“How many times do I have to tell you, Seth, it’s a spear not a sword. The riposte is different.”

Seth ducked another jab from his brother’s spear, his human speed barely keeping up as Jonathan’s words went in one ear and spilled out the other.

Of course the riposte was different. Seth moved his spear to his side in defense and caught his brother’s blow. His defense was acceptable but the force sent him staggering with so much vehemence it was a surprise he didn’t fall.

His arms throbbed as he caught himself. Luckily, he stopped himself from tripping over his own feet. With a frown, he repositioned himself and took his stance again. The tip of his spear was held forward and pointed down. Despite his stance, he was fatigued. The strain left him panting like a child who’d run a marathon and not a thirteen-year-old boy who’d just defended himself with the spear for the last three… maybe four minutes.

He really hoped it was at least five minutes.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Derek smirked.

Seth’s scowl touched more than just his lips. It reached so far that he scowled with his entire face as he looked at his brother.

“Don’t goad him, Derek,” Jonathan warned from where he stood watching from the sidelines. “That’s not the lesson we’re trying to teach him today.”

“And what’s the lesson I’m supposed to be learning today?” Seth snapped at his older brothers, “How to survive against a Silver mage? I’m only human, for crying out loud.”

“A weak human at that,” Derek laughed. “Weak and faulty.”

Seth’s scowl deepened until he could feel his facial muscles grow sore. It was becoming as sore as his entire body. As a child of House Darnesh, it was his duty to learn how to use a spear. It was the family’s official weapon, and their use of it was meant to be unparalleled in the entire territory. This was a rule Seth had no grievance with. Sadly, he lacked any talent for the spear. However, as a third child, five years younger than Derek, he was sparring far above his weight class.

Derek was already a soul mage. And at his level, he was gravely more than capable of killing Seth with a casual swipe of his hand. So training with him, regardless of how much he held back, was simply a punishment.

Jonathan spared him a simple look.

“You,” he said in his smooth and regal baritone, “are supposed to learn how to stop swinging a spear like it’s an overgrown bat.”

Under his oldest brother’s gaze, Seth’s frown withered.

Derek was stronger than Seth, but Jonathan was more so. What Derek could do to Seth with a simple slap, Jonathan could do to Derek with a bit more seriousness in his slap. So Seth reminded himself that not all grievances were meant to be voiced.

They were in the family training hall, in a basement built deep and wide under the family home. It was vast and the ground was covered in enough sand to swallow Seth’s feet. The place was boxed in by four walls and was wide enough to contain an entire cavalcade if they numbered no more than fifty men on their armored horses.

Despite being built under a house, the place wasn’t dark. There were magical orbs embedded in the walls. Each one length a clear orange glow with a touch of yellow. From what little Seth knew of magical objects, the orbs were infused with the mana of a certain species of fireflies. These fireflies had evolved after the first world crack and possessed orange mana that glowed about them. How it had been inculcated into the orbs was an entirely different conversation. Suffice to say, the glow from the orbs made it seem as if Seth and his brothers stood on an open plateau under the gaze of the evening sun.

Jonathan stepped into the arena, relinquishing his place at the sidelines. He gave Seth the smallest reprieve from his training with Derek, and Seth felt his muscles sag in relief. His oldest brother was tall. He was almost twenty years of age. But while he was tall, his height wasn’t anything special for a soul mage. Most soul mages—males to be specific—averaged around his brother’s height well over six feet. The females, from the few Seth had seen, usually stood about two to three inches shorter. At thirteen years, Seth had to tilt his head back to see pretty much anyone. He was short for his age. Even his younger brother, Jeremy, was tall enough to face him at eye level, and the boy was just ten.

Jonathan’s height wasn’t the only regal thing about him, though. His blonde hair was always cut to an acceptable medium length. It was kept short on both sides and was styled elegantly at the top. His odd royal amber eyes gave him a superior stare that he somehow managed to make look benevolent at the same time. Having him look at someone felt like having a benevolent king’s attention.

In summary, it was a sharp contrast to Seth’s brown hair and brown eyes.

As Jonathan approached him, Seth spared Derek a quiet glance and found his brother smirking. Like Jonathan, Derek had a presence. His eyes were a deep morning blue where Jonathan’s were amber. He kept his dark blonde hair long and held back in a horse tail. He was also as tall as their brother. He carried himself regally just as well. However, where Jonathan resembled a benevolent king, Derek was an arrogant prince. He was the kind of prince who knew he looked good, knew he was powerful, and flaunted it like a skilled ballerina flaunts her twirls and pirouette. How he continued to attain fame and love with such arrogance was beyond Seth’s understanding.

“What you’re supposed to learn today,” Jonathan continued, a few steps away from Seth. “Is that the spear is an extension of yourself, and—”

“Can’t I get a break?” Seth interrupted him, then pointed the tip of his spear at Derek. “I know you think he’s holding back, and he probably is, but he’s still silver. There’s only so much I can do. And he keeps saying annoying things about Natalie.”

“An enemy won’t be nice to you just because he’s stronger.”

“And the unsouled third son of House Darnesh won’t be foolish enough to be caught fighting a soul mage, not to talk of one of silver authority.”

“You know his problem?” Derek chimed in. “It’s that—”

“No one cares, D,” Seth cut him off.

“—He’s too eloquent,” Derek finished without missing a beat. “He talks more when he should think more. How do you get riled up when someone insults some girl?”

“That girl is my best friend,” Seth shot back, his anger rising again. “And you stay away from her. I see the way you look at her. You’re eighteen, and she just turned thirteen. This isn’t one of Jonathan’s old world medieval novels. In our time, you make a move on her and it’s called child abuse.”

Derek laughed as if Seth had cracked a joke. “And who’ll arrest me?”

His words were enough to grab Jonathan’s attention, and the oldest son of Lord Darnesh turned to him with a raised brow.

“Who’ll arrest you?” Jonathan asked, befuddled.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Derek sputtered.

“You didn’t?” Jonathan forgot Seth for a moment to attend their brother. “Regale me then, D. How did you mean it?”

“I didn’t mean it any way.” Derek stepped back as Jonathan took a step towards him.

Seth fought to conceal his smile. He took his little pleasures where he could find them. Right now, he found it in the discomfort of his least favorite brother. He didn’t hate Derek, but there was just some mutual dislike that existed between them. Their mother claimed it had simply been that way since the beginning. She speculated that Derek was simply a child unhappy at having lost his place and favor as the last born when Seth had been born. Seth saw it as no excuse. He was older than Jeremy with three years and never bullied him.

Regardless, Seth’s lips fought the urge to smile as he watched Derek stutter. A moment sooner, he was fighting over a different reason. A slow thrum of headache began growing at the back of his head and his lips pressed in a frown.

Not this again, he panicked. Can’t it just wait until I’m in my room.

His joy at watching Derek squirm under greater power was short-lived. Now, his attention was in the resistance of the building pain in his slowly aching head. As he fought it, resisted until it chose to be done with him, his brothers continued their exchange. They were oblivious, as always, to his pain.

He’d had this pain for as long as he could remember. It was a steady hum at the back of his head, like a muffled bee, buzzing and darting around behind an almost sound proof box. Sometimes it was bearable. But there were times, like now, when the bee found a way out of its box to buzz right inside his head. When it did, pain was always an accompaniment.

Seth bit back his pain through clenched teeth as it rose to a crescendo. Gripping the side of his head in his right hand. He staggered back but refused to fall, holding on like a child for his dear life. Experience had taught him it would last a few minutes then leave him, but it didn’t make those minutes any better.

Slowly, Seth’s jaw worked itself open in a voiceless cry. It was always the same; always painful; always refusing him the reprieve of crying out his pain. Silence, he’d learned vastly too young for any person, was the worst way for any pain to be taken. It trapped the pain inside and embraced it to the point of madness. To cry out was to release some of it to the world beyond. But pain knew this and trapped itself within him. It was soundless and dominant in the breaking of his mind and the swallowing of his sense of self. His pain was his, and no one else’s.

It would not be shared, and it would not be ignored.

When his spear clattered on the sand filled ground, his brothers turned to him. Seth couldn’t see their expressions but knew Jonathan would be worried while Derek would be exhausted.

In record time, Jonathan was at his side, silent as the dead. He rubbed gentle strokes along the length of Seth’s back. He was a brother from time to time, and a benevolent one at that. His thumb eased circles that did nothing for Seth along his back. Seth pretended it helped whenever he had the presence of mind to. It was the least he could do for the kindness given. Today, his focus was entirely on his pain. He ignored Jonathan’s actions and fought his pain.

The training room waited in silence for the length of over five minutes, playing witness to Seth’s silent suffering. Watching with the helplessness of winter’s chill in autumn’s reign. Eventually, the aegis of pain lifted. Seth found his mind belonged to him once more.

The pain finally lessened. It did not die because it never did. Seth’s reprieve from it was in the muffled buzzing it became. There was little pain, but the threat of it was always there. He lowered himself to sit in the sand and sobbed the tears his pain hadn’t given him leave to shed in its presence. Jonathan, being the understanding brother that he was, allowed it for two minutes before speaking.

“How’s the arm?” he asked.

Seth didn’t need to think about it. Jonathan asked of his weak arm, his left arm. The answer was clear. He turned to look at the spear. It lay in the sand where it had once been in his grasp. Beside him, the arm in question, his left arm, lay inert.

It had abandoned him as it most often did. It was gone from his control, numb and lifeless.

According to their parents, it was the result of a tragic incident that had happened to him as a child. It was a side effect to the headaches that now plagued him.

“Can’t you just try to hold it in,” Derek said suddenly, tired. “I mean, it’s a headache. And every time you make it look like I’m beating your head in.”

For whatever reason, his brother’s opinion prevented him from noticing the look on Jonathan’s face. There was a touch of anger in it, tainted with a touch of disgust. Derek was still talking when Jonathan got up. Derek failed to silence himself even as Jonathan left Seth to give him his undivided attention.

“It was understandable when you were small,” Derek went on as Jonathan approached him, “but it’s just pathetic now. You should have a handle on it by now. It’s been what, eight years now? The least you can do is not be so dramatic about it. I know it hurts but learn to not make a scene about it. It’s why Natalie’s your only friend. No one likes a drama—”

Jonathan drove his foot into Derek’s chest and he shot across the hall. He crashed into one of the room’s four walls. He made a hole in it, wedged into the crack in a rubble of broken concrete.

“For someone not as eloquent as his younger brother, you talk too much,” Jonathan said.

Soul mages were a different breed of humans. In a world plagued by beasts and monsters for the last forty years, they were humans who’d harnessed the power of these alien creatures to reach a realm beyond what had once been termed as natural. The more they strengthened this power, the higher their authority in it rose. This state of harnessed power was what it meant to be a soul mage.

It was what it meant to be Souled.

At Derek's authority, Jonathan’s kick probably hurt Derek far more than the wall he’d broken.

Derek didn’t hesitate to pull himself out of the broken wall with a frown. He stepped down, placing his feet on the floor so lightly it was a testament to his control. When he was out of its embrace, he looked at Jonathan angrily. He bent and picked up the spear that had fallen from his hold when he’d hit the now broken wall. Something about the way he watched his older brother rubbed Seth the wrong way.

“Careful, brother,” Jonathan warned. “You activate a skill here, and I can’t promise your safety.”

Derek’s knuckles whitened around the haft of his spear. He stared daggers at their brother. A tension built between both brothers and Seth scuttled back, increasing the distance between him and them.

His father and mother had rules regarding their two older sons. For whatever reason they were to come to blows, they were not allowed to use the beautiful gift of skills being souled granted them. Unfortunately, down here, none of them were around to enforce this rule.

Seth only prayed he wouldn’t be a casualty to their chaos.

When the altercation began, it was to a more than pathetic war cry from Derek. He hefted his spear in both hands. He stood against Jonathan’s casual unarmed stance, and roared: “Fuck You!”

Then he activated a skill.

“[Ice Guard].”

Seth watched the air around his brother tremble. It was a strange phenomenon that continued to awe him each time he witnessed it. In truth, it wasn’t the air that trembled, it was more like watching the world move to his will. It was as if he called out his skill and the world somehow answered. A conclave of ice gathered to his free arm. Where there had once been nothing, a shield of pale blue ice as tall as three feet and as wide as two gathered to his arm.

It was an inverted triangle that gleamed under the day colored lights of the hall. Its glossy exterior made it look as fancy as it was sturdy. The ice climbed up Derek’s arm until it ended at his elbow, and he held his spear like a jousting lance.

Jonathan watched his brother, unbothered.

“It’s still not too late, D,” he said with a sigh.

Derek turned to the side and spat. His spittle hit the sand, bloodied. “You’ll never take me seriously until I’ve wiped your face with the floor.”

Jonathan frowned as if tired of a petulant child. “And you never listen.”

Derek’s anger tightened and he activated another skill.

“[Ice King].”

His second skill filled the air with lances of ice like stalactites in freezing winter. Each one gathered in the air behind him, forged from nothing, and he prepared himself. All twelve stalactites aimed at their brother and Jonathan shook his head.

“Very well.” Jonathan turned to Seth and shooed him further back with a gesture. “Do endeavor to learn something from this,” he said.

Seth nodded, scooting further back and abandoning his spear.

When the first ice spear shot from its place above Derek, Seth didn’t see it. All he saw was one less spear of ice. One moment there were twelve spikes of ice and the next moment Jonathan was shattering it in his grasp. The action was so casual it would’ve been easy to believe the attack had been weak. Seth knew better.

Jonathan took a step forward shaking loose residue of ice from his hand. He looked at Derek for a moment. His face was a mask of contemplation. It lasted briefly before he sighed. It was resigned. “My turn,” he said.

“[Hearth of Fire].”

Jonathan’s skill came alive. The world grew hot around him and the air burned. A crack appeared in Derek’s shield.

Seth would have braced himself against the heat if he could but he couldn’t. Instead, he fainted.

In the nothingness of the unconscious, something whispered without words.

[You Have Been Stunned].