Rehtul stretched his arms over his head and cringed as his elbow smacked into the hard stone floor beneath him.

Wait, stone floor?

Groggily he opened his eyes and surveyed his surroundings. All around him was a floor of stone, varying between shades of blue and gray. The young man sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, hoping that when he opened them once more he'd be back in the familiar inn room that he had leased for the year.

"Nope," he said as he opened his eyes and surveyed the same cold stone surroundings as before. Ordinarily, most people would be quite agitated by the idea of randomly appearing in some new location, but the ice mage wasn't most people.

"Not screaming, begging to find out why you're here?" a voice echoed out from the shadows, bounding off the walls. The young Orlouge shrugged and leaned his back against the wall. The cold touch of the stone behind him soothed his aching back temporarily, but he knew he'd have some severe stiffness come the next day.

"Why would I bother asking? If you want me to know you'll tell me. Otherwise I'll be kept in the dark and you'll only get annoyed or amused by my questioning. It does me no good, either way," he responded with a slight scowl. Not only had he apparently been kidnapped from the center of Radasanthia, he'd been taken by one of those buffoons who so enjoyed the sound of their own voice.

"You're right, of course," the voice said in a somewhat annoyed tone. "But you ruined my fun, and that's incredibly unsportsmanlike considering the trouble I went through to get you here."

"I was asleep in a nice soft bed... and I find myself waking up on a cold hard floor. Do you truly expect me to be all that happy to play your games in this case?" the mage shot back without missing a beat.

"True... It's been so long since I've had guests, perhaps I have neglected the finer details of keeping company. Ah well, what's done is done." With those words, a translucent blue being, vaguely humanoid in shape, but with shimmering, nearly undiscernible features, stepped... or rather floated forward from within the shadows.

"Before you ask anything, what you see is not necessarily my true form, if I have one at all. I've brought you here through the realm of dreams, where anything is possible."

"Now we're getting somewhere," Rehtul said as he stood up and stretched. Dream or not, he felt like he'd been sleeping on a stone slab for three days straight and needed to work out the kinks.

"I suppose you won't ask why I brought you here, either," the being said, a hint of a pout to its voice. It was all the mage could do to suppress a smile at the childlike petulance the being before him was exhibiting. "Whatever. I brought you here because you are one of the few high leveled ice mages on the planet, and as an elemental spirit of ice, I cannot bear to see you going down the path you are currently walking."

"That being... what? My desire to kill Ciato?"

"The very same."

"Well, I don't particularly care whether you approve of my intent or my actions. I will do what I must."

The apparition raised an eyebrow, or at least Rehtul thought it did, as it said with incredulity, "What you must? Do you truly think that you're the one that absolutely has to deal with this man? Because I can tell you, there are plenty of others better suited to taking that man down than yourself."

"Yet none of those who I know are capable of doing so seem to desire it."

"You could gather the evidence, give them time?"

"So that they can form ranks and protect him, maybe. No, I will kill him myself ."

"And how exactly do you propose to do that?"

Rehtul slammed a fist against the wall behind him as he nearly screamed, "I will become strong enough to kill him, his wife, his children, and my uncles if they're stupid enough to stand in my way!"

"Well, that's what I expected to see... You hear yourself, boy? You're willing to kill people who have technically done no wrong by either yourself or the one you claim to be fighting on behalf of, just to snuff out the spark of life in a single being. However reprehensible this man may be, are you willing to cause so much collateral damage to-"

"OF COURSE I AM! Everything I've done up to this point for the last five years has been in preparation for this! Why would I let them stand in my way at all?! They've done nothing to deserve it? They've shielded him from the consequences of his own actions for so long that he believes he can get away with anything! Anything, including playing the family against once another! He caused my sister to suffer because of his arrogant power grabbing!"

"You'll despise who you become in the meantime, you know," the spirit said, a tinge of melancholy in its voice. It was as though it knew precisely the direction the young man was heading, and simply did not wish to see that.

"Once you kill him, the only monster left... will be you."

The words hung in the empty air between the spirit and the mystic for quite some time before Rehtul was able to come up with a response.