Year 3043 AGD

Month: Preparation

Fourth Eighthday

Continent of Terroval

City of Safeharbor

Nim’s Manor

Nim woke suddenly. Years of dangerous situations had honed his mind into warning him when something was not right. He realized that the door into his room was slightly ajar a moment before he sensed movement at the foot of his bed. Pulling out the dagger he kept under his pillow, he was able to parry the first blow from his would-be assassin. Rolling off the bed, he grabbed the hilt of his longsword and unsheathed it as he completed the roll to land on his feet. His opponent, seeing that their initial attack had failed, and that their prey was now armed, pulled their second dagger.

Looking at the person who had tried to take his life while he was sleeping, Nim surmised that the fellow was a member of the Guild of Shadows—an assassin for hire to the highest bidder. Nim had dealt with the guild before—usually it was fighting them—but occasionally he had hired them, and considering the predicament he was in now, he favored being the contractor rather than the mark. Then another thought went through his mind: someone wanted him dead, and he didn’t appreciate that very much.

“Your days of meddling are over, Nim,” the man shrouded in black hissed.

Instead of replying verbally, Nim responded with a high thrust of his longsword aimed at the man’s head. The assassin tried to get in low and take advantage of the opening Nim had created in his attack. Nim’s dagger had been at the ready for such a maneuver, however. He deftly diverted the path of the assassin’s leading dagger, throwing the man slightly off-balance with his second attack, giving Nim the time to dodge out of the way. As he turned, he used his still-extended sword arm to bash the side of the assassin’s head with the sword’s pommel. He didn’t have the leverage to do any damage with the blade, but it was enough of an impact to make the man move backwards quickly, slightly dazed.

Not allowing the assassin time to shake off the blow, Nim moved in quickly with a fast series of blows, keeping his attacker on the defensive. To the man’s credit, he was able to block every blow as he was forced steadily backwards. His flaw, however, was in his limited knowledge of his surroundings. It took the man only a moment to realize that he had been run through from behind, as the man looked down at the point sticking out of his chest Nim saw realization alight in the assassin’s eyes a moment before the light left them forever. The man had backed up into the statue of a unicorn that Nim had on display in his room; the creature’s horn had pierced the would-be assassin’s armor and body like it wasn’t even there, as it had been designed to do.

Taking a moment to catch his breath, Nim realized he could hear fighting outside his door. Assuming a defensive posture, Nim opened his door to find Bartholomew and Jenn standing side by side, holding back three other assassins. Jenn held her twin daggers out before her, ready to fend off attacks, while Bartholomew held a pair of sticks in each hand. When the door opened, showing Nim instead of their fourth companion, one of the assassins lunged in between Jenn and Bartholomew and tried to strike Nim down.

Ever protective, Jenn plunged her dagger towards the man who dared to strike out at Nim, unconcerned about how her own opponent might use this to his advantage. He fell to the floor with a dagger sticking out of his armpit, his heart having been punctured cleanly by the blade. The look of surprise on his face nearly mirrored the one of his companion, who tried to take advantage of Jenn’s attack. Before he had even begun to leap for her exposed side, the assassin felt a piercing pain in his skull as Nim’s dagger entered his eye and ended his life.

The final assassin in the room saw that the odds had quickly changed against him and decided to take out the old man as swiftly as he could. As the assassin moved in, one of the sticks in Bartholomew’s right hand darted out and struck the man in his gut, knocking the wind from him. The assassin realized too late that the man he was facing wasn’t as old or defenseless as he had initially thought. Having only heard stories about the weapons in Bartholomew’s hands, the assassin was not prepared to face a master of the weapon simply known as chain sticks.

The assassin tried to take a swipe at the old butler while his body recovered from the first blow. Instead of backing away from the blow, however, Bartholomew used the chain of one of the chain sticks to wrap around the blade of the assassin’s dagger, ripping the weapon from the assassin’s grasp. The assassin’s eyes went wide a moment before the end of the chain sticks in Bartholomew’s other hand struck his temple, knocking the man unconscious.

The three took deep breaths, as they felt the familiar effects of adrenaline coursing through their systems.

“Did they cut either of you?” Nim asked, checking to make sure his companions had not taken even a scratch. “You can never tell what those bastards have on their blades...” With that thought, another struck him, “... where’s Victor?!”

Jenn looked around, embarrassed that she hadn’t thought about Nim’s ward. “I… I don’t know. Last I saw him, he was headed toward his room for bed.”

Nim ran down the hall, past the stairwell, and around the corner. He barely slowed down as he turned the knob and opened the door to Victor’s room. He realized several steps into the room that he may have made a mistake, as he heard several weapons being unsheathed. Coming to a fast stop, he flipped backwards through the door he had just entered as four daggers flew through the air he had occupied half a second before.

Four men stood in the room, one in each corner, obviously waiting for their target to return. He heard one of them swear as one of the errant blades that had been thrown hit one of the assassins. Four men for me and four for Victor? Someone wants us dead badly. Why send four for the boy, though? Nim wasn’t given time to dwell on these thoughts before three assassins began to carefully move towards him. The fourth fell over, no longer able to use his legs after whatever neurotoxin that coated the blade quickly worked its way through his system. If the assassins had come straight for him, they might have taken him out, but their cautious approach gave Bartholomew and Jenn time to enter the fight.

“Jenn, go make sure the girls are safe, and find Victor,” Nim heard Bartholomew say before he re-entered the room.

“But…” Jenn replied, obviously hesitant to leave them alone against three men.

“Just do it, Jenn. If they are being attacked, they are going to need your help more than we will. Besides, these men aren’t nearly trained enough to take us out.” Bartholomew entered the room, slipping past Nim and immediately beginning his assault on the nearest assassin.

Nim heard Jenn pause, and he could feel her eyes on his back. “Go!” he yelled. She turned and ran, and he let out a sigh of relief. He had taken her in several years ago and then allowed Ashur to train her when she had made it apparent that she was going to be getting into trouble one way or the other. She had quickly become overprotective of him and had taken it upon herself to ferret out any potential dangers against him. Nim knew that she was infatuated with him, maybe even in love with him, but he also knew that she knew that he could never love her as long as Erin was out there somewhere.

Nim focused on the lights in the room and they came to life, disorienting the assassins who had been sitting in the dark. He struck out at the man on his left and scored a small gash on the man’s arm. Nim ran up the wall and cartwheeled over his opponent, landing behind the assassin, severing the man’s spinal column in one smooth motion. Bartholomew was losing ground to the two assassins that had decided to gang up on the older opponent, once again underestimating the old butler.

“Interesting night, sir.” Bartholomew calmly held the two men back, his sticks whirling in front of him at blinding speed, creating an impenetrable barrier.

“Yes, quite a night. Did you take their coats as they came in?” Nim laughed as he began to move around behind the two assassins.

“Sadly no, sir, they seem to have no manners.” Thinking for a moment he added, “But at least their shoes are clean.”

Nim laughed again as the two assassins involuntarily looked down at their shoes. At that moment, an explosion went off over their heads. Taking advantage of the explosion, Bartholomew made an attack with each hand, sending a stick heading towards the temple of each assassin. One of the assassins avoided the attack, but his companion was not so lucky, crumpling to the ground in a heap. Unfortunately for the man who avoided Bartholomew’s attack, he stepped right into Nim’s blade, impaling himself.

“Go check on Jenn and the girls, I’ll head to the roof and see who’s trying to blow up my home.” Nim ran towards the stairs leading to the roof as Bartholomew took off in the direction that Jenn had run shortly before.

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Earlier, on the roof.

Victor found himself unable to sleep; he and Nim were scheduled to travel the lines of power with the army in the morning. If he would have been told three eightdays ago that he would be traveling with the knights, he wouldn’t have believed it. After the month he had gone through, however, he no longer doubted.

Sleep eluding him, Victor decided to go outside and get some air, throwing on his clothes, his dagger belt, and the bandolier of daggers that High Commander Cantel had given him less than an eightday ago. When he reached the roof, he realized that he had put on his weapons automatically, something he would not have done two eightdays ago. Nim had taken him back to each council meeting, and Victor now knew things that no one outside the council knew. His attendance had a side effect that he had not expected, and he had been given special attention by several of the council members over the past four eightdays.

The first one to come calling had been the arch magus himself. He had impressed upon Nim, in more than a few words, that Victor would be best served by being tested and given training by the mages. To Victor’s dismay, Nim had agreed on letting the mages take him for an eightday. In that time, he was tested, given a dozen books on Shaping that he was supposed to memorize, and taught how to safely test the limits of his abilities. He was taught by Zander Halcyon the basics on how to focus his Shaping in combat quickly to achieve deadly results. Zander seemed to take especially well to the young boy. Victor had come back to Nim’s manor after that eightday feeling like he was ready to collapse.

Victor was only given half a day of rest by Nim before he took him out into the caverns beneath Safeharbor for a three-day excursion. During this time, Nim built upon the things that Victor had learned about skulking from his time as a thief. He refined Victor’s talent at manipulating shadows to make them look more natural, and how to use a cushion of air around the feet to reduce noise. Before the three days began, Victor had thought that he knew quite a bit about how to sneak around unnoticed; at the end of the three days, he realized he still had a lot more to learn. There were some things that Victor had been taught during those three days that he didn’t want to think about, but he knew deep down that someday they would be useful. Victor slept very well on the night they had gotten home from their excursion, more from exhaustion than anything else; he just wished he could have been given another day or two to rest before more people came to take up his time.

The next morning, High Commander Cantel and High Lieutenant Commander Theromvore stopped by, telling Nim that he should have the boy train with the knights, especially if he was going to go with the army at the beginning of the month. Nim had not even told Victor that he was going to take him with them at that point, and he made the commanders promise not to let their ruminations slip into the wrong ears. They agreed, on the condition that Victor go with them until they were ready to leave, which would have been fifteen days; they settled on eleven. For nine of those days, Victor spent ten to fifteen hours a day training with High Commander Cantel, High Lieutenant Commander Theromvore, or General Theromvore. The last two days had consisted of a fourteen-hour session of riding lessons from Rigel North and a twelve-hour sailing lesson on a patrol boat with Abe Swiftflow, on what seemed to Victor to be an unusually stormy day. At the end of those eleven days, he knew that he had reached the end of his energy reserves.

Each person had pushed him in a different way; the knights and mages had been training kids for thousands of years and knew how to safely test a trainee’s limits. On the off chance that they had miscalculated, there was always a cleric nearby, just in case. The last three days, Victor had done little more than sleep, eat, read, and practice his forms. Nim had him practicing his sword exercises and working with his throwing daggers, but these were things Victor enjoyed doing, so it had been like heaven compared to the previous twenty-three days.

He was watching the stars and thinking about the previous month when he heard a noise from the garden. There were wards all around the mansion to protect from intruders and to catch harmful Shapings, and the sound he heard reminded him of a ward being dispelled. He relaxed his mind, probing the different energies in the area like the arch magus had taught him, and found that the barriers were missing on the wall directly below him in the garden. It was then that he noticed the energies of the fifteen men coming up the wall where he was standing. With so little warning, all that Victor could do was throw his cloak around himself and blend into the shadows in the corner of the roof. Seconds after he made his hiding place, men in dark clothing began to come over the top of the wall. He knew it was going to be a long night.

Victor watched as the men communicated with one another through the use of hand signals, their actions illuminated in the moonlight. He could do nothing but watch as eleven of the dark-clad individuals crept down into the mansion using the door he had unlocked. Victor silently thanked Nim for the lessons he had given him as the four men canvased the roof looking for anything out of the ordinary. Finding nothing, the four men took up watch positions around the roof. Victor thought hard about what he might be able to do against them, but he knew that he was no match physically for any of these men yet. He might be able to surprise one or two of them, but then the other two would surely capture or kill him. Thinking these were his only options, Victor slowly began to pull in energy, hoping that something would draw the men in together. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes—even though it felt like much longer to Victor—when sounds of battle were heard from below.

The four men on the roof stood frozen, listening to the sounds. After the battle had been going on for a few minutes, moving throughout the manor, one of the men on the roof motioned for the other three to go downstairs and assist their associates. Victor knew from the pitched battles he could hear below that he couldn’t allow them to do that. Focusing the particles he had gathered into a condensed ball of potential energy, he rolled it along the ground as one might a marble. When the ball reached the area where the three men were converging, he used a blast of air to toss it into their midst.

The difficult part of this Shaping was keeping the explosion contained, feeding it with as much energy as possible before it became too much for the shield around it to hold. A skilled Shaper could make a much larger explosion, but he hoped that his skill was sufficient for what he needed to do this night. One of the men saw the bead of energy as it bounced into the air before them, but at that point it was already too late. As the shield released, the air itself fed the conflagration, turning it into a giant ball of fire. It burned hot enough to melt an inch of the stone roof in a ten-foot circle before disappearing. All that was left of the three men were three twitching, charred corpses.

Victor didn’t have enough time to process what he had just done, as he realized that his shadows had slipped as he focused on the explosion. The leader of the group was now running towards him, preparing to let a dagger fly.

Realizing he didn’t have time to do anything but dodge, Victor put all of his effort into not getting hit. Victor rolled to his left as the dagger came flying through the air and felt the wind from the projectile as it just barely missed his head. As he came out of his roll, he unsheathed his daggers, getting them into position to block the man’s first attack. Victor silently thanked Stewart Cantel for his lessons in knife fighting.

Victor put everything he had into thwarting the man’s attacks and avoiding those sharp, surely poisoned, blades. After dueling with the high commander, this man’s movements seemed sloppy and slow, but Victor knew that he would not be able to keep up his defense for very long. Not only was the man much larger than Victor, but he also had much more fighting experience. It was only a matter of time before the man got over his initial surprise and did something Victor could not react to fast enough to stop. He made a feint, drawing the man into overextending enough that Victor managed to roll between the man’s legs, cutting the man’s thigh on his way through. Knowing that he had just made the man angry, he began to take in more energy and form it into a barrier around himself. By the time the man turned around it was in place; it was a lucky thing, too, because the man threw another dagger at that moment.

This was a Shaping that Zander Halcyon had taught him; he had said that it was one of the basics that any mage would need to protect himself and his brothers and sisters in arms. After compressing more energy than he had ever used into the explosion that killed three of the attackers, Victor knew that he was pushing his mind more than he should. Zander said that once he was stronger, he would be able to set the shield so that it would absorb a certain amount of damage and then flicker out, but he was nowhere near that skill level. Victor would have to keep channeling energy to the shield, and each time the man hammered on the shield he felt more and more exhausted.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a movement from the stairwell. He was just about to run away when the man in front of him suddenly stopped attacking his barrier and fell to the ground with a dagger sticking out of his chest. Victor didn’t have enough time to even feel relieved before he blacked out. The last thing he saw was Nim running towards him.

Year 3043 AGD

Month: Ragnós

Morning of the First Day

Continent of Terroval

Safeharbor

Nim’s Mansion

“Is he going to be alright?”

“Yes, he’s just tired. He’ll be fine in a couple of hours.”

Victor heard a sigh of relief, but he couldn’t open his eyes or move. Maybe I’m dreaming. Hmm… I wonder where I am.

“What about Megan?” the first voice asked.

“The poison is moving too quickly, and it is aided by magic. The four men who went to Victor’s room were the only ones that seemed to have neurotoxin on their blades—the rest all had some kind of poison. I don’t think they will be able to do anything for her even at the church. Whoever hired them wanted only the boy alive.” Victor liked the voice that was speaking, but it didn’t sound familiar. He was trying to remember who Megan was, but all that he kept seeing was the color green. He gave up trying to remember as the voices started again.

“Jenn, maybe you should go talk to Lia, or just be with her. She’s going to need a friend, it seems.” I know that voice. Victor tried hard to bring up an image, but his mind was not cooperating; it was as if his thoughts were covered in a heavy fog.

“Okay Nim,” a female voice said. That must be Jenn, a small part of his mind whispered, still unable to put a face to the name.

“He should be awake by mid-morning. I’ve done all I can—he pushed himself much further than he should have. I gave him something to help with the disconnect.”

Victor heard the door open, and the room was silent for a while. A short while later, he heard footsteps coming toward him. They’re back! His mind cried out, and he tried to move, tried to open his eyes, but found himself unable to do either. I won’t let you kill me! he screamed inside his head, finally getting a response from his body, even if it was just to thrash violently in his bed.

“Calm down, Victor, it’s just a bad dream.” It was that familiar voice again.

Victor stopped trying to move, realizing that his mind had overreacted. Feeling safe again, Victor fell into a restless sleep, his mind replaying the explosion he had created over and over again.