therealkaichan | Riding the Attis/Darius wave xD

Bonus 01

As he walks trough the corridors of the church, walking towards Attis’ studio, Darius almost always remembers the first time he saw him.

He remembers having fidgeted a little before even daring to knock on the door.

About him they said many things.

They said that he was a murderer, a monster, that he experimented on war prisoners and on their own soldiers, that he vivisected humans and replaced their organs with other organs, not always human ones, and even that he had torn people open with his bare hands.

The last one was a partial lie, as he had used magic, so ‘bare’ wasn’t true.

The scientific branch of the military had been growing fast, and everyone really busy trying to find more effective methods to wield their magic. Studies were made on connection between partners, optimization of mana consumption and shaping, and studies on which people were more apt for the use of the different types of shaping.

And among them, there was a tiny division made up of one man and two assistants. Division 13 had been a larger group before that man made his way to the leadership, but his practices had pushed most of the other scientists to abandon him because of ethics conflicts.

The scientist had once said that ethics did not exist when waging war, because any scientist working for any branch that was not medicine was already a bloodstained knife, just waiting for the next victim.

Doctor Gabriel Rhodes was deep into his research to create the “perfect mage”. A mage that would be able to both channel and shape magic without the magic killing him in the process.

The Perfect Mage was a bit of an utopia if anything. Nobody had ever seen someone capable of such feats, as the organs needed for magic shaping and magic channeling would simply overload and self-destroy if an attempt to do both were made.
It was known that many mages had died attempting feats like those.

The first law of magic, simply said that it took at least two people to use magic, or the user would die.

The second law, said that it was not possible to use magic to heal.

Those were the untouchable laws. Everything else was fair game, or so they said.

Everyone was horrified at the things that happened at Division 13, but nobody ever did a thing to stop it.

That day, the church had asked Darius to deliver some secret documents. When he arrived to the building, the lady at the information desk had told him to deliver the documents himself. Even from outside of the church’s military branch, Darius had heard about the man.

They called him the Demon Scholar. And somehow that was an affectionate nickname. They said that he had defected from the rival country’s military, because he was not allowed to carry on with his experiments in the place where he had been born. They said so many things, that the man was a frightening figure for anyone, even when almost nobody had seen his face or talked to him.

When Darius knocked, his hand had trembled a little.

A young man had opened the door, most likely one of the two assistants for the Doctor. He was just a little older than darius, had brown hair, neatly slicked back, and cold green eyes.
“How may I assist you?”
“I was requested to deliver these documents.” He said, offering the envelope.
“Just a moment.” The man took the envelope, giving a quick look to the writing outside. “Please, come in.”

Both walked back into the room, and the assistant motioned for Darius to take a seat. The office looked like a completely normal one, and nobody would say that any kind of terrible things were happening there. The older man continued his way to the back of the room, and opened the farthest door a little.
“Doctor, there is a man from the church. He has some documents addressed to you.”
“I’ll be out in a moment.”

True to his words, the man was out just a few seconds later. He was tall, and much younger than one would expect a supposedly mad doctor to be. Probably his most defining feature was his long silver hair, which was pretty much all over the place, as if he didn’t care much about it.
The man took off his gloves and dropped them in a basket nearby, already filled with other gloves much like those. The young assistant was quick to offer the papers to him, and he gave a quick look to the contents of the envelope, before walking and putting them in the table.
“Good afternoon, thank you for delivering these on such short notice.”
“You don’t need to thank me, sir.”
“It’s the least I can do, since you won’t be getting any thanks from anyone.” The doctor chuckled. “Gloves, please.”
The assistant made short work of handing another pair of gloves to the man.
“I do not make my work to be thanked for it.”
“It sounds fine. Do you mind waiting?” He asked Darius.
“No, it’s fine.”
“You. Please go in and sedate the subject. I will need some time.”
“Yes sir.”
The assistant quickly went to the other room, and he doctor after putting on his gloves, took the papers and started reading them.

Looking back, that was a horrible first meeting. It would take some time for Darius to begin understanding the man in front of him, and it would take him much longer to understand how the world looked like for a hollow heart.

After he made his first errand, the church unofficially named him the new errand boy for Division 13. Whenever there was something to deliver, he was the one. With time, he got to meet both assistants and the doctor a little more.
He noted how the doctor avoided touching anyone (and even the things that other people would touch) without a pair of gloves in the middle, he noticed how much blood there was in the gloves he discarded, and even the faint breathes coming from the smaller room next door whenever they opened the door to come in and out.

One day, the doctor looked at him, and finally smiled, a twisted smile that wasn’t much better than his usual blank expression.
“Do you find this disgusting?” He asked, showing the bloodstained gloves.
“No, I find it sad. I find this whole war sad.”
“You are clean and good.”
“I wouldn’t say such things. We all have our own sins to bear.”
The older man walked closer, giving a close look to the other one.
“I wonder how you would react to being stained as I am.”
“Do you truly?”
“But I want to be the one to stain you.”

Things became a little awkward after that. There was something about that statement that made him uncomfortable, and strangely enough it wasn’t what one would think on first sight.

It took something horrible for him to understand. It took pain and death...

The younger assistant, a girl, was dead. The other assistant was gone already, and it was only them. Darius and Gabriel had been of the few to survive this far, if only because of the doctor’s strange practices. He had forced one of his experimental subjects to channel magic somehow, and used that to save them both. The girl had been in he wrong place, too far from the doctor to be saved.

“This one will be of no use any longer. Useless...” The scientist dropped the body of the subject on the floor. “Even with all the work I did on him, forcing a mana transfer is as useless as always.”
“How can you be thinking of that after something like this?” As used as he was to those things by now, Darius found that he could still feel horrified at that man.
“Their mages and soldiers will be coming soon. We will get killed without magic.” Somehow the use of ‘we’ had been the thing that distracted him. Did the man even care? “And with none of my assistants around we are certainly not getting out of here alive.”
“Isn’t there any other way?”
“None. I need a channeler for this, a dispensable one.” Gabriel was quick to sort his papers in a small pile and set them on fire. Somehow more concentrated on hiding his research results than doing anything else.
“We should try to leave, then.”
“It’s pointless. They are probably already on the upper floors. We are only safe because I got a basement office, and even then, the rest of the roof could collapse at any time.”
“There must be something we can do.”
“If you can think of anything, you are more than welcome to try it.”
“I can... I’m a channeler.” Darius was much more quiet. He had refused to fight in the war, so he wasn’t really that trained, but he did have the capacity to channel magic and transfer it.
“But you are not dispensable.”
“And why do you need something like that? Can’t you just use magic like a normal person?”
“I’m stained.”
“What?”
“I’m stained. Transferring mana to me, would transfer part of the stain to you too, like a virus.”
“I’d never heard of something like that.”
“I’m not a normal one. You should know that well.”
“But then?”
“For you, it would be better to die than to receive this. There is no point in you becoming a bloodstained knife as well.”
“Tell me about it. It’s a choice I have to make myself.”
“No it is not. I’m a traitor, so once they come I will take up their attention. You go and hide among the debris. I’ll make sure they don’t search for you.”

Somehow in the end they managed to survive.

It wasn’t at no price, but things never were for free in war.

Gabriel had been angry at him. It was the first time that Darius saw actual emotion in that face, the first time he heard him scream in frustration, and the only time when he saw him cry.

Darius was stained now. He didn’t fully understand what that meant, he only knew what Gabriel had told him.

A stained one has rejected the earth.

The Mother will deny you, you will never go back to her, even after death, you will be dirty, roaming forever.

A stained one, will stain those around him.

A stained one was the only thing that was truly unnatural.

They were quiet now, sitting in the middle of the woods, far from where the quarter was, and even further from the only city close by.

“How did it ever happen? How did you get stained?”
“I rejected her. I met her and I rejected her.”
“You met who?”
“The Goddess. The Earth.”
“How?”
“I denied fate. It’s complicated, I don’t want to get into it.”
“I see...”
“The stain... Is just a mark that she places on us. I don’t see the point, but she still does it. Our connections get stained as well, and because of that when we create a bond to transfer mana we stain others.”
“It sounds complicated...”
“I used to believe it was the way to become the perfect mage, but I’ve found it is not. Now you’re stained as well, you should've done as I told you.”
“This was my choice.”
“Why would you even want to save me?”
“A person doesn’t need a reason to help another. Just the will to do it.”
“You don’t understand. You’re just another idiot.”
Darius learned about a man with a hollow heart. A man that had understood that there was a certain fate and that nobody could escape it. A man that felt there was nothing to move to, nothing that could make that fate any less uninteresting.

So he defied the few laws that were set on stone.

So maybe someday, he’d find something to look forward to. Something to care for.

But in the end, that thing had found him instead.

“Attis, dinner is ready.” He called from outside the office. It had been years since they met, and the stain had finally completely taken over Darius’ body as well.
“Come in.”

As usual Attis was sitting among his papers, researching. It was something fascinating to watch him work, and Darius remembered having done so for hours when they had started getting along.
After the war, Attis had given up his position in the scientific branch, and moved over to the religious one. He offered his own fortune to create a temple near the Central Quarters, in order to settle down here, and passed down the administration of the money to Darius.

Since then, he had been almost completely a different man. He never again talked about experiments on people, nor he showed any interest in returning to his work of creating the supposed perfect mage.
And now, years later, Darius wondered if that research had even been important to him, or if the man, hollow as he was, had tried to fill the empty space with the fascination for that research.

“Will you join us this time?”
“I still have some things to do.”
“It won’t take long, please.”
“Fine.”
“Thank you, Gabriel.”

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A bit of a background thing, not too thought over but that's what february is for, it was nice to get this one out and it has no spoilers and the subtlest foreshadowing ever.

So uh... mengeleattis xDDD

Riding the Attis/Darius wave xD

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