Cause and Effect

The fog in your mind clears, your vision and consciousness returning to you. The air reeks of soot and death, as the memories of what happened crash into you. You stumble backwards, looking around the blood-drenched battlefield. Your teammates, both countrymen and fellow heroes, lay slain around you. And it’s not the Forgotten whose weapon is coated in viscera… but yours. A cracked grin rests on its otherwise nigh-featureless face, staring at you with its hollow eye sockets, in the center of which rest impossibly dark dots.

As realization sets in, you crumble to the ground. Your knees hit the blood-soaked dirt only mere instants before your sword and dagger, followed by your hands. Tears drip down your face, joining the muddy sludge on the ground, as you unleash a silent cry of anguish. Your voice too broken by despair to be able to vocalize anything.

It’s a power that you recognize immediately, in hindsight. Whispered of with dread, talked about only in the highest levels of magic research; not to use it, to fight it.

Mind control magic. The ability to infallibly alter another’s allegiance and compel them to act. To betray, to surrender, to suicide. No resistance or immunity, no… guard known against it. And the Forgotten knows it, and used it. On you.

As the despair slowly twists your mind towards anger, blood drips from your mouth, the taste of metal sharp on your tongue. You realize you’d been biting into your tongue for the last few moments, enough to draw blood. The physical pain mixes with the emotional, trying to force you to act despite your heart and mind.

Drawing your dagger from the ground, you charge the ten-foot-tall Forgotten, leaping at it once close enough, intent on sinking your dagger into its chest. Pouring the last few drops of your magic into your dagger’s enchantment, one which amplifies its power. You know you’ll die, but at least you’ll wound it. Scratch it. DO ANYTHING TO IT!

You sense the activation of a magic circle, the Forgotten starting to cast a spell. But it’s too late. The grin on its face is gone, and its eyes have widened. You managed to surprise it.

Your dagger makes contact, and the clang you were expecting is instead a crackling and popping, like an icy lake. You’re blown backwards a split second later, flames scorching your body, crashing back into the mud atop the dead body of your elven cleric. Posed to watch as its body cracks apart, the shards spreading out with tendrils of blue blood connecting the parts, slowly separating.

A scene you’re not allowed to watch as death takes you… you hope. Scenes of the fight flash in your mind. The surprise of sudden betrayal, the pained screams and crying; death brought by someone they considered a close friend and confidant to their secrets. The burial places of their wills.

When you come to, you’re restrained in a hospital bed. Clerics around you are surprised by your waking, and quickly alert someone. You… don’t struggle. You feel drained of life, completely… unable to move. Physically you’re fine, but… not mentally.

Pretty soon, the person alerted by the clerics joins you in the room, escorted by a few guards. It’s the archmage of the magic tower. Your teacher, Kiel Magos von Zekrin. “I… hope you’re alright with the restraints. We saw some… glimpses through the Memory of the Earth, so… it’s a precaution.” He speaks carefully like always, his tone careful and on the colder side.

You nod weakly. They couldn’t have seen much; the… area was so saturated and fucked with by magic that you assume they maybe saw a few seconds. Enough to see that you betrayed everyone, but not that it was… you can’t claim it was unwilling. It was your will, your… desire and your goal. Sure, altered by another, but… you wanted to kill them, to betray them. Even now, the… feeling that you did the right thing killing them scratches at the edges of your mind, the vestiges of the magic not fully cleared from you.

“Then… would you please tell us what happened? I’m willing to make everyone else leave if you’d prefer.” Von Zekrin has always been accommodating; a powerful figure that managed to protect an entire continent from the Forgotten with his specialty of extreme scale ritual magic.

You sigh shakily.

d100: can you even speak?