Chapter 1

“Pressure. Without it the rough carbon of a mortal could never be compressed into the diamond of a wizard. Yet it is the same pressure that transforms some into the best possible version of themselves that destroys many others. Of all those who work with magic, only a fraction ascend beyond the third circle, and from there fewer still continue their ascent to higher places. Most of those who seek their own perfection are limited in their ascent not by some fault of training, some poorly chosen direction or by the limitations of their capability but by a flaw in their personal philosophy that leaves them ill equipped to continue. For many, this is simply contentment. They feel no further drive to continue because they lack the ambition, or hunger, required to continue driving them onwards. It is difficult to categorize a person feeling content with their lot in life as a flaw, but in the case of a wizard, who must always be striving, it is. For others, it manifests instead as a crisis of faith.”

—The Psychology of the Wizard, Remo Aurea

“I can’t believe it was that easy.” Luna joked, limping along beside them.

“It was far from the most impressive victory ever achieved in a cull, to be fair, too much running, hiding and clever tricks to impress everyone with our incredible potency and talent. Barely a showcase at all. More of a…” Bael’s usually serene face twisted into something like a sneer, “Military operation.”

“We won, didn’t we?” Kaya grumbled from Sylvas side.

“Barely.” Bael had of course heard her murmur thanks to his pointed elf ears. “And predominantly on the gamble of our tactics rather than any particular brilliance in our magic.”

Anak, Enore‘s brother, sounded like her when he spoke softly, and that voice cut through the mounting argument in an instant. “We beat Hammerheart.”

They all fell silent then. Remembering the glorious moment that the dwarf had been punched so hard he saw the curvature of the world.

Bael was the first to concede, “I must admit that was rather satisfying.”

“Did you see the look on his face when the punch did nothing?” Kaya cackled. She slapped Sylvas on the back, making him stumble. “My boy got him good.”

The pain had been late in arriving to Sylvas, riding as he was on a wave of endorphins and satisfaction, but when it did arrive it had accumulated some interest. The impact of Kaya’s none-too-gentle slap had taken the wind out of him, and pain radiated out across his back now. Far worse than it should have been.

With Sylvas too winded to stop her, Kaya pressed on, “That punch… that one he swung back, that’s one for the tomes of lore. Every culgh in the cosmos with Hammerheart in their name felt it, I’d wager.”

“It is inevitable that news of this will spread.” Bael agreed. “Even the Ardent would struggle to conceal it. I imagine that ‘your boy’ Sigil will soon be on the receiving end of another swathe of marriage requests.”

Kaya guffawed at that too. Though even through the mounting pain Sylvas noted that Gharia’s tail flick was one of irritation, not amusement.

The weight of his body, that he could now control so easily with his completed embodiment had been gradually mounting as they walked. He hadn’t paid it much mind, expecting some degree of exhaustion after all that they’d achieved, and accepting that walking across the shifting sands of Strife was always going to involve a certain amount of backsliding, but it had gone on getting worse. 

“If he keeps on swinging like that, I might marry him.” Harvan piped up from behind them. Drawing a roar of laughter from Kaya, a chuckle from the others, and more irritated flicks from Gharia.

Sylvas tried to speak. Tried to tell them he wasn’t planning on settling down any time soon. Even coming close to broaching the subject of his engagement back home, which stuck in his heart like an icicle. But breath wasn’t coming the way that it should. That icicle in his heart soon melted in the burn of pain.

“I saw him first, I’ve got first dibs on him!” Kaya’s roaring laughter was too loud in Sylvas ears, he could feel wetness there now, trickling down, like when Hammerheart’s sonic fiend had deafened them back on their first day here.

“Never thought I’d win one of these.” Ironeyes gruff voice could scarcely be made out through the laughter and self-congratulations going on all around him. “Figured I’d scrape through, but… thank you.”

It would have been a touching moment, if Sylvas had the attention to spare. First, he checked on the flows of mana through his circles, then his body, and all seemed as it should be. There was none of the twisting and whorls in the mana that he’d have expected if there was a blockage or damage. Neither did his newly unlocked gravitational sense do much to help in that regard, according to it, his body was suffering no more pull on it than on anyone else, nothing was being manipulated, nothing was more or less than it should have been.

“Don’t reckon they’ll even bother to dig Hammerfart out of whatever hole he landed in.” Kaya brayed.

Bael looked amused, but uncomfortable all the same. “There is no need to be disrespectful to a bested opponent.”

“Would you dig him up? Can’t be trusted not to murder people in a training exercise? Can’t win in a fight against a mage a circle under him? Doesn’t care about anything or anyone except his own advancement?” Kaya’s tone had slowly shifted from a joke to pained as they went. Enore’s death weighed on her more than she ever let anyone see.

“He doesn’t deserve to be dug out.” Anak’s soft voice didn’t match his harsh words. “He doesn’t deserve to live.”

Sylvas tightened his grip on Kaya’s shoulders and Gharia’s waist, it might have been taken as a sign of affection, and that was fine, he didn’t need to be drawing attention to himself right now. Where his fingers pressed into scaled flesh and cloth, they hurt. They burned. Something was seriously wrong.

Sylvas tried to lighten himself as he went, not reaching for his flight spell in case it drained the dregs of his mana reserves entirely but loosening gravity’s grip on him with his embodiment. Yet even when he was so light he should have been floating along like a balloon, kept grounded only by Gharia and Kaya’s arms around him, the feeling wouldn’t leave. His face felt like it was trapped in a vice. His fist, where it had made contact with Hammerheart was unsurprisingly aching too, but all across his neck, his chest, his back, everywhere that he’d shifted the gravity inside himself to make his brutal swing was aching too. It kept getting worse and worse as they walked, the pain spreading out to cover his whole body. Every movement felt like the muscle was trying to tear away from him, and bruising began to blossom on his skin.

“I for one will be delighted to see him alive and well.” Bael announced, “Particularly the expression on his face as he skulks around the Blackhall knowing that he has burned every bridge, slapped aside every hand of friendship offered to him and lost every advantage. A more fitting punishment for a man like him, I cannot conceive of.”

“Doubt he’s going to take it lying down.” Kaya’s voice had dropped low and angry, though Sylvas was struggling to hear her now. There was a crunching sound with every movement now, as if the desert beneath their feet was coated in a thick frost as they trudged over it. “I reckon that…”

Sylvas managed to walk off the Culling field in the arms of his friends, all of them delighted at their victory, but that was when his progress abruptly halted. “Something… wrong.”

Kaya thought that the blood-thick words were anything to do with what she was talking about. “Aye, he’ll try and say it was a trick, or doesn’t count somehow. Anything to save his…”

Gharia couldn’t show concern due to her reptilian nature, but Kaya’s face was expressive enough for both of them, it contorted into confusion then fear as Sylvas mumbled out, “Its… something… wrong…”

Collapsing into unconsciousness was rapidly becoming Sylvas most common way of getting around the campus. Like his own personal means of teleportation. He’d be at a training exercise and awaken back in the infirmary.

When his eyes opened again it was no surprise to him that he was looking up at the sterile white roof, and that he could hear the half-elf medic relentlessly complaining. “Going to quit my job and get them to hire me back on at a higher pay-grade as a full-time gravity mage babysitter with the amount of time that I have to…” She trailed off when some scrying spell or another alerted her to Sylvas waking up. She emerged from behind the curtains surrounding one of the other wounded with a scowl. “You. Again.”

“Me again.” Sylvas replied, faintly. Speaking hurt. Like the vice that had held his face had been used to work over his whole throat. “What…”

She cut him off with a flourish of her hands. Summoning an image of him, scried previously when he’d been unconscious and bleeding copiously from every orifice. With a swipe of her hands, his skin vanished. Another swipe removed that gruesome display of exposed musculature and then his bones were left hanging over him instead. She dragged her hands apart, filling his whole vision with a massive illusion of his skull. It was covered in lines. Not the cobweb pattern of breaks he might have expected radiating out from Hammerheart’s last blow, but zig-zagging marks spread over everything. The illusion slowly panned by him, showing him those same marks everywhere else. “Microfractures across every single bone in your body, I shouldn’t have expected anything less. Whatever your latest idiotic trick was, you managed to shatter your entire skeleton. Bravo. I suppose. I’ve never seen that before, and I must assume that your goal in life, presenting me with new feats of medical stupidity.”

“I didn’t…” He started to explain but she cut him and the illusion off instantly.

“Stop speaking you buffoon, you are vibrating your hyoid bone into dust.”

He closed his mouth, and felt his teeth crumble a little at the impact.

“You will lie perfectly still in this restoration spell as it welds the pieces of your bones back together now that I’ve returned them painstakingly to the correct places, you will not speak, you will breathe as shallowly as you can, anything that elevates your heart rate is liable to put a rib out of place. Try not to think too hard. Just shut up and do nothing for an hour so that I don’t have to go back in to break and reset anything and start over again. I do not need you to acknowledge that you have understood, so once again I must tell you, as your doctor; shut up.”

Sylvas blinked.

The medic’s eyes narrowed, but apparently blinking was permitted. “Now I’m going go away to see to everyone else that got injured in the accursed cull. Don’t need me again.”

It seemed that his new embodiment may have had some limitations that had not occurred to him.

For a time he was able to just lay there, listening to the soft deep clicking of his own bones stitching themselves back together but his mind was already rushing ahead of him, refusing to stay put in this moment. His victory in the cull established him and his team as the dominant force among the grunts of Strife, destined for the best placements among the Ardent so long as nothing interfered. More importantly, he had dealt with the imminent threat of Hammerheart. A thug without the power to bully was nothing at all, and he’d robbed him of that with this victory. Admittedly, he’d been trying to deal with him in a much more permanent way, but the dwarf had survived that, and that meant that some complications remained, even if he had been dethroned.

The curtains opposite Sylvas bed opened. Hammerheart stood there fully recovered and staring down at his enemy where he lay stretched out and helpless. Sylvas couldn’t even groan. This is going to hurt.

Step by deliberate step, Hammerheart crossed the room, no expression visible behind the thickness of his beard and a face like solid stone. Only when he was close enough to speak in a whisper did he finally rasp out, “You’ve ruined me. Not your redhorn, not the traitor elf, you. Ever since you arrived here, my life has turned to kragh.”

By his side, the dwarf’s mighty hand, almost as big as Sylvas entire head, tightened into a fist.

“I was the rising star. I was the king in waiting. Everyone respected me. Everyone thought I was going to go on to be… Then you came along, and even before your lucky roll of the dice with your affinity, you were standing your ground, pushing back, interfering in all my plans. You poisoned them all against me. Tricked them into thinking I was some sort of monster. I came here to fight monsters and you…” He took a ragged breath, and his clenched fists uncurled. “You win.”

He stared right into Sylvas eyes, and for the first time, the tears of frustration he’d been hiding cam brimming up into them. “You beat me. The cull was my last chance, a chance to prove I was so strong it didn’t matter what else had happened. A chance to prove I could still be all the things I was meant to be. But you… you stole that from me too.”

“I’ve got nothing now. I was going to be the greatest, and if I can’t be that… what’s the point. I’ve handed in my resignation. I’m going home.” He drew away from Sylvas, staring down into his helpless rivals eyes. Fists clenched. He wouldn’t even have to use magic, Sylvas was so helpless, all he’d need to do was lay a hand on him and press and the vengeance he’d been seeking all this time would be his. Sylvas shivered in expectation and agony wracked him. By the time the darkness had cleared from his vision, Hammerheart was gone. Leaving Sylvas inexplicably whole and extremely confused.

Just as he thought that he’d gotten a grasp on everything happening on Strife, the world threw him through another twist. This changed everything again. Without Hammerheart acting as a constant source of antagonism, he could finally rely on the support of the rest of the recruits. Without Hammerheart, he could expect to enter training exercises on an even footing with everyone else. No longer would he and his allies be unduly targeted and punished just for existing.

The first term and all of its torments were over. Things were going to be different now.