Achilles

I woke up on my bed, away from the smoke and the fires of my nightmare. It took me a moment to realize that I was now in the waking world, safe from the demons of my past.

"Good grief," I groaned.

The worst of the nightmare was over.

Ten years had passed since that dreadful day.

Eleanor was gone because of me.

Nothing was going to change that story.

I kept my eyes shut and tried to fall back asleep, but my mind could not relax. So, I tried to remember the dream. Eleanor was there, that was certain. The rest of it was an indecipherable blur. For the next fifteen minutes, I worked frantically to collect the remnants of the dream. There was fire, smoke, and that idiot Jephthah who had taken away Eleanor's life. But try as I might, the emotions I felt so powerfully while I slept were now but cinders. If only there was a way to make dreams like these last forever, and actually make a difference.

Begrudgingly, I sat up in bed.

The dream was lost and my day had already begun.

"No rest for the wicked," I said, taking a long, deep breath.

I kept my eyes closed for just a few seconds longer to maximize rest. The air-conditioned air was blissful after last week's freak heatwave. My body, on the other hand, was terribly sore from the last few days of nonstop chaos at work. I did not want to get out of bed today. Come to think of it, I didn't remember the last time I crawled out of bed willingly. But, against my better judgment, I swung my legs to the left side of my bed. I was just about to slip my feet into my blue bunny slippers when I heard someone unlocking my dormitory door from the outside.

My heart began to race as adrenaline flooded into my veins.

My first thought was that someone had stolen my keys and was now trying to break into my room.

Then I remembered that she now owned a copy of my room key.

What does she want? I groaned. It's only-

I cracked open my eyes and, with great effort, glanced at the black alarm clock sitting on my cluttered desk.

-two in the afternoon.

The door burst open with a slam, and the entire building shook as if about to collapse.

Bright, piercing sunlight streamed onto my face, momentarily blinding me. When my eyesight returned, I saw a young woman standing in my doorway. She was dressed in pink pajamas and a pair of red bunny slippers. Her long brown hair, which fell a little past her shoulders, was a tangled mess. Her favorite red linen blanket was wrapped snugly around her shoulders like a warrior’s cloak. Soft sunlight poured in from behind her, illuminating her frame with a brilliant hue, making her look like a very angry, very sleepy, Greek goddess. Her exhausted eyes and the look of utter contempt on her face told me some fool had woken her from her slumber.

"I heard something break downstairs," she said taking a deep, groggy breath. "Figured it was you. And what do you know, I was right."

"Good morning to you too."

The woman stumbled over to the left side of my bed, sat down, and rested her chin on her hands. She stared intently at the ground as if searching for the right words to say. A ring of red light encircled her right iris, a sure sign that she had recently used psychosomatic magic, magic that tampered with the mind through manipulating one's nervous system.

I remembered someone shocking me awake while I was still stuck in the nightmare.

It must have been her.

"Thanks for save," I said.

She smirked.

"I do what I must, Titus, son of Courdine."

Lady Priscilla Brightchild, or “The Most Honorable” Priscilla Brightchild, as she had me introduce her to strangers, was twenty-four years old. We were technically the same age, but she was six months older and never failed to remind me. At first glance, she looked like one who had lived a carefree life. She often wore a cheerful smile on her face and could put even the most cynical of adventurers at ease with her tactful quips. But at the times her optimism ran thin, one did best to steer clear of the tempest she could unleash at the snap of her fingertips.

“You were screaming, again," she said.

“Uh-uh. Did I wake anyone up? Oh, wait…"

I looked at her with feigned surprise.

She glared at me with mild annoyance before continuing to gaze intently at the ground.

I laughed nervously before I quietly joined her in her vigil, curious as to what held her attention for so long.

At first, I saw nothing noteworthy. The unadorned walls of my room reflected the sun’s light. The wooden floor glistened with a thin layer of dust. It hadn't been swept in months. As I stared at the neglected floor I noticed the valley of glass shards hiding amid the grime. I hadn’t seen the shards at first, because the floor was dirty, but it didn’t help that the shards were so small,, almost as if they had been atomized by a sledgehammer. In the middle of the carnage lay a small golden seal, glistening like stolen treasure.

As I looked around my room, wondering where the seal could have possibly come from, I I noticed that the glass plaque usually sitting atop my nightstand was nowhere to be found, and then it hit me.

I must have punched the darn thing in my sleep.

I raised my hand up into the sunlight. Rivers of blood ran down my forearm, staining my skin like war paint. Hundreds of glass slivers coated the back of my knuckles like powdered sugar. The shards were so small I wondered if a few had already been sucked into my blood stream.

Stop! I told myself as genuine panic shot down my spine. You're going to be okay. Priscilla can heal shredded blood vessels. Just stop thinking about it.

But I couldn’t and the panic kept rising until I was snapped back to reality by Priscilla suddenly standing up and stepping carelessly onto the glass-covered floor. Her fuzzy slippers crunched loudly on the fragments as she made her way over to the seal. She gingerly picked up the seal from the ground and examined it carefully.

“You bent it,” she said after a moment.

“No."

"Well, the person that lives here can punch really hard, hard enough to bend ethereal steel."

Priscilla tossed the seal to me. I let it land on my blankets, fearing that it was still covered in glass shards. Upon closer inspection, I found that the seal was free of such shards. I also noticed that the seal was, as my lord said, slightly bent.

"What I'm more impressed with is how you bent it without destroying the room,” she said. "Or the building. Or punching a hole through the floor. Come to think of it, how did you stop it from punching a hole through the floor? I've seen what your kinetic magic can do."

"Must have been my emergency barrier," I laughed, dread sinking into the deepest recesses of my pounding heart.

"Does that even work when you sleep?" she asked.

"Apparently."

The amount of force required to disfigure even a thin layer of Ethereal steel was well beyond what the floor and the walls of my dorm could handle. The only explanation for the contained destruction before us was that my barrier magic had somehow prevented the seal from breaking through the building after I had punched it with a magically-augmented strike.

Mages were living weapons. And while proper training and strict discipline ensured that the weapon never fired accidentally, extreme distress could crack even the most stringent of regimens. Sleepcasting was a sign of emotional distress and, depending on the kind of magic they could use, potentially fatal. Kinetic magic fell under the “almost always fatal” category if the caster was powerful enough. In our case, he most certainly was.

I could have killed someone, I thought miserably.

"What if you do destroy the room next time?" Priscilla said, clearly going somewhere with this. "Or the building? Or, heck, the entire north sector? What am I going to tell Guildmaster? 'Oh, I'm sorry. Your nuclear warhead of a student accidentally went ballistic and I wasn't there in time to stop him. No, no, he was asleep when it happened! Yes, asleep!' We can't mess up like this, Titus. People will die, and that's not something you want to live with!"

"A little late for that," I grumbled.

"That's not what I-you know what I mean."

"It won't happen again, I promise."

"You're doing this in your sleep!” she said, throwing her hands in the air, “you have no control over it. Believe me, it only gets worse from here."

I remembered all too well when her nightmares turned her into a human Tesla coil while she slept. She needed to be quarantined in a tower all by herself for several months until she, with help of the guild psychiatrist, managed to get her nightmares under control. I wasn't planning to spend my first weeks after graduating from advanced magic school locked away in a tower of my own if I could help it at any rate.

And I wasn't about to admit to her that I needed to do something about my nightmares, not a chance. I would never hear the end of it.

So I focused my attention on bending the damaged seal back into shape. It was too thick for me to shape it with my bare hands, so I applied a minute amount of kinetic magic around its surface, just enough to make the metal move.

Sweet.

After toying around with the seal for a few seconds, I managed to bend the seal back into shape.

I lifted the seal up for Priscilla to see.

"See?” I said with a smile. “All fixed!"

I heard a small crack.

A moment later, the bottom half of the seal plummeted toward the ground.

I managed to snatch the bottom half out of the air before it landed on the ground, but not before Priscilla saw what had happened.

"That is coming out of your next paycheck," she said quietly.

“There’s no way this is real ethereal steel," I protested. "We got ripped off!"

"And whose fault is that?"

"-mine," I replied, remembering that I had chosen the material to make the seal. "It's my fault."

Priscilla buried her face in her hands.

"What did I do to deserve a cheon-sa like you?"

The seal was proof of our covenant as lord and cheon-sa, or rather, lord and vassal. It was embossed with a unique coat of arms, a combination of her family symbol and mine.

At the top of the seal was a pale white serpent eating its own tail, an ouroboros. Beneath the ouroboros was a blue humpback whale.

The ouroboros was the symbol the Brightchilds adopted hundreds of years ago as it was the universal symbol for magic and knowledge. The Brightchilds were pioneers of medical and scholarly advancements in the magical community. Their skill in healing the sick and the wounded was known across all of Nivadnor. Kings and queens sought them out from all corners of the world to cure the incurable and to raise their dead. They couldn’t raise the dead, of course, but so long as life persisted, there were few things they couldn’t heal with their magic. This meant that Lady Priscilla had access to powerful healing magic in addition to her native lightning magic all thanks to her lineage.

The humpback whale was the symbol for my family, the Sempronians. We once served the Brightchilds and the Dreadwings as life-long guardians before infighting drove the two Seraph clans apart. The Sempronians, or the Densus Knights, as we were better known, were never considered to be true Seraphs as the other two families were. Yet it was customary for every Brightchild and Dreadwing to take a knight as their guardian angel. To be chosen was considered a great honor even if most of your day-to-day duties ended up being menial tasks like buying groceries and filling out paperwork.

Priscilla walked over to the foot of my bed, crossed her arms, and gave me the-you better do whatever I tell you to do next-look. The seal had cost about three weeks' worth of my salary to make, but since Priscilla had absorbed the cost, I didn’t have to pay a dime for it. If she was being serious about me having to pay for it, I probably wouldn’t be eating for the next two weeks.

I sat up straight, crossed my legs, and gave her my full, undivided attention. When you broke something valuable that belonged to the hand that fed you, you wanted to make certain they knew you were paying attention.

Priscilla smiled deviously, knowing full well that I was now completely at her mercy.

"We are going to Nivandor."