Starbreaker

“The third circle is considered by many to be the defining one of a mage’s career. This is of course, ridiculous. Affinity is not the be-all and end-all of a mage. There have been many mages with common affinities who have reached the rank of wizard and beyond. There have been many mages with unique affinities who lack the resources and support that they need because of the rarity.”

—A Mage’s Guide to Affinity and Advancement, Foron Bakrun

Sylvas had been on the planet of Strife for a little more than a week, and the majority of his time seemed to have been spent in the brig or in the infirmary. He never thought that he would miss the worn stone of the habitable sections of the campus and the endless red dust, but here he was surrounded by sterile white again, loathing it. He tried to sit up and immediately realized what a bad idea that was.

“Ever grown back a spleen before?” The half-elf medic asked, almost casually as she pushed him back down flat.

His throat felt like it had been shredded by all the sand that had passed through. “No.”

“You have now. So stay lying very still and doing nothing until I discharge you.” She tapped at a suspended bottle where it hung beside him, a long pipe trailing from it and disappearing into his arm, letting whatever alchemical concoction she was treating him with pass straight into his blood. His sleeve was gone again. Burnt tatters of the sleeve were dangling around his upper arm. His vest from underneath was gone too, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel embarrassed about showing a little skin when the medic had already seen what was underneath it and gone for a good rummage around inside.

Opening up his second sight, Sylvas realized just how badly he’d hurt himself. Not from the damage to his channels, which he’d fully expected, or the pathetic little dribble of mana coiled in his core, but from all of the enchantments and spells that were working overtime to restore the balance of that mana. He closed his eyes and tried to draw in more mana, to replenish his strength, but a firm slap to the forehead by the medic put an end to that. “Ow?”

She loomed over him as he lay there aching. “What part of doing nothing wasn’t clear to you?”

“I was just…” He tried to explain.

An accusatory finger jabbed him in the forehead. “Nothing.”

“Not even…”

“Nothing!” It was almost a shout, which was quite impressive given how bored the half-elf usually sounded with even the most gruesome of injuries, so finally, Sylvas took her seriously.

He wet his lips carefully, feeling all the abrasions still there. The dryness of them after him being submerged in the sand. “Okay.”

She gave him one final scowl, then returned to her work. Sylvas mostly wanted to know what had happened at this point. Who had found him. How they had found him. All the answers would come to him in time, but he didn’t want to wait. Nor did he want to miss any more of his lessons than he needed to. There was every chance that days had passed since the last exercise, and he had no idea. Lockmind didn’t work when he wasn’t conscious.

Boredom presented a problem. He was awake now. Alive enough that the medic clearly wasn’t concerned about him dying so long as he just didn’t move. It was like an itch in my brain. At the same time, he didn’t want to bother the medic just for the sake of something to do, so he remained lying as still as he could, letting his senses tell him all that they could and sifting through every iota of information with Lockmind.

She had mentioned a spleen needing regrown, presumably what Hammerheart had burst with his punch. Judging from the various enchantments at work, he had to assume that the worst of the rest of the damage hadn’t come from his own tampering with the affinity balance of his mana. The aches throughout his body certainly seemed to be centered around his channels. He wondered, briefly, just how much his new embodiment had done to protect him from the damage he was causing to himself using mana he had no affinity for. On reflection, outside the heat of battle, it seemed obvious that the reason nobody simply forced mana out of its normal affinity to gain access to a wider variety of spells was that it was damaging to do so, but yesterday… or whenever it had been, he had been riding high on his success and paid the pain no mind. I forgot that pain was a sign from the body that something was wrong, not simply a trial to be endured to prove myself.

There was a possibility that having been raised to be the messiah of a doomsday cult might have influenced the way he thought about things like pain.

And progress if I was being honest.

The itch in my brain had nothing to do with wanting to be the head of his class or the best little soldier that I could be and everything to do with wanting to become more powerful. Part of it was obviously so that he could find some measure of vengeance against the eidolons that had killed his world, and perhaps even whoever had set them loose, but part of it was just… a hunger. I can be more, and I want to be more.

Introspection really didn’t suit him. He would have greatly preferred to be doing things, learning things, moving. But stuck in the hospital bed for all the hours that he had to wait, there was nothing to do but think. And with Lockmind, it was all too easy to go back over everything that had happened to him with a fine-tooth comb, sifting out every minor irritant.

His sleeve was gone, which suggested another explosive outburst from the scars on his arms. It seemed that his new embodiment hadn’t been sufficient to contain it.

The echo that he’d felt when he was casting the beacon of mana. It was like what he’d experienced when he was fighting the eidolons. Like there was something more to his magic that he wasn’t quite connected with. He could feel it by its absence. He wondered if it was his missing affinity. If he simply didn’t have one and never would. If his progress would drag to a halt here, as Kaya and all the rest moved on without him. He would be left paddling in the shallow end, using spells meant for children, and barred from making any change to them for fear of him injuring himself again.

With that already weighing on his mind, he began digging back through earlier memories, before Lockmind, so unreliable, but by far more prevalent. All of the times that in retrospect, it was obvious that the grand masters were manipulating him and the rest of the Heralds of the Hollow Heart. When they were repeating what they had read in their gifted arcane texts verbatim without any deeper understanding and when they had deliberately twisted the words of the texts to better suit their ends. All of the times that if I had just a tiny bit of self-awareness I might have realized what they were actually working towards. I’d been so naïve. So stupid. So willfully blind to what was really going on.

His whole world was dead because he had missed the now obvious signs that something was wrong. If he’d just stopped for one moment, ignored all the fanfare and praise that he'd been receiving for the first time in his life, then he could have prevented all of this from happening. He could have gone on as the most powerful mage on his little backwater planet, far from sight. Doing as he pleased and never knowing that there was so much more beyond its atmosphere. If he had broken away from their dogma, he could have stopped them, he could have prevented whichever other unfortunate that they raised up from falling into the same trap he had. All those people are dead because of me.

Kaya wandered in some time late in the day to find Sylvas lying perfectly still, staring up at the ceiling, lost in his own thoughts. She slugged him in the arm. “I tell you stanzbuhr, there isn’t a day goes by you don’t hurt yourself worse than anyone else ever could.”

The pain of the punch was distant and numb compared to the turmoil he had been caught up in until now, but it gave him something to focus on. “No punching the patient.”

“You pull something like that again, I’ll do worse than punch you!” She grumbled.

“With my blessing.” From across the room where she was attending to samples the medic called back, “It is my medical opinion that punching him before he does these things is the best kind of preventative medicine.”

Sylvas chose to ignore that questionable medical advice. “How long have I been…”

“Three days, Hammerheart has been bragging about killing you.” Kaya practically growled. “Three days of Hot Lips and Gharia fussing every time they see me, like I know anything they don’t.”

He hurt when he chuckled. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“We thought you were dead when Vaelith pulled you out. Crest or no crest.” She said without any of her usual good cheer. “You looked dead.”

“I was…” Sylvas didn’t have a witty comeback for that. “I thought I was too.”

She changed the subject. “We lost. Took more than half of them, the whole center of their formation, and that culgh Hammerheart too. If we were just punching through, we’d have won. But clearing them out of the fortifications… ran out of mana.”

Sylvas sighed. “Not unexpected.”

At some point during all this he’d pulled himself up to sitting without being yelled at or hit by the medic, so he supposed that he must be on the mend. It let him see Kaya properly for the first time. To notice something different about her.

She must have noticed the change in his expression. “You missed affinity testing.”

He had known, abstractly, that he had missed it. Three days was a long time in terms of their training. But the significance of why she was telling him now wasn’t lost on him. “What did you get?”

She blinked hard, and for a moment afterwards her eyes were silvery and reflective, like someone had poured mercury in them. “Metal.”

“I wasn’t really aware that was one of the options.” He was careful to keep his voice from betraying him as all his nightmares of being left behind started to come true before his eyes.

“Yeah, that weird shiny feather…”

He recalled it now. Recalled overlooking it when it had no effect on him at all. “Ah, I didn’t get that one.”

There was a moment of silence before he realized what he should have said. “Congratulations. They’ll be headhunting you for ship-to-ship classes now?”

“That’s right.” She seemed relieved to latch onto something else to talk about. “Sitting in with those officers culghs and Ironeye on some of them.”

“How does that fit in your schedule?” He desperately tried to keep the conversation going.

“Finally out of Fahred’s snooze-fests.”

Sylvas tried not to laugh and sprained something. The wincing and coughing gave him enough time to compose himself for a properly polished half-truth. “I’m genuinely happy for you, you deserve this, and I can’t wait to see what you do with your new affinity.”

“You’ll get yours soon enough, stanzbuhr, don’t worry.” She patted him on the shoulder. And just like that the visit was over. She was up and moving towards the door, probably headed to class or dinner… he had no idea what time of day or night it was. Down in the sterile white light of the infirmary time had no meaning.

“Why would I worry?” He said to himself, laying back on the bed and staring up at the ceiling, as the dread in his gut began to swell and fill the space faster than his new spleen ever could have.