If I was in the study, it would have been nicer. If I was being truthful with myself, then I would say that while there was pain and while there was a sense of being punished and tortured, it was something that I was starting to almost understand and accept.

Tonight wasn’t the same. I was standing in a field in the daylight, and Sam was next to me.

He said, “you wanted to know where your class memories came from. They come from those who are before and are no more. Not like racial memories that you know of from your world, these are different and are born from intent. This is where your power imbuing memories come from.”

With that, I started to remember or relive while watching at the same time a man standing in the field holding a rock. He was me, and also, I was seeing him from where I stood.

I both knew what was going on because I remembered it and was living it because I was him doing it. He was or is that I remembered and is because he was me, a wild human; his hands and mine, his thoughts and power mine; but I had no control but felt his will and my will were the same.

I was him but also was remembering him and not him like watching a play I had been in but also that was currently doing.

He was playing with the strands of mana. It was a thick blue string that was both light and matter but also was entirely not there. He was smiling as he was moving it like a child would a string on a blanket.

The thing was, I could tell what he was doing was wrong. I understood how mana moved because I had the power Imbuing skill and also Ritualistic spell casting.

He didn’t have a place for the mana to go; he was just playing with it like it was a toy. He was also drawing more and more, which would cause an overcharge; if he didn’t have a way to discharge the mana, then he would injure himself.

I was him as I felt the mana overcharge his reservoir. This wasn’t something that I had ever felt before, as I was always using mana that I was trying to charge. I never let it come back into me.

I felt my reservoir, or perhaps his, expand, and then I felt it catch fire as my arms were burning from the inside. My eyes saw mana moving across them like lighting in a plasma globe. At the same time, I remember dying and screaming and saw my body his body explode.

I was screaming myself, but I couldn’t because Sam had locked me in place. I exploded while the other guy did and died all while watching. While locked in place, the seasons changed rapidly like Rod Taylor saw in the Time Machine. Faster and faster, they changed until I saw someone walk up to where I died and picked up my skull.

I was him, not the one who died but the one holding my skull, well, not mine anymore. I remembered feeling the power in the skull. I recalled wanting to know how it was there and all I did with it to try to do it again. I wish that I didn’t remember any of it.

I took the skull back with me to a cave. Where I started to pull on the mana from the skull and saw that I could remove it. I then noticed that mana would grow back in the skull now that it had been put in once.

I lived the next forty years of this man’s life as he dug up people who died and tried to put mana into them. He started with leaving the bones piled over the Power Skull, and that worked some but not enough to matter.

Then he started to try to push mana in but wasn’t moving it in the right ways. He didn’t understand what he needed to do to make the mana stay. So he gave up on dead people and started to capture people and fry them with mana, hoping to repeat what he had found.

I felt all his desire for power and his thoughts that what he was doing was right. I was his greed, his lust. The number of people he killed kept growing until, at last, he was able to push enough mana into a person as they were dying to get a reaction.

It wasn’t the one that he was looking for, and from the child he had killed by shoving mana into them, he created a Zombie.

My joy at a new creation was extreme, as was my disgust at what he was doing. My memories and his were like two colors of sand in a jar. The more we were shaken, the more we merged.

It was a brutal rest of his life as he was working on imbuing mana into bones. I created; he created a massive army of undead animals and wild humans and raised a kingdom that took a year to ride across.

After he had spent sixty years trying to imbue power, he felt that he was dying of old age, so he tied to make himself into a zombie by pushing power into himself. He wanted to see if he could do to himself, now that he was almost dead, what I had done to others.

He was the first Lich. He turned himself using the magic he made to raise zombies into a zombie, but he did it while creating a Loop of power, which he had never done with the zombies.

He felt that his body now could charge and hold more mana, and he saw what he needed to do to create even more storage. So he started with bones and found that he could put magic into them. This was small at first, and then the amount he could put in grew the more complete the skeleton was.

I learned that with a complete skeleton, I could put 20 mana in. I also knew that with an entire skeleton, I had a new minion.

It was another hundred years before I remembered my death. It was nice to see the guy get cut down. He was horrible; the amount of pain he caused was tremendous.

Whole forests had been burned, and cities razed. Families were killed for tests and then for war. All he wanted was power, and in the end, it was the wild humans that killed him.

A new spell had been made that hurt the undead. It took time, but they were able to cut him off from his armies, and then he was cut down. His body was no more significant than that of a zombie. His power was his army, not himself.

I felt the warrior’s stone hammer crush my arms and legs. I felt myself try to heal, and then my chest was crushed. I felt my bones shatter and mana pour out of me as the power in my bones caught fire with magic. I felt all my nerves light up in all the wrong ways. Then I felt death close in on me.

I could not die because I was a zombie, but I felt fear of being killed by magic as the Shaman cast a spell. Then I felt pain and peace and was no more.

The Shaman that was with the group that killed him picked up both the first skull and the body of the Lich. He said that the skull needed to be returned to rest, and the Lich needed to be made to rest as well.

The Lich had taken notes of everything he did, and so the Shaman looked through them and saw how to raise the dead and turn them into zombies and skeletons and also how to make power imbued bones.

The Shaman took that knowledge and created rune stones for spells, and from there, his apprentice created power stones. Of course, his apprentice also became a Lich and trained other dark mages, and started the whole thing again.

The next thing I knew, I was in Sam’s study. I wanted to throw up because of all the evil I did. Not just with the first Lich but with the second set as they all learned to imbue power.

The evil that they did to gain the power they had was great. Imbued power was tainted in my mind. It was created with pain and from corruption. Not at first; that was just dumb unlucky.

Sam said, “your memories because you’re broken are all the memories of the skills and how they come. You access them as you use skills and they come to you to show you what to do. Others don’t have this but because you somehow forgot who you should be you’re remembering what all went into making you.”

I woke up sweating and crying and ran out of my house screaming. I threw up in a bush and tried to wash myself clean. I scrubbed my body with sand and yelled and cried for the death that I remember enjoying causing and the pain I caused.

I had thought that I hated Sam before because of what all he had done to me in the past. Now I wasn’t sure if I would ever be at peace again because of him. I went and laid back down on my bed and cried myself to a fitful sleep. I even pushed Blink away when she tried to see what was wrong.