The air in the room tasted of pulverized masonry and ozone.
Arthur stood in the center of the ruined Northern Dormitory, breathing in the chilling stillness of his own meticulously constructed mind palace. Above him, a gaping, jagged hole exposed a starless sky. Cold wind howled through two massive breaches in the opposing walls, scattering pale ash across the floorboards. To his right lay a pool of flaking, rust-colored blood and my brother's lifeless body.
Arthur's warm amber eyes swept past the corpse without a microscopic twitch of acknowledgment, as if it was invisible.
He approached the only intact wall remaining in the room. Pressing his fingertips against the flat, unblemished plaster, he curled his digits and pulled. The fabric of the mental construct shrieked, tearing open to reveal a blinding, infinite expanse of white abyss. Plunging his hand into the sterile void, Arthur's fingers closed around a fractured shard of compressed time. He dragged the pristine memory out into the ash-covered room.
***
32 days ago.
Rolling up the left sleeve of his high-collared black uniform, Arthur stared closely at the seven stark, jet-black rings encircling his forearm—an authentic, Emperor-rank blessing.
The same stigma on his body held only three rings, Arthur analyzed, his frictionless logic engaging as he superimposed the memory of his twin's arm over his own. But my outermost, seventh ring perfectly matches the exact location of his outermost, third ring.
The geometry aligned with devastating precision. All of his three-ringed blessings were clearly Emperor-rank. The empty real estate between his second and third rings was perfectly engineered to fit four additional rings.
A phantom weight pressed against Arthur's chest—the ghost of his own past arrogance. What a glaring weakness. My past hubris, infecting my psyche, would almost certainly have led me to my death if it had continued. Thankfully, Sinclair opened my eyes before it was too late.
Arthur isolated the next variable, dissecting the physical laws of magic. To hide the rings of a blessing is no simple feat. Just as I once used Petrifying Ichor to mimic the physical manifestation of a blessing, so too can genuine marks be covered up. It can even be accomplished without advanced alchemy, through something as crude as applying paint.
He summoned a secondary memory: My brother stepped from the washroom, damp hair plastered to his forehead, water droplets tracking smoothly down his pale back. However, I've seen him countless times immediately after washing. There was never a single trace of paint or other concealing residue.
The variable of physical concealment collapsed. Which leaves me with two explanations. One: He possessed a knowledge of alchemy that utterly exceeded everything Vigo had discovered, and precisely administered it in a way that rendered all the blessings on his blackened body invisible, save for six special outliers. Or two: His blessings were sealed.
Arthur's mind seamlessly pulled data from the Inferior Archives. Blessings are engraved directly onto the soul, meaning they reappear even if the physical body is damaged, the moment the skin heals. They typically only fade when either the grantee or the granter dies. But there are records of an obscure method of magic affecting the soul—a technique originating from an even more obscure "Sage Ithrael Theokrion Caelumor" who disappeared sixteen years ago.
I'm more inclined to believe the latter, Arthur concluded, his amber eyes narrowing at the memory fragment. Orrin Drevayne was one of the only people ever named to be associated with that Sage. He was his disciple for a short time, even.
Arthur scrubbed the memory forward to a specific, fateful night. The heavy oak door swung open in his mind. Headmaster Drevayne stepped through the frame, his frail silhouette deliberately blocking Arthur's line of sight into the room, shooing him away with a medallion and a new surname to decorate his own.
What was he doing in there?
The sequence clicked forward to the next morning. There is only one answer. His blackened body suddenly turned entirely white the next day. I hadn't even noticed; I was too consumed by reading the Dialogue. But I never saw that dense web of overlapping rings ever again.
The toll of ripping an Emperor-rank blessing from a soul would exact a catastrophic price on the caster. Orrin probably died that night. That's why he never appeared on the Academy grounds again.
Arthur looked down at the blessing of water on his arm, his expression hardening into a mask of grim, absolute certainty. "He is certainly dead now."
"I—"
***
Arthur severed the playback exactly on the syllable.
There was absolutely no hesitation, no involuntary spike of emotion, and no lingering glance toward the rust-colored pool on the floorboards. Operating with absolute, frictionless control, Arthur simply determined the review was complete and shut it down.
He shoved the memory fragment back into the ripped space. With a single, sharp motion, he pulled the wall back over it, seamlessly sealing the abyss behind a flawless surface. His eyes stuck closely to the blank plaster as he strolled to the next fragment.