The storm fly, though dead, continued to project a green-brown impression. Its body had died, but the mana somehow lingered. Strange, I had never seen this before. The green was the storm fly's own mana; the brown was the familiar taint of the mindless, the rot that had been associated with Oscanion's spells.

But the corruption of the mana looked different from what I had seen in the other mindless in the past. When I had seen the taint in victims in the past, it had been mixed with Oscanion's black mana, but now I saw it mixed with the storm fly's green. And more importantly, the green was not wholly mixed with the brown, like a leaf almost but not yet fully overcome by a creeping disease. Had the storm fly been powerful enough, its will so strong, that it was able to manage a partial resistance?

Actually, was that truly brown?

I closely examined the colors revealed to me by my mage-sight, much refined now compared to my youth. I tried to separate the impression given by the mana from the true physical colors in the same area, looking from different angles, in different lighting.

No, I finally concluded. It was not a proper brown, more of a red so putrid that it looked brown. In the past, my inferior senses and the mixing of the taint with Oscanion's own black had hidden this.

That was all the confirmation that I needed. This was red magic, as I had always suspected it must be. This was not something Oscanion had done with black magic, not something Oscanion could ever have done alone, but a spell beyond any red mage in history. I could guess which master mages had sounded the alarm at Solenn, what they had urgently needed to protect against, and what kind of magic the amulets of the Guard had been enchanted to resist and contain.

I sent a silent thank you to my red and blue mage allies from a millennium ago. Immediately recognizing this threat, defending against it on the spot, and soon developing an effective countermeasure that still worked today was truly a masterwork worthy of commemoration. Of all alive today, I alone could fully appreciate how much competence the whole thing had required. I would honor them forever. They had been helpers.

I wondered: did whoever or whatever was responsible for this vile magic understand why the members of the Guard were resistant, how they impeded control of the outside world by their simple presence? I could imagine the caster cowering, intimidated into a hidey-hole by the implied power of a group of enemies that unanimously did not succumb to what must be the overlord's most powerful spell, capable even of subjugating an unsuspecting storm fly. Perhaps the Guard was safe after all; the caster might not dare to send its minions against them.

But those impressive amulets were running out. They hadn't been charged in a long time, and no one alive could charge them. Some may already be failing; this very event was likely a sign of the coming end of containment. Ironically, it had, indirectly, brought me back to the world just in time by sending Dekel's ship to me.

Ha! Should have stayed in your hole!

And now here I am. My pulse was pounding. Never had I come across an opportunity like this before. Purifying that brown--red--taint had always wiped the victim entirely in the past. What would purification achieve here, when the victim, its mana in this case, was not wholly overwritten?

I began the channel while my warriors kept watch silently. Soon enough, the sickness burned away to leave only the leaf, albeit a leaf with holes in it. The impression given by the immaterial mana shifted to the storm fly's native pure green.

I inspected the mana with my healing magic...there was a will in here, an echo of a mind. I had studied such things extensively in my attempts to heal the mindless.

Interesting. One's own intrinsic mana was bound to one's mind, closely linked to the will. With enough mana--storm flies had so much that even this small pure remnant was a lot--it seemed plausible that the mana could have a reasonably detailed record of the mind's form imprinted on it. While far from a perfect copy of its mind, the storm fly's core thoughts and desires were encoded in its mana, the mana not dissipating due to this lingering will it contained, of its late owner.

The echo was mangled, and moreover difficult to understand through the species barrier, but it was there. White magic ought to be able to restore any damaged pattern if enough of it remained to interpolate what was missing.

I gave it a try, and was rewarded.

First, I saw an image of the Southern Marine Research Laboratory at Solenn, viewed from the sea to its south. Was this a scene from the storm fly's memories?

I had never seen the laboratory--I had been born after Solenn became inaccessible--but I knew enough to recognize it. It was a massive cylindrical building hanging off the edge of the famous World's End Cliff, which plunged immediately many leagues straight down to the ocean floor. The floor, I had heard, was at a depth such that the pressure crushed water into an exotic form of ice unstable at the surface. The building was enchanted to endure such enormous pressures so that researchers, and visitors, could view species in their natural environments at any depth, in a giant abyssal aquarium.

And then my spell found a sequence of thoughts and emotions.

...friends? <proud father> Brought children!...

I tried to puzzle out a plausible interpretation.

Ah. Maybe he had brought his family to the Solenn Laboratory to show the newborn nymphs to the researchers he thought were there. Maybe he had been a rescue in the distant past, and had fond memories of the humans at the laboratory? It was obvious what must have happened next, but how exactly?

...<confusion>...<sadness>...<concern>...<confusion>...<confusion>...<panic><panic><panic><panic><panic><panic><panic><panic>....

My skin prickled. The Solenn Guard attacking, unprovoked from his perspective, had probably initially confused and saddened him, or maybe it had been the abandoned state of the facility. But what entity could cause a millennial quasi-god of wind and water, king of the waves, to panic like that?

...<grief>...<regret>...<remorse>...

I sucked in air.

This was no time to hold back. I rerouted all mana I had been supplying to shields, and mustered all that remained of the power I had spent the last 943 years obtaining.

I needed to restore as much of the echo of the storm fly's mind as I could. What had he seen? What did he know?

Never had I invested so much mana into a single spell. In fact, this might have been the most white mana that had ever been dedicated to a single task in history. The mana desperately tried to figure out the mind's pattern, and restore it.

Wind suddenly began to blow weakly in the vicinity of the storm fly's remaining mana, wind magic slowly consuming the mana and thus the very mind that it encoded, in order to gasp out what sounded like faint whispers.

"Impressive, but...temporary...Sorry...city...didn't know...about lab...understand...why...attacked..."

My heart broke for him. His entire family mind-dominated, he had been forced to annihilate a city while he looked on in horror from a prison in his own mind, all for the crime of trying to show his children to the researchers at the Solenn Laboratory. He'd been roaming the seas for a thousand years in order to reach adulthood. How could he have known the danger?

"The ones who attacked you. Are they still alive?" I asked.

"Some...live...sorry...tried to...resist..."

My blood ran cold. So much for the Guard being alright. Some Guards dead meant some amulets inactive, and thus weakened protection. That must be how the storm flies and nymphs could still be controlled, even here, far from Solenn.

"Mind...mixed with mine...saw its mind...memories...fears you...sister...took many slaves away..."

"You saw its mind? The one that enslaves minds? Who fears us? What is it?" I asked urgently. Then I felt a pang of sadness and shook my head. "My sister was...She's gone."

"...only know...always hungry...wants death...dead rot...eats rot...at bottom...fears you...sister..."

The evidence all pointed in one direction. There were far, far, far worse things than storms and sandbars in the deep oceans. In the abyss of the Solenn Laboratory, there was a monster of red magic that needed killing yesterday. It needed killing a millennium ago. It--

I tried to focus, tried to keep my rage from spiking. This conversation was too important and time-limited to lose control now, or slip into self-castigation and regret. The orphans of the world would have their turns at the proper time.

Unfortunately, there was a serious problem with this needing-to-kill-a-monster situation. I'm really bad at killing things.

I missed Izena, so much.

As I was thinking this, the storm fly's remnant asked a question.

"Sister...mana?"

What? What was he talking about? That she had a lot?

"...like mine...now?"

What? No, her mana was black and his was green, but he must know that?

"...linger?"

Linger? Like his was now?

I stared at the black smudge on the ground that had been Izena, her smudge somehow even blacker than the other two, as black as her hair, as black as her mana.

Realization slapped me in the face. My ears rang.

The impression, the sense of over-blackness given by black mana...I--I had left her. She had been right there, her mind, if only a little bit of it, right in front of me, stored in her mana just like this, and I had turned and left! I had flown away, left her for 943 years!

MMMmmmmg. Mmmmff. Aggghhhh.

I whimpered.

Conversation. Focus.

"Yes," I wheezed, stunned and full of acid. "It did."

The storm fly's remnant mustered the last of its resolve to speak its final thoughts clearly, no longer creating weak whispering wind, but masterfully vibrating my body directly with millennia of skill in water magic, belying that magic's reputation as imprecise large-scale weather control. It was clear that he had managed to hold back in our battle. He could have summoned those twisters wherever he damn well pleased.

The sound resonated to my core. I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything but listen.

"YOU COULD NOT HAVE HELPED HER AS YOU WERE THEN. YOU CAN HELP HER AS YOU ARE NOW. HER MANA AND A PARTIAL IMPRINT OF HER MIND MAY ENDURE, IF SHE HAD A TASK THAT SHE STRONGLY FELT SHE MUST COMPLETE, AS I DO. MOST HAVE TOO LITTLE MANA TO HOLD A MIND, AND NOT ENOUGH WILL TO ENDURE, BUT IF HERS LINGERED, THEN SHE HAD ENOUGH OF BOTH. SHE WAS NOT TAINTED, TATTERED AS I AM, AND MAY NOT BE BEYOND HELP. BUT HER MIND WILL BE INCOMPLETE, ONLY ENOUGH TO HOLD HER CORE MOTIVE AND LITTLE ELSE, HER CONSCIOUSNESS SUPPRESSED. SHE MAY BE WHERE HER BODY WAS DESTROYED, OR SHE MAY HAVE DRIFTED TO A PLACE MORE MEANINGFUL, CONNECTED TO HER MISSION. TO WHAT PLace would...sister...I know not...Think...Find...Restore...........win......me..."

The magic stopped. The green mana had consumed too much of itself while casting magic to speak for the echo of will it contained. The mind remnant was destroyed.

My own mind had a lot to think about, but I was spent.

I could tell, the reality of what had just happened would take time to sink in.