Magic is far, far older than the civilisations and powers we know today. Even should we go back ten generations, twenty generations, or perhaps even fifty generations, we still may not find someone that remembers when magic first came into the world.
Excerpt: A History of Magic – Galen Cletus
Sammath sat down next to Ashe after cleaning himself up. The boy’s throw-up was an unwelcome, though not entirely unexpected, gift upon Ashe waking. Looking at Erin’s back, he shook his head and looked at the ground, he’d forgotten that she wasn’t his friend, or at least a pleasant acquaintance. Erin was a spy, and a damn good one too, and the only reason she’d been caught was because Sammath had powers in a place where no one was meant to have powers. No lower-level Shinian Runes could suppress knowledge and understanding, after all, and knowledge and understanding were the basis of Volkarian powers. No, the only reason that Erin was with Sammath and Ashe was that Sammath had threatened Erin with her exposure had she not helped him.
When Erin had offered to train Ashe, he’d taken that as her beginning to care about the boy and his survival when, in reality, it was sheer pragmatism that had forced her to do so. With Ashe as weak as he had been, Ashe had been hindering their ability to escape and return to civilisation, where Erin would likely leave the group to finish her mission. Erin was not their friend; she was doing what was best for her and would likely continue to do so. It just so happened that that aligned with what Sammath and Ashe also needed right now.
When Ashe had began seizing underneath Erin’s training, Sammath had felt a fire overtake him. In the few weeks that Sammath had known the boy, he’d grown fond of Ashe so, when Ashe began to convulse on the ground, clearly in pain and in trouble for following Erin’s guidance, Sammath had immediately been overtaken by the fire in his heart. Blaming Ashe’s condition on Erin’s tutelage, he had threatened to kill her if Ashe had died, but had immediately realised his mistake when she didn’t bow down. Sammath felt a shudder rising in his body as he remembered the look in Erin’s eyes but suppressed it. Only now did Sammath realise just how much of a monster the girl was.
Sammath was powerful. Volkar was the strongest overall power in the continent, with the highest average stage in the population being greater than anywhere else and with the strongest average people at each stage. Everyone knew that Volkar was the strongest power on average, just as they knew that Arikar had the strongest professional soldiers, and Shinia had the strongest equipment and strongest defences.
As someone from the strongest power, Sammath was stronger than nearly anyone else at the same stage as him on Volkar. Sammath knew this from battling against the promising youth of Volkar in the tournament that was hosted every three years. Although Sammath had won overall, proving the strength of his Concept overall, Sammath hadn’t actually won every individual part of the tournament. The only bracket that Sammath had lost in that mattered here, however, was combat. Sammath had fought extremely well, losing only to Astos Balin in the final, but it was in that fight that he’d understood the difference between prodigies and monsters. Sammath was a prodigy, there was no doubt about it, but Astos Balin had been a monster in the ring. Astos, like Sammath, had understood a high-levelled concept that put him at least a step above everyone else. In the case of combat, this included Sammath.
Astos had understood Damage. No matter how hard Sammath had hit Astos, most of the damage that he had been doing to the boy had been pushed back into Sammath’s staff and then, when Sammath’s staff had broken, back into Sammath’s fists and feet. While Astos had taken injuries, the power of Sammath’s Concept and attacks too much to completely ignore, most of the Damage he should have taken was handed right back to Sammath. In the end, Astos had needed only one punch to end the fight with Sammath, after Sammath’s feet had become too broken for him to avoid the punch. Even with the assistance of his Motion Concept.
All of that was to say that not Sammath felt not even Astos would have been able to beat Erin in a fight. When Sammath had threatened Erin and looked into her eyes, she’d gazed right back at him. Almost anyone else their stage, people who could feel the power of his Concept, especially those who’d seen how agile and fast he could be whilst still hitting with the power of three grown men, would have been afraid of Sammath’s threat, or at least uncertain about their ability to win. All Erin had had was confidence and resolve. The confidence that, if it came down to it, she could put Sammath down and the resolve to be able to do it. In fact, Erin’s confidence was so resolute that Sammath couldn’t even call it confidence… it was knowledge; the knowledge that she could put him down.
Sammath hadn’t seen Erin fight, but Ashe had told him how she’d taken down three armed guards with only some knives in a matter of about three seconds. Initially, he’d chalked the story up to some exaggeration based on fact, with the time passing much quicker to Ashe because of adrenaline and the fight, but now he wasn’t so sure. Sammath would have needed at least 15 seconds to take down that many guards, and that was with his power. So perhaps it was best not to antagonise the girl any more before she inevitably left. After all, from that look in her eyes, she’d put down challenges far tougher than Sammath.
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As the high sun peeked through the leaves above Sammath and Erin, they could taste the ocean on their lips and hear its waves crashing against the land somewhere not too far ahead. Things had been… tense in the two days since Sammath had threatened Erin, the girl not wanting to interact with Sammath at all after he broke the tentative trust she’d offered him. Sammath could understand the sentiment, even if he didn’t like it. Despite the weird atmosphere between the two, however, Erin spoke up, “I believe there’s a village around here somewhere.”
As though Erin’s words had materialised the village, the trees began thinning around the pair and they spotted a few tree stumps nearby, clear signs of civilisation. Silently, Erin and Sammath looked each other in the eyes. Erin went on ahead and Sammath shifted Ashe on his back, making sure the boy was secure on his back. Erin flitted through the trees as Sammath slowed down slightly, making his way through the trees as unobtrusively as he could with a small teenager on his back.
After a few minutes, Sammath heard voices ahead and crouched down behind a tree, peeking around it to try and get a view of what was happening. Erin was standing in front of two men, spears levelled at her throat and with her hands up. Sammath strained to listen in but was slightly too far away to hear anything with any consistency. From what little he could make out, Sammath determined that they were suspicious of her coming out of the forest, especially alone and seemingly unarmed.
Sammath didn’t get any longer to listen as a blade slipped up against his throat. Sammath practically jumped at the feeling of cold steel pressed against his skin. While he couldn’t actively feel any Motion, he did have a subconscious sixth sense for Motion that should have told him something was coming close – within a few metres – to him. Since gaining his Concept, with its Sight and his subconscious sense, Sammath hadn’t been snuck up by anyone. Attempts by others his age on Volkar in order to prank him had backfired significantly, with Sammath often using their own prank against them, and none of the adults were immature enough to do so. Even in training, when Sammath was trying and failing to detect his elders, or at least those that could mask their Motion from him, he knew they were coming so he was never surprised.
Suffice to say, when Sammath didn’t hear, feel, sense, or see the person sneaking up on him before a blade was pressed against his neck, Sammath practically leapt out of his skin. Chuckling lightly at his shock, the person behind Sammath spoke in Shinian with a heavy Order of the Solar Storm accent, “Come, now. It’s quite rude to sneak up on people. How about we go introduce ourselves.”
Sammath slowly rose as the person behind him did, pulling the blade up and forcing Sammath to come up with him if he didn’t want his neck slit. “Move forward.” Sammath did as he was told, slowly moving around the tree and towards the small group of three people. As Sammath, and by extension Ashe, came into view, the two guards tensed up and one of them pointed their weapon towards the two incoming strangers. When the person behind Sammath came into sight, however, they lowered their guard entirely.
Was the person behind Sammath truly so strong that they felt completely relaxed around two complete strangers? Or was their sense of strength misguided and they only thought they were safe. Deciding it was best not to try and find out the answer to the question, Sammath went along with what the person behind him was making him do.
“I’m going to remove the knife so that you can put down your friend and your staff. If you try anything stupid, I’ll kill you.” Slowly, the pressure from the knife’s blade eased away from Sammath’s neck and he bent down to drop Ashe on the ground. Along with Ashe, Sammath removed his staff from his back and placed it on the forest floor. Standing back up, Sammath placed his hands on his head, like Erin, to show that he didn’t have any weapons on hand. Sammath immediately rescinded the reasoning for placing his hands behind his head to showing that he didn’t have any weapons on hand. Erin probably had at least three in that ponytail of hers, needles coated in poison, or a thin garotte that looked like hair, or something along those lines.
From behind Sammath, the man walked forward, keeping the knife aimed at Sammath’s head. From a distance, the man would seem wholly unremarkable. While he was clearly fit and strong, his muscles obvious to anyone who looked, he wasn’t extremely bulky. With gleaming black hair and light, flawless skin, the man was clearly from the sects and not the Shinian kingdom, who tended to be tanner and who often had brown tips at the end of their hair from the sun.
The man’s accent only added to the conclusion that he was from the sects, understandable but unusual to say the least. Language in the order was heavily tonal, with different tones giving entirely different definitions to words. As Shinia had very similar sounding words to the Order but conveyed emotion through tone, like Arikarans, people from the Order often spoke with tones that didn’t convey their emotion and made their sentence sound like a jumble of excited, disappointed, happy, and a few other emotions that only truly masterful actors could ever hope to match.
What made Sammath suspicious of the fact that the man was from the sects, though, were his eyes. Most people from the sects had dark, often almond-shaped, eyes but the man in front of Sammath had eyes of aspen gold. Large and round, they seemed to shine with an internal light and they indicated that the man may not be entirely what he seemed. What caught Sammath by surprise was when Erin glanced over and her eyes widened very slightly.
Speaking up in Arikaran, a language that Sammath had no understanding of beyond the basic greetings and farewells, Erin spoke to the man from the sects. When she spoke up initially, the man squinted at her, as though trying to pierce through the layers of grime and dirt that covered her, before smiling brightly. Gesturing for the men to put down their weapons and telling them something that made them reflexively tighten their grip, he came in for a hug before seeming to think better of the idea.
“Who is this guy, princess?” Sammath questioned in Volkarian. Everyone looked towards Sammath but Erin was the only one who understood what he’d asked.
“I don’t know about these guys,” Erin jerked her head to the guards, “but this guy is my cousin.”