The mess hall was quiet. It wasn’t yet peak hours, but thankfully, meal tokens could be taken at most anytime. It was the saving grace of their time in the training camp. Rane navigated his way to the front of the hall where the cooks were beginning to place pots of steaming liquid and spices. Well, not heavy on the spices other than salt, but it was better than some of the grain gruel he had eaten growing up in Auryck. He grabbed one of the simple wooden bowls from the stack, and held it out to receive his portion. The cook deftly poured a portioned amount into the bowl. Rane paid close attention, and was disappointed. It seemed he had gotten more potatoes than meat. He grabbed a chunk of bread and took a seat next to Puddles.
“I don’t get what their problem is,” sighed Rane.
“Wait, what,” inquired Puddles. “Your Southeast, that’s enough for them.”
“Yeah, lots of people are from Southeast,” Rane countered.
“That’s not really all of it. If you stretch it by a few street blocks, you could say I’m from Southeast, but you can’t even say that, can you,” asked Puddles.
Rane frowned, not really getting it. “I’m full blooded imperial, and my father also served the empire as a soldier.”
“Wait, where are you from,” asked Puddles.
“Kelston.”
Puddles sat back and smiled, nodding to himself, “yeah, that’s not a real town.”
Rane was only more confused at this point.
Puddles seemed to be enjoying it, so the two just ate some soup as he allowed Rane to soak in anticipation.
“Kelston is only a few decades old, and has no resident noble family. Technically, one of them probably owns the territory. To get to the point, it’s not a very political place. Soldiers - and the families of them - make up the majority of the populace, and a couple moderators and commanders run the city government. The Empire basically pays for the city to exist.”
“Here in Auryck,” he continued, “things are different. There are quite a few little factions always jockeying for power, but as long as the peasantry is fed and bed, everyone is happy, but as you know well, the Southeast district has plenty of people that don’t fit into either category, and to make matters worse, many of them aren’t from Auryck.”
“But many of them have nowhere else to go. Most of my neighbors were there because of monster attacks on smaller villages,” Rane argued.
“Poor people tend to only be as charitable as they are wealthy, and the wealthy have the charity of the poor, so the word lately has been mostly, ‘get out.’ My dad said the whole city would be better off if the whole district burned to the ground overnight.”
Rane looked down at his bowl. He had nothing to say.
Puddles looked left and right, as if searching for something, and scratched the back of his head a bit. “So… Why’d you enlist?”
Rane answered reflexively, “because of my dad.” He knew that wasn’t really the answer, but it had been enough for the enlistment office, and enough to appease looking to make light conversation. It wasn’t enough for this boy.
“You don’t strike me as the generational service tradition type. Where’s your dad now?”
“He’s dead actually,” Rane responded without missing a beat. It was Rane’s turn to hold the other in suspense for a bit. After he’d had his fill of Puddle’s discomfort, he continued, “he died a long time ago. They think it was a monster attack while pushing past the Kelston front. Probably stumbled into something's territory.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“You had me going there, so why’d you really join?”
“I had to get away from Auryck. I was training to be a blacksmith,” explained Rane. Puddles raised a brow. Skilled trades weren’t common in the Southeast. “A bad blacksmith. I had no talent for it. I figured I would enlist, get strong, kill some demis, and move to a port city. All for the Emperor, of course. What about yourself?”
Puddles lowered his head and glanced about the room. “I’m doing it for the girls, man. I’ve seen it myself. I had a cousin come back from his term, still in uniform, a few medals of distinction, and he practically had marriage proposals falling like leaves after the first freeze.”
Rane broke the silence with a quick burst of laughter. “I can’t believe it. You joined for the girls? If sir, tall, blond, and bashful needs military service to round out his resume, I’m gonna need my weight in medals hanging from my chest when I finish my term.”
“Come on, it's not that bad, you just need a bath. And a haircut. And brush your teeth. And maybe become altient. And you could –”
“Yeah, I get the point, pretty boy,” Rane said, cutting him short. “You ready to work with ambient? I didn’t do well in the hand-to-hand, nor the weapons training, but that’s not where real strength lies anyways.” The spark of ambition could be heard in his voice.
“Yeah, been looking forward to it,” said Puddles. “I’m actually pretty close to classient already.”
Rane starred incredulously, but quickly shifted gears to disbelief. “No way.”
“Really, my area of direct control is about… This big.” He held his hands over the table sheepishly. They were about shoulder length apart. “And within it, I can move little rocks.”
Rane breathed a sigh of relief. Puddles was definitely further than himself, but he wasn’t truly close to classient. Classient was the first class of ambient control that actually mattered. Before that, any application of ambient was little more that you could get out of simple tools, or drained far too much energy. You could boil water, close cuts, start fires, or maintain the heat of metals in the forge. Technically, he could heat up the metal without a forge, but he’d likely pass out doing so. Classient wasn’t some kind of epiphany or breakthrough; it just represents the first time any of your ambient abilities becomes powerful enough to add to your skill, as opposed to something you could just use a stick or a rock to achieve using less focus and greater precision.
“Alright Sir Puddles of the Myriad Pebbles,” said Rane, “let’s head out to the training ground. We are starting ambient training a bit out into the bush, and I’d probably have to become a deserter before facing the consequence of being late because I got lost from a short walk into the woods. “ Puddles nodded in agreement, and they left the mess hall.
*****
Rane thought himself wise as a sage. Apparently, the meeting place for ambient training was more than just a short walk into the woods. The training camp was on the west side of Auryck, and the meeting place for their work with ambient was supposedly two and a half miles from there. Rane’s only experience in the wilderness was as a child in Kelston, so he didn’t really understand the challenge. Two and a half miles through the bush was in no way comparable to two and a half miles on a main road, something which this place was certainly lacking. The trail that began from camp quickly became less and less recognizable until finally, Rane was sure that, although he believed himself to be on track, the trail itself did not connect to the training location.
They crested a rather large hill, looked at each other, and turned to survey the area. Everything seemed familiar. The trees here were a bit larger and older than where they had been 30 minutes ago, which gave Rane confidence that they were, in fact, heading further out into the forest, and not just skirting around Auryck.
Puddles gestured for his attention and asked, “do you remember if the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, or the other way around?”
Rane thought about his home in the Southeast District. “The sun definitely rises in the east.”
Both boys looked to the heavens. Unfortunately, the sun was still too high to really give them a bearing. It would need to be a bit closer to the horizon to give them a good sense of direction. And, with no other ideas, they simply waited until it was.
They found the training site about an hour before the sun fell below the tree line as they could see from the large clearing. Once they had found the correct area, it was rather hard to miss. Report time was 30 minutes prior to sunset. They were not the first arrivals, but neither were they last. Recruits continued to trickle in even as they were called to attention for the address of High Tally Cloud. The low tallies stood along the outskirts, no doubt documenting those who were either late, or simply absent.
The voice of High Tally Cloud blasted away the hushed murmurs of the recruits like the first clap of thunder in a soft rain, “Some say that ambient is the will of the world itself, but that’s not something dregs like yourselves need concern your feeble little minds with. You need only be concerned with your own will, because that is the primary way to use ambient to exert change onto this world.”