Seth struck again. The blade of the Tachi came free with a troubling hiss. Its sharp edge struck the tree before him and bounced off with a jarring clang as if striking metal. He felt the impact from his hand all the way to his shoulder. It stopped there, terminating in a silent throb.

It was a week now since the priest had him doing these drills.

Jabari, he thought as he sheathed the massive Tachi. His name is Jabari.

The priest had insisted he remember it and he was motivated to do so.

Sweat dripped from his brow, blurring his vision in one eye, and Seth wiped it with the sleeve of his shirt. Its week old stench did not escape his nose.

He returned to his stance without vigor. He took a deep breath, intending it to calm his nerves but knowing it would fail, and drew once more. The Tachi came free again. Its deep blue blade, longer than Seth was tall, gleamed in the afternoon sunlight.

He braced for impact as it struck the tree and his mind split thrice to contain every action.

Seth tossed one part to the task of containing the pain of the impact. He gave another the task of tracking the new path of the blade no longer controlled by his sword arm as his throbbing arm doing its best to redirect it. The third part was tasked with maintaining the location of the scabbard now strapped to his waist. With his other arm out of commission, he was forced to keep a mental tab of where it was. There was no purpose to a successful retrieval if he missed the scabbard in its entirety. Especially since he was using his weak arm.

The monotony of The Draw, as Jabari called it, was anything but boring. It tasked Seth, and forced him to work his mind. Having three of them to work with was interesting, despite the confused fear it brought. Seth found that he couldn’t complain.

Its constant use led to a decrease in his headaches and he was glad for it. The aches throbbed lesser now. He even had moments when he completely forgot about it.

With another failure, Seth looked down at his right arm, mildly perturbed by it.

A week ago, if he’d been told a day would come where he would be forced to rely on his left arm because his right was useless, he would have called whoever was responsible horrible names.

Now, watching his right arm cradled in a sling against his chest, the discomfort he felt was confusing. Scarier, still, was the fact that his left arm was functional, more so than it had ever been. In the past week it had given neither discomfort nor weakness.

It hadn’t even given up on him…

Yet.

Seth drew again.

He took an odd excitement as his mind split despite failing to return the Tachi properly to its sheath. The tip of the blade clattered slightly against the edges of the scabbard’s entrance on its return before it found the hole. Seth forced it in without care and it slid in noisily, sealing shut with a loud clack as hilt struck scabbard.

He looked around, taking a momentary break and found no sign of Jabari. It did not surprise him. Since fixing his arm—if he was to believe the man—he’d been constantly away. It was the way with them now, a simple reenactment of actions every day.

They would rise at the crack of dawn and eat a meal of what Seth suspected was roast pheasant, though he wasn’t certain, having asked once to no reply. Satiated, which Seth never really was, the priest would pick out a tree and set him to the task of The Draw. Then he would leave, coming back only at the dawn of dusk.

Today, however, Jabari came somewhere in a time lost between noon and dusk.

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“The trail is clean,” Jabari said without preamble, patting the back of Seth’s target as he passed it. “There’s no one for miles.”

Seth’s first thought went to why a Baron would need to physically check his environment. Barons, he’d heard, could sense a wide range of their environment with nothing but their spirit—whatever that was. The thought came with a realization that he’d never truly confirmed what authority the man held. He’d merely assumed because Macbeth had been a powerful gold, judging from the deference his father had given him. It was the likes of which a Lord gave only to a soul mage standing at least on the threshold of equal authority.

That said, it sufficed that Jabari would be more powerful. And Jabari had, after all, ended the man’s life along with the contingent of guards he’d come with.

Guards with reia guns, his mind added.

Oddly, Seth thought he heard the same mind laugh mockingly, as if at a particularly cruel joke.

Another realization came soon after.

They’d been in the same place for three days and had come across no one. Or to be more precise, no one had come across them. Were they even searching?

He’d thought as a son his father would’ve already begun searching by now, turning stones and uprooting trees in search of his lost child.

But does he even know? One of three minds asked.

He must, Seth answered. The accident had happened barely four hours away from the house. They had undoubtedly still been within his father’s territory. There was little doubt they had even left it.

Perhaps they think you’re dead.

Seth shook his head in disagreement. He was the only child in the convoy, and he’d survived. The absence of a thirteen-year-old’s body from the crash site would be quite glaring. On habit newly born, Seth reached for The tachi as he conversed with himself. He took the hilt in hand. There’s no excuse.

There is also the—

Seth drew the blade free and his mind exploded in blinding pain. It split thrice upon itself at the touch of the hilt. His thoughts words echoed as if it had been spoken into an empty room, and the sentences splintered like crushed glass.

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The Tachi fell from Seth’s hold, barely leaving its scabbard, to clatter in the dirt.

His thoughts exploded in his head. Each broken word was incomprehensible to him. Their meanings hovered at the edge of his senses like imagined objects lurking in the dark. It was as though something took his brain and scraped it along shards of broken glass.

His knees scabbed as he fell, hitting the coarse dirt he did not feel. Pain established dominance as he squeezed his only working hand over one ear.

His headache returned with a gleeful vengeance as if angry at being suppressed for so long. Seth was a child at their mercy, sieged on all sides and begging for clemency from an enemy that did not exist.

Pain continued to prove a tyrant in his head even as Seth felt something warm trickle down his nose. Whatever it was, it tickled him even in the midst of all the pain.

Somewhere in his mind another sound joined the chaotic cacophony that was his broken thoughts, and somewhere in him, a part undaunted by the pain, something else echoed into the madness. Seth thought it was a chuckle, a suppressed laugh, as if held back simply because the moment was awkward, like a fart at a funeral.

As considerate as it felt, it broke Seth just as much as the broken words and the headache. It added to the pain of broken thoughts.

Seth tried to struggle against his pain as he thought the child of a lord should—as he always thought he should—but the action was pointless.

Slowly, he drowned in the void of his own pain.

His hand grew numb but he didn’t feel it. When something trickled from his ear, it was a lost sensation, a drop of pin in a hurricane during a blizzard.

When he screamed, it only made it worse. That he couldn’t silence himself only worsened a situation that shouldn’t have been capable of worsening.

When unconsciousness was a mere breath away, its darkness a recognizable color in the void, its embrace hungrily sought after, Seth heard the first coherent sound.

It felt like the first thing he was ever understanding. It pierced the madness like an unnaturally solid pin through timid glass.

“That’s quite enough of that,” someone said.

The words were simple, apathetic. Something touched Seth after them, and everything simply stopped.

A hand rested on his shoulder. It drew every drop of Seth’s senses to it so that he felt nothing else. He felt nothing but gratitude for it. As an atom of order returned to him, a soft realization of how horrible everything had been came with it.

He’d lost himself there for a while, Seth realized, perhaps more than a while. He’d been a prisoner of his own mind, trapped in a world collapsing on itself, shattered in countable pieces. He knew there had only been three pieces now, but then it had felt like more. It hadn’t been the quantity that had been the problem, Seth knew this with an odd certainty. It had been the quality that had broken.

Slowly, in the reign of the loving quiet, Seth slumped forward.

When his face hit the rough sand, he was glad for its coarseness; glad he had the presence of self to feel it.