I went back to the disaster that was now my room. None of the mess had been cleaned, thankfully. No lit fireplace. No candles. It wasn't warm, with the Sun now set. Sighing, my eyes shut, and I tried to imagine. A blazing Sun, giving off energy that I could feel flowing around me, less than during the day.
The moment I tried to manipulate this burning feeling, my eyes snapped open, and I could feel my body burning. All I could see was fire. All I could feel was fire. All I could think about is fire. It was beautiful. Blazing, hot and overflowing, coming from the figure that appeared out of the flames.
"Burn. It. All," the fire whispered to me, overtaking my mind-
My mouth opened, my dry lips crackling with the strain. I would have felt blood flow down my chin, if the blood didn't boil off the moment it exited my burned lips. "No," I mouthed, no voice coming out. There was no air to breathe.
I felt another energy prickle my skin, the opposite to heat. A chilling feeling, numbing my body to feel nothing. The fire erupted, erasing the cold, burning my mind away. But a voice rang out, louder than the growing whispers to burn everything. "Let your fire burn," it said, its voice crackling and without tone. "Let it consume you."
The Fire Mana ate every sense of mine, leaving me in nothing, until I felt my eyes bubble and burn and turn to ash.
Vision returned to me, and I found myself lying on the floor. My lungs burned. A sharp intake of breath made me wonder how long I'd been there. I sputtered, coughing until the bile in my stomach threatened to escape. Swallowing it all down, I pushed myself off the ground, my arms giving out twice before I pushed through the strain.
I made my way to my desk, collapsing in my seat, shaking with the strain of keeping my back upright. The pain was still beneath my skin. I looked over the notes I'd wrote the other day. It was chaotic, the sprawling of a madman. No way I was leaving it like that.
An hour later, all of my notes were put into a proper list, ordered by the priority and usefulness of what I knew. Half of it was useless. A third of what was useful was out of my skill level. I focused on one thing from the rest of it. The antidote. It would be discovered years later, the day after Talon's daughter died from the disease. There were eighteen ingredients I needed to get before meeting him, if I had any chance of keeping my house. Sixteen of them were common herbs and spices.
"Damn it," I muttered, biting my finger. The other two might just kill me. But I had to keep the house. I had to.
I put the notes into a stack on its own, keeping it separate from everything else on the table, and pulled out more paper. My mind was fuzzy as I wrote down names. Missing last names, first names forgotten, nicknames all I could remember for some. Most were people who grew up to be strong soldiers, some healers, others explorers, so on and so forth.
My hand stilled on the last page I needed. This one would be those I needed to kill immediately. Demon worshippers, tyrants, and those who would get in my way of saving the world. I pinned this page to my wall, keeping the others in its own stack on my desk.
Finally done with all of that, I bit my finger before stretching. My body was sore, but it'd be sorer tomorrow.