Isabella did not follow quietly.
She followed because resistance, for now, was inefficient.
Aldir noticed that immediately.
They traveled eastward along the borderlands where civilization thinned into half-claimed roads and watchless villages. He set the pace—unhurried, relentless—and she kept it without complaint, though her boots were worn and her magic still burned erratically beneath her skin.
She watched him when she thought he wouldn't notice.
He noticed everything.
"You walk like you don't feel weight," she said on the third night, breaking hours of silence. "Not physical weight. Moral."
Aldir did not slow. "Weight is a choice."
She snorted. "That's a lie powerful people tell themselves."
He stopped.
Isabella nearly collided with his back.
The undead he had bound for protection—four revenants, stripped to bone and wrapped in travel-cloaks—halted instantly, motionless as statues.
Aldir turned to face her.
"Say it again," he said calmly.
Her chin lifted. "You choose not to feel what you do. That doesn't make it disappear. It just makes it rot."
The devils stirred faintly, curious.
Aldir studied her as one might examine a flawed weapon—annoyed, intrigued, not yet deciding whether to discard or refine.
"You bind death through emotion," he said. "Anger. Fear. Conviction. You think that makes you righteous."
"I think it makes me human," Isabella shot back. "Something you abandoned."
That landed closer than she expected.
Aldir turned away again, resuming his walk. "You mistake erosion for abandonment."
She followed, jaw tight. "You mistake numbness for clarity."
The psychological war began there—not with spells or blood, but with definition. Each tried to name the other. Whoever succeeded would win something far more valuable than obedience.
They made camp beside a river swollen with spring melt. Aldir did not sleep. He never truly did. He entered a state of stillness where thought slowed and perception widened. Isabella noticed this too.
"You don't dream," she said quietly as she stirred the fire. "Do you?"
"No."
"Figures."
She hesitated, then spoke again. "Why didn't you kill me?"
Aldir opened his eyes.
"I don't destroy resources without understanding their potential."
She flinched, then laughed softly. "You reduce everything to function."
"Yes."
"And people?"
He met her gaze. "Especially people."
She held his stare longer than most would dare. "Then you'll miscalculate me."
"Unlikely."
She smiled then—not kindly. "Everyone does."
In the days that followed, Aldir trained her.
Not gently.
He stripped her magic down to fundamentals, dismantling her spells mid-cast, forcing her to feel where instability entered. He forbade emotional surges, cutting her off whenever anger spiked her output.
"You're choking your own power," he told her coldly. "Control precedes expression."
"And you're strangling it," she snapped back. "Magic isn't meant to be caged."
"Death is," he replied. "Or it devours indiscriminately."
She hated that answer.
That was good.
They came upon a border village on the seventh day—a place too small for guards, too remote for protection. Smoke rose from between crooked rooftops. Aldir felt death before he saw it.
Raiders.
Human. Desperate. Armed poorly, but numerous enough.
Isabella stiffened. "We should intervene."
Aldir surveyed the scene from the treeline. Three bodies already lay in the mud—villagers. A child cried somewhere unseen.
"Intervention costs resources," he said. "We gain nothing."
She rounded on him. "People are dying."
"Yes."
"You can stop it."
"Yes."
"Then do it."
Aldir's silence stretched.
In the capital, he would have acted already—not to save, but to end. Raiders would fall. Corpses would rise. The situation would resolve cleanly.
Efficiently.
He lifted his hand.
Necromantic threads unfurled—
—and Isabella stepped in front of him.
"No," she said.
The undead behind him shifted, responding to the interruption. Aldir's eyes darkened.
"Move," he said.
"If you do this," she said, voice shaking but firm, "you'll turn them into tools. Again. You'll win—and become exactly what you claim not to be."
Aldir felt it then.
Not anger.
Resistance.
Something inside him tightened—not against her, but against the ease of the solution. He saw the sequence play out in perfect clarity: death, control, silence.
Routine.
He lowered his hand.
The threads retracted.
Isabella's breath caught.
The devils stirred sharply.
Why? they pressed—not demanding, but genuinely curious.
Aldir did not answer them.
He stepped past Isabella and walked toward the village alone.
He did not raise the dead.
He fought the raiders himself.
It was slower. Messier. Pain returned—dulled, but present. Steel bit into his side. A club cracked against his skull hard enough to stagger him. He killed with hands and blade, not command.
When it was over, five raiders lay dead by human effort alone. The rest fled.
The villagers stared at him in terrified silence.
Isabella joined him, eyes wide—not with triumph, but shock.
"You chose restraint," she said softly.
Aldir wiped blood—his own and others'—from his knuckles. "I chose inefficiency."
She shook her head. "No. You chose difference."
That night, as they left the village behind, Isabella spoke more quietly than ever before.
"You didn't have to listen to me."
Aldir stared at the road ahead. "No."
"Then why did you?"
The answer came slower than most.
"Because," he said at last, "for the first time since my death, the easier path felt… wrong."
Isabella said nothing.
But something shifted between them—not warmth, not trust.
Awareness.
And far behind them, in the spaces where devils watched and recorded, something ancient adjusted its expectations.