Dovik doesn’t come. I haven’t seen him since the first day. Maybe I scared him off, would serve me right. I know what I sound like when my thoughts start to turn on me. I’m right, but I can’t put it right.
More and more of late, I find my thoughts turning back to Maidenlake. With all that happened in Danfalla, it is easy to forget that more than one town in the Mari Duchy was ruined by the beast tide. Those termite monsters were unlike anything else I have ever seen. They moved together in armies thousands strong. They had a social hierarchy. They had a king and queen. Am I the crazy one for knowing that can happen in other places out there, for wondering what if there hadn’t been an army of adventurers waiting for the monsters when they showed up? Probably.
I could look into it; I should look into it. This can’t only be a concern that I have. I know that the nobility of various kingdoms work with the Adventurers ’ League to manage these kinds of monsters, to keep their hunting ground relatively safe, but it can’t last. Nothing ever does.
My eyes focus, and I realize that I have been reading the same passage in my book over and over again. I close the text on textile techniques, by far one of the most boring subjects that I have dedicated myself to studying, and can’t help but laugh. I really don’t have a life anymore, do I?
That’s fine, I guess. When I reach the third rank, I will gain centuries of longevity. I will be able to choose how I look, and I won’t age a day after that until my time eventually runs out. It wasn’t so long ago when that was all I wanted in the world, to be a beautiful woman of means, with wealth beyond what I could imagine, the fawning adoration of people around me, and more time to live in luxury than even elven lords have. I have that now, don’t I? All except the adoration of people around me. Faeth doesn’t make a girl feel very wanted.
There is a smell to the room, a chemical cleanliness that sneaks in through the crack under the door. The apartments Jess has been given are the exception to the rule; most languish in small sick chambers where nurses dote on injured patients every hour of the day and night. That this wing of the guild hall is even necessary is a concern in and of itself. Dovik’s mother is one of the higher-ups in the guild and a rank four healer. If she can’t fix the people here, it tells about the dangers out there.
As I drum my fingers across the cover of the book in my lap, I look at Jess as she stares out the window. My ability to heal myself doesn’t extend to soul injuries; the scar across my stomach and back attests to that. How long will it be before I encounter another monster like those in Danfalla, ones capable of crippling me in a way that I can’t recover from? It is inevitable if I continue walking the road I do. After all, those particular monsters are my target, a necessary stepping stone that I have picked out for myself.
My fingers stop moving on the hard cover of the book.
I could stop now. I could try and turn back, enjoy the things that just over a year ago I sold my future in order to obtain. How hard would it be for me to head to one of the more populated hunting grounds out there and burn the place to ash? I could make thousands of gold by selling the carcasses of the monsters I found and purchasing a mansion in some extravagant city where I could live a life of luxury. I could spend my days visiting with the other affluent independents my age, find a man with status and power, and enchant him into a life with me. How easy would it be to just stop here, to take for myself everything that girl from a pear orchard in the middle of nowhere wanted? I could go back and be with Jor in Danfalla, help him rebuild the city, and together we could find out just how high two non-elven people can climb in the empire.
The fantasy is enticing. I retreat to it sometimes, thinking about that, wondering if our children would have his white hair or the orange curls I used to have. Then the cold comes back. Then I remember the whispers that find me in the dark. Corinth gave me almost a decade before my soul tore apart; they could be happy years if I wanted them to be.
I can’t have that. Even if I asked my brother to rip apart one of the hells for me, to retrieve the spear that I need to survive and start a war with the Vivantee over the matter, I wouldn’t be able to rest. My ghosts would linger with me, and the dark truths they whisper would only become more and more real. There is no turning back, not until they are all gone. How long will it take, I wonder, to rid the world of monsters? Too long.
Days pass, and I spend most of my time with Jess. Slowly, she starts to brighten, and I take even the false cheer as a good sign. She talks about her homeland again, asking me to come and visit it once more, and again I promise to. Apparently, there is an actual dragon somewhere in the plains of her homeland. That is something I would very much like to see.
Then, four days after I arrived in Grim, Jess isn’t in her room when I arrive just after sunrise. A note is left on the table that she has spent most of her time sitting at, just a few lines written on the piece of paper in her distinctive scrawl.
I couldn’t do this in person.
My aunt came and took me back home. I still want to show it to you someday, but I need to be with my family now. You have been the best friend that I have ever had. Tell Dovik I’m sorry.
-Jess
That was it, just a simple letter and an absent chair. I don’t know how to feel about it. Angry, I feel that, I feel it deeply, but how can I be when I had done the same thing to Jor? It is…I don’t know how to say it. It’s wrong. Shouldn’t we have said something to each other? Shouldn’t we have tried to smile at one another while she departed from one of the skydocks with tears in our eyes?
This is what I did to Jor’Mari, what I did to my parents before that. Some people say that they are horrible with goodbyes, but I really might be. I’ll probably end up doing it again, won’t I? The note disappears into my vault as I turn away from the table and back to the door. I’ll show it to Dovik later, a good while later.
Corinth is waiting for me outside the guild hall when I exit, standing on the stone pathway and looking up at a statue of a woman with an arrow knocked in her massive bow. My brother spares me a glance as I step out into the light, an attendant closing the door to the guild hall behind me.
“Have you been spying on me?” I ask him as I hurry down the steps. “I don’t see you for four days and now you show up after Jess has already gone.”
“I wanted to give you some privacy,” Corinth says, still looking up at the statue. “This is the Guildmaster’s firstborn, Aeleth. It says something that he put her image closest to the guildhall.”
“Dovik never mentioned her,” I say, stepping up beside my brother and looking up at the statue as well. “He doesn’t talk much about his family.”
“She died before our grandparents were even born,” Corinth says. For a moment, he remains silent, just staring up at the statue next to me. “She was a magician, a fairly famous one in her time. The guild still has some things named for her. There is a block of hard stone in one of the testing pits named after her, and there are still a few legends about how powerful her bow was that are kept alive in the guild. You should ask Dovik about it sometime.”
“They named a rock after her?” I ask, catching on to he odd bit of information.
Corinth cracks a smile. “Yeah, Stubborn Ally. New guild members compete with one another to see how much damage they can inflict on the stone. It is a way that they test relative strength in the Willian Guild. Of course, it just tests the strength of a single attack.”
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“Of course,” I say.
“Then again, I shattered it when I first tried it.” There is no small amount of satisfaction in Corinth’s voice. “Not a small task for a mage.”
“So, you are bringing it up to brag.”
“You are the one who asked me about it,” Corinth defends.
“Yes, you are an impressive and big man. You broke a sentimental rock with your awesome power.”
“Well, the rock got better again,” he says, smirking at the way that stops my mockery in its tracks.
“The rock got better?”
“It’s a magic rock.”
“And you’re sure that it didn’t just get replaced with a different one?”
Corinth opens his mouth to deny it, but then hesitates. “You know, I haven’t seen it since I broke it the last time.”
“Show it to me,” I say.
“I might be a big and impressive man like you say, but I’m not a member of the Willian Guild,” Corinth says. “I can’t just throw my weight around whenever I want.”
“I haven’t seen you restrain yourself from doing so before.”
Corinth’s smirk turns into a full smile, and I can’t help but let it infect me. It is remarkable how easily the man can lift my mood. I really am a fickle girl at heart. Maybe shallow is more the word. Hard not to be shallow when everyone you have dealings with has been magically altered to be incredibly attractive. Not that I think of my brother as being attractive; I just recognize that he is, but not to me. I mentally stab to death the part of my brain trying to come up with strange rationalizations and let Corinth sneak me onto another platform high up on Grim.
As we are walking along the path Corinth shows me to, I come to realize that I have been here. It is the same platform that Dovik showed me once upon a time, where he took me to try and help me figure out how to use my new wings to fly. If I squint, I can even make out the tower in the far distance where I threw myself from over and over. I still haven’t exactly learned how to use my wings to fly, relying on infusing them with sky-affixed mana rather than any real skill at flapping or maneuvering them. I should try to figure out how to fly with just their power again. Maybe one day I will make another attempt, somewhere far away from anyone that can possibly see me flailing around.
Just like Corinth said, one of the sand pits that litter the platform has a great black stone standing upright in the center. The glossy surface of obsidian is flecked with sand across its surface, and several cracks run across it, all incredibly shallow. A man sitting on a bench up on the wall of the pit looks up from his book as we descend the switchbacking wooden stairs to get down to the sand. The brown-haired man who can’t be older than twenty-five arches an eyebrow as we touch down at the bottom of the pit, but shrugs a moment later and returns to reading. I hardly would have noticed him if it weren’t for the fact that his information is hidden from my eyes. Too many people have providence obscuring equipment about them, especially in this guild.
Corinth slaps a hand on the five-foot rock in the middle of the pit, sending a cascade of sand falling off of it. “See. It’s the same exact rock, Stubborn Ally.”
Regenerating Stone
The information flashing above the rock and the slight silvery aura peeling off of it lets me know all I need to know about it. I step up to it as well, brushing my fingers across the smooth surface and tasting the mana. There is a hint of growth mana about the stone, earth mana as well, but there is a third flavor lying deeper within. My curiosity about just how this stone functions begins to climb, but I force the interest back down. The Willian Guild would probably be pretty pissed if I disenchanted one of their training tools, one named after the dead firstborn of their guildmaster.
“I guess you were right,” I say.
“Want to give it a try?” Corinth asks. He glances around.
I can’t help but look around as well. The only other person even close to being nearby is the man reading on a bench above us. He appears entirely disinterested. “You want me to break this rock?”
Corinth shrugs. “If you can.”
“This is a test for rank three magicians,” I say.
Again, he shrugs. “Sure. Yeah, it is tough. Probably too tough.”
“Do you honestly think I can’t tell what you are doing?”
But he just shrugs and steps further away, giving me space and leaving me in front of the rock. I roll my eyes at him. The stone continues to stand there in front of me, an entirely unopposing figure. Hitting a rock to see how strong you are feels like something Halford would do. Hells, I know he would love to do it.
Why should I even bother? It isn’t as if I can actually hit the thing with my strongest attack. I’m still working on figuring out how to use that particular approach without breaking my body. Still, it might be worth it to test something.
Black sand begins to materialize from my vault as I hold my hand to the side, condensing into a solid block of darkness coated metal. Constant practice for the last half a year has shown me how to make the tiny fragments of gold that comprise the metal make certain shapes. The laws that govern what kinds of shapes I can make are difficult for me to understand, and only recently, with my study of chemistry, has anything even begun to make sense. One thing I have figured out, however, is how to make a big block out of the sand, a very solid and heavy one.
A handle of geometric lines grows from the head of the hammer I am constructing, stretching out until it is more than six feet long. My fingers grab hold of it, and despite most of the weight being offset by my ability to control the sand through my presence, the mass is still evident. What better weapon is there to break a rock than a hammer?
The head of the hammer bursts into light with licking dragonfire, a smoldering ball of red-hot fire that is almost as bright as the sun. The heat peeling off the newly created weapon blows sand away from where I stand as I bring the weapon about to hold it over my shoulder. It occurs to me only now that I have never really swung a hammer before. Then again, I hadn’t used a spear either before I started flinging them at monsters.
It should take more time, but my mana flows into the weapon in an instant through the reinforced channels I have cut in my body. The burning light of fire on the head of the ax continues to grow brighter and brighter until it is impossible for me to pour any more into it. When the power reaches its apex, I swing.
The pinging sound as the head of the hammer meets the stubborn stone in front of me is almost anticlimactic. The explosion of fire that follows is anything but.
Dragonfire blooms through the entire sand pit like a blossoming orange flower, running away from me until it meets the walls of the pit and is directed straight up. I am awash in flame, feeling my own fire run over me and turn the world into a vibrant frenzy of bright colors for a brief instant. The roar in my ears almost makes me lose my hearing.
The dragonfire is extinguished almost as quickly as it appeared, the dying flames giving off a last, desperate gasp as they recede to smolder in the sand. The flash of light slowly eases from my vision, leaving me staring at a black stone standing in the center of the pit. The massive hammer disintegrates into vanishing motes of sand as I study the shiny rock of obsidian in front of me, disappearing back into my vault to join the pile lingering there. More dust falls away from my clothes along with it, glowing bright with the absorbed dragonfire. At least that experiment had gone well. For ages, I have been needing to find a way to protect my clothing from my own raging power, and it seems like infusing it with black dust is the path forward. Hopefully, in the future, I will not have to worry about fighting naked when I want to unleash something approaching my full might.
Cracks riven the rock in front of me. The obsidian has been cleared of its sand from the explosion of force I laid against it, reduced to a mirror finish of dark stone. A single piece, no larger than my fist, lies in the sand in front of the stone. I bend down, picking it up and ignoring the incredible heat of the rock as I hold it up to show Corinth.
“Didn’t manage to shatter the thing,” I tell him, tossing the rock over to him. I’m not very shocked. In terms of strength, that couldn’t have nearly been considered my strongest attack. Still, it was good. “I’ll do better next time.”
“So, do you believe the report now?”
The guildmaster of the Willian Guild closes his book with a snap, turning to face the red-haired youth next to him. Two rank five magicians stare at one another for a moment.
The guildmaster inclines his head, nodding a bit. “Your sister seems strong,” he says, looking back down at the sand pit where just a few minutes before the girl had tried her might against the stone there. “I’m not sure that I would say that it is the kind of strength we are looking for in order to claim the land. We only have seven spots, and they are competitive.”
“You will want her to join,” Corinth says. “I know you will.”
“She shows promise, but she is still in the second rank. I need the strongest for my team. We can’t afford to fail. You know that.” The guildmaster stands, pulling a ring from his finger and stripping himself of the illusion covering him. “There isn’t a lot of time left.”
“There is enough time,” Corinth says to the man.
“I hope you are right.” Without another word, the Guildmaster vanishes.
Corinth watches the spot where the man had been standing for a moment longer. “There is enough time.”
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