“Willing sacrifice” leaves a lot of room open for interpretation, especially when the spell only needs said sacrifice as an ignition cost, rather than sustenance. Therefore I could willingly choose you as a sacrifice. I won’t though. Instead, I will willingly sacrifice this carrot.

- Vycar Flamefall discussing the requirements for a ritual.

“You are very bad at this.” Torment remarked, then raised a hand to block the wooden sword I threw at him. It bounced off of his metal bracers with a clang.

“You’re not being very helpful!” I shouted back at him.

“I told you the theory already. You said it was simple.”

“That was before I tried to grasp the intangible nature of your magic!” I shouted as I stomped over to pick the wooden sword up again. “If you’re going to act so high and mighty about it, how long did it take you to make a wooden sword sharp for the first time?”

“I’d already done it by now.” This time he didn’t get his arm up in time, but that was because he was faced away from me, so the wooden sword hit him in the back of the head. He rubbed the spot where I hit him, but didn’t comment on it. “I’m beginning to think this form of Rezan isn’t suited to you.”

Rezan was the name of the technique or spell or ability Torment was trying to teach me. He didn’t know much about it history wise, and frankly I didn’t care so long as he could teach it. The only thing about Rezan that mattered to me was the ability to pick up literally any stick and have it be able to put out as much damage as a smithed weapon.

It didn’t make sense. If this was something that could be taught to anyone, then why wasn’t it widespread and why were blacksmithed weapons not obsolete? That’s what I had thought after Torment had first told me about Rezan. Now that I’d actually tried to do it myself, it was painfully obvious why it wasn’t widespread.

It was fucking hard.

“Well I’m not technically Chosen, so I don’t have any of those advantages.” I spat. “All has decided I’m going to be a stay-at-home wife, so why the fuck would it make something like this easy for me?”

“Do you know how being Chosen works?” Torment asked suddenly, looking up from what he was doing, which was carving another wooden sword. He had an actual pot filled with wooden swords, which made sense considering they were all lethal weapons in his hands.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, something from Above or Below or Beside points at you and tells you to do a thing.”

He raised his eyebrows. “It’s more nuanced than that. Stop throwing things and listen. This migh’ help.”

My hand went to my pocket where my badge was. I really wanted to throw it at him now. Before I could make up my mind he tossed the sword I’d been throwing around towards me and my hands were suddenly preoccupied making sure I didn’t get another piece of wood smacking me in the face.

“The process of Choosing and being Chosen acts as a temporary transferral of power.” Torment resumed carving as he launched into his explanation. “It is a truth on which All is built, and it is true for all things. When you are Chosen, for any purpose, the one doing the choosing bequests a degree of power to you.”

“Well yeah,” I said dismissively. “That’s just common knowledge.”

Torment sighed softly. “Tha’ isn’t all. The nature of the one choosing you dictates the blessing you receive, as does the nature of the task. So your friend Casien, who was Chosen by two fiends, and is owed a favour by another, is remarkably close to his fiendish side for a nizkaling.”

“Again, I knew that.” I frowned, not happy at him calling Casien my friend.

“So what about when you are asked to be the one to get the groceries for the day? What about when someone asks you to go out drinking with them? What do you think happens then?”

“Fuck all?” I shrugged.

“You become Chosen.” Torment stated. “And thus, are bequested a degree of power to assist you in completing the task for which you were chosen.”

“Wait, wait.” I frowned. “So if I asked Casien to kill Mary, and he decided to do it, he would get a blessing from me?”

“He would be your Chosen one.” Torment nodded, not even blinking at my suggestion. “However, that blessing may as well not exist. Your presence in All is infinitesimal compared to him. The nature of that blessing wouldn’t be of much assistance to him either. His talents are in infiltration and books most likely, since he’s a devil and not a demon. Your talents are… other.”

“Fuck you. I can use a bow.”

“You don’t have an archer’s physique.” Torment told me, and I threw the sword at him again. He blocked it this time. “But if you were chosen by a proficient archer as a student, then you would rapidly improve at the task. Rapidly being relative. Such is the nature of that blessing.”

“So why are we talking about this?” I asked, suddenly remembering the reason why I’d allowed myself to spend the night in Torment’s cabin.

“I’m hoping tha’ by teaching you about other things, you will become able to perform the simplest spell I can teach.”

I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them to catch the sword as Torment tossed it back to me. “Hold on, that doesn’t make sense.” I gestured in the vague direction of the door. “Wouldn’t those blessings end when the Chosen one completes the quest or whatever? You said they were temporary. I’m pretty sure that the power invested in me to go get the groceries would only last until I finish getting the groceries. But pretty much everyone in Veliki finished their quests before coming here and everyone’s still ridiculously strong.”

Torment scratched his chin. “I’d call tha’ experience. Every time you do something, it makes a mark on your soul. Grooves are what someone more educated would call them. The more you do something, the more detailed the mark. The more detailed the mark, the better you are at the related skill. If you do something that a Chosen blessing is related to, you’ll detail the mark much quicker than you otherwise would.”

“So the blessing is like a mark that goes away?” I asked. “I’d just be tracing the lines or something?”

Torment nodded. “You can see it tha’ way.”

“Then just choose me to go cut down a tree using this sword, or carve a wooden axe, and I’ll practice your Rezan that way.”

“As much as I’d like to, you need to be able to perform Rezan first. Try again.”

I scowled and gripped the hilt of the wooden sword. The theory was that the wood was an extension of myself, and that manipulating the magic within was a muscle that could be trained. According to Torment, the way I had to move it included pushing it all to the edge, where the shape of the blade would do the rest. That was step one.

Simple, except not at all.

There were two problems with that. The wood was not an extension of my body, and I had no idea how to move magic. I threw the sword in a random direction after thirty seconds of concentration that was intense by my standards. Which was pretty intense, I had a lot of practice hating things.

“It was worth a shot.” Torment said as he inspected his latest wooden sword. That he was using tools made from wood made the fact that I couldn’t do Rezan even more irritating.

“Are you just going to give up?” I demanded.

“No. I thought that if I expanded what I taught you, then you would be more receptive to the technique.” He shrugged. “I was wrong.”

“So you did choose me.”

“In the vaguest of terms, yes.” He found a flaw in his craft and started correcting it. “But it goes back to what I said about relative strength. If you have an insignificant presence in All, then I am still a mere ant after my years of adventuring. My blessings won’t mean much.”

“Then teach me archery.” I said. “I can at least do that. I can hit a target from pretty far away.”

“Whether or not I doubt that is meaningless because I’m shit at archery.” Torment smiled an apology. It was a barely-there twitch of the corners of his lips.

“Can I have your bow then?”

Torment raised his eyebrows, then lowered them as a thought crossed his mind. “If you can draw the string back here and now, then fine.” He gestured behind him to where the bow was leaning against the wall.

I blinked, not expecting him to just say okay like that. But I got over my surprise quickly and sped over to the bow. It wasn’t anything special, just wood carved into the right shape and strung. When I picked it up, I realised it was heavier than the bow I had been using. Much longer too.

“Go on.” Torment prompted.

I glared at him, he wasn’t even looking at me. Then I held the wooden part with my right hand and tried to pull the string with my left. Even straining as hard as I could, I barely shifted the string towards me. I stopped and shifted my feet into better positions, then took a breath and tried again.

“Fuck!” I yelled after failing to draw the bow for a second time. I really wanted to throw something, but I didn’t want to just break a bow because my own had been broken. I saw myself as above that. So instead I put it down harder than I needed to, found my wooden sword again, and threw that.

I just wanted to finish off that fucking deer.

“I’ve had an idea.” Torment announced.

I rounded on him. “Oh yeah!? What is it? Because nothing fucking works for me!”

Torment was completely unphased by me now, which just irritated me further. “I noticed how you tried to draw tha’. You’re left handed, but you've been holding on to the swords with your right. Try Rezan holding the wood in your left hand.”

I sat down on his bed and fumed. I glared at the wooden sword and tried to move something that I couldn’t touch. Honestly, it was just like trying to do anything in the presence of Mary. Whenever I got too loud I received a pinch to the ear. Whenever I was dirty, she would publicly use magic to clean me up. Whenever I hurt Avien, she’d just redouble her efforts to make me miserable.

All because of five words and lightning from the Heavens decades ago. It was as if there was a cliff in front of me, and I was trying to climb it by running into it. Or like I was racing to reach the edge of a neverending plain where the grass grew tall and there were footfalls aplenty.

Endlessly raging against some intangible force. The force of all the other people.

In my raging, something shifted in my lap. It was difficult to put words to it because it was a new sensation. But what I saw was the wooden sword in my lap suddenly change. The form stayed the same, but there was clearly light from a fire flickering across the surface. It shouldn’t have, because the fire was on the other side. All I should have been seeing was a shadow. The feeling of racing had changed to a falling sensation and wasn’t stopping.

Magic was funky like that. I’d done magic.

“Yes!” I shouted, punching my fists in the air.

“Don’t let it go.” Torment warned. He grabbed a sword from his pot of swords and extended it towards me point first. “Try cutting something with it.”

I grinned and swung my blade into the side of his. It cut halfway through then stopped, though the waterfall feeling didn’t.

“Needs refining.” Torment commented. “And an incantation.”

Then my wooden sword exploded into splinters in my hand, leaving only the hilt behind. It took a moment to sink in, then I screamed. Everything ended like this. There was nothing I could do to escape my fate that would succeed.

“Stop laughing!” I shouted at Torment and hurled the hilt at his face. It broke the skin and made him start bleeding from one of his white spots. That didn’t stop the ranger from laughing, and I seriously considered throwing the knife at him as well.

Torment pulled his composure, but he was clearly very amused. “Okay, he he…” He took a breath, and the smile vanished from his face. “Congratulations, you have potential. Do you want the bad news?”

“What? That I’m so bad at everything I literally can’t do your easiest spell?”

“Hm. Not quite.” Torment scratched his head. “You might think tha’ because your magic destroyed that piece of wood you have vast stores of power just waiting to be tamed. Tha’ isn’t so. You just don’t have an affinity for the natural side of the world, which makes sense considering how you were Chosen.”

I glared at him.

“Fortunately, there’s more than one form of Rezan. Mine works because…” He paused. “I don’t know, it just does. You’ll want to talk with Brynn if you want to learn more.”

I frowned. “Brynn does Rezan?”

Torment chuckled. “He doesn’t look it, but he isn’t much stronger than I am. Yes, Brynn could teach you.”

I frowned, trying to remember the last time I had seen that elder of Veliki. It had been… a lot of years, I ended up deciding.

“There had better not be a quest starting in here if the first thing I hear walking in is that.” A melodic voice said, bringing me out of my own head.

There was a blond man standing in the door to the cabin with his arms crossed and in the process of sighing heavily. His eyes were a startling blue, and his jaw was clean shaven. His hair looked almost windswept, but was immaculate at the same time. He was skinny, but not as thin as Torment was, had absolutely no armour on over his well fitted, tasteful, but otherwise unassuming clothes, and had a sword made of white metal at his hip.

My jaw dropped. Brynn Willow, Once Chosen of the Heavens, was really hot.

“Brynn,” Torment greeted, “I thought the saying was ‘speak of the devil and he shall appear’.”

Brynn smiled. “What are you doing out of your grave, Sir Torment?”

“Harbinger told me I smelled and kicked me out.”

Brynn sniffed, then made a face. “Tell the Harbinger he has terrible taste, then. You smell fine to me. Why don’t you talk to Vycar, he can enchant you to smell nice to the Harbinger and have it persist into the afterlife. You might finally leave us alone that way.”

“Over my dead body.” Torment deadpanned, then they both barked in laughter.

“Um…” I didn’t know how to interrupt them, but that single syllable reminded them I existed and they shared a look.

“What’s the story here, Sir Knight?” Brynn asked, pleasant tone still there but clearly meaning business.

“She got lost.” Torment gestured towards me. “There was a beithir I found her hiding from. I kept her here so she could recover from shock.”

“And why were you two saying my name when I walked in?”

Torment raised his hand, showing off the splintered hilt that I’d missed him picking up. “I was teaching her Rezan.”

“I see.” Brynn adopted a calculating expression. “You are aware that we agreed to not do that.”

I blinked. “What?”

Brynn seemed to remember I was there again. “Ah, sorry Amber. This is a…” He searched for the right word. “Complicated circumstance.”

“My ass.” I snapped. Brynn might have been hot, but that didn’t afford him any exemption from me. “You just admitted that someone asked you to not teach me anything about surviving. It was Mary, wasn’t it? It’s definitely one of the Shepards. They’re the only ones who would ask for something like that, and that’s only because they want me to be a godsdamned wife!”

Brynn held up a hand. “That isn’t it. Things need to be reevaluated now. Let me finish discussing this with Torment, and then we’ll decide where to go from here.”

I crossed my arms to stop myself from hurling my knife at him.

“Do you know why Amber was in the forest?” Brynn asked Torment.

“She was hunting a deer.” He answered. “Which raises the question…”

“Where did the deer come from?” Brynn nodded.

“Why is that a big deal?” I asked, butting in again. “Why aren’t you making a big deal about the beithir. That’s the godsdamned monster that I haven’t ever encountered before. It made it really close to town as well. I get that Veliki is full of adventurers, but wouldn’t you have killed all the monsters around here already?”

Brynn was the one to answer. “A beithir is quite common around Veliki. One shows up every year or two. Sometimes they come straight for town, other times they’re smarter and stay away. We kill them when we encounter them, or Sir Torment or another ranger does.”

“But it’s supposed to be safe around Veliki. I had no idea what a beithir was until it tried to eat me.”

Recognition flashed across Brynn’s face. “I see.” He looked at Torment. “I think I figured out what’s happening here. Mr and Mrs Jewel came to me earlier to ask for help finding Amber here. I can take her back tonight.”

“No!” The older man paused as I shouted. “I’m not going anywhere near the Shepards until the next blank moon has passed.”

“That might not be possible.” Brynn told me.

“Just let me stay here for tonight.” I pleaded. “I’ll probably end up killing someone if I go back now.”

Brynn looked me in the eye and I stared right back. Eventually he sighed. “I’ll tell your parents that Torment will deliver you home tomorrow if I don’t. Is there anything else you feel should be shared?”

Torment furrowed his brows in thought for a moment. The question had been directed at him. “No.”

The air between them tinted red for an instant.

Brynn furrowed his brows. “I see. Get some rest then, Sir Torment. Amber.” Then he turned around and left the cabin.

“Why did you lie?” I demanded as soon as Brynn was gone. “He knows you lied as well. That had to have been some angelic magic just there. Why?”

“As nice as Brynn can be, his attitude towards you would change if he knew you carried a symbol of the Vitorian Envoy.” Torment explained. “He would find excuses to spend as little time around you as possible, and tha’ isn’t what you want, is it?”

“Because he knows Rezan that I can use.” I remembered. “Wait. What was that about not teaching me stuff? Has there been a conspiracy to keep me a wife? Actually, don’t answer. Stupid question.” Really, I should’ve realised there would have been something like that from the start. I found myself getting angry all over again.

That feeling of an endless charge across an endless plain stuck with me. I only realised when Torment said something and interrupted my concentration.

“What?”

“I said get into bed.” He repeated.

He had to ask a few more times before I actually did, though.

\V/