Chapter 2

“While there have been many theoretical treatise written on the subject of temporal magic, the practicality of it has always escaped us. The amount of power required to overturn the pull of gravity, or the heat of a flame is negligible in comparison to how much that would be needed to reverse causality. This is not to say that experiments in this area have been entirely unsuccessful or that the study of the subject has not borne fruit in a variety of other areas; indeed we have the elvish study of temporal magic to thank for a great many of the paradigms being exploited by mages to this day, but it can be considered for the most part to hold the majority of its value in the area of philosophy. For whom among us has not had the personal experience of wondering how our life might be if another course had been followed. If a different decision had been made. As a tool for analysis of events, we have few better than retrospection.”

—The Unchosen Path, Ju-Min Oroh

After the stress of their holiday, Sylvas was relieved to wake in his own bed at the figurative crack of dawn – actually an hour or two before sunset – to resume his exercise schedule. By all rights, he should not have had any company, hell-week was over and there was no obligation for any instructor to devote any amount of time to him, but as he came out of the Blackhall onto the scorching red sands, stretching and readying himself for his run, Quartermaster Chul almost collided with him. The fact she brushed him with her shoulder instead of bowling him over entirely suggested that it was deliberate, and there was no question that there was a challenge in it either. Chul didn’t talk much. Preferring to focus on more important things, like running, eating and organizing her supplies, but that didn’t mean her company was any less appreciated. In truth, by the end of most of their exercise sessions, Sylvas wasn’t exactly up to chatting much himself. There had been more than one day of hell week when he’d very nearly thrown up after pushing past his limits in their run around campus.

Today’s jog was less vomit inducing, and surprisingly gentle in comparison to what they’d been doing before his departure to space. Maybe this was the speed that Chul usually went when she wasn’t meant to be honing someone else’s body into the perfect killing machine. Maybe she was being gentle with him because he hadn’t exactly had the opportunity to run a couple miles each day while on a space-station. Either way, the net result was the same, he arrived at the back of the out-buildings with enough energy left over that the prospect of lifting weights did not immediately fill him with abject horror. But to his surprise, the haphazard weight-lifting equipment that they’d pulled together out of scrap metal and broken masonry had been cleared away during his absence. There was just empty space. He turned to Chul expecting answers, but all he got was her usual tired-looking stare and a visual reminder to do his post-run stretches. 

If they weren’t going to be lifting anymore, then he’d really need to find somewhere else to continue training if he wanted to get his body into peak physical… the thought was cut off as his feet left the ground. Chul had just picked him up with one hand under his arm and the other on his hip, hoisted him into the air over her head, and then tossed him up as she walked by. Given that Chul stood at almost seven foot without her horns, it was quite a drop, and even though he was landing face first on the sand, it still knocked the wind out of him.

He scrambled back to his feet in time to narrowly avoid her next lunging grapple, but then he was on his back foot, and it was easy enough for her to turn that grab into a push that sent him tumbling back into the sand again.

At least a little more aware of what was happening now, Sylvas used the momentum, rolled back and then sprang to his feet. Chul looked as bored as she ever had before, but everything else spoke to a heightened sense of awareness that Sylvas had never seen before. She usually moved through life like a bulldozer, but now she was up on the balls of her feet, hands and arms spread, knees bent so that she could spring in any given direction. He’d always known that she was big and that size was almost all muscle, but it was only now facing her like this that he was able to acknowledge just how thoroughly he was out of his league.

She darted in, moving far faster than anyone that size ever should have, and grabbed for his shoulders, but he managed to get his hands up, and she latched onto them instead. Her massive palms encompassed his whole hands, and when her fingers closed over them it was with a crushing strength. They twisted back and forth for a moment until she was sure of her grip, then she made some sort of whipping motion with her hips that carried up her torso, into her arms and ripped Sylvas off his feet, sending him soaring across the sand to land on his back with a groan.

Wrestling had never been on the curriculum here on Strife. Nobody was ever going to be wrestling an eidolon into submission. All close combat was about rapid, hard strikes, then gaining distance before a superior foe could land a killing blow in return. Wrestling was raw muscle against raw muscle, something that the Ardent would never use, because of what they fought.

The next time Chul closed the distance, Sylvas knew what they were doing. He caught her hands, laced their fingers and flooded his forearms with density. As Chul tried to bend his wrists back and drive him to his knees, she couldn’t. There was a twitch at the side of her mouth as she brought more strength to bear. A twitch that could easily have been mistaken for a smile. Sylvas resisted her, adding more weight, not only to his arms but to the rest of him too. He wasn’t going to make it so easy for her to toss him around like a rag-doll this time.

With a deliberate slowness, she moved one of her legs forward until it was parallel with his, then she twisted, turning his hands sideways so she was no longer pushing against the immovable object he’d become and coming around to his side. Her hip hit his, and then he was off the ground again, soaring, guided by her grip on his hands to land in a dune of red sand at the edge of their little sparring arena.

Sylvas came up coughing and spitting the iron-tasting dust, but Chul hadn’t slowed her advance at all. His arms were aching. Not from the stress that she’d been putting them under, but from the added density that Sylvas had thrown into them. There would be tiny fractures in the bones, he knew. Another early morning run to the infirmary to get yelled at. Until he could build up his body, it would never be able to support the forces that his embodiment unleashed on it.

He had lost track of what happened in that last round, but Chul was happy to repeat it so long as he repeated the same mistakes, and this time, she was definitely smiling as she hip-checked him and launched him through the air. This time, expecting it, he made a more graceful landing. She was using his artificially generated weight against him, redirecting it so that it became motion. It was fluid. Until now, when he’d poured on weight or stripped it off, it had always been abrupt and solid, but the way she moved weight around was something else. He filed it away in his memory to practice with later.

On her third attempt at a hip-toss, Sylvas was ready. He shifted the weight inside him until it was all in the leg on his other side, she couldn’t lift him, even with all her strength. Her hip hit him, she grunted with effort, and then she used him as a counterweight to reverse her pull, flinging her full weight on top of him and bearing him to the ground. A landslide of hard muscle pressed down on Sylvas. An armpit of reeking sweat smeared across his face as he was borne down to the ground, and he was pinned underneath the muscular mass of Chul. Pinned to the ground for one long aching moment, before she hopped off, still grinning with her feral pointed teeth, and offered him a hand up. He hesitated for an instant, trying to work out if she was going to immediately throw him across the dust again if he took the hand, before deciding that if she was going to toss him around regardless, he’d rather have the hand up.

Once he was standing again, he was fully expecting another bout, but Chul had wandered over to the ruined remains of one of the outbuildings to retrieve a towel and rub herself off. When she saw him looking, she gave him a firm nod. Which was apparently all he was getting by way of explanation for the change up in their usual routine. Tossing her a salute and shrugging his shoulders, Sylvas set off towards the temple complex. There would be just enough time to hit up the infirmary before he had to run for class.

As he went, he pondered Chul’s new regimen, but it didn’t take much introspection for him to realize that every one of the muscle groups he usually worked on was tender after their bout, and she’d given him a unique opportunity to learn how to use his embodiment in a new way. Not to mention that there was probably nobody on the planet other than him that she could wrestle with and expect any sort of competition at all. With his embodiment he had a hope of putting up a fight against her. Well, maybe not a fight, but at least enough resistance that she could get a little workout too.

Walking into the infirmary was a strange experience for Sylvas, usually he just woke up there, he had no idea of what the correct procedure was. Thankfully, this early in the day, the injuries from training hadn’t started flooding in yet, and the medic was seated over at her desk, eating a yogurt. She set it down with a thump. “You haven’t even been back on the planet for a day.”

“Sorry.” He had the good grace to look embarrassed about it at least.

She stalked over to him with diagnostic spells already whispering to life around her. “You couldn’t make it one day?!”

“It’s pretty minor…” He tried to downplay it, but there were already blue ribbons of illusory text appearing around him, now flickering to red.

“Oh like hell it is. I know you. You’re pretty minor is everyone else’s deathbed. What did you do this time?”

“Wrestling with Quartermaster Chul.”

“Hah.” She drew out a wand from her waistband and pressed the sharp crystal tip into the soft joint of Sylvas elbow, stretching a glowing line down his forearm. “And then you had a knife fight with Instructor Vaelith and a drinking contest with…” She caught his gaze and trailed off. 

“Oh gods you’re serious.”

Sylvas shrugged an aching shoulder. “We exercise together.”

“There are one hundred and forty-seven fractures in your arms, not even accounting for the damage to your hips and the hairline fracture down your left thighbone.” She was casting as she pointed them out, lines of light stretching from her wand, spells coiling through his flesh to take root and spur on his natural healing. “Please find a different way to exercise.”

Sylvas felt a little guilty. “To be fair to Chul, the arm fractures were definitely my fault.”

“Any other way to exercise.” The half-elf pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yoga? Swimming?”

That actually made Sylvas stop for a moment. “You can swim on Strife?”

“No it would be a ridiculous waste of our water rations, this is a desert.” She reached over to seize him by the shoulders. “The point is, do not do stupid things and you won’t end up here.”

Face to face with her exasperation, Sylvas did feel another pang of guilt. “I’ll do my best to be more cautious.”

She let out a sigh and released him, turning back to her slate and the various flows of information her scrying spells were delivering there. “So, no more wrestling?”

Sylvas nodded. “I’ll be more cautious while wrestling.”

She glanced up at him. “I’m going to schedule you for a hearing examination, clearly what you are hearing and what I am saying are entirely different.”

Sylvas started edging away towards the door. “Thanks for all your help.”

“I haven’t discharged you yet.” Her eyes narrowed.

He was almost to the door before he turned. “I’m going to be late to class.”

“Don’t you run away from me!” She called after him, making no attempt to give chase whatsoever. That was probably for the best. Her spells had only just finished stitching his bones back together and both his arms and his leg still felt rubbery with the new bone’s growth.

A glance at his slate showed that his first class of the day was in the temple tower, Intermediate Arcana with Instructor Fahred. It had been a while since he’d seen his mentor in teleportation, and he toyed with the idea of teleporting directly into the classroom just to show off how much he’d improved. Then he realized that he had no idea how much re-arranging of furniture had gone on in their absence. Sometimes Fahred had tables laid out with experiments on them to be studied. Sometimes the lecture hall was transformed into something more like the study rooms that Sylvas remembered from home, rows of tables and chairs, with the Instructor striding between them imperiously. Teleporting into the chamber would only be impressive if he didn’t bisect himself, so he opted for the more sensible hustle up the stairs with the rest of his classmates. Gharia caught him in a headlock as he came through the tower doors, and half-dragged him most of the way as he tried to wrestle free. “Oh no, I’m not letting go of you again. You’ll teleport off to your room and be boring.”

“I promise that I will not teleport anywhere if you just—”

“Nope.” She cut him off. “Untrustworthy.”

“We are headed to class Gharia,” He mumbled into her flank. “I’m hardly going to go off somewhere else.”

From Gharia’s far side, out of Sylvas sight. He heard Ironeyes huff. “Untrustworthy.”

“Can’t be trusted.” Kaya agreed from by his side. Hidden from view by Gharia’s arm.

He hadn’t expected the consequences of his actions to show up quite so quickly. “Guys, you didn’t need me to help you… you had it covered…”

“Excuses and cowardice.” Ironeyes snarled.

“Should be flogged.” Gharia added. “For abandoning his post.”

There was a distinct noise that Kaya’s mechanical arm made when it was drawing back for a heavy blow, and Sylvas heard it now, just before the slap was delivered to his rump. If that particular buttock hadn’t already been blossoming with bruises after his match with Chul, then he probably would have been able to take the blow stoically, but as it stood, he let out a fairly horrific yelp, just as Gharia released him into the lecture hall. All eyes were turned his way.

He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

Even as the blush flooded up his neck to cover his face, he heard the mechanical thrum of Kaya’s arm again, this time swinging up so that her palm and Gharia’s own collided with a resounding clap. The two women walked right past him, giggling, before splitting up and heading for their respective seats. Meanwhile, Sylvas remained in the doorway, awkwardly hunched over and painfully aware of the attention on him.

Nobody was staring at him with more intensity than Instructor Fahred, but while the rest looked to be in various states of amusement, the expression on his face was entirely different. He was looking at Sylvas as though he was a starving man confronted with a buffet. “So kind of you to join us, and to announce your arrival to the whole building. Very aristocratic.”

“Sorry,” was all Sylvas could really say to that as he headed for his place on the benches.

“Oh, is that the only grandiose announcement with which you wished to address us today? Most unfortunate.” Fahred went on, trying to wring the last few chuckles from the class before pressing on. “Please consult your slates for today’s reading, today we are discussing the suspension of mid-cast spells, and the methodologies of multi-casting. For some this will be entirely new information, for some of you little ingrates jumping ahead of the curriculum it will be old news. Regardless, it is our topic of study today, so if you’re still dawdling along with a focus scored below the C ranks expect to have an extremely bad time.”

This was a topic that interested Sylvas immensely, even if his own focus was still only ranked D1, and thus he was guaranteed to be unable to use most of what he picked up for the foreseeable future. So when he picked up his slate, intending to read ahead through the material as quickly as possible so that he could take in more of what Fahred was saying, he was a little let down to realize that there was a private message to him on the slate rather than the promised text.

“Dear Recruit Vail,

The events which unfolded upon the Mournhold Citadel have been classified to prevent the spread of disinformation, and in this case, information about what you actually achieved, from reaching the ears of our enemies across the cosmos. Nobody who was not party to the events, or present during your trial should be aware of what happened to the world-soul shard, nor should you make anyone aware of said events lest you receive a firm slap on the wrist from your superior officers. As such, it should come as no surprise to you that everyone on Strife is now informed as to what occurred, and rumors have begun to spread far and wide regarding the significance of these events.

As your mentor in the arcane arts, I should like to set some time aside to study the precise mechanism by which you successfully destroyed the shard, and to conduct some experiments with regards to the efficiency with which you might reproduce the same effect in other conditions. The process should be entirely non-invasive and require only a very small portion of your time, yet it could provide us with insights that in the future might allow for whole new methods of interacting with worldsouls.

As I’m sure you’re aware, there are few wizards of note upon the surface of Strife who might conduct such research, and those who have that capability lack the inclination. Given our longstanding personal and professional relationships, I would hope that I might have your confidence in this matter, but I am not above going over your head to Aurea if you do inexplicably wish to kneecap the progression of arcane research.

Kindly remain seated after class has concluded so that we might make arrangements for this new project, or if you wish to make some objection to my suggestion, we can of course discuss the matter, or bring it before some higher authority as you see fit.

Regardless, please allow me to congratulate you on your achievements while you were off-world, I always knew that you were capable of greatness, even during those times when your approach ran contrary to my suggestions.

While the formal creation of an apprenticeship is not possible within the Ardent’s current structure, I would like to fully extend my breadth of experience and wealth of knowledge to you, now and always. Please consider me your most willing teacher.

Kindest of regards, Instructor Fahred.”