Aaron looked down at his hand and discovered he was holding a thin rod, about two feet long and made of black energy. Although Aaron’s perception said the thing should be — or maybe that it was — glowing, it emitted no light of its own. Ripples and pulses coursed fitfully along its length in dark shades of blue and purple.

He continued backing away from the sundered Vault, slower now, until he bumped into a wall. He stayed there a moment, staring at the broken stone chunks laying on the floor. Alice had a hand over her mouth and Tia knelt beside the pieces of the broken Vault; Barrett and Mallory both approached, their eyes on the rod Aaron had conjured.

“Mr. Freeman, would you conjure your most effective shield or barrier?” Mallory asked quietly, not taking his eyes off the weapon.

Barrett nodded mutely, then brought his hands together and pulled them, slowly and laboriously, apart. As he did, he made small changes to the shape of his hand, moved his fingers into complex shapes, or included small gestures and movements.

A small point of red light formed between his palms, near his sternum, as they drew away from each other and expanded outwards into a translucent plane to match his motions. It even continued to grow after Barrett stopped his movement, rapidly expanding until it was as tall as a door and twice as wide.

Mallory gestured to the shimmering mystic barrier. “Mr. Abrams, would you be so good as to attempt to penetrate or cut through this with your summoned implement?”

Aaron nodded mutely and swung the rod at the pane half-heartedly; it broke apart on impact and Barrett sucked in a breath.

“Can you feel that, Mallory?” Barrett asked.

Mallory nodded. “Indeed. A tangible manifestation of ardor. Quite deadly and equally dangerous. Can you tell us how you summoned this weapon, Mr. Abrams?”

Aaron swallowed, his heart still pounding so hard he thought it might sprain his ribs. “I was- I was feeling overwhelmed… I couldn’t think straight. I imagined all those feelings as, like, as a physical thing, then I imagined forcing them into this tiny bundle. I was surprised when I felt like I actually had something in my hand… or maybe that I was about to have something in my hand. I could tell it was, uh, unstable, I guess, so I grabbed it before it could unravel and then… then the thing was in my hand.”

“Is your temperament still in a state of agitation akin to what you were experiencing when you coerced it into this form?” Mallory asked.

After a second to figure out what the hell Mallory meant, Aaron looked inward, trying to practice his mindfulness and get a gauge on his emotional state. Now that he was out of the box, the adrenaline was fading and his heart rate and breathing were slowing down to normal, but he found the feelings were still there. Anxiety and fear — terror, really — but there was more than that.

Deep, buried so deep Aaron almost didn’t notice it, was something more dangerous than his perfectly reasonable fear. Rage. A smoldering core of incandescent fury, writhing and pulsing, trying to gnaw its way out of his unconscious and into his mind, where it could drive his flesh to lash out. Lash out at what, exactly, Aaron didn’t know, but he recoiled from the emotion. He… he didn’t get angry. Not anymore.

It was surprisingly easy to ignore, and not just because it was buried so deep or he was so used to it. The anger, like the fear and anxiety, wasn’t exactly close to him at that moment. It felt distant, even muted, and even in a state of wired hypervigilance he could detach himself from those emotions with almost startling ease.

Aaron nodded. “Not fully; it’s almost like I’m dissociating, but only from the emotions instead of the world or my sense of self.”

“Curious, indeed,” Mallory said, one wispy eyebrow rising slightly. “The way you manifested this object — the path of magic by which you accomplished it — can have deleterious effects. Such magic will either sustain the catalyst to a heightened degree or, conversely, isolate them from your psyche. Said ramifications will generally only last so long as the magic is maintained, but I should think it obvious one’s judgment risks impairment for the duration.”

“Uh, sure. Okay. So, what do I do with it?”

“They are your emotions, Mr. Abrams, given a most destructive form. I might suggest making the figurative literal.” Mallory paused for a moment, then gestured to the rod. “Id est, letting go.”

Aaron looked down at his hand, wielding that vicious and ethereal implement, and tried to relax his fingers. A strong urge of protest rose up in him — there were imminent dangers, it argued, and he needed a weapon — but Aaron forced himself to release his grasp.

As soon as his hand started to open, the rod dissipated, streamers of its not-light flooding into Aaron’s hand and arm. Exhaustion swept over him, a flood of vitality pouring out of him like he had the worst case of vertigo. Aaron managed to keep himself from swaying where he stood… much. It was like the aftermath of an adrenaline rush, only not — his thoughts weren’t chasing themselves in circles like a yappy little dog.

Breathe, Aaron, he told himself. Suffocate the nightmare with oxygen.

He balled his hands back into fists, closed his eyes, then relaxed his fingers again. He repeated the process a few times and the sensation passed quickly, though the memory of it lingered.

Perhaps worse than the echo of his unchecked emotions, Aaron knew he would be imagining he felt bugs on him until he took a shower and changed his clothes. A relatively small price to pay for completing another Tribulation, but Aaron might not have been able to agree to it if he’d known the details up front.

“So what the hell was that thing?” Barrett asked. “I’m not crazy to think it can’t be what you’re implying, am I?”

“As a rule, I should think not. However, it does seem that Mr. Abrams effected a spontaneous magical effect by manifesting and shaping his rancor and used it to destroy the Vault of Revelation.”

Barrett shook his head like he had a fly on his nose. “Now hold on a minute, Mallory. That was a continuous effect and, best as I could tell, a stabilized aether matrix. An ongoing enchantment would be one thing, but a hard construct made with wild magic? That’s another thing altogether.”

“Indeed,” Mallory agreed. “It was a most rare and volatile act of spontaneous magic, one that would likely be difficult to replicate. We must be thankful it didn’t lead to catastrophe.” The old man paused, thoughtfully. “Perhaps it would be more accurate to say a greater catastrophe.”

“I think you’re all missing the most important part of all this,” Tia added, stone-faced.

“And what would that be, Miss Kellogg?” Mallory asked.

The young woman strode over and clapped Aaron on the back. “Our guy made an Emo Blade. That’s both super goth and metal as fuck.”

Despite still feeling a bit out of sorts, Aaron couldn’t help but snort a laugh.

“Just get me to a Hot Topic and I’ll be the most powerful wiz-rawrd eksdee,” he said.

Alice stifled a laugh, but Tia snickered unabashedly. Neither of the older men seemed to get the reference, which was quickly becoming a theme Aaron knew was going to annoy the crap out of him.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

But the girls laughed, Aaron thought. And that’s what really matters.

Mallory turned to speak to the room at large. “Yes, well, aside from the risks Mr. Abrams brought on himself and all of us in conjuring that weapon, the methodology he employed creates a unique quandary insofar as I’m unsure if he satisfied the criteria for the Tribulation.”

Aaron blinked. What did he just say?

“He escaped the Vault, didn’t he? That’s the Tribulation,” Barrett said, giving voice to Aaron’s own scattered thoughts in a form more eloquent than a muted ‘buh?’

“Mr. Abrams used wild magic in a state of panic and destroyed the Vault. I’m not confident that qualifies as mastering himself or overcoming the challenge he was posed.”

It had taken a moment for Aaron’s brain to catch up with the conversation, but now he looked at Mallory and couldn’t stop his frustration from mounting. Was he really talking about calling that a failure? After what he had just endured?

And what the hell would that mean for me? he wondered. Are they going to try to kill me so my essence can find a new body?

Aaron wasn’t willing to go quietly, if that was the case. He probably didn’t stand a chance against just the people in the room — let alone if Albert, Griffin, and Kiara came to help — but he was sure as shit going to try. He was grateful Tia had gone back to the Vault to continue examining the pieces; she’d probably be less likely to notice as he began trying to collect his feelings the same way he had in the Vault.

It wasn’t going well, but Aaron was determined to get there. He’d already seen how effective that… thing… was as a weapon and he’d use it if it was the difference between life and death. The fear was proving to be a lot harder to wrangle this time, though, and it wasn’t made any easier when he realized he might not be alone in this.

“That’s bullcrap, Ezekiel,” Barrett said, his voice more fervent than Aaron had heard from the folksy old man so far. “He conjured a tool that fit the situation despite the stress he was under and used it to get out of the box. Mission successful, in my opinion.”

Mallory nodded, considering the argument. “That may be true if looked at from a remove; however, there is a great deal at stake to wager on an opinion. You know as well as any how poor our records have fared. If one of us — any of us — could access a relevant memory of our legacies, that would be ideal.”

Barrett threw up his hands in frustration. “So, what, we’re just up the creek for eternity? Neither of us are good at inherited memories, Tia might have barely more past experience than a first-time drakus, and Alice is almost certainly on her first rodeo, so now what? We can never confirm another Primus again and our best shot in more than two hundred years is out because you’re feeling extra prissy about what’s permissible? Should we go to the desert and bend our knees there, old man?”

Mallory opened his mouth to respond, but Barrett cut him off. “He went into the Vault, it didn’t kill him, and he came out of it under his own power. That is an escape.”

“Hey, the old and the restful,” Tia called out from beside the broken sarcophagus. “What if breaking the Vault was something all those mysterious old snakes anticipated and planned for? Would that shut you two up?”

The tiny, weak snarl of emotions Aaron felt like he was starting to pull into some kind of core slipped from his grasp and wriggled away. Not only did it seem like Tia and Barrett might be on his side, but it sounded like Tia had some kind of theory to tilt the scales in Aaron’s favor. It was hard to hold onto fear when hope blossomed.

Mallory’s head whipped around to his apprentice. “What do you mean, girl? Have you called up a memory?”

“Okay, first of all,” Tia snapped, “I don’t love your tone, Zeke. Second of all, don’t call me ‘girl’ like I’m your dog. And third of all, no, I suck at that memory shit hardcore. But I think the Vault getting damaged or destroyed was something its makers thought was highly possible and they took steps to deal with it.”

“What kind of steps?” Barrett asked.

The symphony of emotions Aaron had been feeling — a melody of fear, a rhythm of what was obviously not anger, but frustration — warbled as Tia injected another, more optimistic note. The scale of the thing began to shift and it took on a different tone.

That put a smile on Aaron’s face, or it would have, if he weren’t resolutely clamping down on his emotions as they continued to siphon back into his consciousness from… wherever the hell they’d been after he made that magic stick thing.

My Emo Blade, he thought blithely. I thought I outgrew the black nail polish in high school, but maybe not.

Tia picked up one of the chunks of broken stone. There were several perfectly straight edges of the piece, suggesting it was from a corner of Vault, and its other edges were smooth where it had been severed from the whole. She tilted the broken edges towards them, revealing the stone was actually a bit more coarse, even grainy, compared to the walls.

Except the texture was an illusion created by the latticework of white crystal veins, which were far thicker and more dense than they seemed from the exterior of the stone. The same faint red light Aaron had seen in those small deposits was much more pronounced on the uneven edges, running freely along the curves and no longer confined to the crystals.

Tia set the corner piece down on a flat side and lifted another nearby chunk from the floor. The same red light swept along its uneven edges, as well, and Tia moved it close to the corner piece, showing that the irregular lines matched up like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

“Watch this,” Tia said with a wink Aaron thought was meant for him.

She moved the piece closer, until there was less than an inch between them, and the red light of the two pieces started to rise from the surface. Tendrils almost like smoke flowed between the pieces and reached out towards each other. When the light from both pieces came into contact, it flared for a moment, then quickly faded. When Tia lifted the corner chunk off the ground again, the other piece came with it, a single, reunified piece.

Everyone in the room had slowly ambled closer to watch Tia’s demonstration, but it was Barrett who spoke first. “There’s not even a sign it was ever damaged,” he breathed.

“I think it was designed to repair itself,” Tia said. “Since this box was only ever meant to do one thing…”

Mallory was nodding slowly. “...that means the possibility the Vault would be damaged or destroyed in the Tribulation was anticipated. Well-spotted and well-reasoned, Miss Kellogg.”

Barrett clapped his hands together. “Hot diggity dog! Well, let’s not sit around marveling over the thing. Let’s put the whole shebang back together!”

As Alice, Barrett, and Tia fell to the task of assembling the shattered Vault, Mallory moved to Aaron’s side and laid a hand on his shoulder, holding him back from lending a hand.

“While you reassemble the Vault and determine whether we can call this Tribulation a success, I would like to take a moment to discuss the perils of magic with Mr. Abrams,” the old man said.

“Can’t we sort this out first?” Barrett asked.

Mallory shook his head. “I am confident Miss Kellogg’s assessment will bear out, but given the threats we may yet face and what has transpired here this morning, I do not believe we can spare even a moment.”

Barrett agreed with a silent nod and went back to working with Alice and Tia to reassemble the box. Aaron had a concern of his own.

“Wouldn’t teaching me about magic disqualify me if I have to do this again?” Aaron asked.

“If the Vault can reconstitute itself, as Tia suggested, I see no alternative but to treat this as a success,” Mallory said. “If it cannot, then there may be no way to complete this particular Tribulation ever again, which would render that an unnecessary consideration.”

Aaron was conflicted. He wanted to learn about magic — who wouldn’t? — but he also wanted to brush Mallory off. The old man had basically just argued to deprive Aaron of his success in the Tribulation, so he wasn’t exactly Aaron’s favorite agéd sorcerer at the moment.

He knew that might not be a fair characterization of Mallory’s motivations, but it was better than letting the idea that Mallory was afraid to push the envelope become ingrained in his understanding of the old man.

Petty, perhaps, but it would keep him from looking down on Mallory with complete disdain in the future.

In the end, Aaron decided he could make the effort to reevaluate his opinion of Mallory if he found himself thinking of the drakus as too hide-bound and inflexible. Besides, he really did want to learn about magic.

“I would love to know more about magic,” he said, keeping his eyes on the other three scrabbling among the broken pieces of the sarcophagus. “Magic seems awesome, but I don’t want to be a toddler playing with a hand grenade.”