I couldn't help but steal a glance at the wallpaper. It made me blush, and I didn't blush often.

But after all the exhaustion and fatigue we went through, I was feeling strangely touch-starved and the implication of what the figures on the walls were doing made my skin tickle. I tried to concentrate on the artistic details. The colors were pastels. The art looked like some of the most suggestive Silanian art. Which had never made me blush before.

"What are you looking at?" Roman stretched his legs on the bed. He wasn't putting up a fight to the vicious game Alefpeneash had created for us --- like me, he was too tired. "Don't overthink it. It's likely those pampered nobles wouldn't know what to put and where if it wasn't for the images on the walls."

"Spoken like an honorary member of the Brotherhood," I put my sword down on the beside table, close enough that I could grab at it during my sleep. "I'm sorry. My mind feels so far away."

"That's... a strange thing to say," Roman commented. "Maybe you're just tired."

"It's probable. But you wouldn't say it if I felt like I felt..."

I didn't have words to explain it, and I realised that it was because words weren't coming to me in the first place. The sensation was one of being almost locked out from my mind. Perhaps it was extreme weakness. My body could move just fine. I laid down on the bed.

"Take off your boots," Roman chided me.

"I always sleep fully clothed, with my sword on my bedside table. It saves a lot of time if there's trouble. And if I have a sleeping companion, they must understand that it's either this or nothing."

Roman looked strangely prickled by the remark. 

"I'd rather for you not to wake up in the middle of the night, sense a foreign body next to you and impale me," he muttered. "Maybe I should sleep with my knives."

I fell asleep very quickly. Or so I thought. Before I could realise what was happening, I heard Roman asking in a very strange and rough voice, "What... what are you doing?"

I tried to roll over and see if I was nudging him with an arm or a leg, when I realised in panic that I did not have any control over my body. I could see, from the inside, what it was doing but I couldn't tell it to stop.

And what it was doing was kneeling over Roman, my legs spread around his in a menacing position, as if holding him hostage, and grabbing my sword from the bedside table. Before I knew what I was doing, the tip of my sword was propped under his chin, and close enough to draw blood.

"Don't you dare turn away from me," I said, words that I would never think nor speak out loud. "Don't you dare turn your face away from the injustice that was inflicted on me."

Roman used more force than I would have granted him possible and pushed me down the bed. He winced when I landed on my back, but I soon was up on my feet again.

"You're not hurt, are you? But you have to snap out of it," Roman said, almost pleading. "You're possessed!"

I laughed, and it was a harsh and dark laughter I'd never laughed before. "Possessed? And by whom? There's no one else inside of here but me."

"But it's not you either! Possession might work differently in the realm demons are from."

I tried to sheath my sword, but I couldn't. My arm trembled slightly. "How do you know it's not me?"

"First of all, do you even have to ask? Second, your sword is made of sardo. It snaps in half if you do something that's not pure with it. I know you wouldn't risk breaking it in half just because you're having an urge to kill me... which you wouldn't have anyway."

"And," he added when he saw the look on my face. "Weapons tell a lot of things about the warrior, especially Watchers' ammunitions. You have it made just for you. Which means you're the kind of person who commissions a sword made of sardo, that would first break in half before it makes you do something you're going to regret."

"It also snaps in half if there is something that I should do to fight impurity, and I don't," I murmured. It was the first sentence I spoke directly out of my mind. "So it keeps me in control of my faculties all the time."

"You see? You weren't in control before."

Just when I was becoming convinced of his words, my mind felt like splitting in two and suddenly I wasn't in control of my body anymore. I lunged, and the sword tried to strike at Roman again. My thoughts were still my own --- it gave me relief to think my sword would have broken before hurting the Prophet. But we were in a different realm and the way I lunged at him was so fast and merciless the blade could have waited to softly sink into his body before it snapped. I couldn't afford to take any chances. I tried to drop it, and, to my surprise, my body replied to the command and the longsword fell clanking to the floor. Roman and I looked at it in horror. 

"Maybe the sword was the one who'd been possessed," I said, but when I realised the implication of it, that I made it look as if I would have knelt down on his legs either way, we both turned a little pink.

"I can kind of sense it, it's not a full possession like Mira's," I added through gritted teeth because my mind was going back to that cotton-like feeling again.

"Maybe it's simply done by a different demon or ghost," Roman explained.

Still, my hand tried to go for the sword again, but this time I managed to put it back in the scabbard. Satisfied, I didn't put much control over my actions.

It was the wrong thing to do. The force took control of my body again, and started using the sheathed sword as a baton. I unwillingly tried to beat Roman with it. Thankfully he was quick and he evaded most of my blows, but a few landed on his arms and I couldn't help but feel terrible about it.

I wanted to cry, but it was possible not only that the tears wouldn't come --- they also might turn into something else entirely, like laughter. It was another chance that I couldn't take. I thought about the time Alefpeneash had made my body feel estranged from me. Back then, the pain was being inflicted on me and I tried to put an end to it by slitting my wrists. But now I was the one hurting someone else, and it was worse. I couldn't take it. I would have done anything to make it stop.

"Talk to me," Roman commanded me, or the spirit. He dodged a blow, ad part of the tacky wallpaper was torn apart by my blow. 

"You don't know anything of injustice," I said against my will. "Of being trapped forever in a body that's not yours."

"No, spirit, this is not the time for your story, nor I care much for it," Roman said calmly as if I wasn't striking him. "But you're hurting my friend. Jonathan, talk to me. Tell me something, anything."

But I couldn't. The spirit had lost all its previously remaining calm when it heard that Roman didn't care much for its story. Even the little control I could exercise before didn't amount to nothing now. Still,  I didn't blame him. It was about to happen, either way. I'd been feeling the vengeful ghost growing stronger.

I started screaming and tried to lunge at Roman. In the end, with the little I could do, I managed to simply grab his sleeve but I was being so forceful I tore it apart. When he got out from under my grip, I picked up one of his knives from under the bed, where he decided to leave them in the end.

"This is not made of sardo," the spirit said. I noticed it talked differently from me, the little Tallyard accent I still had from my childhood was gone.

"Jonathan. You're still in there. You are," Roman replied. It sounded as if he knew he was losing the fight.

"That was always kind of point," the spirit commented. "To let him know what I've been doing."

And that said, it plunged the knife in Roman's back, and drove it in deeply.

A few hours after that, Roman woke up from the sleep he'd dozed off in after I stabbed him. He didn't seem able to remember our fight at first, so he simply looked at me, and at himself with a puzzled expression. He'd been sleeping with a wound on his back that was probably hurting him like hell, but that I already bandaged using materials from the nursery in the castle. I was looking at him with my clothes more torn apart than before, and a baleful expression in my eyes.

When he looked into my eyes, it was when Roman's expression steadied and looked guarded. He remembered things, now.

"I have two very important things to say," I cleared my throat. "First, we need a new change of clothes. We could find something in here that make us look noble and princely and not like two wrecks who went to hell. And second, we should have eaten Auld Pipes' chocolates. I'm beginning to think they were meant against demonic possessions."

Roman's face relaxed. "You're really Jonathan," he said.

"I am," I replied, but I couldn't keep my composure anymore. I tried not to start to cry, but I felt tears wetting my eyelashes. "What good does it do to me, a sword that doesn't let me commit evil deeds, if I can just turn my back on it and commit them all the same?"

"It was not you," Roman said in surprise. "That was not you, Jonathan, it was a ghost or a demon."

"I should have put up more defences. And I know who it was --- the soul in the pillar of salt. It was possessing me from a long distance, but I recognized her voice in my thoughts. The story of injustice, the body she didn't want... It was her story."

I handed Roman a cup of tea I had prepared for him. "But it was also mine."

Roman looked lost for words. "You mean when you were turned into a Watcher?"

"I've never told anyone this story, though some people know it all the same," I sipped the jasmine tea. "Still, I trust you. I've been meaning to tell you for some time, because it's been taking its toll on me now that we're on the Other Side and it's messing with our minds. I was eight years old when I was turned by a Creature and it was no accident.

And unlike Atticus or others, it wasn't even to defend myself or save people. I had no say in it, when I became a Watcher. Start drinking your tea. It's going to be a long story."

Roman could sense I was still hesitant. "It doesn't matter. I still want to hear it."

"When I was seven years old and a half, Athanasios bought me."

"You mean to say he adopted you," Roman corrected me before he could think on it.

"No, he bought me. There's a system in Ichor that's not known nor advertised in Meglenia, but of which the Court approves. It's called the Market, and people go there to perform illegal adoptions --- they buy kids who were orphaned in the war or who had nowhere else to go. Those children are often sold to brothels or employed as servants. Instead, there was another reason why Athanasios bought me. It was to make me become a Watcher and uphold his legacy.

Athanasios had married his wife, Penelope, when he was already in his late thirties. She was much younger, and she bore him a son, whom Athanasios named Jason after his brother. But when Jason was six years old, there was a tragedy. They never told me whether it was illness or something else. Suffice it to say that Jason died.

Heirless and after having lost his son, Athanasios went to the market and bought me. I barely remember my life from before, back when I was in Tallya with my mother. I have no idea how I ended up being sold. But I've never known my father, of this much I'm sure, so when my mother was not in the picture anymore someone must have thought it fitting to take me away and offer me to the highest bidder."

"Athanasios did pay a lot for me, too," I added with a bitter grin. "Every year, he celebrated my birthday. Not the real one, but the day where he bought me. He celebrated his wisdom, and his brother's, for choosing me out of all those children even before knowing my Skill was extremely rare.

But let's proceed with the story. I was eight years old when it happened, and Athanasios had been giving me difficult tasks like learning the sword, which was the weapon I chose. His own weapon, both inside the household and outside, were the bare fists. He told me to go to the basement, one day, and I did.

I had my sword with me. The one I had at the time, made of steel and too heavy for me. Besides, I couldn't know back then that it would serve me nothing against my opponent. When the Creature appeared..."

I couldn't help but laugh nervously.

"Why are you laughing now?" Roman asked. He thought about it for a while. "Are you being possessed again?"

I shook my head. "I laugh because I know I will only be believed because it's you. The Creature was not one of the three that roam the Chaos Realm now, Roman. It was not a Leviathan, a Behemoth or a Fadua. I later heard Athanasios telling Jason that he'd contacted a very important person and made a sort of experiment to let the barrier slip to welcome the last of its kind. I wonder whether the ward between realms had been thinned a little back then, too."

"The last... of which kind?"

"A Ram. It was huge, almost as big as the Behemoth, but not quite, for it fit inside the basement, you see. And it had horns..."

I couldn't help it. Every time I recalled it, I relived the pain. I hugged my ribs wincing while I proceeded. "Well, the story isn't much longer. I tried to put up a fight, with my sword. But in the end there wasn't much I could do. It cut through my body with its horns."

Roman looked horrified. He almost let his cup of tea fall to the floor, but then he caught it with his other hand.

"That was how I became a Watcher. I didn't want to become one, I'd never wished for it, and it took me years to understand that it was a duty, and a good kind of duty, seeing as I could save the world. I made a promise to myself that I would always use my powers for good, for I considered myself nothing more than a dead person with obligations to fulfill, and at least I wanted to be the right kind of Watcher, not one like Athanasios. I vowed to myself, that day, that I would one day dismantle the Market so there wouldn't be children like me in the future. It was many years after when I finally gathered the courage to ask the Court about the Market. They told me they had their hands tied, because while Watchers use it, it is humans who work there. They told me to take it up with the King."

"And you did," Roman commented. His voice was still hoarse. "This is why you joined the Brotherhood. You could have told me before."

"I don't want people to know," I shook my head. "I like my acquaintances to judge me based on my behavior and not my past."

"Not even if it could help people understand your political affiliation better?"

I stared at him. "Is it so hard to simply believe that one day a boy took a look at the world and decided it needed changing?"

Roman let the matter drop, and he asked something that seemed to be bothering him. "Was it lonely, to be turned into a Watcher as a child? There aren't many people who get turned quite as young as that."

"I didn't know it, at first, since during my childhood Athanasios did not let me play with other children. It would still be a while before I met kids my age. But when I went on patrol with him the first time, it was one of those times he patroled with the Court. Bertha got mad at him. She told him that he shouldn't have brought the kid along, because it was dangerous and I could be killed, or turned. That was when Athanasios shut her up, and told me to open my wings. And I did. I didn't know what it looked like, back then, a child that age with white wings big enough to engulf him, but when I looked around, I saw something I wasn't expecting. The Court, five adults who'd seen a lot of things during their lifetimes, had a look of shock and horror upon their faces, as if they understood what Athanasios and they didn't want to condone it. It was then that I thought that he made me a monster."

"But Watchers are not monsters!" Roman tried to speak sense into me. "They have the most sacred duty there is. Some say they are the warriors of the Endless One. Their existence is to protect the cities..."

"I know all of that, but back then I didn't. In Athanasios' household I simply was some kind of pawn in the political games he played, and it was hard for years to feel any differently. Things changed a few years ago, when I left home. But that's a story for another time. And they changed again, when I met you."

When I saw the look on his face, I added hastily, "And Mira. And Minx."

"Thank you for telling me all of this," Roman said. "It must have been hard."

"I don't want to discuss it right now, but I am glad that you know. I needed to get it off my chest," I put down my cup of tea. "Now, before we move along, I'd say that, other than the change of clothes, we should also help ourselves from the kitchen. Don't worry, it's on me."

Roman smiled thinly at that. "Do you know what to do next?"

"Yes, I believe we should head back and see that pillar of salt again."

"The one that possessed you?"

"Exactly. She didn't help us before, but she might now. If I didn't get it wrong when she was speaking from inside of me, she has a story she wants to tell us, too."