Fallen Mage Regressor

Mal kicked down the door in one solid blow. The lock cracked and it swung inward with a wheeze before it slammed into the wall with a loud thud.

He marched in and set Hemp down on the dining room table.

"Who the hell—?"

Cassandra stepped out of her bedroom, arms raised and magic flooded to her fingers when she stopped as soon as she saw Mal.

"I need your help," he said.

She looked down at Hemp, then back at Mal, then back to Hemp.

Instantly, the fierce expression on her face was replaced with an iron wall. She stepped up to Hemp and traced the path of bleeding up to the shoulder.

"Fetch me some King’s Crown and Elderroot. Start boiling some water at the fireplace as well."

Mal, long acquainted with where she stored her herbs, darted to her cabinet and pulled out the requested items. He put them on the table next to Cassandra, then ran over to the fireplace and got to work. His hand shook as he struck some flint and steel against a tinder pack. Each strike resulted in a shower of sparks that all somehow managed to miss the tinder. He tried two more times, then the packet lit up in flames.

Behind him, he heard the sound of glass hitting the table. Ahead of him, the flame consumed the wood and blazed to life, red and yellow filling the stone alcove.

He placed a pot full of water on the fire and waited. A groan. Not Cassandra, but Hemp.

"Hang in there, Missy," Cassandra poured a few drops of some kind of solution she'd fetched from her pocket onto the wound. "You're going to be just fine."

Hemp's only response was another pitiful moan.

Cassandra took out a few flakes of the herbs and put them into a mortar.

"I need that water," she said.

Mal grabbed some mitts and pulled the pot out. He walked over to Cassandra and gently poured a small amount of water into the mortar. She nodded, then pulled the mortar away and ground at it with her pestle. Within a few seconds, there was a thick paste resting in the bowl and ready to go.

Cassandra took a dollop of it with her index and middle finger, then pressed it and rubbed it across Hemp's wound. Hemp shuddered from the contact, body twitching like she was trying to move away from Cassandra's touch.

The paste applied, Cassandra took out a roll of bandages and wrapped it around Hemp's shoulder. She took out a knife, cut the roll, then put the bandages back.

The bleeding had stopped. Hemp's pale face started to regain a little bit of its normal color.

Mal let out a relieved sigh. He stumbled backward into the wall of the room and found his knees to be unable to support him. Unwilling to put in the effort to keep them straight, he collapsed and rested against the floor wall.

Mal watched the flames dance in the fireplace.

Cassandra had interrogated him, and he'd told her everything he knew. Which was very little. He didn't delve deep into his relationship with Hemp, nor what they were doing. Surprisingly, Cassandra had looked to be on the verge of pressing him, but had chosen not to. Instead, she'd gone back to her bedroom and asked him to wake her if Hemp's condition deteriorated.

A groan.

"I feel like I just got run over by a wagon."

Mal stood up and pivoted.

Hemp pressed her palms into her temple and pushed herself off the table. Her eyes were half-lidded in exhaustion, and the way her spine was bent made Mal think she was on the verge of falling asleep.

"Hemp?" He stepped over toward the table. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit."

Okay, so she's probably doing okay.

She looked down at her left shoulder and rotated it around in its socket.

"Whatever painkillers you've got me on must be pretty damn good, because I don't feel any pain there."

"Yeah, you should rest it. Don't move it around."

She dropped the injured shoulder, then turned to face him.

"What happened, Hemp?"

A dry laugh.

"Yeah, that's a million dollar question, isn't it?"

A smirk played on her lips, it was a painful contrast to the exhaustion evident in her eyes.

Mal chose to let her speak first. After nearly a minute of silence, she sighed.

"I think at this point, you probably pieced together what happened," she said. "Before all this, I mean."

"You were experimented on. Cornelias was trying to figure out how to enhance human beings with extraordinary physical and magical abilities."

"Mostly physical abilities. He wanted to figure out how to do stuff with cores, but that was much harder and even more dangerous."

For once, Mal agreed with Cornelias. Given how close Lusia had come to death, cores were something that ought to be stayed away from.

Hemp's hands shook.

"I was cut up like a cow. Over and over and over. It was hell. There's as no other way to describe it."

She reached up and adjusted her shirt, and the faintest white line poked out on her skin before it disappeared behind her clothes.

"I'm sorry," Mal said.

"It's in the past." She took a shaky breath. "But the part you didn't know was that there were others. My friends."

"And Cornelias has them?"

"I thought they'd been dead. And then all of a sudden, he somehow gets a letter to me saying that if I don't return myself, he's going to kill them."

"How do you know he's telling the truth?"

She snarled and pointed at her shoulder. "Because I went to verify for myself, you idiot. I checked. I saw. They're alive, and I… I—"

She made a strange noise, halfway between a sob and a groan. The water welled up in her eyes for half a second before she rubbed the wetness away with her forearm.

"I wasn't strong enough," she said. "I wasn't strong enough then, and I wasn't strong enough now, and they're going to pay the price for it."

Mal's mind flashed back to a scene years ago in a future long gone.

She'd said something like this. Not specifically about her friends, she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him about them. But she had expressed that she was weak. That she was tired of being weak.

At that time, Mal had told her to become stronger, and she had. She'd endured grueling, brutal training that pushed her to the very edge of her limitations, and had come out the other end impossibly powerful.

Mal opened his mouth to repeat those words, but they remained lodged in his throat.

Something about her expression made it impossible to finish his sentence.

Oh, of course, he thought.

I need to increase her emotional attachment to me. I can't make the same mistake that I did before.

"Hemp."

She stiffened. Her fingers, that had been shaking uncontrollably up to that point, stopped and froze completely. She looked up at him, eyes clouded and unfocused.

"You were weak."

She furrowed her eyebrows. "What? What are you talking about?"

"You were weak, and that's why this happened. That's why you were injured, and that's why everything in the past happened the way it did."

"I know it's my fault, you don't have to tell me that!"

"I wasn't finished," he said. "You're not weak anymore. You're strong, and you're only going to become stronger. And what's more, I'll be by your side for all of it."

He held out his hand. "Count on me. Depend on me. And we're going to save your friends. We're going to put Cornelias in the ground, and end this farce once and for all."

Hemp stared at his outstretched hand like he was an angel sent by Eternus himself. In that moment, Mal knew that he'd won her over.

He truly was the worst sort of scum.

She reached out and clasped his hand. A wide grin crossed her face from cheek to cheek, the cloudiness in her eyes gone and being replaced with a crystal clear light.

"What's the first step?" she asked.

"I have a vague idea, but I'm going to need a little bit of help from the man at the top of the food chain."

Yes, in one fell swoop, he was going to secure Hemp's loyalty, obtain a priceless artifact, stop the school bombing, and get some of the pressure from the school off his back.

"I need to go talk to Headmaster Puck."

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