Marroo’s mother died when he was fourteen. A bad landing by the aircab she hired for some trip to a market. The impact was loud enough to draw Marroo out of the book he’d hidden with in the confines of his room while his parents were gone. He emerged onto their balcony to see a newmade crater in the street in front of the tenement building. Bits of the wreckage sprayed out of the aircab when it shattered, and Marroo’s eyes snagged on red streaks left by some of them, until they finally snagged on a red streak laid out right beside a little handbag that he recognized and refused to move any further.

Confirmation came, far too soon, followed shortly by his father who pulled Marroo to him in one of the few embraces between them in Marroo’s life.

Marroo never felt so alone.

The day after her funeral he and his father sat on the training room floor for their usual breathing exercises while mugs of tea steamed beside them.

Neither of them cycled their breath. Marroo’s spirit felt heavy and knotted in his channels. The atmosphere of the room sat oppressively on his chest and the tea his father made for him tasted as bitter as he felt.

“Nothing will stand between us and your training now.” His father said as he looked down at the mug cupped between his hands. Marroo met the silver eyes that rose to his. He felt nothing when he met them, nothing but heavy, heavy beyond any ability to carry. “We will accelerate it.” Darro said. He took a sip from his mug as he studied his son, then sighed. “Not much time, now, but you’re almost ready.” He cleared his throat and set his mug down. Stared at it.

Marroo turned to his own mug to stare at the swirling impurities leftover from the brewing process, felt nothing, thought nothing, or wished he did.

“We’ll bring you on missions.” His father grated. “Keep you in secluded meditation when you aren’t on one. Push for the icon. A year, at most, I’d say. Perhaps even sooner.”

Marroo cupped his mug of tea to draw off warmth as he’d once cupped the agony stone, and felt the spiritual weight pressing him to the floor triple as the year stretched out before him.

Darro shifted on the mat across from Marroo and closed his eyes as his breath began to turn within him. “Cultivate.” He grated. “Find the strength to free yourself for the task you have ahead.”

It took six months for Marroo to run away. He took nothing with him, nothing but a couple of books he’d rescued and hidden away during his father’s house-wide purge of everything that even hinted of his mother’s memory.

The pictures on the walls, the flower painted kettle on the stove, the plants she’d kept on the windowsill until they withered and died from lack of attention, and her books.

Her books.

Her books were the worst part.

Marroo heard his father start on the books after secluding him to closed-door cultivation in the training room. He left his mat, passed sterile halls, until he found his father in the hall outside his parents’… his father’s… room, ripping books from the shelves and tossing them into the boxes that would accompany them on the long drop from their balcony to the dumpster below.

“They’re trash.”, his father grated when Marroo asked what he was doing, “That’s where they belong.” A book jammed sideways on the shelf and Marroo felt the world sharpen, then the book split in a flurry of pages while his father moved on to the next book.

The falling books tugged at Marroo, first one foot, then another, until he found himself kneeling next to the box and lifting one of the shredded pages to read the broken lines printed there.

He recognized the fragment from a book he’d read and re-read since he was nine until the characters were more like old friends than fictional beings. Their names leapt out at him from the page along with sections from adventures he remembered well. He smoothed out the fragment and placed it carefully in the box on top of another book before more fell in the box beside it. One of the titles caught Marroo’s eye and he pushed the rest aside to lift it gently in his hands.

“Put that back.” His father growled from above.

Marroo opened it and stroked the page with one hand while words and the smell of the book’s glue wafted from it like an aura as powerful as any adept’s.

“This one is mine.” Marroo said. “She gave it to me.”

His father grunted, and the page Marroo was looking at grew a sudden line as a manifestation of the sword icon slid through the pages. More lines appeared like cuts made in Marroo’s soul. He watched the book fall to pieces in his hands.

His father dropped another stack of books into the box, then leaned down and picked one up. He waved it in Marroo’s face. “These are what killed your mother.” He grated. “They made her soft when she needed to be hard.” He threw the book back into the box with enough force that it’s paper binding exploded and the pages blew over the box’s side.

Marroo didn’t move to rescue the pages as more books fell into the boxes at his father’s feet. He didn’t even move when his father bent to scoop up one of the boxes and threw it over the side of the balcony before returning for more.

“I won’t let you follow in her footsteps.” His father growled.

Marroo just stared at the pages scattered across the floor.

The books Marroo took with him when he fled were ones he rescued from the dumpster the night they were thrown away. His father said he was no longer permitted to leave the house while he reached for the icon, but Marroo was a cultivator, a full cultivator by then, with all five of his Meridian Clusters fully opened. Core, at eight years old, Extremis a few months later, Sensorium at ten, Mentalis at eleven, and Externalis only a year before his mother’s funeral. Locks, doors, and long falls meant nothing to the strength Marroo’s spirit had over his own body.

When the Midnight Plains eclipsed the core over both horizons, he jumped from the apartment balcony to root through the trash until he found his mother’s books stacked haphazardly in boxes burst by their long fall.

He only took a few, a book his mother never gave him, a chapter book from the middle of a series about talking animals lost in a dragon’s maze, a story about an adept who discovered the fictional Food Icon and used it to end conflicts between a city’s warring factions, a few others. The rest were destroyed, cut to ribbons by the sword icon, or stained by unwholesome fluids from the trash thrown on top of them.

Marroo sat with one half of a book with a painted dragon on its cover for a long time before he left it behind and leapt back up the balconies to stash his rescued books in the secret compartment under his desk, the spot he’d secreted the other books he rescued when his father moved into Marroo’s room to continue the purge.

He took the novel about the food adept when he ran away.

It took him a long time to pick, but he knew that he would need to find a way to feed himself after he left, and it seemed like the right choice if he was going to leave with nothing else. He made the same leap from their balcony as he had to recover the books, at the same time of night when the midnight plains were at their zenith, even though he could have left at any time with his father away on some mission. He came and went when he pleased, while Marroo stayed locked away by his father’s order and a lack of any friends or family he could run to.

Instead of pondering the Sword Icon, Marroo used the hours of his father’s absence to prepare for his escape. He wandered the house, picking out things that seemed useful once he ran away. He visited every room, every room except his parents’ bedroom.

When he put his hand on the handle to that room he stopped and put his forehead against the wooden panels. When he finally tried to turn it, he found it locked, and rather than forcing it by brute strength he left it alone.

He collected a sizeable pile of bits and bobs piled up on the blanket he planned to use as a makeshift backpack. There was a knife and a pot from the kitchen, a towel in two different sizes from the bathroom, toiletries, spare clothes, a mechanical clock from the living room to replace the familiar he would be leaving behind since it could track him, some string, a roll of tape, a small bag of medical supplies, and nine books, the only nine he’d been able to rescue from the combined collection on the shelf in his room and his mother’s in the hallway.

It was too much. The books alone were too much, and the other things rattled around in the blanket when he tied it around them. The weight didn’t bother Marroo, but the awkward way it sat on his shoulder when he hoisted it was uncomfortable and he kept worrying that things would fall out during the run he planned to make during the first part of his escape.

In the end he left it. Left everything. He put it all back in the places that he’d found them. Towels in the bathroom, clock on the end table, little pot back on the shelf in the kitchen. He kicked his spare clothes onto the floor since he wouldn’t be coming back to clean them up, then sat for four hours reading while he tried to decide which books to leave behind.

His father never came home, but when the Night Plains eclipsed the core, Marroo told his Familiar to wake him at the darkest hour and tried to get some sleep. He didn’t think he fell asleep until he felt the nearly intangible touch of his familiar standing on his face. He opened his eyes to find tiny red woman manifested on his cheek. She smiled and waved when she saw that he was awake then disappeared in a swirl of red sparks that flew back into the clip he kept next to his bed.

He left the clip on the bedside table, clutched his books to his chest, and ran off into the night.

It was immediately apparent, on leaving, that he wasn’t going to make it out in the real world on his own. He ran for most of the first two hours through dark streets and twilight parks, his senses pounding with the noise of the people and the lives around him as he pushed his breath through his channels and ran for everything he was worth.

He stopped when he no longer recognized the landmarks around him. Towers he’d grown up around hidden by the growth of new towers that crowded out the sky. Sky barges moving towards unfamiliar destinations and air-traffic moving in highways and constellations that he couldn’t have navigated if he wanted to.

He wandered streets that circled markets built like fortresses, through public parks of fruit trees cast in other-worldly twilight by cold blue float lights like those he’d seen below ground, and past fountains that hissed and filled the night-time air with moisture. He found some streets crowded by night-time revelers lit by gaudy holographics and flaring familiars, but avoided them for fear of getting lost in such a crowd, intimidated by his own difference from the dark skinned folk he found reveling there.

He found a bench and lay down to try and untangle his reeling insides only to be shaken brusquely awake by two men in uniforms with badges Marroo didn’t recognize glowing on their chest plates.

“Go down if you’ve no place to stay.” One of them told him when he wouldn’t tell him where he was from. “Rules here keep most folk safe, but not if you ain’t from here. Go down, or at least to the Gates if you’re scared of the dark. There ain’t no rules down there, and there’s room for everyone in the pipes.”

They pointed it out for him, the direction he would have to go if he wanted a way into the underground. He noticed that neither of them let their hands stray far from the pistols holstered at their hips, even when they wished him luck and sent him on his way.

Dawn found him still wandering the unfamiliar streets. When he saw the shadow of the night leave the horizon to anti-turnward he found a bench and sat to watched the vast bulk of the Plain drift above him until the Core peaked around its edge and winked at him like reflected fire from the windows and towers that surrounded his bench.

Three triangles of shadow drifted above the Midnight Plains in formation, moving anti-spinward, so far up in the heavens that Marroo could not begin to judge their size or purpose, while other shapes less distinct danced around the edges of the Core’s sphere half lost to the haze. He could guess at some of the shapes, a bit of the spindle still visible like a wraith amidst the fog, a sharp hexagon, the half visible disc that would herald the midpoint of the year, but the rest were lost to him, as lost as the opposite side of the Bottom, or the outskirts of the city, or his mother.

He was hungry when his father found him. Leaving his familiar at home had also meant leaving the credit his father extended through the little device, and he had no real physical money. He could have robbed any number of vendors or shops he passed along his way towards the dregs, but he chose to soldier on instead.

The crowd of pedestrians parted as he walked beneath a raging highway of airtraffic no more than fifty yards overhead, and his father materialized in their midst, arms crossed as he watched Marroo.

Marroo stopped when he saw him. He thought about running away, but silver eyes met, and Marroo eventually hung his head to trudge on until he stood before his father.

A hand fell on Marroo’s shoulder as Marroo studied his father’s chest.

Neither said a word, then Darro turned and led Marroo to a landing station where an aircab opened to let them inside before it joined the torrent of traffic moving into the sky.

From the air, Marroo realized just how little distance he’d put between himself and his home.

One of Darro’s hands gently took the book from Marroo’s arms as they flew. Darro snorted as he read the title, then cracked it to look inside.

Other aircabs jockeyed for position in the fast moving stream outside their window and Marroo watched a mother hold up a smiling baby to laugh and pound tiny dark fists against the glass before their aircab was separated by the drift in the traffic.

“How did you find me?” Marroo asked.

His father manifested a single blade, a single cut in the spiritual reality of the universe, then pulled the book across it and let the two halves fall to the floor. “The same way you sense these.”. He said with a gesture towards the invisible blade. “When you cultivate, you strengthen your spirit. At a certain point you learn to push it out into the world and feel the world’s spirit, and the changes other spirits make in it, but when you form a connection with an Icon it reforges your spirit, the stronger the connection becomes the deeper it changes you until an adept is as much spirit as he is flesh. You no longer have to project your breath in order to touch the spiritual realm around you. Once you touch an icon, you can truly see. Thanks to your cultivation you can hear the voices of everyone in a building as soon as you step through the door, but I can feel their spirits even before my foot crosses the mantle.”

“So you sensed my cultivation.” Marroo replied. “How did you sort my spirit out from the crowd?”

Marroo’s father looked at him. “You’re my son.” He said, “I could pick your spirit from a thousand others, even if they had the same strength or cultivation level or from a mile away. I’ll always know where you are.”