The training course cut through the woods in a massive loop around Nathariel’s hovel. A worn down, well-trodden path guided her. The ground was packed tight, but black vines crept across it, threatening to trip her. It was designed for someone much stronger than Vayra—someone who could plow straight through the undergrowth without even flinching.
When she first realized, she faced a wide gully more than ten feet across. At the bottom was a trickle of magma, and on the other side, the path continued. She was supposed to use her enhanced body to leap across, she knew, but she had no enhanced body.
“We’ll have to jump it,” she said, holding out the hand that she carried the seer-core with. The magma was far below, and simmered, awaiting her. She wasn’t sure how bad it would be if she fell into it, but it was much hotter than flame, and she didn’t want to find out. “Phas, how did you store starlight during the day?”
‘I didn’t ever need to store it,’ Phasoné answered. ‘My dresses are cut from the Sky Window, an Arcara-enchanted treasure—a piece of fabric that always has a view of the night sky plastered to it. The good thing is that it was also a window, and I could draw in starlight from it.’
Vayra looked up at the sky. There were still a few stars glimmering on the horizon, but in a minute or two, she knew they would be gone. She had to get across the gully quickly.
If Bracing her arms with starlight could enhance them enough to help her destroy a magmaspawn, then the same could work for her legs.
She shook her hand, dispelling the seer-core, then drew in the retreating wisps of starlight. Pushing them down through her body, she fuelled her legs with the white energy. “I’m jumping.”
She took a step back, her legs stiffening. Each step she took seemed heavy, but it took almost no effort whatsoever to move her legs. They felt like loaded springs, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.
She crouched, then bounded forwards. As soon as she reached the edge of the ravine, she pushed off, trying to throw herself into the furthest jump she’d ever managed.
Her legs pushed off with a blast of starlight and a rush of wind, and she sprung across the gully—
Almost.
Her fingers caught the stone edge on the other side, and the rest of her body slammed down into the rocky ledge. Her legs smashed into the stone wall, but Braced with starlight-Arcara, they instead shattered the stone. The rest of her body, however, wasn’t protected. Her ribs slammed into the rocky wall, and a jolt of pain ran through her body.
Nothing felt broken—she’d cracked enough bones to know what it felt like—but it still took her a few seconds to catch her breath. She hauled herself up to the other side like she was climbing up onto a rooftop in Tavelle.
“Sorry,” she muttered to Phasoné, then held out her hand and reformed her seer-core from the stars on the horizon. It was a slow process, and she only managed to form the core about halfway before the stars faded away.
‘That isn’t ideal,’ the Goddess said.
“Not really,” Vayra agreed. But there wasn’t much she could do about it—except to continue along the training course.
She sprinted through the woods, following the trail and pushing through shrubs. A few trees had fallen over the path. She leapt over the ones she could, and slid under the ones that she couldn’t. The deeper she ran into the woods, the thicker the trunks were. Some, she had to slide under, and others she had to break her stride to scramble overtop of.
She encountered another gully, but it was much smaller, and she didn’t need to pull any starlight into her body to help herself leap over it. She latched onto the opposite wall a few feet down from the top, and spent a few minutes trying to scramble back to the surface while maintaining the seer-core.
As soon as she climbed out, she felt a shiver run down her spine. Nathariel was nearby, and he was watching.
After a few more minutes of running, she reached a steep shelf of obsidian. Normally, she figured she would be expected to leap up it in a single burst, but she couldn’t jump twenty feet up in the air. She bent down and coated her hands in the dusty, dry mud.
Vayra began to climb. She pulled herself from foothold to foothold, careful not to slice her hands on the sharp wedges of obsidian.
After a few minutes of grunting and laboured climbing, she arrived at the top of the cliff, only to find a metal training dummy staring at her.
There was nowhere to place her feet and nowhere to place her hands. The dummy stood in the center of the path, surrounded on all sides by undergrowth and slippery vines. If she wanted a place to stand, she would need to topple the dummy over.
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She wedged her knee into a crag to help keep her balance without any hands, then reached for the dummy’s base. If she could just pull out the pins that kept the base in place, she could topple it, giving herself a foothold.
Gripping one of the little metal pins, she pulled as hard as she could. But the pins were part of a larger mechanism. A string whirled, a lever clunked, then a ring around the dummy’s base swung towards her. A bar whipped towards her. She didn’t duck in time, and it swatted her off the cliff. She fell down to the path below and landed hard on her shoulder.
A sharp crack raced through her body, followed by another wave of pain. The seer-core dissipated, and she flopped onto her back, gritting her teeth.
“Shit…” she breathed.
‘I really, really don’t want to get used to this,’ Phasoné said.
“Neither do I,” she hissed, then rolled onto her stomach. There was no way she hadn’t broken her arm, but it could have been worse.
‘That’s not the mindset we should have! You should have just used the starlight we had to jump up. Now we have none.’
Vayra sighed, then turned back to the cliff. She had to climb with one arm, now. To keep her bad arm from jostling around, she tucked it into the folds of her robe. Hopefully, that would hold it in place.
‘Is there no way around?’
“It wouldn’t be very good training if we went around it.” Shakily, Vayra placed the hand of her good arm on the rock, then took a deep breath. “We’ll—”
“Do you solve every problem by beating your head against it?” came a voice from high up in the trees. Nathariel’s voice. “Either you or the problem will break, and eventually, it will be you.”
Vayra glanced around, trying to see the God-heir. She couldn’t see him, only pinpoint that his voice came from somewhere above. She began. “I—”
“You have an enhanced body, still. Use it. Cycle Arcara to your arm, cleanse the damage, and let your specialties do their job. And use the Burnished Flame Loop, this time.”
She let go of the cliff face, then dropped her arm and shut her eyes. Over the past two weeks, while she practiced cycling, she had managed to push the Flame Loop wider and further through her body, and a few times, she had managed to direct the limbs it went to.
Like when she kept it near her core, it fed bits of mana to the surrounding flesh, filling them with a buzz.
This time, she also had to feed the Arcara outwards.
“Your channels are built for this,” Nathariel said. “They’re strong, but they’re porous. Your body will accept the purified energy.”
She took a deep breath, clenched her gut, and guided the Arcara with her mind. She imagined a wind blowing the candle in the direction she wanted the Flame Loop to travel, and it obeyed her.
As soon as the Arcara reached her arm, it warmed up. She pushed it outwards, away from her channels and into her flesh. It obeyed.
Her bruised muscles were the first to repair themselves. In a matter of minutes, she felt the fibres knitting back together. In a half hour, her muscles felt fresh and new. After an hour, her bones didn’t feel anywhere near as sore, and as far as she could tell, nothing was fractured or broken anymore.
‘That was…incredibly fast,’ Phasoné said.
Vayra recalled the Goddess needing weeks to recover from injuries without medical attention. And she was a Goddess.
‘Don’t get too full of yourself. That’s all you have going for you, right now.’
“Yeah, yeah,” Vayra muttered. She opened her eyes and shook out her hands. They functioned normally, as best as she could tell. She turned back to the cliff. “Time to try this again.”
She didn’t hear Nathariel, nor could she sense him, so he must not have been terribly close. Or he wasn’t directly interfering anymore.
Before she began to climb, Phasoné asked, ‘And how do you plan to beat the dummy? Think, Vayra, think a little first.’
Vayra crossed her arms, then turned around. “I’ll…I’ll need a source of starlight.”
‘Meet me in the void.’
Vayra shut her eyes and pulled the white void over her vision with a whisper of Phasoné’s name. After a few seconds of falling, she righted herself and turned around. Phasoné sat on the floor, cradling her arm. “If only you had some healing elixirs,” she said. “Those were nice for helping us both. Advancing, too, that helped.”
Vayra nodded. “I’m sorry. I’ll take it easy. But…you’ll live.”
“Not much compensation, is it?” Phasoné offered a small smile, then looked down at her dress. “But that’s not why you’re here. You need a source of starlight. I have one.”
“And…”
With her good arm, Phasoné reached down and tore a strip off the bottom of her dress. The fabric ripped with a sound like shattering glass and splintering wood, all at the same time. Even removed from the dress, the fabric still shone with the light of stars.
Phasoné handed it to her, and readily, she took it. It was long enough, and thin enough, that Vayra could wrap it around her neck like a scarf, or a small shawl. Vayra didn’t understand the treasure, she knew that well enough, nor could she fathom how truly powerful it was. She did know that such a thing was an amazing, incredible gift. “I, I—”
“Don’t worry,” Phasoné said. “I can still read your thoughts. Wielding this before you reached Master? Terrible idea, like I said. But now…well, you should be able to make it work.”
Vayra wrapped the length of the dress around her neck like a scar. As she tied it, she couldn’t stop her gaze from drifting downwards. The moment her eyes passed Phasoné’s thighs, she averted her gaze and tried to stop herself from blushing.
“I can still read your thoughts, Vayra.”
“I…I’m—”
Phasoné leaned closer and whispered, “It’s alright. I know you swing both ways. Now, you do have a cliff to scale and a training dummy to defeat, correct?”