Chapter 24: The Stupid Way

Despite all of Miro’s most earnest hopes, his newly discovered “debuff” did not disappear the next morning. Several times throughout the night he was visited by dreams that showed him either that the line had once again read “unavailable” or had disappeared altogether. A profound sense of relief would wash over him until he would wake up to the dark wind-swept plains and his heart would sink at the discovery that the tidy resolution was a lie. Those dark words were invariably still with him: “Mother’s Blood”.

At breakfast, Miro wasn’t in the mood for talking, or really making eye contact with anyone from the group and figured that they probably attributed his behaviour to the previous day’s unpleasantness with Hima. He, however, hardly dwelled on it by that point, his thoughts consumed by the debuff and what it meant. Where it had originally come from was likely no mystery. His mother died the same day his father did as a result of the brazen assassination attempt on King Ganryh the Second’s life. Surely, this wretched thing had its source in that. But what were the implications of being branded by it? Was Miro to walk around cursed for the rest of his life, gifted with mage powers but rendered incapable of using them with any sort of proficiency? And what would happen if the rest of the party found out? Likely they’d leave him by the side of the road and continue on their adventure together, reporting that he perished in a tragic razorback accident somewhere on the arid plains.

He thought best to keep this one to himself, and then jettison from the group at the nearest town. In the meantime, he would dutifully follow his training with Hima and Nydra before getting out of their hair for good.

“Miro? Hey.” It was Nydra who was trying to get his attention and Miro wondered how long it had been since he fully tuned out. “I know this landscape can be a bit of a downer. But look on the bright side, by the end of the day we should be in the lowlands of the Deep Scar Mountains and, well, I wouldn’t call it much cheerier, but it’s certainly better than this.”

He managed only a weak smile and an “oh yeah?” in response and returned to staring down at his feet and the hard dusty ground underneath them. It would be a nice change of scenery, he agreed silently; the dry winds that constantly battered them made him feel like a shriveled-up earthworm who never made it across the road after a rainstorm.

Soon after, Hima picked some arbitrary point to declare that breakfast was officially over, even though Miro had now for a while just been aimlessly poking at his leftover food, and said that they had to put in a training session before they set off again. As a small mercy, she chose to set up their training ground on the opposite side of the camp from where they had their confrontation the day before, but this gesture annoyed Miro more than anything. There was, he thought, a twinge of pity in her eye, like she’d come to accept that he was a broken thing and all he yearned for at that moment was to experience the same barely-concealed intolerance she’d graced him with since they met.

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She willed five icy targets into existence – ambitiously one for every fireball that should have obliterated them, which just ended up resulting in a handy visual representation of his terrible aim.

“Okay, let’s pick up where we left off yesterday.” She sounded wearier than he ever heard her.

“Hopefully not exactly where we’d left off.”

Hima took a deep breath, caught herself, and didn’t sigh on the exhale.

“Remember,” she said, “Your powers are not a tool, they are not a weapon. They are not something you’re handling or fumbling with. They are an extension of you. They’ve been with you your whole life, just like any other body part, whether it be a heart or an arm. You don’t think about having to use your heart. You’re not solving the puzzle of how to move your hand every time you need to pick something up. Same with your powers. You are doing it, you are not thinking about it.”

Miro raised his right hand toward one of the targets, thinking very hard about not thinking about it. Nothing came naturally and instead he felt like he was striking at a piece of flint that was too small for the job. The fireball left him and grazed a corner of the target, crashing almost unimpeded into the ground behind it. The reminder of his handicap came almost immediately, not just appearing before him, but angrily crackling into view, etched in sizzling yellow letters: “Mother’s Blood”. The next two fireballs met the same fate, each of them summoning that dire warning and there seemed to be no way for Miro to shut it off.

“Why are you doing this?” Miro asked, his arm dropping to the side even though the beginnings of the flame hand already been summoned to his hand – he had no desire to see those two words again.

“What.” Hima half-asked, half-stated, her arms crossed and eyes on the targets instead of at Miro.

“Why are you still training me? Clearly I’m awful.”

“You’d think having asked myself this question every day for the past week I would have a good answer for you,” she said, turning to face him. Whatever pity may have been there earlier was gone. “Unfortunately, I have nothing better than ‘because this was something I had been chosen to do’. Why me? That’s for the infinite wisdom of the masters at the Akademiya to know. As far as I’m concerned, if they believed that I would succeed, then I will. And I’m not interested in hearing you feel sorry for yourself about how terrible you think you are in the hopes that I will agree with you and we can have a good laugh about it. Now go, you have two fireballs left – all three from today veered right, so let’s try this the stupid away and aim more to the left this time.”

He tried it the way Hima suggested, aiming for a spot on the left rim of the target instead of in the middle. Both of his next fireballs went high and slightly to the left, only one making any contact, managing to melt the target partially, but otherwise ineffectual.

“Even the stupid way didn’t work,” Hima muttered beside him and the morning training was concluded.