by Heath Pfaff
“After the Scholars come the Scouts.” My attention was immediately piqued. This is what Ghoul had talked about last time we’d spoken. This is what he wanted me to strive to be. “Scouts travel at the head of our people. They delve into the places controlled by our enemies and gather information and knowledge that we couldn’t otherwise get. Theirs is one of the most dangerous positions, but one of the most important as well.” Something he’d said caught my attention.
“Enemies? I didn’t think anyone opposed the Iron Will.” I caught on to the inconsistency and began to pry at it, looking for more. “I thought that with the downfall of the Way we’d vanquished our enemies from the land. That was what we were taught in school.”
Arthos just smiled again. “I’ll get to that in a moment. I promise. The fourth group amidst us are the Knights. They are our arm. They stand at the front line of our conflicts and defend us from the enemy without. It takes strength and power to be a Knight, honor and courage. It is the Knights we believe you will eventually belong to. They have high hopes for you, but you don’t have to choose now. In fact, it’s better that you don’t.” His smile fled a bit as he used his Will to unlock a massive steel portal and we stepped through the doorway out onto a stretch of grass that lay out like a carpet all the way to a line of trees in the distance. There was something about this that was different from other doors I’d been through that seemed to magically open up on wide natural vistas.
This was a real space. This was a field that actually existed beyond the main city. I knew it immediately, though I wasn’t sure how I put it all together. I was outside the walls of the school. Distantly I could see the final city wall cutting through the trees, but it seemed forever away. This was a private piece of land out behind the school grounds, one that I hadn’t even known existed. It was my first time beyond the school in years. I couldn’t help but smile, even as sadness spread through me. Zark would never see this. He’d been so close.
“The enemy is out there.” Arthos said, and he pointed towards the wall. “Far away beyond that wall you see in the distance. We don’t tell the people of the city. They are happiest believing the stories we make up for them, but now you get to know. We are at war, Lillin, and it’s a war that we’ve been fighting for hundreds of years. We may always be fighting this war, but fight we must.”
I was shocked to hear that. It went against everything we’d been taught while at the academy. “I didn’t think anyone opposed the Iron Will. We were taught that it was absolute.”
“Nothing is absolute. Well, if anything was absolute it would be that nothing is. We must strive to be indefinite and unchanging, but it is always a struggle. It can never be achieved, but it is the struggle that makes us what we are.” He proclaimed as he looked out at the wall. “We’ve fought hard, but our enemy fights hard as well, and is very powerful. We never truly defeated the followers of the Way, Lillin.”
“The Way?” I was again taken off guard. “You mean the cult that existed right after the Skolbala were defeated? I thought they were wiped out quickly. They were just troublemakers.”
“Again, that’s just what we tell those beneath our banner, especially those here in Black Mark. We don't’ want everyone in the city to know that we exist in a world where there is a strong opposition to us. If the people here knew that the Iron Will wasn’t absolute, they might question their loyalty, and that would create turmoil here. Peace if preferable. We don’t need to fight a war on two fronts. The world beyond the walls is a very different place. You won’t even recognize it out there. A few days from the wall there are people who don’t even know what the Iron Will is.”
These revelations were coming quickly, and they were huge in my current view of the world. I’d thought the Iron Will was everywhere. It was so strongly enforced in the city that I assumed everyone understood it. It was our law. It was what we lived by. Saying that people didn’t know what it was out there made me think they must just be barbarians.
“This also isn’t the only Warden school. There is another beyond the walls, smaller than this one, but it trains some very strong students. It’s called Second, and actually produces more Wardens than this school here, though not of quite the same fortitude.” He was grinning. “Are these the kinds of answers you wanted?”
I nodded, though I was still trying to process this all. “So we are at war with the Way? Do they train Wardens like we do?” I was trying to understand how they weren’t simply crushed by the power of our Will users.
“No, they don’t practice the Will at all. They find power in unity. They give up their individuality and in joining together they create beings called Archons. The Archons are incredibly powerful, and they become more powerful with every Way users that joins them. To do this, to create these Archons, they must give up their independence. They have to abandon their own Will to the Will of the whole, and even then an Archon can be slayed by a Warden, but it is much easier to become an Archon than a Warden. There are far more of them than us.” He looked back at me, his expression grim. “We’ve been fighting for a long time, the front shifting back and forth. Sometimes we’re further in our direction, sometimes theirs. The swath of land we’ve been battling over is barren and burned at this point. I’ve been there. They call it the Desert. Nothing lives there.”
An unending war, and none of it known to the people of Black Mark. It seemed impossible. “Have we ever tried just coming to some kind of truce?” It seemed illogical to keep fighting for all this time. The expenditure of lives would have to be huge. I wondered how we even kept up the war effort.
He shook his head. “It has been suggested from time to time, but neither side trusts the other. Neither of us will be the first to extend a hand in peace, so we keep fighting. Our ideologies differ so greatly that we both believe we cannot exist in a world in which the other exists.”
“Do you believe that?” I wasn’t sure if I did. If we both just kept to our own territories we could stop fighting and live how we wanted. What was to gain by endless turmoil?
“You have to understand the thoughts of our leaders to really understand what is happening. The Iron Will believes that all men must submit to it. The ultimate Will cannot be seen to submit to anyone, so the existence of the Way is an affront to it by its very nature. That Will cannot submit to the Way because that would be admitting it lacked the strength to dominate the Way, and Will, true Will, submits to nothing.” He explained.
“Then this war is our fault.” I raised an eyebrow. “We won’t give up the fight?”
He gave another of his grins and a short chuckle. “Well, the Way won’t give up either. You see, to their way of thinking, everyone must be united for the world to truly experience peace. Joining in the peace and unity of the Way is the only path to a strong and unified society. Our existence, our strength in individual power, is an affront to their beliefs. They won’t stop while we are out here. We are too far opposed to one another ever to end this fight. We will fight the Way until it’s destroyed, or until we’re destroyed. They will do the same.”
I frowned. That seemed like a sad state in which to exist. If neither side would give up, then the war would go on until one side could finally grind out the other, but that seemed impossible given the strength of the two armies involved. Hundreds of years of battle had seen no real progress made. “How do you fuel a war that lasts this long? Certainly we must be running out of men to send against each other at this point?”
“That, Lillin, is an explanation for another time. Let it just be said that both sides have had to do some unfortunate things to keep the war effort alive. The story of the Pits isn’t a pleasant one. We will explain it to you, but I think you’ve heard enough for one day, and this trip isn't’ really about a history lesson. This is about learning what you can do with your Will, and teaching you how to focus and use the power that you have now.”
I wasn't happy that we weren’t going to directly address my questions, but he’d already answered several
that had been on my mind for a long time and expanded upon what I knew by a great deal. I could wait for more answers if I knew they were actually coming at some point. Besides, I already had much to mull over.
“So where do we start?” I asked, looking up at Arthos.
“We start with a simple rule of Will use. Any time you use your Will to affect the world, it is a matter of weighing your strength versus that of what you’re affecting. Inanimate objects have what we call absolute Will.” He reached into his pockets and started drawing out different sized spheres. There were four of them, and he tossed each one into the grass between us. They were different sizes, the largest being about the size of two hands together, and the smallest being less than the size of an egg. The two in the middle were about the same size, though one looked made of metal and the other wood.
“Absolute Will?” I asked, looking for more on that. It wasn't a concept I’d heard of. I knew that a person having Absolute Will was supposed to be a good thing, it was the goal all Wardens strove for.
“Yes, absolute Will. The will of living things is just Will, and it can vary based on the mental state of the living thing being affected. Inanimate objects, though, have absolute Will, which means that the amount of Will that is needed to affect them never changes. It is proportional to their mass.” He looked at the first ball he’d dropped and I felt a surge of pressure pass from him. At that same moment the smallest of the spheres he’d thrown jumped straight up into the air before falling back down to the ground. Another surge of pressure from him and the second jumped into the air.
“The first ball is easier to move then the second because it has less mass. They are both made of the same wood, but the first ball is smaller.” He said. He tossed the second ball up, and then the third, but the third ball didn’t go nearly as high. “I’m using the same force on these two, but the second isn’t going as high. This is because the third ball is made of metal. It has a higher mass than the second which is made of wood. Even though their size is the same, their mass differs. The metal ball has greater absolute Will.”
The fourth ball hopped up next, and it went higher than the middle two. It was larger than them, but apparently had less mass. “The fourth ball is hollow, and so is very easy to move.” He confirmed my suspicion.
I was nodding to myself, but I was still confused on one point. “Alright, I think I understand why that works the way it does, the mass, but why do inanimate objects have any Will at all? Shouldn’t we be able to affect them without any difficulty since we’re basically weighing our Will versus things that have none?”
He smiled and chuckled. “You’re not weighing your Will versus the Will of the inanimate object. You’d always win that. What you’re doing is weighing your Will versus the immobility of that object. Objects that aren't moving don’t generally move on their own. You have to give something to them to make them move, and in this case you’re giving them your Will. It would be like walking up to it and picking it up. It didn’t want to lift into the air, but by using your strength you’ve lifted it. You’ve given the object something to move it. The difference is that your Will can be controlled remotely once it is awakened, and it can be far more powerful than your arms ever could be. However that brings us to our next topic, Will fatigue.”
He looked back at the balls and popped the metal one high into the air, letting it fall down again. Then he slowly lifted the smallest wood one and spun it a few times at about half the height he’d set the metal one up before he let the small wood one fall back down. “Which of those took more Will to do?” He asked.
Logically it seemed to me it would be the metal one, but I guessed this was a trick question. “The smaller one.” I answered boldly, thinking myself clever for seeing around this trick.
“Yes, and why?” Arthos asked with a knowing grin.
I opened my mouth and closed it before giving him a half grin of my own. “I have no idea.”
He chuckled. “The longer you exert your Will on a single task, the more difficult it becomes to do so. It increases at a staggering rate. Something easy becomes almost impossibly difficult in a matter of a minute or two. It’s like when your muscles fatigue. You can combat this by constantly practicing your Will, pushing it to its limits, but it’s always going to be true. The longer you do something in a single pass, the harder it is to keep doing. Most of the time Will users will push their Will in fast, powerful bursts. Slow, consistent build ups take far more energy.”
I thought of when I’d been questioned earlier, the press into my mind and how it had built up slowly over time, and I’d pushed back. I wondered if that was the same. “What about when Will isn't being used just to move things?”
“That is the same, though not to as great a degree. It is easier to do things quickly, of course, but if you’re not directly working against mass it isn’t as fatiguing. Clashing Will to Will is difficult, but not in the amount of power it takes. It’s more difficult in the precision that it takes to accomplish. It’s a fight in which neither person can see the other’s weapon and must respond based on how the weapon strikes him.” He explained.
I wasn’t entirely certain what he meant by that, but I still had more questions I wanted answered. “Well, what about when a person falls unconscious? Do they get easier to move, or harder?” It seemed that they would get easier to move since their Will would be taken out of the question.
“That is a very difficult question. A lot goes into the answer. An unconscious person loses agency and becomes an object of Absolute Will, but depending on who the person was before they became unconscious, they could have been easier or more difficult to move then their mass dictates according to Absolute Will. The trick is in how much skill it would take, and how much power would need to be used, to manipulate that person while they were conscious. In the case of most practiced Will users, they become easier to move once they are unconscious, but almost everyone else is much easier to move while they are conscious. But you wouldn’t just be throwing them around. Instead you would force them to do as you wanted by bending their Will to your purpose.”
I nodded hesitantly. This seemed like a complex process with a lot more subtle variances then I would have guessed. Clearly I looked as confused as I felt because Arthos gave a short laugh.
“It’s alright if it seems overwhelming. You’re asking questions and I’m answering them, but most of what you want to know is just techniques that you learn as you go. You don’t have to understand all of the theory today. Bending anyone to your Will, forcing them to do something they don’t want to do, that is something that takes a careful moral decision, and we have strict rules of use in place to keep it from being abused. It would be easy for a powerful Will user to take advantage of others because of their Will, but it is forbidden. A Warden can enforce their authority against a non-violent person, enforce rules, and you can cause harm when it is necessary, but there is a great deal to learn about before you’ll even begin instruction on manipulating people directly.
“Today we’re here to toss the smallest wood ball around, and maybe the other two wood balls as well if you can. If you can move the small one, then you’re doing good. That’s all you really need to worry about for now.”
I looked at the wooden spheres, questions about how we might honestly determine what was a just use of Will and what wasn’t floating through the back of my mind. It didn’t seem to me that Wardens always used their abilities in a just fashion. Sometimes they acted out of anger, and sometimes they seemed to just use their power as a show of force. Where did this fall under their rules, I wondered? I forced myself to focus on the more immediate situation.
“Alright, then how do I move them?” I asked, looking at the small spheres and deciding it was time to start some actual training.
“Will is an extension of self. If you wanted to pick that ball up and toss it, you’d just do it, and you need to function with your Will the same way. You want to use your Will to move it, so that is what you
do, but don’t focus on lifting the ball. Lifting it is difficult. Instead, hit the ball from underneath.” I felt a surge of pressure again and the smallest ball hopped into the air. The pressure was his Will exerting force. He didn't need to explain that for me to understand. “I struck the ball from beneath, quickly, a direct assault of Will, but not a lasting one.” It seemed redundant to explain it after he’d just shown me how it was done, but I took it in stride. He was my teacher, after all, and I’d heard some students learned better through words than demonstrations. “You want to gather your Will and let it surge forward, focusing the strike at the center of the bottom of the ball.”
“Alright.” I said, and then I focused on the ball and pictured it bouncing up like it just had a moment before. I concentrated on that image, picturing it happening again and again, but there was no physical result. I tried picturing it lots of different ways, and at one point I realized I was even blowing air out of my mouth as though trying to push it from its place with the wind I could gather in my chest.
“It’s not working.” I said after what felt like twenty minutes of this somewhat frustrating process.