The moment my eyes close, everything seems to shift slightly. From one moment to the next, I go from laying on the couch to standing on solid ground. Realising this would be part of the Awakening Mom mentioned, I open my eyes.
Before me stands the gate made of night I’ve seen so much. Unlike every other time I stood before it though, there’s a strange solidity to the air around me, like those dreams were only half real and I never realised it, and now I’m here in truth.
Curious about what surrounds me, I take a look around. The same night sky the gate is made of is all I can see from every angle, though it looks more natural than the gate. Strangely, I can see no seam between where the gate ends and where everything else begins. There’s no difference in the darkness either, it’s like the only thing that lets me see the gate is the placement of the stars.
Hesitantly, half expecting it to end the dream, though I’m no longer sure it is a dream, I reach for the point of light that marks the handle for the gate.
It feels weird in my hand. There’s no real sensation of touch, more of an impression against the skin to tell me I’m touching something.
I take a deep breath, and push.
Past the gate is what appears to be an entrance hall, made of dark wood and darker stone. There were a set of tapestries on the wall on either side, displaying yet another depiction of the night sky. I would have commented on it starting to get a bit much, if it weren’t for something else taking up my focus.
Or rather, someone.
A woman, tall and athletic, wearing scuffed dark leather armour, stands in the middle of the hall. She has a faint scar running down the far side of one cheek, over the jaw, and down the neck, along with a lazy, almost predatory grin that sends a light shiver down my spine. But that’s not what arrests my attention so much.
No. That would be her long silver hair and matching eyes.
Just like mine.
“Finally,” she says, “I’ve been waiting all week for you to open that door, what took you so long?”
“Um.”
“No, never mind that, come here, let’s get a look at you. I want to see what I’m working with.” She gestures to approach, and stunned, and a little intimidated by this strange woman, I do so.
“Hmm. Not the most confident, but we can sort that out easily enough. Now let’s see,” she says as she begins to circle around me, looking at me with a glint in her eye I can easily imagine coming from a sculptor with an untouched block of marble. “Decent height, slim build, arm length,” she pauses for a moment and grabs my wrist pulling me arm out firmly but not harshly, and seems to examine it before letting it drop, “I can work with that. Not much mass though so nothing too heavy. Unarmed, obviously, can’t ignore the basics. Longsword. Spear. Daggers. And, hmm. Fuck it, let’s go with the whip as well, should be fun.”
She rubs her hands and together almost gleefully and seems to get lost in thought. Seeing this, I finally muster up the courage to speak.
“Uh, I’m sorry, but who are you? What’s going on exactly?” I ask, still catching my bearings.
My question throws her off for a moment before she replies.
“Huh? Well, I would’ve thought that would be obvious. Clearly, I’m your Guide.” She throws her hands wide, as if expecting me to understand what she meant.
“What’s a Guide? And what’s this place?”
She laughs a little, as if what I said was funny.
“‘What’s a Guide’ she says, as if you don-” she pauses. “Wait. You’re serious. You really don’t know. How the heck does that happen? I know there aren’t many of us, but you mages like to brag whenever one of you has one of us tag along and you’re telling me you don’t know?”
Something in me snaps at that. All the questions that have built up in me from Mom’s reveal, the small shards of resentment from the things she’s been hiding from me, it all comes bubbling out.
“Well excuse me for not knowing something!” I yell, “I didn’t know magic was real twelve hours ago, you want to have a crack at that?! Or how about that my Mom is from another world and never told me, or that she told me stories about my father and I didn’t even know until today! Things have been piling up on me all day and for once, just once, can someone please make some kind of sense!”
Tears are flowing down my face, but I can’t feel them. My heart is beating but I can’t hear it over the pounding in my ears. The woman gapes at me for a while, but time is hard to keep track of with my emotions suddenly escaping the box I was keeping them in.
“Okay,” she says, “Right. I was going to go for more of a teacher-student thing this go around, but I think you’ll need a more personal touch. Why don’t you follow me further in? There’s a place we can sit and talk this out, maybe get you a cup of tea.”
I give a small nod.
“Alright. Come on.” She turns around and heads to the door set in the other end of the entrance hall.
I find it hard keeping track of where we go, lost in my own head as I am, but after passing through a few rooms we come to a kitchen that looks suspiciously like the one in my home.
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The woman groans in front of me.
“Oh, bloody hell. I keep forgetting it does this. The stupid kitchen keeps changing the layout with every damned Claimant, absolutely bloody infuriating it is. Take a seat at the bench, I’ll get started on your questions while I find the mugs.”
I do as she asks, sitting on the same chair as I always do. She begins to rummage through the cupboards, talking all the while.
“Right. Well, to start you asked who I am and what this place is. I’ll tell you about the whole Guide deal in a minute, but as for me personally, my name is the Armsmaster. The importance of that name is- oh there’s the mugs. The importance of my name is linked to my role as Guide, but this place, where you find yourself now, is the Astral Armoury, and it is your Aspect.”
As the Armsmaster is talking she places down two mugs, and holds up the jar Mom uses to hold the sugar with a raised eyebrow. I lift a finger to indicate one sugar. She also takes out a teabag and Mom’s preferred brand of instant coffee, the former she places in my mug, and the latter she takes a meaningful glance at, shrugs, and pours some into her own mug.
“Kettle, where’s the kettle?” She starts to rummage through the cupboards again, and this time I manage to speak up, if quietly.
“Bottom left cupboard, next to your knee. Top shelf, right hand side.”
“Ah, right you are.” The Armsmaster picks up the kettle, fills it with water from the sink, and places it on the stove. “Now, the Armoury is special as Aspects go, which we’ll go into in a bit, so let’s move on to Guides. As I said before, there aren't all that many of us, only a few thousand or so. What we do is every now and again we pick a kid who’s just starting out as a mage, and we act as, well, a guide for them. We teach them things based on the archetype we fall under. For example, the Magister is a brilliant mage, he knows basically everything there is to know about magic, but he couldn’t care less about physical combat no matter how hard you try. My old friend the Golem can take a hit like nobody’s business, but even he needed some pointers when it comes to dishing them out.”
She leans against the kitchen counter as we wait for the water to boil.
“As for me? Well, I’m the Armsmaster. There is no weapon or fighting style that I don’t know like my own breath, and whilst the Magister or one of his ilk would know the theory behind it far more than I, I also know a few things about combat magic as well. Are you following so far?”
I take a moment to digest the things she’s said. Now that I’ve calmed down a little, I can take a more objective look at the things she’s saying. If there truly are so few Guides, then I suppose it’s a little understandable Mom never mentioned them. The only reason I know as much about magic as I do was because it was relevant to the stories she was telling me, and with so few Guides, the chances of me having were too few to bother considering.
Doesn’t stop all the other secrets from hurting though, and I can’t shake the feeling there’s still a lot she hasn’t told me.
“Yeah, I’m following,” I say.
She nods.
“Good. A few details on Guides in general, then we’ll move on to what makes the Armoury so special. The first thing you should know is that we can manifest physically out in the world, but it requires both the individual Guide’s consent and fairly solid mana control on the part of the mage, so don’t think that’ll happen time soon for you. The second thing is that there are rules we have to follow, and while I’m not bound to them like the others’ thanks to what the Armoury is, I do respect those rules, so don’t get in the habit of thinking I’ll be saving your bacon when things get tough.”
Another reference to the Armoury not being like other Aspects? Just what is this place?
“The other rules basically all boil down to respecting the privacy of other Guides and their pupils, so we don’t need to cover that. Which means we can finally get to the fun part; the Armoury itself.”
At that, almost as if on cue, the kettle begins to whistle as steam is released. That was faster than usual, it normally takes longer than that.
Seeing the mildly confused expression on my face, the Armsmaster gives a wry grin and says, “The place may copy what you’re used to, but it does like to add its own conveniences.”
With that, she pours water into both our cups, her coffee and my tea. Once down, she returns the kettle to the stove without turning it back on. Then she grabs the milk from the fridge, giving an appreciative glance at the fridge itself for some reason, and pours some milk in my tea. Once the milk is back in the fridge, the Armsmaster picks up her coffee, seemingly preferring it black, part of me notes, and takes a seat.
“Now, one of the big differences between the Armoury and most other Aspects is that where they vanish or what have you when the mage dies, the Armoury does not. It persists. It has in fact existed for more years than seconds in your life, and for as long as it has, so have I. We’re a package deal you see, you get one, you get the other. One of the downsides to being linked to the Armoury like I am is that I don't actually get to pick my students, it’s all up to this place. And where most other Guides will have passed you up because they could tell you hadn’t even used your mana once by the time your Aspect manifested, the Armoury sees something they didn’t. Which is their loss, really, as I’ve never known it to choose poorly, so I’m not too bothered by the lost autonomy.”
She takes a sip from her mug, seemingly not bothered by how the coffee should still be.
“For now, I’ll have to keep why the Armoury is the way it is secret for now, for your own safety, as for reasons that should become clear, if the wrong people find out before you’re ready they will take advantage of you. Being as old as it is, this place holds a great deal of dangerous secrets, most of which must remain hidden. Can you understand that?”
The idea of yet more things being kept from me like this burns at me something fierce, but if she’s telling the truth, and I can see no reason to lie about this, then it does make sense. Secrets are much harder to keep when they’re shared, after all.
Knowing this, I nod.
“Excellent. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything once I’m sure it won’t put you in too much risk. Moving on, the Armoury’s ultimate purpose is to store and contain weapons that have grown too powerful to remain out in the world, but it does also have a seperate arsenal intended for it’s Claimants use, and I’ll teach you how to wield the weapons you’re best suited for. It can also, once you figure out the knack for it, act as a place to store things if you need it to, but it doesn’t particularly like doing that. Practically speaking, that won’t mean much, it’ll mostly just amount to your things getting shuffled around when it’s inconvenient.”
“Are you saying the Armoury is alive?”
She lifts her hand and wiggles it slightly.
“Ehhh. Sorta. It’s more like it has a personality. I’ve yet to see any actual proof of intelligence, but things do shift around every now and then, and the timing is usually too deliberate to be random, so I won’t deny it's possible. Anyway, the last thing the Armoury can do that other Aspects cannot is eventually you will be able to open doors to access it physically, as it is technically a sort-of real space. I don’t fully get the details myself, but what you’re doing now is what’s called an astral projection. Your soul is currently separate from your body and is inside the Armoury, where it gives it physical substance, like it does for me right now, and you will continue to do so basically every time you go to sleep from now on. It’s perfectly harmless, and if anything happens to your body the Armoury will immediately return your soul and wake you up. It’s essentially the same as normal sleep and you no longer need to worry about nightmares, so I suppose that’s nice.”
I lift an eyebrow at that. “You suppose?”
“I don’t sleep, why would I know what dreams and all that are like?” she replies.
“Oh, right. Fair enough.”
“Uhuh. All that brings me to the only real rule when it comes to wielding this place. If you ever, and I do mean ever, bring someone into the Armoury that I do not approve of, I will kill them, and I will not budge on this.”
The severity of her words and tone catches me off guard. The lazy grin she’d been sporting this entire conversation is now gone, and all that remains is a look of unyielding resolve. I can practically feel the weight of the years in her gaze, and I’m instantly reminded of her near casual mention of how old she is.
“W-what? You can’t be serious?” I say, bewildered.
“Very. It doesn’t matter who it is, kid. It could be your parents, your little brother if you have one, your boyfriend for all I care. If they come in here without my say so, they die. I’ve made the mistake of letting the Claimant bring in whoever they like before and it backfired. Their trust was betrayed, the Twilight Vault in the bottom level was breached before I could stop it, and we’ve still yet to get back everything that was stolen. If we ever will. This isn’t something we negotiate over. This is how it’s going to work, and you are going to accept it. Got it?”
I search her gaze for a moment, looking for any hint of give over this. It’s not that I don’t understand why she’s putting her foot down, I do, but part of me chafes at the restriction anyway. It doesn’t matter, though. I can see that no matter how hard I try, she won’t change her stance.
“Okay.”
She immediately relaxes, the lazy grin springing back like it never left.
“Great. I think that’s all the big stuff out of the way, and I only just realised we’ve been talking about me this entire time, and you’ve still yet to introduce yourself. What’s your name, kid?” she says, taking a deep sip of her still hot coffee.
“Valerie Endmarch.”
The millenia-old Guide immediately does a spittake.