In the past, Rayse and Vincent travel down into Alerar by train with a group of soldiers as part of an attempt to acclimate them to dark elves, which are rarely seen in Salvar. They march through the city to pick up a small pyromancer girl who is being transported back to their country, but are ambushed shortly after the exchange. Vincent demands a lock-pick from Rayse to free the girl, and the trio escape in the confusion of battle. They are chased through the streets of Ettermire, but eventually escape their pursuers. After meeting an shady dark elf in an abandoned building, they move on but are soon found again. The young girl, Taische, scares off the dark elves with an impressive display wrought from a magic circle she drew with oil in an alley, and the youths escape deeper into the city.
When Taische steps on some jagged metal, Vincent convinces Rayse to carry her on his back. They hide in another abandoned building near a factory, and take the piece of metal out of the young girl's foot. Rayse looks for another way out, but returns dejectedly, and the group decide to rest there for a while. Taische talks with Vincent about his past with Rayse, who has wandered off, but after a while they decide to move on, and boost the young girl up to the second floor to look for a way out. While she searches, she gets a premonition of one of the boys dying, and yells for them to watch out just in time for them to avoid a crossbow bolt fired into the room. The two lads rush the dark elf who comes in a moment later, but despite wounding him they are overwhelmed, so the young pyromancer girl collapses part of the second story onto Vincent and the dark elf. The lad makes it out okay, and the trio escape through a stairway young Taische had found.
They find an old court room, and bar the door with a metal pipe. The two boys begin arguing, but soon the dark elves are banging at the door. They decide to hide in a hole in the wall, behind a cupboard, but Vincent says he has a plan and sends Rayse and the girl in ahead of him. They listen from inside the walls as he is surrounded, then beheaded. Young Taische has to pull the other boy along for them to escape, but after running for a while the pair is stopped by a man who appears wreathed in flame. He takes the girl, and they both disappear. Young Rayse gets back to where the pyromancer girl had drawn her circle, and recreates it just before he is caught; he manages to escape. In the present, it is an older Rayse who appears out of thin air in his vault carrying Taische. After his subordinates had mistakenly kidnapped her, she had accidentally activated a witch's eye, which sent her back into the past. Rayse manages to convince Taische that the younger version of him she had escaped with was his nephew, and that he only wants to return her to her mother. The tale ends with Rayse realizing he might be the girl's father.
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