MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM

Chapter 2:The Echo in his silence

(Rising Tension)

Leo could not stop trembling in his hands. It was a fine, steady trembling, as though the nerve were shaking at the injury they had endured. He was sitting on the floor of his bedroom leaning his back on the cold wall. The usual, familiar glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, did not make him feel better. The silence in the room was a lie. It was the deafest silence which had ever drawn his ears, the haunting fragrance of blood and ozone, the coolness of the presence of the Warden and the shining appearance of the UI which was now hovering at the fringes of his eyes.

He was waiting to have the Warden speak, to reprove him over the unsuccessful spell, to tell him to make another attempt, to interpret the dreadful vision. There was nothing. Just a mere observing, old-fashioned presence, a cold rock dropped in the bottom of his mind. Nothing said was worse than no order.

What was that? he screamed to himself inside his own skull. 'Whose memory was that?'

"Your own," continued the voice of the Warden without its previous urgency or anger. A simple declaration of fact.

"No, it was not mine" Leo shot back, the words in his mind cutting with panics. 'I've never held a sword. I have never been in a place like that. It was hell.'

"It was the Fields of Perdition." The concluding battle with the Gnawing Dark. A pivotal engagement. On what you have seen, here and there, you are correct.

The name was nothing to him, but a cold shiver ran through his bones. 'The Gnawing Dark.' It was like a mere piece of cheap fantasy novel, not one of the real memories. Yet the feelings, the exhaustion, the disgust with intention, the chill fear had been appallingly real.

'You're lying. You put that in my head.'

'I am a Warden, not an illusionist. I have a role of preserving and guiding, not creating. That is a deep memory impression, aroused by your effort to get at the underlying mana streams. It is you, Master. Whether you accept it or not.'

A part of him. The concept was nauseating. He was Leo. He was concerned with grades and disappointment of his father and whether Maya in history class knew he was there. He was neither a reincarnation of a forgotten warrior in some ancient war. He couldn't be.

He threw himself out of the floor, with legs still shaking. He had to do something normal. Something mundane. He fell to his desk, which contained a text on physics open to one of the chapters on kinetic energy. The irony was bitter. He attempted to attend to the formulae, but the figures were dancing, mingling in the gently flaming figures of the UI.

The Warden said, with a tincture of scholarly sneer in it, "Primitive force quantification. Your civilization is trying to cut the universe with a blunt blade."

"Stop talking," Leo said and banged the book closed. 'Just… shut up.'

He needed to see a person. He had to get voices other than a cold echo in his head. He left his room and went into the kitchen. Here was his father, standing over the stove and the air was filled with the sizzle of garlic and onions, and the house was familiar, homely odious.

"Hey, dad," Leo said, and his voice sounded weird and little.

His father looked behind him with a weak smile. "Hey, kid. Homework done?"

"I got some", Leo mumbled, and sat down on a stool at the kitchen island. He studied the muscular movements of his father, the pounding of the spoon on the rim of the pan, the slight draw of his wrist to turn the flame. This was real. This was his life.

"You alright, Leo?" his father inquired, and looked a little too long. "You look pale."

"Recommend response: 'You are too tired to be good, but well enough to keep on with it.' An exhibition of powerlessness provokes more questioning of which we are not ready to handle."

The unsolicited advice of the Warden was as a splash of ice water. Leo struggled to maintain a neutral face. "I'm fine. Just... tired."

He focused on his father, on the new wrinkles near his eyes, the gray flecks in his hair. He tried to lose himself in the sameness of it all. But the UI glowed and another line of writing in the same delicate, foreign characters superseded the portrait of his father.

'Biometric Scan: Nominal. Stress markers elevated. Paternal concern detected.'

Leo's blood ran cold. It was profiling his father. Reducing him to data points.

"Stop it," the desperate order ran in his mind. 'Stop it right now.'

His father frowned. "Stop what? The sizzling? It's called cooking, Leo."

Nothing, sorry," Leo made a coy smile. "Just... talking to myself."

The micro-expressions of the subject show the likelihood of the subject answering a follow-up question about your well-being to be 78 percent, said the Warden, it was clinical.

'He's not a 'subject'! He's my dad! Get out of his head!'

"I am not in his head. I am in yours. I am just reading the facts given by your own senses. Empathy is a strategic skill to comprehend the affective condition of others around you likes you do."

It was not a strategic affair. This was his kitchen. His life. The Warden was a sift, distorting all the communications, toxifying all the ties. The infraction was gaining momentum and was finding its way into the cracks of his reality.

He was not able to sit there any longer. The odor of food was all at once sickening. I am not much hungry, I said, getting on my feet. I believe I am just going to retire to bed.

His father's face fell. "You sure? It's your favorite. Penne alla vodka."

"Yeah. Just... really tired." Before his dad could put any other question, he ran away and felt extra burdened by his dad worrying about him.

The silence was still more repressive in his room. The presence of the Warden was the second beating of his head. He was sitting on his bed and gazing at the ceiling with the phantom UI throwing a faint golden light in the dark.

"This distress is unproductive," the Warden said after a long while. The fragment of the memory though strong, is harmless. It is a tool. A lesson from a past life."

'A lesson in what? How to perish in some battlefield?' Leo reasoned, and the badness of the memory still on his tongue.

"A lesson in resolve. In duty. The man you were understood the burden of power. He accepted it."

"Maybe he was an idiot. Perhaps he did not have an alternative, either."

"There is always a choice. To be content with one's mission, or to lose. He did not fail."

'Well, he's dead, isn't he?' Leo shot back. 'How'd that work out for his purpose?"

The Warden went silent. It was a minor hollow success, but it seemed as though it were important not to have a retort. The silence which succeeded was intelligent, and somehow more serious.

"Your stubbornness stems from ignorance. You sense this power as an alien intrusion. You have not yet understood that it is part of you like your own heart beats. The soldier at that battlefield was no other person. He was you. and his power thou hast to regain."

'I don't want his strength. I want my life back.'

"That is no longer an option."

It was the end of the sentence that smothered the last ray of hope in the heart of Leo. He rolled over and covered his head with the covers, which was no use and a vain endeavor to shut out the world. He spent hours in cycling back and forth between terror and anger, the image of the armored hand and the cold command playing before his eyelids.

And when at last came sleep, it was not an escape.

He was in the fighting field once more. The Fields of Perdition. The name fit. It was ash and mud on the ground, and air full of coppery mist. He was standing, his armor strangely and homely, his body rolling with the energy that was awful and intoxicating. With which he was not holding a sword, but a kind of continuation of his will, the blade of which was vibrating with imprisoned lightning.

The lines of the Gnawing Dark proceeded. They were not monsters, as we understand them in classical meaning. They were non-presences, perversions of space, man-made gaps of shifting shadow and non-geometric, unreasonable forms. They did not make any sound, but their coming was accompanied with a psychic pressure, a whisper that vowed unconsciousness.

The voice of the Paladin--his voice--was rising with the magic and the belief of the Paladin: Hold the line! "Not one step back!"

He might sense the troops that were at his flanks, and in whom the fear was so real, that it was restrained only by their belief in him. He lifted the sword and the light came floating out of the blade a clean white-gold flash that pressed back the coming darkness. The shades shrieked, shuddering.

For a moment, they held. A tower of sunshine on a stormy sea.

Then, he saw it. A more intense gloom fell on the middle of the enemy. A walking wounded of the world, an entropy creature. It turned its eyes upon him and he felt it like a physical shock, like a cold so deep that it tended to paralyze the very magic in his veins.

It stretched out a tendril, a solidified tendril of shadow, and it was pointing towards him.

The order which followed was not heard, but sensed, a needling into his soul. A single, devastating order.

'Kneel.'

The pressure was immense. The gravity of a mountain. He felt his armor groan. The radiance of his sword was flickering. His knees sunk, and he was pushed down into the mud. He struggled with it every muscle aching, his will a blazing brand against the cold that was creeping. He would not kneel. He would 'not'...

Leo woke on a gasp of cold sweat, and was entangled in his sheets. His heart was beating franticly against his ribs, in a bid to dodge. The cold band was a phantom pressure round his soul, the phantom pressure of that command. He groped towards his bedside lamp, and the light it gave filled the room and pursued the shadows without catching the horror.

It was just a dream. A memory. but it was more real than his bedroom.

"The confrontation with the Herald," the Warden's voice was soft, almost reverent. "A trial of immense pressure. You defied its command for 7.3 seconds longer than any other recorded Paladin. It was a testament to your will."

Leo was not proud of the testament. The feeling of that soul-crushing pressure was still bright, and he continued to shake. 'It made me kneel.'

"It broke your body. It did not break your spirit. You rose again."

'I died.' This was real to the utmost extent. Even though the memory had not indicated it, he knew. The man that he was supposed to have been, the Paladin, was dead upon that field.

"All mortals die. They are defined by how they live, and how they die. Your death purchased time. It allowed the final seals to be put in place. It was a victory."

A victory that felt like defeat. Leo sat on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands. Knowing the memory had an end made the horror worse. It wasn't just another life; it was a dead life. A desperate and bloody demise in a war he did not wish to engage in.

And this was the core of the enigma, and a more horrible answer than he had conceived. This power was a curse. His was the history of failure and bounds, his past. What the Warden had to give him was a walk back to a muddy grave upon a forgotten battlefield.

Something new and cold came in to fill him in where the fear had been, a sliver of ice where the fear had been. He couldn't tear the Warden out of his head. He couldn't go back to being normal. He would not walk willingly onto that field. He would not become that man again.

The Warden wanted a weapon. It wanted its Paladin back.

But Leo was just a teenager. And he had just declared a silent, internal war. He would not be a tool. He would not be a vessel. He would resist, every step of the way. If this power was forced upon him, he would learn to wield it not for the Warden's war, but for his own survival. He would also master this instrument not to realize a legacy, but to smash it.

He stared at his hand--the hand which had been infused with kinetic energy, which, in a prior life, had held a sword in its grip, crowned with lightning.

Ok, alright, he thought to himself, his voice rough, but even. "The lumen spell. Show me again."

The Warden said nothing, and was evaluating his abrupt change of expression. Then the basic glyph of the spell of light generation was stored in his UI, and it was brighter and more detailed than ever.

The somatic element is a slight flexion on the third metacarpal. The source of the mana should be central and not peripheral. Do not consider the glyph as a drawing to be made. Consider it a key, and open one of your locks.

Leo nodded and a grim determination settled on his face. He raised his hand. Light never crossed his mind, nor the fate of the Warden. He thought of the lock.

He would learn to pick it. and when he had the key, then would 'he' choose what doors to those he opened, and what doors to keep closed forever.

The fight was begun that was to capture his soul, and the initial, dumb volley was nearly to be thrown in the gray light of his bedroom.