“... what makes you think you can help? Two Knight-Captains and three Knights are in that team, we only have a few Knights here…”

Yuriko caught most of the words from the other speaker but with the door muffling their voices, she couldn’t tell who it was. She wanted to enter the office to find out why her father hadn’t returned, to find out if they were in danger. Her hands clenched as worry and fear ravaged her mind.

The voices were softer now and she couldn’t hear anything more. If she knocked and entered, chances were that they wouldn’t continue talking about the expedition. Afterwards, either Marron would tell her--or he won’t. She might also get in trouble if she asked them outright. It was still a militia expedition and only those who needed to know any details knew about it. Those who didn’t need to know would not be told. She was definitely in the second category.

So instead of knocking, she drew on her Animus core and channelled it to her ears, focusing on the need to hear what was being said behind the door.

“WE COULD STILL DO…”

The words thundered in her ears and she nearly cried out in pain. It took her a minute to recover after she cut off the flow of Animus and by then it was too late. Someone had walked into the hallway and was staring at her just standing by the door.

“What are you doing here cadet?” the young woman asked.

“Oh, uhm, I wanted to talk to my brother, but I heard shouting…” she answered quickly.

“Your brother? Oh. You must be Yuriko,” the other woman mused. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognise you with how much Marron keeps bragging about you, I mean. Uh...” She coughed. “I’m Niamh, by the way. Your brother and I are teammates.”

“Oh, nice to meet you,” Yuriko said, giving the woman a small smile.

“Wow, you’re so pretty,” Niamh murmured, then started when she realized she said that out loud. “Well, no sense waiting out here.” She walked up to the door and opened it.

The voices cut off when the door opened. Yuriko peeked inside and saw Marron and two other officers in a clump.

Marron looked up at her, looked at Niamh, and then said, “Cadet Davar, why are you here?”

Yuriko blurted out, “Maru, is it true?”

Her brother’s face reddened and the officers took a look at the both of them and started snickering. Niamh’s shoulders were shaking.

Marron grunted and marched out of the office, grabbing a hold of her arm and pulling her along. “You should stick to protocol, Yuri.”

“Nevermind that! Please, Maru, what happened to Da?”

Her brother sighed but kept silent. He led her to a corner with a window and, after making sure that there were no others nearby, said, “We don’t know. It's just that they haven’t sent any messages. Even accounting for the worst time distortion, they should have checked in with the Watchtower yesterday.”

Fear gripped her throat and she had to force the words out. “Da is never late. Not when he can help it.”

“Agreed. Which is why I think it warrants investigation. Vice-Commander Stuart disagrees, especially since the Wyldling Wave signs are imminent. He thinks that Inquisitor Gorlyn was mistaken when she gathered a sizable force to hunt. Now, it’s left us undermanned.” Marron shook his head. “I disagree with him but we can’t change what has been done. I wanted to send a search party…”

“Let me go with you!”

Marron glared at her. “You’ll just hold everyone back.”

Yuriko reeled back. “But…”

“You haven’t even inlaid your Facet. You may have the Animus capacity of an Apprentice but you will remain a Novice until you’ve inlaid and advanced your Facet. You won’t even have the strength to hold yourself together beyond the Shallows. I don’t want to risk losing you.”

Yuriko looked down, hot tears welling in her eyes. “Da…”

“Don’t worry. Da has survived worse circumstances than this.” He ruffled Yuriko’s hair. “Hmm, what’s this?” He asked, pointing at the box she was holding.

“Oh?” Yuriko held it up, she had almost forgotten about it. “Uhm, I won a bet against one of the kids in our camp. I think I should return this though; the wager wasn’t really fair.”

“What is it?”

“Chocolate.”

Marron’s eyebrows rose so high it almost disappeared into his hairline. Then his eyes narrowed. “Who?”

Yuriko blinked away the tears before she answered, “Braden and Orrin Foster.”

“So…” he muttered. “This bears looking into.” His voice was so low that Yuriko didn’t think he intended for her to hear.

“Maru?”

His hand darted to her hip and pinched. “Don’t. Call. Me. Maru.”

“Ow-ow-ow-ow!” Yuriko huffed. “Well, what do you want me to call you then? High and mighty Squad Leader Davar?”

“Just Squad Leader Davar is enough. High and Mighty is so obvious you don’t need to say it.”

Yuriko rolled her eyes.

“Why don’t you give those to me instead?’

“No.”

“Well, get going then.”

Later that evening, back in her bunk bed, Yuriko placed the chocolates by her pillow. Worry still gnawed at her guts and much as Marron’s words hurt, she knew he was right.

“Oh, I forgot to ask him,” she muttered. She meant to talk to Marron about her idea on inlaying her Facet but what she overheard completely drove it from her mind.

“I’m turning the lights off,” Millie announced when she entered the room. She had a towel wrapped around her hair. The girls’ dormitory rooms didn’t come with an ensuite bathroom, just a water closet and sink. The common bathing area was down the hall, thankfully with an attached changing room. Yuriko had taken her bath earlier and had done her evening ablutions.

Millie pressed a palm on the switch, channelling her Animus to change the settings. The overhead lights started to dim.

Yuriko laid on her back. She wasn’t able to sit straight up when she was on the top bunk, an annoying oversight on her part. So she did her meditations lying down. The problem was that she often fell asleep within a few minutes from starting.

After a minute of intense soul-searching involving visions of chocolate truffles swirling around her mind, she managed to push past it as well as her anxieties, and recall what exactly she realized during that game.

She envisioned her Anima and split half of her remaining Animus from her core. Her tank was at half-full after the day’s exercises now she had a quarter sitting in her mental grasp. She brought nearly all of them near the Facet pattern and split off the lot into eighths. She fed the first strand it into the terminus point, imparting in it the need to follow the line all the way to its natural end.

She did the same to the next point that beckoned to her. Every day since the theatre performance, she practised inlaying her pattern exactly once every night before she slept. The rest of the time, she worked on handling multiple strands of Animus. By this time, she had memorised which terminus points were to be filled and in the correct sequence.

In her practice, she found that, depending on the excess Animus she imparted in each strand and the intent she filled it with, she could let go of the strand and it would keep doing what she wanted it to do. Regaining control of the strand was another matter, however, and if the strand was outside of her Anima, which meant away from her body in most cases, it was incredibly difficult to regain control and alter the intent, or even to return the strand to her core.

It was what made melee weapons incredibly important to the militia, according to her instructors. The reason why only sharpshooters were allowed to wield Plasma Casters in combat was that Animus cannot be recovered after firing the weapon. With a sword or a spear, a missed strike would not completely deplete the Animus charged into it. In essence, the Animus is only spent when it breaks through a Wyldling’s Protective Field.

Yuriko thought the technique she applied to her strands should reasonably allow her to complete the Facet unless the lines branched somewhere within the pattern. She could only a bit of the line ahead of her Animus strands after all. If that happened, she could regain control of the strand and adjust as needed.

Her previous limit had been seven terminus points but this time she reached the eighth one. No other terminus points lit up to her senses and, amidst growing trepidation, the lines continued to be filled.

Just as she anticipated, when the first line encountered a branch, her strand stopped after a moment and the entire pattern trembled. Yuriko’s immediate reaction was to pick a branch to follow but her instincts screamed in protest. Instead, she forced the strand to split and go through both paths.

She felt sweat beading on her forehead as she nervously wondered if she had enough Animus to complete the inlay. She drew some more from her core and added it to the first line. But just as she did, the second line encountered a splitting branch, and the next instant, the third line came upon one as well. It took all she had to juggle control of each line, making them follow each split and adding more of her Animus into the strands. Eventually, she was left with but a sliver in her core, but all eight of the lines had split into two paths.

A few minutes later, the two branches of the first path met each other again and combined into a single, thicker line. The movement this time was slower but steady and she had the feeling that all she needed to do now was wait. Soon all of the branching lines converged into thicker lines.

The eight terminus points weren’t equidistant from each other but the image formed by each of the lines splitting and rejoining made it feel like they were. The image somewhat looked like a tongue of flame or perhaps the stylized rays of the sun. A vast feeling of relief washed over her. She knew that it was only a matter of time until her Facet was inlaid.

She eagerly anticipated its completion but as the minutes passed by, there was no change. No indication that she needed to do anything but wait. After a couple of hours of waiting, lethargy had completely filled Yuriko’s mind. It didn’t help that she only had a little bit of Animus in her core and after jerking herself awake several times, she eventually succumbed and fell asleep.

As she fell into a deep sleep, visions and words filled her dreaming mind. Perhaps because her worry over her Da had been foremost in her mind, she dreamt of him from when she was younger.

She dreamt of the time a bit more than six years ago when numerous Wyldlings had stormed out of the Tidelands and her Da had to go and shoot them down. He brought all of his kids to the Watchtower with him to ensure their safety, leaving them in a room with the children of other militia members but Yuriko snuck out to follow Virgil.

He only went to the top of the tower, some hundred paces above the ground. He soon noticed her but instead of bringing her back to the children’s quarters, he just carried her on his shoulders as he climbed. At the top, he started to aim with his rifle, but he didn’t shoot. Instead, he looked at Yuriko and drew her attention to a point off in the distance. There she saw a tornado of varied colours.

“That’s where all of them are coming from,” Virgil told her.

From up where they stood, Yuriko could barely see the Wyldlings on the ground but the vortex of power was impossible to miss.

“There’s a Chaos Lord over there,” he said quietly, “and all we need to do is kill it to stop all of this madness.” He pointed the Plasma Caster at the vortex and he started glowing purple as he gathered all of his Animus to his hands down to his weapon.

“Goodbye.” He pulled the trigger.

She could only recall the events up to that point but the image burned itself into her heart. She had similar dreams of this very scene throughout the years and normally, her dreams would have shifted to something else by now.

This time, Virgil stood there after he fired his shot and waited. He looked at her and smiled, and she could see it in his eyes. He wanted to know if this was what she wanted. Yes, she wanted to be like him so very much.

The figure of her father at that moment, gloriously ending a war with a single pull of his trigger finger, was something she worshipped with all her heart. She wanted that strength, that skill. She wanted to be able to kill the enemy leader and end the Wyldlings’ invasion in an instant. She wanted the power to protect those she loved. She wanted power.

Everything seemed to ripple as if what she saw was but a reflection on a pond and someone had thrown a pebble into it.

What she dreamt of next was a blur. At one point her, mum had returned to Faron’s Crossing for her visit, but it was too late. Nobody was there. She found her children soon enough and dragged them with her to Rumiga City and beyond, through the Chaos channels and into Delovine.

In the next dream, she saw a floating citadel making its way across the wheat fields, shooting down lightning bolts that incinerated the Wanderers. In another, she saw a ship cutting through the Chaos, looking for something. Treasure? Land? Magnificent creatures? Who knew? She certainly didn’t.

At another point, she saw a golden silhouette. It was quite large, taller than Virgil and heavily muscled. When it looked at her though, it shook its head, and, suddenly, it turned into a voluptuous feminine figure. Not quite the figure Yuriko cast now but she had the feeling that, in a few years, she could look like that.

One moment the silhouette’s hands were empty, the next, it was wielding a giant sword. It started to swing the weapon, controlling its momentum with deft twists of its wrists, arms, waist, and legs. The sword moved continuously, the slight shifts in angle from the hilt magnified the force and direction at the tip. The silhouette struck different points in space as if it were surrounded by enemies. The large movements precluded any attempt at striking at the silhouette; the sweeping blade was sure to catch any that attempted to come near. With a final full rotation, the sword would have swept everything around it, and then the figure rested with the blade pointed down, digging in the earth.

A moment later, the giant sword disappeared and turned into a pair of short curved blades, and it danced. The movements flowed and swirled, hypnotic, beautiful...and deadly. Yuriko tried to hold on to this dream, to remember the flowing stances. They were, to her own swordplay, what a mountain was to a pebble. Any little bit she remembered would be more than enough.

The tighter she held on to the dream, the faster it flowed through her fingers and soon she grasped at nothing.

With a frustrated gasp, she woke up staring at the ceiling of their shared room. The lights had started to brighten already but today was a rest day, and the cadets were free to train, relax, or have fun as they saw fit.

She scrubbed at her eyes, feeling lost. She wanted something, she knew, but she couldn’t remember. She swung off the top bunk, landing on the floor with knees bent to absorb the impact.

The other three girls were still asleep. Krystal was on the bunk below Yuriko’s and she was cuddling a pillow with drool dripping out the side of her mouth.

Yuriko was in front of the sink with a toothbrush in her mouth when she remembered that she was in the process of inlaying when she fell asleep. Her heart thundered in her breast while she hurriedly envisioned her Anima.

There in her mind, amidst the tangle of lines that was the pattern of her Facet, a glowing, stylized sun in the shape of a circle with eight tongues of flame radiating from it.

She had succeeded.