The Archon's Witchfinders: Malmr

It all moved too fast.

“...Guidelines for existing mage protectors to begin turning their talents toward apprehending unregistered mages.”
Málmr’s blunt fingers traced the Ivran letters over the new Archon’s declaration on the wall, having read them so many times that his eyes had stopped deciphering them.

This isn’t what he was meant for.

“It’s good to meet you – Málmr, is it?”
His assigned partner, Milovash, seemed nice enough. Tall, bearing similar scars, eyes crinkling as they shook hands, eventually insisting he called him Milo. Málmr was supposed to protect him from dangerous mages, and it was so easy to be swept along the narrative that they were helping. The very air felt different as they rode familiar roads, and Málmr felt uncomfortable, hostile stares leveled on his Order attire.

Monsters, the lot of them, he heard whispered behind his back. Everything he did was wrong these days.

“-the Order shouldn’t be a choice, Málmr. Don’t be so naïve.”
They’d been getting along, he and Milovash, enough for Málmr to speak his mind on what was going on. They felt like old friends for the most part, and after a week on the road with him, Milo’s gently spoken reproach hurt more than it should have. It stung enough to make him stop and close up. Milo regretted when their conversations stopped, that much Málmr could tell, but that didn’t mean he apologized or admitted any wrong as they continued their work.

Why was he doing this? He was supposed to protect people, that’s all he came to Ivras for, all he worked for in the Order. His shields were becoming walls, and then prisons, and it made him feel sick.

Bang.
He and Milo stopped for the night in Mead, and somehow the man had gotten Málmr to open up again. He needed it, with so much anxiety building in his stomach, but as they made their way down the quiet streets, the sound of a flintlock went off like thunder in the quiet town, and both he and Milo ran towards the sound.

There were two noblemen on the ground, one knocked out cold with a smoking gun scattered away from his hand, the other screaming, bleeding out from a wound at his knee, shadows lashing out violently. The mage was hysterical, out of his mind, deaf to reason. A girl tried to help, but the shadows were aiming for her, threatening to tear her apart.

Milo got hurt pushing the girl out of the way, yelling at Málmr to do something, and for one sickening moment, Hagia’s moment of corruption came back to him, the havoc and devastation and pain threatening to consume him, and he acted out of fear.

Wall after wall bound itself around the shadow mage, curving to make a solid cage, locking his shadows in with him as the man continued to blindly scream, the sound muffled.

The girl took the unconscious man and fled towards the coach down the road, and Málmr couldn’t think straight, couldn’t do anything but follow Milo’s assuring commands to take the mage away to Namarast.

“...did you hear me, Málmr? The shadow mage was a murderer. We did the right thing.”
Málmr felt numb. According to reports, it’d been a scuffle between the fallen Veres house and the noble Varlettes, a brother and sister. The shadow mage had murdered the Varlette girl’s coach driver, and the brother had shot him to protect the both of them. But something felt wrong. He could’ve sworn he’d glimpsed the girl running towards the coach and he hadn’t seen a body on the ground...and the way the mage was screaming, the tears in his eyes – was it wrong to think he was more than a violent, corrupting mage like Milo was so keen to believe? There was the damning report from the Varlettes, but who would listen to the mage in Namarast’s prison?

Milo tried his best to comfort him, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that this felt wrong, all of it. The anxious feeling twisted in his gut, tasting like he’d swallowed a handful of nails.

“Get out of my way – MEDEA! Let her go!”
They were on the beach this time, far from Faline. He’d come with a large group of witchfinders, all to apprehend one mage. Milo knew Málmr well enough by now to tell him to stay with the wagon, but he saw anyway. The mage in question, harassed in a heartless crowd, was no more than twelve years old.

The witchfinder dogs caught the scent of two more – no, three - in the crowd, and all hell broke loose.

He and Milo ran across the sand to stop the scuffle, and he saw a woman in a knit-shawl run off with the child mage.

Was it traitorous to wish they’d have made it? They ran into the group that’d stayed with the wagon, caught and thrown in without much of a fight, and he and Milo stayed behind to fight the two mages left.

And it was legitimately terrifying to fight them. Fire breath downed a witchfinder Málmr didn’t know, and the second mage was the one who screamed after the woman. He sounded desperate, bleeding from a wound on his arm, and Geirr damn him, but his heart twisted to hear how they were tearing them apart.

That is, until the lovesick mage raised the downed witchfinder from the dead to fight for him, trying all the while to chase after the wagon, screaming the woman’s name.

Málmr felt sick. His magic rose, cutting into his arms for the price of it, summarily ending the fight with the cages neither mage could break. The screaming mage pounded on his shields, and he could read that name on his lips.

To Namarast both of them went, a murderer and a necromancer – but why did this feel so wrong?

“Málmr...are you alright?”
Milo had a hand on his shoulder, and by all that was holy, Málmr wanted to lean on his friendship. He’d been a wreck ever since the beach, and they’d only seen more scuffles since then, more groups torn apart, violent and resisting arrest, and it made him feel cold to know there was nothing any of them could do. His shields were unbreakable.

Maybe it was their despair that was killing him. Stopping a fight and staying any losses on either side kept him going, but the sheer misery on their faces once the mages were caught, their doors broken down and their screams cut off in his cages; it was too much.

He wanted to tell Milo why he was losing sleep, why his stomach was always in pain, but for all that they got along, he would never understand the guilt. He never stopped trying to convince Málmr that they were doing the right thing, that so many more people would be hurt if he wasn’t there to stop the fight before it started, that what he was doing was valuable.

Málmr put his head in his hands. He didn’t want to be valuable, he just wanted to do the right thing. Geirr’s teeth, it felt like nothing was right anymore.

“...No. No, I’m not alright.”