Supreme Magus

"Yes, she does. Yet like any other children of Baba Yaga, Dawn is imperfect as well." The hybrid replied. "The moment a spawn dies, she loses access to their abilities and knowledge except for the bits she has spent time practicing.

"Otherwise with her eternal life, she would have already become nigh-omnipotent. Dawn is the incarnation of the undead's feeding flaw and her mission is to find a fix to it. If she ever succeeds, the undead will become unstoppable."

'That's why she's after the Odi ruins.' Lith thought. 'The Odi were body snatchers, but their procedure was imperfect as well. The new body would not inherit the original's mana core nor their muscle memory.

'I bet Dawn is after their research about memory transfer and that's what that odd machine is about. She's trying to apply to Odi technology on herself before adapting it to the rest of the undead.'

"How did Acala came into play?" Lith asked.

"Dawn can't be destroyed. She feeds upon the light element so even locking her in a cave is pointless." Nalrond said. "Yet like her maker, she suffers from isolation. Given time, my tribe exchanged our company for her knowledge about all kinds of light magic.

"We hoped that Body Sculpting would help us find a way to merge our twin essences. That we could put her skills to good use. We never succeeded, but over time, our skill with healing magic became legendary.

"People would seek our village to fix what was wrong with their bodies, their minds, or even their souls. They believed us to be heavenly creatures, but there's only so much we could do for them.

"Acala is among the few that managed to find our village. He was at the lowest point of his life, to the point that salvation and death were equally charming to him. Acala told us how he had slaved away for his masters until they had thrown him out once he was no longer deemed useful.

"Now I know that his side of the story was twisted, but his pain was genuine. We felt empathy for his situation and we did all we could to prevent him from throwing away his life.

"Like many before him, Acala found peace among us and decided to remain. He was a good man and a powerful mage, so we accepted him as one of our own. Acala even took one of our women as his wife and that was the beginning of the end.

"Our skills reminded him of someone called 'Manohar', one of the most powerful men in your Kingdom. He asked us to teach him the art of shaping light, but we know nothing about human magic and he proved to be incapable of learning the way we do."

'Yeah. That would require him to be Awakened.' Lith thought.

"As long as Acala was our guest and lived at the fringes of our community, he knew no envy. Yet once he got married, watching so may marvels, watching so much power wielded even by children while he was stuck with his primitive ways made him bitter." Nalrond said.

"He started to live it as another injustice. As if every time we practiced our magic, we reminded him of how insignificant he was. We were worried by him spending so much time alone in the forest, but only because we thought he might commit suicide.

"Dawn was locked inside a chest, hidden in our chieftain's house, and protected by several arrays we inherited from our ancestors. We had no idea at the time that just like we learned from her, she had learned from us.

"Even from within her prison, Dawn used her mastery over the light element to see everything that happened inside the village and learn our personal spells. She also managed to discover the passwords for the arrays and how the chest's lock worked."

"Wait. How could you be so stupid to not use a light-blocking array against her?" Lith asked.

"We did, but it wasn't enough!" Nalrond clawed his own legs in frustration. "You don't get it. Dawn doesn't feed upon light magic, but on the light element itself. Hide her inside a cave, bury her in a marine trench, it doesn't matter.

"The only way to fully stop her would be to destroy the sun."

"I'm sorry, but I still fail to see how Acala could help her. It seems to me you had everything under control." Lith said.

"So did we, and we were wrong. Dawn had already tried to free herself from the arrays in the past, but she always failed. We believed that our teamwork, our relentless preparations were the reason for our success, but the truth was that Dawn was just probing our ranks.

"It had never been us or the arrays to keep her from leaving, it was the lack of a suitable host. Someone so crazy and desperate to bond with her even though he knew what she was.

"Without a host, she could exert less than half her full strength. That along with the passwords for the arrays was enough to escape from her prison but not enough to get away from the village. With our numbers, it would have been only a matter of time before we captured her again.

"Dawn only had one chance, because once she revealed her hand, we would have changed the codes often to foil further attempts. Sadly, a single mistake was also our last. Dawn deactivated the arrays, burst through our ranks, and reached Acala.

"We had failed to understand that what he looked for wasn't a family, a place where he belonged, or even acceptance. The only thing Acala wanted was what he believed that Mogar owed him.

"Once he bonded with Dawn, he absorbed so much light energy that he blotted out the sun and then he burned the whole village to make sure that no one would live to tell the tale. I survived the massacre only because I was on the front lines when it happened." Nalrond started to sob.

"I beg your pardon?" Lith asked. The hybrid's words made no sense to him.

"After Dawn deactivated the arrays, I was part of the guards that took the full power of her first attack. I was too severely injured to be of help, so I Blinked away to heal and avoid becoming a hostage.

"I watched at the whole thing from a distance and when Acala bonded with Dawn I know everything was lost. I tried to Blink back to the village to save as many people as I could, but without light element, there's no dimensional magic.

"The only thing I could do was fly away and curse my own weakness. You can easily imagine the rest."

"Have you tried warning the Kingdom?" Lith put the table back in place. His hospitality surprised Nalrond, but at that point, the hybrid didn't care about anything but his own hunger.

"And tell them what? That a decorated Ranger had stolen a legendary artifact from a tribe of monsters? Don't your people give a medal to those who commit such crimes?" Nalrond wolfed down the food the moment he shapeshifted into his human form.

His stark-naked human form.