Chapter 19

“Enchantment is the only kind of magic that matters in the end. Everything else fades. The fireball that burns so bright burns out. The teleportation spell makes the journey pass in an instant. But that journey is everything, and you missed it.”

—Mageobolgus: Elvish Philosophy Primer, Komlaeth Havenspring

By the end of the session, it was well past time for breakfast and heading past lunch too. Sylvas had never really bothered much about food, not the way that Kaya did, but now that he was working his body so much, he discovered that he really needed to eat, and in far greater quantities than he was used to. He was getting hungry again in a way that he hadn’t since he was back in the orphanage.

Lunch was also the only time he got to glimpse anything like a friendly face. Kaya was just on her way out as he was arriving to the mess hall, hopping up to give him a kiss on the cheek as she went by and blathering about running late. Bael was still at a table, but so engrossed in the various slates spread around him that Sylvas wasn’t sure if interrupting him was wise. 

Luckily, winning the Cull had resulted in a lot of friends that he hadn’t known about springing up among the various officers in the naval program. After he’d collected a tray containing some sort of fragrant stew and various vegetables that he’d never encountered before, he was waved over to join them. Ironeyes was at the table, so Sylvas assumed that it couldn’t be a den of enemies, but then again, Ironeyes had never really taken sides in most of the conflicts within the training groups. Bortan was there, which meant Sylvas knew at least one familiar face, and to his surprise the one who had waved him over was Vel, Hammerheart’s old lieutenant.

“How is hell week treating you?” She asked as he sank down at the table beside her. Unsure of exactly how to handle the situation. Her voice was odd now that she was talking normally, throaty and a little raspy, deeper than he would have expected from how delicate she looked.

“Hellish, I suppose.” He wasn’t sure how much to give away to a potential enemy. “And yourself?”

She smiled at him, tight-lipped so that her shark-teeth didn’t show. “Closing in on circle five. I’ll be out of here in no time.”

He managed to return the smile before turning to his food. Bortan was happy to pick up the complaining. “Wish I was already out of here. You wouldn’t believe the rotation they’ve got me in…”

All the various naval candidates voiced their complaints as Sylvas shoveled down his lunch. Trying hard not to acknowledge the sensation that every time he wasn’t looking at her, Vel was looking at him. He supposed that he could understand the fascination, he didn’t know much about her either, and the two of them seemed to be playing their cards close to their chests. The announcement that she was approaching circle five was hardly a surprise, she was one of the students that had been here the longest, and while Sylvas was willing to admit that he had accelerated through his own training at a somewhat breakneck pace, Vel was no slouch either. Much like him, she had an unusual affinity that gave her many advantages, but even without it she’d managed to rise to the top of the class alongside Bael and Hammerheart. He might have found the way that they conducted themselves a bit distasteful, but Sylvas could at least understand the tactical decision-making that had been involved there.

He decided to take a risk. “They haven’t even been trying to help me advance. It has all been… side-work. Trying to get my embodiments and paradigms working optimally.”

Glancing at him sideways as the complaining still went on around the table, she leaned in a little conspiratorially. “Don’t let them get sidetracked. When you have a rare affinity, people like Fahred and Vilmander look at you like an experiment. What happens if we combine this with that… They forget you’re a person, or that you’re trying to get off this rock and get to work.”

Sylvas hadn’t really given much thought to it until now. He knew that once his training was complete and his advancement had reached a point where he might be viable in the field against Eidolon incursions, they were liable to be deployed. Then again, the majority of the recruits arrived already at circle two, with a lot more of an idea of what their advancement would look like. The Cull was yearly, and this was the second that Vel had been through, which meant that two years was likely the average lifecycle of a recruit on Strife. He didn’t know if they’d get extra time to train for the full breadth of the naval training, or whether the crash courses they were already on represented all that they’d be taught.

“I’ll bear that in mind, but it isn’t easy to argue with them.” He’d expected a wry smile and agreement, but instead she looked like her hackles were up.

“It’s your progression, it’s your life. Don’t let anyone try to take that away from you. What you decide now is forever.” 

He found it strange that this woman who he probably would have called his enemy a couple of weeks ago was now trying to stand up for his rights, but there was a camaraderie among all the Argent recruits that seemed to supersede any personal grudges. No matter what they had against each other, the real enemy was never forgotten. Not the Eidolons or the Dominion or any of the other miscellaneous monsters they’d have to fight; the officers who were giving them orders.

That had been the highlight of the conversation though. Both of them lapsed back into silence as they finished up their meals, and both rose at about the same moment to head off to their next scheduled session of suffering. Sylvas gave a nod that almost became a bow as old instincts died hard, and Vel returned it with a little laugh.

Old enemies could become new friends, and the people that Sylvas had been thinking of as his allies and mentors could become the real problem. Both Fahred and Vaelith had very clear ideas on what they wanted him to be, and even after the forced revelation of reincorporating all the things he’d been repressing, he wasn’t left with any clearer idea of what he wanted for himself. He couldn’t pretend that Fahred’s promises of a lifetime of just working with magic for magic’s sake weren’t appealing. He even understood the underlying appeal of making broad changes to the way things were done, from a safe distance. On paper, it looked like the obvious option, particularly when Vaelith represented the other option, and her way was so bloody and cruel. Torturing himself daily to make himself strong enough to throw into the waiting maw of the Eidolons in the hopes he’d choke them. But even now that he could see her motivations so starkly, he wasn’t ready to turn his back on that path entirely. 

All the horrible things that had happened to him, all the things that he’d been hiding away and trying to ignore, they were a part of him now. He might not have decided what that meant yet, but he didn’t think he could walk away from fighting back against the evil that he saw in the universe. He didn’t think he’d be able to live with himself, sitting back and just letting the same nightmare he’d lived be unleashed on others over and over again while he cowered in some distant tower, safe at the cost of others safety.

Without any clear instructions on where he was meant to be headed from on high, Sylvas gravitated towards the things that made him happy, and in this instance that meant travelling back to the temple complex and descending deep beneath the level of the red sands outside to the forge. Sagran was notable in her absence. Every moment he’d been in this room, she had been too, radiating heat and unwanted scrutiny. He found his staff in progress, examined it for anything amiss, and then set to work with the construction. 

The magic had to be woven into it as it was put together, and in many ways, the magic would shape the construction as much as heat and hammer. The curving planes of metal that twisted into the opening at each end of the staff were a prime example, the metal could have been twisted and warped by the craft of any smith, but this one was shaped by the lines of enchantment running up the inner side, spaced evenly around the inner cylinder, as the cardinal directions on a compass. 

As he worked hammer and forge to close the metal casing around the liquid metal core of the staff, he spoke the words and channeled gravity affinity into it. With magnetic affinity, he supposed that each of those cardinal lines of enchantment would have blossomed out to seek the different poles of magnetism, but with gravity, all became a spiral. The steel sang and screamed as his magic flowed through it, twisting it into the design that Sagran had predicted it would take. A steady flow of his magic running up the length of it to both ends, managed by his split awareness. He had fractured off a piece of his psyche to manage the flow of mana to one end almost instinctively, as if the very pull of needing to concentrate on two things at once had been sufficient to separate it. In tandem Sylvas and the fracture-clone of his mind drew mana from his core, easing it out into the metal, into the inscriptions, into the whole of the thing, infusing it with his power. Making it his. Not just a tool made for him, but his, and extension of his body and his will. When the metal made contact with the bulge of the freshly crafted orbital spheres inside of the cylinder, it didn’t try to crush it, as would have made sense, instead it warped around it, following its curvature. That made the base of the blossoming metal at each end of the staff. Its own gravity infusion was already in place and protecting it.

There should have been some fanfare, a ringing of bells or fireworks when the staff formed into its final whole self, but Sylvas was alone in an eerily silent forge without even the Instructor present to share in his elation. The staff was complete. The tool he needed to make his affinity actually work in combat. Perhaps it was fitting that he had been all alone when he completed it. Just like he’d been alone when he forged his first circle, or shed his first tear. This memory would sustain him in the years to come. The moment where he had taken all the destructive power at his fingertips and instead he had created.

When he had lived back on Croesia, he had little time for normal people outside of the tower. Of artisans he knew nothing at all. Things were made, there were people who made them, some were better or worse than others, but ultimately it made no difference. He couldn’t have told a well-made shoe from a bad until it fell apart on his feet, and the same was true of everything else. But this thing that he had made filled him with a swell of pride, and for the first time, he understood why people made things. Why they poured their time, and passion and soul into items that others wouldn’t give a second glance.

Almost the very moment that he had finished constructing his staff, his mind began to race towards other projects that he could pick up. Perhaps he’d been foolish, all this time thinking that his choices were between the path of Fahred and his high and mighty magic, or Vaelith and her gruesome combat. Perhaps this was where he really belonged, in a quiet room, all alone, making beautiful and powerful things.

It was a nice dream.