57: Breakers Of The Chain (Patreon)

Hours later, the rain still hadn’t abated. Maiya lay in Vir’s arms the whole time, face pale and eyes unfocused. They’d both shed every tear they had long ago, leaving them dried up and empty on the inside.

“I think…” Maiya said, breaking the long silence. She spoke with a cold, hard voice that shocked Vir. “I think I finally get what you said before. About not being strong. I thought I understood when Rudvik passed. That strength was important. But I didn’t. Not truly. Now… Now, I do. To be weak is to be trampled over. This is a cruel world, Vir.”

She turned to stare Vir in the eye. Magic Lantern cast heavy shadows upon her face, and together with her smeared makeup, made her look like a Child of Ash.

“I hate this, Vir. This feeling of being helpless. I keep thinking, ‘if I’d only warned dad. If I hadn’t come with you…’ But that’s all a lie, and I know it. There was nothing I could’ve done. Nothing. I was inconsequential. My parents would’ve sacrificed themselves for us, no matter what… But with power? If I had magic? I could’ve fought off the knights. Or at least escape with my parents, I dunno. I could’ve done something, Vir!”

Vir couldn’t find the words to reply, and silence settled upon them again.

“What will you do now, Maiya?” Vir asked at last. He genuinely wanted to know… Whatever path she chose, he’d support her. If she asked him to come with her to Daha so she could take revenge against those knights, he’d do it.

“I can’t let it end like this,” Maiya said, looking around. “I won’t let them get away with this. I’ll obtain power. The likes of which this realm has never seen. I’ll become the strongest mejai in this whole grakking world. And then? Then I’m gonna make the people who did this to my parents pay. Every. Single. One. I don’t know how and I don’t know when. But I will, Vir. I swear this to you on my parents’ names. Someone will pay for this.”

Her words sent shivers down Vir’s spine. He understood at that moment that these were not empty threats. Maiya rarely ever spoke like this, and when she did, Yuma help whoever stood in her way.

He only hoped she didn’t lose herself following that path.

“I know you will, Maiya. But for now, I think we should stay at Riyans’ and soak up all the knowledge he can give us.”

His friend nodded. “I’m going to wring every last grain of knowledge out of that woman. I’m not leaving until I do.”

There was something in Maiya’s eyes that scared him, but he couldn’t place what. “L-let’s head back for now. Akros is gonna be worried sick that his ‘risto guests just up and vanished on him.”

“Let that chal sweat,” Maiya seethed. “Not like he’s done right by either of us. He doesn’t deserve our courtesy.”

“I agree, but we don’t want to attract any more attention than absolutely necessary.”

“Right,” Maiya said, gazing off into the distance. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

“Let’s, uh… let’s fix our makeup first?”

Luckily, Vir had packed their makeup kits in the rucksacks they’d brought along. Their makeup had been smeared badly, and the single orb’s light didn’t help matters; fixing it took an entire hour.

The pattering sounds of rain had died off by the time they’d finished, and they made good time back to Akros’ house.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Maiya said. “I can’t stand being here. I feel like… like I want to burn this whole village to the ground.”

Vir tried to ignore the scary things coming out of his friend’s mouth. “It’s dangerous to travel at night, Maiya. How about sleeping at my old place instead?”

If he was honest, his house was the last place Vir wanted to visit, but there was something there he needed to retrieve. Something important.

As Vir had expected, Akros was beside himself with worry. The man had been getting ready to put a search party together, so it seemed like they had arrived just in time.

“Please, stay with us! I hope we have not inconvenienced you? If we have, please tell us how we can compensate you!”

As much as Vir wanted to spit on the man, he refrained out of a desire not to make a scene. Their actions were already suspicious as it was. If someone traced them back to Apramor’s home and then informed Hiranyan knights, it could pose a risk to them and Riyan. Unlikely, but Vir didn’t want to take any chances.

“We appreciate your generosity, ser,” Vir said. “But we have just learned of complications that require us to return home at once. I hope you understand.”

“How did you—ah!” Akros said, coming to the conclusion Vir had hoped. The only way to send messages in a village like Brij was via letter, and a runner entering the village late at night would have visited the village leader’s home first—Akros’ place.

The Sawai had other options. Communications orbs existed, though as Maiya had learned from Tanya, they were so exorbitantly expensive that only the wealthiest families had one.

Akros must have concluded that Vir belonged to such a family, because his eyes went as wide as saucers.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Vir said, throwing him a sack of fifty Imperium coppers. The man’s entire family eyed the coin like a pack of starving bandies, and Vir could almost imagine the saliva oozing out of their mouths.

It was an atrocious amount, but Vir needed this much to stay true to his disguise.

“Disgusting,” Maiya said once they’d mounted Bumpy and rode out of earshot.

“Hmm,” Vir replied. “To think I once looked up to these people. No matter how much I try to empathize, it all just seems so hollow now. So… meaningless.”

Rising at dawn to tend the fields of work in the woods—day after day, year after year—with only marriage and having kids to look forward to. Maiya had once said it was a depressing way to live.

Vir had disagreed then, but now? It was hard not to see things that way. The world was such a vast place. To spend life cloistered in some corner of the world felt like a waste.

Vir asked Maiya to extinguish her Magic Lantern orb, and they rode out of the village, navigating only by the light of the stars and Prana Vision. It was imperative no one noticed them reach their destination, and while the streets were empty, Vir wasn’t taking any chances.

Bumpy initially startled at penetrating the inky darkness, but he trusted Vir’s excellent navigation. Before long, the dirt road widened, and they arrived at Vir’s old home.

Instead of tying Bumpy up at the stables, Vir led the Ash’va around back. This way, any villagers traveling the road would see only an abandoned house—same as always.

Unlike Maiya’s home, Vir’s residence hadn’t been barred. His greatest fear was that someone might have moved into it, but it was unwarranted—after all, no one had claimed Maiya’s home, and Vir’s was far smaller and out of the way. More of a shack, really.

The flimsy latch on the door had already been broken, making entering the house a simple matter of pushing open the door.

Owing to Prana Vision, Vir saw far more than Maiya, so he held her hand and guided her into the tiny house.

Inside, they found a similar scene, with cookware and odds and ends strewn across the floor like discarded trash.

“They left your furniture, at least,” Maiya said, prompting Vir to chuckle.

“Only because our stuff wasn’t even worth stealing. Guess that’s one benefit of being as poor as a pauper.”

He did note that the cooler’s Magic Cold orb was missing.

Vir peered into the bedroom. The villagers had appropriated the single bed he shared with his father, leaving the room bare.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Maiya asked, unable to make heads or tails of the darkness.

“Nah. It can wait until morning. I don’t want to risk using Magic Lantern here.”

“Hmm. Why don’t we leave now, instead? I feel like I’m suffocating, Vir. Every minute, I feel like I’m drowning. Bumpy made it here alright, yeah? We can travel at night.”

“Reaching the outskirts of the village was one thing. Braving the plains and the sands all the way back to Riyan’s place? There’s a reason no one travels at night, Maiya,” Vir said, squeezing her hand. “Trust me, I don’t enjoy being here any more than you do. Can I ask you to bear with it for just a few more hours?”

Maiya relented and sat on the floor in a corner of the bedroom.

They both knew that no rest would be forthcoming on this night, no matter how tired they were.

Vir didn’t even try to sleep. He retrieved a blanket from Bumpy and just huddled together with Maiya, pressing his back against her for warmth.

The hours passed in agonizing silence, with both of them lost in their thoughts.

Vir had always suspected that Apramor would land in hot water if the knights learned of his actions, but never in his wildest nightmares did he think they’d kill the kind-hearted priest, let alone Lady Aliscia.

His heart ached at the thought. It was cruel. It was beyond cruel. Was this what Hiranya was really like? Ruled by tyrants and despots? Knights were supposed to protect people, not execute them!

And what about Riyan? Vir and Maiya had been quick to brand the man a criminal, fleeing from the government. Vir now wondered whether his judgment had been unfair. It felt like with every new thing he learned, the line between good and evil grew ever blurrier.

Unable to deal with these thoughts, he snuck out of the blanket and sat cross-legged several paces away in the pitch darkness. Maiya snored softly, unaware. There was something about his old home that brought with it a measure of peace and familiarity. He hadn’t expected that.

Vir thought back to Shardul’s memory, now faint and half forgotten. As he’d done dozens of times over the past days, he focused on the moment Shardul activated the ability. The man had sucked prana up into his legs, and then…

And then what?

He hit the same wall he’d struggled with. Shardul had somehow slipped into the shadows, but Vir didn’t know how.

The wooden floorboards shone brightly to Prana Vision, filled with Earth and Life affinity prana, and Vir’s thoughts wandered to old memories. The rickety boards always creaked and sank under his weight. Rudvik was much worse—the man had to avoid some floorboards entirely, lest he risk falling through.

Wait… Loose floorboards that give… The ground gives way!?

It finally clicked. He understood what he’d been doing wrong. The difference was slight, but profound.

Vir always tried to push himself into the ground when activating Dance of the Shadow Demon. Shardul did the exact opposite. He allowed the ground to pull on him. Functionally, they were the same, but mentally? They were complete opposites.

He got to his feet and mimicked Shardul. Vir sucked the prana out of his legs as usual, but this time, he resisted the prana that wanted to rush into his body, stopping it from entering. He concentrated instead on allowing himself to sink, to meet the prana where it lay, instead of asking it to come to him.

Bad idea.

Vir suddenly found himself surrounded by pitch black darkness. Not the darkness of his home, but in a world defined by its lack of light. Trapped.

What have I done!? Vir screamed, but his voice had ceased to function. He flailed his arms in panic, but found his body bound and immobile. He couldn’t even breathe.

Because in this place, he had no body.

Out! I want out! He thought, frantically trying to escape this nightmare. Yet no matter what he did, he met with failure.

Panic turned into dread as a horrifying possibility dawned on him. Was he trapped here? Forever? Where no one could find him? He’d always known that delving into the secrets of prana was dangerous. That it could very well kill him.

Finally, his luck had run out. He’d reached beyond his means and landed himself in a place from which there was no escape. This time, nobody would save him. Nobody could possibly find—

And just like that, Vir found himself right back where he was, standing in his home, silent apart from Maiya’s snores. Sweat and chills broke out belatedly, as if his body had forgotten it needed to match his panicked state.

What in all the Realms was that!?

He’d known what to expect—after all, it was the same as the memory fragment. Shardul had sunk into a realm of shadows. Vir just hadn’t realized doing it alone would be so terrifying.

He took a few moments to stabilize his breathing before returning to the memory fragment again. He wasn’t quite ready to attempt the ability… not until he had a firmer grasp of how it worked.

This time, rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the ability, he watched Shardul sink into the world of darkness—of Shadow. Once inside, it took the man only a few moments to pick out an exit from one of the many blurry motes of prana that surrounded him. Vir realized he’d completely missed them in his panic.

Once Shardul had selected a glob of Shadow prana, he’d popped out into the world again.

Okay… So that’s how it works.

Vir took a deep breath and went for it again. He sunk into the world of shadows, and this time, he didn’t panic. The clusters of shadow prana shone brightly to his Prana Vision, but since shadow prana was ‘gray’ and this world of darkness black, he’d failed to pick them out earlier.

Now that he knew what to look for, he saw them everywhere. Dozens of possible exits. He reached out to a closer one with his mind and emerged several paces from where he’d begun.

This… This is kinda fun!

So he did it again. This time, he focused on exiting at the farthest prana cluster he could find. He emerged outside his home, about twenty paces away.

Then he did it again. And again, invoking the ability over and over until the Ash prana in the area dried up, which didn’t take long.

He learned a great deal from all of those repetitions. For one, he was tapping into the powers of Shadow prana—rather, the entire world of darkness was the domain of the Shadow affinity.

And yet, every invocation consumed Ash prana instead. A lot of it—the ability hungered for prana far more than his other Talents. It made him wonder… Ash prana always looked different from the other elements. More dense, More profound.

What if it’s not an affinity after all? He thought. What if it’s more like a meta affinity?

Something that could leverage the traits of the other affinities, though so far, he’d only been able to use Earth and Shadow prana. Perhaps it was restricted to affinities that lived within the ground? That would explain why he couldn’t use orbs. It would not explain why, in Shardul’s memory, Ash prana populated both the air and the ground.

Regardless, he’d uncovered a few other details regarding the ability as well. The maximum range was limited. The most distant clusters of Shadow prana he could see while in that shadow world were just about twenty paces. Beyond that, there was nothing. This didn’t feel like a barrier he could overcome with more practice—it felt more like a natural limitation of the ability itself.

Shardul had gone much farther, but then Shardul had a tattoo. Maybe those tattoos helped amplify the ability’s properties?

Another discovery was that the prana clusters gave Vir a glimpse into the world if he focused on looking through them. While inside the world of shadow, it was as if he suddenly gained a thousand eyes in a thousand places.

Unfortunately, there was a time limit he could stay in there before it kicked him out, like it had done when he panicked. About ten seconds was the limit. Either he had to choose an exit, or it would boot him out back where he entered—namely, his own shadow.

He’d realized that darkness counted as a shadow, which would mean that he’d have almost free rein to disappear and appear wherever he wished. During the day, he could still use the ability, but after venturing near the village’s lights to experiment with it some more, he needed hard shadows for it to function—the stronger, the better.

Which meant the ability was nearly useless on gray, overcast days.

Despite this, Vir felt giddy. The potency of this Talent far outstripped High Jump and Leap. He wasn’t even sure it was a Talent—while it operated on the same pranic principals as Talents, this had so much more depth than the other two that it felt fundamentally different. It even gave him access to a realm he never even knew existed! The realm of shadows.

Hang on a moment… Vir thought back to what Riyan had said about Shadow Blend—the Talent that let its wielder sink into the shadows. Wasn’t Dance of the Shadow Demon similar?

While he could choose to move, he didn’t have to, at least for ten seconds. Vir wasn’t sure how long Shadow Blend allowed wielders to stay hidden inside shadows, but the abilities were similar enough that Vir could lie and say he possessed Shadow Blend. He somehow doubted Dance was a Talent many people knew about. If it even was a Talent.

It wasn’t just the ability to move around near-instantly that made Dance powerful. The fact that he could disappear into the shadow realm meant he could dodge otherwise fatal attacks, as he’d done in the forest. He could then afford to take his time and gather his thoughts, looking out at the world from a place where no enemy could touch him.

On a whim, he tested an idea. He returned home and retrieved a small hourglass Maiya had brought along. They never knew what might come in handy, so Maiya liked to hoard as much stuff as she could on their travels.

Flipping the hourglass, he brought it into the world of shadows. Though his body was frozen inside there, it seemed he could bring anything he touched along with him, so long as it was small enough and light enough to carry. That was another limitation of the ability—whatever he brought through had to fit inside the shadow he wanted to exit from. He couldn’t exit out of a pebble’s shadow; he simply wouldn’t fit.

Vir used up the entire ten seconds in the shadow realm before it shot him back out.

“I knew it…” he breathed, staring at the hourglass. Not a single grain of sand had fallen through. He repeated the test to be sure, but again, time seemed to freeze when he was inside the shadow realm.

Which meant that to an opponent, he’d disappear and instantly reappear at his destination, even if he’d spent several seconds in that world. Of course, since no time had passed, his body wouldn’t get a break, but his mind continued to function just fine. It was an advantage he’d exploit the heck out of in his upcoming battles.

The only downside he could find was that Dance of the Shadow Demon consumed prana like there was no tomorrow. He could easily perform Leap a half dozen times with the amount of prana it took to activate Dance just once. It also took longer to charge.

Despite all of this, Vir was happy. Shardul said there was no way he could learn the ability without the man’s guidance. Vir had just proven him wrong. Through his own efforts, through his own understanding of prana, he’d reverse engineered the ability.

Riyan had once told Vir to be like a shadow. He no longer had to pretend. Now, he was the shadow.

— —

Dawn finally broke hours later. To Maiya, it sure felt like it’d taken its own sweet time, as if it couldn’t be bothered about their plight. To Vir, it’d felt like only a few moments, having only recently drifted back to sleep after his nighttime escapades.

As soon as there was enough light, Vir snuck out from under the blanket and pried open a floorboard in a corner of the bedroom.

“Your stash?” Maiya asked, her eyes puffed and red.

Vir wanted nothing more than to tell Maiya about his newfound power, but refrained. She was grieving, and now was not the time. He’d tell her when she’d recovered.

“What’s left of it, anyway. Rudvik took almost everything when we’d fled to the Godshollow. But he forgot this…”

Vir held up a loop of thread that captured a wooden square an inch wide. On it was a charcoal sketch of Rudvik and Vir, standing side by side and grinning happily.

“Did you—was it that traveling artist who came by a few years ago?” Maiya asked, taking the necklace from Vir.

“Yeah. It’s the only memento I have to remember Rudvik by.”

“It’s really well done. He perfectly captured Rudvik—look at how big and happy he looks in this!”

Vir smiled. He remembered that day with fondness. Rudvik had dipped into his savings to splurge on the artwork, despite Vir begging him not to. Vir was glad his father didn’t listen to him back then.

“Treasure this, Vir,” Maiya said, returning the necklace to his hand and closing his fingers around it.

Vir gazed at the locket. Objectively, this trip had been one of tragedy and tears, and that went for them both. But it did give them something they never knew they’d needed: Closure.

For the first time since Rudvik’s passing, Vir felt like he could turn back and see events as they were—as they’d happened. As history. Not something to agonize over, nor anything to change.

It was simply a cold acceptance of facts. And, with that, came a sense of freedom he’d not known for a long time. As if invisible shackles had finally come off, chains that had been broken—allowing him to proceed with his life. Onwards, beyond the bounds of this little village of petty souls. And outwards, bound for the broader world.

“I will, Maiya,” he said, gazing at her with newfound resolve. And in her eyes, burning with the heat and power of eternal flame, he saw the same. “I will.”