WIS – Classified Report #AS-436-209-238

  Prepared for the Curia Investigative Subcommittee on Ashad

  3rd Invastine, 476 A.T.S.

  Ashad-Vitri, Ashad Province.

  [This interview with Alarion Two-Thirty-Eight was conducted by interviewer -------- three weeks after the Ashadi attack on the Trinity Isles that led to the deaths of Provisional Governor Dar Elzmir, his wife Elena Elzmir, and Sierra Feln, among others.

  This is the subject’s sixth interview, conducted at the request of ------ and -------.

  Certain names and sections of this interview have been redacted to protect relevant parties and for national security purposes. The unredacted copies are available on the order of Imperator Lioric as WIS – Classified Report #AS-436-209-238-B.]

  Please state your name for the record.

  Alarion.

  Just ‘Alarion’? No family name?

  No.

  Alright, Alarion. Please, tell me what happened.

  Which version?

  The truth.

  Which version of the truth? The one where the ------- and the ------- sent men to kill an island full of people? Or the one I have been-

  Alarion, rather than start at the end, I would like you to start at the beginning and work your way forward in time. I am not here to take any sides or tell you what to say. I have been asked to get your complete telling of events as you understand them.

  Where do you want me to start? Imuria?

  You may start anywhere you believe might be relevant. It might be best to begin with the Assessment?

  Okay.

  I was living in the Old City, a few miles from here, when they found me.

  They?

  Some scavengers. We got in a fight and… I killed one of them. I did not mean to, I just panicked. They were in my home, and I wanted them to leave.

  They knocked me out. I think they thought there would be a reward for turning over the Awakened, because I woke up in custody. They gave me some food and new clothes, then did their Assessment and found out that my Aptitude was 238.

  How did they take that news?

  Elena was excited. My Aptitude is one of the highest ever recorded, if not the actual highest. She was worried I would die in the Auxilia without training, so she pulled some strings and brought me to the Trinity.

  I found out later that those strings were not entirely legal. Maybe that is why she was killed.

  Either way, she brought me there, and I met ZEKE, a Steelborn who served as my tutor and System guide. He wanted to train me to fight with twin daggers, but I preferred… uh, bigger weapons.

  They tried to dissuade me from that by pitting me against a dragon.

  A dragon? Forgive me, but-

  Not a real dragon. Elena used a ritual spell called Void Trap to create one at my exact level, and they had me fight it repeatedly to show why a big sword was a bad idea.

  I picked up a questing power while fighting it and sort of… got it in my head that I had to beat it. Which I eventually did.

  That is when you gained your first class?

  My second. Or… no, my third. I Awakened back in Ashad-Mundi, several years before any of this, but one of my flaws, Single-Minded, automatically accepted my first classes, Survivor, which ranked up into Orphan.

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  You have a class named Orphan?

  Fitting, huh?

  But no, I gained my first combat class when I travelled from the Manor Isle to the Fiend Isle. They have a boil there that produces monsters. It can’t escape because of the seawater, so it makes a perfect place to train.

  Or it would, if not for the revenant that trapped Sierra and me on the island.

  Tell me about him.

  He is an old Ashadi researcher named --------. I am not sure how he ended up dead, but his body was reanimated by the boil. With nothing to do and no one to kill, he gained back some level of sanity. Not enough to act civilly, but enough that he did not kill us on sight. He wanted something from us.

  We were not the first. He’d been picking off weak Awakened sent to train on the island and driving them underground to explore some ruins hidden underneath the island.

  How did he force you underground?

  Well… that was actually my fault. I got in a fight with a big fiend, and we both fell into the pit.

  Or… I suppose I jumped in rather than getting pushed, and then it fell in trying to get me.

  Why did he want you down there?

  The ruins, like I said.

  Why couldn’t he explore them himself?

  According to him, they reacted differently to fiends and revenants. He needed us to shut down the security.

  The ruins had security?

  These weren’t just bits of broken-down buildings. There is an entire city-

  [This section of the interview has been redacted for national security purposes.]

  And what happened after you returned to the Manor Isle?

  I had a few days to rest and recover, but not long. The court case deciding my status was moving more quickly than expected, so they took me to the third island to train.

  What was so special about the third one?

  They call it the Magic Isle because it has extremely high concentrations of ambient mana, allowing you to recover your MP faster and practice your spells more often.

  That was where we discovered my second flaw.

  You have three, according to your file.

  Two that I know of. The first is Single-Minded, the second is Splintered Mana Circuits.

  That sounds unpleasant.

  It is.

  ZEKE thought they were broken for the same reason I’m so short, poor nutrition growing up, but whether it was that or something I have had from birth, the result is the same. My gates are stuck open. Mana flows through me really easily, allowing me to drink up mana in high mana environments, but at the cost of being unable to use magic the normal way.

  I thought that was it, that I was a cripple, but ZEKE has… had, a skill called Infinite Library which let him pull up a copy of any book he’d ever touched. Which was a lot of books.

  He found a way to get around that weakness, at least enough to start training.

  Forgive me, but I am curious. How would one go about that?

  Mostly, it involved holding hands with Sierra while he beat me with a switch.

  Uh… huh.

  That part only lasted a little while. Eventually, Sierra…. she played some music for me, and in doing so, I learned how to flare my mana without needing someone to hit me.

  From there, we trained a bit in spellcasting, but it was not going fast enough. The case was going against Elena, and we had only a few weeks before I was expected to be sent off. So she gave me a choice.

  There is a challenge dungeon on the island, a place dedicated to one of the four mothers, Lal Viren. Elena told me it would be dangerous and probably a waste to attempt it so soon. But she gave me a choice, and I took it.

  What do you remember about the dungeon?

  Bits and pieces.

  I remember all the practical knowledge I learned, including a bunch of new skills like how to sense mana, how to stop things from draining my mana, and how to meditate, but all the details are blurry. I know that Sierra was sent in to get me at some point, since my time was up, but I told her no because I was close to finishing all eight challenges.

  You cleared the dungeon?

  I did. I do not really remember what happened, but the class options I got from it were incredible.

  The Governor was angry. He beat me pretty badly before Elena managed to calm him down.

  I am sorry that happened.

  Mm.

  What happened next?

  Sierra came to wake me up in the middle of the night. She said she did not want to leave off our… I do not know, our friendship, on bad terms. She brought me out past the curtain wall to a small outcrop next to the manor.

  She played music. I think it was her favorite thing to do. Something that helped calm her down when the world was spiralling out of control.

  And then the attack happened.

  How did the Ashadi-

  There were no Ashadi. No rebels, no attackers. It was ------- from the ---------- they attacked the island. They killed the Governor, Elena, and ZEKE.

  What about Sierra Feln?

  I….

  She was trying to save me. She said that if I did what she told me, she could get me away safely. But I could not go. Not with Elena and ZEKE dying inside.

  We fought. At first, it was each of us trying to back the other off. She tried to pin me to the ground, and I tried to escape. She’d brought my sword, Echo, with her, so I could not teleport back to the manor. She knew it was going to happen.

  Eventually, I hit her, and we both realized that it was serious. She stopped pulling her punches, and I had to stop pulling mine. She stabbed me, and I punched her trying to….

  I killed her.

  You are saying you murdered Sierra Feln?

  No—I defended myself.

  And Ruin? He is claiming you took him as Patron. How did that come about?

  He came to me after the attack. He was supposed to pick us up, but when he saw her dead, he just started laughing. He hates her father and thought it would anger him if he became my protector.

  Then the ships arrived, and no one believed me.

  Well, you must understand that what you are claiming is extraordinary. An entire household murdered by ------ at the behest of -------.

  I know how it sounds.

  Well, since we have an outline, let us go back over things in more detail. Tell me about your appraisal.

  [The remainder of this transcript has been redacted. Please see WIS – Classified Report #AS-436-209-238-B for the full transcript.]