Chapter 15: Training (Patreon)

The next morning, Elliot was awoken by the sharp nudge of a foot.

“Up! No laying about on my time, boy.”

He groaned, feeling stiff from the night stretched out on a thin bedroll and tired enough that it couldn’t possibly be past dawn, but he forced his eyes open nonetheless. “What time is it?”

“Learning time. Up! Up!” Breka was leaning on her staff, and watching him with an expression that approached gleeful. “Today we begin.”

Hadrian was waiting, already fully dressed, when they stepped outside. He looked Elliot up and down, frowning at his disheveled appearance. “You should be ready early tomorrow. Training is to be taken seriously.”

“I didn’t even know there was something to be ready for. No one told me this was the morning, or what time we were starting,” Elliot groused, rubbing his face. A gleam in Breka’s eyes last night when she’d said to ‘enjoy his rest’ had been his only warning. “I’m up, I’m here, just tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it.”

“Excuses will not serve you well in the months to come.”

“Your task for this morning is simple,” Breka interrupted before Elliot could snap something back about how he wasn’t making excuses. She came to a halt right at the edge of the tier and spun to face them. “Try to keep up with Hadrian. Good luck.”

Elliot glanced over to see if Hadrian had any instructions of his own, but the man was already running, and he scrambled to follow.

The first hour was an uncomplicated slog of pure physical discomfort. It was still dark, the buildings of Bastogne flickering with their eerie blue glow, and only the bright swathe of stars above for light once they cleared the freeholt. Hadrian ran him in circles through the forest until his legs gave out.

As Elliot lay there, gasping for air, muscles spasming, the hunter tossed a rope from his belt over a nearby branch and cinched it tightly.

“Climb,” was all he said, as soon as Elliot had stopped seeing spots. 

The moss was wonderfully soft and cool beneath his cheek, but he levered himself up slowly and limped over to the hanging line. 

It was barely more than five minutes before his arms felt as weak as his legs, unable to pull him more than a foot off the ground.

“Press-ups,” Hadrian said, arms crossed, expression neutral.

Elliot’s muscles were worked to failure over and over again, and when he felt like there was no possible way he could continue, Hadrian moved on to sparring.

“You must read my movements,” the hunter said, after his first three strikes all fell painfully on Elliot’s face. “You are too weary, and too unskilled, to evade by reaction only. Watch my torso.”

“I’m trying,” Elliot wheezed out, jerking his body to the left too slowly to avoid the next strike. “It’s hard.”

“Life is hard. I will begin striking with more power if you do not demonstrate improvement.” His next blow connected with Elliot’s ear. 

“Damn it,” Elliot spat, fixing his eyes on his opponent’s chest. “You’re so quick, I ca—ahgh!” Hadrian had flicked the next strike at his mouth. He reeled back, thoughts spinning as he tried to figure out a plan. What am I supposed to do here? The man moves like a goddamn puma.

An excruciating few minutes passed without anything that felt like progress. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the twist in Hadrian’s abdomen triggered him to duck to the right, and he dodged his first punch.

“Good. Rest, but only for a moment.”

Elliot flopped to the ground, wheezing. What a nightmare. It felt like he’d been forcibly recruited into the navy seals, but there was no one else around to distract the drill sergeant. Surely this couldn’t be survived on a daily basis?

As he caught his breath, the vast stretch of stars overhead drew more and more of his attention. Once, when he’d been thirteen or fourteen, his family had travelled to Bryce Canyon in Utah because his dad had read an article about it being one of the top stargazing spots in the country. To this day, he remembered the milky way painted in brilliant white against the black expanse. 

These were brighter.

Three massive galaxies took up much of the pre-dawn sky, each a wide, multihued band of stellar dust stretching along its own axis. The surrounding space was scattered with individual stars, each a blaze against the night. It was breathtaking. With the sound of the wind in the pines and the soft earth beneath him, Elliot almost felt like he could lie there forever.

Hadrian shifted impatiently. “Enough. Time to continue. We will practice footwork.”

With every fiber of his being, Elliot wanted to decline. To go back to Breka and beg for an easier regimine, or a gentler teacher. He’d never truly committed to intense physical training—no weekly gym sessions, no high-level sports. This was the most profound degree of exhaustion and discomfort he’d experienced in his entire life.

Really? Day one, and I already feel like quitting? This is sad, Elliot. Surely he wasn’t this weak. Rowan deserved better.

“I’m ready,” he forced himself to say as he rose shakily to his feet, muscles screaming.

Over an hour later, with the sun just peeking over the horizon, they made their way back into Bastogne. Hadrian strode, and Elliot limped behind. When they arrived at the house, Breka had a meal waiting.

“Dig in,” she said, looking far too pleased with herself. She pushed over a bowl full of some kind of stew, with floating vegetables Elliot didn’t recognize. He didn’t even bother with [Detailed Appraisal], yanking the bowl across the table and grabbing a nearby spoon before diving in. It was thick and flavorful, and he didn’t raise his head until he was done.

“Did you boys have fun?” Breka asked.

Elliot grunted, already feeling his eyelids growing heavy. He eyed the empty bowl, considering seconds. I didn’t even think about the food being alien before eating this time. Progress.

“Not in the mood? Fair enough. But you’re not done yet.”

He glanced up warily.

Breka was grinning from across the table, holding the Tome of Eyes. “Time for skill training.”

“Do you think I might learn more effectively after a nap?” Elliot asked, trying to make the whine as un-whiney as possible.

“No,” she replied, grin fading. “It’s best to do it while you’re tired, in pain, and unfocused. That’s where you’ll see the most benefit.” She placed the gold-embossed book down on the table in front of him. “You’re in a unique position. I assume you don’t know how vitae and profession choice work in this part of the world, given what you said about your home?”

“No,” Elliot admitted. “I don’t even really get what vitae is.” A fact that had been bugging him after Hadrian mentioned it, even with the chaos of recent events, but he hadn’t wanted to annoy Breka or Hadrian with extra questions. Ethera was the local term for magic, or energy, or whatever powered all the crazy stuff that went on here. He hadn’t gotten much farther than that.

“You’re in good company, since even our greatest scholars couldn’t claim to have a complete understanding. It’s ethera that has been attuned to living beings. You can use ambient ethera for all sorts of techniques, and many enchanted items rely on it, but if you tried to draw the same ambient ethera into your core you would find it impossible. Somehow the Beacon draws it in, changes it, and allows it to integrate seamlessly into our souls.”

“I know you get it from killing monsters. Are there other ways?”

“Until the age of fifteen children gain vitae naturally, with no profession at all. Almost anything they do, learning, working, playing, the Beacon rewards. To the point where it’s impossible to avoid. They move up the steps and inevitably reach the second circle. You are the first person I’ve ever seen still at the first circle while already assigned a profession, much less the first step of the first circle.”

“So I’m uniquely weak?”

She leaned in, her expression growing more intent. “You are uniquely moldable. A blank canvas, waiting for the painter’s brush.”

“That sounds like a nice way of saying I’m uniquely weak. Wait,” he frowned. “Hadrian said he could tell I was a merchant when he first saw me. If I have this impossibly low level, why didn’t he notice that?”

“Your advancement can’t be viewed directly, at least not with any clarity. There are exceptions—a powerful enough profession focused on inspection can learn a terrifying amount—but they are extraordinarily rare. Many will be able to tell that you are a merchant of some kind. The strong will be able to tell your relative strength, very roughly. I am fairly skilled in this area, although it’s not my specialty, and I could tell you were somewhere below the middle of the second circle. I have a skill which would let me learn more that is…discomforting for its target. Few will be able to match even that level of detail.”

Elliot tilted his head, wondering if [Detailed Appraisal] would ever let him inspect people.

“There are many ways to get stronger,” Breka continued, settling back in her chair. “But they primarily follow three paths. Acquire new skills, upgrade your existing skills, or enhance your profession. There are, obviously, innumerable minor ways to gain advantage—one of which in particular I intend to leverage for you—but those three are the spine of any path to true power.”

Elliot frowned. “You get either skills or skill upgrades when you move up a step, and then stronger skills when you move up a full circle, right?” Hadrian had said something to that effect. “How do you enhance your profession?”

“Outside of the broad strokes, no one really knows. The Beacon doesn’t speak, and it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. But it has something to do with taking big risks, and accomplishing great things, by whatever metric those can be measured. It only happens when moving up to a new circle, but it doesn’t happen at all unless you meet the criteria, and it’s more likely at the higher circles than the lower.”

“And what does me being a blank canvas mean in terms of the whole paths to power thing?”

“I’m not going to get into the details with you now. That would be counterproductive—too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing, where the type of advancement I have planned for you is concerned. I’ll say this. Children gain vitae simply by living, but once you gain a profession there are only two ways to move up the steps. Kill living things with some level of core advancement, or perform actions of meaning within the boundaries of your profession. And therein lies your advantage.”

“What?” He tried to think. “Is it really easy to get vitae from being a [Merchant of Antiquities]?”

“It’s easy to not get vitae from being a [Merchant of Antiquities]. If you don’t kill, and you don’t deal in antiques, then you don’t advance your step or circle. We can control exactly when, and exactly how, you move up. And that means we can get you precisely the level of training in precisely the areas we want before you move forward. There are benefits to gaining proficiency with certain things early on in your progress. I told you kings and queens would kill for a spatial skill earned at the first step, didn’t I?”

He did remember that. The statement had been strongly worded enough to convince him to take [Esoteric Storage] over the navigation ability.

“So, before you gain any vitae at all, you are going to train.” She tapped the book on the table. “Starting now. Work as hard as you can for an hour, then we’ll move over to your spatial skill.”

Elliot picked up the book slowly. Despite Breka’s limited explanation, he thought at least some of what was being implied was fairly obvious. If you could get more powerful abilities by having more extensive life experience, as he’d already proved through his spatial skill, then heavy training would probably raise the bar for the skills he would be offered through the first circle.

Lifting the cover of the Tome of Eyes, his first reaction was to nearly drop it. As the cover rose, what had seemed before like a stack of standard paper pages dissolved into a riot of color, stretching and blending until they formed a diorama in three dimensions. 

The scene looked straight out of a children's book: a small stream rushing between two grassy banks, an old log across the middle covered in moss, even complete with small buzzing dragonflies and what looked like a toad by the water.

Hesitantly, Elliot reached out to touch the image, and it fizzled where his finger passed before reforming afterwards. I get it. Like an incredibly realistic 3D hologram. Interesting.

“Try your skill,” Breka said.

Focusing on the moss, Elliot used [Detailed Appraisal]. It was feather moss, a term he vaguely remembered from back on earth. Low value, naturally occuring. His eyes widened. It felt just like inspecting a real plant, rather than an image from a book. 

Concentrating, he harnessed the vortex and pulled harder, trying for something more. After a few seconds, he felt a small influx of information. The name feather moss referred to their multi-branching stems, and of all mosses they were known to have one of the most diverse ranges of habitats.

He sat back in his chair, letting out a soft whistle. “Is that how this works? It makes an image, and whatever’s in the image acts like it's real to my skill?”

“Exactly,” Breka replied. “Damn useful, that thing. Try closing it and opening it again.”

Following her instructions, he flipped the cover closed—turning the image of the country creek back into a simple stack of paper—then slowly cracked it open again. This time the picture that formed was an overcast ocean beach with a stiff wind driving hulking waves onto the sand. At the far edge, a nearly vertical stone cliff sat ponderously against the water.

“It will conform roughly to your skill level. The better your control and the higher level your ability, the more interesting objects will populate. It has a fairly high upper limit, although not astoundingly so.”

Elliot resisted the urge to open and close the book over and over again to keep generating scenes; it was just so realistic. Even as exhausted and uncomfortable as he was, he felt a growing excitement. This was exactly the kind of thing he loved: a project he could approach at his own pace, for as long as he wanted. School had always felt like an endless sprint to the next exam. He loved to learn, but he was also a terrible test-taker. This world might work better for him on that front.

And this was a chance to learn real magic. He liked the sound of that.

“Throw yourself into it for an hour or so, then we’ll move on to the spatial skill.”

“Do not become complacent,” Hadrian interjected, eyes still closed and cube in hand. “Refuse to accept the simple information you find at first. Demand more. Struggle for excellence.”

“Good advice in many subjects, I think you’ll find,” Breka said. “Now go go go!”

And he obeyed, the next hour passing remarkably quickly. The change from punishing physical exertion was welcome enough to give the whole exercise a warm glow, and rather than a repetitive slog Elliot found a surprising amount of natural diversity in the work. The act of using [Detailed Appraisal] never changed much, but he found the most success when trying to piece together disparate chunks of information into a whole, like he was working on a puzzle.

The first step was realizing that items in a scene tended to be interconnected. A desert dune with a caravan passing through presented quite a few objects to examine, but when Elliot inspected the wagon itself and learned it belonged to a merchant association, it made him pause. The figures in the scene all looked warlike. At first their equipment had appraised as belonging to armed riders, but when he circled back with the inconsistency in mind suddenly it appraised as belonging to marauders instead.

He frowned. Maybe that was half the exercise—keep inspecting until he was able to peel back all the layers and make each scene into a story. It made sense if the Tome started off as a training aid for what sounded functionally like crime scene investigation.

There was never a major epiphany or a sudden sense that his skill had grown more powerful, but even after an hour he could tell he understood it much better, and was faster at drawing in extra energy with the vortex. Facts begat facts, and the more he could learn about the context in which an item existed the more he could then draw out of that item in turn. He found himself moving faster as well, jumping from item to item as he tested associations and connections, gathering information and checking hypotheses about how it all fit together. By the time Breka came to check on him, he hadn’t even realized his hour was close to up.

“Good, good. Excellent work,” she said, sounding chipper. “You’re starting to get a much better handle on how the skill functions, which is most of the goal at this point. Now, the spatial pocket.”

The next hour was, unfortunately, much more boring. She explained that despite [Esoteric Storage] having a strict definition of its own dimensions, by owning it in the first place he had just the tiniest bit of wiggle room. It took almost a third of the practice time for him to even demonstrate this slightly, but after glaring at the back pocket of his jeans ferociously enough to make his face cramp for over fifteen minutes, he finally felt the boundary of the extradimensional space flutter.

“I think I just felt something,” he said, leaning forward intently, “did you feel it?”

“I can’t feel the boundaries of your skill, boy,” Breka replied, but she had also leaned forward. “What did it feel like?”

“Like…a tiny gust of wind hit the back of the space. It sort of danced like a curtain for a second.”

“Yes!” She exclaimed, “that’s exactly right. Now you’ve done it once, it’ll be easier to do it again.”

“But why?” he asked. “Why bother? This feels like it would take weeks of training to even move the boundary by an inch, and I couldn’t keep it expanded. It feels useless.”

“I couldn’t care less how big the space is. What you’re doing right now is learning to make adjustments to an extradimensional boundary. That is an amazing gift, and it doesn’t matter if the Beacon is holding your hand through the whole process. If you spend enough time learning what it feels like, training your brain to work with those forces, then the Beacon will respond. This is why spellcasters fight for any spatial ability at all as early as they can, because it means something to get your toe in the door. Now do it again.”

Elliot forced his focus back to the spatial skill, containing a sigh. It was getting harder to keep his exhausted brain on track. Focus, Elliot. Rowan’s waiting. Don’t screw this up.