I placed my hand on the man as he tried to pull free of me. Magic on an individual was easier with a physical connection. I hadn't tried to read a person like this before and wasn't sure how to go about it. I remembered how our lord read my mind and decided to try and start there. My green flames formed a similar tentacle and reached for the man's mind. The man was tired from trying to fight against the woman holding him. I could feel his fear, and anger. I saw a picture of him getting free and beating me. This was cartoonish and not well defined, something he wanted to happen not something that had happened. The man started breathing harder waiting for something to happen. I could see my emotionless face through his eyes. He was focusing on me to keep the fact that he was so close to a vampire out of his mind. It wasn't working.
His feelings about the vampire were not clear cut. He wanted to be away from our lord, he wanted to kill the smaller man next to him to distract our lord to get away. That image was also cartoonish. So, I seem to be seeing what he is thinking, but that isn't what I wanted to know.
"Who are you?" that wasn't what I wanted to know but I wanted to see what would happen. It was hard to split my attention between watching and talking but I managed it without passing out. I could feel the black flames watching me as well. The black flames had all the time in the world to watch. I was the one who had serious handicaps to doing this.
I pulled my focus back to the person under my hand. Less than a moment had gone by and I could watch as the man's mind put meaning to the sounds I had made even as he tried not to think about it. The words brought up unbidden memories. A boy talking with his mom before joining his brothers in training. His mom was a poor woman though rich enough to have a house. He knew how well he did would affect her and her standing in the house. The boy fought hard against the tears as his older brother took him from her. A flicker of many fights and kills in the arena. Flickers of nights with the sisters of the house he had been traded to. Flickers of those women later with children. Flickers of his mom visiting him from time and the news she shared with him. Overall, of that was a name just the sound Jorge.
I let my mind straddle the space between my mind and his to say, "Jorge." The man's eyes got wide as I spoke as he had not spoken. I recalled the face of the man's mom as the black flames gaged the man and he fought harder. I was surprised to recognize her, she was 91. She must have been older than I thought to have a son this old. Then again, he was younger than I had thought, he had been fighting since he was 13. He was a year older than me. 18 was old for a fighter and he was a good fighter. I felt his mind go blank as he entered battle mode to try and keep me from seeing anything else as he knew I had to be in his mind.
He couldn't keep all his thoughts down though. He focused on me and his mom's face over laid mine. He was sure I had killed her, and he was going to avenge her if it was the last thing he did. Even if he did it by only preventing me from getting what I wanted and disappointing the lord.
I tried not to roll my eyes, which wasn't hard. My mind wasn't in my body enough for me to move it. "She isn't dead, yet. Show me how you are related to her stabbing my wife."
Again, I watched as his brain started to change the sounds I made into meaning without him trying to. He knew what I meant because he knew a bit of what I would have seen but he managed to cut off the meaning of the rest of the words by focusing on his last arena match. He focused on every detail of the match.
I could almost feel the hot summer sand in the arena burning the bottoms of my feet through the thin sandals. I sighed and reached out to speed the thought along without really knowing what I was doing. The thought went faster as I applied pressure. The man knew I had caused it and that I really was in his mind. He still couldn't feel me like I had felt the black flames, but he didn't have the missing piece to see magic like that.
I started seeing if I could move through his memories myself, but I couldn't seem to figure out how they were organized. I would get one from when he was young followed by a match that I couldn't put in a time frame. Memories of sights and sounds all disjointed. The man definitely knew what I was seeing now. He was in pain as he tried to fight with me but without magic there wasn't any way he could stop me. I was trying not to push too hard as I didn't want to cause damage.
The black flame seemed to sit on my shoulder just watching what I was trying. I was caught off guard when the man suddenly changed tactics as he realized he couldn't fight me.
I hadn't noticed that I was becoming bias of the intelligence level of the people our lord kept until the man made the change that I had not been ready for. If he couldn't keep me out, he decided to overwhelm me with useless information.