Young Writers Society

Kevfalcor

53

This was the first school I’d been that had an armory in it. To be fair, this was the second school I’d seen and I wasn’t sure whether it was really classified as a school, but I didn’t think they usually came equipped to repel a siege. Whatever the case, the Eternian Academy had an armory that was far more extensive than the one the elves had.

I began examining the wall of swords. There were many different styles and designs, I assumed from different worlds the Academy was monitoring.

“Do you know how to use one?” a voice behind me queried.

I turned around and saw Alsari the Stoneshaper. “Yeah, I trained with a sword in an elven village for a few months.

She raised an eyebrow. “A few months? That’s not very long.”

“No?”

“All the same….” Alsari tossed me a sword; it took just a little more time than it should have as it flew through the air. I caught it. It was a bit longer and heavier than the one I was used to, but I could tell it was a similar design. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”

The lithomancer lead me through a door and into a blank-looking stone arena about a hundred feet across. The only thing that made it different from other rooms was its circular shape.

Alsari walked about halfway across the room and shifted her sword into a fighting position. I mirrored her position. For a moment, no one moved. Then in a flash, Alsari distanced the gap between us; she was faster than I’d expected, almost as fast as Rakfelcov. Still, I managed to block her sword with mine; they met with a metallic crash. The impact knocked me off balance, so I backpedaled and recovered it.

Alsari, however, wasted no time. She darted forward again, but this time I sidestepped, so her momentum carried kher past me. I slashed behind her, but she dodged the strike before it could make impact.

I immediately continued on to the offensive. I’d never win a battle if all I did was defend. I feinted left, before aiming a strike to the right, but my blade was blocked by Alsari’s.

We continued like that for a few minutes. Alsari was faster, stronger, and more experienced, but I got the sense that she wasn’t very experienced against my fighting style. Still, that was never enough for me to gain the upper hand. I was definitely outmatched and I was constantly having to defend against Alsari’s attacks. I got the feeling that she wasn’t so much trying to beat me as testing my skill as a fighter.

Finally we broke apart and I had a moment to catch my breath. I realized that the Stoneshaper wasn’t even breathing hard. “You’re amazing!” I observed.

“You’re better than I expected,” she replied. Suddenly, the stone floor melded into a stone spike the size of my body and hurled itself towards me. I was forced to roll out of the way so I wasn’t impaled.

“I thought we weren’t using magic!”

“We weren’t,” she said. “Now we are.”

I felt my sword fly from my hand, summoned by Alsari’s lithomancy. In a panic, I tossed a ball of fire in her direction. It never hit, her but she dropped the sword. It was closer to her than it was to me. I stood there, frozen and unarmed.

“Come on, Kev, improvise,” she said, striding closer to the sword. “You’re from Alaran. That means that you’re not a pyromancer. You’re not limited to the types of magic you practice. Most still only study one type, they specialize, but it’s handy to know a little telekinesis.”

Telekinesis? She wanted me to….Well, it was worth a shot. I closed my eyes, held out my hand, and willed the sword to fly into it. Nothing happened. I opened one eye. The sword appeared to have twitched in my general direction. I grimaced.

Alsari sighed. “Keep working on it. It might save your life some day.”

I focused my concentration, drew from the depths of my magical powers and willed the object to move. A pebble dragged itself halfheartedly across the stone floor.

Thørn sat pensively with his legs crossed. He tried to hide it, but he clearly didn’t understand why I was failing so miserably. I had been working for half an hour with increasingly small objects and no positive results. I was getting extremely frustrated.

“Maybe you need to focus more on the object itself,” Thørn offered.

I shot a jet of fire at the pebble, surrounding it in a circular scorch mark. “I’ve tried that,” I growled. “This isn’t working.”

“I’m not a teacher,” Thørn diplomatically admitted. “I don’t really know how to help.”“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I said.

“The only teachers you have access to are in the Eternian Academy.”

“I can’t trust anyone else with telekinesis,” I grumbled. “What about Quint?”

Thørn sighed. “Quint is the point Alsari and I disagree on,” he stated, resignation clear in his voice. “I trust him, but he might be too loyal to the Academy to trust. Alsari definitely knows how much she trusts him.”

“So what should I do?”

Thørn shrugged. “Regardless of if you trust him, he’s a necromancer. No telekinesis.”

“Great,” I muttered. “Still stuck.”

Thørn

54

Kevfalcor had the potential to become much more powerful than I’d ever expected. The fact that he could use different types of magic opened up worlds of possibility. Figuratively. It had never occurred to me that that was possible because that just wasn’t how Archora functioned. On Archora, using magic for anything outside your specialized range was like using paper to build houses. I never thought Alaran would be different.

That brought new ideas to light. If I traveled to Alaran, would I be able to harness different types of magic? Would I have to stay there while I learned? No, that didn’t make sense. If it worked that way, then Kev would become a pyromancer upon entering Archora. Unless he had and his telekinetic magic was being suppressed. Then again, maybe telekinesis didn’t come naturally to him like it did to me and fire came to him.

Whatever the case, it wouldn’t matter if we couldn’t escape the Academy. It was time to work on the prophecy again.

I locked the door to my room and summoned the illusion of my thoughts on the first two lines. I made an illusion of the third line, The Maelstrom forms to face the blight. I sighed. More doom and despair, but aside from that, not a lot to go on.

Blight, of course was a reference to some oncoming doom. I made an illusory branch connected to the line. The fact that I wasn’t overly concerned about that worried me.

The Maelstrom forms….that was puzzling. Of course, a maelstrom was a violent whirlpool. I didn’t see how that could face any blights, unless the prophecy was about a drought. That seemed unlikely given the rest of the prophecy.

I decided to move on to the next line. But one will fall to darkest spite. Why couldn’t the prophecy be about happy things? That was pretty obvious. Someone would get angry and that would end up getting them killed. Or maybe they killed someone else. Whatever the case, it wasn’t cheery. My thoughts on the line appeared in blue script next to But one will fall to darkest spite.

For a moment I wondered if I should give more thought to each line, but I decided I’d work on that once I’d gone over all of the lines for the first time.

I moved to the next line and it appeared in the air. Eternity ends, fading from sight. This was another bizarre line. Eternity, by definition, couldn’t end. And how would it ‘fade from sight?’ That just didn’t make sense. On the other hand, my conversation with Alsari brought another possibility to light. ‘Eternity’ referred to one or both of the two remaining Eternals, Phyrza the Hooded and Parallax the Mindbreaker. I added a branch labeled Phyrza and/or Parallax die? Alsari had made the two Flickers sound very powerful, but she’d also said that someone would always beat you. However, ‘fading from sight’ didn’t sound like a violent death. I was puzzled.

I sat in silence, but before I could move to the next line, I heard the doorknob twitch, but not open since I’d locked it. I dematerialized my progress and telekinetically opened the door.

Quint stood in the doorway. “May I come in?” he asked. I nodded and he stepped in. “What were you doing?” The question was lighthearted, but there was underlying suspicion. He still didn’t totally trust me. I wasn’t surprised. I wouldn’t trust me, either.

“Changing,” I lied. “So what is it?”

“You’re going on a mission,” Quint said.

Everyone responded at once.

“What kind of mission?” asked Kev suspiciously.

Alsari’s answer was simple and absolute. “No.”

“Only if we get all of the information first.”

Quint sighed. “Don’t worry, this one’s easy and has very limited danger.”

“So there is danger,” I observed.

“There’s danger in everything. Otherwise we wouldn’t need you.”

“Touché.”

“This is a reconnaissance mission,” Quint said. “A few hours ago, a village was destroyed by a fire.”

Quint’s eyes flicked to Kev as if watching his response. I felt a wave of conflicted emotions radiate from the pyromancer and it took all my willpower to stop from trying to read his mind, but I didn’t think it would work anyway. Kev said nothing.

“What happened to it?” Alsari asked.

“We….we don’t know,” Quint admitted.

“Lack of information. Perfect. Just what got us into a mess last time.”

“What happened last time?” Kev asked.

“Last time was a test,” Quint said.

“Last time they sent us on a mission they knew we would fail,” Alsari coldly contradicted. “Last time, we were supposed to capture Rakfelcov and they didn’t even tell us he had magic. Thørn was almost driven insane and we had to run back to the Academy. We barely escaped with our lives.”

“And now he’s sending us on another mission where we get very little information?” Kev observed. “Well, that’s not at all ominous….”

“Your sarcasm is appreciated,” Quint said. “But this time the reason you don’t have a lot of information is because we don’t have a lot of information. And we’re losing time. We believe this fire wasn’t started by accident.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Kev quietly muttered.

“We need you to search for survivors,” he continued. “That’s all. Try to move as many people as possible to safety.”

Are we doing this? I mentally asked.

I’m willing to, Kev said.

Alsari mentally sighed, which I didn’t think was possible. Fine. Let’s go.

Quint tossed us each metal cuffs. “Well? What are you waiting for?”