Because Ember was just so darned still, he didn’t notice her at first. Odd how a Fire Mage could somehow manage to not be seen next to the only light source for leagues. He spoke his heart without his mind acting as a filter. “I can’t learn from you.”
Ember twitched, her head raising as her eyes flickered back to focus. She’d neither expected the response, nor its contents. A word she didn’t use came to the tip of her tongue. She didn’t like the word. The word meant something wasn’t simple. It meant she had to do something she wasn’t good at. “Why?”
For a reason Artorian simply didn’t understand, the bonfire turned blue. Light to dark cerulean hues and tints flickered before him where oranges and reds previously lived. He deeply wished that he understood. He’d said the words without thought to them. Raw emotion brought to his tongue and needing to be spoken. Diplomacy had no place here, and her retort set his mind abuzz. Excuses and reasons piled from his mind like someone had knocked over a scroll case, and all the vellum and rolls were flying everywhere. He ignored his scattered thoughts, and did his best to get a grip.
No amount of side-stepping the topic was going to be helpful here. He had to take a page out of Ember’s book and just slap it directly to the face. No finesse, just drop the tome on the table.
“You’re… you.” He steadied himself with a breath. “Decades ago, I was a soldier. The campaign took us to many places, but in the end, it took us to a desert. There, all the people I had come to grow fond of… died in flashes of fire. Round, conical, swirling towers of orange and ebon. Whirlwinds of flashfire that removed anything it got caught by, turning it to ash, dust, and cinders.”
He pulled the side of his robe away, exposing his woeful artwork of sandpapered skin. “Outside the radius of those pillars, the wind picks up what’s nearby and shears people to ribbons. I was on the outskirts of that effect as I watched some of my best friends at the time just… disappear.”
Artorian folded his robe back in, biting back emotions with a stiff jaw. “I never had a face to place onto the source of the losses, and now…
“Well.” He looked up, locking wet eyes with the Ancient Elf. “Now I do.”
It had been centuries since Ember had felt prickles on the back of her neck. She’d forgotten it was a sensation that she could have at all. Her hand waywardly rubbed the feeling away. Her ascended body shouldn’t be feeling that, though she couldn’t put out of mind that she just had. “I…”
She frowned, turning to face her cerulean fire. “I remember none of that. You speak of actions which are clearly mine. Yet I cannot place them. Recall them. Feel them… I… apologies are useless, and I do not know what to say when being faced with your loss.”
Artorian wrung his hands together, trying to cope with reality. “You mean to say that someone as wise and powerful as you, didn’t know any better? Not a willful act?”
Ember felt a tinge of irritation, but controlled herself. She waved the mention away. “I am not wise. Do not refer to me as such. Being old has merely made me forgetful and regretful. Age is not important to an ascended… no, Artorian. I did not willfully murder your people. Even my best guess says that I, at best… just happened to be passing by.”
While she’d used his name, and that was appreciable, his hands squeezed together so hard they turned white. That had been a biting indictment of her actions, and yet he could not find the anger within himself to hate her for it. Her words were so flat and empty that even notes that should have been somber were swallowed by a pit of apathy.
It was just too much, and he laughed through the tears in not knowing what to do. “Ah. Ahah! Passing by, she says! My fourth family wiped from the plane, because someone passed by.”
His face fell into his cupped sleeve. The wet stains would find no foothold on his cheeks, and he did not wish his expression to be visible. Even to himself. This was a revelation he wished had not come. A truth he wished not to be. At least as a formless threat, it would have been an unanswered question. Now the person he was supposed to learn Aura control from — the only one, with the Wood Elves scattered — was someone he didn’t know he could look at without hearing the screams in his head.
“Here I had so many questions. Now I can’t recall a single one.” Ember didn’t move closer next to the blue fire. She silently watched it, lost to her own demons as Artorian spoke. “My hope had been to make a friend.”
The Ancient Elf nodded lightly. “That would have been nice… I am sorry.”
The old man wiped his face off, and frowned at her as he slumped back against the tree. “What happened to apologies being useless?”
The Elf moved her shoulders. It could have been a shrug, but it was hard to tell. Her voice was the usual monotone flat, and while it didn’t sound sad, he heard the deep undertones anyway. “A useless mention from a useless, outdated Elf.”
The old man bit the side of his lip. This was normally where he’d fight the very notion anyone could be useless, but his personal pain was getting in the way of that kind of support. “Don’t… nobody is useless.”
What was he doing? He should be enraged at this person, not building a foundation for someone to pull themselves back together! The shattered portion of his mind whispered to him, and it stung. Because it was true. Without that cornerstone, he would be someone else. From the bonfire space, his own words echoed. ‘We hold to principle’.
Artorian squeezed his hands on his knees, and drew a stern breath. Doing just that. Holding to the principle. “Nobody is useless. Not a one. I may be old, falling apart, and not be up to snuff. Yet I have things to accomplish. People to get to, people to save. There’s good to be done, and I can do it.”
The old Elf tilted her head towards him. Half-watching the old fool as he went on about something that seemed important. It was hard to tell, her eyes were glazing, and she was fading. “Teach me something.”
The words were bitter and deep. Artorian’s face twisted into a contortion of defiance, consternation, and resentment. He mocked her words in the strongest accent he could muster. Ember’s eyes brightened to life as he took one of her axioms, and twisted new meaning into it. “Lesson one. If you can’t… try anyway!”
Chapter Nine
“You and what Essence?” Ember spoke curtly. It wasn’t an admonishment, but it sure felt like one. Stagnation in harmful ways of thinking had been the end of him in the Academy. Her pose hadn’t altered from the over-the-shoulder look, but she was at least conversing now. “What do you need in order to enlighten yourself?”
Artorian regarded her quizzically as his mind fell into an existential crisis. Her question held many possible answers for an academic, that wasn’t just something you could throw-
“What do you need in order to gather Essence?” The rephrasing of her question made him feel silly. This was so difficult. He felt terrible, and this living wall of a person wasn’t making it any easier. He could understand intellectually that Ember did not hold a grudge against him, and that her cold tone wasn’t meant to be scathing.
Yet the emotional distance… he squeezed the bridge of his nose and tried to get a grip on himself. Better to just go with it; this kind of rift wasn’t something that healed in a day. “I need direct contact with starlight. Birch spread the canopy for me before, but I don’t quite know how to do that myself. I suppose I could clamber up those trees and use my dirty clothes to tie some branches apart. Even a small gap would do.”
The blue flame of the bonfire sizzled and dimmed. Ember rubbed her temple, regarding her free hand while the flames turned back to their common orange-red. They would have shifted through the full set of colors had she not gotten up and removed whatever was fueling the fire. In an instant, it stopped burning. The entire bonfire simply vanished with a sucking *Fhwop*!
She marched to him, and the ground-thumping approach made the old man tense up and press his back against the tree. Ember was an intimidating thing, and with her tendency to brush shoulders with the edges of soc
ial convention—by which he meant bulldoze through them with the subtlety of an elephant tumbling through a straw house—she was the silent person to watch out for in any bar.
Her hand tensed. This time rather than try to touch him, she merely extended her palm. This was another difficult moment for Artorian, and he blinked at the offered hand. On one side of the coin, it was a welcomed offer. A bridge to cover the pit that years of resentment had dug. On the other, that gaunt palm had cost him a family. Ember saw the hesitation, and swallowed her social anxiety, risking a few words.
“There is a saying an old warrior-mentor of mine used to have. ‘Onwards and upwards, to the stars’. Seneca-il-Yaran used it in times where he had fallen, and even though he had the strength, told me he could not get up. I did not understand at the time how such a thing could come to pass. Yet, having lived it, and seeing you on the ground… I hear his voice as clear as a chiming crystal.”
Ember hesitated a moment, her fingers curling in to momentarily retreat. “You remind me of him. He was something I am not. He was… good.”
Their hands clasped as Artorian took her wrist-to-wrist. He recognized a mind that was also just trying its best to move on. The lightweight elder was pulled up without any effort on the Mage’s part. She moved, and up he went. “I… thank you, Ember. I’m sure your mentor was a good soul for you to say that of him. I am still… incredibly torn. On you, and what you’ve done that I remember. Even if you don’t.”
He frowned, exhaling hard through the nose. “I don’t believe I’ll be able to hold it against you, but the memories will plague me. I fear at times it will make me fall where ordinarily I would not. I will keep your words in mind… he was wise, your mentor.”
Artorian nodded in recollection of the specific phrase. ‘To the stars’. As if it was some destination to be reached. A flicker twitched on the edges of Ember’s mouth. The second motion of a possible smile that didn’t see fruition. Her discomfort was skyrocketing at the sudden silence, so she killed it. “If you are dirty, we will clean. To learn the ways of Presence, you must be full of Essence. When you are, we can begin.”
Artorian looked down at his wrist when he felt her grip tighten. He tried to budge, but no amount of flexing was making any of her thin fingers budge. Artorian couldn’t gain the space of a quill tip! Heavens this woman was strong. “Did you say… Presence?”
He didn’t receive an answer. The philosopher only felt the pull of gravity change its direction to sideways as his velocity altered from standstill to an eye-squinting zoom. To the Mage, the trip may have been a brisk walk to work off some stress, but Artorian was holding onto his socks. His feet didn’t touch the ground at all during Ember’s ‘walk’. Artorian flew as she whisked by the flickering green-brown landscapes, the armored woman fully in control of this wild dash that could have really used some cushioning.
He tried to call for her to ‘slow down’, but the attempt only spurred an increase in speed as Ember tried to escape the skin-crawling discomfort of needing to speak further after that moment of awful tenderness. The flutter of his robes became so loud that it was all he could hear over the whistling of wind.
When he finally did settle feet back on land after a journey that could only be described in colors and lines, he shakily fell and half-splashed into the edge of a stream. His shoulder was sore, but that was an insignificant detail in comparison to prized stillness. “Oh, blessed ground, how I’ve missed you.”
He would have kissed the dirt if it didn’t feel so awkward with Ember watching. The rough journey had left him shaken and sickened, but the old man was starting to feel better as his passive cultivation kicked into gear. Only then did he think to look up, realizing there was no canopy above the space the stream occupied. The flow of water was too minor to be considered a river, but only just. Looking across to the other bank, Artorian blinked as he saw an equally confused red-chested bear staring right back at them.
“Erm… Ember? Bear.” The D-rank creature made of muscle, claws, and fur sliced its claws into the water, fishing out a sparkling indigo salmon the size of its forearm to show off that this was its hunting area. It didn’t take kindly to them interrupting its business lunch, and so roared at the intrusion. Rather, the bear tried to roar, but its head soundlessly slid off the rest of its raised body.
*Splop*.
The disconnected neck space didn’t bleed even a little as the entire head dropped into the water. The Fire Mage corrected him as she watched the severed component bob down the stream, body finally collapsing with a weighty *thud*.
“No.” Only after the body had dropped did Artorian notice the flashing movements of a yellow string dancing through the air. The mana-created culprit behind the decapitation re-spooled around hand, as another flick of her wrist flash-carved the creature into diced chunks. “Food.”
The longbeard snapped his gaping mouth closed, and just nodded when Ember said it so matter-of-factly. What Birch had mentioned about the rules of the forest came to mind, but he decided that, for the moment… he was going to conveniently forget he’d ever been told. “Mhm. Yes. Food. Of course. How silly of me. It even comes with a bonus fish.”
He tarried no further and got to bathing, stripped down to his skivvies. To get his mind off of things, he hummed an old tune while pondering how wonderful sleep was going to be. Oh. Right. Phantomblight. He sighed hard in the middle of his wash, and kept scrubbing himself with part of the robe. He needed something for it after all—and when you had nothing—one improvised. The memory was unsettling, but not as much as the chunks of bear meat moving about as the Ancient Elf separated edible from inedible.
“Are you planning on bathing? That armor looks like it hasn’t seen a brush in years.” A blood covered Ember popped her head out from the inside of the carcass, stopped butchering the bear, and looked at herself. Completely perplexed, Ember reacted as if she had forgotten physical bodies required maintenance.
“I…” She didn’t speak another word as she kneeled next to the stream and looked at her reflection. Her frown and despairing facial expression made the old man stop what he was doing.
“Are you alr…”
“I’m old?”
Artorian pursed his lips together in a flat line, an expression he’d picked up from Tibbins. “Isn’t that… normal?”
The Mage touched her face. Running fingers over her wrinkled, aged, gaunt cheeks. She prodded at the dark bags under her eyes and didn’t recognize the woman in the wavering reflection. Ember snappily bit the words away. “Ascended don’t care about age. Only function.”
She spoke with rote, mechanical certainty. Her actions didn’t follow the automated response that fell from her mouth. She looked genuinely distressed.
“Maybe a wash will do you some good? Could just be soot like on the armor.” The Elder’s words didn’t need repeating. The Mage tore her oven-torched armor off, and it fell to the ground with a dense *gong*. The chest plate alone was so heavy that it embedded itself halfway into the hard-packed ground just by being dropped.
Artorian didn’t believe his eyes. “What is that thing made of?”
The response was another mechanical matter of fact rebuttal. “Iridium.”
She’d said it like it was the most common metal ever, but the academic had never heard of that material before. Was it just a different name for worked bronze? Who knew? The woman had been mixing the tongue of the current age, Wood Elven, and Ancient Elven the entire time he’d been around her. He dropped his hands into the water, not even sure how to articulate what he wanted to ask.
“I have as much idea of what Iridium is as I do ‘Presence’.” He adopted a dramatic pose, as if he were performing in a play. “Do you be, Artorian? Why yes. I bee. Buzz buzz.”
“What language was that? To me it was nonsense.” Ember cocked her head at him, the last of her clothes falling away. The old man had never turned around so fast. Thoughts ranged somewhere between ‘I don’t want to see that’ and ‘I am about t
o die from looking’. He faced away from her, and that was just jolly. Was turning around the last thing he’d ever do? Probably. Was he going to? No~o~ope.
*Kasplash*!
Several high waves went in every direction as she cannonballed into the water. He would make no mention that the water downstream of her was dyed pitch black, as years of soot were finally released from her surface. That was another one of those ‘end up like the bear’ scenarios. Her voice reached him as she came back up from a dive, seemingly not remotely bothered by her state of undress.
“Iridium is a type of metal my people had great skill in. It is impressively heavy, and used primarily for its density. I haven’t seen it in….” She got quiet, cutting off that part of conversation. “‘Presence’ is the true name for the misunderstanding currently termed ‘Aura’. The word ‘Aura’ was originally meant to reference an external function of something Presence does. It has been muddled by time, and now Aura, Blooming Spirit, and the like, are used to reference the three parts of a person’s Presence. The art of the three has been lost.”
Artorian scrubbed, really getting the grime off his face as he puzzled out that explanation. When he added the details gleaned from the Wood Elves, he concluded Aura wasn’t merely a storage area. Rather, it doubled as a ‘field’ around a person that could be altered and manipulated. This likely meant that Aura was an area of space where one could impose an effect upon the world, and that the areas were split into three distinct sections.
Due to time and misunderstandings, these sections had all been smashed into meaning the same thing. Taken as a single entity, it was instead named ‘Presence,’ and he assumed that the whole could do far more than the individual parts. Especially if those parts were either derived from it, or functions of the main ability.
The academic considered her mention of how this application was a lost art, and addressed it. “Do you know it? How to teach and explain it?”
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