Arthur grimaced as he poked his tongue through the hole in his cheek. The injury hurt far more than it should have, and was healing incredibly slowly. Worse than that was the perverse magic he could feel settling over his person, trying to dictate his psyche to fit a very specific mould. Memories of Rize rose to the forefront of his brain, and he could feel his temper rising to the surface. Logically, he knew these people had no part to play in his sister's death, but the role this foreign magic was trying to force him into didn’t care for such niceties. Reality became obscure, past and present merging, the lines between fact and fiction blurring.Arthur bit his lip hard enough to make it bleed. The man who’d cut him was saying something to the goblin, but it sounded like gibberish in his ears. In retrospect, it made sense that high-profile guards would encrypt their speech. “Stop it, whatever it is you’re doing,” Arthur ground out.The head guard looked at him incredulously and then at the dead bodies on the ground. “And why, pray tell, should we do that. You just killed some of my men. That means all limits are off, including the unpleasant shit I usually try to avoid. You started this fight. Not us.”Arthur should have known not to listen to this guy speak after what he’d pulled the first time. There was a stabbing pain in his left foot, and the next thing he knew, the entire limb was rotting. Boils popped across his flesh before bursting apart, cancerous tumours rapidly growing throughout his calf muscles and expanding out of his flesh like bulbous plant-growth.The infection was spreading up his leg, but it met some resistance midway through his thigh when his nether-infused blood began to actively combat it. It’s his blood, isn’t it? Arthur realised, from when he spat on the ground.The blood mage, if that was what he truly was, grinned at him, revealing bloodied stumps where his teeth had (...)