-Sixteen Years Earlier-
-Averix, Garma's Rest-
Knox
The first time he felt pain, it had come from his mother.
They had come back home from seeing another Physique in Garma's Rest - a tiny, tucked away hamlet on the edge of Averix's Goba Desert, remarkable only in its utter un-remarkability. The residents of Garma's Rest were born with an eternal chagrin that their town was little more than a place for the unmotivated to rest. Adventurers who had had enough of their travels. Disgraced political figures who wished to retreat from the wider world. Condemned soldiers who rejected Amaratian rule and all their military obligations. Garma's Rest was a place for the solemn, for the debased, and for the disgraced.
His mother did not belong there.
His mother - he can't remember her name - she was a woman of conviction. All frayed, wild hair ending in disheveled curls, with eyes that flamed like two lambent, fiery crystals at even the slightest insult. She always dressed herself in her best jewels, her best rags, and covered herself in nothing but the finest ointments which the Yok'ra merchants brought into town - squandering all the money her ailing husband had left her with on these small attempts to seem presentable. When her useless husband died, she wasted no time in selling his useless adventuring armor, bastard sword, and the little treasures he had obtained from his idiotic dead-end job. The fact he hadn't died sooner had irked her relentlessly - such fury was the real reasons for her sleepless nights on those days when he came home late, and (perhaps to her credit) when he did come home he threw his arms around what he assumed was his stalwart, loving wife, who had waited up for him. But she had been counting the days even on those nights, cursing herself that some stray creature born of the great pit up North hadn't yet consumed him and shat out his dumb, decrepit body.
The only useful thing he ever did was give her a son. And even then, he gave her a failure.
She'd named him Knox because he was born on the day when the single red sun above reached its equinox. She'd squealed with delight when the midwife had told her it was a bad omen. Bad, good - it didn't matter. It was exceptional! Unusual! It was something that would mark the young one as distinct from the other wasters in her life.
Yet, even from the moment of his birth, he'd mocked her. He'd thrown all her effort to bring him into the world right back in her face the moment he'd opened his blood-spattered eyes.
No screaming. No wails. Not even a little cough of life had escaped from the baby's throat. He just sat there, on her cushioned bassinet glistening with inset topaz, and did nothing.
She rocked him, and he did not laugh.
She sang to him. She belted out renditions of the most beautiful songs she'd heard from all the bards she'd dreamt of running away with.
Still, not even a mutter.
She'd played with him. She'd bought him stuffed bears with money that could have fed a family of four. Still - nothing.
He just sat there - a mute, tanned little pebble.
When he was four she took him to his first Physique - a traveling doctor who had set up shop in the town. She never had trusted traditional medicine, but her desperation had grown in the months since her husband's death. Sympathy was on her side. Free of charge, the Jilae doctor had examined her son with his sharp bird eyes. He'd conducted experiments with leeches to test for anemia, he'd pricked his skin to try and get a reaction, he'd even tried some of his cultural acupuncture to try and unlock what he called his 'blocked Chi'.
But the boy said nothing. Did nothing. He was just a dumb, mute creature. And the Jilae, carefully, with attempted empathy, told her as much.
That was the first day she hit him. She threw him into his high chair and slapped him, hard, across his face. His eyes grew, the amber pupils pulsing like a vein of popping gold, and his little body started to shake.
But still, he said nothing.
She hurt him plenty of times after that day. At first, to see if she could coax something from him - a scream of pain, a wail of betrayed anguish. But he did nothing but look up at her with his dumb, deep, sad eyes.
It was enough to send her over the edge. It was enough to drive anyone insane.
Some nights after she'd pricked his skin with plyers or poked his eyes she'd sit across from him, amidst the jungle of smashed furniture her house had become, and she'd feel his gaze on her. Never faltering. Unblinking. Torturing her with his unrelenting silence. Eventually, even the infliction of pain on him did nothing to dull the growing knowledge in her mind that she should give up. Even her womb was an unremarkable thing - capable of producing something that could only mimic a truly living creature.
She resigned herself to sleeping most days of her later life, while her son was left to interrogate the world on his own, in the mocking silence that followed him like a jesting specter.
But his mind was not as silent as his mouth, or his lame limbs. As his mother languished under her increasing depression, taking to wasting the rest of her money on expensive liquors and lusting after men who would never spare a glance in her direction, her son's mind reached out to the world, seeking a way to replicate the one sensation that connected him to this reality: pain.
At first, he used animals to explore his newfound interest. A small puppy often frequented the well just outside his mother's house for a drink, and Knox soon understood that through offering the creature water above and beyond its usual intake, he could easily coax it into his garden. As he held out his hand and let the creature drink from it, his other disheveled, scarred paw reached out to grab it by the scruff of its neck and pulled, hard. The dog squealed in surprise and agony, and he received a bite and a snarl for his trouble before letting the creature go.
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He stood in panic as he saw it run off, and with indescribable fear he made to run after the mongrel and hide it from his mother's site. He did not wish the little creature to become her new plaything. He was hers, and the dog would be his. He would give it the same love she had given him - the only true love in the world.
And as his frenzied panic reached its pinnacle, he felt his mind reach through the air and his hand fly to grab at the thing before it cleared the garden door:
GLANCE Type: Wind
Incantation: Galechain
Effect: Telekinesis up to 60ft (up to a weight of 45kg)
His eyes bulged when he saw the little scampering creature bark against the wind that kicked up beneath its paws and drag its tiny body back to him. It looked up at him with new eyes, now. And when he reached down to claw his hands across its fur, it did not try running again.
His hands - they tingled now. It felt like little maggots were writhing underneath the soft flesh of his palms. His veins pulsed with new energy - new power. Something in him that had woken up in his moment of fear.
He turned his hands round - once, twice - and flexed his fingers. He closed his eyes as he felt the very air itself coil between them, tickling the notched webbing between his digits. He was feeling more than just himself now. He was feeling the world running through him.
The next day, he found his little friend at the well again, and this time the shaggy creature came to him without even the promise of water. It rolled over on its side, and let him stroke it. But the mind of young Knox was interested in more than its matted fur and wagging tail. He touched the creature's belly, and closed his eyes. He breathed in.
The world came into him and gathered at the tips of his fingers.
Glance Type: Wind
Incantation: Air Slash
Effect: 10 pts DMG (Wind) on touch
He looked down when he felt the dog yelp in pain and saw where his fingers had made their incision - a small, bleeding wound gaped in the center of the dog's abdomen, and as it wriggled to be free it bit his shaking hand. He let it run away this time, still bleeding from its belly, and looked at his own wound - the result of the dog's vengeance.
Sudden excitement possessed him and he squeezed his hand, hard, feeling the blood run down the inside of his palm, through his fingers, pooling on the hot desert sands below and smearing them with a bright, stark crimson. He fell, exhaled sharply, and lay there for the rest of the day, his hand emptying itself slowly onto the parched earth beneath him.
And in his dreams, the world entered into him again, breathing its life into his blood in the world of dark silence that he loved, craved:
Glance Type: Wind
Incantation: Healing Breeze
Effect: 20pts HP Restoration
He opened his eyes with the burning curiosity of one first taking in the sights and sensations of a totally foreign land. When he looked at his once wounded hand he saw that the dog's bite had vanished - his skin miraculously stitched together as he slept.
He lay there, mouth agape, and memorized the feeling of what had occurred during his dreams. He knew he could do it, too, now. And so he lay on the searing sands of his mother's garden for the remainder of the day, breathing heavy, mouth open. It was the only means he had to express his joy.
The next day, after receiving a liberal beating from his mother for staying out too late, he made a point of finding the dog again. It wasn't hard. He'd come back for water to wash his festering wound, and as Knox drew near the shambling creature barely even moved. He took it into the garden, ran his fingers across the growing purulence of the cut, and closed his eyes.
Healing Breeze
He saw the dog's eyes open with what might have been delight, and then he knew that this animal was just like him. When he let it go it shook its fur and licked the very same hand that had inflicted its pain. From then on, the dog was his.
The comparisons he'd started to recognize between human being and animals became only more pronounced as the days rolled on. The dog came to him every day, and he began to experiment - some days he'd slash the thing with his strange powers until it screamed for mercy and hobbled, barely living, from the garden. Then, the next day, it would hobble back, and he'd regenerate all the lost skin, the faded tissue, and heal any infected scratches he'd carved into the creature. Once, he had been stroking the thing calmly, looking out into the desert winds, and a sudden desire had come upon him. His hands slowly reached down from the being's skull and settled on its right eye. He let the air of the world course through him and when he opened his own eyes again the creature had skirted off with its eye trailing from its socket.
The next day, right on time, the dog found him and he healed that, too.
It was not fury that drove him to hurt the being. Nor was it anything as base - as irritatingly ordinary - as a desire to enact some form of vengeance against the world and his mother for her beatings, and for the strange men she brought home to disturb the quiet of the house. He saw the dog in the same way a child sees building blocks, or stones - as a tool to learn. It was nothing more or less than a medium through which he could interrogate his ideas about the relationships between beings in the world he'd been born into. His mother, after all, had only taught him about pain. He needed to know more, and his voracious appetite for learning about interactions between living things was realized through the only means he could find. And he was a quick learner.
By employing the strange powers he had, he learned that he could break the dog and rebuild it like a toy. And yet, no matter the promise of pain or peace his increasingly confident hands represented, the dog would always come back. This was when he began to form his theory: this dog and he were linked, as were all animals and the bipedal mortals like him who called themselves 'humans'.
We all bled, we all cursed, we all inflicted unimaginable pain on each other every day. His mother had taught him how cruel human life could be. He had in turn delivered the same lesson to the dog he now held in his hands. Yet, even when such pain was assured, the small always craved the attention of the strong. He still curled up next to his mother every night, knowing that the next day would bring at least once drunken, rage-filled beating. In the same way, the dog always returned to him, even as he had inflicted terrible cruelty upon the beast.
He at first thought this comparison made them both equally pathetic. But then his mind wandered, seeking answers beyond the emotional, and settled on something: it was not misery that drove them, but comfort. A desire for connection. Because the greatest pain - beyond even physical scars or mental anguish, lies in isolation.
All life seeks connection. All life seeks companionship. Every body casts a shadow, and may never throw it off, no matter how dark.
So he kept the dog as his mother kept him, and through his experiments on its body he gained all the knowledge he needed of the world. He knew then what his place was in it. Just like his mother had always wanted, he would be exceptional. He would teach the rest of the world what he knew. He would deliver to them the true meaning of the word love.
And he would start with her.