Erich’s mana flowed into the glowstone, brightening the entire room with just a touch of power. He hadn’t learned any techniques or arts to accompany his new image and truly advance into the first tier as a swordsman, but his body felt lighter and stronger than ever before. More than that, he no longer needed to prod and coax his mana. As soon as he thought about using it, the energy moved on its own accord, an eager assistant as it carried out his will.

  “Thank you Erich,” Sathis said politely. “A scavenger has been prowling around the mouth of the cave, some sort of misshapen bat thing. I think it smells the bodies piled up in the stairwell. The extra light should keep it away.”

  He shivered. It was easy to forget the dangers that lurked in the dark while he was in the cave. The food and water weren’t particularly appetizing, but there was something about Sathis that relaxed him. It was like he was back home camping.

  “Anyway,” the cinderborn continued. “Where was I?”

  “You were talking about the theory behind learning techniques,” Erich replied, glancing nervously at the cave entrance. He couldn’t see the scavenger outside, but that wasn’t anything new. The glowstone lit up the cave and a small amount of light spilled outside, but that was barely enough to see the uneven stone that made up the ground. He couldn’t see more than ten feet out into the murky gloom.

  “Right,” Sathis responded, tapping his fingers on the rock next to him. It had been a day since the two of them worked together to establish Erich’s image, and the cinderborn hadn’t moved since then. Erich didn’t know whether the warrior was conserving energy or truly injured, but either way it was clear that the old man planned on keeping his own counsel.

  “Techniques are a lot like images,” Sathis said, finger still tapping against the rock. “They are aligned with one element and they require a certain amount of affinity. No matter how hard a martial artist works, someone with an intermediate affinity will never be able to learn an ability that requires a high or a very high affinity. This is also influenced by images. Just as a warrior with a high talent toward fire will be limited by an image with an intermediate affinity with fire, they won’t be able to learn a ‘high’ ability even though they would otherwise have the skill for it.”

  “Is that why I could never learn the Winding Stream Sword?” Erich asked. “It was the signature fighting style of our school, but no matter how much I practiced, my mana never seemed to move right as I went through its forms.”

  “Given your image and its name, I would suspect that the Winding Stream Sword is a water art,” Sathis answered. “You have no talent or skill for the element of water. You have as much chance to learn that sword style as a child does to spontaneously develop the ability to fly. Part of martial arts is knowing your limits.”

  “So everything I’ve learned is wrong,” Erich said bitterly. “Years and years of practice only to find out that I was using the wrong image, slowing my accumulation of aether by a factor of at least ten. I barely know how to process this.”

  Sathis replied with a dry wheezing laugh, shaking his head slightly as he smiled back at him.

  “You’re still young Erich. More than that, martial artists live longer than normal people, especially martial artists that have the life element in their image like you. There is plenty of time for you to relearn what you’ve lost.”

  “Still,” Erich said unhappily, “a quarter of my life has been wasted. I woke up every day before the sun rose to practice my sword style and gather aether. Now, with my image shattered I barely even remember the forms I used during those practices. It’s all hazy, like it happened to someone else.”

  “Losing an image will impact your memory of its associated abilities,” Sathis responded. “Techniques and arts rely on the elemental mana from the image, so as soon as it is damaged or destroyed, they start to disappear. Already I can feel Asura’s Eruption disappearing from my mind.”

  Erich stopped himself. As much as he wanted to complain about his circumstances, it was beyond ghoulish to do that to Sathis. Listening to the older cinderborn cheerfully talk about how he was slowly fading to death really put Erich’s concerns into perspective.

  “So I have to relearn the Swaying Willow Blade from scratch,” he responded unhappily. Sathis grinned back at him from where he was leaning up against the cave’s wall.

  “Learning the sword technique you were using in the Imperial Army would be a waste. I’m sure it would be stronger now that you have an image that suits you better, but it was a weak skill. Admittedly, that isn’t the worst possible classification for images and techniques, but for you it may as well be.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” Erich asked. “That’s the only technique I ever learned. I have some notes on a body strengthening art, but I have no idea how strong it is. Just like my instructor never told me about the elements and images, I don’t know the first thing about differentiating a good technique from a bad one.”

  “It isn’t that hard when you advance past the fifth tier,” Sathis replied. “You’ll understand once you reach that threshold, but manifestation truly is the boundary between an ordinary martial artist and an expert in just the same way that the tenth tier is what defines a sword master.”

  “Until then,” the cinderborn continued, “you just need to know the basics. Theoretically there are eight categories of affinity. Supreme, very high, high, intermediate, inferior, weak, very weak, and least. Technically, either of your intermediate talents in light and life would be respectable in their own right. Together? You’d be sought after as an apprentice in most mid-sized sword families. Cinderborn have stronger affinities than the average human, but it’s rare for one of us to have more than one talent. Humans on the other hand are notorious for having two to three weak affinities.”

  “I don’t even know what four affinities means in the grand scheme of things” Erich said, shrugging slightly. “You’ve told me that I have a talent for lightning, fire, life and light. That’s more than two or three, but is that a lot? Are there five elements? Five hundred? You should just assume that I know nothing because, frankly, other than knowing which end of the sword to hold and which to point at the bad guys, I’m about as ignorant as a baby.”

  Sathis chuckled, a smile blossoming on his face as he shook his head slightly.

  “I know that,” he said lightly. “But at the same time, your innocence is astounding. Even a cinderborn baby would know this much. It’s hard to believe that between your martial arts school and your family, you managed to learn absolutely nothing.”

  Erich’s expression froze. He looked away from Sathis at the steady light of the glowstone as he weighed his words.

  “My family didn’t teach me much of anything,” he replied slowly. “They gave me food, a bed, and a handful of coins to amuse myself with but once I could look after myself I was expected to do so. Shortly after my birth it was decided that I would train and enter the army so that the family trading business didn’t get taxed into bankruptcy. I suppose there’s some honor in that sacrifice, but I don’t really feel much of anything to them. It barely felt like I was part of the family, more like I was one of father’s prized draft horses. Something to be acknowledged and fed, maybe even praised, but not treated the same as my siblings.”

  He bit his lower lip chewing on it for a second.

  “Or the servants really. They would at least receive praise or scorn based on their actions. For me, even when I would screw up, I would just be told to go play outside. I wasn’t even worth the effort it would take to yell at me.”

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  “Even the flower tenders and slaves aren’t treated as such,” Sathis replied, his brows furrowing. “Whatever their societal status, they are still thinking and feeling beings. It seems cruel to simply ignore their existence.”

  “As for me,” he continued. “I cannot imagine treating a family member in that way. I trained my children diligently, and they cursed me at times, but there was always a bond of love between us. Even when they were in the tenth straight hour of stamina training, they knew that I was pushing them that hard because I didn’t want them to run out of energy on the battlefield. We still correspond regularly after all of these years.”

  Erich flinched. Neither his father nor his mother had ever written him a letter. Really, after his fourteenth birthday and admission into the Green River School, the only family member that talked to him at all was Ben.

  “It wasn’t all bad,” he replied, a hint of morose bitterness entering his voice as he looked back at the charnel house that marked the spire’s stairwell. “Once I entered my martial arts school I managed to make some friends. We were close before we made it to the battlefield, but after we started fighting side by side, that bond became inseparable.”

  “Except death has a way of breaking those connections,” Erich said with a sigh. “All those dreams and plans for the future erased by a single spell to the back.”

  “War is like that,” Sathis consoled. “There is something about shedding blood and almost dying next to someone that creates lifelong friendships in a matter of seconds. Then, they’re gone. Such is the price of mastering martial arts.”

  Erich shook his head, clearing the morose thoughts as he refocused himself back on the injured cinderborn.

  “Anyway Sathis, you were going to finish explaining the elements to me. If we start talking about my family and circumstances I’ll end up morose and unproductive for the next couple of hours. That is the past, and focusing on it won’t really do anything but make me unhappy, and neither of us have time for that.”

  “That’s the proper attitude,” Sathis replied, happily slapping a hand down on the rocks next to him. “A warrior never sees his own footsteps because he is always facing forward.”

  “As for elements,” he continued “there are six basic elements and six advanced elements. The basic elements are much more common, and they generally improve two of a martial artist’s traits as they advance tiers while advanced elements improve three.”

  “Traits?” Erich asked. He could feel the early signs of a headache coming on. He hadn’t been drinking much water, trying to stretch out their limited supply. Between dehydration and Sathis skipping over facts that were apparently common knowledge, it was almost a given that he suffer a little.

  “Attributes?” Sathis hazarded before catching himself. “Right. Like a baby. Traits and attributes aren’t anything as set in stone as an element, they’re more groupings of physical ability that martial artists have come up with to describe their growing capabilities. Strength is fairly obvious, Fortitude is a measure of your physical resilience and stamina, agility represents a warrior’s precision and physical control, speed is how quickly a martial artist can move and strike, reflexes is a combination of vision and reaction time, and mana recovery is fairly self obvious. Together, they make up most of the skills that map out a martial artist’s capabilities.”

  “The traits represent one of the advantages possessed by human warriors,” he continued, nodding toward Erich. “When someone advances a tier, their capabilities in the attributes associated with their elements all improve. The amount of the improvement is related to their affinity in that element. That means that humans with their multiple weaker elements tend to improve in multiple areas simultaneously while cinderborn become experts in just one or two abilities. For example, as someone with a fire affinity, my attacks are incredibly strong and fast. Improving the rest of my attributes is difficult. I was forced to use two of my precious technique slots to learn the Body of Embers and Ashen Recovery. Even high and very high tiered abilities like those are very inefficient when they don’t encompass an element’s strengths.”

  “Ashen Recovery is designed to improve my mana flow,” Sathis said, tapping his chest, “but despite its strength and rarity, I’ve seen least ranked light element body enhancements that work just as well. Still, unlike attributes and affinities, arts and techniques can grow with training. As difficult as it was for me to increase the levels of Body of Embers and Ashen Recovery, they have improved to the point that I am able to hold on for an entire week with a shattered image. Fairly impressive if I do say so myself.”

  Sathis stopped, taking in the confused look on Erich’s face. His expression sank.

  “Everything I just said should be simple and common sense. Where is the confusion this time?”

  “Since when do techniques have levels?” Erich asked. “I didn’t manage to learn anything else so I just practiced my sword technique over and over again. I ended up being more skilled in it than my companions were in their sword arts, but I thought that was just a matter of effort.”

  Sathis closed his eyes. His lips moved quietly, forming the words ‘just like a baby’ about five times before he finally opened them again. He fixed his exhausted gaze on Erich.

  “First, you are aware that you can only learn one technique per tier, right?” There was a note of pleading in Sathis’ question. “Please tell me you know at least that much.”

  “My instructor, Elias said that,” Erich responded, “but given how much else he got wrong, I don’t know whether or not to believe him.”

  “I suppose that’s fair,” Sathis said, leaning back slightly against the wall of the cavern. “It’s clear that the elves didn’t let your school know much about martial arts theory. I’ve faced a couple of humans with passable skills, but they were all from Cothleer itself. I think your people call them loyalists.”

  “Regardless,” the cinderborn continue, “for every tier of your image, you can only learn one technique or art, and every technique has a fixed quality that determines how much benefit you can get from it per level, but the reason why a martial artist trains is to increase their technique levels. After all, you accumulate aether by walking and breathing. The only thing that can speed up its growth is slaying a creature that has its own aether like a monster, demon, or martial artist.”

  Erich blinked.

  “I.” He got one word out before he paused, licking his lips. “Do you mean to say that all of my time training didn’t actually increase my aether absorption? That practicing like crazy until I exhausted myself never earned me more aether?”

  “No,” Sathis scoffed. “Of course not. You managed to train your sword skill to about the third level, an impressive feat given your low tier and mana reserves mind you, but the only things that change your natural aether accumulation are the compatibility of your image with your talents and the place where you’re living. Certain locations such as the bridges between worlds gather more aether than others. Between the aether density, the chance to hone your skills in combat, and the ability to slay monsters and martial artists, speeding your rate of growth, it is a great honor for a warrior to be posted on the front line.”

  The cinderborn screwed up his face, as if he had bitten into something sour.

  “Even if the elves are a treacherous and honorless lot, killing them still provides months if not years more of aether than if a warrior was earning it naturally.”

  “For us it's a punishment,” Erich replied. “Actually, more than that, the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that the war isn’t actually being fought to conquer anything. It’s mostly just about thinning out the number of skilled humans on Hollendil, to prevent us from even thinking about fighting back.”

  “Most of us have had that thought as well,” Sathis said. “Your leaders are on the same level as our warriors, but the Imperial Army is huge and inefficient. The only way it is able to test our forces is through sheer weight of numbers. With a force like that, any sane general would be to stay on the defensive, where they can use the advantage of your massive numbers of mundane archers to hold back a more elite attacker. Instead you invade over and over again, suffering massive casualties without any real gain. The only real explanation is that your rulers do not care about those casualties.”

  “And that’s why you can’t just relearn your old arts,” he continued, fixing Erich with a stern glare. “Pretty much everything you’ve learned to date is designed to keep you weak and subservient. Going forward, you should try and only learn techniques that are around the limits of your image. If you cannot find an art that matches your ability, it is up to you to create one that does. Anything less is a waste.”

  “How in the world am I supposed to create a technique on my own?” Erich replied with a frown. “Especially a high class technique. It seems like it would be easier to spin straw into gold. I know Elias was working on a body enhancement art, but even after years of experimentation, he could never get it right.”

  Sathis chuckled, the dry sound quickly turning into a bout of full bellied laughter. There was a hint of madness to it that Erich tried to push from his mind.

  “You learn a new technique or art the same way you earn an image. Hard persistent work and luck. It can take a day, a year or a hundred years. There is no way to know how difficult it will be to develop the art until you try.”