So, after hearing his story, Lisle, Bill, and Trevor changed the questions they were asking.
They no longer asked people if they had seen a trader, six feet tall and with kind eyes and a friendly word for anyone.
They now asked people if they knew where the bandits made their camp.
After visiting dozens of inns, shops, and village squares, they learned the truth from a man named Redtuth, who was in the gallows and set to be killed by the town guards for his road crimes.
Now the boys knew that the bandits had taken their father. They knew where the bandits were.
It wasn’t hard to guess what they did next.
That was why, days later, only Bill and Lisle made their way home. The bandits killed Trevor, and the other two brothers somehow escaped with their lives. But their father?
Well, the bandits had no clue where he was. They said as much, and though Lisle had provoked them to hostility by doubting them, Bill and Trevor both believed them.
Their father was gone, and his body was never recovered.
Vedetta’s favorite brother had perished at the hands of bandits.
The remaining two boys abandoned their dreams of swordsmanship and magery. They sank into a deep, dark depression.
Vedetta’s mom became ill, and it was an illness so sudden and so powerful that it seemed to make an old lady of her overnight. It robbed her of her strength until she barely left her bed, let alone her room or the house.
So, Vedetta helped care for her mom while trying to run the house and still study at the town school. Her brothers wouldn’t help, and the town healers, alchemists, and herbalists were at a loss to cure her mom. This went on for years, and so much responsibility made Vedetta mature beyond her time.
Desperate to fix things, Vedetta visited a witch who lived in a hut way out in the forest.
(By the way…cliché much? A witch living in a hut in the forest? Come on! If I didn’t doubt the girl’s honesty, I would have laughed in her face. Which would have been entirely inappropriate given the circumstances.)
The witch, after doing the normal witch things of using a leech to drain Vedetta’s blood for no discernable reason and then casting strange spells of premonition, was able to tell Vedetta a couple of interesting things.
For one, her father had died after the bandits waylaid him, though the bandits left his body on the road.
Two, his body was claimed by a gentleman named Blacke Kyle, who procured bodies for…
…The Dungeon Core Academy.
Yes.
The academy necromancer’s performed their rituals, raising Vedetta’s father’s soul from the dead and forging his soul into a core, where he was presumably living his second life.
“Where is he?” Vedetta asked.
The witch smiled sadly. “You will never find him, sweet one. The world is a vast place, and even vaster under the surface. You could search for centuries and never find him.”
That would have been shocking enough for anyone, let alone a girl. Vedetta had formed a shell as tough as steel by now, and she kept her head when most would have lost theirs.
She listened as the witch explained what a core was, and why such practices were still done even in these enlightened times.
She also listened while the witch laid the most startling fact of all on her…
That she sensed death around Vedetta. That Vedetta had not only died and been turned into a core herself in the past, but she had ascended from her life as a core and had earned the right to be reborn as a human once again.
CHAPTER 12
“You poor thing,” I said, touched by her story. “But I’m sorry to say, that if you don’t leave my dungeon, I’ll have to slaughter you.”
Vedetta nodded. “I understand. After all, I was a core myself. A much better one than you, since I earned my third resurrection and all.”
“We aren’t supposed to remember our past lives,” I said. “Not even if you become a master core and then ascend. The only way you get to remember your life as a core is if they resurrect you to be an overseer. After all, an overseer who couldn’t remember being a core wouldn’t be much use.”
“The witch and I couldn’t access the core part of my memories at first, but we worked on it,” she said. I was all too aware now of how wise she sounded, despite her voice being high pitched and annoying, just like most children.
“The witch helped you remember your core life?”
“Over months and months, yes. She was so interested that she didn’t even ask for payment. I remember a lot of it, now. Not all, but a lot.”
“Did it ever occur to you that she was lying?”
“You’re cynical.”
“He is not cynical,” said Tomlin, finding his voice again. “He is the Dark Lord. Tomlin is sorry about your struggles, child.”
“Child? You’re an academy hatchling,” said Vedetta. “If you added my three lives together, I’d have almost four hundred years on you.”
“Wow,” I said. “You know about the academy monster breeding. You’re not just spinning stories to stop me from killing you, are you? This is all true?”
Vedetta nodded sadly. With every second I spent with her I could see there was more going on in her head than I’d first thought.
“The witch was able to tell me a vision she had of a pocket watch nestled in some grass on a road near a tavern, miles away from town. So I went there, and I found it. My father’s pocket watch.”
“And that made you trust her enough that you believed her when she said you had once been a core.”
“Yes.”
“That explains why you aren’t scared down here. As a human coming down here, I
