Emery seemed to deflate, sinking into the bath a bit with a huge sigh. “Where to begin?” She asked no one in particular as she searched for the words. I waited quietly and patiently for her to begin.

As she was contemplating, I looked over her scars again. Or, I supposed, at least the ones I could see. The most obvious began at the base of her neck on her left side that trailed down the back of her arm, ending just past the elbow. There was another I had noticed before getting into the bath that began above her right knee, and traveled up under what her towel covered; who knew where that one ended.

Then there was the mess of scar tissue running across her upper back. They seemed to be roughly all the same shape and size, and even spread evenly across her shoulders. Eventually, I was able to tear my eyes away from her scars and look at the water we sat in instead.

“You know, I don’t remember my birth family. Not even a little.” Emery began, with a self-depreciating chuckle. “When I was…I don’t know, maybe two? I was taken by the Hidden Blade Sect.” It was a name I didn’t recognize. Emery seemed to pick up on the look on my face. “Yeah, you wouldn’t know it. Not only was it a fairly secret Sect back then, it was completely destroyed.”

“Ah.” Was all I could get out.

“The earliest memories I have are of that Sect, along with some other children and our “caretakers”. I don’t remember all that much outside of eating, sleeping, and training.” Emery said, leaning her head back to look up at the sky. “It wasn’t…Well, it didn’t start bad? At least, not that I can remember. But by the time I was around five, things were…bad.” I could see Emery swallowing, as if her mouth had gone dry.

“To start with, the Hidden Blade Sect was very interesting. They had techniques passed down through their members that had different properties.” Emery churned her Qi, which coalesced into a small knife in her hand. “My basic techniques all come from their Sect. They were weapon masters, trained in practically every weapon you can think of.” The small knife in Emery’s hand seemed to melt into some kind of mercurial substance before reforming into a different shape. First a long, sharp needle. Then into a small club. The strange movements of the liquid metal were eye-catching and somehow hypnotic.

“Basically from as far back as I can remember, I was being trained in various weapons. Most of the motions and strikes are so deeply ingrained into me that I’m pretty sure I could keep fighting even while I’m unconscious.” She chuckled darkly.

“But like I said, around when I was five or so, the training changed. While the base technique of creating weapons from Qi was the foundation of the Sect’s training, what made it special was the ability to add special properties to a weapon you manifest through your Qi.” Apparently as demonstration, Emery held up the little bit of metal, shifted it back into the shape of a knife, and added a little more Qi to it. Suddenly, the blade seemed to seep a green mist into the air.

“Poison.” She said. Then her Qi changed again, and the blade seemed as if it sucked up the light around it. “Qi disruption.” Then once more, the blade’s edges seemed to fuzz. “Intangibility. You get the idea.” She said, before tossing the blade into the air. At the apex of the small toss, the whole knife just puffed away to essence.

“They started to try to teach all of their techniques to myself and the other kids that they had ‘taken in’.” My brow creased with a question, which Emery was quick to answer. “Ah, yes. How would someone teach an Unawakened child Qi techniques?”

I nodded. “If you and the other kids were all around five years old…even if you had been training for two years surely you couldn’t have made it to Awakening by then. Even starting early, most kids don’t Awaken until they are at least eight or so.”

Emery nodded sardonically. “How familiar are you with demonic techniques, Avuri?”

The question was sudden, and I bristled for a moment before calming and seeing where this was going. “Oh.”

“Yeah. There is a demonic technique - several, in fact - that can be used to forcefully Awaken someone who hasn’t made their Core yet. Most of them are terrible techniques that are usually used to create a Core within someone else that is under the creator’s control, and not the person it is used on. The technique used on myself and the other children wasn’t one like that. It was a faulty technique designed to give the target a usable Core, but one that was built on the shoddiest foundation.”

“Obviously, children that were given Cores like that wouldn’t be able to learn advanced techniques like what they were trying to teach us all. And the class I was a part of slowly started to vanish one child at a time.” Emery’s expression went dark and empty, as she likely remembered some of what happened. Maybe even faces. I just stared both enthralled and disgusted by her story.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“As you may imagine, the weakest were taken first. As each of us failed to show any results, they were removed.” She laughed then, suddenly turning dramatic in tone, as if performing. “I was one of the last to go. Such a dutiful student, I was. What a joke.” She spat out the last line before taking a deep breath.

Words started to come out of her in a tumble, as if she wanted to get this part over with as quickly as possible. Or maybe she wasn’t sure she would continue if she stopped even once.

“I can’t speak for the others. But when I was finally taken out of the class…First the assholes destroyed the Core they had so graciously given me. Then they had used one of those other techniques to create a Core under their control. That’s when they began to try different things. They tried to implant teachings into my head with demonic or corrupted Qi techniques. They tried to alter my body’s Qi flow and natural affinities.”

She motioned to the scars. “I don’t know what each goal was. Mostly it was just mental and physical torture. Mostly physical, I suppose. The mental bit just went along with it. They didn’t care what kind of side effects they were causing. I think they just wanted to see what would take hold in a body and what wouldn’t.”

“All of that lasted something like two years. Maybe three. I don’t know.” Emery shook her head. “Eventually, one of the Sect’s Elders, who had been in secluded Cultivation for several hundred years at least, emerged from his meditation. He found out what was going on after being among the Sect for a month or so, I think. He was absolutely disgusted by what his Sect was doing and so massacred them all. Cleansed the whole Sect of the demonic taint that had taken hold.”

Emery wrung her hands in the water as she continued. “He basically killed every single adult in the entire Sect. Almost all of them had been either involved or at least complicit. I think there were less than twenty-five survivors from a Sect of almost two hundred. And they were basically all students that had joined recently.”

“The Elder tried his best to help the kids that had been tortured. Some were hurt beyond help. I found out later that most of my ‘class’ had been turned into Qi cattle, just wrung dry of their body’s natural Qi, the same way we found Cierra. A few, like myself, had been undergoing various experiments because we seemed to exhibit the most strength, will, or whatever.”

Emery slid a bit farther down the wall of the bath, taking another deep breath before letting it out into the night air. “Long story short, the Elder did what he could for the kids that remained. Took in whoever was in the worst shape himself. Left others in the care of orphanages or the like. I imagine you can piece the rest together yourself.”

I imagined I could. “Would Vale happen to be a weapon master of some renown?” I asked.

Emery seemed to shake herself free of her inner demons before answering. “Renown? No, but he is absurdly strong.” She snorted. “Me and all my siblings were saved that day by him. Those of us that were either too damaged or exhibited some skill as a Cultivator he took in. Trained any of us that wanted it. He made for one hell of a father, all things considered. Though I’m sure he took us in out of pity at first, I think he genuinely formed real bonds with all of us after a time.”

I nodded. “I could see that in the way he interacted with you and Talya today. He clearly loves you.”

Emery nodded. “Yeah, I think he does.” She sighed, conjuring up her knife again. “Vale helped each of us break down the demonic Cores and form new ones with strong foundations. Funny thing about all the nonsense I went through as a kid? After he started to train us, I realized that some of the crap they did to me actually stuck. I know so many of the Hidden Blade’s techniques that it actually scared Vale at first.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you use them after what they did to you.”

Emery merely shrugged. “I figure I may as well make them my own. Use my traumatic past to my advantage and all that crap.” She said venomously. “More than that, though, all of those techniques drilled into my head - not to mention all of the demonic bullshit they did - put me in a singular position to create new techniques.”

The knife in her hand turned from the clean silver into a pure, brilliant white. “I have so many variations to pull from, that it's almost too easy for me to alter weapons I create to have new properties. This one can purify demonic Qi.” She said. Then the dagger turned a deep, bloody scarlet. “This one destroys demonic Qi. Painfully.”

I stared at the dangerous looking weapon, unsure what to make of it. “I…see.”

Emery turned to meet my eyes for a moment, snorted, then the knife puffed away again. “I’m sorry, Avuri, for what it’s worth. I don’t know why you came all this way, or what exactly you expected from me. Or even why you wanted to know any of this.” Emery stretched her arms out before her before continuing.

“I know you didn’t make me tell you or anything. But I’m an open book. I don’t keep secrets if I can help it. You seemed like you wanted to know, so I told you. Simple.” She looked into my eyes again, openness clear on her face. “I’m not a good person, Avuri. I’ve trained most of my life to be a weapon to kill demonic Cultivators wherever I can find them. I don’t know what it was about me that you found so ‘interesting’ when we met before, but I’m sure I’m not worth that interest.”

I sat back against the edge of the bath, sinking down a bit, as I took in everything in full, trying to process it all. “You know,” I began, “I’m not so sure that you’re a weapon, Emery.” I caught her raising an eyebrow out of the corner of my eye. “Sure. You killed a whole mess of people in that compound where I found you that day. I won’t deny that your sword is certainly sharp. And deadly. Maybe even scary.”

I chuckled a bit. “But. You put that away to rescue a little girl, become her mother, and have been protecting that little girl for almost a year. A ‘weapon’, as you put it, wouldn’t do that.” I said earnestly, but continued looking at the sky. “You are just as much a shield as you are a sword. Even if you don’t necessarily think of yourself that way.”

I turned to face her finally, the look on her face was pensive. “Also. All of this made you more interesting, not less.”