I stepped off the bus, claimed my large pack and stepped into the corner store that served as this mountain town’s bus depot, money transfer, post office, and bait shop. A quick conversation with the store's attendant gave the location of the local grocery, hardware shop and the town's only motel.  

The Post Motel turned out to be much larger than I was expecting, a two-story L shape with 30 units on each floor. The price for a single room for the night was half the price of the bus ticket. I stashed my pack in the room and walked down the street to the grocery and hardware store, picking up light, dry consumables that I would be taking with me into the bush. I checked the hardware store, noting what they had if I needed something.  

Before I returned to The Post, I stopped by the town’s only restaurant, The Cheese Man, and had the last meal someone else would be cooking for a while. Their grilled cheese was really good, the cheese fries not so much. 

The next day I hitched up my pack and started walking up the well-maintained logging road leading in the direction of my first target site. Anyone that has walked on the side of a road for any significant distance knows how incredibly boring it quickly becomes. Add the fact that all you had to look at was gravel road and trees your mind either goes numb or heads off in directions that you normally avoid by doing anything to distract yourself. Like scrubbing toilets or cleaning out the back corners of your fridge. In my case I started with an equally welcome task, practicing Aura magic. 

Aura magic was, at its base, was circulating mana through your body. It sounds simple, but it was anything but. Normally when creating a new magic system, I often used parts from many different native systems that worked, throwing out the parts the created problems or were just dumb. But when it came to Aura magic, there were very few systems like it. The system itself had so few flaws that I originally thought it might have been created by a god or someone with modern medical knowledge. 

Aura magic had been practiced by several orders in a large kingdom, which were collectively called Aura Knights. Based on the power of these orders, the kingdom had expanded over a century, annexing or outright conquering their neighbors. Each of the orders had its own style, from the artillery like Aura Bow masters to invulnerable juggernauts, Aura Tanks. 

I had awoken in the body of a devil on one of the many battle fields dominated by the kingdom, and was almost immediately taken as a war slave. As I was one of the few war slaves that were in good condition, I was put to work right away instead of being shipped off to a slave market. As devils are known for their magic abilities, I was put in a suppression collar, then handed over to the Knight in charge of the Aura Blade knights. I kept my mouth shut, did the work I was given, and eventually I was entrusted with the personal affairs of the Knight Captain. 

Over the next five years I remained with the captain. Wintering in front line fortifications, pushing that frontline further out every spring, consolidating the gains over the summer and fall.  

Devils have a distinctive lack of empathy, the “Me : Devil” was no different, which made me the natural choose for dealing with people that the captain didn’t want to. From starving peasants to local nobility, I delt with them in the most advantageous manner for the captain’s interests. Formal attire, embarrassing subordinates, obnoxious nobles, and dirty peasants were all handled efficiently, with the minimal attention from the captain as necessary. 

Means were based on my personal code, “What I received, I returned doubled”. Those that concluded business fairly, received compensation and promotion. Those that worked received their pay, and protection. For those that took or cheated, I always found the most delicious means to extract the price from them. It seemed like I was always looking for hidden mistresses, bastard children, embezzled funds, or disgruntled employees of some obnoxious noble or other. Devils are truly creative when it comes to devious schemes.  

On the sixth year, the captain was promoted to Knight Commander and was called back to his order’s main hold in the kingdom’s capital. I was taken with him. The captain's posting was to an administration position in the hold, which he hated. He also married, about which he turned into a love besotted teenager. Once again, I delt with the details that the new Knight Commander didn’t want to. Less starving peasants, more obnoxious people of power. I was a lot of work at first, long hours after the commander left to spend time with his new pretty wife. But as I cleaned up the mess left from previous uncaring Knight Commanders, and organized the office, the workload became manageable. It also helped that several of the problem subordinates that the commander inherited were caught embezzling, and were promoted to front line positions, or suffered life altering events in their less than savory pursuits. I was happy to arrange for competent replacements to be introduced to the commander for promotions. By the end of the year, the commander spent most of his office time on the training grounds, at home or at official events, and my position was secured.  

Several years passed, my personal freedom expanded. The Commanders personal needs were now taken care of by a more publicly suitable group of maids and man servants. The majority of the office work was taken care of by well trained and competent subordinates. Important issues were delt with by me, and sent to the commander, with his newly expanded family, for final signatures. His head butler and I had long divided our duties, the butler being an ally that I could trust with any details that entered his domain, as I took care when his entered mine. Competing factions within the order had learned by explicit example not to annoy me, and those external factors that threatened, were treated with even less humanity.  

The order had an interesting quirk, one started by an early Grand Knight Commander, and had long evolved into hardened tradition. They collected books, scrolls, maps, journals, or pretty much anything made of paper. When the order campaigned, it was inevitable that crates full of seized documents would soon arrive, to be stored in the catacomb of rooms bellow the hold. The order was often referred to as the Paper Knights, behind the order’s backs, or by those intending to provoke a fight. The real oddity of this quirk was they rarely did anything with all this paper, it mostly just sat I storage.  

The order had a massive library, with a Knight Commander in charge, which was in truth a retirement post, one that only required its holder to attend social events. A few listless subordinates maintained the basic functions of the library, tidying up only for the traditional biannual inspections. My expanded freedom allowed me to haunt the library, and as the years passed, start to dig through the geological layers of paper. 

In the mounds of useless material, I found a few interesting nuggets. Maps were the easiest to find, important not only to military pursuits, but also land title and trade. With a little funding from my office budget, the maps were collected, collated, and compared by a hired map maker. With a few hints, like topographic lines and standardized symbols, the two-year project created an accurate atlas of the kingdom. The year after, a gilded and illustrated version was presented to his eminence at his Empyreal coronation, marking the move from kingdom to empire. This move gained the order his empyreal favor, and my commander a Star prefix to his title. 

The second nugget was the treasure of blackmail material from journals, secret letters, and crooked financial records. Much of what would have been useful, was rendered mute by the fact that the countries were conquered and added to the empire, but some remained useful. 

The third was something I think the order had intentionally buried, and over the long years, forgotten. It turns out this order was the first, the other competing orders had all been founded by members who had later left. That in itself would be embarrassing enough for the order to hide, but it was where they got the magic was the true reason, they buried their origins. The founding Knights, those gallant, upstanding, leaders and paragons of virtue, had stolen Aura magic from a pacifist healing order. The founders had slaughtered every healer and the surrounding village to hide their theft. 

As bad as that nugget of information was, the fourth was by far the most important to me. I had found the original complete system that was stolen from the healers. When the men that left and founded the secondary orders, they had each taken only part of the Aura system with them. Each order later evolving its own distinctive style based on the part that they had taken, while the original order specialized only on blade aura. It was here that I realized a very important fact. Aura magic was about circulating mana inside of your body, whereas the suppression collar that they had wrapped around my neck only prevented one from projecting magic outside of the body. 

Aura magicians needed to know the intricate workings of their body, allowing them to pass the infinite potential of mana safely throughout their body. Devils, high elves, fae, dragons, magic monsters, and other high magic races all had physiologies that were designed to allow mana to pass through their bodies safely. Humans, dwarves, beasts and others did not have these advantages, limiting the amount of mana they could channel without damage. The Aura magic system had gotten around this limitation in a way, by making the users entire body receptive to mana over years of training. By slowly circulating small amounts of mana through the body's structures, increasing it bit by bit over years as you trained, the body adapted. The Aura system was about controlling these changes, slowly building a body that was mana charged, becoming stronger, faster, more resilient and capable of channelling larger amounts of mana. It also had another effect, one that had attracted the Knight’s attention and subsequent bloody acquisition. An Aura user could manifest the circulating mana, creating a controllable Aura outside of the user’s body, which became the basis for all the orders distinctive abilities.  Aura weapons, like a sword or bow. Massive boosts to strength and reaction speeds. Aura armor or shields. And finally, a body that could regenerate almost any damage and slowed ageing down to a crawl. 

But there was a catch, remaking the body took time, as in decades of consistent effort, and it was painful. Physical training helped to speed up the process, providing a better base to start from and helped to alleviate some of the pain, but not all of it. The harder you pushed, the faster you progressed, and the more painful it was. There were also parts of the original Aura system that could marginally speed up the process, like diet, and meditation. Parts that the orders had long forgotten or abandoned. 

The decade that followed was devoted to maintaining my position in the order, adapting Aura magic to work with my devil physiology, and enduring the pain circulating mana brought.  

When my commander stepped away from the order to manage the noble title his wife had brought him, I was passed to his teenage son, who had been inducted into the order as a Knight Candidate. A move that at face value was a demotion for me, but one that I did not oppose. In truth I encouraged it, becoming the man servant to the impressionable young man. In fact, I did enjoy the role of the silent, eminently competent, and wise servant/mentor to the heir apparent. I quietly removed obstacles he never knew existed, helped him deal with his youthful indiscretions, guided him to choose capable companions, and admonished him when he strayed from the path of a knight. 

When his initial training was completed, I accompanied him on campaign. Subtly molding him, and his companions, nurturing their belief in the knightly code, giving them hints on how to improve. They fought monsters, rescued villages, defeated bandits and repelled invaders. They quickly rose in prestige and glory, and just as quickly gathered envy and enemies. I used my influence to stop, or outright destroy those that used underhanded methods against my charge, although I did allow a few minor schemes through. The boys needed to learn about the corruption of the orders and the empire, just in small enough doses that they didn’t give up in despair. 

After 5 years in the field, the heir and his companions were recalled to the Order’s hold for further training. In the heir’s case, he was promoted to Knight Captain, while his companions “luckily” becoming assigned as his subordinates. 

The Empire had been going through a peaceful phase, consolidating their conquered territories, and forging a new identity for their new Empire. The year that the heir became a captain, the Empire started to move once again. Armies were raised, the orders joined them under the emperor's call and the heir marched to battle. 

I arranged for the young captain to be assigned to a corrupt and venial commander, surrounded by sycophants and thugs. They were perfect. Over the months of marching to our winter posting, the captain and his companions came to completely despised the commander and his henchmen. I didn’t have much to do protecting the heir, the commander's thugs were so dumb and incompetent that the captain was able to crush their pathetic schemes with only a small amount of advice from me.  

The winter posting was a fortress built to protect a small pass through a mountain range on the northern end of the coming war front. It was far from the plains and forest where most of the battles were expected to happen, a fact that the corrupt commander was all too happy about. The captain and his companions were young, vigorous, and as planned, very unhappy with this posting. 

Over the winter, the rift between the commander’s faction, and the young virtuous captain’s, grew deep. The captain and his companions soon spent most of their time out in the town, or training with the common troops in the mountain terrain. They quite often ended up protecting the commoners of the town and in the army from the commander's thugs.  

Spring came, and a few well-placed whispers soon had the captain ordered out of the fortress to scout the pass and local villages. The companions lived up to their ideals, killing monsters, subjugating bandits, and becoming heroes to the locals even as they chaffed at news of battles that they could not take part of. Their knightly behavior won the trust of not only the local people but also of the regular army that was posted alongside the order.  

Over the months as the boys shone, the commander did exactly what I had expected of him. He extorted money from the locals, embezzled funds sent by the empire, threatened when his men's deeds were to be exposed, and did everything possible to become the villain I hoped for. All without any prompting. I just collected the evidence and waited. I knew that something would come along and light the bon fire.  

By early summer dire news of several defeats for the empire had arrived, along with rumours that the enemy had many times more troops than originally thought. The mood in the fortress, and the surrounding town became darker with each new rumour. This port town was sacked. The emperor ordering the death of the families of those who lost. The enemy unveiling a new weapon that wiped out an entire empyreal army. The thugs became even more open and brutal, the commander not even bothering to cover over their acts.  

Late in July the heir and his companions had been tracking down a merchant that they believed was responsible for the disappearance of local women. After a pitched battle with the merchants' guards, they captured the merchant in his warehouse, and rescued a few enslaved locals. True to their tradition as paper knights they collected everything, but unlike the rest of the order, I had taught them the value of looking through the papers. The merchant had kept excellent records. Not just of the women he had sold to the commander, but how commander had used the merchant to sell out to the enemy. An enemy army that would reach the pass in two weeks expecting the commander to open way. They had found the match for the bonfire. 

After stopping the young captain from charging into a face-to-face confrontation with the commander and his powerful Aura, I suggested that he gather the good people that he had meet here and remove the commander legally with their help.  

The resulting battle in the fortress against the commander was epic. Aura blades cutting through stone walls like butter. Heroic young knights freeing brutalized sex slaves. Spells flying and the final climatic battle between the young captain and his companions against the corrupt commander. I missed that ending as I was hunting down the cockroaches that were scurrying away. Fortunately, I was compensated with the unexpectedly large pile of gold that the commander had accumulated. 

The young captain, supported by his allies, fueled by the death of a companion at the commander's blade, rallied dispirited troops and successfully defeated the enemy army when they showed. 

The fall was filled with reports, paperwork, rebuilding the damage from the battle and presenting the evidence to the empyreal marshal who came to investigate. The winter was quiet as the captain was left in charge of the order’s remaining knights, under the command of the empyreal army general that came with reinforcements.  

In the spring we returned to order’s hold in the capital, the young captain and his companions receiving accolades. Before they could be exposed to any schemes or plans, I arranged for them to be transferred to the front line, and the fighting that they longed for. I did not go with them. 

The heir's father, boosted by his son’s achievement, gained the prestigious command of the library, which he promptly put me in charge of.  

For the next decade I ruled as much as I wanted from the shadows in the library, guiding the heir's career to greater heights. The shape of the ideal knight that I molded him into stuck, the years wearing the hard edges of his youthful idealism into inspiring leadership. He soon had a faction form around him of young knights, military commanders, nobles, and even members of other orders. I watched as they clashed with the corrupt establish factions, enjoying the drama their political battles brought. I even helped out occasionally, creating openings or fortuitous events for the now not so young knight turned Knight Commander. 

As I began to master the full Aura magic system it became harder to hide the fact from others. I had concentrated on keeping my Aura low key, blending into the background of the order members blazing dominate Auras, but it got progressively harder as even my subtle Aura was many times stronger than any but the oldest knights. I moved further into the background, deeper into the library, soon becoming a ghost story told to the newest knight candidates. And I waited till the next bonfire was ready. 

The Empire succeeded in conquering the continent, bringing a new level of prosperity, and corruption to the capital. Faction fights evolved from character assassination and prestige wars to bloody daggers in the night and the ruin of whole families. With more people moving in the dark, I stepped back from that front too. 

The heir finally became the lord when his father died, taking him from ‘the leader of silver knight faction’, to ‘the leader of the silver noble faction’. As patron of a noble house, he looked to produce an heir, which required a wife. In a bid to impress one of the families that he looked to arrange a marriage with, he opened the order’s library to the widowed mother of his proposed paramour. As a noted historian she was sure to jump at the chance to see the fabled paper knight's library. 

I first encountered her as she sat reading a tomb written in a lost language. Her long finger absentmindedly brushing a strand of her long straight auburn hair from her face. Devils are noted for their lack of empathy and high magical ability, but those are just the most commonly known traits of the devil race. One of their less well-known traits is that when they fall in love, that love becomes the center of their world. In that single moment as I watched Annabella Niomi Thorn brush her hair behind her ear I was lost.  

The commander married her daughter, and Annabella became a near permanent resident in the library. We dug through old records, debated the legitimacy of kings long dead, and even wrote a book on the early kingdom that would become the empire.  

The records of the orders shameful past, originally intended to be the spark that would ignite the bonfire that would destroy the orders, was put aside as unimportant. My years of grooming the silver knights, forgotten in the face of Annabella’s smile. The first time we kissed was engraved into my soul, and the years that followed were all that was important.  

Then one day she did not return, nor the next. At the time I was not worried as her social obligations sometimes kept her away. On the third day of her absence, a new Knight Commander came to the library, telling us that he was now in charge. When I spoke up, he was startled, probably surprised to find that the “devil of the library” was true. I asked him again if that meant that Lady Thorn was no longer allowed into the Library. He shook his head and said that the previous Knight Commander in charge, and his whole family including Lady Thorn had been found guilty of treason. The whole family, children included, had been executed by royal decree. 

The knights face became confused, then scared as my Aura rose, shattering the suppression collar that marked my status as a slave. The new Knight Commander’s steel blade had just cleared his scabbard, already coated in Aura, when my true Aura blade severed his head from his body. A blade from one of his entourage bounced harmlessly off my Aura covered skin as I looked up from the headless Knight Commander. I blurred, my speed and strength boosted to the point where others had a hard time following my movements. The rest of the entourage fell as my true Aura blade passed through their necks, my fellow librarians died quietly, Aura bolts through their heads. Then for the first time in years, I stepped out of the library. 

The leader of the order, the Knight Grand Cross, was married to the daughter of powerful noble. He was also a lascivious man and had gone to some lengths to keep his indiscretions hidden from his wife's family. He had a secret entrance built into his private chambers, to sneak his young mistresses in and out, and noise dampening to keep others from hearing what he did to those mistresses. Even as much as his marriage had secured his position, his Aura strength was no joke. By the time I had opened the secret door, the Knight Grand Cross had sprung from his bed and invoked his true Aura blade. My Aura armor, and Aura boosted body made up for my truly rusty sword play. l left the Knight Grand Cross’s head on the bed next to the empty eyed and mentally broken mistress. 

I moved through the hold, moving by secret doors and hidden ways, silently slaughtering any of the order I came across. The servants, assistants, maids, handymen, messengers, and unfortunate guests were all killed quickly with an Aura bolt through their heads. This was the only mercy that I would give anyone in the hold. By the time the alarm was raised it was too late for those that remained, their numbers and skill not high enough to stand against my combined Aura power. 

When the last Knight Candidate fell, my true Aura blade sliding out of his heart as he slumped, I looked around. Night had fallen, and I could hear someone yelling and pounding on the Holds main doors. Blocking the huge double doors was a large broken carriage, splintered and twisted from when I used an Aura push to move it out of my way. The Knight Candidates had been using it as a makeshift barricade during their heroic but futile last stand. 

I walked back into the Hold, past the dismembered Knights I had left behind. Any that were still alive, despite the blood lose, lost their heads with a flick of my glowing red blade. Back into the Library the light from the oil lantern I picked up illuminated the blood-soaked floor. I left bloody footprints behind me as I disappeared deep into the Library. 

That night, the Paper Knight’s Hold lit the capital as it burned. 

KurtHudson

I enjoyed writing this chapter.

The story that went along with the MC's explanation of Aura magic's history was planned to be only a few paragraphs. Intended to illustrate the personality differences that the MC's body imposes on him.

I kind of got carried away.