“Are you serious? You want to try a second Calling ritual?” Tomar said as we walked along the temple’s hallways.

“Tell me you aren’t curious,” I said, quoting a line he had once said to me when I was surprised about an experiment he wanted to do out in the woods.

“The circumstances were a little different when I said that... We can’t risk someone losing their life, right?”

“Technically, I said we can’t risk someone’s life, but what if they did it voluntarily?”

When I was thinking about ways for people to find a new purpose in life this morning, I kept coming back to one question. What if we could simply change their Callings? There were various possibilities for why someone might have decided to limit the ritual script to one use per person, and if we never tried to ignore this limitation, we would never know what might be possible. It was true that we didn’t know what would happen, and hypothetically, the test subject might be harmed, but that was only one of many possibilities, and I wasn’t so sure it was the most likely one. Still, we would need someone who was willing to test it. 

“Hm... Okay, I get that. But does it need to be Oryn...?”

“Do you know someone else who would agree to it? And he’s already in the know.”

“I see your point... But that guy is creeping me out. I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to see him again.”

‘Yup...’

While Tomar and I discussed this, our guards walked a few meters behind us at my request, so they wouldn’t hear too much yet. Another reason why we might want to explain a few things to them was that discussions and experiments like this might seem a little weird if it was all supposed to be part of the gods’ grand plan. We could technically dismiss them, but ever since the attack, I had admittedly become a little more careful, and having a few additional pairs of eyes did make me feel safer.

“I could go alone if you want,” I said. “It’s understandable that you’re not a fan of him.”

‘That doesn’t help me though...’

“Sorry,” I said to Lilana with a chuckle.

Tomar suddenly slowed down, and when both of us stopped, our guards came to a stop a few meters behind us as well.

“It’s not just that I don’t like him...” Tomar said quietly, while briefly glancing at our followers. “You were with me. You know what he did. To me. And to Riala. The last time we went to him I could’ve killed him right then and there... How do you do it? How can you be so... casual around him?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer this question.

“Same thing with Eissen... I get that you wouldn’t show your feelings while standing in front of the crowd, but it seemed like... it didn’t bother you much after we stopped you from killing him. What happened there?”

Berla and I once hypothesized that Tomar had taken over my ability to switch off my feelings, which then allowed this once timid boy to not only attack guards, but also to massacre an entire group of soldiers without feeling bad. For the last couple of weeks he had mostly seemed so carefree that I thought he was fine, but he was still thinking about what had happened. Maybe I should’ve had a serious talk with him after all...

“You understand that killing him would’ve been a bad idea, don’t you? And it’s the same with Oryn.”

“Yes, of course, but that doesn’t change what they did! That’s what I’m asking! Don’t you hate them?”

“Hate them? No, not really,” I said.

“I don’t get that.”

“I see...”

Apparently I had been wrong, he hadn’t become like me. At least not yet, or not completely. Something was different. He could do what was necessary, be it killing someone or not, but he always felt that burning hate that I experienced just recently. Now that I think about it... I suppose he might’ve gotten that from me as well...

“You might not be able to relate to it...” I said, “but I simply decide it. Negative feelings like that don’t benefit anyone. All they do is... well, make you feel bad. In the best case you feel like crap, and in the worst case someone else might even be happy about you feeling bad. What do I gain by hating them?”

The notion would be obvious to anyone, negative feelings equal a bad time, so don’t have bad feelings. The crux was that people naturally had a hard time turning their feelings off. In extreme circumstances, this obviously included me, but as long as I had a cool head, very few things would actively bother me. I would always try to go with what was most beneficial to me, and wasting time on hating someone... didn’t do anything for me. I hadn’t met a lot of people in my lifetime who could think this way though, and more than once I had been called apathetic or even a sociopath because I hadn’t shown “enough” emotions in a situation. Story of my life.

Berla was actually the first person who told me something different. And due to knowing my history, it delighted her even more when her presumed death had triggered an extreme reaction in me.

“What do you... gain?” Tomar asked in bewilderment.

“I mean... Say we were to never see Oryn ever again. We could just let him rot in prison, maybe exile him, or even execute him. Whatever the case, he would be gone. Maybe that would make us feel a little better, but we wouldn’t gain anything tangible. It’s easier to... turn off your feelings, and then use him to your advantage.”

Tomar thought my words over for a moment before responding.

“That doesn’t sound like you at all,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I get the ‘using people to your advantage’ part... But... turning your feelings off when they’re inconvenient? When have you ever done that?”

“... Like right now. I can look past what happened and just go talk to him. I have my emotions under control.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” he said, looking at me appraisingly. “You always preached for me to keep a cool head in extreme situations, but you did the exact opposite when you hunted Eissen. Even if you wanted to kill him... it would’ve made more sense to stay calm.”

“Well, yes. That was an outlier... I’m not sure what happened there myself.”

“What about when you decided that we should become the leaders of Alarna? You ranted for like two solid minutes. You weren’t in control of your emotions at all.”

“... I—”

“Or every single time something seriously surprises you and you fly into a slight panic? Not to mention Berla... I’ve seen thirteen year olds who had better control over their emotions when they had a crush.”

I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t wrong, I hadn’t been in control in these situations, but did that invalidate what I had said.

“Just because I let myself get carried away a few times doesn’t mean that what I’m saying is wrong, does it?”

‘I think I’m with Tomar here,’ Lilana said.

“Eh? You too?”

‘When you tricked me into giving you control, you did it out of spite... not necessarily because it was the right decision. I’ve seen you handle things with a calm mind, but... you also get irritated easily.’

Having those two list my slipups of the last couple months, I started questioning my own reasoning. All my life I had thought about my apparent apathy as “turning off my emotions,” but was that actually the case? Not too long ago I attributed some of these situations to my hosts changing me, but now that I thought back to my life on earth, I realized it had been full of such “outliers,” to a point where my reasoning for why I acted the way I did at times started to almost sound silly.

“You’re not as complex as you think you are.”

I thought back to what Berla had said to me when we talked about Tomar. Had she come to the same conclusion? Was the explanation I came up with for myself in younger years nonsense?

“That’s... how I always explained it to myself. It’s how it felt to me... Wow, I sound ridiculous.”

Somehow, this lightened the mood a little, and both Tomar and Lilana chuckled lightly at me. I was never a very social person, and I never had acquaintances who knew me well enough to actually poke holes into this story. “People who called you a sociopath clearly didn’t know you,” Berla had said. Once more, I felt kind of stupid. I didn’t think you should take until my age to realize something like this. “Grml.”

“I guess you don’t actually know how you do it yourself,” Tomar said with a disappointed smile. “But if you’re going to test this, I do want to be there. Shall we go?”

“Alright...” I said, and we resumed our walk to the front entrance of the temple.

“You don’t think he’s going to die though, do you? You wouldn’t risk that. Not if you thought there was a reasonably high chance for it.”

“I... No, I probably wouldn’t... It’s kind of irritating how you guys appear to know things about me that I’m not sure about myself.”

“That’s what it’s like to have friends, isn’t it?” Tomar said with a smile.

“Friends, huh? Hm... Anyway, I do think the chance is pretty low.”

We couldn’t be sure what would happen, but if this check was all that stood between people living or dying, it wasn’t a very good security mechanism, because it would be possible to erase it by accidentally scratching up the platform. In my mind that made an instant death unlikely. However, that was just my impression, and in full honesty, I would never risk someone important to me in such an experiment. I was fairly certain that Oryn would jump at the chance though, and if he did, I wouldn’t have any qualms about going through with it.

“Hm, okay. Let’s do it,” Tomar said.

We came to a stop at the front door and our guards overtook us to lead the way out the temple, across the main square, and to the prison. This early in the morning, on the “eighth day,” we were greeted by an entirely empty square and were able to walk to its south-east corner in peace. Greeting the guards in front of the prison as we walked past them, we entered the building, got a bundle of keys from the guard at the reception desk, and walked for a few more minutes until we arrived in the back of the building, where the cells were.

I motioned for our guards to take their usual posts beside the door and unlocked it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Oryn and Aelene were still sleeping, they didn’t have anything else to do after all, but I could vaguely make out chains rattling inside as I opened the door. Both of them came into view, standing up.

“Good morning,” I said, but I quickly realized something wasn’t right. Oryn looked like he was scared for some reason. Aelene then suddenly raised her arms and seemed to be aiming at us.

“Aelene! Don’t!” Oryn said, just fractions of a second before her mana exploded, started swirling around her wildly, gathered in her arm, and finally shot in our direction, while I was just standing there, watching the display in wonder. I felt like I was seeing it in slow motion. That’s... not a script... She’s doing it by herself!