I help Bali strap on the rest of her armor, all the while keeping an eye on the silent woman who continues to stand in the center of our campground. She watches me with strange, quiet eyes, but her face is as placid as a pond, and I cannot read anything from her. Bali helps me out of my bloody clothing and blasts me with warm water before letting me change and helping with my steel breastplate. Apparently, the water trick costs Bali no mana, something about earthspeakers having affinities for certain elements.
It is a half hour later when Halford returns with the other two boys. Kapin wears his new riveted steel plates; several indentations mar the armor. He carries in his arms an unconscious woman, an elven girl whose pale alabaster skin displays raised purple veins.
“Bali, can you help her.” he asks when he reaches the middle of the camp, laying the girl gingerly on the ground in front of the party’s healer.
Bali bites her lip as she sets a hand on the elven girl’s forehead. “She’s so cold,” she whispers. The woman is on the verge of tears. “I will do what I can.” She spends the next hour ignoring everything else around her other than the girl in front of her. She trickles a light drip of water into the girl’s mouth and prays for her to survive.
Halford looks seriously at the sight but leaves after a few minutes to start digging through his own tent. After I notice, Jellian does as well, and we watch my brother go into his tent and retrieve something from his pack. He holds a metallic filigree up to the morning light, it is shaped in a globe, the intricate lines of the metalwork shaped like swords.
“Is it time?” Jellian asks, seeing my brother holding the orb.
“I could feel it after the fight. Pushing myself against that many of them at the same time, which must have been enough to put me over the edge,” Halford answers.
“You can become rank two!” I cringe from my own explanation, embarrassed. I realize what it is that Halford is holding, it’s a soul cage. For weeks the only thing that Kapin and Halford have been discussing is what soul cages they are going to commission. They have eagerly related to me about how the material and form of the soul cage a person uses to house their souls in the physical world will have a significant effect on them; after all, a soulcage is where a soul lives. They had also told me that people usually used expensive material for their construction. The one Halford holds up looks to be made of silver.
“I’m going to try,” he says back with a smirk. Halford walks away a bit and sits on the ground with his legs crossed.
Between my brother’s meditation and Bali ministrations for the wounded elven girl, the campground grows silent. Jellian busies himself with checking and rechecking the perimeter, and Kapin starts eating breakfast. Mostly, we watch my brother as he attempts to ascend to the second magical rank.
After a dozen or so minutes, Halford holding the soul cage in his lap, sweat starts to run down his back. After twenty, a light begins to blink on and off inside the soul cage. The light pulses a mixture of silver and red light with the beating of my brother’s heart. Soon the light becomes a steady shine of bright light, slowly revolving, its twin colors always shifting.
Halford brings the cage to his chest, and ever so slowly, pushes the soul cage into his chest. The metal ball of silver halts against his skin. Halford continues his meditation, struggling against his own soul to pull it all the way into our world. The soul cage slips into his body, flowing into him like a breath of air. The light like blood on a sword shines from his skin so brilliantly that it is impossible to see.
I blink back tears, trying to find the world hidden behind the blinding white that I see. The blindness is temporary, and when I can see again, I find my brother transformed, standing in the middle of the camp.
He has gotten taller again, in fact, he is the tallest man I’ve ever seen at a few inches over seven feet. His muscles have grown more compact, and his mop of hair falls straight over his shoulders and down his chest like a river of glossed gold. His face irks me, I can still recognize my brother in it, but his nose and chin have become distinct and perfect while his eyes have taken on the crystal blue of the river in the twilight.
“It worked,” Kapin breathes. “It worked!”
“It did.” Even Halfords voice has become more manly. He is now at the peak of humans, rank three will push him over that edge into his permanent magician’s body, and like all third rankers, it will take on a magical quality that will make him something greater than human.
“Can you feel your new abilities?” Jellian asks. The greatest meaning behind the ranking system that essentia magicians use is how many abilities each of their essentia grant. I’m told that the previous abilities of the essentia users also grow more powerful with rank.
“I can,” Halford says. He casts out his hand, and his familiar greatsword falls into his right hand. He puts out his left, and a dark sword appears there. It is not as long as his golden greatsword, it appears to merely be a longsword, but its blade is the color of night, and a red smoke mists off of it. I try to stop the idea coming to me and fail; he looks like the god Gan Mori--Exeter's son and principal of war.
“Do you know what your soul presence is?” Jellian asks.
“I do,” Halford says, planting his two swords in the ground before him. “I do!” he exclaims. His face grows serious once more and his attention disappears somewhere inside himself.
“What is a soul presence?” I ask Kapin. I have heard them throw the term around a few times, I didn’t really understand.
“That’s right, you can’t feel soul presences at rank zero,” Kapin says back to me. “The more powerful an essentia magician becomes, the better they can perceive the power and souls of others. All you can really do at rank one is feel them. At rank two, one of the abilities you gain will absolutely be a soul presence ability, it lets you use your soul to affect the world directly. There is a lot more to soul presence, but they don’t exactly teach that kind of thing in our backward part of the world.”
“And I think that I have an idea on what it does,” Halford says, responding to our conversation. He stares at a tree ten feet away from him, then after a look of confusion, moves closer. When he is six feet away from the tree, there is a crack as the bark explodes, like an axe has just been swung into it. The cut in the tree is deep, not as deep as what Halford could do with his hands, but it looks seriously lethal. Halford smiles in delight, dozens of cuts land on the trunk of the tree in a blink, the invisible cutting force chipping through the entirety of the tree trunk in the span of a few seconds. The tree falls away from us. “The range seems somewhat low.”
“That’s incredible,” I say. My brother turns and beams a smile at my words. He is like an old hound, easy to forget that just a little while ago he had been trying to pick a fight with me.
We find Bali back at the top of the campground, her knees pulled up and her face hidden in her arms. The elven girl lays on the ground in front of her, the raised, black veins beneath her skin having spread all over her, purpling her white skin with bruising. I sit with her beneath the tree, rubbing small circles on her back while she stays silent and still. Though I try not to, I can’t help but look at the dead girl laying in the damp leaves.
No one could mistake her for being asleep. That is what I’ve always heard. The only dead person that I’ve ever been close to was my grandfather Roan. My mother kept me from seeing him at his funeral, but through the tears and strained voices of the adults around me, I remember hearing about how he looked like he was merely sleeping when the dirt was thrown over him. This elven girl, there is nothing peaceful about her. Her left eye stays open, staring up at the tree canopy overhead, bloodshot eye unseeing, a bare speck of mud clinging to the iris. I can see the wound I missed when she had been brought into the camp, an angry, twin gash of black and purple puckering around her collarbone. The sight of it makes me touch my own collarbone where the boiling python bit into me. I hug Bali, but she doesn’t stir, the phantom pain of the snake attack still firing electricity into me. I find out that the elves lose their flowery scent in death, the sweet fragrance I get from her now is wrong and burns my eyes.
The boys move off, speaking in hushed tones, planning no doubt.
We have our breakfast while Kapin explains where he found the girl. When alerted by the scream, he ran off into the forest in the direction of the noise, only finding the elven girl, spasming from the poisonous bite she had taken. He over indulges, he can’t help it, but the mood is no longer right for his braggadocio.
“Then I found it,” he says, taking a serious tone. “On the way back to the camp, with the girl, the azure rabbit attacked me.”
Kapin’s story captures my attention, my soggy jerky momentarily forgotten. The man waits for Jellian to come join us from where he was performing rites over the dead elven girl. He has lain a sheet over her, I don’t know where he has gotten it from.
“You did see it then,” Halford prompts.
“I did.” Kapin nods. He points to the new dents and pocks in his armor. “I assume that I did anyway. A blue rabbit the size of a dog attacked me. When it hit me, well, I’m just glad that I have a defensive power. It felt like you hitting me Halford, maybe like you hitting me now.”
“That likely means that this is a strength-type azure rabbit,” Bali mumbles over her bread. “That woman said it was a possibility.”
“Probably,” Kapin agrees. He rubs his hand over the steel breastplate he wears, thicker and more expensive than my own, a concave dent in the metal stretches over his heart. “That thing can kick, that’s for sure.” Kapin nods to the covered body of the elven girl. “Do we think it did that to her as well.”
“Maybe,” I say. “She has a bite on her neck, two marks, like a rabbit might have. This is a monster rabbit, so I don’t really know. Don’t remember that Willian woman mentioning them being poisonous or anything.”
“Venomous,” Jellian corrects.
“Whatever.”
“There is a lot that we don’t know about the monsters on this mountain,” Halford says. “The only one that I’ve even heard about before was that dire porcupine. These claw monsters.” He shrugs over-muscled shoulders. “Let’s treat this rank two monster like it is venomous until we know otherwise. Let us also assume that it has more abilities that we don’t know about. We’ve never fought a rank two monster, we might have heard about what they can do, but I don’t think any of us really know.”
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“I fought it,” Kapin says.
“And how did that go for you?” I ask.
“It kicked me through a tree,” he says with an empty grin.
“So, poorly.”
“I cannot follow you,” Jellian says to Halford. “I have not finished the rites for my kin. I cannot leave her alone here.”
Emotion flashes across Halford’s face. He opens his mouth to respond, closing it with a click instead, and nodding. He turns to Bali. “Are you with me?”
“Always,” she says. She has recovered some of her pallor with the food, but she still looks in a bad way.
“Then we had better hurry,” Halford says, standing and dusting off the damp leaves that cling to him.
“Now,” I say as I stand as well. “You don’t want to take care of the bodies of those other monsters first?”
“No.” He looks down at me, and for the first time that I can remember, I am intimidated by him. “The first priority is winning this competition. If we know where the target is, then I am not going to be naïve enough to believe that no one else will find out as well. We will win, and then we will return and take care of the other monsters.”
“Can we even win?” Bali asks. “You said it yourself, this is a rank two monster.”
“Bali, right now I feel like I could beat anything.” Halford’s smile is infectious.
“You are still just a man, Halford,” she says.
“Not for much longer.”
A man and woman stand shoulder to shoulder on a rocky island in the middle of the monster infested forest. The woman holds a staff, its ruby head glowing with heat and power, while her left arm hangs limp, a bruising twist at her shoulder making the limb and the buckler shield strapped to her wrist useless. She breathes heavy, onyx hair clinging to her sweaty face, drool running from her huffing lips. The man beside her sports a myriad of superficial cuts across his tan skin, but he sneers at the monster in front of him with defiance and mania. The second man, on the ground behind them, continues his bawling scream, clutching at his right knee that bends in the wrong direction.
The rabbit, the monster before them, is blue in the way some shepherd hounds are, more of a swampy gray. Malignant, beady eyes stare out from a face split by sharp, protruding teeth that still drip with the viscera of its most recent kill. The adventures' weapon’s shake from the tightness of their fists about them. When the monster moves, it springs from one spot like a missile, racing faster than any arrow, trying to go straight through whatever is its target. Behind the monster, lying headless amid the wreckage of a boulder that had been the size of a small house, their fourth party member lies.
The monster begins to move, slowly gathering its legs fully beneath itself as its eyes narrow on the screaming man behind the two. The woman tries to raise her shield, but the pain in her arm makes her stumble, almost fall. The man with swords screams a wordless roar at the beast, torn between shielding his injured friend with his own body or to allow the monster to pass him by. If he intercepts the creature, he is certain that he will end up like his cousin back on the rocks. He stands his ground between the monster and his friend anyway.
The monster screams a hiss at the two, its forked tongue darting out past three rows of drill-like teeth. They see it make the same move it has made several times already; it crouches and lowers its head like a battering ram toward them.
A blur, silent and huge, appears from out of the air next to the monster. A booted foot strikes out from the resolving image of a massive man, catching the azure rabbit in the ribs, and sending it soaring back through the air like a cannon shot. Another boulder in the clearing explodes as the monster makes contact with it. The sound is like the collapsing of a mineshaft, rattling and echoing through the forest.
“I’ll be taking this one,” Halford says to the two adventurers that stare up at him, dumbstruck. “You can thank me later.”
I am far behind my brother making it to the clearing. Kapin sticks next to Bali and me, though we both know that he could run much faster if he wanted to. The dust kicking up from the destroyed boulder is still drifting through the air, making it stale, when I stop to catch my breath. Though my brother offers the injured pair a sincere smile, he never removes his eyes from where he has punted the azure rabbit.
“Bali,” he commands.
“I’m on it.” Bali rushes past me to the injured adventurers, immediately beginning to apply her healing.
“Cover everyone,” Halford tells Kapin.
“So, you’re going to take it on yourself?” he asks, hefting his shield.
“That’s the plan.” Halford holds his hands in the air, two blades of light and ink appear out of the air and fall into them. “It doesn’t seem so tough.”
“Yeah,” Kapin says, his eyes lingering on the body of the adventurer in the rocks. “Don’t get too cocky.”
“Never.”
The monster comes back out of the rubble it was launched into like a cannonball. I barely see it before it collides with the flat end of Halford’s swinging sword. His swing propels the monster through a tree and into the bare face of a cliff that climbs further up the mountain for another fifty feet. Halford laughs so hard at the beast that he almost doubles over.
I find it hard to do anything. My feet stay planted to the stone as I watch my brother manhandle the deadly creature like it were a kitten. My crossbow lies forgotten in my fingers.
When the creature comes shooting toward Halford again, three antlers, like the decrepit limbs of a tree, jut out of its head. I don’t see the move my brother makes, it is too fast for my eyes. Halford’s sword flashes, the monster collides with him. Halford and the monster tumble, bouncing together in a jumble off the stone and dirt, before colliding with the trunk of a tree. The tree groans, shedding small, sickly fruit from its branches as vibration shakes through it.
We are all frozen, watching on as Halford disentangles himself from the azure rabbit. Black ichor runs from the monster’s mouth, its beady eyes staring in different directions as Halford hefts its corpse, impaled through the chest on his sword.
“Halford!” Bali shouts, and then I see it too. The monster’s antlers stab into my brother’s chest, six points of impact that dig all the way through him, protruding out his back. Bali stands to run to him, forgetting her current patient, but he stops her with a motion of his hand.
A sickening sucking sound cuts the still air as we all watch Halford grip the monster’s head, and then with a roar of pain and triumph, rip the azure rabbit’s antlers out of his chest. My brother stumbles to a knee as he tosses the corpse aside, and I find my feet. I am running to him even as golden light begins to peel off his skin. He is standing by the time I make it over to him, and I watch as the gory mess in his chest knits itself back together. Even with magic, I can’t believe what I see. Halford winces when I touch the spot on his chest that is hardly more than a scratch any longer, and he laughs when he takes in the sight of my confusion.
“I told you,” he says. “It wasn’t that tough.”
I can’t take my eyes off him as we return to the campground, no one can. After healing the injured adventurers and seeing them off, Bali checked Halford all over for any wound that he might be trying to hide. He walks at the head of our group of four, bare-chested and carrying a blue fur pack over his shoulder that I received from disenchanting the corpse of the monster. I can’t blame him for showing off his new, grand physique; I probably would be doing the same if I were in his shoes.
That woman is with us again, we found her standing on the edge of the clearing, waiting, watching. There is an amusement in her eyes. I don’t like it.
We collect Jellian who has bound the dead girl in furs and made her body safe for travel. Halford puts me to work breaking down the bodies of the monsters that ambushed us that morning. The total haul is beyond anything I could have imagined: an assortment of copper, iron, and bronze coins, sixty-eight silver coins, three gold pieces, seven daggers that seem to be made of the claw monsters’ fingers and which cut through bark like butter, meat from the rabbit that will rapidly accelerate Kapin’s advancement to rank two, some kind of magical stone that contains the azure rabbit’s eyeball inside, and, best of all, an attunement stone of strength.
Even Jellian, the most knowledgeable on magical matters in the group, only has cursory knowledge of how an attunement stone works. He explains that they can augment a singular magical ability of an individual, the most common types of attunement stones being elemental in nature. He has never seen one used before and has never met anyone who has used one. When we reach the cage elevator, Halford stands at the top of the cliff, operating it for everyone he sends on ahead without effort.
I don’t think my brother has stopped grinning for the last hour or more. The chain of the elevator rattles as he lets it out hand over hand, giving Bali and Kapin a smooth ride to the ground of the cliff. Jellian waits for them at the bottom. Halford laughs to himself again after setting them down at the bottom of the cliff and moves his foot out over the ledge as if he were planning to step off. I don’t try to stop him, it is hard for me to imagine anything hurting him anymore.
That is the moment that I begin to really understand. When word about our brother Corinth reaching the fifth rank made it back to our little mud pit part of the world, people began to treat the two of us differently. I couldn’t understand it, not then. In my mind, there was no real difference between being a well-respected carpenter or magician, just different occupations. After seeing Halford’s long journey to the place he has arrived at now, I finally understand what it is that everyone respects so much; power. A rank one magician is impressive, incredibly so, they have powers that set them apart from normal humanity, but seeing Halford in action just today, I can see that the gulf between rank one and two is indescribable. I imagine that it must be that way for all the ranks. If I ever meet Corinth again, will I find a god or a man looking back at me from behind his red eyes?
“I think I’ve made my mind up,” I say.
Halford turns to me as he hauls on the chain, bringing the elevator back up for me and the silent woman. “About what?”
“I think that I know what I want to do. I’m going to use that Snake Essentia, and I am going to become a powerful essentia magician, like you.”
The chain hitches for a moment as he pulls on it. The smile disappears from Halford’s face, and he turns away from me, focusing on the elevator. Behind me, the silent woman lets out the first sound I have ever heard her make, she barks a harsh laugh to herself and removes a scrap of paper from the folds of her habit, taking a moment to write something there.
“I don’t have it anymore,” Halford says back to me.
“What?”
“I needed the money,” Halford says, his hauling on the chain slows. “I could feel how close I was to rank two and knew that I would need a soul cage on this trip. They are expensive, especially--”
“You sold it!” My voice echoes into the trees behind us, bouncing back to me like the whine of a child. “You promised that you wouldn’t do that!”
“We can still get it,” Halford says to me, irritation in his voice. “There is no chance that Mr. Gleece has managed to sell it yet, there isn’t enough money in West Grove that essentia just get snatched up at the first opportunity. With the money that we have now, it will be easy to buy it back. Better, with the money we have now, we can finally move out of this backwoods province and go somewhere with real challenges and real money to be made. I’ll buy you all new essentia, better ones, ones that you won’t regret using.”
“You sold it!” I repeat.
“I can get you better ones.”
“I can’t believe you!”
“What is so important about that one, eh?” Halford hooks the chain on the line and turns back to me. “Why do you want a Snake Essentia so badly? I just don’t understand it.”
“Because you promised that you wouldn’t sell it.” I stab my nail into his chest, and see that I was wrong, something can hurt him. “Because I was the one who made it. Money, meat, whatever else, I don’t care about that stuff, but this was the first thing that my stupid power gave me that I actually wanted. You promised me that you wouldn’t get rid of it, and you lied to me, Halford. I trusted you with that.”
I watch as his eyes dart back and forth over me. He stumbles for something to say but comes up short. Turning back to the chain with a grimace, he gives a single, hard haul on the elevator and brings it all the way to the top, locking it in place.
“We’ll get it when we get back,” he mumbles to me. He frowns back at me when I don’t say anything, opening the door to the cage elevator. “Are you going, or do I need to carry you down.”
Scowling back at him, I march into the elevator alongside the silent woman. I can’t stop tapping my foot on the wooden flooring as the elevator begins a bumpless descent back to the ground. I’m not just angry with Halford, though I certainly am that, but I am also angry at myself for throwing a fit over this. I hate that it hurts me so much because I know in my head that he is probably right about needing to sell it, he is usually right about most things. If he hadn’t bought a soul cage before coming up the mountain, then who knows what might have happened.
The silent woman slips a piece of paper into my hand as we ride the elevator down. When I look to her, she stares out at the rolling hillside as placid and innocent as stone. There aren’t many words written on the paper, but they are enough to boggle my mind. I tuck the paper securely away before we reach the ground, it wouldn’t do for anyone else to see.