Chapter 9

“The Ardent differentiated themselves from the regular militias of the Alliance through many means. Their focus on arcane warfare, flexibility of deployment and purpose as a deterrent to existential threats are often cited as the most important, but their true strength lies not in their uniformity, but in their uniqueness. Each is a specialist in their own field. This may seem like a system without redundancies, or even an impossible force to muster and manage, but instead it produces the most effective of individual combatants, each one a contained military unit in themselves, capable of decision making on the ground and of performing the functions that typically require a whole chain of command in addition to being effective combatants in and of themselves.” 

—A People’s Oral History of the Empyrean Alliance, Rosen Barvel

The personal attention that he was receiving from the Instructors should have made the other recruits jealous, but even the most self-obsessed of his colleagues in arms were too focused on their own personal misery to give Sylvas a second thought during this particular week.

His first day, after the instructors had hashed out all the details of his training regimen more or less entirely without his input had been spent with Quartermaster Chul. It was pretty much the first time he had spent any time with her. She was older than him and the other recruits by a few decades, but seemed to lack a lot of the maturity that marked the actual instructors, or at least she didn’t put on any airs of superiority like they did. Without a rude scry, Sylvas wouldn’t find out what exact circle the voluminous fiend had achieved, but her actions seemed to speak louder than words in terms of her capabilities. Every other Instructor used teleportation and Cold Storage freely, relying on kinesis to move things around when it was required. Chul never did anything the easy way.

Much of their time together was spent pouring over a complex filing system that the Quartermaster kept stowed away in cabinets behind her desk. A system that could have been uploaded to slates without much in the way of effort, but that the fiend seemed intent on preserving in paper form. Sylvas had never encountered anyone quite like Chul, but that was more because of the limitations of his experience than any particular rarity of her personality type. Everything in outbuilding storage had its own particular place, and had its details noted in Chul’s own scratchy hand, but the vast majority of what had accrued there seemed to be primarily useless. There were a great many broken artefacts, an even greater number of functional artefacts that Sylvas could see absolutely no use for, a full laundry set up in one of the other outbuildings to deal with the uniforms of the Ardent stationed on campus that contained so many individual items of clothing it boggled his mind a little. All the different sizes and cuts of the same clothes, made for all the myriad species that had passed through Strife and all of them kept clean, pressed and ready to be worn again should another of them arrive. For someone who had lived a spartan life focused solely on self-improvement and arcane knowledge, the sheer mass of material objects that filled every inch of the rickety looking shelves in the outbuildings boggled Sylvas’ mind. Chul wasn’t just a quartermaster, Chul was a hoarder. Yet the filing system combined with the fiend’s memory proved sufficient to find anything in its proper place.

Conversation was pretty much non-existent as they worked. Chul would offer up an index card with some potentially useful item and they’d set it aside to seek out later on. Sylvas would pluck out something that he thought might help him and more often than not, it would end up filed back where it came from after a few grunts from Chul and a little tap on some note or other that Sylvas had missed. Lockmind had granted Sylvas an eidetic memory, but somehow Chul seemed to know every detail of everything in the whole campus just as readily as Sylvas would have, if given the time to read through every single index card. It was simultaneously impressive and mystifying that anyone would have bothered.

Eventually they took a tour through the rows upon rows of shelves, Chul having to suck in her gut to squeeze through the tighter junctions and gathered all of the potential artefacts that might assist Sylvas in one place.

The rarity of his Gravity Affinity was a double-edged sword. Of all the items gathered here on Strife in Chul’s vast collection, there were only a handful that were even tangentially related to the magic that he now wielded. But every one of them was laid out on Chul’s desk by the time that they were done. Still, the fiend didn’t come to a halt. Sylvas had half expected the woman to be tired from the minor exertions of exploring her hoard, but despite her impressive size, she trudged on like a juggernaut, pausing only long enough at each shelf to extract what they wanted before rambling on. The vast laundry in one of the more worn-down outbuildings turned out to be their next destination, giving Sylvas a glimpse behind the curtain at the grunt work that was required to keep a place like this running. Back on Croesia, a training camp like this would have needed a full compliment of servants to keep it running. Even the secret tower where he’d undergone his training had a small village worth of common folk running around to keep everyone fed and dressed, but here it seemed most of the work fell to Chul alone.

That work must have included repairs to damaged uniforms, judging by the heap of them by the sewing machines that Chul had set up and enchanted to repair rips. Sylvas winced at the memory of how many uniforms he had inadvertently destroyed during his time on Strife, and fully expected to be dressed down by the Quartermaster in much the same way that the medic had told him off, but instead, she bypassed that particular set of machinery to get to an unenchanted stitcher set up to one side. Draped across it was a new uniform jacket in the white and black of the Naval track. Chul scooped it up in one sausage-fingered hand and tossed it to Sylvas with a smug grin that showed her pointed needle teeth.

He was, of course, already wearing his uniform jacket, but he took this one and unfolded it all the same. There were the usual minor enchantments woven into it to protect him from harm, nothing as elaborate as the Crest, obviously, but little things to stop every scrap of shrapnel tearing through it or any flames he strolled through from burning it. Apart from that its only real distinction was that it was lighter. Lighter by one arm.

“You made this just for me?” Sylvas tried to keep the twinge of amusement out of his voice.

Chul shrugged, which was a bit like a tectonic plate moving. But said nothing until Sylvas had dressed himself again, snatching his old jacket and tossing it onto the laundry pile before they moved on.

It felt strange to have his arm exposed, not just because he could suddenly feel the moisture in the air of the laundry on his skin, or the coolness of the night air when they meandered between the outbuildings, but because for the first time since departing Croesia, he was letting the full extent of his scars show.

Anyone could see them. Anyone walking by could see the sigils carved into his flesh by his failure to save his world. The moment of his greatest shame and defeat, visible for all the world to see. Clearmind held the shame back. But even thinking clearly, he had to acknowledge that having the scars on display was going to prompt more questions that he didn’t have answers to. Despite all the times he had been through magical healing, nothing had made a dent in the scars, if anything, they seemed to be worse than when he’d left home. Not fading like all the others, but deepening, darkening, until they almost looked like a tattoo on his skin.

Chul poked him in the bare skin of his arm and he jolted back to awareness. They were back in the storage shed, at the Quartermaster’s desk, and they were ready to begin vetting the selection.

The first, and most promising item on the list looked pretty unassuming at a first glance. Entirely out of place amidst all the futuristic technology of the Ardent. A simple leather pouch that Sylvas could wear at his waist. “This seems a little pointless when I have Cold Storage at my disposal.”

Chul grunted in disdain, then strummed her thick fingers across the stitching on the pouch. There was no sound, but Sylvas could feel each pluck of the threads like the twang of a harp-string with his other senses. Pressing on one particular thread Chul softly cast her own spell to access Cold Storage, and reached inside the pouch, her arm vanished a fair distance into the small bag, then came back out with a substantial looking hammer that she casually tossed aside. With her hand clear, she pressed on another thread and reached in once more. Visually there was no difference, but to Sylvas senses, what had just happened within the bag felt monumental. The pocket-dimension that was Cold Storage had just shifted. The portal formed inside the mouth of the bag had remained in place but reconnected to an entirely different plane of existence on the other side. With the demonstration complete, Chul went over to one of the big metal bins arrayed around the place, then pressed her fingers down on each line of stitching in turn while giving the bag a good shake to dislodge everything that had been stored inside it, which included several more tools, what looked like an exoskeleton piece from an Eidolon, an umbrella in desperate need of some patching and an inexplicably pristine apple, which she caught before it hit the heap of junk in the bin and returned to her desk.

“I apologize for speaking too soon, that seems like it will be exceedingly helpful to me in my new role as pack-horse for the entire Ardent corps.” He joked, but he was reaching for the bag with avaricious hands all the same, already thinking of all the different ways that he could use it.

Chul wouldn’t hand it over without him signing a receipt for a “C-Type Bag of Holding” but with that done he was delighted to strap it onto his belt.

Next came a wand. Most of the wands that Sylvas had come across so far were delicate looking things. None of the other recruits used them, as they were typically only helpful for the young who had trouble with focusing their magic. Sylvas hadn’t had that problem in a very long time. However, he could see the appeal of a wand now. If he could narrow down the area of effect of some of his gravitational distortion spells, they could become lethally effective.

The wand Chul held out to him was anything but delicate. It was wrought iron, heavy as a rock in his hand. Solid and weighty. He looked askance to Chul, but she said nothing. Helpful as always. He pointed over to the apple on the desk with the wand and cast a simple spell of kinesis to pick it up and pull it over to him.

Two things happened in rapid succession. The apple, which had survived untold months lost in the vacuum of a pocket dimension without harm, turned instantly to mulch, imploding in on itself with an unpleasant wet crunch. The wand, which had been constructed by twisting the wrought iron around in a spiral, unwound itself, blossoming out like the petals of a particularly clunky flower, with a shriek.

Chul wiped some apple juice from off her cheek, and very carefully plucked the ruined wand from Sylvas fingers, grunting, “Gravity’s a bitch.”

Sylvas probably wouldn’t have put it so bluntly, but she wasn’t wrong. Even earth affinity mana, considered some of the densest, wouldn’t have destroyed something like that wand. He suspected that the wand had been built for metal or earth affinity mages before his own magic had destroyed it. Not that he could see Kaya wanting it.

The next item was a pair of boots, which Sylvas sincerely hoped that he wasn’t about to explode too. They were enchanted with a few easily recognizable spells that Sylvas had already managed to pick up in his classes with Instructor Sagran, self-cleaning and adjustable to any size of foot, but the fundamental enchantment escaped him. It didn’t feel like anything to do with gravity magic, but presumably Chul wouldn’t have presented them to him if they weren’t relevant. She chimed in at the sight of his confusion. “Lightfoot Boots.”

Air affinity mana flowed through the soles of the shoes, removing weight from the person that wore them. With these he’d be able to sprint across the shifting sands of Strife without sinking, maybe even dart over the top of bodies of water if the surface tension was high enough. More importantly, it was another way to reduce the mana cost of his flight spells. The less he weighed, the easier it would be to fly, and if he really needed to reverse their effects, he was having no trouble at all piling on more weight and gravity with his Embodiment. This was probably the first thing that they’d come across that might actually be useful in a fight. Struggling to find the right words, he blurted out. “Thank you.”

Luckily, Chul was more accustomed to this sort of transaction. She produced paperwork. He signed another receipt for “Type A Lightfoot Boots.” They moved on.

The next item was the largest by far. It appeared to be made entirely out of thick wires of bronze, much of it tangled when Chul first retrieved it. It was only after a fair amount of untangling that Sylvas saw the collars and cuffs meant for his wrists, ankles and throat. It looked like some sort of medieval torture device, or perhaps a full body chastity cage of some sort. Shiny and gilded but made to constrict and follow the contours of the wearer’s body very tightly. Each line of wire felt like it would have bound around a single muscle on his body, and he couldn’t fathom what this thing could have been for.

“Exoskeleton Reinforcement.” Chul informed him as he stared at it. “You’ve been breaking bones. This’ll stop that. Mostly.”

Sylvas considered how he could even get into this device, and whether it would be worth the effort. “It will protect me from the extremes of my embodiment?”

“Until you’ve built up enough muscle to take the strain.”

“And it won’t interfere with my movement?”

Chul looked sideways as he said that. Which was all the answer he needed, really.

“I’m going to learn to moderate my use of my embodiment, and I suspect this would… interfere.” He wasn’t going to tell Chul that Kaya would never have let him live down wearing the exosuit, even if it was hidden under his clothes for the most part.

The fiend just shrugged her shoulders and set it aside in a jangling heap. She turned back around with a long case in her hands, flipping up the latch, and then rolling back the lid. Inside, sitting in green felt indentations, were a row of balls.

Sylvas looked up at her, at the jagged toothed grin, at the expectation and he chose not to say the word ‘balls’ however much it might have delighted her. He reached out tentatively towards the identical iron spheres and felt resonance with his mana. They had some aspect of gravity affinity to them. The first thing that he’d come across so far that did. As he drew his hand back, the ball floated up slightly out of the case, before dropping back into place. Chul offered only one word of advice to explain them at all. “Magnetism.”

The weaker and more common relative of the Gravity affinity that could not enact spatial magic. No wonder it felt familiar but lacked the inherent power to stay afloat without his intervention. Reaching out to all the balls at once with his mind, Sylvas invested them all with a touch of gravity mana and let out a startled laugh as they all leapt up. He had been half expecting another wand-style explosion, but it seems that these balls, which chimed as they drifted around, were made of more solid stuff. Gradually, they moved away from the box, and began encircling him, moving first in one orbit, then drifting apart into various ones around the central core of his body.

“Bludgeons, tools, a focus for your gravity to hook onto.” Chul went on explaining as the little balls jingled in orbit around him. With a little effort, Sylvas could draw them closer or push them further out, the amount of mana he’d invested in them was miniscule, but it felt like they’d go on floating all day. He laid a hand on one and tried to pull it out of orbit, only for the ball to resist. With his new boots on, it was a simple enough thing to hold onto that floating ball and pull his feet clean off the ground. That definitely had some potential.

“Magnetic Orbitals, Elvish Origin” was the description on the receipt. Nothing about them seemed particularly elvish to Sylvas, beyond their inexplicable chiming, but he was sure Bael would explain them to him at great length. Divesting them of mana one by one and tucking them back into the box gave Chul more than enough time to present her next offering.

It was a bracer made of a leather only a little darker than the Bag of Holding, inlaid with a large crystal on the outer side, right where the wrist and hand met. To the eye, it looked like nothing more than some clear quartz, but to Sylvas other senses, it sang a song of emptiness. Trying to invest it with mana the same we he had done the Orbitals had no effect, in fact, it seemed to actively repulse his mana. Perhaps it was some sort of shield.

“It’s a cheat-caster.”

Sylvas blinked. “A what?”

“Crystal stores unaligned mana as it passes through it, you can use it to fuel simple spells instead of your core.” Chul scratched the back of her head. “Figured it’d be handy, since gravity doesn’t play nice with other affinities.”

He could have kissed her. Everything that he’d been learning prior to acquiring his affinity had been essentially cast aside the moment that he had gravity mana inside him instead of the chaotic mix that was called ‘unaligned’ but now they were all available to him again. Judging by the slow rate at which the crystal was accumulating mana, it wasn’t going to allow for anything particularly big or complex, but just being able to do anything again after having had it snatched away filled him with relief. “I cannot thank you enough for this. It will make my life…”

“Just doing my job.” Chul said, but he could see a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

Which brought them at last to the final item on the table. It was a simple circle of what appeared at a first glance to be stone, but which took on a transparency when Sylvas carefully lifted it from the table. He peered through it and could see everything on the other side with perfect clarity, but what it lacked was any sort of clarity of purpose. It was about the size of one of his eyes, he supposed, maybe it was intended to tie into his new Paradigm and make the forces of gravity visible to him, but much like he’d wanted to avoid a crutch for his embodiment, he felt the same way about his paradigm. He would learn to use both of them properly in time, and until then, he would learn more by making mistakes than trying to skip past learning.

“Pick up your slate.” Chul grumbled.

Sylvas did as she said absentmindedly and then startled when suddenly words appeared on the tiny circle. The text that he’d been studying on his slate the night before now appeared to him in miniature on the circle. “Oh, it’s a… miniature slate.”

“We rig it up with some wires or something, it can sit over your eye all the time.” She had a broken twist of copper that looked not entirely dissimilar to the full-body nightmare she’d tried to wedge him into earlier but she tossed it aside as scrap. “Like a monocle.”

Sylvas was accustomed to being, if not the smartest person in the room, then at least in the top ten, so he was genuinely shocked that he couldn’t work out what on earth Chul was driving at. “And why would we want to do that?”

“You’ve got Lockmind.”

The possibilities were suddenly endless. There was the obvious practicality of being able to look things up while not having to blind himself to his surroundings, but with Lockmind, this last little object could become the most potent tool in his arsenal. Every moment of every day, he could have a different text set to scroll past his eye. On a conscious level, he’d retain none of the information, but Lockmind would stow it away in the back of his memory, ready to be retrieved at a moment’s notice, no matter where he was or what he was doing.

“How did you know that…”

Chul grinned. “We track the slates, just in case. I’ve seen how you use yours. Didn’t get it for a while. Now I do.”

“Then you understand that what you’re offering me is…” He was at a loss for words.

She clapped one of her massive hands on his shoulder. “Figure we’ll head down to Sagran, get her to knock you together a holder, maybe talk about options?”

Sylvas just nodded along with her. After everything that she had done for him today, she could have told him that they were going to jump off a bridge and he’d have trotted along and performed as perfect a swan dive as he could manage if he thought it might repay her. This was amazing.

The remainder of the first day had been spent deep in the depths of the temple complex, in the sweltering heat of Sagran’s forges. Some looked to be much the same as Sylvas was familiar with from back home, but others were bizarre technological monstrosities that he was fairly certain were actually powered by some sort of miniature stars. The dwarf instructor herself had banged together the pince-nez piece to afix his new mini-slate to his nose in record time, but by the time that they’d finished adjusting it, she and Chul had fallen into a rather one-sided conversation about what equipment Sylvas was lacking.

Sagran had looked him up and down, in his half-uniform with miscellaneous heirloom items handed down from prior generations of Ardent recruits and she’d huffed out a little breath that rippled the folds of wrinkles that hung about her mouth. “You want a focus, right? A wand or stave…”

“Ideally.” Sylvas had always felt oddly nervous speaking with this particular instructor. Maybe because of her meandering which he took as a sign of senility, maybe just because heat radiated off her as if she were another one of the forges around her.

She’d shown her gums then, in what he assumed was meant to be a smile. “Then you’ll be making one.”