He heard someone voice his name only distantly, deep in the dream as he was.  In his dream, he relived a nightmare that at one time had been quite real.

Aegan was deep in the hold of the bloated galleon Scarlet Skies.  The ship's hold was dark, save for the flickering light of fire roaring around the hatches.  The deck above creaked and groaned with a fire that seemed alive, and the chaos of their captors battling boarders.  The smoke inside the hold was thick, choking not just Aegan, but all the others that were chained together with him, and to the planked walls of the inner hold.  The heat of the fire could be felt, even through the smoking, blackening wood of the deck above them.  Battle raged in all its terrifying chaos, while chains of unbreakable iron held them all.

The Scarlet Skies was moving, however slowly, and a grinding noise panicked them.  Boards and panels within the hold buckled, shattered, and gave way.  Someone near to Aegan died with a gurgling of blood from their lungs, pinned by a massive splinter of wood that broke off and plunged forward, missing Aegan's nose by scant inches.  Water began to flood the hold, even as flames leaked through the deck above, as though the deck were a sieve letting liquid fire through.

The terrible nightmare grew worse, as the warm water spilling into the hold began to grow chilly, and his breath began to frost in the fiery-lit hold.  It was getting cold.  Very cold.  So very, very cold.

"Aegan!" shouted the voice with such volume, that the young man started awake.

He was out of his nightmare, in his small dormitory room.  The only light came from a lamp held high -- a light that illuminated a chilling scene:  frost covered every surface in the room, and Aegan's breath steamed from his mouth in the light of that lamp.

The holder of the lamp rushed forward, and laid a hand on Aegan's shoulder.  Master P'Arkon, the Dual-Minded, was one of the instructors at the academy, and had chosen Aegan as his apprentice.  The instructor was dressed in sleeping robes, and stood bent over his apprentice with a look of feverish concern in his dark, almost black eyes.  P'Arkon's raggedly short, graying-black hair was in disarray, indicating that he had been sleeping but recently.

Aegan took several deep breaths, watching his breath fog and steam in the cold, cold air.  "Master Arkon?" he asked, in a thickly accented tongue.

His master spoke as though he was slightly hoarse -- a common problem for the instructors at the academy.  "I've told you, drop that 'master' business, or I'll turn you into a toad.  Are you all right?  The voices said you were in trouble!"

Aegan blinked away the last of sleep, and the nightmare.  His normally brown eyes took in the the room.

Master P'Arkon claimed to hear the voices of his forefathers -- his demonic forefathers -- in his head.  He admitted that he could be insane, but the voices had never let him down.  If, indeed, he actually heard them at all, or just imagined them; hence, his title of 'the Dual-Minded'.  Despite the 'voices' in his head, Master P'Arkon was there, and the room was iced over.

"Aegan.  Are you all right?"  His eyes were intense, and perhaps tinged with madness.

"D'yes, Master.  I'm... fine.  It vas just... a nightmare."  He sat up in his bed, and put his hands underneath his arm pits, trying to restore warmth to his fingers.  He shivered in the intense cold, and wondered how Master P'Arkon could ignore it so.

The instructor snaked a long leg out and pulled Aegan's writing stool over beside the bed.  He set the lamp on the writing desk just behind him, and started warming up Aegan's legs by rubbing them through the blanket.

"You dreamt of the Scarlet Skies, again, didn't you?"

"D'yes, Master."  Aegan shivered, again.

Aegan was a young man of perhaps twenty years, with broad shoulders and a powerful build.  His dark hair was cut short, and dark stubble covered his strong jaw.  He had been a journeyman blacksmith, before his powers manifested -- before he was chased out of his homeland, taught to mutiny, steal, pirate, kill, and more.  He shuddered from more than the cold, as memories born of terror and fear coursed through his veins like ice.

Master P'Arkon sighed, and gave up on trying to warm Aegan's legs.  He jumped up, upsetting the stool, and touched one wall with his hand.  There was a surge of greenish light from the instructor's hands, and the frost that covered the walls and ceiling fell down in a crescendo of light, icy hail.  The lamp was extinguished as ice fell onto the wick.

The sound of wings swept into the suddenly dark room, as though some enormous bird circled the tiny room.  There was a clap of thunder, a bright flare of green fire, the surprised and indignant squawk of a raven, and the sudden curses of the Dual-Minded one.

An eerie green light seeped up through the floors, and the frost shards and crushed ice on the ground began to melt, some of it sublimating instantly into steam.  Next to the extinguished lamp was Master P'Arkon's familiar, a huge raven he called 'Equal'.

Aegan smiled faintly.  The chaos was typical of his master, and the humor of it all eased the icy dread in his heart.

Master P'Arkon suddenly glanced to one side and tilted his head, as though listening to voices -- and, perhaps, he might have been.  "They say you'll be fine, now.  That -- I should get to some rest."  He looked at Aegan.  "Yes!  I should get some rest, now.  You'll be fine.  You'll have no more nightmares, tonight."  He turned to his familiar.  "Come, Equal!  We shall both rest, now!"  He held up his arm, and the enormous raven hopped up lightly to it.

The raven cawed, and said, "Rest, now!  Rest, now!"

Arkon looked as though he had had a revelation from the gods.  "Yes!  We shall rest now!"

Aegan's instructor glanced around as though trying to remember something, and then backed quickly out of the room.  He paused inside the doorway with one hand on the door latch, looking intently and wildly at Aegan, and then closed the door in a hurry.

Aegan Smithdanovich smiled in the faintly glowing green light.  The light was fading, leaving only small puddles of water behind.  He sometimes thought himself in a madhouse, and that perhaps he had lost his mind, but, somehow, the sheer madness of his instructor left him grounded and centered.  Also, the voices in Master P'Arkon's head were rarely wrong.  If they had said that he would have no more nightmares that night, then he believed 'them' -- whoever 'they' were.

Finally warming up, he slid back down under the covers, contemplating his life -- and the nightmare.

The young sorcerer had no doubt as to the cause of the nightmare; the event that spawned it had happened barely three nights prior.  He had escaped the hold, along with all the other mages trapped there.  The fire that had raged on the deck above had been no accident; it had been the work of their rescuers, knights of his new homeland.

The journeyman smith and apprentice sorcerer sighed.  His entire world had been turned upside-down, such that few things made sense.  The one bit of reality and sanity he had to hold onto, was his master's insanity.  It was the only thing that felt right in a world seemingly gone mad.

Aegan's mind wrapped itself around the many strange things going on, and that had happened to him.  He had been a journeyman blacksmith of no small skill, when the woman of his dreams had been set upon and raped.  Aegan had had a crush on young Milli Kaldaemoch for the six months he had been in the town of Gimore.  Milli had withdrawn, and had seen all men as potential predators, after the rape.  The injustice of the attack, and the way it had changed the impassioned woman into a cowering girl left Aegan's heart in a fiery heat of Need.  Aegan had needed justice, for himself, if not for Milli.

His tools had begun to shatter in his hands.  Projects that he worked on shattered, as though cold-forged of cast iron, instead of bellows-forged of the finest mithral.

Aegan flexed his powerful hands, as though aching to hold a hammer once again.  His passion for smithing was forever taken from him, by his cursed powers.  Master P'Arkon said that, perhaps one day, when his rage and his emotions were contained, he could return to the forge -- but until that day happened, he would continue to shatter metal, wood, stone, and even flesh with his icy emotion-fed powers.

The young sorcerer could suddenly feel the temperature of the room chilling, again.  He reigned in his anger at his situation, and forced himself to calm down.  His powers had grown so much so, during the terror on the Scarlet Skies, that he had to keep his temper reigned in at all times, less his hot anger feed his cold powers.

The other smiths had talked in those seemingly long-ago days of Gimore, but none suspected the true cause of the 'bad mithral'.  Aegan discovered that he had powers by horrible mistake, and by horrible intent.  He had overheard Ponsh Labikol's drunken confession to 'enjoying Milli Kaldaemoch's tender young thighs' at the Red Bull tavern, one night.  Ponsh's cronies urged him to be quiet, and then asked for more details of the rape.  Aegan, unable to take anymore, had set his tankard down with calm deliberation, and left the tavern without paying his tab.

Outside the Red Bull, he waited in the cold, spring night's air, watching around the corner for Ponsh Labikol to come out.  Ponsh's cronies were with him, but it mattered not to Aegan.  When they walked past, the smith yanked Ponsh into the alleyway so hard that he threw the man close to ten feet away.  Aegan turned and advanced on Ponsh so quickly that the stunned men in the street could only stare in confusion.

The memory of what happened next was another of Aegan's nightmares.  He had straddled the addled Ponsh's body, and with one hand, lifted the rapist up far enough to deliver blow after blow from his right fist.

Aegan's breath was steaming in the reddish moonlight that filtered into the alleyway.  Frost crawled up the alleyway's sides and along the ground.  The blood from Ponsh's nose and mouth began to thicken, and congeal.  Frost began to cover the face that was being hammered.

When Ponsh's head shattered into a thousand fragments of ice, all of them colored red by the hue of the moonlight, Aegan realized with crystalline clarity that his anger was powering something deep within him.  The realization made his fury turn to icy dread.

Mages were outlawed.  Mages were hunted.  Mages were executed.  Mages were feared.  Mages were responsible for all the death and destruction of the Storm Wars.  Mages had killed thousands, perhaps millions of people.  Mages had raised armies of the dead.  Mages were the boogiemen with which parents frightened their children into behaving.  Mages were blamed for every illness, every evil deed, and every wont in all the world.  Mages were the embodiment of evil.

And Aegan realized that he was a mage.

Ponsh's cronies set upon him from behind, unable to see or grasp what had happened, with Aegan's back to them in the alleyway.  Aegan's mind was glacially calm, like the time one of the other smiths had had molten lead run down his arm.  Aegan had taken care of everything, then, with ruthless, thorough efficiency, saving the smith's arm, and earning his gratitude, and that of his family.

A push against the wall resulted in one man's skull cracking against the alleyway; the man went unconscious immediately.  A sucker punch to the gut had the second man wheezing and gasping for breath.  Aegan directed his attention to the third man, and knocked out several of his teeth in one mighty strike to the face.  The second man found an elbow in his face, and then a wall at the back of his skull.  The combination knocked him out, as well.  The third man received a second punch to the face, and then a third, and a fourth, until he, too, went out cold from the attacks.

Aegan glanced out into the street and saw no one else out.  Without a backward glance, he walked out of the alleyway and towards the smithy to gather his things, and leave.

Lying in his dormitory room, he sighed.  He had gazed longingly at his tools, and left them there in Gimore.  The small town had been an insignificant outpost on the edge of the Vridaran Empire.  Without the tools of his trade, Aegan had become just another migrant worker, taking on odd jobs, and working his way further and further north, away from Gimore.  He had had no clear destination in mind; he had sought only to flee the murder of Ponsh, and the horrible realization of what he was.

No stories followed him.  No rumors of a man killed by a mage circulated the towns.  At least, no more than the usual rumors that laid the blame for everything on mages.

The only thing that hounded Aegan was his own guilt:  the guilt of murder, but worse, the guilt of magery.

He rolled over in his small bed, pulling the blankets more tightly about him.  Aegan closed his eyes to the memories.  The guilt still hounded him.

What gnawed at him, even worse, was that his new, adoptive nation was asking him to kill, again -- and use his powers to do it.

Only Master P'Arkon seemed to understand that he couldn't kill again.  Some part of him had been left behind in Gimore, along with Milli, and Ponsh's grossly-beheaded body.  He could close his eyes, but he could not seem to close his mind.

He had wandered for close to three months, before any real rumors of 'mage' surfaced.  He thought, at first, that the rumors were wild distortions of what he had done back in Gimore.  The rumors turned out to be about another mage entirely.

Eshir Anyalethelis had been a respected elder of Lamental, but the rumors said he had been exposed as a mage, and worse, an agent of the nation of Rakore.  Rakore was a far distant, vile land that harbored and protected mages.  The Rakorans were led by dwarves, and the people of Vridara, like most of the Inquisition-aligned nations, feared an alliance between the historically disciplined dwarves and the fury of magic unleashed.

Aegan felt evil, and despicable.  He had begun to hate himself, and all that he was.  Most of all, though, he hated magic, for what it had done to him, and what it had cost him.

He calmed himself down, rolling over in his bed.  He felt that the last thing he needed was to frost the walls of his room, again.  The apprentice sorcerer idly wondered if any of his spellbooks had been damaged by the frost, and subsequent melt.  He sighed, and turned over, again, failing to get comfortable.  He drifted off into a doze, his restless mind playing odd tricks on him.

He dreamt of snow, on a high mountain pass, with glaciers in a valley below him...