Chapter 10

“By the time that an affinity for a particular type of mana has emerged, the signs have likely been there for quite some time. A fiery temper. An inclination to go with the flow. Affinities represent not only our relationship to magic, but our personalities. The core of our being is where mana is held, and it is the core of our selves that holds it. The addition of circles may seem like an artificial modification of what is our fundamental nature, but from the third circle onwards, all attempts to change course are doomed to failure. We are what we are, and the Embodiments and Paradigms aligned with out affinities merely provide more depth to that platitude. We do not seek to become the greatest mage, we seek to become the greatest version of ourselves. Refined and perfected.”

—Progression Fantasies: Why You are Investing in the Wrong Embodiment, Curgal Groenen

Day two was when things really went off the rails.

An hour before the usual wake up call, a heavy knock sounded at the door of his chamber and Sylvas couldn’t help but let out a little groan. Sleep was the only time when he couldn’t maintain the walls of Clearmind and he was assaulted night by night with memories and dreams. Impossible scenarios mashed together from everything he was trying to forget. Hotlips being turned to dust at the touch of the Crimson King. Flames engulfing the orphanage as Hammerheart roared for vengeance and tiny helpless Sylvas Vail cowered beneath his bunk. Fists pumelling him, turning to claws raking at him, turning to magic bursting out through his skin, tearing him apart, every word of every spell he’d ever cast glowing beneath the surface of his skin before searing through. Needless to say, he did not sleep very soundly, so having that limited amount of rest curtailed by a mystery knock was cause for quite a bit of grumbling.

He opened the door to find Quartermaster Chul blocking out whatever daylight might have filtered in. “Training time.”

As it turned out, there had been absolutely no simplification in Chul’s explanation of his new exercise regime. He was led out to behind the outbuildings where rubble was scattered and set to work lifting. There probably wasn’t a single toppled chunk of stone that Chul couldn’t have casually hoisted onto her broad and muscled back without breaking a sweat, but Sylvas himself could lift barely more than a brick in each hand before beginning to feel the strain. Calisthenics may have kept him looking trim, but it had been almost exclusively aesthetic. Within a few minutes of them starting, aches that Sylvas had thought were long cured were back and his shoulders began to burn.

It only lasted for a brief time before no amount of willpower could overpower the screaming in his arms. It wasn’t a matter of simply ignoring what his muscles were saying and pressing on, there was simply no strength left in them to lift any more. Then Chul was there, hoisting him back onto his feet, setting him on his course and taking off at a jog alongside him. Already exhausted from the hour or so of lifting rocks, Sylvas path was more serpentine than hers, but eventually he regained some sort of control over his balance and legs and he managed to catch up to the fairly gentle pace she was setting. “You lift until you can’t lift. Then you run until you can’t run. Then the rest get you.”

“On the ship, when they brought us here, they made us run.” Sylvas panted out.

“Shame you weren’t on the ship longer then.” Chul grinned before putting on a turn of speed. Nobody built so heavily should have been able to run at that pace for so long without even being breathless, but there she went, like a boulder rolling along beside him. And now, ahead of him.

Letting out another groan, Sylvas picked up his own pace and chased the fiend off into the red desert.

What he had initially taken to be fat was clearly all muscle, though how the hell she was able to propel that muscle forward at such a speed was beyond him. He had assumed that it was something to do with one of her embodiments, but the longer that they ran, the more he doubted it. She never used magic. She was still glowing to his Second Sight with as much mana as they’d started out with. There was no tell-tale sign of an enhancement spell, and though he wasn’t going as far as scrying her, nothing any of his senses told him could explain away her incredible fitness as anything other than incredible fitness.

It just made him hate her more.

Eventually, even the Air Boots that she’d found for him weren’t sufficient to keep him going. His feet slipped out from under him as they rounded the edge of the campus abutting the cliff-face for the third time and he hit the ground hard. Instinct got his hands up quick enough that his face didn’t smash into the dirt, but combined with the pain of his earlier exercise, the jarring landing was enough to make him quit. He rolled over onto his back and panted for breath as Chul jogged casually back to his side. 

“Go get your breakfast. Need to keep up your strength.” She was grinning again and Sylvas found that he could find no hint of anything but cruelty in it. “Tomorrow will be harder.”

The journey down into the complex in the cliff was torturous. As much a crawl as it was a walk. Without his embodiment making him lighter, he doubted he could have managed it at all. He slumped onto the bench opposite Luna and Ironeyes, who both looked almost as exhausted as him, though in Luna’s case that was probably because she’d just rolled out of bed.

“Hell week.” Ironeyes said solemnly.

“Hell week.” Sylvas and Luna agreed.

There was better food on offer at the Blackhall itself, but to get it would require a small amount of walking, which Sylvas absolutely was not prepared to do. After devouring his slop as if it was a five star meal, Sylvas finally had enough attention to spare to take in the other two. Both were still in uniform, but he noticed some new pieces of equipment strapped onto various parts of Ironeyes. It seemed that he wasn’t alone in getting Chul’s upgrades, though how she’d found time to torment anyone else was beyond him. As for Luna, opposite the Crest pinned to her chest, there was another broach of some sort, a circular array of colored gems glowed on it in sequence, one after the other, like a little rainbow chasing itself around. She followed his gaze to her chest, smirked as he quickly looked away, then chuckled. “Accelerated affinity testing. It filters my mana intake until there’s one that works.”

“A pity they never offered that to me, I could have avoided the damage to the testing room.”

The smile on Luna’s face grew cold. “Think its only for folks who’re really falling behind.”

On that awkward note they all had to go there separate ways as white shield sendings started manifesting all around them. In Sylvas’ case, two of them.

“Report to training field east.” There could be no mistaking Vaelith’s clipped voice.

Meanwhile, Fahred’s message played alongside it. “Meet me in the chamber where you began your studies into spatial magic at your earliest convenience.”

He wasn’t sure which of the orders he was meant to follow. He couldn’t be in two places at once. With a sigh, he cast a pair of sendings of his own. “Contradictory order from Instructor Fahred. Please clarify.” And the same to Fahred with Vaelith’s name attached. The mess hall had already cleared out, leaving him and the beleaguered couple of staff members still lingering. They kept staring at him as he waited for his replies.

Both arrived more or less simultaneously. Vaelith’s curt, “Obey my order,” playing a moment ahead of, “You just let me worry about Instructor Vaelith and head down here.

Unhelpful.

In a brief moment of inspiration, Sylvas cast another sending, this one to Instructor Vilmander. “Receiving contradictory instructions, please clarify my schedule.”

Another long moment ticked by, and Sylvas shuffled his way towards the door of the mess to avoid being swept up by the staff along with any of the other non-existent dirt on their floors. He could swear that the dwarf was actually prodding him out the door with the broom when he wasn’t looking.

Vilmander’s missive came back. “Proceed to Lecture Hall C.”

For a moment, Sylvas still remained in place. Neither of the other Instructors were going to be there, and he couldn’t help but feel like Vilmander was commandeering him in much the same way that they’d both tried to, but after a moment of consideration, he set off for the hall all the same. Despite being a rude and disagreeable little man, Vilmander had never shown any real interest in Sylvas, regardless of his affinity or capability. If he was going to be stuck in a room with one of the three, he’d prefer it was the one who wasn’t going to treat him like he was some sort of chosen one. He’d had enough of that to last him a lifetime.

Sylvas arrived in the lecture hall to find a raucous argument already in full swing. Fahred looked about a moment away from sticking his tongue out at Vaelith as he said, “I saw him first.”

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Vilmander’s dull droning voice cut through the argument by force of flatness alone. “The subject of your dispute has just arrived. Might I propose that he make the decision?”

The two mature adult mages spun around to look at Sylvas as he entered. Fahred quickly stepped forward, putting his back to Vaelith, which was a lot more courageous or stupid than Sylvas would have been if she’d been glowering like that at him. “Clearly there is no decision to be made. I’ve taken this young man on as a protégé from the moment he arrived on Strife, crafted his path of advancement, provided him with all of the reading materials he’s requested… clearly the best thing here is consistency, wouldn’t you say? I should be the one providing you with instruction.”

Vaelith’s glowing green eyes narrowed as Fahred spoke. It was amazing that he made it through his whole spiel without a hole being drilled into the back of his head by her stare. “You have provided him with the bare minimum of information required to advance, interfered in his freedom to choose his own path and locked his advancement potential. I need to undo the damage you’ve done.”

That was sufficient to catch Sylvas attention in amongst the bickering. “I’m sorry, locked potential?”

Vaelith nodded a little too eagerly. “Your circles are interlinked, you use them to manage one another. Growth requires balance. If you add another circle, it’s going to be a third of what’s already there and locked together, it’ll spin out.”

“A situation that it will be no problem at all to manage with a little finesse and intelligence.” Fahred was quick to pipe up.

Vaelith’s stare could have bored a hole through to the core of the planet if she’d glanced down instead of at Fahred. “You’re suggesting I lack intelligence?”

“So you admit that you lack the necessary finesse?” Unaware of how close he was to death, Fahred attempted a cheeky grin. 

“Instructors.” Vilmander spoke with all the gravity of a mortuary attendant. “Both of you are capable of assisting in this student’s growth, but neither of you are going to achieve anything if you continue competing.”

“I assumed that both of you would be instructing me in your own areas of expertise.”

“Be assured that I will be doing exactly that Cadet, under my tutelage you will be able to expand your mind to encompass fields of study that wouldn’t even occur to the rank and file grunts of this man’s Ardent.” Fahred was quick to say before Vilmander’s dead-eyed stare silenced him.

The Instructor, who seemed increasingly like the only sane one in the room, then turned to Sylvas. “Both Instructors are capable of assisting you through independent improvement, choose your preferred candidate.”

“I… how am I meant to choose?” Offending either one of them was going to be a serious impediment to his progress on Strife and making him choose between them because they couldn’t act like adults and make the decision themselves was infuriating.

Vaelith had just been watching him levelly throughout the whole argument. Now she shrugged her shoulder. “Whatever you want to do kid. No hard feelings.”

“Oh there will most assuredly be hard feelings on my part if you choose to abandon the course of reason and throw in with this…” He finally made eye contact with Vaelith and immediately stopped speaking.

She cocked her shaved head to the side. “This what?”

“Lovely young lady.” He answered through a carefully frozen smile.

Once again, Sylvas reiterated. “I don’t know how I’m meant to pick one over the other. Is there a reason that they can’t both teach me?”

Fahred and Vaelith both opened their mouths to begin arguing again when Vilmander droned over them both. “They are at cross purposes. One seeks to make you a wizard, capable of great feats. The other seeks to make you a finely honed weapon for the Ardent to wield.”

“I can’t be both?” Sylvas knew the answer to that before it was even out of his mouth. Of course he couldn’t. If he wanted to be a good little soldier, it would require abandoning the freedom that an academic enjoyed. At the same time, in spite of his souring feelings about the Ardent, he still wanted to fight against the encroachment of the Eidolons and sincerely doubted that he’d ever find any satisfaction in a kind of work that wasn’t that. “I can’t be both.”

“I believe it is time for you to make your case, Instructors.” Vilmander sighed, going back to the paperwork on his slate.

Once again, Fahred barged forward. “Don’t waste your life. Don’t throw it away on some dusty rock, scrapping with space bugs or zombies. You have the potential to be a real wizard, to expand the bounds of the Empyrean’s knowledge, to usher in a new golden age of spatial magic and become a force for real change in the galaxy.”

Vaelith’s pitch was a lot less egotistical. “Or you stay true to your promise. You fight, you win, you save lives. Save planets.”

“What promise?” Sylvas temper prickled. He’d been tricked into signing up with the Ardent, caught between a rock and a hard place with no options beyond a life of serfdom and debt or this. He felt quite certain that she knew that too. “The agreement I signed with the Ardent?”

“Same promise I made.” When her voice came, it was softer than Sylvas had ever heard it. All the harshness drained out of her. “The promise to your dead that you wouldn’t let it happen again. Not to anyone else.”

“Oh come on now, don’t give in to that blatant appeal to your emotions. Yes, if you go swinging magic around like a club, you’ll be able to save a few people, maybe even planets like she promises.” His bushy brows had drawn down low over the glowing oceans of his eyes. “But then you lose and you die and you end up as someone else’s sad origin story while the galaxy goes on lurching from one crisis to the next because nobody is willing to take a step back and think things through. Yes, you can save lives by fighting. But think how many more you can save by eliminating the need to fight.”

Sylvas opened his mouth to ask what the man was talking about, only to realize that the instructor had just been catching his breath.

“You’re the first new gravity mage in decades, the only one I know of with your Paradigm, ever. With you, and some research, we could predict where Eidolon incursions are going to happen before they happen. With you and some research, we could deploy ships around the galaxy so fast that Eidolons can’t ever catch up. The Empyrean is falling behind, it is becoming a second-class superpower, and if we don’t do something soon, it is going to crumble. People are going to recognize that the Dominion is on the rise, and they’re going to defect, and the whole universe is going to fall into ruin. Wars, plagues, whatever bloody horrible thing you can think of are going to happen if that happens, but if you can change that…”

“It’s a pretty dream.” Vaelith conceded. “But we both know you don’t get to have it.”

Sylvas had been drawn to Fahred’s bright and shining future where he was the savior of all the Empyrean, because anyone would have been, but just a glance at Vaelith and her scars reminded him of the world that they actually lived in.

“People like us don’t get to keep our hands clean. We don’t get to hide in an ivory tower. Because when the bad thing happens, we won’t let it.” Her last words came out in a growl that made Fahred step back.

Vilmander looked up from his notes with an exasperated air. “Has a decision been reached, or do I need to involve Aurea?”

Sylvas wet his lips. “Both of them. I want to split the time evenly.”

“You can see the inherent contradiction in—”

Sylvas cut the man off without meaning to. “And I can’t decide which path to follow, so this week they can show me. They can show me what each choice really means. Where it will lead. What my future will look like.”