For weeks, Syron continued to hole up in the library when he wasn’t training his body. He hadn’t been given a weapon to practice with after the first day when it was clear he hadn’t retained any of his swordsmanship training, so it was just full body workouts and cardio mixed with stretching. Lots and lots of stretching. An apparent side effect of his mother’s magic was that new muscle wasn’t limber. Not at all.

The reason for Syron’s stay in the library wasn’t reading. He’d given up on learning history and magic from books, as he had gotten good enough in the past three months at writing and reading that he rarely had to look at his notes to get through words. He was instead focused solely on realizing some grand ambition he had yet to share with anyone else. In an effort to keep it secret, he’d even used the Phoenician alphabet and English to ‘encode’ his words and had taken to locking up his papers in a personalized warded cabinet.

Finishing up after several hours writing down ideas and notes, the Knights and Marigold were getting pretty exhausted from his silent work throughout the day. Partially since it was not their place to interrupt him out of curiosity, but also because they didn’t want to interrupt his concentration.

Sometimes, when he wasn’t in the library, he was standing in the various rooms that held taxidermized monsters and just studying them. He would sometimes stare off into space while he did this, but again, no one bothered him. Finally, after studying the goblinoid in the foyer and staring into space for the better part of a few hours, Syron came to a conclusion.

“I want to see real monsters. This just isn’t cutting it. Do the Warden’s only capture monsters for Trials or is that a regular training thing?” He asked his mother later that evening at dinner. She seemed startled at the request, but gave a gesture for a Knight to come to her and whispered in her ear for a moment. The Knight immediately left.

“They have a live training tomorrow. They do not do them often because it is dangerous to trap monsters if you do not possess the proper magics to capture them safely. Currently, there is only one member of the Wardens that is on site and possesses the requisite magic. It is her unnatural cycle, so it is far weaker than her true magics, but it is enough to capture a small variety of weak monsters. Do you wish to go?”

Syron had jumped out of his seat and cheered happily. “Yes!”

The Lady had a conflicted look on her face for a moment, but eventually returned to her carefree smile.

The next morning, Syron went down to the kitchen to talk to one of his new favorite people, Raylin. Being personally vetted as totally loyal by his mother, Syron liked talking with the strange young woman because she was the only person on the entire estate that talked to him like he was a person and not a lineage slaying, temperamental ‘Young Master’. Her personality reminded him of one of his ex-girlfriends from his previous life. One that he had ended things with rather amicably, though they didn’t remain close friends afterwards. Off putting, but in a friendly, nostalgic way.

Crap, I just realized I’ll have to have a political marriage… or maybe I’ll lose the inheritance and won’t have to worry about it. Or maybe… my mother will go crazy and won’t let a prospective marriage candidate near me… Syron thought as he left the kitchen and headed for the plaza. He boarded the carriage by himself and it rode off to the training fort once again.

I’ll have time to worry about that later. For now, time to go look at some monsters. I’ll get a proper model to base my illusions on!

* * * *

As the carriage headed off to the training fort, Patricia moved from her window watching the plaza to the library with enough speed to generate a gust of wind. If there was dust in her home, it would have lifted with her passing. Arriving at the warded cabinet her son had been storing his ‘work’ in, she ‘added’ her mana signature in the list of people allowed to enter the cabinet and immediately opened it.

She pulled the first leather bound notebook he had started working on and looked at the first page. It was titled “Wardens and Wastelands”, but then crossed out. “Bunkers and ba…” was written below it, but that was crossed out too before he had even finished the thought. “To be determined” was the final title, and it was underlined three times and had exclamation points as though he was extremely proud of his decision. Everything other than the title was in code.

Why would he encode a notebook? Where would he even learn such a cipher? He never seemed to have such interests before his coma, so how did he teach himself this so suddenly?

Knowing she had quite a bit of time before Syron returned from the training fort, she started pouring over the other books he had started filling out.

Half of these seem to be legers? They are laid out in consistent patterns with boxes surrounding them, clearly segregating them from the rest of the sheet. Some of them even have childish drawings of monsters next to them. Is that supposed to mean something? What exactly have you gotten yourself into, my son?

Patricia continued snooping through each and every notebook, trying to crack the cipher while a bored Marigold watched on.

* * * *

The goblin was sitting in its cage, confused and nursing a lump on its head. Nearby, a gelatinous blob wiggled and jiggled inside a large glass bowl. Two cages away was a huge red and yellow bird like creature with a broken wing and an oozing arrow wound. The cage beside it was filled with a white gorilla with dark grey pectoral skin and a little blood seeping out of its ears, its breathing labored and misting frozen in the warm morning air. Yet another cage exhibited a pair of green wolves, both asleep or unconscious. At the end of the row of cages was a team of haggard, slightly crispy or freezer burned, Wardens laying haphazardly across a few benches. Another team was doing their best to recover the wounds but none of them seemed to possess even a third of Syron’s mother’s power.

Since he couldn’t do anything for the team that worked so hard to capture the monsters, he just focused on looking over the monsters himself after giving them the perfunctory “Great job!”. As he got closer, they started to rage and thrash in their cages, froth and feathers coming out between the bars in surprising number. Ignoring all but the goblinoid, Syron reversed his powers to their unnatural state and created within his own mind a wireframe representation of the goblin. Slowly, so as to not fatigue his mind, he started adding details, first broad strokes of color, then clothing. Next he added more variation to the color, and gave the skin a bumpy looking texture.

When it came to the constant drool the goblin created, instead of changing the way the ground looked through interacting with the slobber, he simply had it fade away as though it never existed to begin with. Syron examined the goblins claws next, noting the dirt and dried blood beneath the nails. Slowly, Syron started walking around the cage and tried to examine the goblin from every side, but unfortunately it kept turning with him and throwing itself against the bars to get at him. His image creation started to incorporate skin defects such as scrapings or poorly healed cuts. This particular goblin seemed to have an infected patch near its eye that it kept scratching at when it wasn’t trying to pass between the bars and eat Syron’s face.

“Is there any way to get it in an area where it can move around more? The cage is too limiting.” Syron asked a nearby Knight. They didn’t question it to his face, but the looks some of the other Wardens gave him behind his back were a little less than thrilled.

“I had heard you guys were training today anyway, so I was hoping to see the monsters move around a bit before you all fought them.” He announced, much to the chagrin of the Wardens. One of them sighed dramatically as they all stood in unison and prepped a pit for the goblin.

“Careful Young Master. Goblins are known for their climbing. We’ll keep it in its pit while you perform your… examination… but we insist that you keep a distance and understand that it will likely escape and need to be swiftly dealt with.”

Syron nodded his affirmation while the cage was pulled over next to a dirt hole with a door on each end leading to small stair cases. The cage was opened and the goblin tried to swing around the opened cage door and at a nearby Warden. They kicked it in the chest and the goblin flew bodily to the back of the pit, crashing against the wall before falling face first at the ground. It laid there for a few minutes, recovering, before it once again tried to throw itself at the various wardens ringed around the pit.

Syron added more and more details to his image, including how its veined, muscular legs tightened visibly as the goblin danced from left to right, occasionally trying to find purchase on the dirt wall.

“Alright, that’s enough of that. Can you give it its weapon back?” A few of the Wardens and Knights couldn’t hold back their appalled disgust at his request.

“Young Master, the goblin is dangerous even to higher ranking fighters if they attack with surprise. If we give it the rusty knife it was holding before, it may distinguish you as a target and throw its weapon.”

“That’s okay. I’ll be fine. I just want to see it.” They obliged, though not really happily. He finished up his examination of the goblinoid and allowed the Wardens to get rid of it.

For the next few hours, Syron continued the process with the other various monsters, as well as asking some of the initiates to go through various fighting techniques for him to watch. They did it, though again they seemed a little nonplussed about the request.

Finally, after hours of examining, it was time for Syron to head home. He pulled from his satchel another notebook and began writing any observation he could think of. He then boarded his carriage, writing vigorously on his notebook whatever thought he needed to remember. Once he was done, he only had a little time left before the carriage returned to the Keep, so he quickly started focusing on his magic. Within his mind, an illusionary Warden was dancing around a goblin, taking turns slashing or stabbing at each other. The fight was one sided with the Warden winning, so Syron tuned the illusion back so the Warden started moving slower and the goblin was getting actual hits in on the Warden. The fight was playing out in Syron’s head, though occasionally he would force them to undo their actions. They seemingly moved backwards in time for a few moments and struck at each other again, this time a little sharper.

While he gave his familiar greeting to one of the Knights at the entrance way, they made way for him to pass.

Today I got a lot of work done. This is going to be amazing!