“Pain is one of life’s great educational tools.”
—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar
Sylvas was shunted out of the infirmary shortly after that, even though he still felt as if his bones were only half-healed. He ached all over, as was typical of any day on Strife, but there was a level of exhaustion that he hadn’t known before after the medic’s speech about his… habits.
Bael and Kaya were just coming out of the mess hall as he arrived, both trying to act as though they weren’t walking together. It was enough to make Sylvas suspect a burgeoning romance, if they didn’t spend so much of their time together deliberately ignoring that the other existed. “Hey…”
After a live combat exercise there was always some tension, some unsureness over whether feelings were hurt and the results would provoke animosity, but Sylvas shouldn’t have worried. “You absolute madman. You crazy culgh. I cannot believe you did that.”
“She could, actually.” Bael corrected. “She placed a bet on the fact that you’d go out in a blaze of glory rather than allow anyone to defeat you. It was her argument against the plan to bring down the tower.”
“What can I say?” She cackled. “I know my boy.”
“Forget that, how did you bring the tower down?” Sylvas pressed past Kaya’s usual ego inflation to Bael’s more useful analysis.
“A simple counterspell, but one that required some degree of preparation.”
“Some degree of… I saw him doing the math in the sand, and I couldn’t even understand what half the numbers he was scribbling were, let alone how he got them to add up.” Kaya guffawed.
“Surpassing the boundaries of your intellectual prowess isn’t exactly an overnight trip, my dear.”
She smiled at him politely, “Pardon?”
“I said…”
Kaya cut him off. “You want me to headbutt you right in the shriveled little elf raisins?”
“By no interpretation of my words could one come to the conclusion that…”
She rolled her head on her shoulders to loosen up. “Alright, one nutcracker coming up.”
Bael scampered back with his hands upraised, trying to cross his legs while still standing. “No need for all that, I apologize.”
She grinned. “Aye, that’s right you do.”
“The counterspell could be incredibly helpful in future exercises. Is there any way to accelerate the process? What if we can sublimate the creation of the circle into a separate spell, and then…” The three of them fell into a mixture of technical jargon and their usual banter as they headed towards the tower that housed them. If Kaya felt like the conversation was getting too technical for her, it never seemed to show on her expression, though she did definitely offer up fewer opinions that the other two had to share.
“… establishment of the circle is essential, but as are several other factors that need to be taken into account. For instance…” Bael trailed off as they entered the main living area of the Blackhall tower and the glowing illusory list of their standings in the day’s exercise came into sight.
Sylvas approached it with as calm an expression as he could have hoped to muster, assuming that he’d be right on top of the roster as usual, followed by Bael and Kaya, who had come in second in the whole exercise, taken out only at the last minute.
There were Bael and Kaya, sharing the top slot. A little unexpected, but he supposed that they had to be graded on some sort of curve depending upon their individual power, and he hadn’t really demonstrated anything all that spectacular, given his newfound power and affinity.
He wasn’t in second place either. That was another naval track mage from Kaya’s team. He had to search all the way down the list for his own name, hovering close to the bottom in amongst all the nobodies who had been picked off with casual ease. “This can’t be right.”
Kaya and Bael were both looking with rapt fascination in any direction other than at him. “But, I won?”
With a spike of concentrated mana and gravity, he punched through to Cold Storage, reached in, and plucked out his own slate, somewhat the worse for wear. Cold Storage snapped shut behind his hand and he flicked through the slate until he found the assessment report.
Vaelith’s dry writing crackled into place on the screen. “As the team containing a gravity mage, there should have been an expectation of receiving particular attention from the rival teams, and a failure to comprehend this and prepare a suitable strategy for the opening moments of the day resulted in the majority of the squad under Vail’s command being wiped out in the early stages of the exercise, leaving only a single straggler behind. While this straggler of the team was able to secure victory, it was in spite of Vail’s leadership rather than because of it. Given the difficulty of fighting against an unfamiliar and uncommon affinity, all other candidates scores have been adjusted accordingly.”
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“I’ve been given a handicap?”
Bael wasn’t smiling as such. Actual expressions very rarely showed on his face, but there was a hint of amusement in his voice. “Ah. The burden of excellence is the assumption that it shall continue unabated.”
“Excellence? I was excellent! I took out…” He trailed off, realizing that most of the people he took out were gathered around the room with rather stern expressions on their faces. “This isn’t fair.”
“Whoever told you life would be fair was having a laugh with you, stanzbuhr.” Kaya grumbled, trying to move him along towards their rooms.
But it was more than unfair. Ranking him last, among the students who hadn’t even fought, when he’d essentially dominated the entire battlefield by himself was… it was cruel. Like the Instructors had seen him happy for the first time and decided to cut him down to size. He had been challenged before. He’d suffered. But it had always felt like it was a step on the path towards progress. Pulling the rug out from under him like this was something else entirely.
The medic had been right. She’d been right. He kept throwing his life on the line for the Ardent, for these stupid little tests, all to prove that he was the best that there was. That he was worth keeping around. That they shouldn’t send him back. To the other Croesians on whatever backwater they’d been abandoned on with their massive debts, to the orphanage where he was loathed.
There is no going back.
Setting his jaw, he broke away from Kaya and Bael, pushing past the other naval track students and up the spiral of stairs to head for his chambers.
They couldn’t send him away because there was nowhere to send him to. Croesia was a husk. The orphanage had fallen in the sea if it hadn’t been razed. Wherever the other people that had survived his involuntary manslaughter of their planet had gone, the Ardent weren’t going to send him back there. They couldn’t. Not now. Not with how important he had become the moment that he found out about his gravity affinity.
If the Ardent didn’t want him, he had almost a hundred letters from people who did. Kings and Queens of whole solar systems, galaxy spanning conglomerates, even the Obsidian Dominion had sent through a polite invitation to interview with them, though it had been heavily censored by the Empyrean and the Ardent before it came to him, to the point that it was more or less indecipherable. The fact was, they could not afford to lose him. Not when all these other factions were vying for him.
I can stop.
Sylvas slammed the door shut behind him. As if afraid that the thought might echo down the halls. He could stop. He wouldn’t, of course, he still wanted more than this plateau that he’d managed to clamber onto, but the breakneck sprint ignoring all of the damage that he was doing to himself didn’t have to go on the way that it had. Pain was one thing, but this was another. This self-destructive drive; for a moment he couldn’t even think of where it might have come from, then he remembered his guilt. His complicity in the death of his world. Without him, they could not have called on the Eidolon. Without his actions, Mira would be sitting next to him, making sarcastic comments and belittling his every decision in that affectionate way she did. He wondered what she would have to say about him shattering every bone is his body to win at some training exercise, and then losing all the same. She’d probably call it an object lesson. If he hadn’t killed her.
With a heavy exhalation, he sank down with his back still against the door. Grief pressed against the walls that he’d built in his mind like an inescapable tide. The walls would hold, the walls were solid. He didn’t need to worry about them. Clearmind kept it all at bay. It had been keeping it all at bay every time that these feelings had reared their ugly head.
It was hard to remember an hour passing where he hadn’t slipped into Clearmind to be rid of these thoughts. The guilt, the shame, the pain. All of it so easy to discard when there was work to do, mountains to climb, achievements to be made. Ever since his arrival on Strife there had always been an excuse to keep pushing forward, to keep himself focused on the prize. Hammerheart had been ideal, an existential threat driving Sylvas on towards advancement. If the dwarf hadn’t already existed, the Ardent probably would have manufactured one to serve the same purpose.
Drawing his knees up to his chest, Sylvas tried to breathe, slowly and steadily, like he was in meditation. Like he was trying to draw more mana inside him, despite being full. His Paradigms were both locked in place, both locked together, the interlocking points of the two circles rotating oh so slowly against one another. His mind kept clear by one and filled with potential distractions by the other. He never had to think about anything he didn’t want to for the rest of his life. The weight of the water on the other side of the walls of the dam never had to find its way through.
“Everyone on Croesia. Everyone that I ever knew, is dead.” Sylvas said it slowly and aloud. “I am responsible…”
He had been manipulated and groomed since he was a child to fulfill his role in the ritual. He had been tricked and pushed beyond his limits by people who saw him as nothing more than a tool. He was free of them now. He had killed them all, and now he was free in a vast empty universe where he could go anywhere and do anything, and he had chosen to go on being a tool. He had chosen to keep on hurting himself, trying to become more powerful, trying to prove to everyone that he was the best, even though nobody had been asking him too.
Hurting myself isn’t going to bring them back.
There was no price of blood so steep that he wouldn’t pay it if it would have brought Croesia back. There was no price he wouldn’t pay to get Mira back. But there was no price that he could pay. Killing himself wasn’t going to bring them back. Being the best wasn’t going to bring them back. Nothing was going to undo what he had done.
Sylvas slammed the walls of Clearmind up against the wave of despair threatening to consume him. The roiling chaos of his thoughts went still. Pure logic prevailed.
I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to suffer. I can choose to keep this buried. I can choose to protect myself.
But he also had the choice to stop; to stop pushing himself to the limits, to stop hurting himself to prove that he was worthy of respect, to stop killing himself piece by piece so that he could get another little gold star on his report card.
I’m done.