by Jeff Wilson
“Just as you tied your leash around me,” Edryd said, making the point that he had no sympathy. He did not care much right now who this master was that so troubled Seoras.
Seoras was surprised. “I did try”, he admitted, “but I failed to create the link.”
“No,” Edryd insisted. “I felt every emotion that flowed through your head. Believe me when I tell you it worked.”
Seoras was no longer surprised; he was dumbfounded. The intervention of the shroud had ensured that the link had only functioned in one direction. He looked anxious then too, frightened upon learning how much Edryd might know of him and worried that his darkest secrets had been compromised.
“Then you understand how my master can use the link to trace me,” Seoras said. “I cannot hide from him without your help. I am sure that only it can shield me.”
For the sake of ending all of this, if not for the pitiable state of fear this man was living in, Edryd was almost willing to do what Seoras was asking. “Would you believe that I don’t know how it is done, that it is something caused by the sigil sword?” Asking this as a question, instead of stating it directly, did not make the explanation any more persuasive, but then Edryd did not actually know if it was the truth.
Seoras didn’t seem to immediately dismiss the idea, but eventually he rejected it. “The sword is a focus, not a living object, Edryd,” the shaper lectured. “It can only enhance your ability, in no sense can it actually shape.”
Edryd felt certain that this couldn’t be entirely correct. It did not match some of his experiences with the weapon. Seoras had to be at least partly right though. The shroud had remained in place long after Edryd had become separated from the sword. At most, the sword induced him to shape the concealment and worked to maintain it, but it could not be the actual source. It was an interesting thought, but this wasn’t going to be something he was going to solve so simply.
“This is all beside the point,” Seoras said. “I need this as a shield against my master. You are going to teach it to me.”
“No,” Edryd said, shaking his head.
Seoras was not ready to give up. “You can’t say no. I will do whatever you ask, I will become your apprentice,” he begged. The part about becoming Edryd’s apprentice was spoken as if it were some enticement, but it was in fact what Seoras truly wanted, more even than the means to shut out his master. Seoras seemed to be overestimating Edryd in a truly dangerous way.
“No,” Edryd insisted once more. He might have explained it in terms of his simple ignorance on the subjects Seoras wanted to be trained in, but instead Edryd said, “This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I don’t quite like you, Seoras. I certainly cannot trust you, and I do not believe that I could ever teach you anything.”
Edryd saw something then that he hadn’t thought possible. Exposed for just a moment by the harsh words, a severe sadness and pain could be seen in the shaper’s eyes. Edryd had come to believe that the man did not have any emotions that were not some form of anger, and had judged him to possess little or no capacity to be hurt by anything.
The momentary reaction did not take long to metamorphose into deep offense and from there into the raw anger with which Edryd was more familiar. Edryd felt fortunate that his link with Seoras had been severed, certain that the force of this man’s anger would have been enough to almost knock him down. He was much too close to Seoras. Edryd retreated as quickly as he could, relying on the previously established correlation that distance meant safety where Seoras was concerned.
The sigil blade was in his hands now, and Edryd stopped backing up in response to some prompting that urged him to stand and face the shaper. Something opened inside Edryd again, but this time he couldn’t have felt less prepared for it, lacking the sense of calm and expanded consciousness he had possessed leading up to his fight in the palace. Edryd understood this much, he could once again, for what would now be the second time in his life, consciously touch and shape the dark.
Edryd was not the only one filled with power. Seoras didn’t even bother to draw his weapon. His entire body erupted in undulant flows of black flame. In contrast, Edryd appeared quite ordinary in all respects, and the same was true for the sigil sword. Edryd had no white flames with which to combat the black ones, and no idea what to do. He recalled then something Seoras had once said of himself, that he had ‘always been especially good with fire.’ Aware that he strengthened Seoras just by being near him, it seemed like an obvious idea to run as far and as fast as he could, but something continued to press him to stand firm, while at the same time giving the seemingly contradicting warning that even the briefest contact with those flames could incinerate him.
Edryd did not know for sure before doing it that it would even be possible, but he compressed his own aura. He had done the opposite before when he had confronted Aodra, straining the demonic construct that had been holding her and forcing it beyond its limits. This was no more difficult to do and had a much more immediate effect. The black flames around Seoras shrank back, decreasing in intensity until they extended only a small distance.
Seoras gasped as if air had been taken from his lungs, betraying a reaction to the power that was being forcibly pulled from his grasp. The flames may have become smaller, but they persisted, and Edryd was certain that they were no less dangerous. It was however more realistic now to believe that he might be able to avoid them.
“You are unwilling to allow me equal footing?” Seoras asked.
“We were never equal in anything,” Edryd answered. Though this meant something different to Edryd than it did to his former teacher, it was truth from just about any perspective. Edryd was not a good judge of his own strength. Seoras was. The shaper knew just how big the difference in pure ability was. Seoras, however, had a deep knowledge of what he was doing and could exploit an enormous gap in understanding. Edryd comprehended this difference here much better than Seoras did. It was with these thoughts in mind that as they began the fight, each man was convinced he was overmatched and believed he had little hope of surviving against the other.
Seoras drew his long thin sword with his left hand, its reach not much less than that of the sigil blade. He would have immediately launched into an offensive flurry, but Edryd forestalled this by initiating a shaped attack of his own. Dark flames danced on his blade as Seoras blocked and absorbed the powerful attack. As the blades deflected off of the point of contact, Seoras returned the strike, delivering the energy he had absorbed from Edryd’s attack in addition to further infused forces of his own. The sigil sword held up under these forces without being reinforced, as no other weapon could have.
They traded several blows in this manner, the accumulating power growing with each exchange. This could not continue, it would soon be more than either of them could handle. Edryd altered the sequence, recognizing that there was no sense in handing Seoras so much power to work with. He declined the opportunity for a counterstrike after blocking one of Seoras’s attacks. Instead Edryd took hold of the accrued power, retaining it within the sigil blade. The ancient weapon was well suited for this, having an immense capacity to store such energies.
The master shaper, surprised by what Edryd had done, began to back away. He had been building to an attack that he was certain could not be blocked, and giving Edryd, by only a small degree, more credit than was due, he was impressed that his ultimate design had been so thoroughly anticipated and so easily frustrated. This generous interpretation of Edryd’s intuitive discernment, made Seoras cautious.
Understanding little of what had motivated his teacher to pause, Edryd still appreciated that things were going well for him to this point. He didn’t have a plan, but he didn’t want to give the dark shaper more time to think. Edryd began to attack, applying everything he knew as a trained swordsman, executing swift skilled strokes, but imbuing none of them with added speed or momentum as a shaper would have done.
This too caught Seoras by surprise, having expected that Edryd wou
ld try to overwhelm him, but he soon began to adjust. His opponent might be holding back, but that didn’t mean he had to. The speed and strength of his counters forced Edryd to back off, rebalancing the combat. Edryd was superior at anticipating Seoras and had mastered absorbing the shaped impacts, but he was reluctant to take any risks.
As the fight wore on, Edryd developed the beginnings of a very flawed concept. If he could keep a tight defense, Seoras would begin to tire from shaping such powerful strikes. His strategy failed for multiple reasons. Seoras was growing stronger instead of weaker as the battle progressed, and Edryd was increasingly concerned that his defense was not adequate. A single mistake would be fatal.
Edryd remained convinced that there was little to be gained by shaping his attacks, but he began to look for an opening, and when he found one he rushed a simple exploratory attack. Seoras shifted his stance and brought his sword up to knock the attack away, expecting that he would brush it aside, but something unexpected happened just as the blades collided. Edryd’s sword barely changed course. Seoras felt as if he had struck against a dense iron pillar that had been firmly rooted into the ground, and his shaped attack was completely ineffective against it.
It felt strange to Edryd as well. It was not something he had done himself. It was as if the sigil blade were growing heavy just before the point of impact without slowing down, the corresponding momentum increasing as the weight changed and returning to normal only after the contact. It had put Seoras off balance. There was nothing unusual when Edryd struck again, or the time after that, but with his next strike the technique repeated itself. It then began to happen again at irregular intervals, becoming increasingly frequent but still random in sequence.
Edryd couldn’t predict when it would happen, and neither could Seoras, which made it impossible for the shaper to react quickly enough to respond appropriately. Seoras inevitably mishandled some of these attacks, one of which in particular pushed an ineffective parry far away from center, nearly knocking the shaper’s weapon from his hand. His guard had been blown open.
Drawing on the dark and imitating a move he had observed Seoras repeat many times before, Edryd stepped in with a speed that matched that of the master shaper, putting Seoras into the striking range of the sigil blade. At that moment, Edryd’s side erupted with intense searing pain. Seoras held something in his right hand, his off hand. It was the bronzed hilt of an ancient sword. There was no blade, just a long strip of what seemed to be nothing, neither darkness nor light, just an impossible void. Somehow this all made perfect sense to Edryd. There had always been something off about the style of combat Seoras used, and now Edryd understood what it was. The man fought with an aggressive style that made use of two weapons, and Edryd was seeing it now, for the first time.
Edryd altered the target of his strike, swinging down almost blindly, but trusting that the trajectory was right. The sigil blade came alive with white light as it struck the hilt of Seoras’s arcane weapon just above his hand, expending all the energies absorbed during the fight and shattering the object into thousands of pieces.
Seoras had sensed the immense release of energy and had only barely managed to ward against it in time. It saved the shaper’s hand and his arm, but it could do little more than that. He was blown back several yards where he fell to the ground, stunned and barely conscious. Edryd had been pushed away as well but he had managed to keep his feet. His body had been further from the event, and he had been more prepared for it. Frantically, Edryd felt at his side with his free hand. He pulled his shirt away from where he was certain he had been pierced, but there was no wound, and no cut in the fabric of his clothing.
The pain he had felt was gone but the memory remained. He could find no physical injury. It seemed that he had destroyed the dark weapon before it could completely form, but it had done damage, even if there was no visible evidence. Edryd felt like he was bleeding, despite the absence of a wound, as though he were in the process of slowly losing vital energies which sustained his existence. He allowed his aura to decompress, achieving a natural stable balance, at which point he felt an almost delirious relief when the aural seepage ceased. This was an injury that no doctor could treat. Edryd would have to pray that it would heal on its own and be careful until it did.
Edryd walked over to Seoras, who was breathing painfully, his bright slender sword a few feet away on the ground. Defying a prediction made weeks earlier, Edryd once again had an opportunity to end the man’s life. Edryd used the sigil blade, bringing it down decisively to destroy Seoras’s weapon on the ground, something that was now simple to accomplish while it was not actively being reinforced by its owner. Edryd warily examined his fallen master. Life was returning to the man’s eyes. His recovery disconcerted Edryd a great deal, but what surprised him most was that as Seoras became increasingly aware of himself, he seemed content, as if this is what he had expected would happen all along, and he was ready to die.
“If you will not give me your help, you should kill me,” said Seoras.
Edryd could not believe Seoras was still begging for his sympathies. “I will put it to you once more, why would I want to help you? You did nothing for me, when I asked.”
“You didn’t need help,” Seoras said, brushing the question away and looking uncomfortable, whether from lying defenseless on the ground, or as a result of what he had been asked, Edryd could not tell.
“I was fighting a draugr, of course I needed help,” Edryd said, his patience growing thin. “You said you were prevented. What could have possibly prevented you? What could have been more important? Did Irial and Eithne mean nothing to you?”
“Eithne is my daughter,” Seoras answered.
Edryd didn’t believe it at first. He didn’t want to. He could see the resemblance though, the blue eyes and dark black hair. She had also inherited her father’s power.
“They would have killed her,” Seoras said. “You can’t know how grateful I am.”
Edryd tried to put it all out of his mind, unable to handle the sudden need to reexamine everything that had happened. In that moment, if anything, he hated Seoras more than ever. Seoras had never been a father to Eithne. Edryd didn’t try to comprehend the danger it would have caused for Eithne if Seoras had ever done so.
“You repay me for protecting her, by trying to kill me?” Edryd asked. He had no reason to forgive this man for anything, and the knowledge that Seoras was Eithne’s father, absolved the shaper of nothing where Edryd was concerned.
“I wanted to see,” Seoras said while rising to a seated position, but losing his concentration as he did so, he was unable to complete the thought. The man didn’t want to die, he had just expected to, and maybe felt that he deserved it.
“What did you want to see?” Edryd asked, as he helped Seoras to his feet, prompting him to finish the thought.
“I wanted to see a sigil knight,” answered Seoras.
“I am not a sigil knight,” Edryd said. He had made this protest to others before.
“No, you’re not, but you are the closest thing I am ever likely to find.”
Edryd wondered why this was so important to Seoras. “Did you have to try to kill me just for that?” Edryd asked.
“Apparently I did. Nothing less has ever been enough to persuade you to show even the smallest measure of your power.”
It wasn’t worth trying to explain, and Edryd knew he needed to hide from Seoras just how helpless he would be without the sigil sword. Better to play the part Seoras had set for him.
“You must understand why it is that I cannot trust you,” Edryd repeated again, with only a slight softening of the reproachful tone he had used before. “I am not a sigil knight, but you are the furthest thing from,” Edryd continued. “You are corrupted and dark, and you are unworthy of a sigil blade.” He could see from the shaper’s reaction, one of shame and failure, that Seoras knew this already. Edryd guessed that Seoras must have tried to use the weapon after he had collected it from where it h
ad been left near Esivh Rhol on the day of the attack. He had returned it to Edryd only once he discovered that he could not use it himself.
“There is nothing I can offer you,” Edryd continued. “You are filled with too much anger and too much hatred. Knowing that, it would be wrong of me to give what you have asked.”
“I will change,” Seoras said. There was determination behind his words.
“You will have to prove that you have,” Edryd replied. “Find and master a sigil blade of your own, and then I will agree to help you.”
It was an unachievable task—a deliberately impossible demand—unreasonably presented as the only condition under which Edryd would ever consider the desperate shaper’s request. Seoras must have understood this, but he took hope from the direction it gave him anyway. His reaction caused Edryd to feel guilty. It shouldn’t have, he was being far more forgiving to Seoras than the dark man could possibly have ever deserved, but Edryd felt incredibly false playing at being some wise man of power whose dictates were a worthy guide for the other man’s life.
But there was something he could do to make up for occupying Seoras with a foolish hope on which to waste the rest of his life. Edryd began to shape. It was a pattern equal to the most complex and powerful thing Edryd knew. He surrounded Seoras with a shroud, constructed so that it was fed by the dark shaper’s own connection to the dark.
“This will not last,” Edryd warned. “It will shield you from your master for a few days at most. If you can’t figure out how to maintain it before it is gone, or make one of your own, it will be lost to you. Do not seek me out. I will see to it that Eithne remains safe.”
Without any further explanation, Edryd turned, leaving a grateful Seoras behind in the stupor of his own stunned silence.
“Wait,” Seoras called out, before Edryd could leave the grounds of the estate. “You need to listen to what I have to tell you.”