floor, she emerged from the darkness. Another flash of lightning revealed the face of the marquis’s younger sister.

“You realized it when you slept with me, didn’t you?”

“You poor thing...” He smirked. “You don’t know, do you? You, just like everyone else, are nothing but a doll in this little play.”

The young woman snarled, baring her fangs. Ash’s face immediately lost its childlike innocence and became an emotionless mask. The poor woman didn’t know that before her stood one of the most notorious mages on the entire Continent. Then again, trapped in this cursed place, how could she have known?

“I asked you a question, boy,” she growled.

“A moment,” Ash said and took a look at the note he had written on his hand. “Yes.”

“Bastard!” she screamed; her voice devoid of anything human. “You’re all the same! Men! My brother, the traitor, he was the same! But he... Thank the Gods that he came! He showed me the truth! He gave me strength! He gave me power!”

Her features changed as she spoke. Her skin cracked, flooding the floor with blood. Her dress burst at the seams, her spine twisted, and her face, stretching and morphing, turned into a snarling snout full of sharp teeth.

Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance. Lightning flashed, and rain drummed against the windows, beating to some unknown melody.

A monster stood in front of Ash. Tul was wrong, it looked nothing like a bear, more like a cross between a human and a beast. Eight feet tall, with powerful paws adorned with claws the size of a saber, and foam dripping from its snarling maw. Red eyes shone with madness and bloodlust.

Howling, the werewolf lunged at the mage, covering the distance of twenty feet in one fell swoop. Ash took the blow with his staff, but the beast didn’t so much as growl when its fur caught flame. Just licked its paws, putting the fire out. There was too much rage in it. Too much sorcery.

Ash twisted and shoved the beast aside. It fell on all fours, claws glittering with gold.

“It must be getting ready to use some spell,” Ash thought as he raised his staff. “First Form: Incarnation!”

Seven fiery petals burst out of the wood and hid underneath the werewolf’s fur. The smell of burnt flesh and hair filled the air, but the beast didn’t seem to feel pain. The spell was too weak to wound it but had Ash used anything stronger he would’ve probably made the castle collapse, burying everyone who was in it.

The werewolf leaped at him with a howl and scratched his left arm, turning the sleeve red. Whatever skill it had used, it managed to only scratch him as he got away.

Ash realized that if he continued to play cat and mouse, he might get killed. He had no other choice but to kill the werewolf before he became its next meal.

As if it heard his thoughts, the beast turned to him and leaped once again. However, this time, Ash counter attacked. The strike was so strong that it threw the werewolf away with a broken jaw and a couple of teeth missing. It crashed into the wall, breaking the masonry, and disappeared under the debris.

Ash stood still with his staff raised. His eyes and skin were red, and veins the color of magma. The Third Form was Unity, one that only skilled mages could use. In this form, fire filled every cell of the cultivator’s body with its power. With it, one could pierce a steel shield with the slightest of hits.

But Ash, a Master, was capable of far more than that.

Kicking off and leaving a dent in the floor, Ash jumped so high that he reached the domed ceiling of the hall.

“First Form: Incarnation!” he yelled as he plummeted down like a stone.

The beast stuck out its golden claws. It could cut stone like it was paper with them, the mage and his stick stood no chance against its strength.

Crimson collided with gold.

“Impossible!” the beast’s eyes said as flames turned its claws into molten ash, burning through the marble beneath.

The fight was over.

It was brief and simple, but that was how it should’ve been. A foolish girl using borrowed power couldn’t compete with a talented mage.

Ash let go of the fire. His eyes were azure again and skin sun-kissed. The fire also faded away, leaving behind the sound of bells ringing somewhere in the distance. The curse had been broken. It, like the stained-glass window in the shards of which the morphing girl lay, shattered into million pieces. Only mages could hear its cries as it was exiled to the depths from which it had come.

“Two... Forms... Impossible...” The girl coughed as she assumed her human form. “Who... are you?”

“Your murderer.”

He sat next to her and, lifting her head, placed it in his lap. Tears rolled down the young girl’s face, staining his pants. With trembling hands, she tried to cover her wound and stop the bleeding despite knowing that her attempts were in vain. “He tricked me,” she sobbed. “I’m going to die... All because of him...”

“No,” Ash said. “You will die because you were a fool and because there’s evil in your heart. You’ll die because you chose to.”

Light flashed for the last time in the girl’s eyes.

“Damn you,” she croaked, breathing her last breath.

Her hands dropped to her sides. Empty eyes stared into nothingness. Ash put his hand on her face, pulled down her eyelids, and got up. He walked away without looking back, knowing that he did what had to be done.

“Such is fate,” he thought, placing his hand on the aching left side of his chest.

Morning of the same day

“So, it was the sister’s fault,” Blackbeard mused.

The group was going in the direction of Zadastra, a town bordering the Forest of Shadows, the last hotbed of civilization, beyond which only the most dangerous and vile creatures roamed.

“I don’t get it,” Lari said. “She loved her brother so much... I was sure that the mother was the culprit...”

“You’re all blind,” Mary said, patting her horse. “Her father didn’t care about her. Her mother ignored her. Her brother was her only family... And then this baroness came and captured everyone’s attention. Jealousy combined with the sweet nothings that the stranger she had mentioned to Ash whispered to her... It’s strange that we hadn’t noticed it sooner.”

“Though, I don’t get why she kept kidnapping people... And why always in pairs...”

“Yeah, that’ll remain a mystery it seems...”

“Oh, oh, I know! I know!”

No one was surprised to see Ash waving his hand enthusiastically as if he was a student trying to catch his teacher’s attention. Mary gave him a stern look but nodded.

“Everything has its reasons,” Ash muttered. “People are not born werewolves; they become werewolves on a full moon. Thanks to spells, the castle was under the influence of the full moon every night.”

“Explain to me then why there were so many corpses in the castle,” Mary said.

“There were a lot of werewolves in the castle.” Ash winked.

“What do you mean?”

“The food was mixed with poison that turned every guest at night into a werewolf. People would lose their humanity during the period when they were in the guise of a werewolf. In addition, no one knew that they, too, had turned into a monster. They thought that everyone else was a monster. Having met each other, people in the guise of werewolves began to fight and then killed each other. That’s corpses always came in pairs.”

“So that’s why the victims had such deep wounds. What happened to the Ternits then?”

Ash shrugged. “Simple, the young marquise was supposed to kill everyone who wore the coat of arms of the detachment. She carried them to the cellar, where they died. In the same place, she hid for those twelve hours, during which she was in the guise of a werewolf.”

“When you changed your toast,” Mary muttered. “She shuddered. She remembered everything that had come before.”

“Bingo!” Ash grinned.

“A lot of things still don’t make sense,” Lari said. “Why did you sleep with her? How did you even come up with this plan? And how the hell did you defeat a werewolf on your own? Wait... Is that why you didn’t eat with us?! You knew about the potion?!”

“A mage never reveals his secrets!” he replied with a grin.

The Stumps rolled their eyes. Mary slapped her forehead so hard that it left a mark. Ash just laughed. He hadn’t done that in quite some time... Not since the night that his entire Legion was killed.

What the Stumps didn’t know was that somewhere in a castle at the foot of the Fire Mountain, a real monster was trashing about. Was it afraid that its trap didn’t work? Or was something else on its mind?

Well, that’s a story for another time.