Falcon's Jess [Eitan]

[Florian]

72nd SEARING, 121 AOS

He was leashed, like a bird to its trainer. A tool. An extension of the one who held the other end.

Florian Albrecht joined the military, and he was immediately leashed to a Warden. A man who had drunkenly regarded him as a friend, but he was also his superior, and one who he could be assured would not hesitate to kill him if he stepped out of line. It was a theoretical leash, a metaphor, but he could feel its effects. Most of them were beneficial. His crewmates were noticeably less wary when the XO was around, and he was thankful. He had been trying his very best not to make a fool of himself in public , and especially not to betray the growing trust between him and Angevin. Between him and his friend. Between him and his superior, thought the Ashborne. Trust was important, because if someone as seemingly popular and candid with his crew as Eitan could trust him, then perhaps others could, too.

He stretched, the morning light filtering in through his window. He did not want to do anything to break this trust, he reassured himself. But stillness bothered him. It was too peaceful for him now. Minor bruises and harsh words slipped off him like the water off of a duck's back. Florian was a troublemaker at heart, and the strict behaviors that were required of him in the military - and to maintain the working relationship with Eitan - were stressful. But he did not want to cause trouble. Was it so difficult for one to be content with their circumstances, to leave this as they grew? Did he have to stir the pot and uproot the plants?

A burning part of him implored that he do. That perhaps his good behavior would simply come to bite him in the ass, and that he should show what he was really made of for once. But he felt the power of the ward that Commander Angevin had made, and if anything, he would be able to put him down. Easily. Without hesitation, even. The man did not separate himself from the State, and they'd not known each other for even a season. The night two days before notwithstanding, and as embarrassing as it had been for Florian to wake up and realize he remembered near everything, a friendship was not something to be so publicly displayed. But it was still something that was important, if not necessary for them to work together like this.

Florian washed his face, dressed, attempted to tame his hair just a bit, and ate some bread leftover from the day before for his breakfast. If he was anything, he was anxious, and his appetite was near nothing, but he had to eat something if he wanted to be effective. All too soon he realized he had to leave. He preferred to walk, and he could walk quite a far distance, but it was a far walk to where Eitan had wanted them to meet. He opted for the train, and past the simple ticketing transaction and odd looks he had received, it was a painless trip.

[Eitan Angevin]

While Eitan Angevin was a true believer, he was also aware that there were depths of politics within the Order of Reconciliation that he did not understand. They thought him a fit candidate to bear the curse of Negation to protect the interests of the High City, and the boy had acquiesced. But he had found that there were those who skirted the edges of self-aggrandizement with their power, whereas Angevin wanted to be the last mage standing in the world and then end the threat by falling on his sword in heroic self-sacrifice. And so he was much more comfortable with the regiments and regimentation of the Air Defense Corps. If the Order wanted to drop a Lysanrin in his lap so he could serve in the Corps, that was fine. But he was going to keep the both of them in the Corps whenever possible.

He arrived early because over-achieving was how he felt comfortable. Attached to the barracks were training areas, and after he had completed his calisthenics regimen, he made sure to claim one of the few training rooms that had been warded against magic for those State-sanctioned mages within the Corps to hone their skills with the abominable runes that so plagued Ransera.

Word was left up front that should a one-horned, scarred-face Lysanrin private show up, to direct him back here. In the meantime, he went through sword forms with a cutlass. Though he more often than not provided covering fire from behind a ward, he always wanted to be prepared to cross blades when the time came. As every battle taught him, every battle was a fractious, chaotic event. If he stayed ready, he wouldn't have to get ready. When he had talked about it with Albrecht in their brief post-mortem, he had talked about how the senses seemed to speed up and time slow down; this was true in his experience, and he could sometimes almost see the order underlying the chaos. Still and all, he didn't want to take chances with the lives of his men and the innocent citizenry of Zaichaer and its environs.

After he went through the forms with the cutlass, he switched it out with the more modern, straight-bladed saber. He was a modern sort of gentleman after all.

[Florian]

Florian had been quickly directed by a particularly bored-looking man up front. Before he had even begun to ask. It seemed Eitan had already arrived, and he had prepared for his own arrival. Everything prepared, as fitting for a man such as him. He walked in on Angevin practicing with his saber. While Florian had certainly held a saber before, he'd little practice using it. He could swing it in a direction, but whether it would do what he wanted was another question entirely. He would have to learn, certainly, and perhaps Eitan would be the one to teach him, but he relied now on his mediocre skill with a pistol and his barely-better fists.

He did not want to interrupt the man, however, and simply watched him practice for a few minutes. Whether or not Eitan noticed him, he could not tell - he continued to practice his forms. He cleared his throat and launched straight into exposition.

"What do you want to do first, then? Do you want me to explain everything I know how to do?" He was less formal, perhaps even less formal than he should have been. His eyes turned silver as he saw the world and its aether, the same as the night of the failed ambush. The only aether in the room were the wards placed around the walls. A room for mages within the city that hated mages for the mages that were allowed to be mages to practice their magic. "I think it may help if you...create your wards and your shields, and tell me about them. Tell me about your magic so that I may see it and know what it's for. If I can identify your wards, all the better."

Florian took a few steps into the center of the room and took a slow turn, watching the aether flow through the wards that lingered on the walls. Already he could notice the subtle difference between these and the wards that Eitan had created, the personal touches that mages tended to have. The signature they left in their aether, intentional or not. "Unlike you...I can't do anything by myself. Not without hurting myself, at least. I need to absorb it, siphon it from something. And then I can use it."

[Eitan Angevin]

Angevin heard the door open, then saw his Lysanrin subordinate in the mirrors. Between cutlass forms and saber forms, which were distinctly different, at least to his mind, he had removed his shirt. It hadn't been a conscious mirror of Albrecht's disrobing the other night; he had merely worked himself to the point of perspiration and felt better without it. He became conscious of it now, though, but managed to finish the last form before sheathing his saber and setting it aside. He blotted his forehead with a towel and drank from the water he had brought with him.

With a small smile, he listened to Albrecht speed through things. He wondered if the Lysanrin was nervous about how all this would go. Perhaps he was right to. Angevin himself had been nervous that he would be punished in his training sessions even though the Order had marked him with magic to begin with.

"Good day to you as well, Private," he said when Albrecht stopped speaking. But he laughed, amused. He would be a stickler for protocol aboard the airship and in front of any members of the Order of Reconciliation, but he wasn't going to climb up his arse about it in private. Allowances would have to be made for them to work as a single unit.

After considering all that Albrecht had said, he glanced at the walls. He couldn't see aether as if he had an aether glass, but he could sense wards. He was keyed to their particular patterns now. And so he patterned a small, simple version of the wall wards, just a blanket negation of all known magic. He took some time to task it against the various vagaries of magical manifestations, hoping Albrecht would learn more for seeing how it developed. In battle, he had been much quicker as the need had been urgent.

He had anchored it to his vambrace and strapped it back around his wrist so the ward would follow the movement of his arm.

"This is a smaller version of the exact same ward that's on the wall. Can you... I don't know... taste the difference between me and the wall?"

[Florian]

"Oh. Good morning."

Florian scratched at his cheek, a gesture of embarrassment. Had he really forgotten to say hello? But it didn't seem that Eitan minded. Nor did he seem to mind his lack of formality in this private place. He'd have to be more careful, though, that he did not show so much familiarity in public, and especially not on the airship. If he had noticed that Eitan was shirtless (and he certainly did), he chose to ignore it. It wasn't uncommon to see people shirtless while training, and Florian certainly did not want his thoughts to wander. Not now, anyway.

Florian watched as he made the ward, and he could already tell the difference. The aether just moved in a way he found hard to describe, but it was distinct. It flowed outward, slowly forming the ward. It wasn't just the differences that he could spot, however. There were similarities, and before Angevin had announced the recreation, Florian had managed to identify that they were blocking the same thing.

"Your ward is dimmer." He started to narrate what he could see. "But I think that's a matter of individual skill..." He walked up close to the ward, and by extension, Eitan, but his eyes were not focused on the man at all. Rather, he was inspecting the aether that made the ward up close. "I mean, not that you aren't skilled, but that the ones who ward this room are more experienced." He added, his silvered eyes flicking up to Eitan's face for just a second before returning to the ward.

"Your aether moves differently, but I can tell that this—" he made a broad gesture around the room, "Is meant to be the same as this." He made a smaller movement, emphasizing the ward in physical space. "There's something about it, like a fingerprint." Florian took Eitan's arm, holding his vambrace - the anchor point - closer to his face. The aether was bright so close to his eyes, but within the glow, he could see the wiggle, the look, the taste, as he had put it. Still holding onto his arm with one hand, his thin fingers pressing with surprising force into his flesh, Florian took a step back.

"It's strongest here," he pointed to the anchor point. "And just barely grows dimmer towards the edges." Florian shrugged. "I'm no mage, but it might be worth spreading these," he gestured to the anchor point again. "Around. Multiple of them. Might be more durable." He realized he was still holding onto Eitan, and released his hand.

With that, he took a few steps back and turned to examine the brighter wards on the walls around them. "This is brighter, for sure." He walked along the wall, gesturing to multiple spots. "Brightest here, here, here..." Florian turned his head to look between Eitan's ward and the wall's. "Come closer, I want to see them next to each other."

[Eitan Angevin]

It was certainly fascinating to have his work described to him from a perspective he couldn't share. He nodded along with Albrecht's assessment. Of course the wards in here were laid by the most experienced Warders; he had been called to shore them up before on several occasions, which he could do by carefully going over what more skilled Warders had done almost like putting tracing paper over something to learn how to make the pencil create certain shapes. He would likely do so again today when their training session was complete. Eitan Angevin liked to leave places better than he found them.

When Albrecht released his hand, he considered the notion. When he was more skilled, perhaps he could build a series of wards that overlapped like scale armor. It might even work anchoring a myriad of tiny wards over actual scale mail. But his considerations were cut short, and he walked over to the wall at the Lysanrin's request so he could compare it more closely against the permanent wards on the walls—as permanent as wards could be, anyway.

It was clear that whatever sense came along with the ability to siphon aether, Albrecht was savvy to what he was seeing. Or perhaps it was a native power and so some things came with little training. But when the private ceased speaking, Angevin was looking at him with a searching expression. He didn't ask how he had learned so much about magic. If the Order and the Corps deemed him fit for service, then his XO wasn't going to contradict them unless he showed himself ill-suited to the tasks at hand. So far, he had been a solid soldier and Angevin had little to say that wasn't positive.

"All right," he said finally, leaving those questions behind. "Can you siphon my ward?"

[Florian]

The wards held their obvious similarities between Eitan's and the wall's, which he took to mean was because of what they mutually blocked. "I don't know if what I'm talking about makes any sense to you," he added. "I'm just making guesses based on how it looks. I've never looked at Negation up close." He made a move to stick his hand onto the shield that Eitan had created. But he paused, leaned his face into the ward, and inhaled.

"Flowers...?" He looked at Eitan and then leaned into the wall and did the same thing. "Like a bouquet..." He mumbled. The realization that he had been so focused on what he could see that he ignored his other senses...did all magic smell like flowers, or was that just for him? He couldn't place the flower for Eitan, nor could he distinguish between the many different scents of the wall's wards. And, as if he realized Eitan was still in the room (a common theme for him, he thought), Florian gave a firm nod.

"I can do that."

It took some time for him to absorb the ward, though he moved around a bit, trying to watch from multiple angles how it looked while it flowed into him. It was a slow spiral into his hand, but now Florian noticed patterns in the spiral, the spike-shape of flower petals that undulated and disappeared. More importantly, it was a small insight into fragments of Eitan's mood - a touch of curiosity, a splash of nervousness. He was silent during the process, but he felt the crackle of energy between his fingers when he had finished, the foreign aether desperate to be released.

He still did not dare release the aether without an order from Eitan. Florian knew just as well that the man who had just asked him to absorb his ward would just as quickly kill him or place him in Order custody if any unasked for display of power came out of him. He clasped his hands together in front of him and watched Eitan for a moment, an expression of fear on his face. He may have drunkenly declared them friends, but if what Eitan had said was true, nothing came before the state. They tred a dangerous line, and Florian was certain that nothing good would come of practice. Fear of him could easily override any usefulness he was able to provide. A chill ran down his spine at the prospect of being overturned to the Order of Reconciliation once his use had run out. Maybe he was just being paranoid.

The look passed, and he rolled his shoulders. "What's next?"

[Eitan Angevin]

Eitan cocked his head curiously at the mention of flowers; he would ask later, though he assumed perhaps there was some symmetry to the ward as there was in nature, or perhaps more than one sense supported the Lysanrin sense for the aether. Ah, a bouquet—then perhaps his nose was telling him whose wards were whose. Albrecht seemed nervous, and so was Angevin, though the Lysanrin probably feared showing his power outright as he ought to, while the mongrel human was merely alert.

Then he watched his ward unravel, those parts that were visible, and sensed his work coming apart at the seams and draining away. It was an odd sensation and there was a thrill of fear briefly when there was nothing left to give and he wondered whether the Reconciliators had good information, that Lysanrin couldn't just drain a man of his aether, rendering him a dead, empty thing.

But it was done and Albrecht was waiting, expectant. He could almost sense the bits of himself now trapped in the private.

"So we know that you can sense the aether, siphon the aether, discharge the stored aether, sustain yourself for a time with aether, and catalyze it into an existing weave... I trust you aren't hiding any other abilities from me?" He smiled when he said it, though. Hadn't they agreed that they would build trust between them, bit by bit? "Well, eventually you will. Eventually, we will have you able to reflect spells back at the caster, shield yourself and your crewmates with a particularly Lysanrin form of warding, and even change the aether you absorb. But not today."

He considered for a moment, put his hand on Albrecht's shoulder, then pointed to the far wall.

"Discharge it there. Practice your aim."

Meanwhile, Angevin would try to get a sense of how the Lysanrin worked. He really should have requisitioned an aether glass.

[Florian]

Florian tilted his head like a confused puppy. Eitan knew much, far too much about Lysanrin abilities. Even Florian had not known what he could do, and his knowledge came from intuition and trial and error. Yet, here this man had just listed out a series of words - were they the Order's classification of Lysanrin abilities?

He did know that what Angevin had asked of him was near impossible. "I can't just direct it, it's like, it's unpredictable." He said, his head still tilted and his face fraught with the fear of being a disappointment. He moved far away from Eitan's hand and discharged a fragment of the aether, but not all of it. The static crackled around him, silver and bright and explosive, dissipating against the wards of the room. The fraction of a second of light passed and Florian's face was contorted into a frown. "It just...comes out. Around me. Not from my hands." He looked scared again. "I don't want to use it."

"You know what happens to people who practice this. You know what happens to them. What happens when the fear overrides my usefulness? You may be a warden, but you're not in charge. Maybe you can use me now, but that's not going to last forever." Florian had not intended to be so honest all at once, but as his eyes brimmed with tears, mid-outburst, he could not keep his anxieties contained. "You may have a rune carved into your skin, but you chose that. You were inscribed with service to the state and I was born this way, and because I was born this way people are scared.

I started...I practiced...because..." His voice faltered, and he realized he was cutting to close to the truth than he really should have. He realized his fists were clenched at his sides. He pointed at Eitan. "I do this knowing they will kill me for it. It's a fact. No one - not Zaichaer, not you, not anyone - will suffer me to live."

Just as quickly as he had started, Florian lowered his hand and took a deep, ragged breath. "I'm sorry for the outburst." He rubbed the wet out of his eyes with a hand. "You know that I do not have the same protection as you." The whites of his eyes were tinged with red, and the irises were near-black as his pupils. "I would like to just...bolster the wards. But if you want me to—" He waved his hands around, mimicking an explosion. "I will."

[Eitan Angevin]

The only one who had ever let him cry was his half-sister Delia, and that was on a rare occasion. Every other older person in his life had called it a weakness and beaten it out of him or sneered it out of him; consequently, he didn't know how to deal with tears very well, his own or someone else's. He was disappointed that Albrecht hadn't followed his command, but he reminded himself that they were here to learn, and that no true partnership was forged in an instant.

His first instinct was to mock Albrecht for his weakness, but he knew that wouldn't work, and so he fumbled into his secondary instinct, which was to close the gap between them and wrap his arms around the slender Lysanrin. He surprised himself. Having no idea whether he was comforting or just making matters worse, he squeezed. Perhaps it was what he would have wanted or needed if he had ever been given the option.

There were many things that Albrecht said that were true, but Truth wasn't a monolith. Angevin knew that even as he believed wholeheartedly in the spirit of the High City. Angevin believed that they would both die in service to the State one day or they would continue to serve until their bodies gave out, which would still be dying in Zaichaer's service, albeit not in the dramatic, heroic fashion some dreamed of.

"I am a Warder," he said certainly. "And I am an officer of the Order and the Corps. If you work with me, I can protect you. I can't protect you from everything, but I can protect you from some things. But you have to let me. You have to trust me." He paused. "Now discharge a little. I want to know what it feels like, how it will effect enemies of the State."