My face was covered by a grimy mask of sweat mixed with dust. I felt the prickling of a single drop of sweat carving down its road through the dirt on my neck, reaching the blades of my shoulder and traveling onwards, along my spine. Under the mask was a red hot burning of humiliation, redding my cheeks and whistling in my brain. I was close to snapping. I would have already, if not for the exhaustion I felt. The sensation was new to me. I was sweating, being exhausted, in my mind.

The Betrayer stood before me, the imitation of Kingslayer in a curious grip, high on the hilt while his other hand rested on the crossguard. He was watching me with nothing but contempt. He had taken the sword from me, taken my balance, and sent me to the ground tumbling with nothing but a tiny movement and subtle shifting of his weight.

“I enjoyed that quite a bit.“ He said with much less emotion than his words indicated. “The part of the training I get to show you what a miserable failure you are.“

I gritted my teeth. The insults would not get to me, but the constant...humiliation on the yard. Yes, I had locked my Skills away, and yes, we were on equal footing as far as the supernatural was concerned - And he was so far above me, I could not even understand what he was doing to defeat me so easily. I had been sure to have a good eye for things like that.

“You are an awful teacher, Betrayer.“ I spat.

“Is that so? Or do you simply lack the talent to scrape together the little bit of insight even a cow-brain like you should be able to gather from watching a master fight? “

“I am not watching a master fight, I am being beaten up by one without a chance to understand what he is doing right, or what I am doing wrong.“

“True, I have never been a patient teacher, but I have trained countless knights to the ceiling of human competence in my time. A single cohort strong enough to hold back the rest of the forces of the kingdom. And all of them learned to respect their teacher the hard and...“ he looked at my dirt-covered face and clothes, "...dirty way.“

“Can we skip the phase?“ I held out my hands to the side in mock admiration. “I am pretty fucking awed by your superiority, Betrayer! Can you go on being helpful now?“

“You don‘t get to make demands in my valley.“ He snarled. “But I guess the standards of swordsmanship have slipped even more after the untimely demise of my brother and I.“

He put the tip of his sword to the ground, appraising me like a horse. “There is not much wrong with your physical prowess, I guess, even if you look malnourished. Then again, you don`t need physical strength to wield Whisper, if you have the Skills to make up for it.“

I just waited for him to continue, swallowing the urge to strangle him with my bare hands.

“There is an argument to be made for covering the basics first, developing the necessary base before going on into more advanced techniques. But you will never swing a sword without the help of your Skills ever again, so why bother?“

“I do need it. I have a way to lock myself out of the benefits of my Core Skills to train with the fighters and teach them what little I have learned. They, even more than me, are in desperate need of guidance. And I need to learn the foundation to teach it.“

“Even so. Teaching you the way I fought in the arena will be a futile exercise because you have Skills I did not have access to. I will think about this. But in the meantime, I guess we could go going back to the absolute easiest and most basic lessons. Stance!“ He shouted and I assumed one, holding Kingsbane with two hands upright, in front of my body.

“Wrong!“ He shouted again, slapping Kingsbane lightly with his sword, showing me the weight and leverage an extended sword as long as Kingsbane had. I immediately lost the stability of my position as I struggled to hold the swaying sword upright, just a second - but a second was all that was needed in the chaos of a real battle.

“Whisper not only is a hand-and-a-half sword, also, unfortunately, called bastardsword, it is also unusually wide and heavy. There are countless weapons out there lighter and faster than yours. Yes, you put your blade between you and the enemy, who will likely have less of a reach, but you do it when they move, not before. You'll exert yourself needlessly and your blade itself will be a target to throw you off guard. A target you will have a harder time controlling than your opponents with less weight in their hands. This means they will be quicker on the attack than you on the parry that must inevitably follow such a move.“

He returned to his position. “Stance!“

I took the same position but rested the blade on my shoulder instead, to which he nodded, albeit not completely satisfied with my display.

“Now, there are the five diamond parries, the patterns of parrying up and down and to a side respectively, resembling the shape of a diamond, and the eight angles of attack. You will show them to me. But they are subpar. Why? Because your weapon is heavy and swinging it around is a mistake punished by a quick lunge or the fixation of your sword out of balance. Instead, make small movements. Let the blade of the enemy slide upon yours, lead it upwards, and thrust downwards at the same time.“

He showed the parry into the thrust with his sword, then turned to me, gesturing to my sword. “Whisper's true strength is cutting, but the true strength of the bastardsword is its reach and versatility. Master the style first, the weapon second.“

Tortured by the snide remarks and, even worse, display of obvious competence by the Betrayer, I began repeating the same movements for what felt like hours, but what I knew to be 20 minutes, as that was the extent of time I could summon the Betrayer to the Valley of Swords each day before I had to use my Skill to call on him again.

But today would not be such a day. I could not freely spend my Mana, being the strongest fighter in Ravenport, I needed to be ready for emergencies, while the Wounded Pride was away and the Albatross gone.

I spent the time on repeating the forms and techniques I had learned, relearned that is, in reality, to someday get them ingrained into my muscle memory. It was a strange feeling, repeating movements I was sure to know, which I clearly remembered mastering, in a body that was very much the same but had not learned them yet. There was a significant disconnect between my mind and my body concerning the training, and I needed much more time hammering out the kinks of the techniques, in reality, then I needed to learn them in the first place, albeit in the seclusion of my Demesne.

That would be the extent of my training today, as I had a project equally as intriguing as the lessons in sword fighting had been.

Winter was approaching with giant steps, and while a part of me dreaded the hardship that would certainly entail, another part longed for the long nights at the fire and the forced calm the cold would lay over the world. Which would give me time to finally - finally! - study the tomes of the golem maker.

To that end I needed to weave, and learn to use, the Skill [Decipher the Ancient Truth], which I had learned from the Seeker in exchange for secrets of the Dragon of Darkness. It was hard for me to find a place for it, as my Demesne always had been a place of introspection, if anything, and recluse. But studying the tomes would be neither.

There was no reason for me, nor really the possibility, to do the studying in my Demesne, but I needed to anchor the Skill somewhere, and all the options I had felt wrong. Even now, looking down on the little things I had done since creating the space itself, the lake and all the statues around it already felt cluttered and mismatched.

It was time to extend the space, to create meaningful areas, so as to keep the central tree, the resting place for all the souls, free from the other influences. Widening my hands, I let the cliff grow - although it looked from where I stood as if the lake below me plummeted down. I could still oversee it, but the distance helped to detach the sanctuary of the tree from the rest.

I floated down to the lake, looking at the weathered statues surrounding it. I still liked that eerie feeling they evoked in me, of witnesses of a time gone by. And so I threw my first thought out of the window, which had been creating a grand entrance to a temple of sorts with the statues flanking the entrance.

No. I wanted a contrast. I wanted the simple. A small round door of wood in the base of the cliff and beyond not a grand library but a warmly lit room, stuffed with books and candles, a fireplace, and a comfortable chair. I anchored the Skill to the reading desk, and a comically out of place magnifying glass.

I was not a big reader, yet, but I was young. I respected the wisdom reading could bring, and I respected the learned men which lives revolved around the bound parchment, but I only needed a small space of calm. Because I could not see myself reading much besides that. Not here. So it felt right to hide the place behind a door in the cliff.

With that done, and the Skill finally woven, I returned to reality and took a place overwatching the bay. We still did not know if we had banished all danger from the bay, and even If we knew that the crystal whale was more or less claiming the sea for itself, driving off the brunt of the more dangerous beings, I wanted to be in a spot I could quickly react to anything that arose.

I sat, protected from the wind and rain by a spanned sail, in the flickering light of a couple of lanterns around me, and summoned my chest, digging for the tomes I had found so long ago. I would hate every second of what came next, but the possible reward made it worth it, I felt. Golems!

I was completely and utterly the wrong person to ask for if it came to prying knowledge out of parchment, foreign even, and the path of a golem maker was bound to be difficult to learn, even harder to master and nearly impossible to actually do in Ravenport at the moment. But the sooner I started, the sooner I would know if spending time reading the tomes was worth my while. I even was torn on the outcome. Part of me wanted to be unable to understand the books so that I could concentrate my efforts on easier tasks. Then again, I was nothing if not stubborn.

I opened the dry pages of the oversized book, after I had freed it of the neatly-wrapped protective wax paper, and activated [Decipher the Ancient Truth]. Immediately, golden fractals appeared on the page I was reading, and the letters began dancing in front of my eyes. I did not get a translation. Instead, I was feeling the intent of the author. There was a difference there, a quite significant one, as the text may have been masterfully crafted, a journal, or even a book meant to preserve the knowledge of a lifetime or made to be understood. The intent I got was raw. Unpolished. Snippets of information connected to a world of knowledge the author might have had, but that had not been transported onto the page.

I stared at the page for minutes, making sense of it, trying to understand the lights, the letters, or the fractals, but a hammering headache soon made me slam the book shut.

There was a single intent I had clearly discerned, as one precious second I was able to ignore all the other connections and focus on the meaning of the first page.

To give Skills to a golem you first have to learn to create, mimick, and adapt Skills themselves.

A mortal that had looked behind the veil and discovered what was the purview of gods? Or had the golem maker been a godling himself?