It took two years of endless effort, repeated failure and countless drops of spilled blood to be able to say that I had mastered everything the coven had to offer. That time saw Star's flight from the coven for unknown reasons, the perpetuation of my tragic companionship with Miles, and many murders. There are far too many of the latter for me to remember them all. But I must clear my conscience of as much of these horrific crimes as I can. And so I confess:
Shortly after Miles “joined” our coven, I was told that I would have to feed him. At first, I insisted on draining my own blood to sate his needs, but soon found that these needs were too great to sustain with my own life force. Samson insisted that if I were to have any reasonable hope of increasing my power, I would have to stop and allow him to feed on someone else. I can only partially assuage my regret by admitting that my first victim had at least deserved to die. That month, a bandit rode south from Heron into our country with a pack of fierce brigand followers. They rode through the towns of Ridge and Foldo in a primal frenzy, committing the heinous acts that most would attribute to mountain bandits. Who could blame me for feeding him and his ilk to my blood thrall?
It is a spellwarrior's duty to handle such problems, but they were entangled in another controversy that stirred panic in the south. While I defied the gods for abandoning me to suffer at Maula's hands, those very same hands were closing over the rest of the kingdom. It was curious to me, just then, that the spirit that I've come to know as Garanda remained dormant. With my mind still my own, I saw a way to get some measure of payback. Although, she did not personally influence these events, it certainly fell in line with Maula's plan that the Spellwarriors would be too busy to stop these bandits.
So, with Miles in tow, I confronted these men myself. When I faced the evil thug who led them, I felt proud of who I had become for the first time. Although, he was enslaved to me, I stood shoulder to shoulder with a spellwarrior. Although I had not taken their pledge, I honored the very name of Hem Academy by rising to defend the people. But this gallant euphoria did not last. Miles and I captured them all alive and escorted them back to our hideout. The events that transpired upon our return are so hideous, I nearly dare not recall them. But I must.
Samson took half of the men into the dungeons, where the rest of the coven would practice their magic on them. Their leader was taken as Samson's own blood thrall. To witness the process that created a blood thrall for the first time filled me with a perverse pleasure. Samson drove his dagger into his neck and drew a fountain of blood from the wound. His magic was not necessary for that, but with a wave of his hands, he then gathered the spilled blood and consumed it. What remained of the bandit was hollow in spirit and desperate for his blood to be returned. Instead, he and Miles would feast together on the brigands who remained.
Samson was nearly as impossible to read that night as he was on the one in which I returned with the man who would become my blood thrall. I never understood him, but became quite used to this stoic expression over the years. I would often attribute the look to the mixed feeling of lividity and pride, because it always seemed to appear when I did something without his approval that ultimately benefited him or the coven. Over the years, I had gained a reputation for such adventures. It was hard for anyone to begrudge my wanderings, because I always returned with some perverse idea of a gift.
Weeks later, Samson had brought me a family of four on who I would practice a new spell. The parents struggled and pleaded in the hopes that we might spare their sons, but there was no escape from Samson. I opted to kill the children first, much to everyone's chagrin. Samson was truly enraged because their bodies were useless to us now. I had suspected then that he harnessed a particular desire for making that entire family suffer together. The parents were understandably upset with what I had done and that they were forced to watch it happen, but could take hollow solace in the fact that those boys died without suffering. Saying this was no proper justification for killing them, but I understood enough of our craft to have little taste for its effects on the young.
Despite my perceived insolence, Samson used the bodies of the grieving parents to teach me how to manipulate blood flow for the infusion and expulsion of toxins. Over and over, I would poison the broken couple and detoxify them. It was both sickening and shamefully empowering to make them shift between inconsolable sorrow and intense pain at a whim, but I accepted that this detoxifying spell was a truly useful skill. I was told it could heal any corruption more reliably than a Serene healing spell. But I never used the spell for infusion again. Back then, I found the use of poison as inelegant and today, simply horrifying. By the time we were done, they begged for death. This time, it was Samson who obliged.
Meanwhile, Maula's enemies had begun to gather to the south, intent on driving the Goddess back to Fadal. Their journey led them to our doorstep, as it seemed that the family Samson had captured was related to a young apprentice to the Champion of Chaos. It was this girl's desire for answers that took the famed Seth Midas out of his way to confront us. So I met him for the second time in my life shortly after we had disposed of the bodies. You see, Seth Midas is a distant relative of mine, his mother being a half-elven cousin of my father's. I met him just once and found him to be an uninteresting fellow. But this was not the same boy that had been brought to my academy initiation party.
The man who confronted us was the spellwarrior I had hoped to be and a living embodiment of Chaos' rage. Although I was surprised to see him, it feels like fate in hindsight. Here I was, cursed by Maula to do her bidding, facing the mortal champion of her father. It seems that Garanda had also appreciated that coincidence, for he chose that moment to take over my mind once more. Just as with the first incident, I have no memory of what had happened. I woke up in a new hideout far from where we were before. Many of our number had been left behind, including Miles, and Samson appeared to trust less me than before.
It took a long week of independent practice before Samson would speak to me again. Realizing that I might not have been completely responsible for my actions, he relented to my appeals for knowledge of what had happened. When the spirit took over, I had been bound in armor and took to fight against the champion. But after a while, it had become clear that I was losing to Seth. Samson had demanded that we retreat, but Garanda was determined for us to stay and fight. Being an enemy of Maula, there was no way that Garanda would have let him go while he and, by extension, I still drew breath.
Seeing aiding Garanda as essential to their survival, many of the members of the coven threw themselves at the champion, only to be handily dispatched. When Samson made final the order for the other blood mages to flee, Garanda killed some of them himself. Samson never knew where Miles had gone, but the blood thrall was never involved in the conflict at all. Only with Samson, Seth, and myself remaining did Samson attack me with a spell that subdued the spirit. Samson then took me away from the fortress, leaving Seth to languish in his failure to obtain justice. The coven had survived, but only barely.
Here in our new home, the other members of the coven gave me a wide berth. For days I felt exactly like I had in my final days at the academy, oh so long ago. Gone, once again, was the feeling of camaraderie that I had enjoyed. However, Samson had not given up on me as the elders at the Academy did. So long as my training continued, I had no need for friends. Without realizing it, he had revealed what I had forgotten that I wanted. I needed to learn to control Garanda, and in rescuing me from Seth, he had shown me the way.
Although I pleaded for him to teach me whatever spell he had used to quell Garanda, Samson insisted that I master the fundamentals of blood magic first. So, I continued to follow his instruction. I drained people of their blood, boiled people from the inside out, and killed in increasingly painful ways, but still he did not teach me the spell. By the end of my second year, the magic I learned had ceased to be benign and had advanced to nothing but violent applications. Still, he would not teach me, so content was he with the knowledge that Garanda's appearances seem to be isolated incidents. To him, it only seemed to matter that he could seal away the spirit himself if necessary.
But my learning eventually outstripped my patience. I had grown to truly hate my mentor and was convinced that he had no intention of ever teaching me the spell I wanted to learn. One day, I got the idea to use my own blood to scry for the secrets myself. What I found chilled the blood that still pumped through my veins. I discovered that the spell that had been used to defeat Garanda was not blood magic at all. He spoke in the ancient tongue of the divine and his hand gestures were a crude form of what I now know to be the magic of Serenity. Everything I had believed about my predicament for the past four years had been a lie. There was an answer to my problem in the very hands of one of the goddesses. Samson knew this, and yet he had lied to me, forcing me to kill for him.
I left that night and returned to Palon, hoping to never see Samson Amul again. It was a futile hope, but I welcomed the prospect of confronting my terrible mentor.
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