Chapter 20

“There are some who question the freedom that the Ardent are granted to choose their own course for advancement. These people argue that while choosing one’s own progression is a fundamental right of everyone else in the Empyrean, the soldiers who die to protect that right should be exempted from it. The most prevalent argument against this freedom is the idea that Ardent recruits might choose to deliberately sabotage their own advancement to avoid active service. This works off a number of flawed conceptions. The first being that anyone is willing to deliberately sabotage the composition of their body and mind for such petty advantages, the second being the idea that a mage is any less valuable to the Ardent if they are not a front-line fighter. A war is won on materiel, lines of supply and intelligence, not brute force. All are welcome in the Ardent, all will have a place here.”

—Keeping the Peace Among the Peacekeepers, Gorgan Wartback

Sylvas slept like a baby that night, finishing up early and forgoing any further self-improvement or attempts at socializing in favor of a solid night’s rest. They were all dead on their feet, there wasn’t going to be much in the way of conversation anyway.

There were nightmares, horrors he had witnessed, and imagined horrors yet to come. Eidolons stalking him through the catacombs of the cliff complex while he was blinded. The voice of some woman, whether Hotlips or Mira, he couldn’t say. He hadn’t had Lockmind back home on Croesia, and some of the memories were starting to break down now. He was going to forget Mira’s voice, her face, it was all fading.

When he woke it wasn’t in terror the way it used to be, but with a deep and abiding sadness resting heavy on his chest. He hated that even more. Guilt, grief, anger and pain, he could use all of those as fuel to drive him on, but this sadness was like a suit of lead.

Chul was waiting for him when he emerged from his chambers, and he couldn’t help but wonder why she bothered. It wasn’t as though he had given any sign he meant to shirk his duties, or that he had any trouble rising in the morning. He genuinely wondered if the Quartermaster just didn’t have anything better to do with her time. Glancing sideways at her as they emerged into the early evening air, he tried to take the measure of her intentions, but she was a blandly belligerent as always. Her horns curled back from a face that looked vaguely sinister and grumpy, but nothing in her actions had ever conveyed that bad mood. Sylvas wondered if she was accustomed to being intimidating because of her size, and simply adopted a disposition to match it.

She reached over and gave him a solid slap on the back. “Two more days.”

He staggered under the weight of the blow, and until now, every time that Chul had inadvertently sent him flying he had assumed it to be cruelty. Now he wondered if she genuinely didn’t know her own strength, or more importantly, whether he was misunderstanding some cultural thing. All of the fiends that he’d met had been a lot more physical than he was used to. Jostling into his personal space, pushing and shoving at their friends, licking the roof of his mouth. Admittedly, he didn’t think that Chul was going to make an attempt at that one. Perhaps this was all just how they were around other people. Sylvas made a mental note to replay all the interactions with fiends that he’d seen and see if this theory held up.

The exercises of the morning were on the same testing machines as yesterday, but this time the readout of the force he was managing to generate had been turned off. They resisted his efforts to operate them, pushing back at him with more and more force as he tried to exert first his own musculature, and then his embodiment to the maximum effect, but at no point did Chul stop to check the results that they were getting. There was no need. No matter what results they produced, she still would have driven him on to keep exercising, to push his body past the limits of what it had been capable of before. The strength of some of the other species, like the fiends or dwarves, was inherently greater than the baseline for humans and no amount of exercise would ever let him ascend to the heights that they could reach, but that didn’t mean that there was no area of overlap, the weakest of the fiends were naturally somewhere in the low E ranks and the mightiest humans Sylvas had read about ranked almost as high as D before taking embodiments and enhancement spells into account. If he went on with this same course of training past this nightmarish week, he would inevitably grow strong enough to contend with them. Not even considering how much his own embodiment could change things.

It hit him like a revelation that he was going to continue with the exercise regime beyond Hell Week, that it had been designed with that in mind, to slot into his usual schedule on campus. That he’d been taught how to exercise with a full complement of the machinery available for that purpose within the Empyrean, and how to improvise his own workouts. It had seemed stupid and repetitive, and he’d spent most of the time practicing his new cycling technique and sifting through the information that his eyepiece had been feeding him throughout the rest of the day for anything useful. Bizarrely, this most pointless part of his self-improvement regime had turned out to be one of the most valuable.

Chul was leaning against a crumbling wall with the same complacent stare as always. There if he needed her, but more than content to go unneeded throughout the whole routine. He couldn’t shake the idea that despite the advanced and complex training that Fahred had given him, or the brutal lessons that Vaelith had handed out, perhaps Chul had done the most for him out of all of them, by being there without any demands or expectations.

His eye-slate alerted him to the time as he’d programed it to. Letting him know the session was done and breakfast was due. He disentangled himself from the apparatus he was in, something that looked halfway between a torture device and a climbing frame, and crossed the distance to Chul. She looked down at him as he opened out his arms as wide as he could and tried to stretch around her broad trunk enough that she would take it as a hug. Without hesitation, she returned it, and Sylvas regretted everything as his ribs creaked. Different methods of communication. He’d have to remember that going forward.

After Chul dropped him back onto the sand, he headed for breakfast, only to get intercepted halfway to the Blackhall by a white shield. His second sight was growing more sensitive as time went by. The minute variances in different castings of the same spells were becoming more apparent to him, which was why he was confused to be confronted with a sending spell from an Instructor that had never sent him a sending before. Or at least, not that he could recall ever seeing. Frowning, he reached out to touch it. “Report to Instructor Aurea’s office, top floor, temple complex.”

For a moment he was surprised, but he supposed that it had been inevitable. In all his time at the campus on Strife, he’d only seen the Instructor-In-Chief twice, once on arrival and once when his affinity had made itself manifest. Another meeting was probably long overdue.

Still, he resented the many many flights of stairs that he’d need to climb to get to her, right after his session out in the training fields. Gritting his teeth, he set himself to the task at a jog.

Perhaps the decision to build the Ardent training base on Strife in these old ruins without any attempt to install a single elevator had been part of the body conditioning work that Sylvas was now engaging in so heavily with Chul, but either way, he arrived at the doors of Instructor Aurea’s office breathless and exhausted. It wouldn’t even occur to him until later that he had been following the hulking fiend’s suggestion to keep his body weight heightened with his Tidal Shift to improve muscle growth throughout his regular day, and that he’d essentially run up the stairs at almost double the regular gravity.

Taking a moment to compose himself, he reached out to knock, only for the door to swing inwards before he could touch it. Aurea was sitting behind her desk at the far side of the cozy office, smiling at him pleasantly. A chair was sitting slightly turned as if inviting him in. “I hope that you have been enjoying your time here, Recruit Vail.”

He returned the smile and settled himself opposite her. “I’m not certain that I’m meant to be enjoying my time, but it is certainly… informative.”

Her hand moved, almost imperceptibly, scribbling something on the slate in front of her. It seemed to be almost compulsive, rather than a deliberate attempt to ignore him and carry on working, so Sylvas remained polite and didn’t draw attention to it.

“How have you been getting along with the other recruits in the naval track?”  

Her hand stopped moving when she asked questions, and didn’t resume again until he had answered, “I think I’ve been getting on well with more or less everyone now. I had some issues when I first joined with… well it seems silly to call a full-grown dwarf a bully, but it has been resolved.”

“And you have since integrated said bully’s right-hand man into your own social circle and have begun making overtures towards the other member of that team. It speaks to a personal philosophy of growth, acceptance and adaptability. All admirable traits in their place.”

The fact that she’d commented on him getting along with Bael and the sonic fiend made him wonder if that was not the intention, if they were meant to remain as rivals to drive him on in the soap opera that the Ardent seemed intent on constructing for him to live in. “You think that I should have been less accepting? Punished them for following Hammerheart? Allowed the rift between different factions among the recruits to fester?”

“It isn’t about what I think, it is about what you think and the decisions that you have made. I have no influence over the situation whatsoever.” She said it so casually he almost believed it for a moment. As if she hadn’t chosen exactly who was in what lecture together, who bunked together, what friendships would easily be forged and which would have impediments.

He tried to keep his tone neutral, but it was difficult in the face of such blatant lies. “I think it is better to have everyone in your army behaving like they’re on the same side.”

“Absolutely.” She smiled brightly.

There was a long silence as she scribed whatever notes she was taking, then she looked up at Sylvas once more, over the top of the glasses that had slipped down her nose. “How have you been finding the personal improvement program?”

“Good. I think.” He was taken aback a little, he hadn’t really thought about it as anything more than the latest hoop they wanted him to jump through. “Hard in places. Painful, but good.”

“And you are content with the progress that you are making?” Nothing in her affect gave away any hint as to whether she was content with the progress he was making, but the fact she was asking the question suggested that she wasn’t.

“I understand that I leapt ahead in terms of circles very quickly, and taking some time to go back and fill in some of the blank spaces where I missed things has been very useful. Not to mention getting to grips with my new affinity spells, embodiment and paradigm.”

“Do you believe that the instructors you worked with this week will share this opinion?” She approached it from a different angle. “Do you think that they are content with your progress?”

“Yes. I do.” He answered after a little thought. “I haven’t mastered everything they’ve been teaching me yet, but I think I’ve made good progress, and I have another lesson with Instructor Fahred later today when I should be able to work on teleportation some more.”

Thwarted twice by his refusal to engage with the subtext of her question, Aurea finally asked him plainly. “Why have you made no attempt to advance to the next circle of magic?”

“Because my advancement was proceeding faster than everything else, I’m still getting to grips with…”

She cut him off before he could make any more of the same excuses. “Since your arrival on Strife you have advanced twice in rapid succession, and now you seem to have lost all momentum. Do you believe that you could not have conducted the necessary learning while also working towards the formation of a new circle?”

The truth was, he hadn’t been working towards his next circle because he was still in limbo. He didn’t know which direction he wanted his future to go, and choosing one set of embodiments and paradigms over another had the chance to lock him into one of those outcomes.

“Do you think I should have been working on my fourth circle?”

She smiled again. It was a very well-practiced smile. Even if he spent a century faking happiness, Sylvas didn’t think he’d ever be able to match it. “I am simply trying to understand your reasoning.”

“I advanced rapidly because I was informed that it was necessary to do so for my own safety and that the optimal rate of progression was slower.”

Her scribbling on the plate halted again. “So you believe that your decision was made purely on the basis of logic?”

“What else would it have been based on?” Sylvas didn’t really understand the question.

“While I am privy to all of the information about your training and instruction, I don’t know your emotional state, or the reasoning for the actions you take.”

Sylvas had the benefit of Lockmind to go back through every thought that had run through his head since he had acquired that Paradigm, and throughout it all, he truly believed that logic had been his compass. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t been angry or upset, but ultimately when he had made his choices, it had been to acquire the advantage he needed. Not to punish those who had transgressed him. “To my knowledge, every choice I have made is based in logic.”

“So you think it is an unfair characterization to say that you have given up your pursuit of progress?”

For a moment, Sylvas was stunned, then he blurted out, “Why would you think that I’d…”  He cut himself off as his thoughts caught up to events. “Wait.”

“Is something troubling you?” Aurea’s hand hovered over her slate, ready to resume her report the moment he said a word.

“This is a psychological examination.”

To her credit, she didn’t flinch. “I don’t know why you would assume that…”

Things were finally making sense. “It’s a psychological examination because you’re the only psychologist on staff, and the mental state of recruits attempting to advance to higher circles of magic is a defining characteristic of how they turn out, that’s why you’re in charge of the whole facility, even though Administrator Mengrammon handles all of the practicalities of keeping the base operational.”

Caught in her lie, she cleared her throat and tried to press on. “Be that as it may…”

“You caught on to the fact I’m not pushing myself to the brink of death in every exercise, and you think it means I’ve lost my drive rather than finally acquiring a little bit of sanity.” He let out a mirthless laugh in spite of the situation.

“I would have termed it temperance, but you aren’t entirely incorrect.” Her smile was beginning to fade. “A degree of… thrust is necessary for any ascent.”

“You’ve read my files. You know that I have been manipulated my entire life. In a much less ham-fisted way than the Ardent have been manipulating me so far. You must have realised that I’d catch on.”

Bland faced, she lied again. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“When I was self-destructive, you were happy. Now that I’m trying to live, you’re not. That doesn’t bode well for the future of soldiers under Ardent command, does it?”

She shrugged, shamelessly, “As I said, a degree of drive is necessary for success in the Ardent. The situations that our troops are sent into often seem overwhelming or hopeless. A strong drive to succeed can counter that.”

He sat for a long moment, letting all of this bubble away inside of his brain, then he took a calming breath and did the unthinkable. “I’m going to lay my cards on the table, and I would appreciate if you would do the same.”

“Cards?” She was still playing dumb, and it was infuriating.

“I am going to be honest with you if you will do me the courtesy of being honest too.”

She took her hand away from the slate, and laid both palms on the table. “Insofar as I am able.”

“The reason I have lost my drive is because I detected your manipulation.” She flinched ever so slightly as he said that. A minute movement that he doubted he would have caught onto if he weren’t so used to Bael’s carefully schooled behavior. “If left to my own devices, I am more than happy to ascend with all speed and be deployed in the battle against the Eidolons. But I am not going to be manipulated. Not again. Not after what I have been through.” 

She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off once more. “I gave the Ardent my oath. If you tell me that you need me to walk into fire, I’ll do it. But don’t try to trick me by saying it won’t burn.”

That was apparently enough of a statement that she paused before coming back with an answer. “You do not believe that you require any encouragement?”

He tapped the desk beside her slate. “Look at my file again, ask yourself if I have anything in my life that matters to me more than fighting the Eidolons.”

Wetting her lips, Aurea sat back, her mask of civility returning in an instant. “Your opinion is noted, and I shall take your aversion to being… guided into account moving forward.”

“Thank you.” He replied, genuinely.

But it seemed that the bombardment of questions was never going to end. “Does this mean that you have come to some conclusion with regards to preferred mentorship moving forward?”

“No. I’m… still weighing that.” Ambivalent was not something that he wanted written in any report about him. “Do you have a preference?”

“As you have said yourself, you strive to make decisions based in logic,” She quirked a little smile onto her lips, and despite himself, Sylvas couldn’t help but think it was genuine. “I have no doubt that you will come to the conclusion that logic dictates.”

He found that difficult to believe. “The Ardent has no preference?”

“We will get full use of you, either way.” She pushed her seat back and rose, making it clear that their time together was firmly at its end.

Sylvas cleared his throat as he rose. “Thank you for your time, Instructor.”

“And you for yours, Recruit Vail.” She leaned over the desk to shake his hand. “I realise time is at a premium at present.”