In our time in the last city I had grown accustomed to sharing a bed with my wife, Nyah. Being far away was hard, that physical connection that holding each other as we slept was a hard thing to loose. Luckily, the marriage ceremony here was more than just a religious or legal experience, it was a ritual that bound each other together, linking their souls together no matter the distance between them. It let us hold each other in our sleep in a different way. Less satisfying, but it gave us a sense that we were still together, even as the distance grew.
I held onto that connection, holding her with my spirit, I could almost hear music it felt so right. Actually, I could hear music, gently pulling me from my slumber. A guitar tune, something gentle and slow, no words just the inherent beauty of the acoustic guitar. I gently looked out of my small tent to see Zerrious sitting around a fire with my guitar in his hands. I wasn't sure when he had started the fire back up, or when he had picked up my guitar, but I knew I had Named him a bard for a reason. I didn't recognize the song, especially not this early, but it was something like a folksy lullaby that I greatly appreciated.
"What are you doing up so early?" I asked, lightly stepping up so sit next to the young prodigy.
"I should ask you the same," Zerrious muttered playfully, his fingers never stopping on the guitar, just like I taught him.
"Your playing woke me up. I don't mind though, I slept plenty for one night." I gazed into the blazing inferno at the center of our little camp, mindlessly watching the flames curl in on themselves, going up and up until they they fade to smoke, always shifting, always moving.
"Sorry. I just couldn't sleep. This special ability stuff, it just feels so important. I've gotten all my Names from following those feelings, chasing the any skill I could see and any I couldn't I followed my gut to find. I followed it all the way to you, I followed it through all my Names, but I just don't know where to go from here. I need to figure this out, but it's just not happening," Zerrious said, each word growing more frustrated than the last, bordering on a meltdown as he finally stopped playing the guitar and set it down.
"Zerrious, listen to me. I know how you feel, I know how important things feel, I know it feels like if you don't master it soon you never will, I get it. I came from a world where from the age of five you were told that if you failed here it would ruin your life, if you didn't do well on this test you'd never make it in the world. The secret is, it's not near as important as anyone says it is. I didn't do well in any of my classes, I got a really low score on the SAT, and in the end I was still able to go to college and get a job that would pay for what I needed. Not so say none of those things were important, they were, but our bodies have a way of convincing themselves that things are much more important than they are." I reached an arm around the distressed boy, bringing him close like I imagined a good father would have done. "What I'm saying is, listen to those feelings, but do it with the knowledge that they aren't always as smart as they think they are. Zerrious, you have your entire life ahead of you, I could be your father and I have confidence that I will live to see you become a god, even if each skill takes a year, two years, even five years to master. Plus, finding those abilities wont come with Names, we're already masters in the relevant skills," I said lightly, rocking him a little bit to convey the light tone of the last sentence better.
I could tell that the words of encouragement weren't enough, not right away. He was still riding high on the emotions he was just experiencing, he couldn't come down from that fast enough for mere words to be enough. My cane was leaning against my leg, still syphoning the reality stuff from me, but also leaving it available for spellcasting. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, but I knew that the center was the pathway to the soul, and I could get into his center. Sure, it required permission, but if you weaved it slightly differently, just sent intent instead of my entire being through, finding holes in his defenses. . .
My Aether created Mana that then flowed from my arm and washed over Zerrious' center with a calming feeling. Zerrious calmed down quickly with the help, even if he didn't notice it at the time. After calming down the young man fell into the single arm hug and leaned on me, his head making itself at home on my shoulder.
"Thank you," Zerrious croaked quietly, drying remnants of tears marring his face.
Now, I may have been perfectly fine comforting him when he was in a crisis, but now that the crisis was averted this position had grown rather uncomfortable.
"Okay, so we're both up, why not get to that next city as soon as we can?" I said loudly, extricating myself from the bundle of emotions.
"Yeah, okay," Zerrious said, joining me in standing around the fire while nodding and pulling himself back together.
We got to work packing our things in our bags of rings, quickly putting everything in tight bundles with the efficiency only constant practice can achieve, finally lifting our packs and making our way out of the clearing and back onto the road where there were two other men getting a head start on their travels in the predawn morning. We didn't exchange more than a glance before continuing our separate ways, both of us too tired to make small talk this early, especially since we weren't running on as much sleep as we were used to.
I strummed lightly as we walked, copying the tune Zerrious had played this morning. When it came to a close I repeated the song, the last note leading perfectly into the first as if that was how it was intended to be played, as a circle with no beginning, no end. Something that could be easily repeated until a baby fell asleep I thought with a silent grin.
It wasn't long until I got sick of the song repeating endlessly, so I cut it off, letting it fade into nothing in the morning air. I didn't start another song, just felt the Mana in the air as we walked by, each of us pulling it into our centers, mine being filtered as it did.
Zerrious was worried about finding the rest of his Names, as he rightly should be. He had Names for skills I didn't even know existed, and he was still short by several hundred? I couldn't fathom how we would do this, but I was excited to find out. I put my guitar away, instead summoning my soul in the form of a book and quill to write our journeys out, as well as my discoveries in the Aether as well as some theories I had on the mysteries of so much of this world. I couldn't do much with the history of this world, but I could ruminate on it's apparent lack of a creation story.
It seemed that as far as history or religion went was "chaos before the gods rose to power" which doesn't tell us much. All I can guess is that the world was simply ruled by regular physics with the odd addition of magic until then. After that apparently not much happened. A few countries split off and now they pretty much just rule everything in relative peace with few to no disputes between them.
I lost track of my surroundings as I muttered under my breath, quill scratching quickly across each page that then turned on it's own for me to continue my writing. Suddenly I was stopped by Zerrious' hand pulling my collar too keep me from running into the wooden gates which sat closed in front of us, stone making up the rest of the wall, each brick cut precisely so that nothing was needed to bind the stones together, they just sat in perfect sync with each other. Expert carving I had only heard of back home.
"Ah, sorry. When do the gates open?" I asked.
"No idea. Get comfortable, hopefully they allow tourists," Zerrious said as he moved off the road to sit on the ground and lean back against the wall for a moment before getting into a rigid lotus position and closing his eyes.
Well, if he was going to be like that. . . I pulled at the fabric of reality and stepped into the Aether, willing a relaxing beach environment into existence before I opened my eyes to observe the sand and water around me. Just being here was filling my center faster than I could handle, so I decided to practice willing things into being while I was here.
I had figured out that as long as I wasn't directly observing anything in some way it was malleable and would bend to my will. So I tested with a slightly scary prospect. I fell back, trusting full well that there would be a comfortable chair waiting to catch me. Luckily I was right, the soft cushions breaking my fall painlessly. I closed my eyes and willed a drink to appear on the armrest of my chair, served in a coconut, of course. I snatched the drink off my armrest without opening my eyes and took a sip from the straw that I had full confidence was there.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The drink slipped into my mouth only to dissolve into Aether and go directly into my center which was already flooding with the stuff. "That's disappointing," I muttered to myself as I set the drink down, letting it disappear as I looked about the beach.
"I think the secret is to just do everything without looking with confidence that it will work," I muttered. Falling over in hopes that a chair would catch me was something I could barely get past the anxiety of, but it worked, so maybe I had to go a little bit harder. . .
I got up from my seat and walked over to the water, keeping my eye on the waves and wading in until I was waist deep in water, then I backpedaled out with confidence that my foot would reach dry sand with every footfall. And it worked, as I packed up I saw that the water had met a barrier just beyond where my vision sat and dry sand stood everywhere behind that point.
"Here goes nothing," I said as I closed my eyes and ran up with full confidence that there would be solid ground to meet my feet no matter how far I ran. It worked, I was running up with my eyes closed, getting higher and higher into the fake sky. I opened my eyes to see an endless expanse of nothing ahead of me and a set of narrow stone stairs behind me with no guard rails.
"Time for the moment of truth!" I screamed as I closed my eyes and fell backwards with confidence that there would be a cartoonish bouncy castle to break my fall at the ground. I was maybe thirty feet up, so I hoped with all my heart that this didn't go terribly.
I hit something soft and was flung back up ten feet into the air, causing my eyes to pop open of their own accord. It had worked! I bounced a few more times before deciding I had more or less mastered this skill. If I could memorize where things were in physical reality I could travel through walls or defenses if I needed to. This was going to be an incredible skill to have! I jumped out of the bouncy castle and directly into another comfortable chair, willing a pair of sunglasses to fall into my waiting hand and putting them on, closing my eyes and diving into my center to try and figure things out from there, as my experiments with the Aether had been a resounding success and I was riding that high.
I stood in that odd liminal space where my center resided, just watching the cloud of Aether stir as pages were formed at rapid speeds, the book flaring brightly with the overload of Aether, shining through the blueish green cloud like a light tower on a foggy day, flickering quickly with the rapid turning of pages. This felt like a day for discovery, but I still had no idea where to start.
I took a page with my mind and tore it out like I was going to use it for a spell, but instead of letting the Aether fall back into a cloud to follow my directions I let it stay a piece of paper. I wasn't sure what my plan was, or if I even had a plan, but I took some of the Aether from the cloud around my center and willed it into the page, and just started drawing with my mind. It wasn't very good. I figured drawing was all about hand eye coordination which was eliminated in this scenario, but I was wrong.
There was a technical element to it, you had to know where to put each line, how much Aether to use on each line, exactly how things had to curve to add perspective, and I just couldn't do that. It looked like something a little kid would draw, all simple shapes and lines, but it was the best depiction of my wife I could manage. I didn't destroy it, even though it made me a little sick at how bad it was. Instead I put it back into the book, where I could tell even as that page melted into the back cover and came out the other side the picture was still intact. That page had a bit more Aether in it, so it was a little more powerful, which is a fun thought, though it wasn't very useful because using more pages didn't really effect me in any way. It felt like a start to something, I just wasn't sure what.
That cloud of Aether had grown incredibly thick in the time I was drawing, almost enough that I couldn't see the brightness of my center through the thick haze. I just wished I had somewhere else to store it. . . Like another center connected to mine.
I mentally slapped myself in the forehead for forgetting one of the most important parts of the marriage ritual. All the Aether my center couldn't process fast enough went streaming into Nyah, being pulled off into a hole that didn't exist before, or I supposed it existed everywhere all at once always but couldn't be observed until it was needed. Centers are weird.
I then remembered something else, Nyah didn't have a center that could properly store large amounts of. . . anything, so all that Aether would just leak out into the world around her. It's not like it would do anything, but it felt like a waste. I watched the Aether flow through that hole, wondering what I could do.
I still needed to find something that could hold the reality stuff so Nyah could cast the spells she knew, and I also had to help her see her soul and shape her center accordingly. I could write a letter and try to explain the process, but it seemed like something that she would need the help of someone experienced to accomplish. But I couldn't just leave Zerrious because I wanted to be able to store more Aether than I rightly should. Maybe I could convince him to try and hunt another Aetherweb Poisoner, but before I killed one no one even knew they existed, so I wasn't hopeful we would find one.
I could try to replicate the effects of the material of the chiton, but I had no idea how to do that synthetically, I never had to do that kind of work. I worked in programing, our catchphrase was "nothing works and we have no idea why". It was an art, not a science like synthesizing magic bug skin.
"Why did you put me here? An engineer would have dominated this world in thirty seconds and solved all the universes problems," I muttered. I was pretty sure whatever gods there were couldn't hear me, as I was both in my center and in the Aether, but complaining made me feel better, so I did my whining and opened my eyes to the beach experience, wind against my skin and sun hot on my skin.
I had no way of telling time here, but it had probably been way too long since I was in reality. My only problem was, I had no idea where I was in relation to the physical world. I didn't remember much from the early days of my arrival on this world, but I did remember one warning about stepping out of the Aether and into an object that didn't sound fun.
I stood up, steeling my nerves for the potential of accidentally killing myself and everyone I loved by ripping a hole in the side of the universe before I reached out with my hands and pulled the curtain keeping the Aether and the physical world separate and stepped through. Luckily my feet hit soft grass and I didn't explode or stop existing, which made me so happy I couldn't even describe it.
"Sigurd! Where were you? I thought you had been kidnapped or something! I looked all over for you!" Zerrious yelled from the tree line close by where he had gone in search of me.
"Sorry, sorry. I was just practicing one of my skills, I should have told you," I said sheepishly. The kid had clearly been in a panic over my safety, even though he had told me he wouldn't worry about my safety at all. The big softy.
"Ugh, come on, the gates opened almost an hour ago," he said, shaking a little bit and grabbing me by the sleeve to drag me though the gates.
I knew this was a time where I deserved to be in trouble, but I did have a way out of it, even if it wasn't strictly "good". I mixed my Aether with the reality stuff and weaved the Mana into the calming spell that I guided into his center. The ribbon traveled into his center just like before, but this time the Mana fizzled out and Zerrious' Mana shot up through the middle of the string, causing a feedback and shocking my center with a heady jolt, blasting several pages out of my center.
----------------------------------------
Notice!
Center Property discovered: Adaptive Defense.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Adaptive Defense:
Zerrious' center is designed to learn and evolve with experiences, the same trick will never work twice! Whenever Zerrious' center is accessed without his consent or knowledge his center takes note of the experience and builds defenses against threats of the same kind, not only preventing attacks of the kind but offering an automatic counterattack to protect Zerrious!
----------------------------------------
Fuuuuuuuuck me.
"You were rooting around in my center?!" Zerrious growled under his breath.
"Okay, I can explain-" I tried, but I should have known that was the wrong thing to say, it was never the right thing to say, why would I say that?
"Oh no, you can't. What am I just some big experiment to you? Do you just try things out on me just to see what'll happen? I've been forgiving about you trying new things, I've even let you see my soul! If you wanted to see my center you could have just asked! I would've let you!" Zerrious yelled. It was drawing the eyes of traders and guards, they were getting interested, especially with this talk of centers. Most of them would have no idea what we were talking about, but it was definitely the wrong kind of attention to be getting in a new city.
"They were calming spells, I used it to help calm you down last night, and I tried to calm you down just now," I whispered.
"I can't trust you anymore, I don't know what to believe, I don't know what's true or not!" Zerrious yelled, completely ignoring that I was trying to keep us under the radar.
"I'll teach you the spell, just calm down," I whispered.
"Fuck you. Fuck you straight to hell," Zerrious growled, no longer yelling. I thought my attempt at peace had failed. Well, I had wanted to go see Nyah again, though it hurt my soul to consider abandoning this quest, even though it wasn't my own. "Fine, teach me the damned spell and maybe I'll believe you."
"You wont regret this, I promise. Let's get a seat in a bar and some drinks, then I'll teach you there," I said, quickly stepping behind a trader who was breathing on the orb to be admitted into the city.
"At least I found out something my center can do," Zerrious muttered under his breath as he joined me with a glare, keeping me at arms length. I guessed I wasn't supposed to hear that, but I did and it healed a little bit of the regret I was feeling.
"I really am sorry," I said quietly before the guards started talking to us.