First Mend in the 74th year of the New Order

Aurora ay Elysia let out a long, drawn-out sigh as she let herself fall onto the nearby fur-covered couch, her whole body embracing sweet release after having been strained for such a long period. Even after half a year, she was still thoroughly spent after each lesson, Marianka proving to be quite the effective albeit strict teacher. She drove Aurora to the utmost and then one step further, yet the progress Aurora had made in such a short span spoke for the elf’s methods. Granted, it was something Aurora had to remind herself of after every session since it really felt as though she died in part every single time.

She had never imagined that dancing would be this exhausting, although her stamina had been practically nonexistent when she had asked her fellow slave-sister to teach her the fine arts. Back then, Aurora hadn’t really thought of anything specific, but nowadays she was taking her lessons in song and dance very seriously.

The blonde elf offered her a glass of cold milk while praising her progress. She thought Aurora a good student, just like Aurora considered her an excellent teacher.

As she took a sip of the wondrously chilled white beverage, her mind trailed back to their first encounter over an entire year ago and she wondered how she had ever considered Marianka as anything but a font of knowledge to draw from and given her truly vast amount of experience, Aurora doubted that it’d ever run dry.

She and Arakiel had actually celebrated their twentieth anniversary almost a month ago at this point, since Master Arakiel had rescued and then enslaved Marianka on the Day of Opportunity in the 12th Liberation in the 54th year of the New Order on a medium plane affectionately called ‘Everwinter’. He had been eight years old then, while she had been six.

They had grown up together from there and although Marianka had first loathed him and his ilk, she had changed her opinion after having learned about the circumstances of her capture several years later.

Even now, she still fondly retold the story of the boy who rushed into a collapsing, burning cathedral only to prove that he was braver than the adult planeswalkers that had set the building aflame. When he had emerged wounded but victorious, the boy had stood his ground against a group of foreigners that had been much more powerful than him at the time. Even today, Marianka still laughed heartily when she claimed that he had enslaved her just to prove a point to his fellow planeswalkers, thoroughly disregarding her rather prestigious background and ancestry. He had another name back then, but no matter how often Aurora had asked, she never told her, saying that she’d take it with her to the grave.

Instead, the elf then usually dodged the question and tenderly recalled a part of their shared history, often remarking that their first years had been anything but harmonious since he had no idea what to do with a spoiled brat of a girl while she blamed him for the destruction of her people’s realm along the whole not-wanting-to-accept-the-realities thing.

Aurora always found these stories so very fascinating, for they were very different compared to her much shorter history with Arakiel, one that held no disharmony whatsoever – something she doubted would ever happen.

Over this and the whole student and teacher thing, Aurora and Marianka had bonded quickly and now it seemed utterly ridiculous that she had once regarded the elf with contempt. Instead, she was like the elder sister that Aurora had, but had never experienced – and she somehow doubted that her elder sister would be anything remotely like Marianka, given the fact that she had banished Aurora to the Maidenhold for an event she had no way of influencing.

It was really the only part that made her bitter, still. She wanted to know why so badly, but there was no way to know, for she didn’t even know who her elder sister was, she just knew for certain that she had one.

Well, now she had found a surrogate, one that was much better than the original.

The two retired to the bath after their exercises and then lazed about for an hour or two until Marianka began to do something in the household. She was, after all, the one that kept it from falling into complete disarray.

Master Arakiel was often out and about, doing something he never spoke about and while he had visited Aurora almost every day when she had still been inside the tower, he now often went missing for several weeks and when he returned, he seemed kind of drained and exhausted. But he never spoke about what he did and Aurora had quickly learned not to pry.

But it wasn’t so bad, because in the tower, she had been alone. Here, in the Alexandrite Keep, she had someone to talk to and they had even visited the color-changing district down below several times when Marianka was stocking up on food, drinks and most importantly, sweets. Despite the name, most roofs and facades didn’t actually change their color, although a few people must’ve paid a hefty sum to show such loyalty to the House of Alexandrite.

The hustle of the city, the amount of citizens that wandered around with or without purpose and the perpetual noise, it had all been rather overwhelming at first, never minding the people that were performing breakneck stunts above, jumping from one lovely house’s roof to another, even more exotic rows of houses. And while the general theme of the district had been green and red to honor the ruling House, there were many splashes of other colors interspersed, with the people and their multitude of different attire forming a personal highlight of hers.

Those had been memorable adventures, even if the reason had been rather mundane – but Kalanaar was out there, beckoning – and the longer Aurora stayed here, the more she wanted to heed its call.

Alas, Arakiel had explicitly forbidden her from leaving the keep unless Marianka was present, who herself wasn’t allowed to leave the House’s influence that stretched all across the entire color-changing district, but not one meter further.

Too dangerous he called it and given the stories that Marianka shared on occasion, Aurora was bound to agree, but she also kind of wanted to experience some of these by herself.

Ghostly apparitions, sudden monstrous sightings, rampant crime and conflict… even an occasional fight between demigods that shook entire blocks – it all sounded so very exciting, like straight from a novel.

Yet all of this paled in comparison to the stories that Lady Chryse shared whenever she had come to visit, sometimes with Sophie, sometimes without. Those stories concerned her and Lord Lyktos’s exploits on other planes and those sounded even more fantastical given the high stakes and the awesome returns.

Aurora found it hard to believe that a group of six fighters, eight supporters and twelve slaves could take on an entire foreign realm that had consisted of an ocean and a thousand columns of stone stretching out to the sky, with two different civilizations living above and below.

But these kind of stories were apparently the norm for Kalanite planeswalkers who were considered the cream of the crop even among the elite, which were usually backed by one of the five Eternal Cities – the cities that had survived the fall of the Old Order and had risen to unprecedented power in the wake of the New Order. Kalanaar was one of them, Elysia another.

They were just like the novel stories she consumed on a daily basis, only much more authentic and Lady Chryse’s words only furthered Aurora’s belief that many of these fictitious stories had grains of truth, if not entire fields of it. In addition, she occasionally, almost casually, confirmed some of the rumors that Marianka spread about Kalanaar.

Sadly, the visits of Lady Chryse and her maidservant had more or less stopped a month ago since both were highly pregnant and the children were due any week now.

With nothing else to do, Aurora grabbed the novel she had begun to read lately, one about a desert plane, a handsome warlord with a thirst for vengeance and a spoiled, naive princess of a crumbling kingdom. Some of the sections, especially those that had the warlord and the princess meet, made her grow red with shame yet she also couldn’t quite stop reading – it was just far too exciting and honestly… enticing.

She knew that such things happened often and although many of such tales ended in drama, some turned out quite the opposite.

In a way, Marianka and Arakiel were a perfect example of such a story since she could tell that both desired each other very much and quite unlike Lady Chryse’s assumptions, Master Arakiel was not practicing any abstinence whatsoever, he was just making every encounter very special when they happened.

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Sometimes, most often when he returned after several weeks, Aurora listened with bated breath whenever the two retreated to someplace private and she usually snuck away whenever her heart threatened to burst from all the sounds and her own imagination running wild.

She put the book away, realizing that she was most likely red as a tomato already… she just found this stuff so captivating while she grew increasingly frustrated that Master Arakiel didn’t desire her.

Yet, she told herself. Didn’t desire her yet, but she didn’t want to wait any longer.

Aurora had tried to speak with Marianka and even Lady Chryse about it, but the elven woman had clearly told her to not worry about it – such things happened naturally to every girl. Some were a little quicker, others a little slower. Race also played a great part in it. Marianka, for example, had flowered at the age of twelve, but the Young Master hadn’t begun to notice it until a few years later when he himself had turned into an adult.

Lady Chryse had merely looked Aurora over and chuckled, saying something along the lines of her coming along nicely while thoroughly dodging the question of age.

Aurora had often wondered how old she was, but her memory – especially that of her infancy – was faulty and given that every bud blossomed differently, it was kind of impossible to tell.

Her elder sister should know, but Aurora didn’t even know her name. She was probably Elysian… and that was all she knew about her.

On the other hand, her body was clearly beginning to blossom, but the speed at which it happened was still an endless cause of frustration on her part. She couldn’t even say why exactly, but she really wanted Arakiel to notice her as a maiden.

And so far, he did not.

She more or less squandered the rest of the day, undergoing a wide array of emotions that started with sullenness and ended with frustration some hours later.

Tomorrow, she’d try extra hard on her lessons. If her background and age were insufficient, then she’d need to impress him with her skills and now that she had a teacher, she was learning fast.

Either way, a day like today shouldn’t repeat lest she go crazy.

The days and weeks went by without much happening, really. Arakiel was away and Marianka didn’t really need any help in keeping the house in a working state, so Aurora spent most of her time training and reading. It wasn’t a new revelation, but any time she spent somewhat sensibly wasn’t time spent moaning about issues she couldn’t change and influence.

With a heavy heart, she even let go of the ‘steamy novels’ as Marianka called them since these admittedly entertaining pieces of fiction really didn’t help at all in her situation. If anything, they made it worse.

And as the days passed by, she kind of fell back to wondering about the city beyond the walls of the Alexandrite Keep. There was always activity here, with people constantly arriving and leaving – yet those in the residential districts didn’t really witness any of it given their isolated nature.

So, she went out into the publicly accessible sections at some point, wanting to see whether there was something exciting she might witness and when she beheld the differently dressed groups that came and went from the planeswalker district on the third level, she had found a new hobby.

Several days later, after having spent another afternoon watching the proceedings of the planeswalkers with great interest, a pair of young men dressed in the colors of House Alexandrite approached, their monochrome cloaks indicating that they were members of a cadet branch, not the main one.

They introduced themselves with names she soon forgot although they were kind enough to answer her questions. The two men belonged to some planeswalker group that had just returned successfully from a medium plane, with one of them boasting something about being a level ten ascendancy while the other claimed to be a level thirteen class. The names of these professions told her nothing. What was a ‘Dragoner’ supposed to be, and why was an ‘Astral Evoker-Alterator’ something to boast about so proudly?

Sure, the people in the novels had all these fancy names, she had more or less just glossed over them. It made her aware of the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about the Class System that fueled just about everything really, and it made her wonder why she hadn’t picked a class yet. She recalled something about Marianka being level nine, even if she couldn’t tell what class the elf was. The same applied to Arakiel. He had called himself a Traveler… was that his class?

From the two men, she learned that the Class System had been put in place by the Transcended in the twilight days of the Old Order, for this had been what allowed the mortals to fight back against their immortal oppressors that were using magic fueled by their souls.

But the Transcended gifted the mortals a way to embrace magic on their own – or any other profession one might think of.

Every living being had a set of stats that were hard to alter and according to that statline, people could embrace or choose classes or in very rare cases, ascendancies which were two classes combined. The young men also mentioned tales of hidden, unique ascendancies as a way to mystify the whole process.

As soon as one picked a class, they’d gain a basic understanding of its denoted principles and the more one progressed alongside that path, the more accomplished one became.

For example, all the artists whose work one could listen to on the soundeaters, the naara-fueled machines that replayed recorded audio, were singers or musicians, most of them in the higher levels and high level entertainers were coveted additions to any planeswalker party.

Even the Alexandrite Keep and most of Kalanaar had been designed by people that had chosen their careers in the architectural and engineering facets and this basically applied to everything.

The Transcended’s Creed guaranteed access to the Class System to anyone regardless of sex, race or background – the only requirement was that one had a mortal soul and was under no legal guardianship, in which case the guardian could choose for the ward.

Unsurprisingly, classes and ascendancies that helped in planeswalking were considered the most logical and thus the most sought-after, but some did not wish to risk their life and instead chose a civilian, noncombatant class. Most of these were viewed with contempt in Kalanaar and apparently any other Eternal City or plane in general, for only those who sought power, especially personal power, had any chance of reaching the apex of the Class System in order to tread on the Path of Gold, the path to attain sparks of divinity.

Depending on one’s class, one had to do different things in order to progress, but the two most common ways were to offer wealth to a temple of the Transcended or to perform as the chosen class. While that seemed simple enough for craftsmen and the like, it wasn’t so easy for combat professions, who were forged and tempered in the fires of conflict.

Given the limitations on traversing the planes, with portals becoming increasingly more expensive the more people one tried to transport to the same spot, many had begun to specialize while banding together. Thus, the planeswalkers parties had emerged as the most optimal way of raiding or conquering foreign planes, for the easiest way to obtain wealth was to take it from someone weaker.

There were a few strict rules in place for what kind of level could visit a specific type of plane, although the two men didn’t know how these rules had come into being, only that they existed and none, not even the demigods, could bend them.

The planes were divided into three types: minor, medium and major, with each plane being progressively bigger than the last and many of the major planes were large enough to have several kingdoms or even entire empires spanning continents which denoted massive strips of land that could take weeks or even months to traverse by foot, horse or carriage. At a certain threshold, high-level people could no longer travel to a minor or medium plane.

When she queried what kind of plane Kalanaar was, the two laughed heartily, stating that, of course, all the Eternal Cities were on major planes for they were the Gateways to Divinity, so of course those at the apex, meaning level 20, had to be able to come here.

The young, charming men spent nearly the entire afternoon with her, patiently answering any question she offered and although she learned a lot on this particular afternoon, she also became aware of the fact that they were looking at her somewhat differently and when it clicked, Aurora became terribly afraid and ran away without so much as giving them a proper farewell or thanks.

Once home, she slammed the door shut and sank to the ground, her heart beating far too fast and not because of exertion.

These two men… they had…

No, this was all wrong. Why would they? She wore a collar, did she not?

As her adrenaline receded, she slowly began to shiver instead, feeling exceedingly cold all of a sudden.

Right in this moment, she truly wanted Arakiel to embrace her, but he was not here.

When Marianka found her a little later on the ground, she softly asked her what had happened and Aurora couldn’t even explain why this had distressed her so much, but she kept spouting all kinds of words that at least relayed the fact that she was deeply distressed.

Later that day, after the elven maidservant had given her a long and hot bath, she pulled Aurora over and began to talk earnestly on all manners of sensitive subjects, subjects that Aurora read about all the time in her novels, but never truly thought about. But when Marianka began to lay them out from an entirely different perspective, the world outside became a very scary, frightening place all of a sudden.

From one day to another, any adventurous thoughts that Aurora might’ve had were instead heaped onto Arakiel – for it was his fault that he hadn’t been there to protect her.