They sat on the floor of his father’s house, in the training room that should have been a spare bedroom, or his brother’s… in another life. They sat much as he’d once sat with his father every morning for all of Marroo’s seventeen years of life. A sword lay between them. To Marroo’s spiritual vision it was no longer the burning reminder of his father’s last breath, his final gift of spiritual power, poured into the steel until it practically became a manifestation of the Icon his father followed all his life. Once raucous with that power, it sat, now, as silent as the man himself in death, silent now thanks to the adept who sat across the blade in his father’s usual place.

“I do not know what your father taught you about breath.” The reliquary adept told Marroo as they both went through the motions of their individual breathing exercises. The adept looked like an almost alien being. He was hugely tall and thin, swathed in pale robes that only served to emphasize that alien-ness in its attempts to conceal it. He was pale skinned, like Marroo, but otherwise shared none of his features. No black hair, no silver eyes, no scowl of concentration. To Marroo’s spirit he seemed to radiate a soft golden light brightest where it emanated from his eyes, his ears, the crevices beneath his fingernails, and when he spoke, from his mouth. Each time he let his breath out, the bonfire of spiritual light at his core swelled imperceptibly in sympathy with his spirit.

“In our order.” He went on. “We are taught that breath is our soul, extended through cultivation beyond the flesh it animates.”

Marroo let his own breath flow in and out of his chest. The movement of air through lungs meant little to the cultivation they were practicing, but it served as a prop for his mind to focus on as he moved his spirit, his breath, in sympathy with his chest. His spiritual breath rose as he emptied his lungs and dove through his opened meridians until it danced in the air around him. The bonfire at his own core grew, just as the reliquary’s did, each time Marroo drew his physical breath back in, then pushed his spirit back out.

Marroo could feel the sword between them each time he did so.

Even contained by the reliquary’s Icon, the sword that sat between them sang to Marroo’s breath of the Icon his father forced him to touch with before the man died. The Icon of the Sword. The Icon that cut.

That Icon played at the edge’s of Marroo’s aura where his control faded and the true Icon of the sword could manifest in ghostly razors that didn’t quite exist on the physical plane. They could, if he called on them. The Icon could turn his breath to whirling blades, cuts in reality itself sharper than the blade his father left behind, as sharp, perhaps, as the memories left with it.

The icon pressed itself into more than just his spirit, but his very being as well. It was sharp and painful, and alive in a way that no sword should be. Marroo closed his eyes as he felt it twitch somewhere within his soul, begging to be made real, to cut, resonating with the sword that sat in front of Marroo. He struggled to keep his breath moving coherently around him without allowing the Icon to claim more of his spirit than it already had.

“As a cultivator, we learn to move our spirit through our bodies, first through our core, then our limbs, our senses, and our mind.” The Reliquary adept went on. “The aura is the hardest meridian for most in my order to clear, because, unlike the other meridians, it is not in our bodies. It requires that we understand our breath as more than the thing that animates our flesh, but as a thing which can animate the very air around us as well.”

Even with his eyes closed, Marroo could still see the world around him, not in colors but in the textures and realities of the things around him. He could feel the nails in the floor like small stars of sharpness arranged in a grid throughout the building, the kitchen knives he’d put out on the table for the junk collector, and the hard edges of a neighbor’s fingernails and teeth as they fought with broken pipework in an apartment three doors down.

While knives and sharp edges were the brightest colors in his spiritual vision, others touched him too. The floor spoke of rough grains and sweat, pipes in the walls of vague pressures and liquid flows, the scales of a drake nesting at the top of the apartment of the core’s warmth on scaled leather. He could feel the broken bits of a striking post he’d shattered as though he held them in his hand, all without moving from his place on the mat or opening his eyes.

Where the Reliquary adept’s aura touched his own, he could feel it like slick glass, emanating the man’s spiritual golden glow, almost as powerfully as he could sense the knives and broken edges of the world highlighted by the Icon of the Sword.

“Traditionally this is the stage at which most people are called an adept,” the Reliquary said, “despite the fact that many require years of additional practice and effort to properly touch an Icon. Our breath, when it moves beyond us, carries with it, our memories and intentions as we project it into the world. It becomes, to one degree or another, a manifestation of everything we know and are from one moment to the next. So, we make intense studies of the objects whose effects we wish to manifest in the world, and eventually, learn to manifest them.”

Marroo opened his eyes to meet the golden glow of the Reliquary’s own. “The Reliquary preserves, and presents.” The Adept intoned. He waited, and eventually Marroo added his own mantra, the one handed down to him by his father.

“The Sword cuts.”

The blades at the edge of his aura thickened as he said the words and Marroo grunted as he felt the Icon sink deeper into his spirit.

The Reliquary Adept watched him struggle with cool blue eyes until Marroo’s aura leveled out again and he managed to thin the blades manifested along its edge.

“Therein lies the adept’s deepest fear.” He said quietly when Marroo regained his control. The wall of golden light at the edge of the adept’s aura seemed to have thickened much like Marroo’s own and he seemed quieter and more distant than he had only a moment before.

“To create, is to be human, on some level.” The tall pale skinned man strained as he said the words, and Marroo felt the golden aura thin and shrink, his breathing change, as he demonstrated the technique he’d sat down to teach to Marroo after finding him in his father’s house.

“Adepts are trained to know one thing so well, to its very essence, that their spirit can bring it to life even without physical substance, but breath, carries memories, and it carries it both ways. The danger becomes, that in giving life to an Icon in our spirit, we become the very thing we create. Preserved, in my case, presented. Entombed, while your father might have become… sharp… near the end.”

Marroo snorted at the understatement, but the Reliquary’s eyes were closed as he focused on his technique.

“Our own spirit changes, over time, and changes us, until we are no longer recognizably human. Just human manifestations of the Icon we’ve touched.”

Marroo watched the spiritual light emanating from the adept’s core fade until the only hint of his spirit Marroo could sense was a small flickering light at his core, one small enough to mistake for any other mortal walking on the streets outside.

The Reliquary let out his breath in a long sigh and this time, there was no accompanying swelling to his aura or his spirit. The small excess of breath disappeared as soon as it was born, sucked away into the veil he’d created to bottle it up in. When he opened his eyes, they were only pale blue again, free from his Icon golden spiritual light.

“A veil is our only protection.” He said as he met Marroo’s eyes. “But it is not an art that comes naturally to many adepts, even among my order, because it requires us to abandon the very Icon we pursued for most of our lives.”

Marroo looked at the man across from him in his father’s training room and remembered a thousand other times when he’d sat in this exact place, in this exact position, and listened to his father force knowledge of the sword into his mind until no matter what he did, he felt the blades spinning at the edge of his expanse of breath.

“How?” He asked.

“Close your eyes.” The Reliquary replied. “Pull your breath back into yourself. Sow it into your bones, your veins, your very flesh, and remember that, like the flesh animated by its identity as your own, your spirit must become your spirit before it can ever manifest the icons that you’ve touched. Only then can you be free.”

In time, and with help, Marroo was able to do so, if only for a short time.