Azure didn’t leave her chambers for anything that wasn’t a direct command from her master for almost a week. Not that he has commanded her to do anything specific. She would wake up, make herself presentable, and take care of her daily chores. A couple times she had seen the master making preparations to bury Emerald properly. She wasn’t a scholar yet, and technically had no right to be buried with honors, but no one was going to speak against the master after the ordeal they had seen him undergo. That’s how they would see it. What HE had to go through.
Today just as all the others she had finished her chores and was returning to her chambers to study before crying herself to sleep. Her misery had found a comfortable rhythm to adhere to and she was starting to think that she would find a way through this. Just as she rounded the corner in the hallway, she saw her master standing by her door waiting for her. Even now as she had more feelings of contempt for him than she’d ever imagined possible, she couldn’t help but see him as a statue of perfection. Every fiber of every muscle of his body was in proportion with one another. He stood there, towering over her even from 30 arms away. His arms were behind his back in his favorite militaristic pose, the one he had held the day he murdered his own daughter in cold blood. His clothes were informal, something anyone on the street might wear, but they stayed within his favored color scheme of navy, brown, silver and white.
Azure took in his presence and panicked internally. She wasn’t ready for this. Her master had always had a good reason for everything, but there was no reasoning away what he did. At the same time, she and her sister were slaves. They’d have died almost a decade ago but for his intervention. He'd given them both a life they couldn’t have imagined. She was overcome by a roiling cascade of emotions as she stood there staring at his figure. And for all this turmoil she was going through he was just standing there, glancing out the window.
His hair was up in a messy bun. He never did that. As a matter of fact Azure was also sure she’d never seen him in street clothes before. Everyday he dressed as though he intended to have an audience with the King. Even at home when no one would see him. Maybe he was bothered by what he did. But what difference did that make. He still did it. Emerald was still…
“Despite what the law says, you know that I’ve never considered you or your sister to be my slaves. You were and always will be my children.”
That stopped Azure dead in her tracks. She had always believed that to be true but yesterday… He continued interrupting her thought.
“ And so it is with great discomfort that I give you your first order as your master.”
What he had said before stopped her in her tracks, but this almost knocked her off her feet. Invoking an order as a master meant that her disobedience was punishable by death. Prior to yesterday this wouldn’t have been as much of a threat but now… He might actually kill her. It’s not like she could put up any resistance. He was easily one of the most powerful people in the city and several stages of advancement more powerful than her. Whatever he was about to ask of her was about to be serious. She shuddered.
“ We are going to go into your chambers, and you are going to take a blood oath to listen to everything that I have to say and repeat none of it. After that if you wish to leave my service I will allow it with no enmity. Even if you choose to leave, I will continue to sponsor your education and you will be given full access to my other estate in the Students wards. You will have a stipend for all your necessities and all your necessary materials will be taken care of. I will not attempt to hold you here. All that I need is for you to listen and understand.”
That all actually sounded rather reasonable. More than reasonable, it was incredibly generous. This was the behavior of the master that she adored so much. This was how the man she had just a few days ago, wanted to dedicate her life to, acted. But what could he possibly have to say that would make what happened? She couldn’t begin to imagine it. Well either way it was this or she’d be executed so best to get it over with. She opened her mouth to try to speak, but no words would come out. Without noticing, tears had begun to stream down her face and her throat had tightened. Her voice was buried under miles of emotion. So instead she met his eyes and nodded.
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After the oath was made Azure sat on the bed. Her master gestured to the chair at her desk and it slid toward him as he sat down. He folded his fingers together and put them on his lap as he stared at the floor. A heavy sigh fell from his mouth into his lap like a smooth solid stone before he lifted his gaze to meet hers. She had never seen him look so… tired. His face was crestfallen. It was surely just her imagination or a trick of the light but it was as if lines of age had suddenly appeared upon him making him look like a much older man.
“I gave you an order to listen in a rather dramatic fashion so I suppose I should begin speaking.” He took a pause to breathe before continuing.
“I had intended to tell the both of you about this, about all of my secrets after the ceremony. I had it all planned out. The both of you were supposed to succeed me and continue the work. We were supposed to be end of slavery. I’m getting ahead of myself. First I need to give some things.”
The City of Elders was one of the most wonderous places on the face of the planet, rivaled only by the Machine God’s Flying monstrosity. As such it was no trouble at all for the wealthy and powerful to have access to spatial storage devices. It was however seen as low class to have ones that needed to be worn in plain sight. That’s why Azure was surprised to see her master raise hand and wave it near her with a black spatial ring. Her eyes nearly bulged out her skull when she saw the money pouch the size of her torso appear on her bed. She turned to face him with what must have been a much fiercer look on her face than she intended as he immediately put both his hands up in a placating gesture.
“ The Grand Scribe was not happy with House Arinver’s Head. He caused a scene, and that makes our monarch look weak. He was ordered to pay us restitution for the incident. I’m pretty sure they’re nearly bankrupt after this. I have no interest in it. It’s yours whether you decide to stay or not.”
Azure opened the bag to see it sparkle with an ethereal light. This bag must have represented around 10 celestial Silver seals. This kind of fortune could last a normal person for several lifetimes. Currency in the city came in Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Celestial Silver and each could be a coin, a mark, or a seal. A coin had a value of 1, a mark of 5 and a seal of 10 while a coin of the next highest metal was worth 100 coins. This meant infront of her was the equivalent of a hundred million bronze coins. Or about 10 million days at an inn. The money didn't make Azure feel any better about her sister, but it was nice to know that the people who’d arranged for such a situation to play out in the first place would be taking a hit somewhere that mattered to them.
As she pulled the strings closed on the sack, her foot bumped into a stack of books at her feet. Her master must have also brought them out of his ring with the sack. She had been far too distracted by the obscene display of wealth to notice, but from the binding of the books at her feet there was a good chance they represented even more value. They were a navy blue hide with rose gold metal plates on the binding and a symbol she’d seen many, many times before in the masters study. An unfurled scroll with the character for Freedom on it, the crest of his new born household that he had strode for. He only put these on his independently researched ambitions.
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The master gestured for her to inspect them. She grabbed the one closest to her foot and set it on her lap before opening the cover. Since the day her master took her and her sister in he had poured his whole heart into granting them the best education imaginable, even before they began formal schooling. She was more advanced than one of her age had any right to be and so immediately made sense of the complex diagrams, notes, and footnotes. She flipped through the book until she stopped on a page that told her precisely what was in her hands: Arcane Ambition: Subschool of Fate: The Spell of Divine Domains. She looked up at him in shock, as he returned her gaze with a sad smile.
“Yes. You and your sister sailed through the Mortal Realm and are well into the Heroic Realm. A few more stages and you will be able to choose a path to divinity. Given that you are my students I had always planned for you to become Aspects like me and have 10 spells of yours bound to the 10 aspects of divinity. The formal education of the City is second to none in the world, but even that would not be good enough for my girls. I wanted to grant you the best chance possible to gain a powerful Domain that would suit you. I could have simply bought you all the Great Scholar level spells I could afford but it didn’t seem like enough. My astral affinity may be more rare than Primal, but you and your sister's Arcane affinity is notoriously the most difficult to predict a Domain for. Even more so than the Umbral affinity. I kept thinking that if only I knew what domain you were suited for, I could make a more informed decision, but every other scholar in the city's history has had the same thought and tried and failed. But that is because they lack the disrespect for tradition that a foreign slave has.”
The Master smiled as leaned forward in his chair.
“I scoured every library in the city to learn everything I could of the properties and interactions between Astral, Umbral, Arcane, and Primal Ambition. When I finally sat down to meditate I had narrowed down for spells that I would need. Primal Ambition, subschool of Life: Empathic empowering. Astral Ambition, subschool of Prophecy: Flash of Finest Hour. Arcane Ambition,subschool of Knowledge: Crystalized Thought. Umbral Ambition, subschool of Secret: Revelation. When I began my meditation ritual to commune with the Mantra, I didn’t ask for the spell you see before you, but for one that would allow me to combine the four that I had already memorized into something to create my desired effect. If I didn’t know better I would have thought the Mantra itself chuckled at me before giving me the tasks I needed to complete for the spell. And now we’re come to the reason I’ve been going on so many trips outside the city. The tasks I had were extremely dangerous and frankly, just shy of being outside of things that I could complete. But the results were worth it. I gained a spell that would tell me precisely what domain a given person is suited to, but more than that it even gives the Ambition, subschool and names of the spells they need to learn to guarantee they get it. I was floored by the success. I cast it on you and your sister while you were sleeping one night and began preparing ever since.”
The Master heaved a heavy sigh as his expression fell and he looked back down at the ground. He couldn’t bear to look at her for this part.
“The both of you had 4 spells that were a problem. Two were Great Scholar level spells, meaning I would not have access to them until after the ceremony. And two of them were Sage level spells that simply didn’t exist yet. If you couldn’t tell from the complexity of that book, the Spell of Divine Domains is Sage level. And its creation gave me the inspiration to solve that final hurdle by repeating the process. Once I had gone through enough trial and error to bring down the task requirements of the mantra to something manageable, the path forward for the both of you was set in stone. Up until the moment that conniving bastard opened his mouth. Without those two spells, neither you nor your sister would get the domains. As a matter of fact, all of us would have become slaves of the state, had all our power sealed, and likely never seen the light of day again as we were worked to death mining celestial silver. But that’s not what made me do it. That’s not nearly enough to sacrifice my daughter to a room full of animals.”
Azure was completely blown away. There was so much… so many sacrifices. All for them. And somehow still there was more. Someone not from the city not from the city wouldn’t have recognized the amount of faith and degree of value that had been admitted to in this one sitting. Firstly, creating new magic was always hard but, the creation of new spells above Great Scholar was almost unheard of in this day and age. Technically all you had to do to learn a spell that didn’t already exist was meditate until you’d connected with the mantra and basically ask for the spell. You’d awaken with a mental list of tasks that were in line with the desires of that branch and school of ambition. After you completed the tasks the knowledge would pop into your head like it had always been there. The issue was that those tasks became harder and harder depending on the complexity and power of what you were asking to do.
It was known that by learning more of the natural world in relation to the effect you wanted to achieve you could lessen the tasks required but there were limits. The Primal Ambition of fire was to consume things in flame, so if you wanted to learn to make a few sparks you’d likely have to do something simple like burn some wood on purpose. By helping it fulfill its desire you’re granted power, thus the name ambition. But if you wanted to say, create a vortex of flames the size of a city on command, you might have to find a specific and powerful dream beast, kill it with your own hands and burn the fur. And therein lies the problem that makes spells of a certain category or higher so incredibly expensive. By the time you were powerful enough to fulfill the task necessary, you’d already begun your path to becoming an aspect. Becoming an aspect meant focusing on your own domain, spell, and their connection to divinity. Researching spells that had nothing to do with that could set one back decades on the path to godhood. The nice thing about those spells though is that once they’ve been learned they can be transcribed and used by others so long as they have the energy and perform the rituals correctly.
While the City of Elders was a place for merit and free exchange of information, they understood that not everyone could have access to every spell that had been discovered all the time. That’s why they created the spell ranking system which would limit who was allowed to get information from where. In order of increasing power the ranks were: Apprentice, Student, Scholar, High Scholar, Great Scholar, Erudite, and Sage. Erudite level spells are the kind of thing only royalty have access to and number Sage level spells in history could be counted on your fingers and toes. Not only had her master found a loophole for the creation of such spells. He’d used it 3 times and likely added 30 or 40 more years to his path to ascension. With a perfectly suited Domain both Azure and Emerald would… would have been, blow for blow, more powerful than any other aspiring aspects.
If her master had simply said that he didn’t want to be a slave, and didn’t want all of his hardwork and effort to go to waste she’d have understood. She wouldn’t like it, and she wouldn’t have forgiven him, but she’d have understood. But there was more than that. If that wasn’t enough, what could have made this man she’d admired all her life kill his own daughter in cold blood?
Her master saw the expression on her face and knew had come to grips with everything he’d divulged so far. Now it was time to tell her a secret that could very likely tear the world as they knew it apart. And so he told her. He spoke of prophetic dreams, of visions from gods, of politics and magic and alliances and betrayals. He spoke for what certainly only a couple hours, but the gravity of the words made it seem like days. Suffering. So much unbridled suffering and backstabbing and death and misery all to keep a secret agenda. At first Azure couldn’t believe it. But as she followed his logic, and examined the evidence he had tucked away in that storage ring, what he was saying only became more plausible. All of a sudden the part that she and her sister were meant to play became clear, and so did the necessity of her sister's death. Emerald had a strong sense of justice. If she had found out all of this later and learned that her master didn’t do everything he could to stop it because of her… Finally it all came to an end.
“I believe that’s everything. Your oath is fulfilled. If you wish to leave I understand, really I do. I don’t expect your forgiveness, I just need you to understand.”
He met Azure’s eyes before he spoke again. There it was again, he looked so tired. And she understood. Taking all of this on alone for years like that, it was too much. But her master did it anyway. That’s what he was like.
“I… I’m going to stay. At least until we can get the work done once and for all. It needs to end, and my sister deserves vengeance.”
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Ayaal Ay Abinsuuri sighed as he closed the door to Azure’s chamber. He strided gracefully back towards his chambers letting out a slow sigh that filled the hallway. Anyone watching this moment would have known that this was the sigh of relief from a man who had found out that he hadn’t lost everything. Anyone watching this moment would have been wrong. What came from Ayaal was indeed relief, but not because his daughter had stayed. It was because she had bought it. Everything he’d told her she’d bought it. It was a convincing performance, the best lies are made of mostly the truth. Emerald did really have to die, and it did really break his heart. But all of the deeds he’d laid out before Azure as part of his plan were simply collateral damage for him achieving his real ambitions, nothing compared to what he would one day accomplish. And as it always had for him, everything was going according to plan.