A new dawn's light poured into Ulric's room. He'd been so exhausted by the rigors of his perpetual training that he'd slept early, not far after sunsdown, and rose late, just in time to greet the Twins as they crested the horizon of frosted branches. Standing under the iridescent glimmer of Winter mornings in Irielhos Ulric ran through his new morning tradition of a balance beam routine under a blindfold. Of course, the balance beam was in his head and the blindfold was his eyelids, tightly shut and no peeking thank you very much. Still, his feet moved with increasing sureness from day to day. He wavered, he windmilled, and, at times, he planted his bare ass on the floor hard enough to resolve to do better on the next go. Ten times going and ten times coming. Every morning and every night. It was becoming a very zen way of life, this kinesthetic hello and goodbye to every day. Doing the evening runs with shaky legs, courtesy of Idra'se, and the beating throb of a mana exhaustion headache, from one of three bewitching tormenters, just added spice to the thing.
Life is suffering. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Failure is the cocoon of success. There is no spoon. Ulric used every mantra he had to persevere through this hell week. In the background of it all was the budding conception that, maybe, he had started a war by being born. Reforged. Whatever. The reality was that portentous times were coming to this little corner of Varda. War loomed like the Winter's Herald, foretelling a season of bleakness. For somebody at least; increasingly Ulric was sure it would not be for the Elves of Iriel.
Like sandpaper pulling the rust off an axe blade, the warriors of the Iriel'en ground to a razor's edge in their combat readiness. Disciplines that had languished in peacetime were honed under the hawkish eyes of career soldiers and the more bloody-minded Hunters. Nowhere was that more apparent than under the tender mercies of Idra Halb'rt, the Heartwood Sabre, leader of the Iriel'en royal guard, and who could be considered the first sword of Iriel.
Veteran guardsmen, hardened fighters with literal centuries of experience under their belts, vomited onto the floor and burned with fatigue. Mock duels, formation fighting, shooting drills, and combat routines involving being struck with wooden poles while executing maneuvers all of these were employed to burn weakness from their form. Before any of that though, first and foremost, stance work. Footwork was where a warrior was born and footwork was where he or she died for Idra'se. It was grinding, the endless adjustments, the numbing repetition, the exhausting pace. Geyrt had become a full-time stance chiropractor. Movement, adjustment. Movement, adjustment. Like waves in the ocean. He didn't feel like he was getting any better.
Once, in a moment of tired stupidity, Ulric asked when he would be taught how to fight with a spear, knife, or sword. Idra had, incredulously, asked him "What in the hells he thought he'd been doing all this time?". Ulric had answered unsatisfactorily to which Idra told him that "You can barely walk correctly, I cannot, in good conscience, confuse you with something to occupy your hands." and summarized his position as he had at the beginning: "Any time that you believe yourself ready I will accept a spar." Ulric avoided that trap.
As well he had.
Two visiting warriors from other tribes, one from the plains folk, the Lagranel, and one from the mysterious clan Narii' that had no specific home that they would admit to, the Hidden, asked for a spar from the fabled weapon master. They got what they wanted and Idra beat them with a shortsword made of some kind of rubbery sapling that made a sound like a bullwhip when he struck, which he did often and with such precision that not a single wound overlapped with another. Pride kept them going well past sense, they didn't want to concede in front of their host brethren. Pride earned them significantly more pain than silence, another lesson that the attendant warriors were eager to learn, at another's expense, from their commander. Never a hair of the elf's head did either one of those warriors touch nor did they, at any time, get a practice blade so much as halfway through a strike without being parried, counter attacked, or found themselves swinging at empty air. Idra'se fought like a particularly hateful breeze. No one of the attendant Elves laughed. They all knew he could, and would, do it to them as easily.
One younger warrior, at a tender sixty-some years old, had become fast friends with Ulric. They bantered at one another regularly: criticism levied at one another to spur them on, physical deformities mentioned in passing, inferences about the origins of their parentage, it was all in good fun. Despite the seriousness of their work, the brown and green flecked eyes of the elf always seemed to hold a joke just on the verge of utterance. The young elf, named Kryr'st, was promptly bequeathed the simplification to simply 'Christ' by Ulric for his insistence on a near-daily spar with Idra. Christ claimed, with some sound reasoning, that if he was going to daily be beaten by the best, he might one day become him. That the young elf had, at an exceedingly rapid pace for Iriel'en warriors, proven himself worthy to be a royal guard indicated his talent. He remained humble in the face of his living god Idra, however. He didn't go to the extremes of the former two Elves but instead bowed out gracefully after what amounted to three mortal blows. As he had done this daily, however, he had a growing collection of wounds, hence the nickname 'Christ' for the long-forgotten flogged god of Ulric's ancestors. Idra thought it amusing and wasn't as harsh with the youth as he might have otherwise been. For his own part, the young elf, handsome, tanned, though not dark as Geyrt and her ilk, and with straight brown hair shaved along the sides of his head gathered into a short bushy tail on the back, wore his growing bruises with pride and drank knowledge like a sponge from the master.
Elsewhere, the old boy was not fucking around these days and as Winter's cold sharpened the air, so did Idra harden his men. After his reprimand and the "spars" Ulric redoubled his efforts, shut his gob, and worked to learn what Idra'se had to teach. Which was frankly more than he would ever be able to take in. The Elf shat with better swordsmanship than any other warrior in the citadel.
Outside of the physical punishment, his lessons with the Ladies Iriel were picking up steam. Vedyr had recreated each of his original spells or shown him their likenesses that she had already mastered. Speed, power, control, all head, and shoulders above what he'd managed. The only exception to that rule was in two areas: his [Absolute Zero] and his Ceraun spells. Shor said that [Absolute Zero] was locked behind knowledge Ulric alone possessed, a philosophy that, even after he attempted to convey it, somehow was too lacking for them. They were certain that an attempt to cast that specific spell would be lethal. Ceraun, for similar reasons, was an elemental form at which Ulric found he had talent. He was on his way to theorizing a construction he was certain would produce potent magnetism.
Between Shor's conceptual groundworks and Vedyr's direct coaching Ulric was put through the process of shaping mana, manipulating it into spell works considered common for novices. Gathering water from the air to make fog, a globe of light, smoothing rough stone or roughing smooth stone, a small vortex of air that could lift heavy dust, a zone of air that would resist heating so long as it remained in close contact with the ground, that kind of thing. Minor workings, Shor called them. Heavy improvements in utilizing his mana is what Ulric called them.
He did also learn to make a series of between four and nine dense, remarkably hot, marble sized fire balls that could be fired in sequence or all at once or which could be made to spin to form a basketball-sized shield of flame capable of stopping arrows. Geyrt proved it by shooting a few at him, unbidden when he had asked what it could do later that night. The small streams of cinders that bounced off his clothes when they passed through his shield had not harmed him but he cursed at her soundly and, the next day, Shor wrapped her in a coat of ice and made her wear it for the entire duration of the lesson, having, somehow, learned of the event. He knew not from where, as he'd not mentioned it. Eyes in the portraits and the walls had ears, he supposed.
Geyrt had apologized later for the prank when they were in private, so at least she was scared of something, if not of him. That didn't stop Ulric from dumping a surreptitiously gathered globe of chilled to near-freezing water on top of her while they bathed. She declared the bath off-limits for pranks after the howls of laughter from present kin eventually stopped. Ulric agreed, satisfied that his point was made, and not wanting to lose that one bastion of solace, though lose it he would if she persisted in that kind of uncalled-for tom-foolery. Arrows were dangerous and he was far from a master spell caster, if he'd blown the spell he'd have been perforated.
He had come to awareness, probably slower than he should have, that his Shadow had not fallen so far from the clown tree as she first seemed. The woman was engaged in a guerilla war, setting small ambushes, and planning minor nuisances, all under the guise of feigned innocence and prim decorum. She probably thought he hadn't noticed, mostly because he wasn't sure how he was going to retaliate and so pretended ignorance. He could just order her to stop but that was no way to go about winning the game. No, he would have to be better than that. For now, he was willing to take small losses while he crafted a deeper victory.
Spellwork continued. He had been unable to manage any other completely new spells, other than the [Cinder Pearls] and their [Cinder Shield] evolution. What he had managed was to improve all of his current spells by at least one rank. [Stone wall] was at rank IV and he was getting better at making it into definite shapes, rather than crude blocks. He felt like he was on the cusp of something involving moving liquified regions of stone around the ground, like a puddle he controlled. If he put that under someone's feet and locked it solid they'd be trapped until they could break the stone free. [Ice Blade] was denser, sharper, and chilled things faster at rank III. [Wind Blade] reached rank V yesterday, after he'd played around with the vacuuming effect that he'd employed to accelerate it, following some casual suggestions from Shor and steady coaching from Vedyr's own more mature Caelum spells.
The spell now had a form of auto-targeting. It created a wind tunnel for itself from its destination that both accelerated the compressed air blade and drew it to its target, his control had grown to create blades dense enough that they would no longer disintegrate. The tunnel could be curved allowing Ulric to create several small blades that had unpredictable attack vectors. Coupled with their near invisibility it was a hell of a spell for inflicting wounds on unarmored targets. Best of all, unless the opponent used a spell or mana pulse to shed the tiny threads of Caelum that anchored it, it would not miss and would follow them at ever-increasing velocity, meaning that the harder they worked to avoid it, the more dangerous it got.
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Bathe's instruction proved to be the most fundamentally important, as it represented an area in which he had no real prior experience. Evoking was a matter of practice and concentration, understanding the nature of the arcane was like a physics lesson, but body magic on the level of Bathe's was a completely different thing altogether. Bathe used her core to saturate her entire body with mana, binding its tissues in a protective layer of magic that also enhanced it. Most master mages managed to do something similar, to heighten their physicality. Nearly every nonmage class possessed some form of body augmentation skill, at some point, though mostly of a damage reduction variety.
Ulric didn't even know where to start. Infusing mana into his flesh was not the same at all as circulating it through his core. It had to be done extremely slowly, at his level, with tiny amounts of mana, and with the utmost precision. Bathe could, for all intents and purposes, do a full body Overcharge that let her multiply her strength exponentially. At the more casual levels, she was merely five times as strong as she should have been. If that doesn't sound like a lot, wait until someone uses one finger to lift you off the ground or moves faster than you can see to kick a hole through a rock wall without so much as a scrape. He had been suitably impressed until she had Vedyr hit her with a softball-width copy of his [Water Jet] and tanked it without a bruise. Ulric had carved through [Forest Lord] bone with that spell. When he realized that the dainty, beautiful creature in front of him could probably have beaten one of the great terrors of the continent to death with her fists he became more appropriately terrified of her. She hadn't done anything to reduce that when, in his first two days of struggle with the process, even with the other two assisting him, he couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work. So, she laid a casual hand on his chest, directly over his core, and moved his mana for him. Directly, with no effort on his own part, Bathe Iriel highjacked the mana inside his body to move it according to her direction, showing him the way to properly manipulate his own magic. Just as easily she could have turned his mana against him, destroyed him from the inside. She was a Chi-wielding mana Monk dialed to twelve out of ten. Fucking hell.
Ulric was slow in this practice but he could feel the benefits. Ever so slightly he had bumped up the toughness of his body to the point that his belt knife only penetrated his finger with a fair bit of pressure, instead of the near-instant wounds it produced at the slightest touch before. These were the sorts of improvements that could keep him alive in a place full of monsters. Both those that roamed the wilds and those that walked on two legs.
So it was, on this 11th day, he found the slightest optimism blooming in his heart. Troubles were a coming, but they just might be biting off more than they could chew. A knock on the inner door showed growth of a different kind. By all that was good and growing, his Shadow had learned common courtesy. Somewhere between the ice prison, the frigid water bath, and whatever the hell went on between her and her Mothers while he was having his mystical juices squeezed like a tropicana, she was almost ready to take places. Ulric was under no illusions. A rose, by any other name, would not sting the hand any less than should one brush up against Geyrt Iriel. Their running gag war would not abate and, Ulric had to admit, she kept him on his toes. Easy to relax over much when you were being as well kept as he was under Bald'rt's hospitality.
He dressed into a set of regular old warrior silks, they having quickly become his favorite go to clothing. That leather and bone armor would feel like canvas the next time he wore it. Decency, at least of out appearance, obtained he called to permit his Shadow entry. The carved door, all leaves, limbs, and woven patterns, vaguely Celtic, swung open to reveal the tall, dark skinned beauty that had, through various acts of foolishness by the both of them, become his effective servant, man at arms, and personal assassin.
In she walked all leopard grace and deadly intent. Veridian eyes flecked with gold scanned the room, cataloguing everything in it, before fixing him with its habitual glare. Even after the near two weeks of his stay in Irielhos, her entry still acted like a too bright light, capturing his attention by instinct. At least he no longer went all deer in headlights around her. Just as well, she'd probably find a way to bother him if she knew to what extent her sudden appearance disturbed his inner peace. She already had a tremendously annoying way of finding that exact moment wherein silence had reigned long enough for him to grow comfortable to lay a non sequitur on him and thereby prevent his ever forgetting she was there. It was on purpose. She knew it, he knew it, and she knew he knew she knew it. He should have told her to come in while he was still naked, the sight of his tanned hairy rump punishment for her perpetual distraction. But no, she had knocked and he couldn't break the unspoken rules of courtesy. Another way then.
"Good morning, Geyrt. I trust the morning finds you well. No bruises today bargained for by trading lip with your mother?" He asked.
A slight flinch, followed by a grimace. Ahh, he sighed internally, Wunderbar. He hadn't been sure, not entirely, but she had been slightly too adamant about standing during dinner, claiming an ache in her leg. A mild hitch in her step when one of those pouches strewn about her belt came down a little too jarringly against her hip on the stairs. It was worth spending an arrow, and rewarding when the shot struck truly.
"My bruises, or their absence, will not interfere with my duties Glade Chief. They grow easier by the day as your movements slow." She lilted at him, her tone trying to hide temper.
The remark passed wide of its target, he had watched a seasoned soldier have to have a medic use healing magic on crippled legs when they'd cramped from stance work so hard the muscles had pulled. If you weren't in pain after Idra's training you weren't trying. The only reason he wasn't completely incapacitated was his freakish physiology. Briefly, he was tempted to fight dirty and openly lament that she could not share his suffering by joining them in training. That was a blow too low though, it very much wounded Geyrt that she was no longer welcome among her old comrades as one of their members. There was a difference between trading barbs and trying to truly wound. A different tack, since she'd brought up the topic.
"I am glad that your service does not burden you. I would free you, if I could, but alas, your Father insists that the terms for your duty are lifelong. What was it that Lady Bathe said about master mages trained in body magic, such as she has been teaching me? That they are known to live for hundreds and hundreds of years, well beyond the span of most of their kin? I am afraid that long indeed may be your indenture, if you do your job well." He rejoined, scoring another point.
He could see it scrawled across her face, as it had been when Bathe had told him in her hearing before they parted, that archmages were so long lived. She had been prepared for her sentence to last a century or so. That it might continue well into the lifespan of even her kin was despair. It did not bother him that she should be so aggrieved at the thought of the duration of her term, he would have considered suicide if it were him. Fresh this blow was, across stinging revelation and she bit her lip without returning fire. He was in fine form today, and she knew it. Geyrt knew when he was on top of his game and chose silence rather than take any more punishment. Ulric took his win with some degree of smugness. Taking points off any of the Iriels was a thing well done, they were, to a one, not easy targets.
It was odd, that they should engage in this ritual of casual sparring. But sarcasm was Ulric's true language and Geyrt seemingly didn't know how to talk to anyone but Brighteyes and Idra without demeaning them. Certainly, her cheek was landing her in hot water with her Mothers, now that they had taken a more direct hand in her education. A short talk with Brighteyes, in response to Ulric's half-sarcastic question about how Vedyr hadn't drowned her daughter, revealed that in those days following the Blood Moon rising over Prosper, and the closing of Iriel to any but Elven kin or those directly permitted, Vedyr had been much absent, hunting intruders and border runners.
She had driven like her Heartwood Spear namesake into the organized efforts to undermine the seclusion announcement. Like the Act of Seclusion of old, buried beneath the sea Japan in his world, there had been many who stood to turn a profit breaking the embargo on movement between the North Western part of the continent and the South Western coast, with Iriel lying between. Apparently, hanging the bodies of a couple of dozen of their leaders at a time from the wood line discouraged even hardened smugglers and border runners. But it had taken time and, in that time, Geyrt had been left largely to her own devices.
It had not served her well. What her self-imposed isolation and relentless pursuit of vengeance had done to increase her Hunter's craft, it had only magnified in her insociability. Which, Ulric had to admit, he understood well. It closely mirrored his own descent into hermitude. That was why he was convinced that her Mothers were trying to break her bad habits and why he didn't so much take it personal that she had a bad attitude towards being, essentially, a bodyguard man servant. What she needed, badly, was a friend. He was pretty sure that he couldn't be that, and her Honor, her keeper, not at the same time. That was even assuming he would be able to find enough common ground with her to achieve such a monumental task. Ironic, that he could so easily see now in the alien woman what he'd failed to see in himself before it had, essentially, killed him. He'd imploded under the weight of his own largely avoidable pressures and his spiral of self-destructive behaviors. Death was amazing therapy, really gave a man some perspective.
Having established that, today at least, he was the more able verbal jouster, Ulric beckoned to the tray of breads, cheeses, fruit, and a delicious tea that had been brought early this morning for breakfast. It had been a simple thing, to ask for a breakfast tray and the Duties had done wonderfully with their choices of repast. He needed to give them something to thank them for their incredible efficiency. Put it on the list, Ulric thought.
Silence, as usual, accompanied the meal. It had been a little odd at first, the no talking while eating custom. People in his old world had made discussion during a meal a near ubiquitous norm. A guy could get accused of being sullen if he stayed quiet over dinner. But here, you just enjoyed your meal in peace. It was nice. After the meal, of course, you could chat away. It gave one who did not wish to engage in small talk an easy, polite, out: they simply held a biscuit, or roll, or anything really, on their plate and that bought them a free pass to remain out of the conversation without insulting anyone. Geyrt had fidgeted with a slice of toast until it fairly well evaporated. Those crumbs, those were the crumbs of a battle won in Ulric's heart.
Instead of plying one another with small talk, Ulric took the opportunity to review his personal imprint on the Akashic record, his status. He had done so with increasing rarity, having received fewer *pings* to mark drastic changes while also scaring the living shit out of himself. It seems he had more or less settled down.
[Status]
[https://i.imgur.com/4CEsyQ3.png]
Ulric was delighted to see that his base stats were increasing. When he'd first awakened to Varda, had inspected his stats then, they had been decidely high, for what was considered an average man in the Before. Especially if he thought back to his physical potential on Earth, he’d never been what you might call athletic. At his best he’d have been called fit. Now though? He was head and shoulders above what could be thought of as even exceptional on his home world. At this point, he was pushing into the unknown.
If ten were considered average he was somewhere close to double that in many of his base stats. With the bonuses conferred by various accomplishments, codified by titles in the Akashic, a mystery that still fucked with his brain when he considered it, he was well beyond even that mid-twenties mark. Some of those stats sat at near to triple what an average, unenhanced human should be. He felt it too. His body weighed nothing, unencumbered. Even the absolutely killing work-out regimen with the royal guard was becoming slightly less exhausting, though the damage was accumulating and he needed a recovery day. He would heal from those slight muscle tears, the joint abuse, the bruising, far more rapidly than was normal. Mostly with just a good night’s sleep.
Mana exhaustion daily was pushing his core to grow similarly. He was definitely channeling more mana than he had when he'd arrived. This growth was more subtle, magic was less well defined than the explicit stats, a more fluid concept. Ulric could tell when he concentrated on his core that he was more “full”, that his reservoir of energy was greater. Maybe only enough in the last week to cast one or two extra spells. But that was definitely not nothing, not even close. The Dragons he'd been training with had each been surprised at how many spells he could use or how long he could sustain a particular spell work before tiring. It was unusual they had said, for one of his age to have that kind of volume.
Dangerous, was what Shor called it. His core was still refining pure mana, pure mana that, in great enough concentration, liked to harmonize explosively with literally any other strong mana source. Like the sun. Or fire. Or the air. Or the ground. Or living creatures. Which meant basically everything could set up a chain reaction. Spooky. But that was a problem for Future Ulric, today's Ulric had received a message this morning, indicating that he should attend the Great Hall for an important meeting with the Lord of Iriel and he was, with his Shadow in tow, on his way.