Volume 2 of Starbreaker - Now Live! Read Now

Chapter 35

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“The third circle is considered by many to be the defining one of a mage’s career. This is of course, ridiculous. Affinity is not the be-all and end-all of a mage. There have been many mages with common affinities who have reached the rank of wizard and beyond. There have been many mages with unique affinities who lack the resources and support that they need because of the rarity.”

—A Mage’s Guide to Affinity and Advancement, Foron Bakrun

Sylvas had been on the planet of Strife for a little more than a week, and the majority of his time seemed to have been spent in the brig or in the infirmary. He never thought that he would miss the worn stone of the habitable sections of the campus and the endless red dust, but here he was surrounded by sterile white again, loathing it. He tried to sit up and immediately realized what a bad idea that was.

“Ever grown back a spleen before?” A familiar looking half-elf asked in an almost casual tone as she appeared from nowhere and pushed him back down flat.

Sylvas’ throat felt like it had been shredded raw by all the sand and ash that had passed through it. “No.”

“You have now. So stay lying very still and doing nothing until I discharge you.” She tapped at a suspended bottle where it hung beside him, a long pipe trailing from it and disappearing into his arm, letting whatever alchemical concoction she was treating him with pass straight into his blood. His sleeve was gone again. Burnt tatters of the jacket were dangling around his upper arm. His vest from underneath was gone too, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel embarrassed about showing a little skin when the medic had already seen what was underneath it and gone for a good rummage around inside.

Opening up his second sight, Sylvas realized just how badly he’d hurt himself. Not from the damage to his channels, which he’d fully expected, or the pathetic little dribble of mana coiled in his core, but from all of the enchantments and spells that were working overtime to restore the balance of that mana. He closed his eyes and tried to draw in more mana, to replenish his strength, but a firm slap to the forehead by the doctor put an end to that. “Ow?”

Her face suddenly loomed over him as he lay there aching. “What part of doing nothing wasn’t clear to you?”

“I was just—” He tried to explain, only to earn a single finger poke to the forehead this time.

 “Nothing.

“Not even—” 

Noth-ing!” This time it was almost a shout, which was quite impressive given how bored he’d seen the doctor with even the most gruesome of injuries in his short stay here. So with that in mind, Sylvas took her seriously.

“Okay.”

The doctor gave him one final scowl at his statement, then returned to her work. Sylvas mostly wanted to know what had happened at this point. Who had found him. How they had found him. All the answers would come to him in time, but he didn’t want to wait. Nor did he want to miss any more of his lessons than he needed to. There was every chance that days had passed since the last exercise, and he had no idea. Lockmind didn’t work when he wasn’t conscious.

Boredom presented a problem given that he was not only awake but also apparently alive enough that the doctor wasn’t concerned about him imminently dying so long as he just didn’t move. At the same time however, and given what he’d just experienced, he didn’t think it would be a good idea to bother the doctor just for the sake of something to do. So Sylvas did as he was told and remained lying as still as he could, letting his senses tell him all that they could and sifting through every iota of information with Lockmind.

The doctor had mentioned a spleen needing to be regrown, the organ presumably being what Hammerheart had burst with his punch. Judging from the various enchantments at work, he had to assume that the rest of the damage had come from his own tampering with the affinity balance of his mana. The aches throughout his body certainly seemed to be centered around his channels. He wondered, briefly, just how much his new embodiment had done to protect him from the damage he was causing to himself using mana he had no affinity for. On reflection, outside the heat of battle, it seemed obvious that the reason nobody simply forced mana out of its normal affinity to gain access to a wider variety of spells was that it was damaging to do so. But yesterday, or whenever it had been, he had been riding high on his success and paid the pain no mind. I forgot that pain was a sign from the body that something was wrong, not simply a trial to be endured to prove myself.

There was a possibility that having been raised to be the messiah of a doomsday cult might have influenced the way he thought about things like pain.

It was that thought in particular that made Sylvas realize that true introspection really didn’t suit him, or that it certainly didn’t in the state he was in now. He would have greatly preferred to be doing things, learning things, moving. But being stuck in the hospital bed for all the hours that he had to wait, there was nothing to do but think. And with Lockmind, it was all too easy to go back over everything that had ever happened to him with a fine-tooth comb, sifting out every minor irritant. 

His sleeve was gone, which suggested another explosive outburst from the scars on his arms. It seemed that his new embodiment hadn’t been sufficient enough to contain it, thinking that it likely had happened 

Then there was the echo that he’d felt when he’d vented his mana. It was like what he’d experienced when he was fighting the eidolons. Like there was something more to his magic that he wasn’t quite connected with. He could feel it by its absence. He wondered if it was his missing affinity. If he simply didn’t have one and never would. If his progress would drag to a halt here, as Kaya and all the rest moved on without him. He would be left paddling in the shallow end, using spells meant for children, and barred from making any change to them for fear of him injuring himself again.

With that already weighing on his mind, he began digging back through earlier memories, before Lockmind, so unreliable, but by far more prevalent. All of the times that in retrospect, it was obvious that the grand masters were manipulating him and the rest of the Heralds of the Hollow Heart. When they were repeating what they had read in their gifted arcane texts verbatim without any deeper understanding and when they had deliberately twisted the words of the texts to better suit their ends. All of the times that if I had just a tiny bit of self-awareness I might have realized what they were actually working towards. I’d been so naïve. So stupid. So willfully blind to what was really going on. 

His whole world was dead because he had missed the now obvious signs that something was wrong. If he’d just stopped for one moment, ignored all the fanfare and praise that he’d been receiving for the first time in his life, then he could have prevented all of this from happening. He could have gone on as the most powerful mage on his little backwater planet, far from sight. Doing as he pleased and never knowing that there was so much more beyond its atmosphere. If he had broken away from their dogma, he could have stopped them, he could have prevented whichever other unfortunate that they raised up from falling into the same trap he had. All those people are dead because of me. Mira is dead because of me.

It was a spiraling train of thought that occupied Sylvas until Kaya’s voice pierced through his self-pity, or rather her voice and substantial punch in the arm. “I tell you stanzbuhr, there isn’t a day goes by you don’t hurt yourself worse than anyone else ever could.”

The pain of the punch was distant and numb compared to the heart wrenching turmoil he had been caught up in, but it gave him a lifeline to focus on. 

“No…no punching the patient.” He croaked as he attempted to quickly pack away all his mental baggage.

“You pull something like that again, I’ll do worse than punch you!” The dwarf growled, her expression severe.

“And you’ll do it with my blessing.” The doctor’s voice added from somewhere across the room Sylvas couldn’t see. “It is my medical opinion that punching mages like him before they do something so brainlessly reckless is best kind of preventative medicine.”

Sylvas immediately shook his head at the words, immediately resolving to ignore that admittedly questionable piece of medical advice. “How long have I been—”

“Three days. All of which Hammerheart has been bragging about killing you.” Kaya stated, her tone turning softer, even if her expression didn’t. “Three days of Hot Lips and Gharia fussing every time they see me, like I know anything they don’t.”

“Ugh. Well, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.” Sylvas offered, deciding it was perhaps a good time to risk a shrug, given that he’d already been punched.

“We thought you were dead when Vaelith pulled you out. Crest or no crest.” Kaya continued, her usual good cheer still taking its time in reappearing. “You looked dead.”

“I…can imagine.” Sylvas replied, remembering full well how he felt. How close he’d been to the end.

The two of them fell silent for a moment as they shared a long look, Kaya eventually breaking it and changing the subject.

“We lost. Took more than half of them, the whole center of their formation, and that culgh Hammerheart too. If we were just punching through, we’d have won. But clearing them out of the fortifications… ran out of mana.”

“Not unexpected, I guess.” Sylvas said and tried to offer the best consoling nod he could muster, which was to say a particularly poor one. So instead, he took a deep breath and tried to sit up, trouble or no trouble, feeling that moment deserved more than he could offer lying down. To his amazement, not only was he able to sit up, but no one yelled him for doing so, a sign that he took that he was truly must be on the mend. 

However while he had started his motion with the intention of addressing one thing, it allowed a completely different one to catch his eye now that he could see Kaya properly for the first time since she’d arrived. 

Something that she noticed before he could say anything about it, his surprised expression betraying him instantly.

“You missed affinity testing.” Kaya stated simply, the words explaining everything.

Sylvas had known, abstractly, that he had missed it. Three days was a long time with how packed their training was. But even so, the significance of what she had said wasn’t lost on him. “What did you get?”

Kaya’s answer was to blink hard and look back at him, and for a moment afterwards her eyes were silvery and reflective as if someone had poured mercury in them. “Metal.”

“I wasn’t really aware that was one of the options.” He was careful to keep his voice from betraying him as an all too familiar nightmare of being left behind started to call to him from within the depths of his mind.

“Yeah, that weird shiny feather just…felt right.”

Sylvas nodded, full well recalling it. Just as he recalled overlooking it when it had no effect on him at all. “Ah, I didn’t get that one.”

There was a moment of silence before he realized what he should have said and waved a quick apology with a hand. “Congratulations. They’ll be headhunting you for the naval track then, yeah?”

“Already have been,” Kaya replied, the first hint of a smile crossing her face, if for a second. It promptly vanished as she continued talking. “Going to be strange joining the black patches after all this time. But I’d be lyin if the flying among stars didn’t have an appeal better than being dirtside. Feels more like home.”

“Understandable, but how does that fit in your schedule then?” Sylvas asked, deciding that it would be best to keep the conversation steering further and further away from his own lack of affinity.

“Finally out of Fahred’s snooze-fests.” Kaya replied with another grin. “You can imagine what a joy that is.” 

That was enough for Sylvas’ humor to finally wake up and join him, manifesting itself as a laugh that immediately sprained or stretched something it shouldn’t have inside him. The wincing and coughing that followed afterwards gave him enough time to compose himself for a properly polished half-truth. “I’m genuinely happy for you, you deserve this, and I can’t wait to see what you do with your new affinity.”

“You’ll get yours soon enough, stanzbuhr, don’t worry.” She replied and patted him on the shoulder, though thankfully gently this time. 

And just like that the visit was over. 

Kaya had run out of time and was soon after moving towards the door, to the next place she needed to be, leaving Sylvas to lie back down upon the bed.

“Why would I worry?” He said to himself after she’d gone and he was staring up at the ceiling, feeling an all too familiar dread in his gut began to swell and fill the space faster than his new spleen ever could have. “Why would I worry?”

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