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He could have struck back of course, but he wanted to talk to Kaylee, and she could have easily been hurt in the crossfire. So for now he played defense. Lets the waves crash against his invisible fortification. They raged hot enough to light the wood on either side of him on fire, but thanks to his magic he didn’t even feel the heat.

Instead, he simply stood there, and when the tide of fire receded, he said, “There, now can we talk about this?”

The only answer of his opponent was to shout the word twice more. The second time, he bolstered his shield, but only a little. This man clearly lacked any real power or imagination. When his voice cracked on the second attempt, and he started coughing up blood, he also showed he had very little in the way of stamina either.

How long has it been since three basic words would have done that to me? Simon said, reflecting, even as the basement was on fire on both sides of him.

There had been a time, so long ago that he barely remembered it, that two greater words would always reduce him to a painful hoarseness. That was in the past, though. Today, he suspected that the pain came at least as much from failing to pronounce or understand the word correctly as from actually channeling more power than you could handle. That was a lesson he was only slowly learning with time.

“Say the word,” the coughing man said to his companions. “Say it! He’s weakening! If we all say it together!” As he tried to convince his allies to attack him, Simon chuckled at the idea that he was the one weakening and whispered “Aufvarum Gelthic” to smother the flames with the lesser word of ice before they could burn out of control and cause serious damage to the place.

That shocked the assembled group visibly. “Listen,” Simon said again. “The words of power are cursed, and you damn your soul to use them. Surender and I will ensure that you’re treated fairly by the law. I—”

Simon stopped talking as soon as he saw everyone’s temperament change. When he’d been talking about damnation, he was clearly winning them over. They obviously believed that much. It was the notion that there was any justice to be waiting for them at the hands of their betters that they found to be ridiculous.

He didn’t have time to formulate another argument, let alone time to figure out where they’d learned such a destructive word. He couldn’t even contemplate the fact that fire seemed to be far and away the most common word out there. Instead, he raised his defenses.

As one, almost everyone in the group assaulted him with a new wave of fire. “Gervuul Karesh Uuvellum Meiren,” he said very clearly, bringing an even stronger wall to deal with such an assault. He’d never faced a group of spellcasters before, so he erred on the side of caution and used a greater word to hold back the inferno.

It was certainly enough to make him regret his earlier overconfidence, though. He’d never cast a spell as long as that one and almost always used one word or two, and he felt the burn immediately. He wasn’t sure it was drawing more of his life than a normal greater word, but the complexity pulled at his mind and his throat in ways that were more painful than usual. He’d thought that he could keep this up all day, but that was turning out not to be the case.

Still, nothing they were doing was showing any signs of weakening his spell. The concert of flames roared like a typhoon against him, but no amount of power could cross a line that had been defined so boldly. The only way to make it more powerful would have been to carve the thing into the stone in a sort of reverse summoning circle.

For a moment, he allowed his mind to wander and wonder if that would actually drain less or more from him than saying the words. However, as soon as the flames started to slacken, he drew his sword and focused on whatever was going next.

As it turned out, though, he probably wouldn’t need it. Most of the would-be mages were already wounded or dead. Some lay on the ground, coughing up blood, and others were horribly burned. They clearly hadn’t given much thought to what would happen if they released so much heat in such a contained area. Simon muttered a few words to smother the flames before the smoke became a problem, and then he moved toward Kaylee.

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She was on the ground and obviously wounded, so he was done trying to play nice. A couple of the men still had the strength to menace him with weapons, and Simon didn’t hesitate to cut them down. While he still wasn’t at full strength, they were no match for him.

After that, everyone who was capable ran for their lives, and he let them go. Those who weren’t visibly burned were already scared by this experience in other ways, and once the guards came for them, he doubted that any of them would survive.

Kaylee, who was already on the ground, she was burned pretty badly on her left side. To him, it looked like whoever had been standing next to her practically exploded rather than trying to use his will to direct the fire.

Just looking at her suffering was enough to make him feel bad for her. So, after he carried her some distance from the others to a darkened corner, and despite the strain he’d already put on himself, he whispered, “Gervuul Hyakk,” and practically erased her would with a greater word of healing. It wasn’t perfect, and he could do nothing about her burned hair or dress with any of the words that he knew, but she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her days being disfigured, at least.

“Why did you do this?” he asked, taking off his mask as she finally looked up at him with clear eyes. “You didn’t just plan a massacre, but you worked with warlocks? Don’t you understand how insanely dangerous that is?”

“Simon?” she asked, confused. “How… Why? You can’t be here.”

“And yet I am,” he nodded. His throat was still sore, but he ignored it. After this, he was going to be on a nice relaxing boat cruise for the better part of the week, so he’d have plenty of time to recover. “So talk.”

“But you haven’t aged…” she said, “Well, maybe a little, but it’s been more than two decades…”

“Good genes,” he lied. “I get that from my mother’s people.”

“But why didn’t you help us?” She asked, tears welling in her eyes. “If you have all this power, then you must know… you must. They were so cruel to us, to Eddek and I. For what they did to him, there can be no answer but violence.”

“I don’t,” he answered, “but I wish I did. Tell me, and maybe I can fix it. I just know that violence isn’t the answer.”

“It… isn’t the answer?” she asked in confusion before she looked around and laughed. “How can you, of all people, say that Simon? Violence was the answer against the owlbear and the troll you said you were off to fight. It was certainly the answer you used in this basement today.”

“If you killed everyone up there today, I promise you that worse people would replace them,” he explained to her. “You think that these men would have created a better ruling class?”

“We wanted to create a country without rulers. We wanted to be free!” she said with a look of wide-eyed passion. “And you’ve ruined it.”

“Trust me,” he sighed, “if I’m here, nothing good was about to happen. That’s the way this works.”

This was the first time he’d run across something like democracy in the Pit, even conceptually. He didn’t remember a whole lot from his history classes, but Simon was pretty sure that early attempts were usually bloody affairs that didn’t end well. Right now he didn’t care about any of that. He just wanted information.

“Oh?” she asked. “I always thought of you as a hero of yore. Are you just a harbinger of terrible things to come? An albatross?” she asked plaintively, getting more aggressive with each moment, but he really wasn’t sure what to tell her or even what he could tell her. “I see what you are now. You’re no different than the rest of them. You were just going to hold us down like they did!”

“Kaylee,” Simon said. “Please calm down.”

He could hear that they were running out of time. The door to the basement hadn’t opened yet, but people were definitely stomping around upstairs, and any second now, the guards would come for them. They wouldn’t be looking for innocents, either.

“Calm? I am calm. I know what you are,” she said, leaning forward to whisper something in his ear. “You’re, Mei—”

Simon sensed the betrayal coming, but he waited until she actually said the first syllable before he seized her by the throat. He held her there so tightly that she couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. Even then, he would have tried to reason with her, though. Was that because this was all somehow his fault because he’d had a hand in bringing her to this fork in the road? He wasn’t sure, but before he could figure out what to say next, the guards burst through the door.

Simon dumped her off his lap then and bolted toward the door on the far wall before she could blast him. She didn’t disappoint, either.

The flames licked at him in his wake, and though he heard her cry out that terrible word twice, only the first time was aimed at him. The second time, it was followed by the guards coming down the stairs, who screamed instead.

It’s not my problem anymore. That’s what he tried to tell himself as he sheathed his sword, opened the door to the Sea Seraph, and then quickly closed it behind him.

Somehow, those words did nothing to make him feel better. Had he done everything he could to save her? No. Had he let her down in any major way? Not that he could think of. He’d given her every chance to turn from the darkness. He would have gladly brought Kaylee with him, and away from whatever terrible situation it was that she found herself in, if only her presence wouldn’t have been a constant knife, waiting to betray him.