-Aether-

[The energy of the souls of the dead.

Used to fuel magic casting.]

The next few days consisted of a lot of physical and magical training. Today Oroske told me after breakfast that he thought I was ready for the next step in magic, which he was going to have another Hunter come to help teach me about. But until then, we simply continued sparring and training my fighting skills.

I wasn’t very confident with just my fists, which is what we started out with. I was pretty small for someone my age, and even smaller compared to Oroske. While I had the strength needed to fight and deal some damage, the only real advantage I had without a weapon was my agility. When Oroske didn’t use magic, that gave me enough of an edge, but when he did, he could use magic to move around much faster than me.

Swordplay wasn’t much different, though I felt a lot more confident fighting with a weapon. My movements were much sharper, and being able to defend myself better was definitely a major upside. The blades we were using had an enchantment placed on it that allowed us to get hit by them without them actually cutting or damaging our bodies.

Still hurt like hell though.

Oroske had just knocked me to the ground, overpowering my block from above, when a voice I’d never heard before called out from the house. “Good to see you’re still as unforgiving as ever, Oroske,” the voice belonged to a man, taller than Oroske but not as muscular. His dark blue hair was done up in a faux-hawk, and his eyes were a vibrant red, pupils slitted like mine and Oroske’s.

“It’s the best way to learn, if you ask me,” Oroske laughed in response, “Thanks for coming Nadred, and you too Jarou.” Oroske tilted his body a little bit to look behind Nadred, and a boy poked his head out from behind him. He had crimson red hair, long enough in the front to cover an entire side of his face. His uncovered eye looked very similar to Nadred’s.

I pulled myself off the ground, sitting up and facing them properly as they came outside. In the light I could see more clearly that Nadred was wearing a black cloak, and Jarou a very blue cloak, much brighter in color than mine.

Which I wasn’t wearing at the moment, Oroske had told me I wouldn’t need to wear it until I actually passed my test, and with the heat outside I gladly accepted.

When my eyes met with Jarou, he suddenly looked very sad, almost on the verge of tears, “A-Are you okay?” I asked, worried I had done something to make him upset. “Is it true…?” He asked, to which I just tilted my head, asking “Is what true?”

“Did you really lose your memory? Do you really not remember me?” I could tell he was having a hard time holding his emotions back.

I could only apologize. From what I could remember, this was our first time meeting. He looked down at the ground, clearly depressed. Nadred came and patted his head, “Just means you need to start over, right kid?” He comforted Jarou, before turning to me, “Sorry about that, you two were pretty close before you died. He’s been pretty torn up since hearing you lost your memory. We were hoping you’d still be his friend.”

For the past week since I woke up, I really only had gotten to know Oroske, and we’d been so focused on my training that we hadn’t really taken time to talk about my life before losing my memory. Friends, family, I didn’t really know who any of them were outside of him. So, “Of course! Just because I don’t remember you, doesn’t mean you’re not my friend,” I said with a cheesy grin. Jarou looked up from under Nadred’s hand with a teary smile, and nodded.

“Did you wanna hang around to train Jarou?” Oroske asked, “Maybe you can help teach Kuro, since I know magic is your specialty.”

“Sure! We’ve been doing a lot of Hunting lately, haven’t had a good chance to just practice,” He perked up almost immediately, the sad boy from a moment ago all but gone. “Glad to have you,” I said, still sitting down, most of my energy recuperated.

“So Oroske,” Nadred started, “What have you taught him so far?”

“Uhh…” Oroske hesitated, before responding with a nervous laugh, “Just the basics.”

“Does that include incantations? Or did you skip that again?”

“I, uh, I skipped it.”

Oroske seemed ashamed, and Nadred just sighed, “What about finding his affinity and aspect?”

“I figured you’d be better at helping him with that than I would.”

“Well you certainly aren’t wrong about that,” Nadred finalized, sounding more annoyed than anything, “Let’s start with your elemental affinity then. We already know it, but it’s an important step to discover it for yourself.”

“Why is that?” I asked, standing up as he approached me, and grabbed both of my hands, holding them up at my chest level, not much higher than his waist.

“Finding your affinity for yourself makes you more aware of the difference, both in how it feels to use, as well as how much more output you can get with it. The latter point is as prevalent these days, but it still makes a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“The way we teach and use magic has evolved over the years, especially in the last 10-15 years. Way back in the day, your affinity would be the only magic you could use. Back then, we didn’t really know how to command the aether to ‘burn’ in whatever way we wanted. So the aether would burn according to the element of our soul.

“Then, after that we discovered how to use Alten,” he paused and glanced at Oroske, “Or as Oroske probably called it, the ‘ancient language,’ to command the aether to bend to our will, albeit in a very limited way. And recently, our command over aether has gotten the gap between magic with and without the affinity boost to be much closer to the point where they’re nigh indistinguishable.

“Now!” He suddenly exclaimed, “Let’s begin the actual lesson. I take it Oroske hasn’t even taught you about Passthroughs, so I’ll start there. Throughout your body there are points where aether can gather and be manipulated. These are called Passthroughs. The proper explanation for how magic works, is you gather aether around your Passthroughs, it goes through them like a gate, where they inherit either your affinity, or the command you are giving them, then they exit and manifest in whatever way you commanded.

“So, to test your affinity, I want you to close your eyes, clear your head, and follow the same steps you took to cast magic normally, but with no commands. I want you to do this with both hands at once, and there is a reason for that, but I’ll explain later.”

I nodded, and followed his instructions. As I felt the aether build in my hands, I wanted to give it a command as I had been, but suppressed it. I pushed the aether through my hands, from the backs to the palms. Suddenly, from my left hand I felt a strong gust of wind shoot up to my face, and on the other I didn’t feel much of anything. I opened my eyes to look at it, and I saw lightning crackling around my hand. Confused, I looked at Nadred.

“And that’s why I wanted you to use both hands. Yet another thing that makes us Half-Demons special, is we have a chance to have two elemental affinities. This is due to our Second Souls having a different affinity, which then manifests in having two separate affinities. So in your dominant hand you had wind, or Sentem in Alten, and in your right hand you had electric, or Selr in Alten. Meaning your primary Affinity is wind, and your Second Soul’s is electric.”

“Second Soul? What’s that?”

“Ah, right, well the full, proper explanation would take too long for today, so I’ll give you the short version. The basic gist of it is that due to the way Half-Demons came into existence, you have half of another Half-Demon’s soul inside you, and likewise half of yours is in them. Again, the full explanation is pretty long, and a lot of it is mostly theory. The important point is half of your soul is actually theirs, and half of theirs is actually yours.”

Huh, I didn’t really know what to make to make of that. “Who’s my Second Soul?”

“Oh, you haven’t met them yet. As in, no one knows who they are. Back when the Half-Demon population was pretty small and in mostly one place it was pretty easy to find your Second Soul. Nowadays though, there’re so many running around and all over the place it’s pretty much impossible to guess where they are though. You’ll probably meet them sometime, with how much we travel for Hunts.”

“How will I know it’s them if I do meet them?”

“Hmmm,” Nadred took a second to think, “It’s difficult to explain, but there’s a certain feeling you’ll get when you see them. Basically, you’ll know it when you see them. Second Souls have a very special connection, and it becomes stronger once they’ve met.”

And just when I thought we’d move on with the actual lesson, he went on a tangent.

“Speaking of that connection, there’s a deep history in how different Second Souls respond to meeting each other. These days there’s two common ways people interpret the connection. One interpretation is the romantic route, like for example, I ended up marrying my Second Soul. On the other hand, you have the more familial interpretation. Like Oroske for example, he and his Second Soul were more like brother and sister.”

It looked for a minute like he was gonna continue his tangent, but Oroske stopped him, “That’s all well and good, but can the full lecture wait for another time?”

Nadred looked a little surprised, but just for a moment, “Of course, of course. Sorry about that, let’s get back on topic shall we?”

Incantations, huh? I thought, the name alone gave me an idea of what it was. “If you recall a short moment ago, I mentioned the words Sentem and Selr, or wind and electric in Alten. Alten, being the ‘ancient language of gods,’ itself just means god. It is the language the Aether is the most responsive to. As such, you can use Alten to verbally command it for your magic. Even just saying the incantation in your mind as you cast the spell works.

“Incantations provide extra strength and clarity to the magic you cast. Verbally saying the incantation will provide even more strength than just thinking it, but can give your opponent time to react and counter.”

He then gave a list of more elements and their Alten counterparts. Apparently fire and flame are separated into fyrun and foluk respectively, and have different effects when used in magic. Jarou means stone, or alternatively strength, and orun is water.

“You can also append suffixes to the end of the incantation to give it a more specific command, for now we’ll start you off with just ‘tur.’ Placing that after your base command will cause it to have more of a burst or blast type effect. So for example, try using the incantation ‘fyrun’tur’ on the wood block over there,” he ordered, pointing over at a large wooden block Oroske had set up while he was talking. “All you need to do is bring the aether to your passthroughs, then give the command.”

I faced the wood, and stretched my arm towards it, palm open to the block. I followed the normal steps but rather than commanding it to burst into flames the way I’d been doing it, as it was about to pass through I shouted the command, “Fyrun’tur!”

Just as I did, a flame exploded at the woodblock, blasting the top of it off. It was much stronger than anything I’d tried before.

“Very good,” Oroske applauded, “And if you're curious, this is the difference between fyrun and foluk.” He walked over to the block of wood, casually gave the command “Foluk,” and the wood suddenly caught fire.

“Thank you, Oroske,” Nadred said, preparing to continue his lecture, “As you can see, fyrun is a more explosive or combustible form, whereas foluk is more like if you just lit a fire through normal means. As such, fyrun is probably what you’ll default to in combat if you wish to use a fire based spell, though foluk does have its uses.

“Next, I want you to see the difference in strength in using something like fyrun, in comparison to using sentem or selr,” he instructed as Oroske doused the flames using orun, “Let’s start with selr.”

I nodded, and once again followed the same steps as last time, but changed the command to “Selr’tur.” A loud crack like thunder sounded as the wood piece exploded near the center, charred with the heat of electric shock. The explosion was much more visceral than with fyrun, and the top half flew pretty high, and the tearing pattern was much more sporadic. Parts of the wood were still glowing hot, almost catching fire, when I went to inspect the damage. Nadred was right, there was almost a difference of night and day between the two. Not only was it much stronger, but it followed my will far more closely.

“Impressive,” Nadred commented as Oroske brought out a new wood block, “Now I want you to try sentem, though I want you to use a different suffix, ‘ari.’”

“What does that mean?”

“In the interest of showing you the power of incantations, I will have you find out for yourself.”

I was confused, and a little worried. With tur, I had a clear idea of what it was supposed to do, so I wasn’t sure if this new suffix would work without me knowing what it means. I decided to try it anyway. Once more I followed the exact same steps, changing the command once again, shouting “Sentem’ari!”

Blades of wind shot out, cleanly cutting through the wood with enough force to send the three chunks of wood flying backwards.

“Wonderful! So, what do you think ‘ari’ means?” Nadred quizzed.

“Does it mean something like cut?”

“Correct, though more properly it means slice. The full version of the word also means sword, ‘relari.’ All the suffixes you’ll use are actually abbreviated versions of other words. Likewise, with most element names you can actually shorten them. So instead of having to say ‘fyrun’tur’ everytime, you could instead say ‘fyr’tur’ and it would work exactly the same way.”

I nodded in understanding. It seemed magic and Alten was much deeper and more complicated than I initially thought.

“What about the aspect affinity thing you mentioned earlier?”

“Ah, right. That’s a fair bit more complicated, and will have to be during another day, but rest assured I will teach you everything you need to know. For now though, I want to move on to a bit more advanced applications of elements, which I’ll have Jarou help out with.” Nadred explained.

Jarou perked up almost immediately, having just been spectating my lesson silently this whole time. “Jarou is something of a prodigy when it comes to magic, almost as much as me when I was your guys’ age,” Oroske chimed in, “Nadred and Jarou together are the best people I know to teach about this kind of stuff.”

Jarou got up and walked over to where we were all standing and Nadred began once more, “Alright Jarou, let’s show them what you’re made of!”