Despite outward appearances, Baturya had yet to recover from the attack. He suspected that he never would, not completely. It was a part of him, now. Just as part of Ryt’s soul was part of his. And it was a dark part, full of anger, fear, paranoia, and hatred. But he had weathered the storm, and though he had come out bruised and battered, he was alive. And he was happy to be alive, even if he was troubled by thoughts and feelings which were not his own.

Fortunately, the outcome of the attack was not entirely to his detriment. He was changed. He was different. He was stronger, stronger than he ever would have been without Ryt’s injection of madness. Not because of the madness, but because of clarity that others had gifted him to offset the madness.

Baturya was at peace with what had happened. His physical wound had long since healed, and he was overcoming the spiritual wound that had been inflicted by the Master he had accidentally driven insane. Day by day, he cultivated, allowing himself to feel the fading pain in his soul as bit by bit it recovered. And unlike most physical injuries, the spirit grows stronger once it heals – truly heals – from an injury. The trouble was healing it.

Sitting calmly in his room overlooking the hills on the far side of the Sect compound, Baturya cycled his ki and simply allowed himself to feel. To think. To be. He did not hide from the emotions which lashed out at him from the lingering effects of Ryt’s attack. He did not judge them. He did not even flinch. They were old and familiar now. They were not his, yet, but they would be soon. And when they were truly his, they would no longer be his enemies, but his friends.

A thud in the hallway interrupted Baturya’s calm meditations. Shifting his senses, he sighed as he realized that Shaji was home. Sighing, he suppressed his aura. That had been one of the first things he had been forced to learn after the attack; even the Awakened had felt uncomfortable around him until he had managed to do so. The unawakened were barely able to withstand his presence. Shaji had gotten as far as he did out of sheer stubbornness, and perhaps due to inoculation.

“What time is it?” Baturya asked, his voice loud enough to carry through the hallway where Shaji had collapsed.

“Saz says the letter finally came,” Shaji gasped. “How much did my father send? You told him to send enough to pay for my fines and return voyage, I know you did. How much extra did he send? Don’t think you can--”

“The letter is on the desk, you can read it yourself,” Baturya answered. “I think that would be better.”

Shaji rushed over to do exactly that. Baturya stretched, waiting for what he knew was coming.

“I thank you for informing me of the fate of my grandson, Shajita. It grieves me that the Makavian family has lost such a promising young member to a tragic bandit attack, but knowing his fate will at least give us closure. Enclosed is five ren for the slave who survived to tell the tale. Please see to it that he spends it wisely! What? This is – this makes no sense!”

Baturya sighed. He was fourteen now, more or less. Nobody ever told him exactly, but after some conversations with his primary tutor, Teezo, he had come to that conclusion. Still small for his age after being stunted in his youth by poor nutrition and overwork, he was nevertheless in peak health now. He ought to be, between his cultivation and the exercise that all members of the Sect were expected to engage in. Except for his blond hair, Baturya looked every bit the young lord that Shajita fancied himself to be, but was no longer.

“You’ve been disowned, Shaji,” Baturya explained calmly. “Your family doesn’t want you back. Honestly, I talked with Teezo, and it makes sense when you think about it. You were always extra to begin with, and now you have proven yourself to be an unworthy disappointment not worth the expense of rescuing. Unfortunately for you Teezo was rather explicit in what he told them about--”

“Shut up, Baty, you don’t know anything!” Shaji cried, ripping the document in two. “This is a fake! There is no way my grandfather wrote this!”

“Teezo says he’s quite certain it was written by Shiasbemu’s own hand,” Baturya said. “But I don’t care. The post has somewhat stabilized recently, and I have another letter to send to your family anyway to address the part of this letter which you apparently didn’t bother to read. My letter doesn’t concern you, but since I’m mailing it you can save on postage if you want to write your own to try to convince them to take you back. Honestly, I’d be just as glad to get rid of you.”

“What could you possibly have to write my grandfather about, other than me?” Shaji demanded.

“That’s actually none of your business,” Baturya said coldly. “Shaji, just because I don’t treat you like a slave doesn’t mean—”

“You don’t treat me like a slave? I spent all day shoveling shit, Baty! Do you have any idea how disgusting that is?”

“I do, actually. I was emptying your chamberpot and helping in the garden as soon as your family bought me. Have you forgotten? Perhaps I should give you a reminder,” Baturya threatened.

Shajita flinched, recalling the last time Baturya had crossed the boundary of his mind and forced memories into his mind. The week that had passed in an afternoon as he was trapped inside of his own head, reliving the childhood memories he shared with Baturya, but from the wrong perspective. Instead of being the young master learning to discipline the help properly, he had been the help. As much as he hated his current state of affairs, it was better than those inflicted memories.

Shaji still thought that Baturya’s memories of the events had blown things out of proportion. Surely he hadn’t been that cruel.

Baturya was making an empty threat. He had instantly regretted his actions the last time. He had felt justified at the time, that Shaji deserved worse treatment than that, but had found that the invasion of Shaji’s mind was almost as unsettling to him as it had been to Shaji. Or it would have been, had Shaji never experienced a day of misfortune in his life before their reunion. Worse, doing so had damaged his cultivation, adding impurities which he was still attempting to cleanse from his ki. Baturya would never again invade someone’s mind. However, he didn’t have to let Shaji know that.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

In truth, Baturya didn’t know what to do about Shaji. He’d regretted buying him almost as soon as the auction had gone through, and he was uncertain what it was that had driven him to bid on his former master. Loyalty? Or had it been the slight tug that he felt sometimes, which he believed came from the three goddesses of fate?

“I hate you,” Shaji said, sounding like a child who had been scolded and sent to bed without dessert.

“I don’t care,” Baturya answered. “I’m posting the letter tomorrow. If you want to send an appeal to your family, get it to me before then. I’m going to go eat before the kitchens close.”

Shaji didn’t answer, and the two parted ways for the evening. The conversation was the longest they’d had in months.

~~~~~~~~~

As he reviewed the latest reports from the Elders, Gyre began to feel like the rocks he had described. There was really no point in sending these things to him, the Elders had run the Sect perfectly fine before. He didn’t particularly care about the day-to-day operations and never had. However, whenever he tried to delegate one activity back to the Elder who had traditionally been responsible for it, he found another responsibility added into his in-basket. The result was a never ending cycle which seemed determined to bog him down in bureaucracy.

He wondered if the intent was to frustrate him into letting something slip regarding his cultivation secrets, or if the intent was to stall him along what others saw as a prodigious rate of growth. He didn’t care. He had decades to write down his thoughts and methods before he had to make a decision of whether or not to actually do so. That was whether or not he decided to proceed on to the next stage and begin walking the path of the immortal. Of becoming a hidden master. Because, it had been made clear to him, all immortals within the Empire must hide. If they declared their status openly, they would be hunted.

In the years since he had pursued Ryt, one of his oldest friends, and attempted to convince the man to return to face justice – or to kill him, Gyre still wasn’t sure which was his primary motivation during the chase – Gyre had grown to hate the Sudaman Sect.

Ryt had been a friend, and Gyre believed he was the only one who mourned the man’s passing. It was all so unnecessary. Not only the violence, which had been born out of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Ryt had not murdered Baturya, as they had believed in their final confrontation. There might have been a lesser penance which Ryt might have undertaken, such as joining the Martial Orders, to atone for an assault of one of the Sect’s students.

Instead, Ryt had used his ki to ignite his body into flames. Gyre had been unable to stop him, unable to do anything but watch as his old friend died in a blast of fire that had almost taken Gyre’s life as well, despite his recent ascension.

In a final bit of irony, Gyre had come to realize that there was only a hair’s breadth between committing suicide in the way that Ryt had done and breaking through to the sixth Reformation. How differently the last two years would have been had Ryt only seen the way to unite his mind into the explosive melding he had made of his body and spirit.

Ryt’s posthumous excommunication isolated Gyre in his grief. Worse, the Elder’s had made certain that Gyre himself had authorized the excommunication as one of his early acts as the new Sect Leader, a position which he had reluctantly allowed himself to be pressured to take. In a bit of foolishness, he had signed the papers authorizing it without reading them. Gyre had since solved the problem by simply refusing to sign anything at all. Lately he had been including vulgarities in lieu of a signature, and the Sect hadn’t burned to the ground thus far.

Instead of having a friend and sparring partner to discuss the possibility of an immortal lifetime as hidden masters, or a slow fading of their life force, Gyre’s closest confidants was Ita, a Kastazee girl come to shore because she was enamored with Baturya and unwilling to accept any answer but yes to her marriage offer. Ita was the daughter of a water-walker, Gyre had learned, one of the Kastazee immortals that he hadn’t believed existed until he had met their continent-bound equivalents. Until he had entered the gestalt and learned to see all the colors of the spirit.

There was, after all, far more ocean in the world than land, and the spiritual energy required to surpass the sixth Reformation was abundant on the open sea. The Kastazee did not share Gyre’s dilemma, they walked among their people openly on the ships and islands away from the prying eyes of those born on land. That route was open to him too, Ita had informed him, because there was still more room for Water Walkers in the world, even if some of them had been born on land.

“It just means you must have lots of Kastazee children,” Ita had explained. “Once you have a dozen or so, nobody will say you are not Kastazee. You are strong, but it may take you four, five years. Same for Baty, when he is ready to walk the water. I will be his--”

“We are not getting married! I am not Kastazee! I will not be marrying any Kastazee women! Not you and not the dozen others that you want me to!” Baturya had objected at the time.

“That is okay, I have brothers and we can--”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it!”

Gyre chuckled at the memory, as the conversation had played out in his head. He had noticed that, while the bickering had never abated, Baturya had made no effort to actually chase off the Kastazee girl now that he had the power to do so.

He knew a little about Kastazee customs. They were polyamorous and had a very loose definition of marriage. According to the Kastazee, any set of consenting adults sharing a boat could be considered married, depending on a variety of other factors. One of those was cultivation. Ita would have to reach at least the fourth Reformation before he would be allowed to pursue her romantically. However, she could still pursue him as he was strong and would therefor give her strong children. If he told her to go away until she had become at least that strong, she would have no choice to leave until she had. By Ita’s customs, in simply denying her outright, Baturya was in fact leaving the door open for her to change his mind.

He had asked the girl, who was now thirteen or so, what she would do if he said words to that effect, and she had simply scoffed. “I will just not hear them. He is a rockman with a rockhead. If he ever learns Kastazee ways, he will forget having spoken them. Or we will have been married long and he will not shame me that way.”

“They say that rocks are stubborn,” Gyre had countered, “But they have nothing with the implacability of the sea, breaking down rocks until there’s naught but sand left.”

“Of course,” Ita had agreed cheerfully.

Drawing a phallus on a request from Elder Petecho for a different scent of oil to be used for – Gyre didn’t actually read what it was for – Gyre decided that it was simply time to give up pretending. He had never wanted to be Sect Leader in the first place. He wasn’t an administrator, and it was time to stop pretending that he ever would be.

So, with a swipe of his arm, he cleared the desk. Three centuries old, made of mahogany, inlaid with decorative carvings and priceless. The previous six sect leaders had sat at this desk, although only one of them had been of the sixth reformation. With a finger and a bit of ki, Gyre burned the words “I fucking quit,” on the desk, followed by his signature, followed by several vulgarities. Then he simply walked out of the office they had pushed upon him, heading toward the kitchens where he was certain his young friends would be meeting for the evening meal.

~~~~~~~~~