The sound of dying men and gunshots plagued Seth’s dream. He had only heard the chaos of the events, but his dream was a cruel seductress. It gave sight to the chaos, molding faces and fear and gore where there should’ve been none. He watched Durden die, his head hammered into the few metal patches of the deck in several blows, crushed into silence. Nothing save the spluttering of blood was given sound.

The members of the crew pulled triggers in panic and efficiency, all for naught. Jabari didn’t even dodge. He walked through the carnage, a butcher in his abattoir, as men fell. He caught Skinny Pete as he sailed from the main mast, gun blazing, and broke his neck with a flick of his wrist.

Every man died horribly. Every man died silently.

When Jabari returned to him, his hand was red with blood, his face expressionless as it always was. Then he sighed regretfully.

“You have seen too much,” Jabari said. “You will have to be replaced.”

He reached for him, a dark skinned man in a cassock blacker than a lightless night, and a red right hand. He took Seth easily by the neck.

Death was quieter than Seth had expected.

Seth woke with a start. He did not scream. No sound left his parted lips. He gasped for air in short and quick bursts that did nothing to assuage the panic he realized had been nonexistent even at the thought of death, and he cursed Jabari’s breathing technique. Seth’s sweat was enough to soak his clothes. His face was riddled with droplets of it even in the cold night.

When he came to, calmed from the memory of his dream, he took stock of his surroundings. He sat upright on a soft ground. The earth beneath him was covered in grasses he only imagined were green. He’d gone to sleep enclosed in a sea of trees far greater than he’d ever seen even in his travel with Jabari.

Seth did not know the color of the grass he sat on because in the two days since leaving the thunderstorm, they’d been in this forest without any visible floor. He could walk on it. He could even touch it. But he could not see it. It was covered, as far as his eyes could see, in mist as high as his knees. Oddly, the mist was thicker than mist had any right to be. He hated it, not because it took away his sight, but because if it was any whiter it would be the color of the sword that had ended the lives of men who had almost accepted him as one of their own.

It was not their fate to live past this day, Jabari’s words slithered into his mind. It reminded him of the memory of a red right hand. Seth turned in repulsion and gagged but nothing came. He was refused the outcome of even throwing up.

Seth pulled his knee up to his chest and rested his arm on it. He placed his head on his arm and stared into the mist beneath him. Seated, it came up to his shoulder. He saw nothing but white. This is aura, he thought. It was knowledge given to him by his kidnapper.

You do know you’ll carry his name for a good while, though, his mind reminded him.

In response, he said, “Only till I am free of him.”

A mind chuckled and Seth doubted it was the same one he had just replied. You want all the power but none of the consequences.

“I merely do not want to be heartless,” Seth muttered.

Heartless? A mind scoffed. Do you think a man can walk the path to all that power and come out the same? Do you have any idea what he might’ve had to sacrifice to get there? Power does not come easy.

They were unsouled! Seth roared into his mind. “Not a single fragment to their name! They didn’t deserve it.”

Perhaps…

But what is done is done. This from another mind.

It was right. What was done was done. Jabari had shed the blood of innocent men simply because he’d felt like. The idea that it had been done in some form of self-defense or the other was something Seth had played with even during the storm as he’d struggled against the cold and rain, against the crashing booms of thunder in his ear and the trepid fear of dying in his bones. There was no man on that ship capable of scratching Jabari. Anyone who travelled with the man would know this.

“If you will not sleep,” Jabari said from behind Seth, “then you will train.”

Seth heard a muted clattering in the dirt before him and knew what it was.

The dreaded Tachi had returned to his training when they’d come to land in this nigh desolate forest. He reached for it, leaned forward, and picked it up without protest. He hadn’t heard Jabari’s approach but it was a thing of normalcy now. He could not anticipate the man. He could not observe the man. So he gave acceptance to whatever concerned the man as a credence. He did not have to understand, he merely had to follow.

No one ever said a person had to like the source from which their power came. But Seth did promise himself one thing: Come what may, he would not lose himself; he would not become Jabari.

During the day, Jabari had him sit in the mist, in the condensed aura, and made him breathe. Here each breath was labored, like sucking mud through a straw. But he knew better than to disobey, so he suffered through it, struggled with every breath.

Though Jabari always remained expressionless, something about him always seemed pleased each time Seth struggled. Seth cast his mind from the thought and focused his thirteen-year-old will into breathing… or was he fourteen. He’d since lost track of time. What month was it? What day was it? The questions plagued him often without answer. But that there was no snow meant the year had not closed in on its conclusion. Although, he could feel the bone chilling cold that heralded the coming of winter.

When evening came, it brought Jabari with a canteen in hand.

Seth’s duties for the day had left him hungry and parched. He craved water as much as he craved food. He wouldn’t mind anything right now. On the ship he had eaten properly, garnered flesh on his bones. In the two day in this misty forest, he felt as if he had lost it all.

Seth turned a quiet eye to the priest from where he sat, hoping the canteen was his. However, each time his eyes moved to it they seemed to veer away. He knew there were runes on the canteen but couldn’t draw a single one to save his life. There was something off about it, yet he couldn’t put words to it.

What are those? He pondered.

Dunno, came a nonchalant answer. We can’t see it.

That scared him more.

Seth’s minds’ lack of knowledge was not the source of fear. What scared him was their inability to see the canteen and its runes. They saw everything he did, after all; even things he did not note.

Jabari, unaware of his internal dialogue, offered him the canteen. “Drink.”

Seth hoped the priest did not note his hesitation even as he accepted it. He feared it was poisoned, and contemporary history had taught him that his fear was justified.

The canteen was light in his hand. When Seth shook it, its contents slushed. It let him know that it was almost empty. Gently, eyes fixed on Jabari, he raised it to his lips and sipped. Its content tasted weird, like bath water. Seth grimace as it touched his tongue and he pulled it away from his mouth.

“What the hell is that?” he spat.

It repulsed him, and his stomach revolted. He gagged twice but nothing came. Twice more only led to the rise of bile in his throat. Mixing with the aftertaste of whatever was in the bottle, it left his mouth tasting like something dead, and animal excrement.

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Seth shivered from the taste as the mist around him deemed, darkening where it had been lighter. Only when his vision began to tunnel, much disappearing from his attention, did he begin to feel a sense of alarm. His breathing failed him gracefully, and when he tried to breathe the way he once did, he found he couldn’t remember how. It worsened his situation and Seth was choked for air. Pain filled his lungs at this, as if drowning in sand. Choking, he coughed twice, losing more precious air.

When he slumped forward, it was with the grace of a guerilla.

Through it all, Jabari stood in place, watching.

“When you arrive at the seminary,” Jabari said, “you will be asked questions.” Then he began walking so that he stepped out of view as he circled Seth and became a disembodied voice. “You will tell them that you will speak only to Dante. Dante Faust. Regardless of what horrible threats they give you, regardless of what is done to you, you will hold your tongue and speak only to Dante Faust.”

Pain seared Seth’s mind as the priest spoke and every fragment of his mind screamed with it. It did nothing good in his predicament. It continued to scorch his mind where he had made battle with only his lungs and his vision.

Jabari was still talking when Seth fell into a fit of screams. The pain did not stop. The fucking priest did not shut up. And his screams grew unending.

“… And when you see Dante,” Jabari was saying, “You will tell him that the soul arts are practiced by the dying to stay the hand of death in search for the path of the immortal.” Returned to Seth’s view, he leaned forward and asked, “Can you repeat what I have said?”

Seth’s pain-filled screams were his only response.

Jabari made an understanding sound that could’ve been a groan as much as a snort.

“I guess not.” With that, he turned away from Seth and began leaving. He paused only after two steps. “Oh! Lest I forget. When asked your name, you will tell them you are Seth Al Jabari. You may keep the name Oden, if you please. It will suit you in the future. But never Darnesh. Should you tell them you are the son of the house of Darnesh, they will kill you before you take your next breath. Also, understand that…”

Seth passed out before he could hear the rest.

………………………………………

Jabari nodded to himself.

The child had impressed him by lasting so long. Usually the unsouled couldn’t handle the pain from waters from the sea of the undying. He’d heard on multiple occasions that the pain of it was a price almost worse than death. It was why those who practiced the path of the undying acted as if unable to feel pain. They had felt worse. But it was designed to prepare them for the next step on their path, whenever they were ready to take it. It prepared them for a death that would not hold them.

He didn’t know much about the pain, having never felt it, but he was certain of the water’s effect.

When the boy fell to the world of the unconscious, Jabari turned around and approached him.

With a wave of his hand he cleared the mist of aura around the boy, exposing him to sight, not that he needed it. He went to his knees beside the boy and went to the work of removing his sling. His right arm was normal, though unused. It looked nothing like an arm bound for so long. If anything, it looked as if the boy had been using it all along.

Free from its sling, Jabari placed the arm down gently.

He stretched Seth’s left arm—the one he had fixed so many months ago—out beside the boy, then reached into his cassock. From it he removed a spherical globe as large as his hand. It rested on his palm easily. It was transparent and void with no activity in its empty interior, and from it he felt nothing. He knew the boy had been pondering on ways to absorb it since he’d realized what it was. It was a pity the boy didn’t have the required skills for it.

However, Jabari did.

With a quiet sigh, he placed it in the palm of the boy’s outstretched left arm and left it there. Then he cast his senses far and wide, taking stock of the wild life around them. They weren’t much and they dared not approach a power far greater than theirs. Strangely, there was an order to them, unnatural to wild animals, souled or not. It didn’t take him long to find out why. Off into the distance, in a cave artificially carved into the side of a mountain, a phantasm huddled itself, wary, hiding from his attention. It was a Herald rank soul beast’s phantasm.

Someone in the seminary had killed a herald rank soul beast, he noted. He was impressed. It meant someone in the seminary had finally broken through the boundary of Barony to the authority of a Herald. That the soul of the soul beast remained alive as a phantasm was proof that the Herald priest was still weak.

Jabari ignored the phantasm and returned his attention to the dying boy in front of him. Streaks of light flashed from the heart of the orb to strike where it met the skin of the boy’s palm. Its varying colors were a beauty to behold. But while he knew it, Jabari could not appreciate it, having never understood the human allure to beauty. Instead, he reached a hand out to his side and bent the world to his will as he had done months ago. The world unraveled at his command, and he weaved from its strands a tool to best serve his purpose.

At the back of his mind, notifications came alive in hollow blue and Jabari left them there, relegated to ignorance. He gave his attention to his task of bending a part of reality. When the working was done, he held in his hand a hammer. It looked as if it had been fashioned of cracked glass. The notification that preceded it, he allowed.

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[Item: Tool].

[Type: Hammer].

[Authority: None].

[State: Reality].

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The next task he carried out loudly but swiftly.

He hammered away at the orb, the force driving the boy’s hand deeper into the dirt. With each blow, the orb cracked, spilling its colorless essence so that he was forced to hold it all in place, containing it in a cocoon of force reia as the mist around them was drawn into the activity.

Normally, this task was to be untainted, however, he had already given the boy a gift to win death only once, a gift capable of possibly granting him a skill one day, though the chances of that were slim. Thus, there was no harm in allowing the mist in as well. After all, it had properties capable of helping him, considering its origin.

Each blow from his hammer shook the reia around Jabari and the boy. It drew in the mist until Jabari could see the dirt beneath them. It was black, like mud, though it was not moist. The mist, a condensed coalition of fear aura spilling from somewhere farther north, accumulating over the decades, had no effect on the ground, and the grass grew quietly, regardless of how stunted they seemed.

Jabari struck at the orb again as a smith would a particularly stubborn ore. The force dragged the mist further in as it left greater cracks in the orb.

The last blow broke the orb completely and it shattered in a blinding light. Jabari did not take his eyes away from it. When the light diminished, it did not slowly fade away. It simply ceased to exist like Nathan’s ship, all of its essence sucked into the child’s hand.

The mist around them was gone entirely, consumed by the blinding light apparently, so that there was a space of untainted air around them.

Satisfied with the outcome, Jabari willed the hammer away. It dissolved, evaporating like smoke. Beside him, a crack in reality he had paid no attention to healed.

A moment after, people intruded on Jabari’s range of awareness. He picked them in his spirit sense, noting all eight of them to be of gold authority. He deemed them harmless but necessary.

He rose to his feet and, before leaving, called up the boy’s existence.

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[Name: Seth].

[Being: Observer].

[Specie: Human].

[Title: The Struggling One].

Versed in the art of suffering, The Struggling One wades through terror and insurmountable odds. In the annals of existence, to suffer and strive is new to none, but when faced with the hurdle of inescapable struggles, no one excels more. It is here that above their peers The Struggling One evolves.

[Age: 13 years+].

[Authority: Fragmented].

[Skills: None].

[Status: Unconscious].

[State: Assimilating].

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Jabari was pleased with this. He had put the child through unnecessary hurdles for seven months in hopes of this and had attained it. His disappointment would have tormented him a while if the child had not gained the title.

Unlike its counterparts, the title was written in a dim blue, as if existence had run out of ink when awarding it to him. Perhaps it was doubtful. It didn’t matter. All it meant was whenever the boy’s existence was read, it would not be displayed. Besides, there was none capable of reading the boy’s existence without a tool in the seminary. And tools never showed everything.

It would also be a good while before the boy met those who could perform feats of great enough significance to read his existence unaided.

Jabari walked away as the gold priests drew nearer, knowing Seth would struggle a little more at the seminary’s hands when he woke. He didn’t wish he could’ve made life easier for the boy, for that would imply he cared more for the boy’s emotion than the outcome of the future, and he didn’t.

When he came to the edge of the clearing his task had created where mist feared to enter, he wondered at his next actions and what he would do now.

Perhaps he would go south and visit the domain of the Sun Baron. He’d heard the man had the ability to call down the wrath of the sun. The idea was not truly spectacular to him, but it did make him curious.

Perhaps he would find someone of equal strength to manipulate into challenging the Baron. Hopefully it would keep him entertained until it was time to act again.

Or perhaps he would leave for a while return when the time came.