Chapter 44: Life is Getting Boring
The morning session had been running for two hours before he noticed that he had used Aether Step three times in the last sequence without deciding to. The decision had stopped being a decision somewhere in the last few weeks. The body just found the shorter path and used it.
He stood in the center of the training ground and thought about that.
Three months ago he had stood in a courtyard and told Iris he intended to win a duel he had no visible basis for winning.
He had been working from theory and a stat block and the stubbornness of someone who had debugged his way through worse problems than a fight he wasn’t supposed to survive.
He had been right. It had taken work.
He ran the sequence again, slower, noting where the decisions were. Aether Step on the fourth beat. Hell’s Fire held for a count of eight, the mana heart cycling steadily underneath.
Vector Authority distributing across the field without the conscious management it had needed at the birthday duel.
He released all three and stood in the cold morning air.
Three months to build a foundation.
He had built it.
The academy was going to ask for something different.
The path to the cave appeared the moment the light dropped below the canopy, the same as it always appeared.
The warmth reached him before he reached the entrance. That had started around the sixth week, the cave’s temperature changing the moment his footsteps hit the path, the air at the entrance already different by the time he arrived.
He had stopped noting it as unusual sometime around week eight. Now it was just how mornings worked.
He crossed the threshold and sat down in the center of the floor.
The warmth settled around him the way it had been settling for weeks. Closer than it had been at the start. He had a theory about the radius. He had not shared it.
"The written portion of the exam covers eight subjects," he said. "Standard arcane theory. Elemental classification. Historical conflicts, which I have been reading about in the Keeper’s volumes, so that section should be manageable.
Applied mana theory. Political structure, which is going to be the most tedious eight hours of my life. Combat history. Practical ethics of cultivation. And one section that changes every year and is not announced in advance."
The warmth shifted slightly. He had learned to notice the shifts learned to read them, which wasn’t the same. This one came when the information was new.
"The section that changes," he said. "Last year it was advanced binding theory. The year before that, daemon classification. I have been reading everything in the lower room that touches on either subject on the assumption that whatever they choose next will have precedent in what came before it." He paused.
"The Seventh volume has a full Chapter on daemon taxonomy that predates the current classification system. Some of it is going to be wrong by modern standards. I am reading it anyway."
The warmth moved upward, along the ceiling stone. She was paying close attention.
"You already know about daemon taxonomy," he said.
The ceiling stayed warm.
"I thought so," he said.
He looked at the dark before continuing.
"The practical examination is the one I am least certain about," he said eventually. "Not because of ability. Because I do not know what they will ask me to demonstrate, and the aspects I have are not the aspects a standard applicant would be expected to show.
Ether Authority is rare enough that the examiners may not have encountered it before. Hell’s Fire is going to require explanation regardless of how cleanly I cast it."
He looked toward where the warmth was heaviest.
"I have been trying to decide how much to show," he said. "In the academy, not at the exam. The exam I need to pass. The academy I need to survive for four years without making myself into a target before I understand the terrain." He stopped.
"I have been making that calculation for three months and I keep landing in the same place. Show enough to establish position. Hold back enough to have something in reserve. The problem is that the line between those two things moves depending on who is watching."
The warmth held steady the quality it had when she had nothing to add because he had already arrived where he needed to.
"I know," he said.
He came back the next morning the same as any other morning. The path, the entrance, the warmth meeting him before he reached the door.
He sat down.
"I am leaving tomorrow," he said.
The warmth changed immediately. The quality it had when she received information she had been expecting and had not wanted to receive.
"I know," he said. "I have been saying it in increments. Two weeks, then ten days, then a week."
"I will be at the academy for four years," he said. "I will come back during the breaks between terms. Three times a year, if the schedule holds. I cannot tell you the exact dates because I do not have them yet. But I will know them before the first break, and I will come back as soon as I am able."
The cave held around him.
"I told you I would keep coming back," he said. "That is still true. Four years is not a change in that. It is a gap in the middle of it."
He sat with the warmth for a long time without talking.
The honest version of what he wanted to say had been there for three weeks. He had been aware of it the way he was aware of a variable that hadn’t been assigned a value yet.
He looked at the dark.
"I do not know what you are," he said. "I have read everything in that room and I have a direction, not an answer. I know you have been here longer than anyone I have ever met. I know you refused the transfer before I arrived. You have been listening since the first morning I came down that path talking to an empty cave like a person who had run out of other options."
He stopped.
"The warmth is different on mornings when something has changed for me. You listen differently when I am working something out versus when I already know the answer. You let the warmth follow me further toward the path than the seal should allow."
He looked at the ceiling.
"I do not know what any of that means on your side of it," he said. "But I wanted you to know that I notice. That I have been noticing for a long time. And that whatever you are, and whatever this is, I am coming back."
The warmth moved.
Every direction at once, the entire cave holding the same temperature that usually only existed near the walls. It held for three full seconds. Then it eased back, sitting closer than it had since the morning he had apologized for being gone four days.
He sat in it.
Then he stood, and walked to the entrance, and stopped at the threshold.
"I will see you in three months," he said.
He walked out into the forest and did not look back.
She listened to his footsteps until the path took them past the range of the seal.
Then she held the warmth where it had settled.
She had been refusing things for two hundred years. The transfer, the approaches, the careful language of every Keeper who had come to the entrance and spoken in the specific register of people who believed that patience and repetition would eventually produce the result they wanted.
She had outlasted all of them.
This one had never asked for anything. He had sat on her floor and talked about training and weather and things that had gone wrong and things that had gone right. She knew the weight of his footsteps now.
The cadence of his breathing when he was working something out. The particular silence when he arrived at an answer and decided not to say it yet.
She pressed against the stone.
Three months.
She had waited two hundred years.
Three months was nothing.
Except that it was not nothing, and she had stopped pretending sometime around the sixth week which was when she had stopped being angry at herself for noticing that the cave was different when he was in it.
She let the warmth hold where it was, against the upper stone, along the walls, filling the space that was going to be empty tomorrow morning and the morning after and the morning after that.
She had questions. She had been accumulating them since the first visit, and at some point the accumulation had become something she was keeping for a specific person.
Three months.
She would wait.
Two hundred years had made her very good at it.
Comments