Tracking late into the evening didn’t gain Seth anything of real worth. He caught two rodents of meager size and was lucky to stumble upon a snake on his return through the night’s chill. In truth, he didn’t so much stumble across a snake as he was attacked by one. The encounter had been without consequence for him. For the snake, it had died quickly.

In the fashioning of a makeshift bow for himself, his minds had been as right as he was short. He had expended more sticks than he’d thought he would need and had come out—in the end—with something he wasn’t even certain would shoot right.

Rector Faust had said the test was one of survival. They were intended to survive in the forest with nothing but themselves and their wits for an entire month and return with at least two beast cores, which was within the heart of whatever reia beast they killed. That was incentive enough for every one of them to find a shelter as Seth had done, kill two reia beasts, and hunker down for the remaining month. But the seminary was smart. As there was an incentive to hunker down, there was an incentive to hunt.

Apparently, the reward for this test was not a continued stay in the seminary, it was soul fragments. The more cores a seminarian submitted, the higher the chance of gaining good fragments. Therefore, fewer cores presented mundane fragments. Someone who brought an inconsequential number of hitting the minimum would likely get fragments that would grant them simple skills like enhanced strength, or night vision, or increased speed, or something in that category, common but not special.

Those who bullied the requirement stood a better chance. And if the cores produced were of great quality then… Seth almost reconsidered his decision to hunker down for the rest of the test at the thought.

There was also a rumor amongst the older boys that should one of them do well enough there was the possibility of gaining a black fragment. These fragments quite blatantly defied the laws of physics.

While all fragments came with affinities for certain elements, black fragments gave the addition of distortive skills like teleportation from the start. It was rumored that the Sun King Baron of what was once Nigeria had a black fragment that allowed him call down the fire of the sun. There was a gold who could gather shadows around him and move through them. There were soul mages who could divine the future, mages who could move objects with their minds, roar loud enough to cause physical impact, create illusions.

Powerful as each might seem, these powers drew a lot from soul mages. Their potential not entirely noteworthy till gold authority. At gold other mages would evolve to display truly unnatural skills, but those with such skills from the beginning—those lucky enough to have absorbed black fragments—would always be powerful. And while other fragments often gave these skills, black fragments always gave them.

A black fragment is a no brainer, one of his minds thought.

“As if I don’t already have enough to worry about,” he scoffed. “I already need to kill ten reia beasts unlike the Seminary’s requirements of two. Besides, what’s the point to a black fragment if I’m not alive to absorb it?”

They were in his unstable igloo of a shelter as he hunkered down for the night with an annoyed stomach and a touch of hunger watching him from the horizon.

There’s also another rumor around black fragments, though, another mind offered.

“And what’s that?”

While it hasn’t explicitly been proven, it says it modifies the constitution; makes people taller, more muscular, sometimes slimmer. It adjusts the mage to best handle the arts.

Seth frowned at that.

A few moments later, he closed his eyes after a meal of snake and rodents roasted on a spit over a fire and went to sleep. As he did, he tried his best not to think of the rumors of the black fragment. That the idea of being taller from the absorption of a fragment was more appealing a reason to risk his life than the skills it could give him said a lot about his contentment with his height.

……………………………………………..

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Morning came with the grace of a silent thief. There was no singing of birds or croaking of insects. There was no sudden wave of sound or bright light of the breaking dawn. It simply came, and he simply knew.

Seth crawled out of his shelter of snow before first light. On a stomach with nothing but his supper the night before, he ventured into the forest in search of new prey. First, he would hunt enough food to last him a week, perhaps even the month. He would not look for his brothers, because while the seminary had said nothing on teamwork he had an itch he couldn’t scratch that the seminary intended they worked alone. When his food was sorted, only then would he begin the hunt.

Sadly, today was no different from the day before.

With his nigh useless bow and crafted arrows he hunted whatever he could find. He built traps when he could and situated them where he felt he would best catch prey. He chased down quarries his skill with the bow was too weak to hunt and lost any of worth in the snow. Often times he found his hands and feet numb from climbing trees for the purpose of dropping down on unsuspecting animals.

It dimmed his hopes of the test deeply to find all fail.

Again, he returned his shelter at nightfall with a meal barely enough to hold him for the night. He fed on it and went to sleep less starved, but no less hungry.

The next day he ventured out, again. He hunted rodents and rats, snakes and rabbits. He hunted any and everything he laid his eyes on, hunger driving him more than logic. He found his traps smashed and scattered and cursed the forest itself as there were no gods to curse. In one he found blood and a trail that he followed. It led him to a particularly large hole in the ground big enough to fit his torso and he channeled his anger there.

He dug the hole wider where he did not need to, anger and hope inspirations to his lessening decisiveness. He lit a fire, small as it was, grew it with twigs he was forced to shave free of their barks with his hunting knife so they would be dry enough for his purpose, and cast it into the hole. Chances were he would find a nest of rabbits or some other burrowing creature and would have a haul. If not, he would at least find one creature he could use to hold himself come morning. The latter would merely be a side effect of petty revenge.

He was wrong.

As smoke billowed from the hole, choking the air and life from its occupant, movement caught his eyes and he found a spot away from it and crouched in readiness to strike. Gently, like the dawn of first light, he saw what emerged and froze.

It crawled out of the hole, forcing itself through the widened exit Seth had made. It blotted out the hole so that the smoke ceased, and fear held Seth.

A snake crawled out on its stomach with scales of green and brown, its green eyes watching, searching, hunting down its new enemy. Its tongue darted out, tasting the heat in the atmosphere. Seth heard its hiss and the paralysis of fear fought to take him hostage.

Rather than succumb to it, he stepped back, cautious in the snow, watching the massive creature with a girth wider than Fin’s torso and a length that seemed to go on forever as it crawled out.

In his retreat his back hit a tree and he scurried around it. Hidden behind it, he watched the snake continue to crawl from its hole.

That’s one long one, one of his minds observed. who do you think is longer; it or Snaffles?

Seth’s mind went to Snaffles, the snake residing in the forest behind the Darnesh mansion and knew it would eat this one alive.

Exactly, another piece of his mind thought. And we survived Snaffles. We bet we can take this one.

Seth refused to make that bet. He watched the massive snake crawl away from its hole but not venture far. It simply laid there, a few feet from the entrance, with its head raised in the way only snakes know how to. There it waited.

“You really believe we can take that?” he mumbled, his attention observing his minds.

Silence was the response that met him.

It did not surprise him. It seemed his minds were not as unaffected as he’d thought.

“We’re hungry,” he told them, “and we aren’t thinking straight.”

It’s not a mutated Wyrm, though.

Seth almost chuckled. “We weren’t starving then, were we?”

His minds grew silent again.

This encounter was botched. To attempt what his minds sought was to court death without reason. So with a heavy heart and his spine still struggling against the embrace of fear, he eased himself away while the snake remained in place. Its head bobbed gently and wavered as if listening for something.

Seth did not want to give it the pleasure of finding him so caution remained his best friend till the creature was less than a silhouette in the distance. Only then did he turn and run.

A week went by in this manner, gaining less and eating lesser. He could feel the malnutrition in his actions, in the way he moved slower and conversed with his minds lesser. His body, the very fiber of his being preserving what strength it could, led him to hunt less efficiently. Drawing the bow became a task. His aim suffered, worsening where it had already been bad. And each morning, he completed his daily quest without reward, burning away energy he could not spare.

It was a slow and torturous path, and he struggled to survive against it. Through it all something nagged at him. Each time he struggled against what seemed a growing fate, he had an aching feeling—an itch he couldn’t scratch—as if there was a notification somewhere, hovering just out of his reach. It felt as if whatever it was had been denied to him.

It was another struggle in futility to ignore it.