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@joelle-stone

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I guess you posted that while I was typing…sorry.

So in Haven (the nation/world Brendin is from) every human generally has a soul, which is formed of several components; personality, memories, spark (the part that gives you life), etc.  When someone suffers mental or emotional trauma (like Alessio’s C-PTSD), this also translates as an injury to the soul; vice versa when someone suffers an injury to the soul, it can result in psychological trauma of some form.

That dark figure Brendin saw in the mirror was Ingor.  Ingor is something of a walking spoiler for the story so I won’t say too much, but I will say Ingor has a kind of magic to manipulate and affect souls.  And Ingor uses this ability to create mæres.  A mære is technically someone whose soul is more tightly bound to their body than the normal person.  Ingor would create mære servants by freeing or loosening a person’s soul from their body, binding the soul to him so that he could subjugate it, and then binding the soul back to its body.

For Brendin, this entailed not only getting injured and kidnapped (Ingor wanted him because he possesses a powerful fire syne), but also having his soul torn out of his body.  As one might imagine this was excruciating.  While turning Bren into a mære, Ingor also damaged the part of his soul involved with memories, essentially giving Bren amnesia so he would be a better servant.

Also the fact that a mære’s soul is so tightly bound to their body means that it takes a lot more for it to vacate.  And what that in turn means is that Brendin can take a mortal or even lethal injury like a stab through the stomach and still walk it off because his soul just won’t leave his body.  The tighter bond also means he heals faster and is stronger and faster than he was before he was turned into a mære.

Hope that was easy to follow…