“There is no secret to advancing in any art.” Marroo’s father told him. His voice grated as he spoke, like a rusty sword being drawn from its sheath. The Bolle patriarch sat on the scuffed wooden floor of the makeshift training room he’d made of one of their spare bedrooms. A rack of swords, both real and dulled for practice, sat in one corner, each of them as familiar to the boy that sat in front of his father as his own hands. He was sixteen.

“Advancement takes hard work, certainly, but it takes more than a day’s hard labor. It takes time, and it takes understanding.”

Marroo did not nod at his father’s words. Around him, the air swirled in subtle ripples and eddies he had learned to sense when he was only eight. He trembled inside as he met his father’s silver eyes. Once, he would have struggled to hide his fear, but that was when he was a child. He was no longer the boy he’d been. His mother, once the only shield between himself and his father, was gone, dead now for almost a year, and in that year, he’d learned not to show his fear, his anger, his sadness, but to stand his ground.

Marroo’s father closed his eyes and the invisible blades began to spin faster. Air stirred by the spiritual blades brushed Marroo’s cheeks. His heart beat once, too fast, and Maroo pushed down on his insides, like a boy stuffing toys into an already overflowing box. He held his breath a moment then let it out slowly, under control, always under control, as his heart slowed under the strain.

An ethereal blade sang like a tiny bell as it passed too close to his ear for comfort.

“I have trained you for ten years.” Marroo’s father grated as the air eddied amidst his spiritual blades. “Longer than any boy your age will have followed any similar path.” Darro Bolle opened his eyes, silver retinas matching the silver eyes he’d given his son. The weathered lines of his sharp features were like a mirror of Marroo’s own but aged by thirty years and grizzled. “Every Icon’s journey is different.”, Darro said, “And every adept’s mastery takes a slightly different path, but with all I have given you, you should have touched the icon long ago.”

A blade snicked some of Marroo’s hair and he held himself perfectly still. Inside, he quailed.

His father did not glare. He showed no emotion at all when he studied his son, but Marroo knew the directions his thoughts had taken.

Abruptly, the air stopped moving. “I do not like to think that I have raised a worthless son.” The old man said.

There was a sudden rush, like wind whipping towards him as Marroo sensed one of his father’s invisible blades flying towards his face. The world flickered as his mind caught at the blade. For a moment he not only felt it in the movement of the air and the spirit-breath moving like a sea between himself and his father, but actually saw it, like a shadow made of pure potential, a flash of insight sharp as glass, an ideal made real, and flying straight for his throat.

For a moment, everything was a blade.

No!

Marroo seized his mind and dragged it back, away from the vision, away from the awareness until the world was only what his senses told him again and he sat in front of a rushing blade that he could only feel as a breeze of parting air.

The blow never landed. It froze inches in front of him. It warped the air where it stood between himself and his father. It was a line thinner than a strand of hair, dark where the world bent around the intensity of his father’s spirit, his breath, compressed by his icon into a manifestation of it’s ideal, a flying blade sharper than any steel. It intersected Marroo’s vision just at his father’s chin while those aged silver eyes remained fixed on him.

Marroo kept his breathing even, and his hands loose at his side while adrenaline pounded through veins long conditioned to this kind of self-control.

Marroo knew what that vision portended.

“Tell me again, what is a sword?” His father asked as the blade dissipated and new ones took up the dance around Marroo. Marroo trusted his father, trusted him not to kill him, but knew too, that to move from his place on the mat was to be cut, unless he could defend himself.

Marroo’s lips moved and he tried to ignore the words that came from them. “The sword is only steel. It is the clay, the flesh, in which the ideal is stamped.”

“And what is the ideal?”, Marroo’s father asked. The blades picked up speed.

“The ideal is the thing itself, beyond matter, time, or change. It is the blade itself, the law of all blades. It is separation. It is piercement. It is all sharpness.”

“And what does the ideal, do?”, his father asked.

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“It cuts.”

For a moment, the world flickered again as the world filled with blades that were not what most people called real. Three such blades flashed around Marroo, dancing in the aura of his father’s breath. Marroo held his breath, his lungs, for one second, two, pulled at his brain, at the spirit-breath leaking out of him into the sea around them. He tried to lose himself in memories, but all his memories were just as sharp.

His father, beating him with a wooden sword until he began to fight back.

His father, arguing with his mother while Marroo hid behind her at the age of six.

His hands raw from where his father had beaten him for failing to prove himself in a contest.

Sobbing as his mother’s coffin slid into the wall and his father sat stiff and straight beside him and the words he spoke when they were home.

“Now there will be no one to keep you weak.”

At three seconds, Marroo’s breath began to coalesce into the blades he saw the whole world made from. They formed at the peripherals of the room, swirling like a cloud of razors at the edge of his aura with the movement of his own internal energies. They were cuts made real and physical without any blade but Marroo’s mind, the Icon of the Sword stamped into reality by his own spirit as though he were a channel for some higher power.

He willed them away, back into non-existence. His father was speaking, still unaware of the wisps of breath spinning around them.

“Some icons are more complex than ours. The adepts of the Machine Icon take a lifetime of work and research to see the machine that animates all other machines. They must disassemble and assemble thousands of constructs, in thousands of variations, mechanical, electrical, spiritual, until they see the ways in which all moving things can be arranged. Some say that they must actually touch many icons to touch one, that there are a hundred ideals in that single Icon, while adepts of the sword, the whip, the shield, must only master knowledge of a single ideal, but it is all the same. You must know the blade, as it is present in all blades, in all things that cut, in all sharpness, as the adepts of the engines know things that move, and the adepts of the hammer know what can be accomplished with their tool. You must see it, everywhere, as it exists, everywhere, for those with the knowledge and experience to see it. One who can see a blade where no blade ought to be has truly mastered the ideal, and one who has mastered their own breath as well as the ideal may stamp reality with that ideal. Such an adept can kill as fast as thought, and without ever being seen. Such men are strong. Such men are worth fortunes to those they serve.”

Marroo did not want to see it. He did not want to remember all the ways he had ever been cut, or to summon blades with his mind or kill people. He wanted to escape the memories, to stop seeing the way his father’s blades slashed through his mother’s books when Marroo tried to keep them, to stop hearing his father’s voice when he told him “Your mother cannot protect you from who you must become.” He wanted to lift the hidden flap in his wall and pull out the books he’d hidden there to escape.

He wanted peace.

He did not want to become his father.

The thought of his secret books was like a ray of sunlight cutting through the darkness. It dissipated his vision of the sword and he felt the Icon’s hold on his spirit slip away as the unreal cuts in the air faded back to the weak pressure of wind pushing against his skin.

There were spots swimming in his eyes now, and he was having trouble hearing his father’s voice against the roar of his own pulse beating in his head. Slowly, with as little show of relief as possible, Marroo let out his stale lungs, and brought in a slow and easy breath. He would not give his father the satisfaction of knowing that his son had touched the icon. He would not become his father… not today at least. He thought of his books, and counted the hours until he would be able to lose himself in them again.

When his vision cleared he found his father’s eyes upon him, his face as stalwart as any fortress wall, as uncompromised as any stone heart could be. “Did you touch it?” his father asked.

Marroo met his father’s eyes and held them for the space of a single breath.

“No.”

His father sighed and stood. “Very well then.” He went over to one of the racks of blades, rapiers, the sharpest of their practice weapons, though nothing like the blade his father used when he did his work. He tossed one to Marroo who caught it deftly without standing up. “You will,” his father said, “In time.” He took up a ready stance while Marroo stood and did the same without giving his father a reply.

For most of a year now they had repeated this same affair every morning and every evening, his father pushing him to connect with the powers he’d spent his life pursuing. For most of that year, longer, actually, since he’d begun before his mother’s death, Marroo had resisted the knowledge his father had spent a life time placing in him. For most of a year his mother’s advice before she’d been hit by a falling air-car had protected him, but now, her voice was weakening, and his father’s was only growing stronger.

“You have to choose who you’re going to be. These,” she’d tapped a book as she gave it to him, “can help you, but no one can make you someone you don’t want to be, unless you let them.”

“I won’t let you remain weak.” His father told him as they sparred. Steel rang on steel and the sword vibrated against Marroo’s palm, as it had done for all of his life. “We’ll make you strong.”

Marroo’s face remained a stone, while inside, he boiled.

He was sixteen, legally, still a child. He couldn’t rent an aircab, or even, probably, an apartment until he’d reached his majority at 19. Three more years. Three more years of the violence and the blood his father had washed him in as frequently as his mother had washed him with soap. Three more years of fighting his father and watching his father kill in the name of “training”. Three more years until he could leave all of it behind.

An invisible cut flew towards him, parting air with a song like silver, and Marroo threw himself to the side then spun and cut at his father with as much force as he could put into the sharpened blade in his hand. His father snapped it aside as easily as Marroo might have killed a bug, then swung in to drive Marroo back.

Three more years.

Three more years until he could be free.

In reality he would have only one, and in two, he would be as free as a bird suddenly denuded of its wings.