“I know you’re watching! Well, I’ve done what you wanted. I got to page ten!”

There was no other sound for several seconds, just the usual chirp of birds I had expected until a gentle breeze blew through the clearing. I scrunched my eyebrows up, but I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder before I could say anything else.

“Took you long enough.” I sighed, rubbing at my neck as I did my best to hide the small jump of surprise I had done after being tapped out of nowhere.

“I was hoping for a more expressive reaction. You’re already getting far too used to this.”

“I figured you would go for something like that.” I turned around, my mentor standing off to the side behind me as if he had been here the entire time.

“Alright, well, you called me here. You say you’ve gotten to page ten?”

“What does this look like?” I said, proudly holding up the tome to the tenth page for my mentor to see.

“Hmm.” The shaggy-haired man cupped his chain as if investigating whether I was pulling a fast one.

“What?” I finally asked after several seconds had passed like that.

“Well, that’s ten.”

“It took you that long to count?”

“Well, sorry, I don’t comprehend numbers like humans do. Thousand years later, and they are still weird to me.” My mentor gave me a defensive look before raising his hands. “But I will admit, you did, in fact, reach page ten.”

“Wait-” I wasn’t just about to let what he said go. “-you just finished saying numbers are hard to grasp for you. So why did you tell me page ten?”

“Oh, the book told me.”

“The book told you.” I repeated back to him, my face deadpan the entire time.

“Yes, the book told me. Is that really where you draw the line? Sages reincarnating, magical creatures that live for a thousand plus years taking you out on some adventure, and a book communicating with me is where you find it too hard to believe?”

“Well, when you put it like that….” I sheepishly looked down at my feet before shrugging. “So, is that it? Can we continue?”

“Hmm.” My mentor stared at me for a good five seconds before he coughed. “No.”

“No?”

“No.” My teacher waved a hand before him as if making sure I wasn’t distracted. “Or, not this very instant. I want to see.”

“See what?”

“See the fruits of your efforts. Surely you didn’t get to page ten and manage to take nothing away from it?”

“No, I just didn’t expect a test here.” I answered defensively.

“Life lesson, kid, always expect a test.”

“So, what do you want me to do then.”

“Simple.” Grabbing the tome from my hand, he flung it into the air, where it immediately started to zip around. “I want you to hit it dead on, none of this barely scratching a corner.”

“I-” I looked between my mentor and the flying tome, gulping once as I did. “I’ll do it.”

“Of course, you will, or I’ll leave you behind.”

“You’ll what?”

“Leave you behind.” My mentor shrugged as if it was the most obvious thing. “It will be your job to catch up to me then. If you can’t hit the tome right now, I figure the difficulties of making it to the Pond of Elvermarzon by yourself will do the trick for training you up by the time you get there. Of course, it will probably take you around three times as long as I won’t be around to scare off the nasties in these woods.”

“But there isn’t anything that bad out here?” My statement came out more of a question as I felt a shred of dread grow within me.

“Hah, you think they would make their presence known to humans? That’s just asking for hunting parties or wanna-be heroes to come after them. No, it is much easier for them to lay low, where only the other forest creatures will ever see them.”

“That’s… comforting.” I felt a shiver run down my spine as I thought of some great monsters lurking just out of sight this entire time.

“Well, if you don’t want to deal with that, prove to me right now that what you learned wasn’t just for show.”

I was silent, looking not at my mentor but at the book flying around where, unlike before, it made no attempt at ramming into me. Instead, it dodged and spun through the air in ways that seemed to defy logical sense.

It’s okay.

I bent over, picking my sword up from the ground as I belted it to my side, one hand on the sheathe, one hand on the pommel.

Breath.

Sucking in a gentle breath through my nose, I exhaled slowly.

Kinzar.

I imagined a faint ember within me turning a brighter shade of orange, my breath passing over it and feeding it oxygen to a dimly lit fire.

Breath.

I repeated the process, fanning the embers within until I felt the magic inside glowing merrily.

Next up.

When I inhaled through my nose, rather than let it freely circulate through my lungs, I held the breath in my nose for a moment.

Frezess.

The mental image of the glowing embers within me grew more distinct even as the glow itself faded slightly.

So far, so good.

This was where things would get more complicated, all my prior attempts had fallen apart at different stages, but then I hadn’t tied them together as I was now.

Breath.

When the next breath hit my lungs, I once more held it there.

“Scorz.” I whispered out loud, bracing myself for what was to come next.

My body ratcheted up by several degrees like a furnace that had finally roared to life, my heart beating powerfully. Heart beating like it was, the last two stages I would have to unlock in near-instant succession. Focusing not on my breath, I turned my attention to my heart and, more importantly, the lifeblood it pumped through my body.

“Aulous.”

I felt as my body temperature continued to rise, my blood now feeling as if it were boiling. If I let that heat simmer within me, I would pass out in seconds from minor heatstroke.

“Rentar.”

The heat building like a fired-up boiler suddenly dissipated, my muscles drinking it in like a starved man at a feast. My body stabilizing, I couldn’t help but grin, my eyes opening as I did.

It was intense, as if my whole life I had been walking around with metal chains dragging me down, and only now had I been unshackled. To say I was bursting with energy would have been wrong. What was burning away inside of me felt much more stable, a roaring engine rather than a short-lived explosion.

“Hmm, not bad.” My mentor looked at me with a slight smile before he pointed a single sharp nail at the flying book. “Now, finish what you’ve started.”

I turned my head to watch the book, my hand still holding the pommel of my sword as I tensed up. Blue lines flared up into existence all around the book before vanishing, like it was a swirling ball of thread rather than a flying book.

As I watched it, I finally understood how it moved the way it did. The book had been enchanted, capable of riding along with the latent flowing mana of the world as if on rails, switching trajectory on a whim, every single blue thread appearing from it a potential direction in which it could suddenly zip off in. When I had nicked it before, it had been because I had barely caught a glimpse of one of those very same threads.

Now not just could I see them all, I could react.

I let out one final breath. The air pumped from my lungs was so hot it began to condescend as it fell away from me.

I shot forward five meters instantly, my blade flashing out from its sheathe so quickly that it was a blur even to my own eyes.

It was over in an instant. My sword was back in its sheathe, and the book was lying flat on the ground.

“Wonderful!” My mentor was clapping, but it sounded dull to me. Sight, sound, even smell suddenly muted as I began to stagger.

“Whoa there.” Before I could fall over, my mentor was next to me, catching me. “I must say, quite the straightforward way to solve your problem. Not the solution I expected, but it worked nonetheless.”

“Not…the…what?” I whispered breathily, my words coming out slowly.

“Not the solution I had expected. Most Sages in training tackle the problem from a different avenue. Rather than take such an overwhelming direction for stopping the book, they mask their mana, the book no longer capable of detecting them. It could be considered the first step in crystalizing mana within themselves. Rather than the first step towards crystallization of mana, what you did would be more akin to integration. Dangerous, but I’m shocked you even thought of such a solution.”

“Cryst..alliz…ation? Int…e…gra…tion?”

“Yes, while my knowledge past the fifth ring is hazy at best, the secrets below the fifth ring are fairly well understood. Manifesting the first ring is about crystalizing the base elements of wild magic, literally staining your own flesh with crystallized magic. Understanding that starts with simple mana masking, manipulation of basic mana.”

My mentor gently laid me to sit with my back against the stump I’d been using as a bookstand the last few days.

“Now, what you did, or very, and I mean very, minorly replicated, was integration. Taking those same base elements of wild magic and reknitting your very flesh and blood into something greater. I won’t talk further on that. Doing so is what allows one to manifest their fifth ring, and I do say if you try to get ahead of yourself, you will kill yourself.”

I wanted to nod or say something, but even my own thoughts seemed to float around me, just out of reach.

“I must say, the backlash of even such a simple replication of integration on an unprepared body is severe. Probably should have stopped you, but then I always have been a more curious member of my species. Perhaps that was why I took to a human form like a duck to water.”

I began to sway, my hold on consciousness abandoning me as the light faded from my eyes. The last thing I saw was my mentor peering down at me, looking uncomfortably unbothered by my looming abandonment of the conscious world.

“Nighty night.” The shaggy man waved at me, and the world blinked out all at once.

-----------------------------------------

“Nighty night.” I called out groggily, the words escaping me before I had registered them.

Nighty night?

Eyes opening wide, I awoke to find myself slung over someone’s back. I immediately began to struggle before I heard a familiar voice.

“Whoa, relax kid.”

“M-master?”

“Righto.”

“W-where am I? How long have I been asleep?”

“I’ll answer your second question first. You’ve been out for the last three days. As for where we are, that would be a few kilometers out from Theronhold.”

“Three days! Wait, did you just say Theronhold?”

“Unless there is another Theronhold you can think of.”

“How is that possible? It should have been another few days before we got there!”

“Maybe at your pace.” While I couldn’t see what sort of face my mentor was making, I imagined he was grinning his familiar lopsided smile.

“I- can you put me down?” I gave his shoulder a thump, and a second later, I was dropped flat on the ground, my body painfully protesting to being dumped like a sack of potatoes.

“Could have been a little gentler about it.” I groaned as I rubbed at my aching ribs.

“I could have. But I wasn’t. You’ll survive, I promise.”

“Ass.” I grumbled as I got up to my feet.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” I lied.

“Well, I’ll pretend my hearing isn’t so good that I can make out the ants crawling around on the ground, for your sake at least.”

“Right.” I flushed an embarrassed shade of red before I cupped a hand over my eyes, trying to spot Theronhold, but I saw only more trees.

“While I find the enthusiasm amusing, you’re looking in the wrong direction.” My mentor grabbed me by the shoulder before swinging me around to face off to my right.

“Oh.” I sheepishly replied as I looked out from where the trees parted only a short bit to the right, revealing several kilometers of open plains between the woods we were in and a city off in the distance.

“Whoa.”

“First time seeing a human settlement like that?”

“Yeah.” I responded, too amazed to bother with some sort of quippy response.

It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I’d been to a few nearby villages to Junaper. Still, they were almost all carbon copies of one another, small wooden buildings haphazardly clumped around one another, with a few hundred people living within them.

Theronhold was a different beast entirely.

The first and most apparent difference was the wall surrounding the city. To my eyes, it appeared to stretch to the very heavens, fifty meters tall with additional garrisons atop the walls, stretching up an extra ten or fifteen meters.

“What’s with the walls?” I pointed out, trying to wrap my mind around them.

“Theronhold was built upon the ruins of another city, that was built upon the ruins of another city, which also happened to be built on, you guessed it, the ruins of yet another city.”

“That’s a lot of ruins.” I answered as I continued to stare at the walls.

“Yes. Theronhold, or the site of Theronhold, has quite the history of being under siege. The current governor there doesn’t know it, but the original reasoning for this wall was the fall of the Sages long ago. Their history may be all but wiped away, but their legacy still exists all around us if you know where to look.”

“So they built the walls because the Sages fell?”

“Well, not exactly.” My mentor ushered me forward as we began to leave the forest behind. “Rather, the original Theronhold was reduced to a heaping pile of rubble by the Sages. So, after the Sages had been wiped out, they constructed walls which could never be brought down again.”

“Oh.” My amazement waned as I was made aware of who the culprits behind the last sacking of the city had been, the same people I was attempting to walk the path of. “What about that, though?” I pointed towards a tower that stretched even above the walls, with a golden-looking blob of color inside it.

“Ahh, good eye. That there is the Tower of Theron, I know, quite the original name.”

“What is it?”

“A bell tower. It was constructed after the original governor of Theronhold, Theron himself, was slain in the war of eradication.”

“War of Eradication?”

“That’s the historical term for the war against the Sages.”

“Why did I even bother asking.” I palmed my face, once more reminded that the Sages were anything but upstanding individuals.

“Mhmm. After Theron was slain, they had that bell tower constructed in his honor to ensure an attack could never again take them by surprise.”

“How often has it rung?”

“Since the walls and tower were finished being built eight hundred years ago? Eight or nine times, I’d reckon. Every hundred-odd years some war or another will be waged, siege will be laid against Theronhold until the attacking army realizes that Theronhold has little tactical positioning as far north as it is within Haerasong. That, combined with the fact that since the walls have been built, they have never been breached in a widescale attack, you can see why historically Theronhold is largely left alone.”

“If there isn’t anything important about it, why is the city so big?”

“Well, it’s still the capital hold of the north. Taxes, commerce, all of that naturally flows through there. Combined with being a literal fortress of a city, it’s a secure place to live, at least from outside threat.”

“Outside threat?” I looked about as we continued making our way across the large expanse of the open plain between the forest we had been traveling through for over a week and Theronhold.

“Invading armies and the like. Now, can’t make the same claim for inside the walls, but still, it’s generally safe.”

“Generally?” I turned towards my mentor, my eyebrows creeping up my face.

“I’ve never heard of a single major city in my thousand plus years alive that was completely free of crime or the likes. Apparently, even under the Sages, the cities they controlled were still known to have crime and violence.”

“That’s… nice.” I kicked a pebble as I spoke, thinking of how sheltered a life I had lived.

Not just that.

Sarah…

We had always wanted to come here together. Well, I had gotten my part of our wish.

Just not for the reasons we had wanted.

“Lighten up kid.” My mentor had seen the look on my face, giving my shoulder a nudge. “I get you probably have concerns and thoughts weighing on you, but you will find that you will live a miserable life if you let those weigh on you every day.”

“But, but Sarah! That Sage-”

My mentor held a clawed hand out, cutting my sentence off.

“Now, I should probably mention this now, but when we are approaching the gate, and really whenever we are in the city, make no mention of Sages or anything of that nature unless I specifically bring the topic up first. Never know who or what might be listening in.”

“R-right.” I nodded, never even considering what would happen if word got out that a duo jabbering about Sages appeared. I could only imagine another person appearing like the magic knight who had nearly captured my mother. While the Sage Above All had dealt with him with minimal effort, I knew that my mentor viewed himself far beneath the likes of her. There was no way to know how such a confrontation would play out.

“Now, if you understand, you will be wise to heed these words. As for what you were about to say, let me frame it for you like this. The Sage Above All stated that she was a ten ringer, did she not?”

“Yes.” I nodded.

“Well, let me put it like this then. I consider myself strong enough to contend with the equivalent of a fifth or sixth ring Sage, perhaps depending on the circumstances, even a seventh ring Sage. I’ve also been alive for over a thousand years.”

I felt my shoulders slump, but my mentor gave me a quick thump to recapture my attention.

“I’m not saying it will take thousands of years to reach the goals you have in mind; magical beasts such as myself grow exceptionally slowly in most cases, and I was no exception there. At the very least, if you want to one day contend with the likes of a tenth ring Sage, well, don’t be expecting it to be happening any time soon.”

“I, I don’t need to fight her. I just want Sarah back.”

My mentor eyed me for several seconds before looking straight ahead once more.

“Life is full of twists and turns. Who knows where you will end up in ten, twenty, hell, even a hundred years. I chose to take you under my wing because you had no fixated goals. Keep that mindset. It’s fine to have things you are thinking about, planning for at the back of your mind, but don’t ever be shackled down.”

“You sound like you speak from experience.”

When my mentor looked back at me, his gaze did all the talking.

“Right.” I quickly coughed into my balled-up hand, trying to ignore how stupid the statement I had just said likely sounded to one that had lived for over a thousand years.

After that, we spent the next fifteen minutes walking in silence, the city gradually growing in size before us until we were standing within the shade cast by the looming walls.

“Remember what I told you.” My mentor looked at me from the corner of his eye, to which I mimed zipping my mouth.

“Good.” He closed his eyes, and as I watched him, I saw the razor-sharp nails protruding from his fingers slowly retract, rounding out until he looked like any average person, minus the shaggy black hair that fell to his shoulders. “By the way-” He cracked an eye open, looking at me. “If anyone asks, my name is Yoju, and you’re Awn.”

“Where did those come from?”

“I made them up. Why got a problem with them?”

“Yeah, they sound stupid.” I was muttering from the corner of my mouth as we neared a line leading towards the gate into the city.

“Fine, you chose.”

“You’re my father, John, and I’m your son, Eric.”

“Whatever floats your boat, kid.” My mentor shrugged before turning his attention forward once more.

Theronhold.

I’d finally made it.

I’ll remember everything, so I can tell you about it one day, Sarah.