He was burning for fifteen minutes.
To Nephyr, it felt like an eternity of suffering, though that simply wasn't the case. By the time it had ended, however — eternity or not — he was changed.
Most of the alterations his body experienced vanished nearly as soon is the flame was put out; Most notably the pinkish hue of his flesh and the red markings on his hands.
That being said, his hair kept its bleached appearance and the glow in his eyes lingered, though faded over time. Some burn wounds persisted, but the man was quick to apply the aloe to cure his wounds. Even with its stinging sensation, it was nothing compared to what he had just gone through.
Once the process was over, the man was quick to raise the pendant once more. The same rotation of his fingers occurred, though the clenching was replaced by a quick opening of his palm.
On command, the golden light returned, flowing like an elegant stream of water straight back into the boy's body.
It didn't take long for him to curl up into a ball, however. The pain, while slowly receding, proceeded to leave marks of trauma in his eyes. "What..." He murmured, voice slightly quivering, yet with a sense of rage persisting underneath, "What did you do to me..?"
Elior scoffed. "I made you better."
* * *
Nephyr didn't move a muscle — as if all of his life was sucked out from him, leaving him to die. He laid on his bed, arms stretched to his side and eyes helplessly scanning the ceiling.
Elior had explained it all to him — about the ritual.
Much of which went far over his head and to the horizon beyond, but the words stuck into his brain like a minefield of thorns. He could decipher the basics, however; He was now connected to what's known as the Arcane Lineage.
Cultivated, generation after generation, was a power handed down between wielders via the consumption of blood. It was a hierarchy of magic.
Once the blood is consumed with permission, part of the magic is transferred from the giving to the given and sorted by tier — their generation of magic.
Ascending the tiers was essentially the same as ascending in magical potency. The higher you got, the stronger the magic became. From there, it was easy to assume the following; It all cultivated into the highest position — The first magic user — the first generation.
Due to the way the Lineage exists, magic is inherently limited. Only so much can go around until it eventually runs dry; the main reason as to why people at the lower tiers tend to not spread it around any further. There currently exist sixty-seven known tiers, and Nephyr was near the bottom.
The sixtieth tier,
Elior had stated that Nephyr was his perfect creation. That Nephyr was his life. It was immediately clear Elior had planned this from the very beginning, and that Nephyr was played a fool.
He felt like he was in a bottomless hole — a nightmare he couldn't awaken from. He was trapped, and he was different. He no longer felt like his fragmented self, but someone terrifyingly new and unfamiliar. The prospect of having no ties to anything made him shiver.
Elior had promised to undergo training in the morning rather than more errands for Nephyr. He didn't know what to expect, and simply didn't want to.
And while he tried to sleep, even he knew that wouldn't be possible. After having touched the heart of flames, there was something so unpleasant about the darkness he couldn't shake away.
The darkness began to sicken him.
[End of the first arc - Birth of Nephyr]