Pain, Agony, Suffering, Torment. When the mark is invoked, even the earth shall resonate its anguish. Torment of the mind. Torment of the body. Torment of the soul.

That guard. There is no need for him. If I wanted to start killing people, trust me, there would be none in my path to the outside world that still lived.

I know what you're going to say. "What's a beautiful blah blah blah getting yourself in trouble by manifesting a power you had no control over and then killing a few people and driving the rest mad?" Can we skip that?

Oh, yes, I'll begin. Late Olarune, at age nine or so, my father had been – oh, right. Lucius Ayomore – anyway, my father, who was a low income merchant, had been making the family help him do the loading and unloading of goods from his cart, because the drop in armor prices had forced him to fire most of his help. I was helping him put the barrels of pickles we were selling in Alberis back on the cart after they had been emptied by customers, something I was not suited for, when a man I had known from previous association approached the cart. His name was Dargis Pondsmith, and I'd never liked his snickering grin. Not for a moment, anyway, they walked off and started talking about something in the shadow of the general store we were delivering to.

I finished hanging up the barrels and my father came back with a pale look on his face. The trip home was pretty quiet; the most quiet two days I'd ever had. When we got home, he told me there was some monetary trouble and I had to stay with some family friends for awhile. We went to Biron at the northeast border and he handed me over to a scary looking hobgoblin. I got tossed in a cage right away. Yes, that was in Biron. I don't remember, I was nine. It was a back alley somewhere.

It went for two days. Boiling hot water, moldy bread, and a cold spear tip pressed into my back every so often to make sure I was alive. I got bought by a halfling before they left the country. He was leading around the man my father had been talking to; I caught a glimmer of hope and they dragged me back, and I was very happy to be back in town. Well, up until sly smiled man threw me in a room, took my clothes, and held me down with one hand.

"Don't you get it?" he said, "daddy sold you out. We just happened to buy you up. Isn't that lovely? Tomorrow we'll invite him by and tell him he still didn't make enough money off those hobgoblins from you!"

It was a pretty harrowing six weeks. They had me naked the whole time, made me defecate on the floor in my cell, the fat little halfling kept trotting me out for friends of his. My father, when he came, nearly every day, begged and pleaded, but I couldn't her, I was too busy crying through my tears. I had worms at that point; little maggots that dug in my feet and made it painful to walk. They didn't let me sleep often, and the halfling used me for just about everything. Especially if father was coming by. They kept telling him it was never enough.

I met an elf woman who was also there in my cage. She took the maggots out of my feet when I got them. She'd hold me as I went to sleep. Eventually I found out she was stealing my bread, and she told me that was how the world worked. When I punched her in the mouth, I had a gauntlet full of pins strapped to that hand for a day and a half for putting a bruise on a favored slave.

On the last few days of the sixth week, the guards busted in during a father-torturing session. They slew about half the people there. My father died trying to get me out of the building; a Cyran guard stabbed him in the shoulder blades as he was escaping the front door. The little halfling was arrested and he winked at me even as the guards wrapped me in a blanket.

"You'll never forget me, love," he whispered, and he's right. Even at his execution, I knew I never would.

Oh, it seems like I'm far away from all that? Like it holds no emotion for me? Oh, it does. It's fuel. Can I keep going? You want to know why I set fire to four towns, don't you?

Thank you. The government slapped me into an orphanage so fast my ears rang; I didn't have any living relatives. My father's connections had slowly extracted the silver pieces he owed them in blood. Yes. Silver. The war economy is that bad among the lower class. Well, it was. The economy bounced back two days after his death; the hometown is prosperous again. I got thrown in there without so much as a pat on the back and an assuring word. The governess was a distant woman who let the other kids pick on the fresh meat.

It wasn't so bad; there wasn't any form of abuse the kids could come up with that was worse than I endured in those six months prior. They tried, of course. They'd beat me, steal my lunch, get me in trouble for graffiti, hit me with bats, sneak venomous snakes into my room, dunk my head in the fountain for a minute at a time. Kids can be cruel. Nothing worked to their satisfaction.

"That's how she gets through life," the governess had said, and she let me be.

I spent a lot of time out at the south end of the grounds, where the other kids didn't go.

I did make one friend there; I think her name was Sally or something. We would spend lunchtime together, and we had free run of the south yard without the other kids interfering. I showed her Tristan. She started hiding parts of her lunch to feed him, too. We named his Tristan, after her older brother who was killed in, well, the war. The entire place was full of war orphans. Anyway, about four days later the boys encountered me again.

They had a kitten in their hands, and they showed him to me. It was Tristan. They pushed me down on the ground and said they knew what could make me cry. They started beating him with the broken chair leg they'd been pounding my face with; I looked over at the girl for support, but there was nothing but tears.

I'm pretty sure the boy's face on the right was the first to go. I don't remember. All I remember, really, was that my skin was hot in places and he was screaming. The one on the left let go and started screaming at some figment I couldn't see to go away. He ended up writhing on the ground.

The other two, I don't know what happened to them. The girl? I don't know, she's dead, right? All I know was that I was walking out of the building with a heart in one hand and a dead cat in the other. That was it, then. I'd had it with everything. I knew what I could do. Torment was there for me to grasp and I loved it. I still do. Maybe that makes me a bit of a sadist. A happy sadist.

There's this place, down inside everybody, it says "hey, my life would be so much better if I could get away with it." What do you mean "what's it?" 'It' is anything you want. Anything at all. I could. You know what that does to you? It's like being drugged. The most amazing narcotic you can imagine. That's probably why I got caught. You get so caught up in the whether or not you can you don't stop to think if you should or how long you can get away with it. You start thinking you're invincible.

And then someone disagrees with you and they come and get you with fifteen of their friends. The trip back was kind of amusing. They got so scared I'd pull something they took most of my things. They took just enough of my clothes to leave me somewhat bear so they could see my mark. Plain as day, of course. One of the guards looked a bit too long. I asked him what the most terrible or beautiful thing he'd ever seen was. He just looked at me with disgust and returned to the group.

He showed up later, of course. He was a little drunk and the ropes were arranged so that he could fold me over a log. Yes, he did. Oh, it gets better. I wrapped a vision around his head. I'm not entirely clear what was in it, myself, I let my imagination flow like water. He screamed, of course, and he stumbled back to the camp struggling to put his clothes back on. Oh, his name? Barker or something. I don't care.

No, it's really that simple. I was reveling in torment. Mine and everyone else's. That's the only reason I set those places on fire and burned their crops. I left most of them alive because if they all die, then there's no one to spread the torment. Ruin one man's day and he'll carry it to everyone he knows, you know? I guess I'm the ultimate expression of that. Ruin my life and leave nothing but the torment behind and that's what I become, sifting down through the world.

But that's it. We come to now, where I sit, at this table, your scribe diligently plucking away at the chords of my fate that will be forged from this statement.

You're asking what I think you should do with me? I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, even if I'm executed, it won't change anything. I'm not afraid of anything you can do to me because it's already been done and been done better.

No, that's okay. I can show myself back to my own cell.