Chapter 21

“Outside of the Ardent, we talk about downtime. Time when you don’t have to be performing at maximum capacity, when you don’t have to be ready to drop everything and fight Eidolons at a moment’s notice. Inside the Ardent, it isn’t a concept. Every moment that you are in the Ardent, you are ready. Every moment, from the day you start training to the day you die, you are either fighting, or preparing yourself to fight. There is no downtime when your enemies could destroy the universe, there is only the amount of relaxation that your guilt allows you. Rarely more than a few minutes at a time.”

—Sapient Resource Resilience, Remo Aurea

There was a dressing down waiting for him once he was off the arena floor. While he hadn’t explicitly broken the rule about modifying the standardized spells, he had been damned close in his shuffling of the order in which they were spoken and the delays he’d made. It had been an informed decision, of course, Sylvas had made an extensive study of the teleportation spell when it became apparent that so much of his future career was apparently going to be revolving around it on the naval track. He had understood the existential danger of the move he’d just made perfectly well, and the fact that other people couldn’t make it was less about the inherent dangers, and more about their inherent weaknesses. 

Even in a total vacuum, his mastery over gravity allowed him to move around freely where others would have been trapped. He could see the Ardent officer rambling at him growing increasingly frustrated at what he saw as arrogance. But after his fight, Sylvas wasn’t really feeling in the mood to play nice just to assuage the conscience of one of the people that had thrown him into that pitched battle with false promises about being more careful in the future. He had found a way to use his magic, and he was going to use it, regardless of whether it made those tasked with overseeing the Crucible uncomfortable.

There was a press of bodies all around Sylvas once he’d made his way back up to the overlooking sections of the arena. He’d assumed that he’d stand out with his ruined uniform and visible injuries, but it seemed that the majority of contenders for the day were looking considerably worse for wear. Malachai gave him a stern nod from across a packed corridor, and Sylvas made an attempt to wade his way over to him and say hello in person, only to find a steely grip locked around his wrist. Resisting the urge to try and pull free, he turned to find himself eye-to-eye with Ironeyes. “You got me fair.”

It drew Sylvas up abruptly. “So there are no hard feelings over how things—”

“Oh there’s plenty hard feelings.” The dwarf grinned, showing a gap between his front teeth that Sylvas couldn’t remember ever seeing before. Perhaps they’d been grown back wrong. “Don’t like getting my arse kicked any more than anyone else. But I’m not the type to hold a grudge.”

Sylvas wanted to leave the conversation at that. He really did. But the incongruity shocked him into speaking his mind. “What do you mean you aren’t the type to hold a grudge? You didn’t talk to Kaya for nearly a week after she sat in your spot in the mess hall.”

“That’s different.” Ironeyes answered with a shrug.

“And I’m pretty sure you came up with a detailed plan to turn Gharia into a pair of boots when she accidentally swiped you with her tail.”

Ironeyes grip on Sylvas wrist tightened. “Totally different.”

“Or that time that—”

Ironeyes was yelling now to drown him out. “All different! Completely different situation!”

“—and you swore a blood oath that—”

With a yank on his wrist, Sylvas was pulled down so his nose was an inch from Ironeye’s. “Do you want me to hold a grudge?!”

He wet his lips. “No?”

“Might be time to talk about something else then.”

Sylvas returned to an upright position and straightened what was left of his uniform so that they both had a moment to compose themselves.

“How did everyone else fare?” Sylvas changed the subject with as much grace as he could.

“They’re all still in.” The dwarf grunted back. “Lucky pairings.”

“I wonder if there is any luck involved,” Sylvas pondered, as they tried to move through the crowd once more. Malachai had vanished from sight. “Or if the matches have been made deliberately.”

Ironeyes shrugged more deliberately this time. “Folks been arguing about that all day. Could go either way, I’d say.”

“If the matchmaking is deliberate, then we should be able to work out who would be best paired with us for the maximum challenge. That in turn lets us focus in on those contenders that—”

“Ain’t going to matter none to me.” Ironeyes cut him off. “I’m out, remember.”

Sylvas bit his lip to shut himself up. Definitely some hard feelings there.

“Why is it so busy?” He tried again to change the subject.

“We’re all shipping back to campus for the night.” Gharia’s voice came from the side, making Sylvas jerk his head around to spot her and instantly regretting it as it pulled on all his burns.

While they’d patched Ironeyes up perfectly well, Gharia looked about as healthy as Sylvas felt. About half of her scales were missing, and the rest looked like she was a bird with ruffled feathers, and the exposed flesh beneath was blossoming with swelling and bruises.

“Guess you only get priority healing if you’ve got another match coming up?”

“That and if you’re about to fall down.” Her tail usually lashed from side to side in amusement when they shared a joke, but it was stiff now. Stiff, and missing its tip from the looks of it.

“Ironeyes said you won your match?” Sylvas tried to cheer her up, but his attempt seemed to fall on deaf ears.

“If you call that winning.” She ran a hand down her wrecked scales. “I was a scratch away from lying down by the end.”

“Who were you matched with?”

They managed to keep a conversation rolling until they reached the Blackhall, having met up with all the rest of their friends as they went, and Sylvas had managed to put together a pretty comprehensive idea of what had happened in most of the other matches. Kaya had closed the distance and pounded her opponent into submission. Bael had a couple of matches which he didn’t dig into too much but which he’d won with relative ease. The trouble was, the opponents that they were gaining the most first-hand intelligence on were the ones that they weren’t going to be facing again. 

Sylvas shared all he could about his fight with the Whitehall fire-mage, and how she had abstracted her ability to circumvent conventional defenses. It was a clever strategy that they’d all likely try at some point in the future, assuming they could once they’d made it to fifth circle and gained the freedom to start modifying magic. Sylvas himself was already thinking about different aspects of gravity other than just the raw pull of it that he might be able to manipulate himself. As for the rest of the fights that he’d missed; Bael entirely skipped talking about the losers to instead focus exclusively on who was still in the running. It was a fairly substantial list, but just as it had been rapidly whittled down today, the same would happen tomorrow, until only the best of each of the three campuses were left after elimination rounds.

Sylvas was limping by the time they got back, and was forced to hold off on heading down to the workshops to get stuck into his work on his molten orbital for long enough to visit the medical bay. 

“What have you been doing?” The half elf sounded more exasperated than concerned.

“Working on a new embodiment.” He started to explain, then remembered she was probably looking for an explanation for his injuries more than the deliberate changes he’d made to his body. “Oh, I got burnt and electrocuted too. Because of the tournament—”

“I spend two days not talking to you and during that stretch you go and get yourself cooked alive and…and…wait, is that metal inside you?”

“Imagine what I’d have done after three.” Sylvas quipped back,

She did not seem particularly amused. “Please tell me you know a solid half of the metals and minerals you’ve put into your body are toxic, because if you tell me you don’t I’ll—”

“I know, I know, but it’s for the new embodiment I’m building. They’ll stop being toxic to me any day now.” She didn’t even bother to look annoyed at him, though he was relieved that the awkwardness of his last visit had passed at last.

She shook her head as she worked on the burns. “You realize that reckless pursuits of unhinged embodiments are something that you should mention to your doctor, yes? Maybe just in passing? So you know, I could do the easily minor thing of adjusting your treatment? Right now the healing spells trying are trying to purge your body instead of focusing on your injuries, and that’s because all the crap you’ve filled yourself with is the most likely thing to kill you in this moment. I mean aside from myself.”

He grunted with pain as she yanked his arm up to get at the damage across his ribs. “To be fair, I was going to, most of these changes were made today. The tournament just got moved up and then, well, my matches were early…”

The woman simply grunted in response as she hit the burns with some sort of misty chilling spell from a wand before switching to a salve that she rubbed in quite a bit more aggressively than Sylvas felt she needed to. Throughout the whole process an overall scrying spell was hovering behind him, highlighting one point after another of all the changes that he’d made to his body. The places where he’d inscribed Aion script into his now reinforced bones. The places where he’d enchanted handy tricks or features, such as the bone mending sigils, or the miniature slate that was effectively a part of his eye. She was staring at the unfolding array of flashing red lights with wide eyes. 

“Am…am I reading this right?” The woman demanded after what felt like an eternity. “You’ve drawn, no, etched metal into your…crystalline bones? I can see you’re melding metal onto your muscles, and even more crystal into your…nerves? And your eye…why in all the hells would you—”

“The embodiment is called Runeweave,” Sylvas interrupted while exerting the small amount of effort that it would take to disrupt the scrying spell-form she was staring at. Again in case anyone else was desperate, or perhaps suicidal enough, to spy on him while the medical ward. It quickly made the screen of information blink out of existence.

The medic bit back whatever her first response would have been as she turned to focus upon Sylvas, which more than likely would have been something similar to Kaya’s usual verbal output. Then in a more restrained, but still strained, voice said. “I know what it’s called. There’s a reason why it’s not popular, it’s one of the most damned dangerous embodiments ever created.”

Sylvas couldn’t disagree with her sentiment, because based on everything that he’d read, she was right. Records showed that only twenty-nine mages had ever dared to attempt the embodiment, and of those who did, only ten of them had done so successfully. The others had been forced to either abort their attempt or had killed themselves in trying. But on the flip side, the mages that had succeeded, had done so spectacularly, empowering themselves beyond just what flesh alone could offer. 

Which was why Sylvas gave her the only answer he could offer. “By signed up for the Ardent, I agreed to live a life danger, and if I want to see the end of it, I need every advantage I can get to get there.”

Clearly still simmering with resentment, she continued to apply the salve to his burns, and cast the odd spell for places where the damage was too bad for the alchemical concoction to stitch him back together on its own. The time stretched out, the awkward silence starting to return. Sylvas opened his mouth to try and make something resembling polite conversation, but before he could, she blurted out, “and what if that requires you to lose your sense of self? To lose what makes you, you?”

Sylvas had known that some would have opinions on the changes that he was making to himself, but he’d hoped those would be mitigated given not only his life in the Ardent, but the overall danger that his affinity brought him. As a gravity mage, he was not only a target in every sense of the word, but also in simply just using his magic, which subjected him to forces and exertion that natural human flesh and bone couldn’t withstand. But what he hadn’t expected was to have someone worry about his sanity, the price and the trial of achieving his goal.

“There are a lot of embodiments that aren’t this extreme.” The woman eventually continued when Sylvas didn’t answer. “And I don’t think any of the few who have ever attempted it weren’t motivated by some sort of incurable long-term illness that would have claimed them if they hadn’t tried it anyway.”

“I think you just described our terms of service,” Sylvas replied a tone that both flippant and yet honest. The Runeweave embodiment had technically been intended as a last ditch, desperate effort for when surgery, healing magic, prosthetics, and even prayer had been exhausted to allow a seriously injured or otherwise sick or disabled mage to live something akin to a normal life. Sylvas on the other hand had taken the theory and extrapolated it into what could only be described extreme levels.

“Be serious,” the medic stated as she squared herself up directly before him her eyes boring into his. “Because even with your power, your ability, this is still an extreme step to take, and any doctor worth their license would be asking their patient the same questions I am. Because there is no coming back from this if you have second thoughts, if you change your mind.”

She paused for a second, allowing her words to sink in. “Now, are you certain, and I mean completely certain, that there wasn’t something else that pushed you into this? Fear? Anger? Something one of your instructors did? Something…something from your past? If you’re doing this because of any of those things, or if you feel you’ve hit your limit, say the word, and I’ll write and do whatever it takes to set you free.”

With their proximity, Sylvas found himself momentarily surprised. She had been so careful to avoid anything like this since his fumbled attempt at extending a hand of friendship. But even so, he found an answer hard to articulate, suffering through two false starts before eventually finding the words he needed, “I…thank you, but no. I know what I am doing, and what it means to do it. This is what I want, and what I need to advance.”

It was clearly not the answer that she was looking for, because as soon as the words were out of his mouth, did the woman sigh and let him go, the professional mask reappearing upon her face as if it had never been there. “Then why are you going through all these changes while creating a hole inside your head that will kill you?”

Sylvas couldn’t help but wince at the question, a part of him having hoped that she would have missed that, while another part was equally glad she hadn’t. Indeed there was an empty space inside his skull that he’d been gently and carefully clearing to make way for the apparatus that would hold the physical aspect of his Second Thoughts paradigm. But in its current uncomplete state, it would look like a hollow in his brain, the kind that someone desperate, or not of sound mind, would make if they were looking to flee their moral coil. Which Sylvas was assuredly not, a fact that he quickly moved to convince her of.

“It’s because I am trying to create something,” he said, the words practically flying out of his mouth as quickly as he could. “A paradigm. One that no one has ever made before.”

Sylvas paused for a second as he saw the woman’s composure crack for a second, sheer disbelief appearing first before replacing itself with anger.

“You are doing, what—” the words echoing through the room at an volume that Sylvas had never heard from her before. But even so he’d already prepared for that reaction days earlier when he realized that he needed help in developing the paradigm. So before the medic could get truly even get started, Sylvas snap cast a spell that he prepared, hoping that no one truly was scrying the room to see what he was planning.

“And I could use your help,” he stated quickly as a complicated image of his brain and a wide collection of other medical notes appeared in the air before them. “That is, if you’re willing to hear me out.”

She shared at the image for several seconds in surprise, anger still visible upon her face. But as the seconds passed and her eyes began to move, that anger started to fade, until a spark of curiosity and wonder appeared. Her eyes shifted to look at Sylvas, and a faint whisper left her lips, as if the words that followed were some sort of betrayal.

“Start…start talking.”