Prince Calevaro was being pushed back. Partly the pace of the battle had shifted because it was now just him against Thavin, but he was also distracted by what had happened to Ethan Bishop. The man was standing exactly where he’d been struck by the odd power, frozen in place and surrounded by a red-pink glow.
Cal couldn’t guess the true meaning behind what was happening, but put together it had to do with Thavin’s unknown third Bond. Whatever it was seemed to have drained the man, thankfully, as he’d only been cycling between sand and stone since. That wasn’t enough of an advantage to trade an ally for, however, and Cal knew the only path forward was to find a way to get Bishop back in the fight.
A glance into the Astral was all it took to confirm that the attack was of the spiritual nature. Likely it could even have been prevented had the Assassin’s strange Familiar not been so distracted by its own battle. Truly Calevaro couldn’t recall ever having seen such an intense and savage battle as what was going on between the two Spectral monsters.
As he used his powers to move in unpredictable patterns, barely managing to avoid the other prince’s longer reach, Cal worked to formulate a plan to rescue his ally. In the meantime, he could only wonder what had happened to the man.
***
Ethan couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t know if he’d been here for moments or days, as over and over he was forced to relive those terrible moments in the village. Sometimes he was aware of who he was now, and what was happening, other times he was completely consumed by the vision–if that’s what it was–believing himself to truly be living that day.
Regardless, bandits continued to die by his hands. Again and again. The Assassin was unleashed, blinded by his own rage, and lost somewhere between protecting and avenging. His powers were completely unrestrained, and he saw how utterly unprepared normal people were for such a threat as a Bonded Hunter.
He was inside the inn, chasing bandits upstairs, his blades hungry. He was on the street, watching his daggers erupt into pillars of fire. He was passing through rift after rift. His scars burned. The village burned. The bandits ran. None escaped.
It never ended. He never confronted Gunther or went to Glenn, he just kept killing. There were always more bandits, and the tally he couldn’t resist keeping just kept going up, the numbers both staggering and devastating.
Sometimes details would change, but always in the worst ways. He hadn’t recognized any of the bandits on that day, but now he did. They were faces he’d seen around Viridus, in Corvale and the small farming villages. They were the people he knew and said hello to in the morning. The ones who smiled as he walked by. The ones who called him hero after he stopped the undead invasion.
Ethan killed them all. He couldn’t stop himself.
***
Calevaro knew what he had to do, and as with all challenges, it was a matter of will. What would he be willing to risk for his goal? As always, the answer for Cal was simple: everything. His purpose was ultimately singular. He would go out into the world, and claim his destiny. He would find his own power, and he would make the ones who took Kent from him pay.
Everything between now and then was a distraction. Calevaro looked at the mad prince, spinning his halberd with deadly purpose. Cal would remove this distraction.
His Spirit Familiar Zephyr had been with him for years, and was his first Bond. She was a ventus eagle, and her wind powers were as useful as her Spiritual protection. She was the reason that his Bonds were still intact as the Dusk rank Thavin’s Spirit assaulted him relentlessly, without Bishop’s support. With a thought, Cal sent Zephyr away.
She hesitated for the briefest moment, but theirs was a trust born over countless battles. She flew into the fray, disrupting the battle between the two unusual Spectral monsters, and let out a screech and blast of Astral wind that pushed each back. Before either had recovered she launched forward, her talons reaching for Thavin’s Familiar with deadly purpose.
As expected, this left Calevaro defending against stronger Spirit’s attacks by himself, and he felt his Fire Bond struck almost immediately. Pain lanced through him, but he pushed it aside as he kept himself, and his blades ever-moving. He couldn’t see Thavin’s face, but he felt the man’s glee in the way his attacks changed, confidence growing.
The sacrifice had been worth it, however, as Bishop’s strange Familiar seemed to collect itself, then at last noticed its master’s predicament. It flew to him in desperation, hopefully capable of doing something to bring the man back into the fight. Cal just needed it to be quick, as he could feel the pace of the battle changing.
***
Ethan was going numb. In some ways he’d been coming to grips with what had happened this day. He’d even killed again, and felt none of the rage and regret that came before. But he’d also avoided thinking about these terrible moments. He wasn’t ready to examine them, to ask questions. To decide whether his actions had been justified or not. To wonder whether he could have done it differently.
Now his worst day was his whole world, and it simply wouldn’t stop.
He didn’t think there was anything left for him to do, anything to fight, any way to resist. He was simply consumed. The faces didn’t even register to him anymore, it didn’t matter that they were—wait.
A bandit he’d killed had been more than just familiar, though the man died too fast to be sure. Ethan killed again, stabbing someone from behind…but their shape, that stance. He knew who it was.
It kept happening, flashes of someone he recognized, but couldn’t place. Each kill was just a glimpse, a half-remembered glance, but he knew this man. Finally a bandit turned to face him, and as Ethan’s blade went for the kill, it froze.
“Dean?” he whispered.
“Hello, little brother.” Dean smiled, and suddenly he wasn’t a bandit anymore, not just a face or an image superimposed on a memory, but the man he had been when Ethan had last seen him. His hair was more brown than Ethan’s dirty blonde, and he was about an inch taller, but the family resemblance had always been there.
Dean crossed his arms over his chest, standing ramrod straight as always, a smirk on his clean-shaven face. Incongruous to the rural village, Dean was wearing dark jeans and a t-shirt. He looked at Ethan with a mixture of amusement and concern, shaking his head.
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“I can safely say this is not how either of us pictured your life going.”
Somehow Ethan was able to lower his weapon. The impulse he couldn’t fight against a moment ago was the barest whisper now, and he stood back, confused. “You’re not here,” he said. “For so many reasons, you’re not here.”
Dean laughed. “Harsh. It used to be that I was always with you, whispering in your ear when you needed me, or just needed a kick in the ass. Instead of asking why I’m here, how come you don’t ask why you got rid of me?”
It was true. Ethan had relied on his big brother’s words long after he’d lost the man himself. Here on Nexum, and even on Potentia it had been his brother’s reliable presence that had pushed him forward. Not letting him give up. Not letting him break. But Ethan had slowly let that voice go.
“Maybe you weren’t preparing me for an insane magical world full of monsters?” Ethan said. Because what could he say?
“The hell I wasn’t,” Dean shot back. “What part of ‘do your best’, and ‘never give up’ doesn’t apply to this world?”
“Maybe I needed something more than the advice you’d give a twelve year old,” Ethan said, finding himself smiling. It had been a long time since he’d heard his big brother’s actual voice, and memories were flooding back.
“Please. You’ve always needed the same advice. You’re always in your own damn head. Get out of it and move, man. You think my advice was simple because I’m simple? It was simple because you need to be simple!”
“What the hell does that mean?” Ethan said. “My life couldn’t be more complicated!”
“No, you make it complicated. You always have. Look around us? How is this complicated? You saved a town from murderers. That’s the whole story, moron.” He punctuated this point by backhanding Ethan in the shoulder playfully. “You think it’s more complicated because you fought them in a fancy way? Would it have been clean somehow if you had a rifle?”
“No, I…I don’t know. I killed them, that’s what mattered.”
“And I’ve killed worse. You think this is special because you’re in a world with monsters? You always lived in a world with monsters, kid, you just weren’t the one fighting them.”
“So we’re back to this?” Ethan said, an old weariness entering his voice. “This makes you happy, doesn’t it? I’m finally what all of you wished I could be. I’m just like you.”
Dean laughed. “You were never going to be like me, Ethan,” he said in a surprisingly sober tone. “You really think our family doesn’t respect doctors? You honestly believe a bunch of career soldiers have a problem with the people who keep them alive?”
Ethan glared. “Then what the hell was the problem?” he yelled back.
Dean looked at him sadly, then gestured around to the death around them. “Someone who’s just a doctor doesn’t do this, Ethan. You always wanted to deny a part of yourself existed, just to embrace the others. All this, all the pain and guilt is because you’re still doing it. You still think you need to be a killer or a healer.”
“So what, I’m both? It’s that simple? Just accept two contradictory paths in life and everything is fine?”
Dean rolled his eyes. “No, damn it. Stop trying to make yourself into something! Stop trying to be a healer or a killer, a sinner, a saint or a god damned florist! Just be a person! Just be someone who makes choices, and does the best he can with what he has.”
Dean's voice got quiet, and he put a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “Bad stuff happened to you, little brother. Worse stuff is probably going to happen. You can’t live your life trying to put labels on it, or on yourself. All you can do is keep trying to be someone who can get up in the morning and look himself in the mirror.”
Ethan wasn’t sure what to say. He knew some of what his brother was saying was right, and some felt like an oversimplification. But he also knew that he couldn’t survive if he let moments and memories destroy him.
“So what do I do?” he said at last. “I can’t stop the killing.”
“What do you want to do?” Dean asked.
They were outside then, standing over Glenn as he lay on the ground bleeding. “I want to do what I did before,” Ethan whispered, looking down at the dying knight. “I want to be able to stop hurting and actually help someone.” He looked at his scarred right hand, where the rune had been.
“Then do it,” Dean said.
Ethan shook his head. “My rune…”
Dean rolled his eyes. “You never needed a rune back on Earth.”
Something about that made Ethan hesitate. Thinking about home, about the world he’d left behind, maybe forever, made him realize something. With a thought he shifted into the Astral.
The truth of Dean wasn’t a surprise, and Ethan suspected part of him had been aware that the ‘spirit’ before him was created by Tomo, desperately trying to help him. But it was more than that. This was a place of the Astral, just like when he and the demon had communed, and visited Potentia. There was a realness to the place, including the form of his brother.
Dean was dead and gone, but this specter had been conjured from Ethan’s memories, and his connection to home. Looking at the image of his older brother, he saw an energy he’d only been able to examine in one other place. He looked down at the spiritual reflection of his rune, which now existed only in the Astral.
The mark was so different from what it had been. The lines and swirls had been pulled apart and spread down his whole forearm now. The power of Nexum danced and pulsed, and since Ethan’s intervention, the power of Potentia did the same. They were braided together now, alive and waiting.
But there was a third strand holding it back: the piece of Earth. For all Ethan’s familiarity with his home, he’d never seen it in the Astral, never seen how the power of his world’s ‘gift’ worked. And so the rune was dormant, its core frozen and locked.
But now there was this version of Dean, standing before him like a living blueprint of the power that made up that world. Ethan suddenly–and easily–understood it, like reading a language he’d been speaking his whole life. When he looked back down at his shattered rune, the final strand of power came alive, manipulated as easily as any other aspect of Ethan’s well-trained spirit.
The rune was his again.
Ethan reached out with his mind to touch that power, and felt years of memories and knowledge pouring into him. Long nights studying, tedious books and lectures, as well as his time in the hospital, putting it all into practice. He was himself again. He was a doctor.
Dean just smiled, and gestured down at the injured Glenn. Ethan knelt beside the man, not caring he wasn’t real. Glenn had been part of a system that had been used against Ethan, but that didn’t make him a bad person. They’d fought together, laughed together, and been as close to friends as they could be under the circumstances.
Ethan didn’t regret saving the man’s life, even if someone else took it later. He reached down, and placed his hand over the man’s wound. The rune only existed in the Astral now; there was no trace of it on Ethan’s flesh, and he didn’t think it would work in the real world. But this place–whatever strange hell he was trapped in–was also of the Astral, and the rune flared to life.
Ethan found himself grinning as he watched the wound heal. His mind carefully went over the treatment plan, based on his restored medical knowledge, and watched it play out impossibly fast, putting the injured man back together. He looked up at Dean, seeing his brother smiling as well.
“Nice work, Doctor.” He leaned forward, still smiling, but with a serious glint to it that Ethan remembered from too many lectures. “Now move your ass, Bishop!”
Suddenly Ethan was back in the arena, looking at Cal and Thavin fighting nearby. “Thanks Dean,” he whispered.
Then Doctor Ethan Bishop went to fight a monster.