Chapter 63

It’s a dark night tonight. Tonight’s the start of a new moon cycle which means it’s darker outside right now than every other night this month. The burning torches sparsely hung outside of the taverns which line both sides of this street don’t do much to alleviate this darkness, but they do attract the drunks like moths to a flame.

We already know where we’re headed and as long as we follow the path we’ve planned out, we’ll reach our destination momentarily. When we see the house right in front of us, we slip into the alleyway next to it, the rats dispersing in fear. When the beggars see us, they turn their eyes away, afraid to draw our attention unto themselves. When the patrolling city guards spot us, they ignore us and pretend they didn’t see a thing. Unspeakable things happen every night in the shadows of this city; the less you see, the better off you’ll be. Hey, that rhymed.

Wraine gets to work on the back door while I keep an eye on our surroundings. Olin’s right next to me, his right hand tightly grasped around the grip of my old shortsword I lent him, his knuckles bone white from how hard he’s clutching that sword. He’s a nervous wreck but considering this is only his second ever job, I don’t blame him. I sort of wanted to do this without Olin needing to be here, but since this is for his revenge, Bertrand said he should be present throughout the whole thing. Also, Olin needs more experience with this type of work as members of Candle can’t be squeamish towards blood.

Olin actually already passed his test with Angelene guiding him a few days ago and he’s officially a part of Candle in the Dark now. He’s spent nearly a month with us already and we’ve gotten to know him pretty well during that time. Based on his personality, he fits in with Candle’s moral standards pretty well and once you get past his cold, technical way of speaking, he’s a pretty good guy. The type of person that will go off on tangents for hours when he’s talking about subjects he’s interested in, mostly about magic, but he’ll speak with anyone and everyone enthused the whole time. Sort of like a child, but that childishness is what I like about him.

Unfortunately, his test to join Candle involved rescuing another child from the ledger we retrieved from Jerome and that’s when he had to kill for the first time. Luckily for him, Angelene doesn’t have as much malice inside of her like Bertrand and Quinn apparently do and didn’t force Olin to torture his targets. A quick stab to the heart and it was over for them, lucky bastards.

Angelene told us Olin’s face was white as a bedsheet afterwards but he recovered well enough. The child was turned over to Priestess, erm, Director Emerelda, and they’ll be taken care of at the orphanage. When I saw the child in person, I did feel a tinge of guilt inside me but it wasn’t as vitriolic as when I saw Mary. I can only put my trust into Emerelda now and hope she doesn’t turn out to be another Jerome.

Tonight isn’t about any sort of test or anything like that. Tonight’s strictly about righting a wrong and Olin was the one who was wronged. When Wraine has the back door lock picked, we quietly head inside. The back door leads into the house’s kitchen and the moment we’re inside, we carefully shut the door behind us. The entire building is dead silent and all I can really hear is my own breathing.

When Wraine sees me waving at him, he grabs the brightstone in a box from his pack and slides it open a sliver, illuminating the whole kitchen. There’s a wooden table in the center of the kitchen with five wooden chairs around it. There’s wooden cupboards all around the kitchen, probably filled with the family’s food. The wooden floor under our feet looks old and worn with deep scratches from years of use.

There’s a rustic, stone stove in the back left corner of the kitchen with a small stack of dry firewood next to it. Even without any food being cooked in it right now, I can still smell a lingering scent of what the family had for dinner tonight. A bit of pork and bread it seems. How can a family supposedly living honest lives afford pork and bread regularly for dinner in this city? The answer: they can’t.

We head into the next room which looks like the family’s living room. There isn’t much here aside from a low table with two benches for seats. When we reach the staircase, we start heading upstairs while trying to keep as quiet as possible. There’s a few rooms on the second floor but we’re only heading towards the master bedroom. The door isn’t locked and we’re able to slip inside the room without making too much noise.

On the other end of the room is a huge bed with green covers. There’s two people sleeping in the bed and we’ll need to take care of them both at the same time, otherwise there’ll be trouble. Gesturing with my hand, I take out my sword and a gagging cloth before approaching the sleeping woman.

When Wraine’s next to the sleeping man, he looks towards me for the countdown and when my fingers reach one, we both shove the gags into our respective targets’ mouths and clamp our hands over them while bringing our swords close to their necks. When the woman and the man wake up, they initially try to thrash around and scream but only muffled grunts come out and when they feel the cold sting coming from our iron blades being held against their throats, they quickly stop struggling.

We quickly get their arms and legs tied up with the ropes we brought and sit them upright on the side of their bed. Wraine gets to work as he searches their room for any valuables while I keep watch over the couple. I doubt they can get loose and even if they do, I doubt they’d be able to put up a fight against us but with what happened last time when we were robbing Midriver’s Finest, I’ve learned you can never be too careful.

Wraine quickly finds where they keep their valuables in a wooden lock box kept in one of their drawers. He shoves it into his pack and makes his way over to where I’m standing. Olin’s still lingering around the bedroom’s doors and it doesn’t look like he’s comfortable with what we’re doing with all the fidgeting he’s doing. Might as well start now. I put on the biggest smile I can and put away my sword before taking out the interrogation kit Bertrand made me buy for 20 silver.

“Good evening. I hope the both of you had a good rest before we so rudely disturbed you during your peaceful slumber. Now, allow me to introduce myself and my associates. My name is Isaac and I’ll be the one to take care of the both of you tonight. This is Wraine and his role tonight is to make sure everything goes smoothly. That one over there is someone you should be familiar with. Olin, be a dear and come over here please. Olin’s role tonight is to watch the people who murdered his parents be tortured and witness their deaths.

“Oh, please stop struggling, it’s pointless. Wraine and I made sure to bind those ropes as best as we could since we were taught a harsh lesson the last time we made a mistake with the ropes. Now Olin, this is your one opportunity to get out what’s been on your mind since your parents’ deaths. There’s no judgment here, there’s no one to stop you, do whatever you want to them, say whatever you want to them, and then put your demons to rest after tonight. Nothing will leave this room.”

It feels like I’m treating Olin like a child which is weird considering he’s older than me by quite a bit but I really can’t shake that notion. He still acts and behaves like a child sometimes but is that really so strange? Up until a few months ago, when his parents were still alive, he was still an ordinary child without many worries in the world and now he’s been thrust headfirst into a cruel and vicious world without any warning. Just like how Wraine and I were. Now that I think about it, maybe he’s the normal one and we’re the abnormal ones. Even now when I look upon this terrified middle aged couple and know I’ll be torturing them in inhuman ways before ending their miserable lives in the end, I don’t feel a thing. That is peculiar, isn’t it?

Olin steps in front of his parents’ murderers and doesn’t say anything. It looks like he’s sorting through what he wants to say or perhaps he’s reminiscing. He starts murmuring abruptly as though he’s speaking his thoughts as they pop into his head, “They weren’t the best parents. They’d yell at me sometimes but it was rare for them to hit me. Ever since I was a child, I knew I was strange. I was always the odd one out because I could see things no one else could and that difference made my life much more difficult than it needed to be. But my parents never gave up on me.

“They always told me I was special and that one day I’d find my true calling. When they figured out I had mana sight, they became ecstatic and worked every day to their bones so that they could afford having me take The Institute’s exam. They were good people and they were good parents. But you took them away from me.”

Olin’s voice starts breaking as he tries his best to suppress his emotions by clearing his throat before he continues, “They trusted you- we trusted you. When it felt like the world was crashing down on us, you held out your hands to us and found us a place to stay. I can’t even begin to describe how grateful my parents felt towards the two of you. When I-”

Olin pauses to wipe away his tears. Wraine gives him a pat on the back and nods at him when Olin turns to look at him. Olin nods back and keeps going through his tears, his voice hoarse and cracking, “When I came back to our home from The Institute that day, you have no idea how excited I was to share my joy with my parents. I found out I was exceptionally talented with magic and I had an above average capacity for mana. I had decent affinities for the four orthodox elements but most importantly, I had an outstanding affinity for the irregular nature category of magic. I can still remember how happy I felt when I found out.”

Olin stops to take a deep breath before he starts again but I can see something else now past his red, teary eyes. Anger. Up until this point he’s been narrating all of this pretty flatly without a hint of anger but I can tell it’s there now. “I was finally going to tell them all their efforts in raising me were about to finally pay off. But you took that from me. You took everything from me.

“Even now, Paige wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, because of you. Because of what you did. Every day we lived in the slums, she’d get weaker and weaker with each passing day. She lost her will to live and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it. All I could do was watch over her and pray to every god out there that she wouldn’t die. My little sister. All I could do was hope and pray my little sister didn’t die every time I took my eyes off of her. Do you know how miserable I felt? How helpless I felt? I had a thought back then. I thought if Paige died, what use, what purpose did I still have in this life? I couldn’t think of one. Now? Now I’m going to be the one who takes everything away from you.”