by Andrew Rowe
Mother had left for Dalenos before that explosion had happened.
Had that been a coincidence?
...Or was she involved?
I couldn’t discount anything at this point. Now that I knew my brother was involved with the kidnapping of Tenjin, it was theoretically possible that other members of my family could be involved in similar affairs.
Moreover, Mother had approved the expedition in which Vera and Echion had entered the Serpent Spire. That meant she at least knew something about the god beast attunements. I didn’t know how much she’d been told, but given the other facts, it was likely her knowledge was significant.
Mother was also suspiciously powerful. She’d been in the council room during that vision I’d seen in the memory crystal Jin had given me, and she’d put up a good fight against Keras. She clearly had two attunements, and at least one of them was probably Emerald-level. As far as I knew, that put her in about the top ten people in Valia in terms of raw power.
I knew she’d spent many years in the military before I had been born, but Father had always been the one who was obsessed with fighting ability. When, how, and why had she gotten that powerful?
I hadn’t even known she had a second attunement — she’d just been an Elementalist when I’d been growing up.
What was going on with her?
I wanted some real answers. Unfortunately, she was abundantly clear that she didn’t want to talk about family matters until we could see each other in person.
Instead, I found Sera and asked her to talk to me in private.
“Read this real quick.” I handed her the letter.
Sera read it over, then handed it back to me. “Not sure how this applies to me.”
I shook my head. “That’s not the issue. I just find it...odd that she was in Dalenos at the time the cathedral was attacked. Could she have known?”
Sera frowned. “Think you’re chasing dragons, Corin. Your mom is in Dalenos all the time. She’s been visiting there for years.”
“Years?” I rubbed my chin. “Why?”
“Climbing, of course. She mostly climbs the Serpent Spire, but she’s been going up to the Tortoise Spire a lot over the last few years. Their culture encourages climbers more, so it’s easier to find groups for an expedition. Therefore, you get a lot more veterans, and it’s easier to climb higher.”
I’d known the parts about the Tortoise Spire having more veteran climbers, but I...hadn’t even realized that Mother was a climber. “What’s she been climbing for?”
“You can’t seriously not know that. Did you never read her letters?”
I frowned. “This didn’t say anything about the spire. Neither did the one that she sent earlier this year.”
“I don’t mean those. I’m talking about the ones we sent you back at home, before we came here.”
“I...” I felt my hands balling into fists. “I haven’t gotten any letters in years. Not from her or from you.”
Sera’s eyes widened just a little. “You mean... I always thought it was weird that you stopped replying a few years ago, but I just assumed... I thought you didn’t want to hear from me.”
I stood up, my fists tightening further, and turned toward the door.
Sera stood up, too. “What are you doing, Corin?” She sounded alarmed.
“I’m going to go punch my father in the face.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. I spun, just barely restraining my urge to take a swing.
It’s not her fault.
I took a breath, stumbling back a step.
“Corin. Calm down.”
“No.” I shook my head. “For once, I’m not going to be calm. This is not okay, Sera.”
“Maybe something just happened with the mail—”
“We both know that isn’t true. Magnus — reshing — Cadence has been screening my mail. Apparently, for reshing years.”
I punched a wall.
I barely felt it, but Sera took a step back, raising her hands defensively.
I processed that, taking a breath and lowering my hands. “Sorry, Sera. I’m not angry at you.”
“Okay, but you’re still scaring me a little, Corin. This isn’t like you.”
I balled my fists again, but I didn’t strike. “Resh it all. I trusted him. I thought Mother had abandoned me. I thought you had abandoned me.” I shook my head. “I sent you letters, too. Both of you. More than once.”
“We never...”
I nodded. “I know. I sent them by handing them to Father, because he always was the one who went to the courier’s office. He probably destroyed them just like he destroyed the ones you sent me. Or maybe he just read them and laughed.”
“Corin...”
My mind was running calculations it probably shouldn’t have been.
At my best estimate, Father was a Citrine-level Shaper. Provided he hadn’t been getting stronger somehow like Mother had.
I had no chance of beating him in a fair fight.
But as I’d discovered with Jin, it was quite possible to beat someone of a higher attunement level if I wasn’t fighting fair.
It wasn’t that I wanted to kill my father. I wasn’t in that frame of mind.
I wanted to hurt him. To humiliate him. To make him understand how much of a monster he was for keeping me away from the rest of my family for all this time.
And a part of my mind was angry at Mother, too.
Letters were great. Maybe she cared for me just a little bit more than I thought if she’d been writing all this time.
In some ways, that hurt more than if she’d abandoned me completely.
I’d been worth scribbles on a piece of paper, but not enough for a visit?
It had been three years since I’d seen her in person.
Three. Years.
Letters didn’t forgive that.
Maybe she’d written some excuses in there, offered a few pitiful explanations.
But ultimately, she could take train rides up to Dalenos — apparently repeatedly — but not make time to visit her son.
Why?
What was so important that she’d be climbing spires rather than visiting her son?
“I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just... I can’t.”
I fled the room.
***
I didn’t jump on a train to Hathridge to go see my father, as tempting as that prospect was.
Instead, I went to Keras’ room and knocked on the door.
He opened it a few moments later, looked me up and down, and gave me a quizzical expression. “Corin? Is something wrong?
I lowered my head. “Yes. I need to be stronger.”
Keras paused, then slowly nodded.
“I think I can help with that.”
***
We didn’t bring Marissa with us this time.
I stood on the rooftop across from Keras, hand on Selys-Lyann’s hilt.
I’d told Keras that I wanted to be stronger, and that was true — but there was a part of me that was just itching for a fight.
“So,” he began, “What did you want to practice?”
An image flashed in my mind, something I’d been trying not to think about since I got to the school.
The smirk on my father’s face as I spat blood on the stone and struggled to push myself to my feet, my arms and legs covered in cuts and bruises.
It wasn’t a particular incident I was remembering.
It was an ordinary day of “training”.
“Teach me a way to defeat an opponent that’s much more powerful than I am.”
Keras nodded, looking contemplative. “Lots of ways to do that. Given your skill set, the most obvious answer is ‘prepare’. You already seem to be doing quite a lot of that.”
I shrugged a shoulder, half-agreeing with him. “I am. But I’m already reaching the point where I’m carrying so many items that the auras are going to start interfering with each other soon. I can be more efficien
t about that, getting stronger items instead of a bunch of little ones, but I can’t carry hundreds of items for every possible scenario.”
“Doesn’t the box help with that? Seems like it’s perfect for what you’re describing.”
“It is, but I don’t want to rely on it. Other people are going to want to take it from me if they find out I have it. And as you’ve pointed out, I won’t be able to keep it forever. If Wrynn is alive, she’ll probably want it back eventually.”
“Oh, she’s alive. I’m sure of it.” He paused, glancing away for a moment. “Anyway, you’re right that the box isn’t a permanent solution. Okay, we’ll talk about some solutions that don’t involve making a hundred items.”
“Thank you.”
“Get your transference sword, I have an idea.”
I went and retrieved the sword, setting Selys-Lyann down nearby.
“Toss it here for a second.
I threw him the sword.
Keras drew the blade, glancing it over. “Good balance. But more importantly, the aura should work for our purposes.”
He sheathed it and tossed it back to me. I caught it without difficulty.
Keras drew a training sword. He always left his other sword — the one with the silvery aura he’d used against Katashi — in his scabbard.
“The foundation of most of my sword techniques is the manipulation of my aura. I use it in a variety of ways, the most basic of which is simply reshaping my aura into a cutting field, like what I taught Marissa.”
I nodded. “But I can’t do that, since I can’t manipulate my shroud yet.”
“Right. But you can manipulate the aura of an existing magical weapon. I’ve seen you do it. You’ve got a technique similar to my cutting wave. The one where you swing it, and you project a wave of force.”
“Sure. I just push some transference mana through my hand, which reacts with the aura around my sword and pushes the sword’s aura outward.”
He shook his head. “I think you’re doing a little more than that, even if it’s not conscious. If it was just making two auras collide, your blade’s aura would shift, but it wouldn’t fly outward in a crescent shape like that.”
That...made a degree of sense, but I didn’t think I was doing anything else.
Keras swung the practice sword in the air, and a wave of energy rippled outward. “When I cut the air like that, I’m not just slamming my aura into something and hoping it’ll go the right way. I’m shaping my aura into a blade and projecting it in the direction I’m thinking about. My intent determines the dimensions of the shockwave and the direction it goes.”
“And you think I’m doing the same thing, subconsciously?”
“Right. Which means that you have the ability to shape transference mana, at least to a limited degree.”
I frowned at that. “I have to be able to manipulate mana to force it outward, but only when I’m physically touching it. I had a little stronger sense for mana while I was inside the spire — the air was so thick with it that I could move the ambient mana just a little. But...” I drew the sword, inspecting the aura. “I don’t think I can do anything with this aura. Not without cutting my fingers off, anyway.”
“Well, figuring out how to protect yourself from your own weapon’s aura would be a good training exercise. But for the moment, I think I have a theory on how you’re doing what you’re doing.
“The first type of thing I learned to shape was metal, and at first, I couldn’t shape it unless I was touching it. The way I learned to work around that was to use a piece of metal — like a sword — to touch whatever I wanted to shape. That made a sufficient connection for me to manipulate the target.”
I pondered that. “You think that, in the instant my transference mana is touching the aura of the blade, I have enough of a connection to shape the blade’s aura?”
“Exactly.”
“Huh.” If that was true, how could I use that? Would that be applicable to other types of mana as well? Could I figure out how to reshape other forms of mana by connecting them with mine?
If that was possible, it was going to open up a lot of doors for me in the long run.
But I couldn’t get too far ahead of myself. All we had for the moment was a hypothesis. “Okay, can we test that?”
Keras nodded. “Sure. It’ll be good to figure out how much control you have. That can help determine what techniques I can teach you right now. Try this.” His aura stretched out over his sword, then he swung it in the air. A shockwave flew out as expected, but it veered sharply to the right, rather than directly following the trajectory of the swing.
I immediately understood just how useful that kind of technique could be. Everyone would expect an attack to come directly at them — if he could make a shockwave curve off to the side, that was an extremely useful trick in itself. He could anticipate someone’s attempt to dodge, or hit another enemy entirely.
What else could he do?
I was extremely curious, but I needed to focus.
I tried mimicking him, swinging in mid-air and pushing mana out of my hand as usual. The shockwave went straight forward before I could actively concentrate on guiding it another way. And once the shockwave was free of my sword, I couldn’t sense any connection to it.
But I could sense one, ever-so-briefly, when my mana and the sword’s aura met. Keras was right. It was faint, near instantaneous, but a connection was there.
I tried it again and again, but with the same results.
I’d trained myself with my expectations for how the attack was supposed to work. In order to get it to behave differently, I had to find a way to reshape not just the mana, but how I was thinking about the attack.
“Try thinking about me as your target,” Keras suggested, “But I’m going to stand off to the side, rather than in front of you. Swing forward, but try to guide the shockwave toward me.”
I nodded. I wasn’t even going to mention that a success would mean an attack coming straight toward Keras. I knew by now that my attacks were no threat to him. He was clearly specialized in offensive combat, and he didn’t have a traditional shroud, but I was confident he could knock my attacks out of the air with his bare hands if he felt like it.
Even with a target in mind, forcing my attack to arc was surprisingly difficult. I swung and swung, pushing shockwave after shockwave out of the sword.
In the end, it was a moment of frustration that did it. I didn’t think about it — not consciously, like I’d been trying to. I just swung and wanted the aura to move.
And it did.
It didn’t get anywhere near Keras. Not due to his extraordinary skills, but because my aim was way off. The wave curved so hard to the left that it almost made a circle, and then flew off into the night air to dissipate.
It hadn’t been close to what I’d been looking for, but it had worked.
At least in the loosest possible sense. I’d gotten my shockwave to move in a different way, and that meant I could connect with my sword’s aura.
And that was where the real training started.
***
I only had a handful of days left before my final exam.
I threw most of that time into learning sword aura manipulation techniques.
Once I was in a little better state of mind, Keras went and grabbed Marissa to join us. She was already working on similar techniques, but using her own shroud rather than a weapon’s aura.
I planned to switch to using my shroud once I had the ability to work with it, but for the moment, this was excellent practice.
Keras nodded to us as we began our next lesson. “You both seem to have a solid grasp of the basics of manipulating your aura blade...even if Corin is still cheating a bit.”
I smirked. “I’m always walking the line between cleverness and cheating. If good tactics qualify me as a cheater, I’ll take that label and wear it with pride.”
After some trial and error, I’d figured out that only being able to sense the au
ra for an instant wouldn’t give me the kind of fine control that I needed in order to aim one of those blade shockwaves properly.
To fix that, I’d practiced manifesting a tiny thread of mana connecting my hand to the rune that generated the transference aura. Maintaining the thread required a tiny amount of my mana, but it created a persistent connection that let me sense and manipulate the aura freely.
Keras rolled his eyes at my remark. “We’re getting started. I’ve got something a little different in mind today. Marissa, make a blade aura.”
Marissa bent her knees in a combat stance and extended her right arm. The shroud enveloping her body shifted, with the section around her arm shifting and elongating into a blade-like shape.
When she’d first practiced this, the blade aura had only extended about the length of a hand. Now, it was a solid two feet, giving her reach comparable to holding a short sword. That made it more difficult to use, but vastly more dangerous. Presumably, she’d continue learning to extend it further as her skill level increased.
“Good. Corin, you can draw your sword as well.”
I followed his instructions, then focused for a moment to create a thread of mana connecting to the rune. After that, I fell into a default guard stance.
“Now, both of you, slash. No need to project a wave.”
We slashed through the air. I grinned as I heard the whirring noise from the mana moving through the air.
Magic was awesome.
“Now, let’s say you hit someone with that slash. What portion of the blade aura is actually going to be impacting the target?”
“Not much,” Mara replied. “Prolly less than ‘alf. It’s a double-sided blade aura, and we’re only hittin’ em with one side.”
Keras snapped his fingers. “Precisely. There’s nothing wrong with using a double-edged blade aura as your starting point. In fact, I encourage it, especially when you’re still learning control, or if you’re fighting too rapidly to adjust it. But you can adjust it.”
I lifted my own sword, pondering. “Mara could make a single-edged blade and save mana, sure. But this sword is already emitting mana all around it. That’s just how the runes work.”
“I’m not talking about saving mana, although that’s a valid approach.” Keras grinned, lifting his own practice sword.