It is a strange thing to mostly know about your brother from the stories others tell you. I can barely remember anything about him myself, and at this point I have a hard time knowing if the memories I do have are really mine or what I have invented in my head from hearing stories. The man that Arabella paints for me in her story is a stranger. I wonder if I would even recognize him if I saw him.
“Should you have told me about that last part?” I ask. “A secret door inside of the grandmaster’s mansion sounds like it would be a secret.”
Arabella shrugs. “I wanted to tell you the whole truth as I know it. I realize that I am not very good at mentoring; I have only just started trying to understand how to do so. I never had a mentor growing up. Tutors, sure; I had a plethora of teachers to give me assignments and to teach me the fundamentals of spellwork and the trade, but everyone that I admired, that I looked up to, was so far out of my reach, too distant to come to know in that way.”
She sighs, her composure faltering for the first time that I have seen as her shoulder sag. “I am not so good at looking at things from other people’s perspectives. I tried working with Coriander for months before I recruited Jor’Mari. I thought that she was coming along, that she was getting to a place where she could open up to others, but I see now that I was deluded in this thinking. She hurts you know; deep down she is so afraid.”
“I don’t particularly care,” I say. “She had Kendon stab me and push me off of a cliff.”
“She did,” Arabella says. “It is the things that people do which decide their fate, decide how we view them, not the sympathies they might be capable of evoking. That is just, isn’t it? Like I said before, I will not stand in your way. She might not have injured me, but I find her actions sickening. Do as you will with her.”
Something in the way that she says it inspires a bit of disgust in me. How can this woman go from admitting that she tried to get close to this girl for months to throwing her aside so easily. Coriander never did anything to Arabella directly. I discard that distaste; I don’t see how it might serve me. Arabella is trying to make amends, even an idiot could see that, all that is left for me to do is decide if I will accept her.
“You want to be truthful with me now?” I ask.
“I will. Ask what you will.”
“Why did you not tell me about how awful this contest would be?” I ask. “You made it this big secret, but even before the contest began, I found out that nearly all of the competitors had some kind of idea of what would be happening. There was never a real secret there.”
She smiles. “I get blamed for following the rules. No, it isn’t as if the contest itself is some large secret. The general details are known; we have many generations of nobility that send their young through the Passage, though the specific details of each trial are meant to be kept a secret. When the outline for the Passage was presented to us almost a year ago, there was an emphasis on keeping the details from the participants. Unfortunately for me, it would appear that I actually obeyed.”
“I can’t decide which is worse. Knowing that we are about to step into a bloodbath or finding out by surprise. No, it is obvious that knowing would have been better,” I say.
“Would the girl that I brought here have done anything if she knew?” Arabella asked. “I might not have been a great mentor, but you were not exactly an eager student either. I gave you access to reading materials and training facilities, but you hardly used them to push yourself.”
I wince, knowing that she is right. “It’s embarrassing to know that it took getting stabbed, tossed onto rocks, and nearly dying to make me interested in magic, truly interested. If it never came down to me risking my life, to having to make myself better in order not to be eaten by monsters or killed by my fellow competitors, I don’t think that I ever might have. I still hate those two, but I can recognize that they pushed me over some barrier.”
Arabella looks to the sky, to the illusion that she is no doubt casting on the ceiling of the indoor field. Her eyes scan the emptiness, seeming to mull over something. “This was never meant to be a bloodbath,” she says.
“What?”
“I took the Passage. Exeter, it has been thirty-nine years since I was in this same tower, pushing myself to climb the fastest. In my entire Passage, I believe that only three people lost their lives–out of five hundred and sixteen participants. Each died at the hands of a monster. That isn’t to say that there wasn’t strife between the competitors; factions formed, alliances were made, and a few skirmishes broke out, but no one killed each other.
Young nobles are taught restraint, generally, as a part of their tutelage. When you are to become strong enough to crush stone with a flick of the wrist, knowing restraint from an early age is essential. Those that bear the brunt and harsher realities of life prior to becoming a magician generally understand restraint as a rule. Funnily enough, when an issue like that does come up, it is often the immature girls that show a lack of restraint,” she says, looking at me in a peculiar way. “Something about giving real strength and power to someone who has never been able to hold that over anybody in their lives leads to abuse.”
“I have restraint,” I say.
“Many who have watched your progression aren’t so sure. I’ve gotten off topic. What I meant to illustrate is that this contest was never meant to be, and never has been, a bloodbath. That first day was shocking, an overreach in my opinion, and even though most who fell on that first day were able to be recovered, I still hate how it was done. Past that, all of this bloodiness has been on the hands of the competitors, and something else as well.” She looks skyward once more before nodding to herself. “Something strange is happening in this competition.”
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t exactly know. Normally, I would be back in Grim, sipping wine and watching the proceedings from the comfort of my villa, but I have been called to hold the tower. There is something affecting the people in the Passage, a subtle influence that seems to carry with it thoughts of conflict and a lowering of violent inhibitions. We think that this influence is responsible for the fighting and wanton murder.”
“What could do that?” I ask.
“It is difficult to say. In this world, with so many disparate and unknown powers lurking in the shadows, it is almost impossible to know. There are theories, though nothing has yet been confirmed.” Her eyes bore into me with their seriousness. “I tell you this to put you on guard. The authority believes that to inform the participants would spark chaos and suspicion, but I disagree. I might not be willing to go so far as to directly defy them, but in this place where I am in my power, where they cannot spy on me so freely as I converse with one of the young people that I have sent into this situation, I will reveal it to you. If you notice that you are being pushed into conflict by some outside force, steel yourself. We might not know what is causing this, but we can be assured that it does not have our best interest in mind.”
I study the woman’s face for a long moment. “How can I trust anything you say?” I ask. “I told you already that I do not trust you.”
“Believe me or don’t,” she says. “All I can do now to earn your trust is to be earnest. I will tell you the truth because I believe that you deserve to know it. Eventually, you will see that I am being truthful. I can only hope that your suspicion doesn’t lead you into disaster before that time comes.”
Without another word, Arabella stands and vanishes into thin air. I look once more to the Dispatch that continues to hover over the center of the field, finding a copy of the woman still standing upon it, watching the proceeding match over her staff with a bored expression. I watch the match as well, but my thoughts are far from the bodies that slam into one another, trying to eke out even the barest advantage.
I think that today I saw Arabella for the first time. At least the facade that she presented was more relatable than the one she showed off before. When I first saw the woman, I thought of her as some otherworldly being: beautiful, majestic, powerful. She is those things, but I am starting to suspect that she might also be a person underneath all of the pretension and aloofness.
Her face when she spoke about failing the five of us, the sorrow in her eyes, it seemed real. A part of my mind reminds me that the woman uses illusions, and that to trust anything she puts on display would be foolish, even if I don’t believe that she is directly hostile toward me. Another part of me wants to believe her. I know full well that she is a horrible mentor, she barely taught me anything, and by her own admission she failed in that respect. Despite that, she was the one that provided me with essentia, and not just any essentia, but incredibly valuable and rare ones.
If I had stayed with Halford, I am sure that my brother would have eventually helped me gain essentia, especially if I continued to pester him about it; I have to imagine that a rank two adventurer can earn far more coin than a rank one can. Even so, would they have been as rare as the Dragon Essentia, would they have called to me as powerfully as the Magic Essentia had? She also gave me an artifact. Sure, it had taken my eye being stolen to put in my head, but I don’t believe that I would have survived this long without Galea’s help.
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The biggest point against her is that once she gave these things to me, she simply ceased helping. Did she expect me to learn how to be a magician on my own, the way that Corinth had, the way that Halford had? In the end, I suppose that is exactly what ended up happening.
I am pulled from my thoughts by a dark cloud exploding in the center of the field. The black smoke swirls on the grass, engulfing everyone inside it, their shadows cast upon the cloud by flashes of lightning within. The surface of the cloud stills, resolving into a nightscape of a thousand stars, ever-shifting constellations, and a green cloud of spinning nebula. Clarice explodes out of the nightscape turned cloud, dashing forward with a yellow ball held between her hands, a manic look of triumph on her face. A moment later, an explosion of fireworks erupts from the goal, the elven noble having scored the final point for our team.
She hardly has time to take in the victory, standing in the opponent’s goal, puffing with her cheeks flushed red, before she is tackled to the ground by an excited lizardkin woman. I lever myself to my feet, jogging over to join the whooping from my team, sparing a glance back toward our opponents who linger on the ground where the black cloud dissipates. One man among them lets out a tired sigh, shaking his head and brushing the grass off of him, while the woman on his team, the one who did all of the teleporting and most of the work for their team, punches the ground, grunting. In the end, they lost by two points.
Without Lionel in the game, they didn’t stand much of a chance. Despite his good-natured yell to our team, that same man who continues to laugh to himself, holds frustration deep in his eyes, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye when he thinks no one is watching. The other two wear their anger at the outcome more barren. They understand how important that big man was to their team more than we do, I am sure.
“You are a true athlete,” Jasper says as I am walking over to the gathering, faltering and hesitating before laying a hand on Clarice’s shoulder. I might have thought Clarice burned as hot as fire by the way the man pulls his hand back when she glances down at it. “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” she assures, clearly puzzled by the man. It occurs to me that she might not have ever met a man like this before considering the circles that she used to swim in. The nobility so far has struck me as a socially adept sort. Jasper reminds me of some of the young boys back home, more afraid of girls than of finding snakes or spiders in their boots. “I think Jess deserves more of the valor for this victory.”
“We all did our part,” Jess beams. “Even you Jasper.” She has no problem wrapping a long arm around the man’s shoulders squeezing him and setting his face to blushing. “Once I started listening to you, the paths began to open up. Well, for a little bit.”
“Sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “With that one in the blue in front of me like that, I couldn’t see so clearly.”
“Do you specialize in perception?” I ask him, though my Eye of Volaash tells me clearly that he does not. Ever since attaining Galea, I have often pondered at the attribute. Clearly, once I completed my set of essentia, the way that I see the world completely changed. Everything stands out so much clearer, there are more colors than there were before, but I have never been tempted into putting points into the attribute. Since that first day, stepping out into the street, experiencing the changed world and being overwhelmed by sensation, I have not noticed much of a change to how I see things, despite the attribute increasing alongside my others.
“Oh, heaven above, no,” he says, caught off-guard by the question. “Would that I had an attribute specialization. I have no abilities as fancy as that, though when I had my last soul reading, the magician in charge of the reading did confirm that my perception was high. Many of my abilities seem to involve it, so I get a good workout in it.”
Soul readings, another thing that I needed to learn for myself from one of the books I found on Arabella’s shelf, were a matter of course in the profession. With the right items and spellwork working in concert, a trained magician is able to read the soul of another individual, gaining insight into their souls. Considering that essentia is integrated directly into the soul, such readings allow for a greater understanding into one’s abilities and where they line up attribute wise. In essence, it was a rather vague process that Galea made completely obsolete for me to participate in.
“Are you a perception specialist?” Jasper asks me.
“No,” I say. “Why?”
I see his eyes linger flick back and forth between my right eye and my left. Without a proper mirror to look into, it is easy for me to forget how strange my own eyes have become, one a black orb with a red iris, the other normal except for my pupil having become slit like a lizard’s–or rather a dragon’s.
“No reason,” he demures. His eyes flick back to the entrance to our room, the archway standing open in the illusion of a snowy landscape. “Do you think that he is still upset?”
“Maybe,” I say, looking back to the archway.
“You should go speak to him then,” Jess says.
“Me!” I yell, turning on her. “Why in three hells would I go talk to him?”
“He is your friend, isn’t he?” she says. That catches me out. Certainly, we were being friendly recently, but can I really consider the boorish aristocrat a friend? “If he is going to throw a tantrum and wreck the room, I would rather someone stop him before he goes too far. He seems like the type to lash out when he is angry, and Samielle is still recovering in there.”
“I agree,” Clarice says.
Jasper doesn’t need to say anything, it is as clear as day how frightened the man is of Jor’Mari. I swallow the groan rising in my throat and pace across the field, followed behind at a considerable distance by the other three. Our opponents have already fled back to their own waiting room, but Arabella doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to shuffle us off of the field. In fact, she watches the proceedings from her vantage high overhead; a real look of interest on her face that was absent during the match.
My first step into the room confirms that Jess had been right on the mark about Jor’Mari. The long table at the back of the room lays in two pieces on the floor, a crack running through the center of it. The splinters of a chair lay against the wall, the piece of furniture exploded into a hundred pieces. I find Jor’Mari around the bend where the washroom is, sitting in a shallow puddle, staring up at the ceiling. The indent of a fist is punched into the side of the metal basin, a single break leaking warm water out onto the floor.
“Lionel will recover,” I say.
A long and still moment passes before Jor’Mari turns his eyes away from the ceiling to look up at me. There is a vacancy on his face, and that hurt that I saw before lurks in the darks of his eyes, more near the surface now than I have seen it.
“It was a difficult match without you, but we won. I knew that Jess would be graceful, and she has more stamina than any of them, but Clarice proved just as dexterous. I think that her abilities lend toward obscuring her movement, though she tried to hide what it is that she can do during the match. Jasper wasn’t so bad either. He never put his hand on a ball, but he seems rather adept at reading the movements and intentions of others. Having someone like that around could be useful in a fight.”
Jor’Mari grunts, turning his eyes back toward the ceiling. Water continued to trickle from the basin, a slow drip that echoes through the small alcove. I lean back, seeing the other three keeping their distance at the archway, not venturing inside.
“It’s–”
“You don’t need to push yourself to be kind to me,” Jor’Mari says before I can babble something inane. “We are allied with each other. We share a common goal, but I do not need any false sycophants hanging on. I know full well what you really think of me. My reputation comes well ahead of me. I know that they got to you before we ever exchanged words. I could see it in your eyes.”
“Who got to me?” I ask, stepping into the room, my boots splashing in the shallow water.
“Who else, the elves. I don’t imagine that the Lady Mel’Draven would stoop to gossip with you, but those brothers surely did. The way you looked at me that time we met in the training yard, I knew that my image was poison to you then.”
I scoff, standing over him. “I’ll admit that I didn’t like you then because you were being a prick.”
That catches him by surprise. He looks up at me, “What?”
I can’t help but roll my eyes. “You were talking about my ass right to my face. Do you think that women like that kind of thing?”
“...Yes,” he says. “At least in my experience.”
“Well, I do not,” I say. I try to infect the man with a smirk, but there is just absence on his face. “I don’t hate you, Jor’Mari, and I don’t put much stock in gossip. You are right though, Macille warned me not to get close to you.”
“Called me a murderer no doubt,” Jor’Mari says, looking down at his hands. Ripples spread in rings through the puddle form the constant drip of the basin, somehow turning our reflections that stare up at us sinister. “Everyone says that I am. I hear it when they think I can’t, whispering behind my back, speaking behind closed doors. They sneer as I pass by, talking about my jealousy or my scornful ambition, but…he shouldn’t have died. I didn’t mean for any of that to happen.” His fingers tremble as he stares down at them.
“Your brother,” I say, kneeling in the water next to him. “Macille said that something happened with your brother,” I say in answer to the questioning look he gives me.
“I loved Timmin,” Jor’Mari says. “He was so strong, smarter than he had any right to be, mischievous like a devil. He had a smile that would make you forgive him for putting ivy in your socks or a tack on your chair.” Jor’Mari’s breath hitches. “I can’t see that boy anymore, my smiling brother. All I can see is him on the ground, bent…wrong. He was supposed to be stronger than me. He was the lord’s son, he was endowed, and I am just some bastard that came out backward. How could he just break like that? How can I break people so easy?”
I want to reach out for him, to lay some kind of comfort on him, but my hand hesitates. The pain is there, clear as day on his face now as he stares down at his own hands, grief riven on his face.
“I am a murderer now,” he whispers. “They were all right. Just losing control for a brief moment is enough to make me into the monster everyone knew that I was. The blood won’t ever come off, will it?”
Tears fall from his eyes as his hands sag to the ground, splashing into the puddle beneath us. He shakes, staring down at his own reflection, disgust on his face. As he begins to really cry, to let his pain out with a long and bone-chilling moan, my hesitation leaves me. I wrap up the broken man in my arms, holding him tight as he sobs, as he mumbles his brother’s name. We sit in the puddle, undisturbed, his sorrow pulling my own sadness out of me. My eyes stay dry, no matter how hard I wish to join him. There is something broken inside of me, and I don’t know how to fix it.