The moment Roger Mayfield left Earth without a word was the moment something inside Rhone Tell broke. She’d been forced to stay behind because of ‘medical complications’ while Roger and the rest of their shift class went off to live the dream she’d had since she was a child.
After that, she pushed everyone away, including her older brother and his new wife, who had just returned to Earth to teach enchanting at the Academy. If there weren’t a need to hide Duncan’s parentage, she would have cut off all contact immediately. As soon as the baby was born and the false trail had been laid, she was gone. Matthew Tell never saw his sister again.
Unfortunately for Duncan, he never knew Rhona Tell to show the love and concern he’d learned later in life was pretty standard for mothers to possess. No, she was strict, ruthless, and unrelenting. They trained. Hours and hours each day. Every day that he could remember. For years. There was nothing motherly about the woman. Such was the case that Duncan had grown up simply knowing her as the Sword Master.
Every day he could remember before his Aunt Donna and Uncle Matthew took him in, Duncan woke up on the top floor of a two-story building in Brooklyn, New York. The Sword Master would always be sat at the kitchen counter, waiting for him. With nothing more than a cold breakfast he would be lucky to keep down for the next 15 minutes, they would descend to the bottom floor of the building. Here, the Sword Master went to work forging Duncan into her weapon. Her sword.
Mornings were a grueling routine of physical exercises, stretches, and hand-eye coordination drills. The Sword Master's expectations were high, and any failure on Duncan's part meant starting over until he could perform the tasks in his sleep. The toll on his young body had been evident, with aching muscles and barely enough energy to climb the stairs at noon for another cold meal eaten in pained silence.
In the evenings, they would move on to sword training. The Sword Master may have started slow, but to Duncan, her slow had still been too fast. When he fell behind, she provided him with… motivation. He constantly sported cuts, bruises, and more than a few broken bones. Even with these injuries, he was expected to pick up his practice sword again and again. There was no stopping. Back into the forge. Cold metal could not be shaped.
The Sword Master’s style was one of grace and aggression. She would demonstrate and drill every move she knew into Duncan’s very being with endless repetition. Then, she would ensure he remembered every lesson during the day’s sparring session. If he missed a block or failed to land a strike, the Sword Master would not hesitate to take advantage. Every swing, parry, and movement she knew imprinted themselves on Duncan’s body, left there by her practice sword until they were seared into his mind as well.
After the day’s training, Duncan was schooled in various fields, from more combat-focused subjects like ‘the strengths and weaknesses of low-tiered monsters’ to more mundane knowledge like the common language used in Dintarnum. By the time he was eight, he was fluent in both the language and the vital points of most monsters common to the other realm, along with other relevant subjects.
Some nights, the Sword Master would take Duncan to a sketchier part of the city. There, a failed Academy healing student would put his limited knowledge of healing magics and his stolen healing wand to use on Duncan. The Sword Master said it was nothing like what someone with a Subject could do, but the only true healers on Earth were either returned noble shifters or doctors who had come to Earth to help at the Corvelin Hospital in London. Despite the man’s supposed lackluster abilities, Duncan thought himself lucky whenever he was allowed to visit him.
Duncan was not lucky often.
Years passed in this manner, with Duncan growing stronger, quicker, and more familiar with the sword each day. Despite his young age, Duncan began to excel under the harsh training the Sword Master subjected him to. His body grew as strong and fast as his young age allowed. He could endure pain and mind-numbing poisons long enough to finish a fight. He could even recite the history of Corvelin and some other nations on Dintarnum—at least the history provided by Corvelin to the Academy on Earth.
As his aptitude grew, so too did the Sword Master’s intensity. Each mastered lesson meant another more complex piece of swordplay to learn and drill. Pain and the sword were all he knew for the years he spent with the Sword Master. He had no friends to complain to. No concerned family members to advocate for him. His only companion was the sword. The sword never failed him, no matter how many times he seemed to fail it.
Eventually, when the Sword Master deemed him ready, she brought him to the underground battle arenas. Corvelin’s influence on Earth was thorough, and the premier source of entertainment in the Realm was dueling leagues. As the underground of Earth had a tendency to do, it turned the extremely regulated sport that was riddled with safety measures into a twisted version of itself for those with more violent tastes. In the underground leagues, not many people lost more than once because the first time they lost, they died.
It was there that Duncan truly lost any sense of humanity he might have possessed. He'd been a laughingstock the first time he showed up in that arena. No older than ten, and he was supposed to go up against hardened killers. He was a three-to-one favorite in the betting stakes the second time he fought.
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It all served a purpose. The Sword Master needed Duncan to develop a killer instinct. She wanted to drive all hesitation and weakness from the son she’d decided would be her instrument of revenge. She’d succeeded.
This cage of reality came crashing down around him one day when he had just turned 11. The final spar he ever had with the Sword Master was one he would relive many times in the years to come. One strike, one swing of his sword, was all he could achieve that day before she was gone. A crash accompanied that strike against the Sword Master’s blade, along with a bright light and then blackness. Duncan hasn’t seen the Sword Master outside his nightmares since.
***
“Then, my aunt and uncle took me in,” Duncan said to his listeners. “I was a monster when they first found me. I’d grown up knowing only what my mother had put me through. I didn’t know how family worked. I didn’t know what a friend was. I only knew I had to train, or I would be punished or die in one of those underground fights. It took almost a year before I started to resemble anything close to a person, but my family got me there. I entered the Academy, met my first real friend, and started to learn what I’d missed for the first 11 years of my life.”
Duncan looked around at the rest of his new family. Their moods ranged from rage to grief. Phevona looked like she wanted to take a ship over to Corvelin, take the realm shift platform to Earth, find the missing Rhona Tell, and teach the woman just how dangerous a nature mage could be.
Cinder, for his part, seemed lost for words. He sat on the couch across from Duncan, eyes vacant and mouth stuck in a perpetual frown. Neta seemed confused, and most alarming to Duncan, she also seemed to feel something that made absolutely no sense in the situation: guilt.
In the end, the first to speak was Pheobe, who had been clinging to Cinder’s hand for most of the time Duncan had been talking. “How can you stand to even touch a sword after all that?” It came out as half-question and half-whisper. She looked close to tears, though she never took her eyes off Duncan as soon as his gaze met hers.
Duncan smiled at her question. “Because swords are awesome.” The half-serious answer was not what Pheobe, or the rest of the family for that matter, was looking for. As one, they all turned their gazes on him, their collective pressure making Duncan want to melt into the couch underneath him.
“Alright. Sheesh. I was just kidding… kind of.” Duncan admitted. A moment’s thought was all he needed to arrive at the real answer to Pheobe’s question. “Swordsmanship has been the one constant throughout my life that I’ve been able to rely on. It’s a bridge between who I was and who I want to be. Both of those people need the sword. The monster I was lived by the sword because Rhona Tell forced it. The person I want to be is someone who lives by the sword because I can use it to do great things for myself and others.”
Duncan paused, recalling the year between his mother’s disappearance and his start at the Academy. “You know, I never even took a break from training after Aunt Donna and Uncle Matthew took me in. They had no idea what to do with me at first because I was using their backyard to train, and many of the neighbors were starting to worry about how hard I pushed myself. At first, I trained because it was the only thing I knew. As time passed and I learned about everything I missed while trapped with my mother, I discovered that I liked the training. I liked to improve. And above everything, I liked the sword.”
“Which is something we should all be grateful for,” Cinder said. His earlier blank look was replaced with a genuine smile. “If you had given it up, we likely never would have met. Despite the terrible things you went through, I’m glad you found something to drive you forward in life.” Duncan returned his master’s smile with one of his own.
“I must admit, there is something your story reminds me of that I should have told you a lot sooner,” Neta said from her chair, the guilty look from before still present on her face. “I’m sorry, I honestly forgot about it up until you mentioned the name Mayfield.”
That name. Once again, it brought Duncan’s world to a stop, almost as though a monster had him by the spine and refused to let go. Neta noticed the look and sighed in regret. For an instant, she was gone. Then, she was back as though she’d never left. The only thing different about her was the item she held in her hand.
“My Primo pin,” Duncan said. He’d thought he’d lost it or the prison guards had taken it off him when he’d been imprisoned his first night on Dintarnum. But, here it was, in Neta’s hand.
“I detected your arrival in this realm,” Neta began, holding up the pin, “because of this. I didn’t know at first, but someone enchanted it to drag you off course once you’d entered Dintarnum and bring you to Kuno. Well, not to Kuno. To me.”
Duncan’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head at Neta’s words. He had no idea what to think. Who would want him to meet Neta? Why him? What was going on? He wasn’t the only one who seemed to be out of the loop. Cinder, Pheobe, and Phevona were also looking at Neta with questioning stares.
“I found out who sent you the day after you arrived, thanks to an enchanter friend of mine. They were able to find and display a mana signature of the creator. A mana signature I recognized from many, many years ago.” Neta looked down at the pin for a second, almost like she was reliving a memory. “Tell me, Duncan. Does the name Walter Mayfield mean anything to you?”
It took a moment for the name to process inside Duncan’s mind, but then it clicked. “Walter Mayfield is the headmaster of the Academy on Earth, and likely an ancestor of mine.”
Neta nodded. “Well, he wanted you and me to meet for some reason. I knew him through that family friend Cinder and Pheobe have told you about—the one with some power in Corvelin. Walter Mayfield was a promising enchanter working for that friend. He even enchanted some of the swords I made at the time. It seems he still had one of those, and the brat used my work to bind this pin to my location.”
“But… wh… why?” Duncan asked. “As far as I know, the headmaster didn’t know who I really was. He didn’t know my father was a Mayfield. I should have just been another promising student in his eyes.”
“I don’t know Duncan. I don’t know.” Neta’s eyes never left the pin on her lap. “Despite my reluctance to believe anyone could see you as ‘just another promising student,’ the only thing I truly know is that Walter Mayfield sent you to me. I’m grateful he did, but I just have no idea why.”