Before she was Bedivere, sworn to the royal house of Tudor, she had been Bea, a peasant farmer girl living on the opposite side of the world. Her 34th birthday passed last week, and she has now spent more time here in Kepia than she has back home in Genkov.
It’s somewhat distressing, because she had made a promise that night when she had escaped from her homeland on that dinghy sailboat to never forget it, , but nowadays she can barely remember what the iron coast even looks like. Occasionally, during the few hours of alone time she can afford, she will close her eyes and just barely smell the rust and hear the clamor of gears, but only in small packets that have become rarer over the years.
Kepia is a land filled to bursting with magic, and it makes her feel like a rotting fruit on the verge of bursting. The smell of raw mana fills her with every breath, and makes her feel like thousands of worms are crawling over her skin.
For a brief moment, there is an overwhelming urge to go outside and start swallowing the earth. To peel off her skin and flesh and replace it with sand, dirt, and stone in accordance with the teachings of Mt. Tovia. To chew on her steel tipped shoes until her teeth shatter into dust, and then to make a nice false set with said shoes. To pluck out the rotting grapes that are her eyes and cleanse the sockets in molten steel before replacing them with succulent, sterile gemstones. Her current body was alive, too alive, and she had to do something, anything to get that damned mana out of her-
The metronome ticks on in front of her, and it just barely pulls her back from the brink. She has long since escaped from the influence of gear priests, and she is now here in a land where they hold no influence. She repeats this to herself like a mantra as her heart rate gradually slows down.
Her teeth are chipped and bloodied, and she spits them out along with a fistful of deformed scrap metal. Her episode had started while she was visiting the local armorer looking for new gear, and she had started to chew on anything metallic that she could get her hands on. In that chewed bundle is the prosthetic eye she had gnawed out of the face of a local blacksmith.
She takes a swig of a regeneration potion and starts putting on her bladed shoes. Even here halfway across the world, there is no such thing as a Genkovian who wouldn’t recognize the insanity of a Mt. Tovia priestess. The man would have to be silenced.
The rational part of her brain tries to embrace the worms of magic digging underneath her gums, tries to remind herself that she chose to leave Genkov to escape this mechanical fanaticism. She swirls the liquid around in her mouth and swallows it slowly, savoring the worms.
----------------------------------------
The man had died without a fight. The madness of Mt. Tovia was contagious, especially to fellow Genkovians. She had found him half dead trying to fit his skull through a too small cog, brain matter leaking out of one ear and hands in a vice grip around his neck.
To make sure she wouldn’t get pulled back into her earlier trance, she had drank the healing potion in parts, taking small sips over multiple hours and focusing on the sickening sensation of her teeth growing back. It made her throw up several times, but by the end of it the longing for metal was a distant pinging at the back of her mind.
She’s washing the bile off her clothing by the river next to the academy when she hears someone approaching from the distance.
She hates talking to others. Mana clings to the inhabitants of Kepia, and it singes her senses like fire whenever she stays near someone for too long. This one curls into her skin pores like vines and blooms back out of her eyes and mouth like poppies, choking her with perfumed roses along with a hint of rotting honey.
It was Gibet’s mana.
She shimmies up into a tree and watches him as he practices throughout the night. He does so every night, coming out and practicing broken forms with awkward punches and stumbling kicks.
Bedivere does not respect Gibet.
As an heir to house Tudor, he could request all manner of men to train him in whatever he desired. In addition to the Tudor family style, he had ample funds and prestige to convince anyone to train him, perhaps even Tor instructors if he leaned more on his reputation.
Instead, he wastes his nights outside drilling incorrect movements into his body and then spends his daytime hours dozing in and out due to fatigue and sleep deprivation.
Granted, though she does not respect him, she does understand him. The determination to distance himself from his family is something she can at least admire, especially after seeing the interactions between him and his mother, but the way in which he has gone about doing it was definitely more on the stupid side.
It’s also especially annoying that he liked to do this stupid practice in the most isolated spot in the academy. Her spot. It used to be relatively mana-free, but his presence was ruining that. There were even flowers that were starting to grow along the side!
She resolves to teach him, if at least to set a regular schedule so that he wasn’t bothering her during the few hours of rest she did have.
----------------------------------------
For the third time in two weeks, Gibet is regaining consciousness on the ground from someone punching or kicking him in the face. He can just barely see Bedivere’s smug looking face (she was wearing the traditional owl mask of Tudor personal guardsmen, but the face on the mask looks more smug than normal) in the corner of his spinning vision.
He doesn’t try to get up, and instead focuses on getting his breathing back under control. The metronome in Bedivere’s hand clicked on a basic single note rhythm. She had resumed her attacks somewhere around the 20th beat on the last two rounds, so he paced his own recovery to match that timing.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Bedivere evidently notices it, because he is still focusing on breathing when she launches herself towards him on beat 9.
He feels her hand tighten around his throat, and she throws him into another backwards tumble before chasing him down with a flurry of kicks while he’s still midair. Gibet turtles into himself and takes the kicks, relying on the residual effects of a stoneskin potion to hold out.
For whatever reason, Bedivere only attacks him in a regular rhythmic beat. Her attacks always come in quarter, half, or whole notes in agreement with the ticking of the little metronome tucked into one hand. The current kick flurry was all quarter notes, and though fast, it was steady and predictable, which gave him the mental edge needed to withstand it.
When the quarter note kick flurry stops, he gambles on Bedivere’s habit of using large finishers and takes the extra time of the upcoming full note to uncurl himself. If it was a half not, he would probably be waking up in the infirmary.
Thankfully, he guesses correctly and meets the kick with an earth element infused punch. Bedivere uses the momentum of the pushback to backflip back to the center of the room, and Gibet lands on his ass with his back slamming into the wall behind him.
Bedivere stares at him for the next minute or so as he gets his body back under control. When he pushes himself back to his feet, she unclasps the mask and begins walking over. She looks annoyed, which is always a good thing in his mind.
‘,,,You have not practiced the defensive forms I have taught you.’
‘Nope.’
Might I ask why? An outside observer might even mistake your stubbornness to not learn as some weird, twisted enjoyment of getting beat up in training at this point.’
He does not wish to take up the Tudor family style, and explaining why to her is either going to fail or get him laughed at for his supposed immaturity, so he focuses on her pet peeve of being ignored instead. He starts walking back to the academy without answering back, and Bedivere watches him leave in silence.
----------------------------------------
‘Why are you always so injured?’
Even though he has thoroughly expressed his dislike towards Nawy, she seems to forget it every subsequent time she sees him. She carries herself with an almost child-like brevity, and even worse seemed to be proud of it. When he had brought up her mannerisms, she had simply laughed and proclaimed ‘We ARE children, silly!’.
He puts his hood over his face to cover his black eye.
‘Just injuries from training. Leave me alone…’
Lily isn’t familiar enough with his anatomy to recognize his scars and injuries, and Sieva had been too occupied with juggling administrative duties with classes this past week due to the start of the year to visit him, so he thankfully only has to deal with Nawy, who seemed to get more interrogative with each passing day when she sees him with a brand new collection of bruises. None of them stay for long, given how easy it is to brew a healing potion for himself, but the fact that they were different every time had caused her to hone in on him like some kind of hound.
One day, he’s about to get his face kicked in again by Bedivere when he suddenly feels a hand grab his shoulder from behind. The hand pulls him away from the kick, and suddenly he’s lying in the grass looking up at Nawy, who had deflected the hit with some kind of shoulder charge. She settles into a defensive stance in front of him.
‘Who are you, and why are you beating up students?!’
Nawy was standing up for him. Despite how much effort he makes in insulting her at every turn, she had thought that he was being bullied and decided to go out of her way to follow and defend him when she thought he was getting attacked.
Nawy’s sense of justice and blunt, forceful friendliness reminds him of the heroes he used to read about in storybooks as a child. Once, he had wanted to grow up to be someone like Nawy.
He doesn’t realize that he’s attacking her until Bedivere literally pulls him back mid punch. Physically, he’s nowhere near strong enough to hurt someone like her, and she just looks at him in bewildered confusion. He tries to voice his anger, but he’s so enraged that the only things coming out of his mouth are angry curses and spittle.
He’s surprised when she still comes up to him the day after, though maybe he shouldn’t be given how stubborn she is.
‘So… that lady told me that you two were training?’
He gets up and starts walking away. He can hear her footsteps, loud and clumsy rustling the grass as she follows behind him. For some time, there’s an almost peaceful silence as she follows him without saying anything further. She follows him all the way back to his dorm, and he’s fumbling for his keys when she asks:
‘Why are you always so sad?’
‘... What the fuck kind of question is that?’
‘You don’t look like you want to train. I stepped in that day because you looked like you hated every moment of that fight. Is your family forcing you to get better in physical combat?’
‘No… I asked her to…’
‘Thought so. You Tudors are all academics. If you hate it so much, why bother training the way you do?’
Talking to Nawy makes him frustrated like nothing else, but the simplicity of that question strikes something inside that forces him to answer it.
‘I just have to.’
He tried to say it convincingly, but it came out haltingly, his voice cracking like a child midway through the statement. His right hand is pinching his leg under his robes so hard that it's drawing blood. He would not cry in front of Nawy, even if he has to rip the flesh out from his legs chunk by chunk.
‘What if I taught you instead?’
‘...W-what?’
‘Yeah! I can teach you how to fight!’
‘...What’s the catch? I’ve literally only ever insulted and attacked you…’
‘There’s no catch, silly! I just thought you always looked really sad after you train. Maybe that lady isn’t good at holding back? I can hold back!’
Nawy is like a child. She’s quick to make friends and offer help, and even quicker to forgive past enemies.
Gibet decides at that moment that he hates her for it, and slams the door in her face.