Alone in the Tower

Reegan stared at the glass. He wished that he could tear his mind away from his thoughts that tortured him. As an Alchemist, he was constantly asking questions and breaking through boundaries of what other people thought was either ill advised or scandalous, and so he had developed a callous to much of what people said and did, but there was one thing that he held sacred. That was his mother.

His mother had been a refugee from Cheliax, and had never spoken of her time there, but to tell him that his father found out a way for them to escape that wretched place. When his father died while they were still young, his mother had to resort to doing unmentionable things so that they could survive in the desolate land of Thuvia. While he was still young, he had learned to fix things and was able to start supporting the family apart from what his mother was doing, but when they tried to get her away from the bad company she was keeping she was killed.

Although Reegan was only twelve at the time, he found out who did it, and paralyzed him with a poison slipped into his food, peeled off his skin with a fillet knife, covered him with hard liquor and set him on fire. The remaining prostitutes under the thumb of this evil man pooled their resources and got Reegan into the exclusive alchemist school in town, and in very little time, he earned his own keep. Through his new connections and abilities, he returned those ladies with triple their investment, and that allowed them to open their own fabric and custom tailoring business.

Although he knew in his mind that women could be just as evil as men, and had the emotional scars to prove it, he could not help himself but to feel pity for those women under the thumb of a powerful evil man. So when his new friends killed the cannibal harem, Reegan felt nauseated. Like someone tore out his intestines and wove them into a doormat. Sure, he passed it off as if he didn't care, but on the inside, something else was happening. He needed some time alone.

That's why he was relieved when he had the opportunity. He could stay up in the lighthouse and work on it, and sort things out. Friends were hard to come by, and these, with the exception of Corrigan, were pretty good to him. They looked him in the eye, they protected him, they helped him. Deklan was even conferring with him on some projects. Kali helped him find herbs and would bind up his wounds. Jask talked to him about his god of magic. Life in the alchemist school was pretty cutthroat, not literally, but everyone was out for themselves. And although they had all gotten together to survive, there was a bit of a tight bond forming. He liked these people, he wanted to stay with them.

Why couldn't he just separate who they were to him and what they did? Why couldn't he rationalize the cannibal's evil that must be destroyed? Why did it have to be so hard?

Reegan stared at the glass. He could still see the smudge where Corrigan pressed his face when he gave it a hug. Then he began to cry. He poured out the tears until snot poured out of his nose and his whole face turned red. What would his mother have done? What would she think about him? Why did she have to go? Answers for these questions never came.

After about fifteen minutes, he cleaned himself up, and went back to work, leaving the smudge on the glass.