Energies in Polarity

It is the water that tells the river how to bend.

* * * * * * * *

“IAGO!”

The screech sent a shiver down his spine that sped back up his neck and tried to knock him out cold. He was not sure what he could have done to have upset Eulylia already. He snuck a side glance to Ty and Szak beside him in the combat dome, and he braced himself for what he was about to bear.

“Yes, sweetheart?” he sang with light and gentle tones. “What’s the matter, darling Eulylia, my beautiful angel of grace?”

“It is an outrage, indeed! Bladen is in my Astronomy class!”

“That’s horrid news,” he played along, relieved that she was upset with an entity completely irrelevant to him. “Absolutely atrocious luck for my sweetheart. Hi, Seph.”

“Oh, shut it,” Eulylia snapped. Sephria nodded toward the sound of Iago’s voice as she patted Eulylia’s shoulder. “If you truly wished to fix this, you would stop associating with that despicable man.”

“I would do anything for you, Eulylia—”

“Lyly.”

“Eulylia…”

She glared at Iago, but he only smiled.

“He’s from Szak’s clan. I can’t do such a thing,” Iago reasoned. “Come here. Tell me, love. What was it that he said or did today?” From the corner of his eye, he caught Sephria make a face that told him he asked the wrong question as they walked over to sit beside him.

“That man sincerely had the gall to approach me as if I were a friend of his this morning! And, as if that were not horrendous enough for our day, he did not stop speaking, did not even pause for a breath, until we entered the dome just now. Iago, it takes us half an autumn’s hour to walk from the markets to morning combat.” She saw Iago chuckle and crossed her arms. “Oh, truly! His bragging voice is cacophonous to my siren ears. For the entirety of what would have been a peaceful stroll before the practice of violence, he relentlessly bragged about his dragon, his Drakonforged stars, incessantly listing all the horrible people he had to deal with when he was in Oblivion, oh, how clever he must be to survive over the Edge, and… Iago!”

“… Yes, love?”

“Do you know the name he gives to those who reside in Oblivion?”

“… Oblivious?”

“No, that is what respectable people call them. Bladen has the audacity to call them—oh, I do not even want to repeat it!”

“Filthy casuals,” Szak said, relieving Eulylia of the responsibility. Eulylia extended a hand out toward Szak and looked at Iago, awaiting a reaction.

Iago caught wind of her expectancy and dropped his jaw in a mix of horror and disgust. “Does he really!”

“Szakarilis, you need to speak with him about such rude mannerisms.”

“I don’t need to do anything,” Szak scoffed. “Bladen calls them filthy casuals because if you ever see an Oblivious, that is exactly what they are. They are filthy disgusting, and they cannot be anything more than dirt casual. It’s an accurate description of what they are.”

Eulylia whipped her head at Iago. “What was that?!”

“Hmm… I’m pretty sure that was an explanation of why Bladen calls the Oblivious ‘filthy casuals,’” Ty answered, instead.

Iago closed his eyes and dug his face into his hands. That was rhetorical, Ty. Rhetorical.

“I cannot believe this. Iago, you do not agree with them, do you?”

“I can’t.” He pulled his cheeks down as he lifted his face and sighed honestly. “I’ve never seen an Oblivious, so I wouldn’t be able to say if they’re filthy… or casual?” He ended with an inquiring tone, not understanding the point of this particular argument.

“Seph!” Eulylia turned and dug her head into Sephria’s shoulder, utterly exasperated.

Lyly,” Sephria sang softly, hugging her back. “I believe in you. You are strong enough to endure through seeing Bladen every week for the rest of this quarter. Whenever he speaks, remember I’m here for you.”

At those words, Eulylia lifted her arms and embraced Sephria warmly. Iago sat there and tried to figure out the difference between what he had said and what Sephria had said, why her words worked, but not his, and what he must do to earn that same kind of hug.

“Iago!”

Everyone in the group turned to see Alea running up to them.

“Darling!” Iago smiled as she stopped before them. “You looked around the whole arena to find me?”

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“It wasn’t difficult,” Alea said, taking his question seriously. “Lyly shouted your name but a moment ago.”

“Ah, that’s right, that’s right.”

“Szak,” Alea called, then looked up to him. Szak turned to her a raised brow.

“What do you want?” The terseness of his voice forced the question into a command.

“Szak… I know this is a lot to ask, but would you please, uhmm…” Alea fidgeted with her feet. “… if you think that there is the possibility of you taking time today—and I can understand if you wouldn’t want to because you’re so incredibly talented and I definitely wouldn’t want to be in the way—but if you could, and it wouldn’t be too much trouble for you—”

“You’re rambling.” Szak interrupted. “Without me agreeing, your request in itself is already wasting my time.”

Iago and Eulylia glanced at each other amidst the silence where Alea had offered no reply. Iago noticed, then, how tight Sephria was grabbing onto Eulylia’s arm. He wondered if it was because of Alea’s presence. Just as Eulylia parted lips to speak up for Alea in some way, the day’s announcement beat her to it.

“SZAKARILIS DRAKON. IAGO KYLMA. ETHAN ARGO. RÁDIA VITACÉ.”

Szak closed his eyes, inhaled slow, and tried to gather his patience.

Iago stood up and offered Alea an assuring smile. “Ask him after. He’ll be in a better mood then.”

Alea looked up at Iago inquisitively as Szak walked past them. “How do you know that?”

“You’ll see,” he chuckled. With a wink for Eulylia, he followed Szak onto the arena filled with flat, rocky land. It lay between them and their opponents with no grass, no trees, and all the dirt that could fit within the circumference.

“You think they randomly generate the terrain?” Iago asked Szak when he caught up to him. He had waited for something to grow or change around them, but he saw two others enter the stage on the other side and the barrier rise immediately afterward. There was a merman who looked to be a teenager, with soft blue-green hair and even greener eyes. His partner had radiant, neon green hair with a thick strip of ivory down the middle, reaching from tip of hairline to below her waist. Iago thought her to resemble an exotic skunk of some sort. He nudged Szak again. “Is this it? We’re fighting on this?”

“We’re on open ground.”

“We have nowhere to hide while they have everywhere to run.” Iago leaned in. “You think we could get a reroll?”

Szak only shook his head. Ethan and Rádia looked to be whispering to each other. From what Szak could see at this distance, Rádia was much more confident than Ethan. This would make sense, considering Ethan was a merman on solid, waterless ground. Without ivory hair, it meant he was most likely a morphic innatier. When in the ocean, he could shapeshift into a variety of sea creatures. When on land, he could suffocate and kill himself quite easily.

“You take Ethan.”

Iago was about to ask for a switch—he’d much rather not get fishy slime all over himself, nor did he want to showcase his talent before a crowd. But, before he could ask, he saw Ethan and Rádia start their run toward them, closing the distance.

“I don’t understand why anyone would run toward the enemy on open terrain.”

“You can’t understand doing anything without hiding your true intentions,” Szak answered with a slight scoff. As he pulled his sword out from its sheath, the Drakonforged blade let out a ghastly fierce hiss, and with his swing, the violet-ruby blade laid a path of fire behind it. But, with nothing to swallow, all fire dissipated, and only steam rose as he held the blade steady before him.

Iago pursed his lips in deep thought. He could not tell if Szak gave him a serious answer or not. “Can we play a game?” he asked instead.

“No.”

Szak ran forward to meet up with them. Exactly as he predicted, Ethan pulled away and ran toward Iago to not be matched against the Drakonforged. But before Szak could get close enough, Ethan was thrown into Rádia, knocking both of them sideways.

He stopped and turned back to Iago. “I thought I ordered no games.”

“Oh, come on,” Iago laughed. “You know how I fight.”

Szak gathered his patience, considering everyone was watching. “And I also know what you’re avoiding. Just get it over with.”

Iago kept his hands in his pockets. Ethan and Rádia picked themselves up, and while Rádia shook her head to regain herself, Ethan ran toward them again. Seven, eight, nine steps in, and Iago lifted his hand, as if flipping the air. A wave of icy breath exhaled within him, cooling all that was kept under his skin, and Ethan flipped up into the air before dropping face-up onto the ground.

“You think they’ll run up a third time? Or a fourth?”

“There are limits to idiocy.”

“Maybe they will,” Iago chuckled lightly.

Szak only shook his head and left Iago’s side to meet up with Rádia once more. All that Iago was doing was an absolute waste of time.

The battlefield is never a game.

“Can I just stand here, then?” Iago called out. “Since you won’t let me have fun!”

Szak glared back. “Just don’t lose!”

He reached Rádia at magnificent speed, half the time it would take a talentless human, and swung at her. Fire excreted from the blade once again, and Rádia could have sworn that she saw, for a split second, the head of a dragon emerge from those flames. She dodged the attack, cowering low to the ground, and pressed her hands hard into the dirt, channeling her talent into the ground. Immediately, the terrain changed around them. Szak stopped moving to not lose balance. His feet sank where he stood, and what was once dryland had become a green, muddy meadow trying to make hills. Every step he made to regain solid ground was met with more soft mud getting more and more watery.

So she’s a wetland sprite. Szak glanced over to check on Iago. Ethan had actually been foolish enough to run at him a third time, without a better plan. Perhaps this was their plan all along—to stall for time until there was enough water for a merman to be useful.

Crooked bodies of trees burst out from the dirt between the two of them. Szak stepped forward at the sight of growth and cut every tree as close to the roots as possible. If the trees ever grew to full strength, they would only be an army under her control. A morphic kind of puppeteering.

Fire lifted from his blade again, and this time, in meeting with the bark of mutant trees, flames latched onto the grooves of wood and bark and spread like twirling rivers of wildfire.

Rádia was sure she saw it this time: the flames that reached into the air flew a fiery silhouette of a dragon before exhausting away above the tips of her trees. Her entire plan had burned with the branches before her. She ran out of the grassy patch, not sure what scared her more: the fire from Szak’s blade so willing to escape the surface, or the rage kept caged within his scarlets when he stared her down.

Szak pulled out his dagger, a curved and ivory dragon fang, and threw it right at her. Because her back was facing him, she could not see, and by the time she felt it, she had already collapsed into the dirt with a burning pain ripping her shoulder blade from the rest of her limp left arm. Rádia screamed in bloody horror, shaking both Iago and Ethan’s attention.

“Well, that’s not good,” Iago muttered. He could feel Ethan lose all morale to continue their part in the arena.

Just like Szak to push for his way of winning.

“See, if I were him, I’d throw that annoying dagger at Rádia’s leg instead.” He turned to Ethan with an apologetic smile. “Nasty wound… Drakonforged, you know how that works. The fire melts everything as it spreads, and Szak just put a very short timer on her life. And on the left side.”

The merman said nothing.

“Surrender for her sake, Ethan.”