MAGUS INFINITE

The first thought that entered my head was that I had failed my World Quest, but I had seen the power of the Pale Matron, and I was not strong enough to suppress her yet... the quest was to stop her from rising, so clearly I was not meant to kill her, not unless I was strong enough to reach past Transcendence.

I was back in front of the vat that had imprisoned me for three months, in the second temporal anchor, and the world was frozen around me. The knight who wanted to take my head floated behind me, effortlessly held up by my domain.

However, my mind was not focused on what was around me, as my thoughts kept dwelling on one thing... the cold pragmatism of Sovereign Caldus Thorne that would condemn an entire continent to die, just to flush out the enemy.

In the short time I was with him, he had given his reasons, and with his charisma and power, the edge of my fury had been dulled... it was not an easy thing to stand in front of a Sovereign and feel the full focus of their attention.

Before the loop, I had not had many reasons to think about evil and all the forms it took. I was too busy with learning magic and understanding the world to think about such ephemeral and distant concepts.

Sure, I knew of evil, but it was almost a cartoonish sort of evil, and up until the loop, the only time I had seen the face of evil was in the face of the most beautiful woman I had seen in my life.

The funny thing was that up till this moment, I had never seen a more beautiful woman.

She had lured travelers to their death with her beauty, faking an injury or a felled cart with a broken wheel. So many had seen her beauty and stopped to help, men, women, even children.

What they had received from being proper human beings was the edge of the blade from her husband and his band of goons.

When she was about to be executed, she did not appear apologetic for what she did; she just seemed to accept her fate, and after thinking about this for a while, I understood that she understood that what she was doing was wrong and knew the consequences if she was caught, but she did it anyway.

This operation had been going on for years, and she and her husband had killed nearly seventy people.

She and her husband were mortals, and even if they were evil, the damage they could unleash on the world, even though it was horrifying, was ultimately very limited, but for a mage, this was something else entirely.

It did not seem right that the more power you gained, the less the concept of good and evil began to apply to you.

I say this because of something terrifying that was happening to my soul. Two loops ago, I had butchered millions as a Death Titan, and my soul had been scarred by the weight of all those dead.

These scars hurt, since they were etched into my soul with a branding I would never forget, and I did not want to forget, but life was unfair, even when you want to live with the result of your actions.

As I began the second round of crystallizing my soul, those scars... were fading.

I had killed millions, fathers, mothers... babies. Without the loop, I would be a monster that would frighten a generation, but the purity of my Anima was washing these scars away, making me pure.

I did not need to check my status screen to see that the Scarred Soul was no longer in effect, and I was confused and a bit terrified.

Is this the reason Sovereigns no longer cared about actions that shattered the world, why they could weigh the lives of millions against the abstract concept of clarity and find the scales balanced? Did they simply... forget what it felt like to care? When did evil begin to apply to us?

What did the Sovereign tell me, ”You are a child; what do you know? Power like yours should not be in the hands of a child; you should have lived for centuries, and the true realities of life should have been opened to you before you held this power, but it is not your fault.”

Did this mean that if, say, I was centuries old, and my parents, sister, and most of the people I knew were dead, would I be looking at the world in a different way?

I thought about Sovereign Caldus Thorne. Three thousand years of watching, waiting, calculating. He had seen empires rise and fall. He had buried friends and watched students fall to corruption. He had done nothing, because doing something would have cost more than doing nothing. And now, when the world was burning, he felt relief.

”I am not okay with the deaths,” he had said. ”I am not okay with the destruction, or the demons, or the suffering. But I am okay with the war.”

I had hated him for that. I still hated him for that. But I also understood him.

He had been alive for so long that the lives of individuals had become statistics. He had seen so much death that the death of a million was just a number. He had felt so much grief that he had learned to set it aside, to file it away, to let it fade.

And now, my soul was doing the same thing to me.

The scars were fading, and with them, the weight of what I had done. I could feel myself becoming lighter, cleaner, and purer. The guilt that had been pressing down on me for two loops was dissolving, and I did not know if I was being healed or if I was being broken in a way that I would not understand until it was too late.

I closed my eyes, and I thought about the beautiful woman in the square, who had accepted her fate with a calm that had haunted me for years.

She had understood what she was doing. She had known it was wrong. And she had done it anyway.

Was that what I was becoming? A being who understood right and wrong, but who had been alive so long that the distinction no longer mattered?

I opened my eyes and looked at the frozen world around me. The knight was still suspended in the air, his blade still swinging toward my neck, and near my face, a single drop of blue fluid was still hanging in the dead air, frozen in the instant of its fall.

I had been given a gift. The second temporal anchor was a place of stillness, a place where I could think and plan, where I could become something more than I had been without the weight of the Pale Matron’s rise pressing on my consciousness. The world far below me was burning, but in this place, there was silence, and I held it close to me.

I miss Aurora, even the Hollow Avatar; they would have been here with simple words of clarity that would show me the light through this madness.

Still, I knew that I had been given a warning. The scars were fading, and with them, the memory of what I had done. If I was not careful, I would become like Sovereign Caldus, a being who could watch the world burn and feel only relief.